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Archive for the ‘from the reading room’ Category

Ken Wilber’s 4 quadrants

Posted in from the reading room, philosophy on March 15, 2011| 11 Comments »

Ken Wilber’s “Integral Theory” has a number of elements. The holon is one of them. Another important element is the simple, elegant and immensely useful Four Quadrants. He simply draws a cross which yields four squares, or quadrants. On the horizontal, the upper two quadrants represent a singular perspective, and the lower two, the plural perspective. On the vertical, the left hand quadrants represent the interior, and the right hand ones, the exterior.

Even more simply, you can think of the pronouns which apply to each quadrant – upper left, is singular, interior and is communicated by using “I”, whereas, upper right, is singular exterior, so is communicated using “it”. Bottom left is plural interior, communicated with “we” and bottom right, being plural exterior, communicated with “its”.

You can see that the left hand refers to subjective experience and the right to objective.

One of the things you can do with this is map other conceptual maps onto it. So, if we take Karl Popper’s “three worlds”, then top left is “subjective”, bottom left is “cultural” and the right hand side is “objective”. Habermas describes three truths – the subjective truthfulness of I, the cultural justness of we, and the objective truth of its. You can also map Kant’s three great works against this – Critique of judgement (art and self-expression), Critique of practical reason (morals or we), and Critique of pure reason (science).

Finally, you can map onto the same plan, Plato’s Beautiful, Good and True.

I’m sure you will probably be able to come up with other parallels, but why not play with this for a bit. I think you’ll agree it provides a very useful and much more holistic framework within which to understand things.

I especially like how he values ALL four quadrants, and in so doing, makes it clear that if you only come at an issue from one of the quadrants, you’re just not going to get the full picture…..puts objective science into its right place in my opinion!

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The concept of a “holon”

Posted in books, from the reading room, philosophy, science, tagged 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.

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Partitive and aspective

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.

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Emotion and reason

Posted in from the reading room on March 8, 2011| 2 Comments »

I was listening to a discussion recently about rational and irrational thinking. Whilst I agree that rational thinking is a “good thing”, I can’t say I agree with the current reduced materialistic view of rational thinking and I certainly don’t agree with what I heard one of the contributors say, which was that if only we could increase rationalism we would create a better world. My immediate thought was, “really? You think so? I can think of something which is not rationalism which I would much prefer to back as the way to create a better world – love.”

So, I was delighted to find this piece by David Brooks in the NY Times.

We emphasize things that are rational and conscious and are inarticulate about the processes down below. We are really good at talking about material things but bad at talking about emotion….when it comes to the most important things like character and how to build relationships, we often have nothing to say. Many of our public policies are proposed by experts who are comfortable only with correlations that can be measured, appropriated and quantified, and ignore everything else.

He goes on to make the point that the latest research is changing this view of rational being good, and emotion bad.

First, the unconscious parts of the mind are most of the mind, where many of the most impressive feats of thinking take place. Second, emotion is not opposed to reason; our emotions assign value to things and are the basis of reason. Finally, we are not individuals who form relationships. We are social animals, deeply interpenetrated with one another, who emerge out of relationships. This body of research suggests the French enlightenment view of human nature, which emphasized individualism and reason, was wrong. The British enlightenment, which emphasized social sentiments, was more accurate about who we are. It suggests we are not divided creatures. We don’t only progress as reason dominates the passions. We also thrive as we educate our emotions.

Hmm….what do you think? Are we on the verge of a new more holistic (and I’d argue more realistic) view of human beings?

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T S Eliot’s The Cocktail Party – being a patient

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

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The being in human being

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.

 

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The World is made of Stories

Posted in from the reading room, writing, tagged , on March 5, 2011| 4 Comments »

The World is made of Stories, by David R Loy [ISBN 978-086171-615-9] is a wonderful little book, full of memorable quotes about the place of stories in our lives. I read a lot about stories, as well as reading, and hearing, stories every day, but this book is a bit different because it’s written from a Buddhist perspective. I’m not a Buddhist, but it’s refreshing to read a different take on stories. Here are some quotes to give you a flavour of the book.

Like the proverbial fish that cannot see the water they swim in, we do not notice the medium we dwell within. Unaware that our stories are stories, we experience them as the world. But we can change the water. When our accounts of the world become different, the world becomes different.

and

The world is not composed of facts, because what counts as a fact is determined by the theory – the story – it is related to. Science is not primarily about discovering facts. It is about accounting for the relationships that make them meaningful.

I especially liked his references to the relationship between story and landscape, which is such a core characteristic of Celtic culture.

