This Week

New Job Underway

Touch 2

Last week we were at the beach and, while talking, babbling some stream of consciousness, I picked up a pebble. It's shape formed to my hand, its smooth texture comforted my skin. I heald on to it, not really focused on it, returning it to my attention periodically, but mostly just rolling it in my palm. Some distraction came up, a dog running close by or the tide lapping up, and I dropped it. After gathering my stuff and resettling I became aware it was lost. A sensation of emptiness, grief even, came over me. As all feelings do it washed over all of me.
I'll be coming back to this. It has brought a focus to my swirling thoughts on the matter. Emotions, feelings happen in the body. Walking home through dark city streets, you feel them first, look over your shoulder, a gang of men are following you. Your heart beats faster, you sweat, your central nervous system is on alert, viscera change focus, digestion stops. These physical processes are the emotion fear. Secondary to this is the conscious awareness of fear. Some feelings are not registered consciously.
Cognition has been the focus of most theories of mind. Emotions traditionaly have been considered too slippery for consideration in serious theories of being. But there is no reason without feeling. Antonio Damasios' somatic marker hypothesis suggests each new experience, each object, each person we encounter triggers a response in the body. We get a feeling about them. Some people mean nothing and spark no somatic marker in us. Others bring us to states of rapture. Reasoning is slow. We need to have feelings about things in order to know how to react to them. If bitten by a dog when young a somatic reminder will be set. Each time you see a similar dog, even merely thinking of that dog, that same feeling, that warning, gut feeling will kick in. Our language reveals how we 'think' through our bodies. How we grasp facts, have gut feelings etc.
We are losing touch with ourselves. This last year my thoughts have been inspired by neuroscience. This focus on the brain can confuse us. How we feel about things in our bodies forms communication loops with our brains. Mind body dualism sneaked  in to my reasoning despite my conscious rejection of Descartes myth, the homunculus, the ghost in the machine. Being is a whole. How we feel about things comes first. Secondarily we rationalise.
Sight and sound are catered for in culture through music and the visual arts. There is no comparable system in place for touch. But through our seldom being hungry, through central heating, through rarely being outdoors, we are losing touch. In recorded music, digital bass free sound, music without feeling has taken hold and pushed music to a different place in our lives. Only when music is live or loud does it make sense anymore. Children growing in to teenagers today listen to a trebly tinkle through a phone speaker. My generation religiously kept a soundtrack to our lives. Instead of fathers fixing their cars with their sons, feeling how the machinery works, they are out of touch, sending it to the garage where there knowledge is lost and superstition grows. Food, once grown by families who felt the soil through their hands and felt its weight through the spade now walk a trolley through the centrally heated supermarket. The division of labour finds small pockets of craft skill but mostly the population engage in unfeeling work on computers. They are losing touch.
Emotional understanding resides in the body. It lives in touch. In movement. Making things. Growing things. Playing instruments. Dancing. Climbing, fighting, boxing, turning, carving, fucking, dancing, running, diving, these are where we are at our best. The over emphasis on knowing that, collecting facts, has displaced knowing how.
Since we developed consciousness man has looked for meaning. But we are only animals. Other animals can not figure out a meaning to life. And if they can find no meaning then why would we have the mind skills to find meaning. All animals, including humans,  have evolved to survive, not to figure themselves and the meanings of life out. Due to having no need to search for meaning! other animals are content in a way we are not. The path to this contentment is through know how. Through doing. Through touch. When cycling downhill at high speed there is no time to consider meaning. All our consciousness is focused on the job in hand. This is when we are at our most content.

Walls

This Weeks Floors

Touch

On being brave enough to not know what you think

I wonder, am I alone in being unsure of what I think on issues that raise passion in others? Take vivisection for example. I can write a poetic piece, comparing animal testing to animal sacrifice. But does my prose clarify anything for me. The superstitious systems sacrifice deals with were considered empirical enough by the practitioners of these acts. In cosmic terms, as an animal ourselves, and given how poor old science appears to us now, can we really say that the science vivisection serves, is of any greater consequence than old religions?
But even if I think animal testing is the same as animal sacrifice, the same act, different narrative, do I think it always wrong? For sure, we all benefit from the knowledge gleaned from subjecting animals to suffering. In some cases the environment benefits from animal tests, animals sometimes have benefited from other animals being tested. I recall two kittens i once had. When they first encountered the stairs, the smarter of the two pushed its sibling over the edge to see how it faired, before risking the steps himself.
But still it is hard to escape the fact that the humanist science has its roots in Christian separation. From our cultural history we retain the idea that we are the chosen creature, above animals. Even in our secular world we persist with this awful foundation point of the Christian outlook.
Whilst passionate on the point that we are animals, and as ignotant as all the others, I can't say I feel passionately either way on vivisection. For sure, in its worst excesses it repulsed me.
However. It often feels that society obliges we take sides. Learning to accept that we aren't sure is the final step of adulthood. And the strength to admit you are wrong and change ones views.

