Posted in books, from the living room on July 22, 2011| Leave a Comment »
The natural world is one that is sculpted by the life processes that occur within it. Living beings alter their environment and so alter their landscape of possible actions.
………..Alva Noe. “Out of Our Heads”
We don’t create the world from nothing, but we do create the possibilities of our world, which in turn creates the possibilities for us.
Posted in books, creativity, from the reading room, perception on June 4, 2011| Leave a Comment »
I always look forward to reading John Berger, ever since his classic four part documentary and book, entitled Ways of Seeing (see them all here)
I love his description of story where he looks up at the stars and sees story as the creation of the invisible lines which turn stars into constellations and how those constellations and their stories then influence the way we live (even at a simple level of navigation), and his other, related telling of how story joins up the steps we take to create a path, or a journey. Those ideas and descriptions have become such a part of how I see the world that, probably, I now realise, he didn’t exactly say either of those things, but the essence of his ideas has embedded itself in my psyche and the details now are more more personally mine.
His latest book is Bento’s Sketchbook (ISBN 978-1-84467-684-2) and I’ve had it on Amazon pre-order since I first became aware of it. It’s one of those books where you take it out of its cardboard packaging and immediately, I mean immediately, begin to read it. I took it everywhere with me, reading it on trains, in cafes, at work and in my house. I loved it. Completely loved it.
The book is based around the story that Spinoza, the philosopher carried around and drew in a sketchbook, but the actual book has never been found. John Berger decided, on receiving a blank sketchbook one day, to create the book Spinoza might have created. He does this by influencing the way he sees the world by bringing Spinoza’s writings to the front of his mind….in other words, he sort of puts himself into Spinoza’s shoes and sees the world from a Spinoza-Berger stance. (Oh, I’m not sure that really captures it!)
The book is about seeing. It’s about being aware, and really experiencing the present moment, and using drawing as a tool to enable that. This book completely inspires me to try to draw. I’ve had that thought many times, but can’t get the old school teacher’s judgement that I had “no artistic ability” out of my head. Time to banish that after all these years, I reckon. After all, what do you think? Don’t you think my photos show at least some artistic ability??
I normally include a few quotes from books I’ve loved but I’m not going to do that here. I don’t want to reduce it to quotes. This book is an experience and one which can’t be felt without seeing John Berger’s own sketches which heavily illustrate the words.
I can’t recommend this book highly enough. It is an inspiration and a call to wake up……go on, become a hero, not a zombie! (my words, not his!)
Posted in books, from the reading room, philosophy on May 14, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The “Black Swan” guy) has a new book out which is a collection of aphorisms. It’s called The Bed of Procrustes (ISBN 1846144582).
I like books of aphorisms. You can dip and dive into them and just stop where something provokes or captures you. Here are a few of his which have made me stop and think so far.
Don’t talk about ‘progress’ in terms of longevity, safety or comfort before comparing zoo animals to those in the wilderness.
Who doesn’t want longevity, safety and comfort? But he’s right, there’s a difference between being a zoo animal and living free in the wild. Can we have the longevity, safety and comfort AND the freedom and excitement of the wild??
If you know, in the morning, what your day looks like with any precision, you are a little bit dead – the more precision, the more dead you are.
This is pretty close to my heroes not zombies theme. If your every day is scheduled to death, is that satisfying? Is there some room for spontaneity, for freedom to respond to events and circumstances? If life can’t be fully controlled, it certainly can’t be fully planned. Globally, we’re caught up in command and control methods based on a delusion of the certainties revealed by science – whether it’s economic science, earthquake science, or medical science. The events of the last few years in particular are really showing the extent to which these theories and approaches are delusional and only further power and control over the individual.
It is a very recent disease to mistake the unobserved for the nonexistent; but some are plagued with the worse disease of mistaking the unobserved for the unobservable.
This is a bit like Rumsfeld’s famous knowns and unknowns, isn’t it? But there’s also the issue of is reality only that which can be seen and measured?
Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.
This reminded me of Mary Midgely‘s superb “Science and Poetry” – one of my favourite philosophy books. Science isn’t everything and it can’t explain everything either….
Posted in books, from the living room, from the reading room, perception, philosophy on May 10, 2011| 1 Comment »
When you listen to a favourite piece of music, do you have the same experience every time you listen? Have you ever had a wonderful meal in a restaurant, returned at a later date and had, maybe another wonderful meal……but were the two meals the same? Was the experience the same? If you look at a great painting, do you see exactly the same painting every time? I don’t mean is it the same object. I mean do you have the same perceptive, affective experience…….do you actually notice, regard, attend to the painting in an identical way, and does that produce an identical pattern of thoughts and feelings in you?
