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Is meaning a feeling? And can it be measured?

Posted in from the reading room, science on April 12, 2011| 1 Comment »

I don’t know about you but it seems to me that there are some people around who seem to think that science can explain EVERYTHING. Personally, I think there’s a lot more to human endeavour and thought than the scientific method, but that’s another story….perhaps.

Here’s an article from Scientific American where they are posing the question “Too hard for science?” – a question which is actually wondering if there’s anything which can’t be explained by science. They put the question mark at the end because they clearly feel it’s unlikely that that sentence could be a statement. This particular article is by a sleep scientist who talks about how his subjects often want to tell him their dreams (I might be wrong, but I got the feeling he wasn’t that keen on hearing them!).

Dreams often feel profoundly meaningful, bizarre experiences often interpreted over the centuries as messages from the gods or as windows into the unconscious. However, maybe our brains are just randomly stringing experiences together during sleep and investing the result with a feeling of profundity.

Those last three words caught my attention – “feeling of profundity” – is meaningfulness a feeling? Would that make understanding also a feeling? Or insight? Are scientific insights feelings?

He goes on to scope out the “problem” as he sees it….

The problem: The difficulty in exploring this idea is that how meaningful something is might be too hard to measure. “It’s a bit like beauty — it’s in the mind of the beholder,” Stickgold says. “It’s not like heart rate or the level of electrical conductivity of the skin, which you have outside evidence of. If a person says something is meaningful, you’re not sure how to measure that, and you’re not sure how, if at all, that applies to others. One has to come up with a meaningful definition of meaningful.”

That’s the “problem” with the scientific method, isn’t it? It’s all about measurement. Meaningfulness, beauty (go on, add your own list) aren’t measurable. They’re a subjective expression. Not only that, but one person’s subjective expression is often not at all like another’s. What are we to do with that?

Ken Wilber would point out, I’m sure, that only surfaces are measurable, but depth requires interpretation. I deal with the subjective experience of health and illness all day. It’s only through the telling of their story that an individual can communicate that to me, and it requires me to listen, non-judgementally and compassionately so that I can interpret what they tell me. It wouldn’t be helpful to reduce people to what’s measurable in my opinion. Brian Goodwin, the biologist, also used to point out that objective, “measurable” scientifically described phenomena are only the result of intersubjective consensus anyway, and I think that’s also true.

This distinction between what is “objective” and “measurable” and subjective experience isn’t as helpful as it first appears. Whether we are observing, measuring or interpreting, we need reach a consensus about our subjective experiences. That’s the bottom line for me with patients – it’s their experience, as told by them, which is most important and reliable if I’m going to help them to find greater health.

I guess what I’m saying here is that I don’t think science is “the way, the truth and the light” – it’s an appropriate way to increase understanding in some circumstances, and not so appropriate in others. Or is that just too narrow a view of science?

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Science and prediction

Posted in from the reading room, science on April 7, 2011| Leave a Comment »

The Edge recently had an issue on predictability. You can predict why! From the financial collapse of 2008, to the earthquakes, tsunamis and hurricanes which have devastated so many parts of the world in the last three years, certainty seems increasingly misguided. The first main article in the piece is from Bruce Parker, an oceanographer. He starts with this –

Prediction is the very essence of science. We judge the correctness a scientifictheory by its ability to predict specific events. And from a more real-world practical point of view, the primary purpose of science itself is to achieve a prediction capability which will give us some control over our lives and some protection from the environment around us.

Oh, that bothered me. It’s bothered me since I first read it, and it’s continued to bother me since. You see, I like science. I love those scientific stories of exploration and discovery. But I don’t like the kind of science described in this opening paragraph. “Prediction is the very essence of science”….really? I know what he means, but isn’t there a lot more to science than prediction? I went back to Richard Holmes, “Age of Wonder“. No, it’s not a tale of prediction, it’s a tale of wonder and discovery. And what about this aim of science – “give us some control over our lives and some protection from the environment around us”. Again, I understand why he says this, but isn’t this too narrow a view of science? Doesn’t complexity science itself show how unlikely it is that we’ll be able to predict and control ourselves or the natural environment of which we are a part (not “apart from”)?

So, it was with great interest that I read and article from the biologist, Brian Goodwin, entitled “Towards a Science of Qualities….”

Reductionist science is essentially a strategy of divide and conquer: dividing the world into constituent systems whose parts are simple enough to allow prediction of their behaviour, and hence to exert control over their activity. This has worked remarkably well in many physical systems and even, to some extent, in biology. The approach exemplifies the principle that can be described metaphorically as linear thinking, which regards a whole as no more than the sum of its parts. Manipulation of the parts then results in control over the whole.