Mind Body Brain, again...

The huge fashion for alternative medicine may be misguided, it does, however, lead me to think it must be there for a reason. Not a supernatural one, but a recognition that something is lacking in western medicine. The separation of mind and body, the belief in souls and consciousness being separable from the meat is the mistake at the core. Little is known about the placebo effect. Yet when the doctor gives the oblivious patient a chalk pill they do get better. If we are to accept that reasoning is dependent on feelings within the body, that emotion takes place all over the body and not just in the brain, if we accept that there is no mind body duality, then we need to begin to look deeper in to how they interact. How mind affects body, just as body affects mind.
We really don't have a clue when it comes to mental illness. My own problems have no clear organic basis or obvious neurological dysfunction. Instead they are regarded as 'emotional' or 'psychological' adjustment problems. In other words, mental trouble and are thus deemed to be amenable to psychotherapy. The distinction between diseases of 'brain' and 'mind', between 'neurological' problems and 'psychological' or 'psychiatric' ones, is an unfortunate cultural inheritance that permeates society and medicine. It reflects a basic ignorance of the relationship between brain and mind. Diseases of the brain are seen as tragedies visited on people who cannot be blamed for their condition, while diseases of the mind, especially those that effect conduct and emotion, are seen as social inconveniences for which sufferers have much to answer. Individuals are to be blamed for their character flaws, defective emotional modulation, and so on, lack of willpower is supposed to be the primary problem.
Any serious concept of mind should encompass emotions and feelings. Yet most respected scientific accounts of cognition dont do that. Emotions are considered elusive entities, unfit to sit with the more tangible contents of the thoughts they, nonetheless, qualify. This is the common view that excludes feelings and emotions from mainstream cognitive science.
To be sure, feelings are about something different, and what makes them different as that they are first and foremost about the body. They offer us the cognition of our visceral and musculoskeletal state as it becomes affected by pre organised mechanisms and by the cognitive structures we have developed under their influence. Feelings let us keep an internal 'eye' on the body. They let us mind the body 'live' when they give us perceptual images of the body, or 'replay' when they give us recalled images of the body state appropriate to certain circumstances when we imagine we are experiencing them. Feelings offer us a glimpse of what goes on in our flesh, as a momentary image of that flesh is juxtaposed to the images of other objects and situations; in so doing, feelings modify our comprehensive notion of those other objects and situations. By dint of juxtaposition, body images give to other images a quality of goodness or badness, of pleasure or pain. Because of their inextricable ties to the body, they come first in developement and retain this primacy in our mental lives. Because the brain is the captive audience, feelings win out. Their influence is immense.
It is the entire organism that interacts with the environment, not the body or brain alone. When we see, touch, smell or hear the body and brain operate as one, not in separation.
The idea that mind arises from both body and brain, from the entire organism may still sound odd to you. From Descartes day when the mind came from no location to now current fashions for locating it within the brain we have progressed. It is once again when we look to other animals that we see mind comes from brain and body together. The representation of the whole in motion is necessary for most animal processes. The mind is not in the body, but the body contributes a content that is necessary for the workings of a normal mind.
Descartes myth, that the mind can split from body and brain is wholly inaccurate. It leads to more problems than any other misguided notion man has come up with. The soul may at first appear to be a vaguely uplifting notion, but it is only once we value lives over souls that modern peace arises.

Clarification on my idea of self

In a full 180degree shift I am re embracing the 'self'. For this reason. The narrative that constitutes self; my favourite team, preferred colour, subjects of attraction etc may be mutable. I may be no more than a bundle of impulses and urges. But for consciousness to exist we require subjectivity. How do the impulses apply to my sense of who I am? It may be an illusion but it is hard to see how we can be conscious without subjective experience. Reasoning is, at least partially, dependent on feelings. Cold logic could never address the infinity of variables. We rely on subjective feelings, our personal emotional responses to objects or situations to decide how to act. Breaking down a craft path to make an object requires our intuitive sense of rightness. We know which choices are wrong. We feel this. Our body constricts. Our body feels coldness or shudders. I have written of how emotions take place all over the body. When my dog smelt another dogs piss his pupils dilated, he slivered, adrenalin flooded his limbs sparking action. When we meet a potential sexual partner our body responds demonstrating that the body and mind are not two distinct systems but different aspects of one. These feelings that decide or inform our reason are personal. They depend on a self. A narrative structure of who we are. I say narrative but mostly it is reactive and none language based. Some people I can't stand, I distrust them, they raise my hackles. Others make me feel safe or excited. These people would be different for you. It becomes hard to see how we could manage consciousness without this.
Previously I have called the idea of a homunculus within our skulls the illusion of self. I stick with this. Much thought was supported on Descartes myth, the idea of the ghost in the machine. And whilst it can be pointed out that if each seperate aspect of self were stripped away it would leave nothing, this would also be true for leeds rugby league team. If you took out the players one by one there would be no team. The error is a category error. The self exists as the multiple and often contradictory threads and stories of our make up.