To the native Irish, the literal representation of the country was less important than its poetic dimension. In traditional bardic culture, the terrain was studied, discussed, and referenced: every place had its legend and its own identity…..What endured was the mythic landscape, providing escape and inspiration. (R.F. Foster)

and

Landscape is a palimpsest: a manuscript on which more than one text has been written, with the earlier writing incompletely erased.

Let me leave you with one more, perhaps the most appropriate one for this blog –

In the long run, whatever it may be, every man must become the hero of his own story; his own fairy tale, if you like, a real fairy tale. (P.L. Travers)

 

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The biology of music?

Posted in from the reading room, music, neuroscience on March 1, 2011| 1 Comment »

Our willingness to listen to music is a biological trait and related to the neurobiological pathways affecting social affiliation and communication, suggests a recent Finnish study.

The understanding of the “biology” and even evolutionary position of music in human life is something I hadn’t really thought about until I read Ian McGilchrist’s excellent, “The Master and His Emissary“. In that work he describes the theory that music was the precursor to language and that one of its unique functions was to develop and strengthen bonds between people in a group, and to communicate at a “feeling” level, rather than at a more cognitive one.

The particular issue of the relationship between music and bonding is explored in the way the right hemisphere functions, and how it has a major role in the appreciation of music, and in the forming of social bonds. This Finnish study refers to some very similar ideas.

Similarities between human and animal song have been detected: both contain a message, an intention that reflects innate emotional state that is interpreted correctly even among different species. In fact, several behavioral features in listening to music are closely related to attachment: lullabies are sung to infants to increase their attachment to a parent, and singing or playing music together is based on teamwork and may add group cohesion.

Rather less interesting (in my opinion) is their exploration of the genetic “associations” (although I was pleased to see this word “associations” rather than “determinants”) related to the appreciation of music.

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Wonder and anger

Posted in from the reading room, life on February 28, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Another great post from Seth Godin

Great innovations, powerful interactions and real art are often produced by someone in a state of wonder. Looking around with stars in your eyes and amazement at the tools that are available to you can inspire generosity and creativity and connection. Anger, on the other hand, merely makes us smaller.

 

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How do we make decisions?

Posted in from the living room, from the reading room, from the viewing room, life, neuroscience, perception, psychology on February 27, 2011| 1 Comment »

Once you learn that most of the activity of the brain goes on without either conscious awareness, or with conscious awareness only kicking after the initial response, you begin to doubt that all our choices are conscious ones…..or rational ones. In fact, the brain stem and the limbic system are the key centres for our survival responses, our drives, our avoidances, and our emotional processing. How often do we behave in ways which really can’t be understood from the premise of consciously choosing once presented with the facts? Is that how human beings function? Would that even be the best way for human beings to function? (consciously and rationally, whilst discarding other ways of perceiving, processing our experience and responding). What do you think once you learn that there is an enormous neural network around the hollow organs of the body, the heart, and the gut especially, which we might well use to figure things out….where we might process and produce what we call “gut reactions”, or “heart felt” beliefs?

I’ve stumbled on two very different texts in this area in the last couple of days. Isn’t that weird, actually? It’s that old “coincidence” thing again…..never quite got to a point of really figuring out how those “coincidences” come about, or what they mean.

A few days ago, I read about a report for the WWF called “common cause“. The report, written by Tom Crompton. Essentially it argues that if we look at the research evidence, it would seem that human beings don’t make decisions using rational thought very much. Here’s a paragraph from the Summary –

There is mounting evidence from a range of studies in cognitive science that the dominant ‘Enlightenment model’ of human decision-making is extremely incomplete. According to this model we imagine ourselves, when faced with a decision, to be capable of dispassionately assessing the facts, foreseeing probable outcomes of different responses, and then selecting and pursuing an optimal course of action. As a result, many approaches to campaigning on bigger-than-self problems still adhere to the conviction that ‘if only people really knew’ the true nature or full scale of the problems which we confront, then they would be galvanised into demanding more proportionate action in response. But this understanding of how people reach decisions is very incomplete. There is mounting evidence that facts play only a partial role in shaping people’s judgment. Emotion is often far more important [see Section 1.3]. It is increasingly apparent that our collective decisions are based importantly upon a set of factors that often lie beyond conscious awareness, and which are informed in important part by emotion – in particular, dominant cultural values, which are tied to emotion. It seems that individuals are often predisposed to reject information when accepting it would challenge their identity and values.

That’s got me thinking about the importance of understanding our values (and/or our “virtues”) again.

Then, this morning, I read a post about some interesting TED videos, and the first one was this, by Dan Airley. He makes the case that we suffer from “cognitive illusions” just as much, if not more than, we suffer from “optical illusions”. (It’s about how we make decisions. It’s VERY entertaining, and thought provoking, and it’s just 17 minutes long. Take the time to watch it)

 

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