He goes on in the article to describe characteristics of complex systems and to argue (convincingly in my opinion) that we cannot hope to predict and control such systems. What we need to focus in instead is to further our understanding of complex systems and to learn how to increase things like “fitness” and “resilience”.

I think that’s the right approach. There’s too much “command and control” in our world – and it’s flawed. Let’s restore a sense of wonder, a desire to discover and understand, and to develop a good, scientific understanding of how to adapt, how to be flexible and how to increase our resilience and our creativity.

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Reducing pain with your own brain – love

Posted in from the reading room, health, neuroscience on April 6, 2011| 1 Comment »

Here’s an interesting piece of research. Viewing pictures of a romantic partner can stimulate the “reward” parts of your brain and reduce your experience of pain.

In this trial the researchers compared three interventions – viewing a photo of your romantic partner, viewing a photo of another attractive person and a standard distraction test. The first and the third of these reduced the pain experienced most, and the parts of the brain “activated” by viewing the romantic partner were not the same as those areas “activated” in the distraction test.

I should just add that in this particular trial the subjects were in the first nine months of a romantic relationship……but, still, it’s interesting to see the demonstration of the impact of love (and desire?) on the pain reducing mechanisms of the brain.

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Moral development

Posted in from the living room, from the reading room, life, personal growth, psychology on April 2, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Ken Wilber proposes in his Integral Theory, that there is a over-arching map which you can see in various theories of psychological development. Essentially, he proposes four levels of development – egocentric, where the child’s issues are all about their own needs, to ethnocentric, where there is an awareness of the family, tribe, or community of others like us. At this level, accepted norms of morality are adopted. These levels are sometimes termed “preconventional”, then “conventional”. The next, “postconventional” level, Wilber identifies as worldcentric, where we become aware of being part of all peoples, or all Nature. He goes beyond that level to propose a fourth, “integral” one.

One of the authors he cites as an example of this framework, is Carol Gillegan, whose “In a Different Voice”, describes a theory of gender difference along this developmental path. Here’s a wee summary (I think this is an interesting take on development)

All children start out with this selfish stage, but as females progress into the next one, they are taught to care, and as they learn to care for others, they develop feelings that to care for yourself is selfish and wrong. At the next level of development they learn that to fail to care for yourself is as wrong as failure to care for others. They learn this because of their focus on relationships – relationships involve two parties and if one party fails to look after herself, the relationship will be damaged.

Gilligan’s theory about males, takes a focus on justice or rights. The little selfish boy develops through learning that all people have rights to life and self-fulfillment which are protected through non-interference. In other words, rights set limits. As they mature they learn that they have to take increasingly more responsibility for care.

I’m not a great fan of such tightly gendered understandings, but there’s certainly food for thought in this theory. Maybe these two approaches are better thought of as right or left brain approaches as McGilchrist describes them…..with a right brain approach suiting a focus on relationships and the left on logic and the individual. We all need both halves of our brain after all, so maybe these “male” and “female” paths are better thought of as “intelligences” (as in multiple intelligences theory) , or “lines” (in the Wilber model).

There’s certainly food for thought in why we have feelings of guilt or selfishness when we take some time to care for our selves. And how we balance that with feelings of guilt or selfishness from too great a level of “non-interference”. We need to be both self-caring and compassionately engaged.

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Uncertainty and prediction

Posted in from the reading room, philosophy, science on March 30, 2011| 1 Comment »

In the aftermath of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear reactor woes in Japan, The Edge has focused on the issue of prediction. As always they’ve got a fascinating range of pieces, some of which, I completely disagree with, and some which are truly enlightening. All of them, however, are thought provoking. My initial favourite on reading through them all is the contribution from Douglas Rushkoff. He says (referring to these unusual, unpredictable events as “black swans” –

But, as black swan events like this prove, our reliance on the data continually fails us. We just can’t get enough data about our decidedly non-linear world to make accurate predictions.

This is a key point for me – the connections between things in our world are non-linear, because we live in a complex world, not a simple, mechanical one. Non-linear systems have certain characteristics including the phenomenon of “emergence” (which many of the Edge contributors refer to). The detail of emerging events and phenomena is unpredictable. So, what to do about that?

The coincidence of nuclear crises in Japan, combined with our inability to predict the events that precipitated it, forces another kind of predictive apparatus into play. No, it’s not one we like to engage — particularly in rational circles — but one we repress at our own peril. Science is free to promote humanity’s liberation from superstition or even God, but not from humanity itself. We still have something in common with all those animals who somehow, seemingly magically, know when an earthquake or tsunami is coming and to move to higher ground. And our access to that long lost sense lies in something closer to story than metrics. A winter bookended by BP’s underwater gusher and Japan’s radioactive groundwater may be trying to speak to us in ways we are still human enough to hear.