Skree philosophy of life

Bike

Open

Plastic Glove

Coat and Shadows

week in summer

Work and photos from last week. The final bedside table for Pitt, the interior of the campervan and work by Magnus Scholefield. Also we went to the sea, briefly.

Chimneys

Truth

Given that the world was once flat but now round it ought to be remembered that fact, truth, any suggestion delivered from the scientific method is not a solid, fixed thing. Think more of a telescope looking from one, specific point, in to the field at a bird in the wild. Focus can be brought through the lens to the eye enabling the person, at that place and time to clearly see the bird. But alter any part of the process and clarity is gone. Truths are like harmonics. Facts are balanced harmonys, fixed and tuneful for a period of time but always ultimately fading to be replaced by fresh harmonies. The most common mis conception regarding science is to see it as an extension of the Christian forward linear journey to salvation. There will be no finish. The idea of progress is doubtful. A truth may hover, enabling structure to follow but ultimately it is insecure foundation. Physics builds from facts like gravity, something we can see exists yet are no further on from Newton in understanding.

Diet Books, Fatties, Junkies and Self Delusion

Looking today in the book sales charts I saw 5 out of the top ten paperback non fiction were books about diets. That's half of all thought being spent on how to eat properly. What does this say about us? Overheating, bulimia, anorexia; all consumption disorders. For someone like myself who has to avoid alcohol, and other mind altering drugs, it is kind of reassuring. Left to its own devices the human animal developes weird habits. We can end up eating so much we die. Repeatedly gorging on fats and sugars, enjoying the sensory pleasures whilst our bodies distort and warp toward distorted bloated parodies of themselves. The mind and its sensations trumping the body and its physical reality. Or drinking to stave off an emotional reaction to normal life events. Ingesting opiates to mimic the endorphins that occur naturally in response to a thirty mile bicycle ride delivers the same sensation, but the body of the addict atrophys and withers to shadow form. A muddy puddles reflection of the self.
For it is not we who are in control. These things do happen. The stories we spin ourselves about who we are, the stories we spin others, are seldom near the truth. Consiousness is the 1% we are aware of. Our breathing, our heart beat, a million other body functions take place out of our sight. It is not 'we' who are in charge. There is no rider on the horse. Looking at the street junky dropping their trousers for a groin shot, having destroyed all other veins in the pursuit of that same feeling, again and again. Or the forty stone fatty, unable to walk or leave the chair to release their shit and piss, shovelling pizza after burger, coke after chip down throats lubricated with pig fat. These people are real and have stories they support a self on, and a self respecting self too. The human is the animal that tells itself stories. The narrative fantasy can run parallel to the physical truth. But equally so the two can diverge and drift apart. You can not lie to a dog. They can not understand language but they get the sentiment of what you say. Humans can ignore the sentiment of what is being said in favour of the meaning of words. And just as humans believe others lies, they also believe their own.
But it isn't just people like me who when allowed to drink or take drugs will drift off un to death, or people like the fatties who eat till they can not walk. We all lie to ourselves about what we are doing. In a sense, the reformed alcoholic, the conscious dieting eater, the 12 stepping teatotalitarian, is the more conscious. It maybe true that left with no restraint these folk run to greater dysfunction, but those whose lies and self deception never hit the walls of obesity or addiction are left in their deluded state. At AA meetings people are at least self aware. At weight watchers they are under no illusions.
The key to the 12 step success is the acceptance that the individual has no control over their behaviour. And herein lies great wisdom. We are none of us above our nature. Criminal court cases, particularly murders, are of interest as we can see people struggling to explain what they have done to themselves. No one, or very few, believe themselves immoral. Normally they spin a story where they retain some innocence. Or make themselves the victim.
Strip away the stories we tell ourselves, remove our narratives of being heroes, and we find the animal truth of what we are. A bundle of contradictory impulses and urges. And it ought to be understood that because there is no little man inside our heads responsible for resisting urges, addiction, over eating are not moral weakness. I never have to resist urges to go gamble, or eat twenty burgers. So I am showing no moral superiority or strength by not doing so. As a culture we are only just learning not to blame people for their own natures. Current political narratives are deeply enmeshed in notions of worthy poor and unworthy poor. Of benefit cheats and weakness of character. But no intelligent person, with the benefit of modern understanding of neuroscience, ought to blame the ill for being ill. Or blame the depressed for being depressed anymore than we blame a person for the colour of their skin.