William James considers it this way in his Stream of Consciousness essay…
…and yet a close attention to the matter shows that there is no proof that an incoming current ever gives us just the same bodily sensation twice. What is got twice is the same OBJECT. We feel things differently accordingly as we are sleepy or awake, hungry or full, fresh or tired; differently at night and in the morning, differently in summer and winter; and above all, differently in childhood, manhood, and old age. For an identical sensation to recur it would have to occur the second time in an unmodified brain. But as this, strictly speaking, is a physiological impossibility, so is an unmodified feeling an impossibility….
The reality is, we never have the exact same experience twice. So maybe you should slow down a little, become more aware, more mindful of this present moment. You’ll never have another chance to have this particular experience again.
Posted in books, from the consulting room, from the reading room, health, life on March 17, 2011| 2 Comments »
Do you remember hearing this riddle when you were a child…..”how many sides does a bottle have?”
The answer was “two – and inside and an outside”.
Ken Wilber’s 4 quadrant map stimulates us to think about these two sides of everything – what lies on the outside, the surface, can be seen, pointed to and known – Wilber refers to this aspect as the “right hand side” (related to his diagram), or to whatever can be empirically known by just observing. And what lies inside, on the “left hand side” of his diagram, and which can only be revealed through dialogue and interpretation.
Here are a couple of paragraphs from his “A Brief History of Everything” to explain this thinking tool –
…all of the Right Hand dimensions can be accessed with this empirical gaze, this “monological” gaze, this objectifying stance, this empirical mapping – because you are only studying the exteriors, the surfaces, the aspects of holons that can be seen empirically – the Right Hand aspects, such as the brain.
But the Left Hand aspects, the interior dimensions, can only be accessed by communication and interpretation, by “dialogue” and “dialogical” approaches, which are not staring at the exteriors but sharing of interiors. Not objective but intersubjective. Not surfaces but depths.
and
[the Right Hand phenomena] all have simple location, because they are the physical-material correlates of all holons…….But….none of the Left Hand aspects have simple location. You can point to the brain, or to a rock, or to a town, but you cannot simply point to envy, or pride, or consciousness, or value, or intention, or desire. Where is desire? Point to it. You can’t really, not the way you can point to a rock, because it’s largely an interior dimension, so it doesn’t have simple location. This doesn’t mean it isn’t real! It only means it doesn’t have simple location, and therefore you can’t see it with a microscope or a telescope or any sensory-empirical device.
I find this very helpful. Health care is so dominated by this focus on exteriors, on what can be objectively described and measured, but health is such a human experience, that to ever understand it in any individual demands that you explore their interior dimension. Through dialogue. This is just as real, and, arguably, even more important, than what can be seen on the surface, or the exterior. I like this reference to simple location, because my everyday work is in dialogue, in exploring narrative, in diving into the interior…..which cannot be discovered by simple mapping or locating.
Posted in books, from the reading room, philosophy, science, tagged integral theory on March 14, 2011| 3 Comments »
Have you ever heard of a “holon”? It’s an idea first circulated by Arthur Koestler (read more detail here), summarised as –
1.2 The organism is to be regarded as a multi-levelled hierarchy of semi-autonomous sub-wholes, branching into sub-wholes of a lower order, and so on. Sub-wholes on any level of the hierarchy are referred to as holons.
1.3 Parts and wholes in an absolute sense do not exist in the domains of life. The concept of the holon is intended to reconcile the atomistic and holistic approaches.
1.4 Biological holons are self-regulating open systems which display both the autonomous properties of wholes and the dependent properties of parts. This dichotomy is present on every level of every type of hierarchic organization, and is referred to as the “Janus phenomenon”.
So, taking this idea as a starting point, we can consider the whole universe to be made up of holons. I really like this idea. It reminds us that nothing exists in isolation, and nothing can be fully understood without understanding it’s relationships as well as it’s “surface properties”. Ken Wilber, in particular, has picked up the idea and elaborated further with this his four “drives” of every holon. (“A Brief History of Everything” is a good place to start if you want to read more, and here‘s an interesting summary)
Ken Wilber’s “drives” are interesting. He describes two pairs – a horizontal pair and a vertical one. The horizontal pair are “agency” and “community”. Every holon needs agency, or autonomy, to preserve its uniqueness and its individuality. We humans need that. Our immune systems are designed to quickly recognise what is “not me” and our sense of self also strengthens our feelings of uniqueness. However, we also need community, in that we also need to connect and to belong. We love and are loved. One of the most severe punishments in any jail is “solitary confinement”. We are wired to connect to others and to our environments. We need both agency and community.