That bolding is mine, not Douglas Rushkoff’s. This is it. This is a great insight. We need to understand the importance of story, particularly when dealing with complexity, because there just never will be “enough” data.

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Female and male “voices” or tendencies

Posted in from the living room, from the reading room, life, personal growth on March 23, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Female/Male, yin/yang, moon/sun, there are these two aspects, types or tendencies described in many cultures throughout history. It’s too simplistic to say men are one way and women are the other. However, it’s also too simplistic to say men and women are the same. This way of thinking can be helpful if we consider male or female qualities are tendencies, rather than fixed types, if we see their interaction as being present and dynamic in all human beings, and if we aspire to an integrated, mature state, where each of us access both ways of being.

One helpful discussion about this is in Carol Gilligan’s “Different Voices”, where she highlights masculine and feminine ways or types of being in terms of “voices”.

A man’s voice tends to be focused on autonomy, justice and rights, whereas a woman’s voice tends to be focused on relationships, care and responsibility. In other words, men tend towards agency, and women towards communion (see the qualities of holons).
Men follow rules, women follow connections. Men look, women touch. Men tend towards individualism, women to relationships.

Neither of these are better than the other. For example, if the masculine way goes too far, or goes wrong, we see

not just autonomy, but alienation, not just strength but domination, not just independence, but fear of commitment. And if the feminine way goes too far, instead of being in relationship, she becomes lost in relationship, instead of healthy communion, she becomes dominated by others, and instead of flow, panic, or meltdown.

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An Integral framework of psychological development

Posted in from the living room, from the reading room, life, neuroscience, personal growth, psychology on March 23, 2011| Leave a Comment »

In Ken Wilber’s integral map of development, he describes an evolution from egocentric, to ethnocentric, to worldcentric. By this he means an initial focus on “me”, to an identification with others like us (“we”), to an identification with all living things.

He demonstrates how this relates to stages of moral development, from preconventional, where a child is self-absorbed, to conventional, where they learn the rules and norms of culture, and identify with their tribe or group, then onto postconventional, where their sense of identity expands out to include all humanity.

Interestingly he suggests there may be another map which lays nicely onto these – body (a focus on my physical body), mind (expanding to shared relationships and values) and spirit (all sentient beings).

Or even, from a neurological basis, from the reptilian brain stem (centred on me), to the mammalian limbic system (centred on we – the seat of attachment), to the neocortex (able to perceive and identify with the world).

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Science and meaning

Posted in from the reading room, philosophy, science on March 20, 2011| 1 Comment »

I find something very disturbing about the Brian Cox style of science programme. He usually presents something along the lines of the current “Wonders of the Universe” (his other recent outing being the astronomy week on BBC2 where his irritation factor was doubled by the contributions of his co-presenter Dara O Briain). The subject matter should be right up my street. I’ve had a lifelong passion for the wonders of Nature and the Universe. So, what’s the problem?

Two things – a certain contempt for human knowledge and wisdom prior to the present day which feeds an arrogant implication that everyone in the entire history of mankind was thick as two short planks until our current cohort of scientists who have finally found out the truth about everything. Secondly, an apparent view that only science can reveal truth. (Consider instead Ken Wilber’s Integral model which shows that science is a way of understanding surfaces, but that we need other ways to understand the depths)

Mark Vernon nails the issue perfectly.

At the start of the second programme, Cox is filmed on the banks of a holy river amidst Hindus attending to their dead. He notes that Hinduism, along with other religions, has a story to tell about people’s origins and the meaning of their lives. Only, that story is flawed. He has a deeper story to tell. ‘The path to enlightenment is not to understand our own lives and deaths,’ he intones, ‘but to understand the lives and deaths of the stars.’ He then proceeds to describe how the elements in our bodies are made from the explosive death of stars. Which is true. Only that’s not nearly enough to deliver on the enlightenment promise at the top. That would be like saying the meaning of Michelangelo’s David can be found in the quarry where the marble came from.

Nicely put, Mark! He concludes –

Science of itself does not do the meaning part. Only a human interpretation of the science can achieve that. But to do so, the interpretation must make raids on the language of values and metaphysics. It needs the beauty of colour and the harmonies of music – qualities which, of themselves, again are unknown to physics as physics.

I think it’s a shame to hear scientists trying to present science as a kind of “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” activity. Scientific enquiry and exploration is such a wonderful human enterprise, but it goes seriously off course when it turns into scientism.

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Surfaces and depths

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.

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