The vertical pair are “self-dissolution” and “self-transcendence”. Self-dissolution is that disintegration of the whole into parts (or more correctly into sub-holons, as all holons are made of holons!). This is something we experience as illness. When things fall apart, when our systems go out of balance, in essence when we experience dis-integration, we are experiencing “self-dissolution”. The opposite of this is growth and development. The fairly new biological term for this would be “emergence” – which is the development of characteristics and behaviours previously unseen in this organism or system. Wilber terms this “self-transcendence” which is a nice counter to that of dissolution. We have the capacity to literally transcend our current state through creative growth and evolution.
Of course none of us stay the same. We all experience continual change – some of it dissolution and some of it transcendence. (I’m reminded here of the biological processes of catabolism and anabolism).
This idea – the idea of a holon, (both as seeded by Koestler, and developed by Wilber) – is, I think a wonderful one. Once you grasp it, you’ll start to understand reality differently.
Posted in books, from the living room, from the reading room, life, neuroscience, philosophy on March 10, 2011| 2 Comments »
Here’s a quote from a book entitled “Neuroethics“. This is from an essay by Nancey Murphy.
While Greek thought tended to regard the human being as made up of distinct parts, Hebraic thought saw the human being more as a whole person existing on different dimensions. As we might say, it was more characteristically Greek to conceive of the human person “partitively,” whereas it was more characteristically Hebrew to conceive of the human person “aspectively.” That is to say, we speak of a school having a gym (the gym is part of the school); but we say I am a Scot (my Scottishness is an aspect of my whole being.)
Until I read this, I’d never come across these particular terms. Nor did I know there was this difference between Greek and Hebrew thought. But what completely struck me was how congruent this idea is with what Ian McGilchrist says about the left and right hemispheres of the brain. In his “Master and His Emissary“, he makes the case for each hemisphere engaging with the world in its own unique way – the left engaging in a “representation” way, breaking reality down into parts to “grasp” it by mapping it against what’s already known, and the right engaging in a more holistic way, (what McGilchrist describes as a focus on the between-ness, rather on the things). Ken Wilber’s description focuses on the “interpretative” nature of this other way.
So this is interesting. This idea of a “partitive” world view is very much our dominant paradigm. We break experience into parts and we use the left hemisphere strongly to do that. It strikes me we are on the edge of a wave of change here though, and that this worldview is running out of steam. It’s failing to satisfy what it is to be fully human. If that’s true, then we should be seeking to develop our right hemispheric powers, creating a more “aspective” worldview.
Posted in books, from the reading room, health on March 8, 2011| Leave a Comment »
When I read the line in “Cutting The Stone” about looking after the body, but not the being, I remembered some lines from T S Eliot’s The Cocktail Party – here they are –
Or take a surgical operation
In a consultation with the doctor or surgeon
In going to bed in the nursing home,
In talking to the matron, you are still
the subject.
The centre of reality. But, stretched on the table,
You are a piece of furniture in a repair shop
For those who surround you, the masked actors
All there is of you is your body
And the “you” is withdrawn
Posted in books, from the consulting room, from the reading room, health on March 7, 2011| 2 Comments »
Read this line in Abraham Verghese’s “Cutting for Stone”. It’s the last line in a letter of complaint written by a mother whose son died in hospital –
The fact that people were attentive to his body does not compensate for ignoring his being.
I think this is at the heart of what’s wrong with health care. We’ve reduced human beings to human bodies. The truth is a body is an important part of a human being, but there’s something about a being which is not reducible to what can be weighed or measured. In pursuing the science of understanding the body, we’ve lost the art of discovering and relating to human beings.
Posted in books, from the consulting room, from the reading room, health on February 15, 2011| 2 Comments »
It seems strange to me that so much of “health care” is focused on diseases and their management. A disease is always only a part of a patient’s life and experience. Whilst it’s important to deal with disease when it’s present, surely that’s never enough. Health is experienced by a person, a whole person, and care is expressed in relationships. Without a focus on health and care, what kind of “health care” do we get?
At times it seemed to her they were so focused on disease that patients and suffering were incidental to their work
Cutting For Stone. Abraham Verghese
Heroes Not Zombies 