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Archive for the ‘philosophy’ Category

Part of Nature, not outside it

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, life, philosophy, photography, science on January 18, 2012| 2 Comments »

Is Nature “out there”?
Are we, as human beings, separate from Nature? Is Nature there for us to exploit? To have dominion over? To control? To dominate?
Much human activity seems based on this set of beliefs, but it is a delusion.
There is no separate “Nature” from “us”. Every creature, every life form, every natural force, energy and phenomenon is interconnected.
This idea that we are separate from Nature is deeply to connected to a way of thinking which separates the “subjective” from the “objective”.
The idea of “objective” contains a tendency to turn experiences, phenomena, even other people into “things”.
It’s a stance which dehumanises, and denatures.

Look at this fence –

the living fence

I love how this fence instantly challenges the view that it is a “thing” – you can see it’s a living organism.

Whilst on holiday recently, I stumbled across a book by a South African author, Ian McCallum. Ecological Intelligence. [978-1555916879]

He argues that we need to reconnect to other animals and to Nature, and interestingly writes a lot about the concept of the “field”.
I find that concept so useful.
In my Be The Flow, I muse about the relationship between a wave and the sea. In this analogy, the sea is the “field” and the wave is a person. We emerge out of the field assuming distinct, identifiable, unique form. But we don’t leave the field. The wave is at no point separate from the sea. The wave constantly changes throughout its life. It is transient, dynamic, and, soon, its gone. Where does it go? It returns to the sea which in fact, it never left. It “disappears” into the field.

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The meaning of life?

Posted in from the reading room, philosophy on November 12, 2011| 2 Comments »

I was struck by a strange juxtaposition of readings this morning. First of all, I was reading a piece by Raymond Tallis (excellent, by the way, read it here!) where he quotes Professor John Gray, from the London School of Economics

For Gray the animal nature of man leads him to the chilling conclusion that ‘human life has no more meaning than the life of slime mould’. Man (whom he re-names Homo rapiens) ‘is only one of many species and not obviously worth preserving.’

Then I read Antonovsky’s definition of “coherence” –

We are coming to understand health not as the absence of disease, but rather as the process by which individuals maintain their sense of coherence (ie sense that life is comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful) and ability to function in the face of changes in themselves and their relationships with their environment

Well, what do you think? Do you think human life has no more meaning that a slime mould? Or do you find Antonovsky’s definition of a healthy life more appealing?

Frankly, and this is the thrust of Tallis’ argument I believe, attempts to dehumanise what it is to be human by excluding the rich reality of consciousness, is not only unappealing, even frightening, but it diminishes the potential for compassion, and, hence, the potential for a better world.

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Thomas Moore – care of the soul

Posted in from the reading room, life, philosophy on September 30, 2011| 4 Comments »

This week I had the enormous and delightful privilege of meeting Thomas Moore. He delivered a talk in the Medical Lecture Theatre at Glasgow’s Western Infirmary after visiting us in the Centre for Integrative Care, Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital, in the afternoon. So we had the chance to both meet him personally, and hear one of his really inspirational talks.

You know, Thomas, it felt like being “home”! I guess, you’d call it a “soul connection”. It all felt so right.

If you’re not familiar with his work, you’d do well to start with The Care of the Soul in Medicine, but really I’d recommend any of his books. I’ve enjoyed every one I’ve read.

He began by talking about mystery, and how none of us is completely knowable. Seems obvious, huh? But I’m repeatedly amazed how patients will say to me, at the end of a one hour first consultation, that I now must know “everything” about them. I usually respond by saying oh, we’ve only had an hour together, and you can spend a lifetime with someone and not fully know them, so really at this stage my knowledge must be very slight. But I know what they mean. The process of a holistic, non-judgemental, compassionate consultation, forms a strong (what Thomas would call “soul”) connection. The patient feels heard, they feel felt, they feel understood. However, I thought it was great to be reminded that we are all unknowable, that we all have unfathomable depths. It sets up a certain humility of practice and of living.

Thomas’ idea of “soul” seems very common sense and right to me – the best way to grasp it is to think about the phrases we use such as “soul music”, “soul food”, “soul mate” and so on. It’s a deep sense of being connected to other and to the world in which we live. He talked about some of the elements we identify as important in creating a good life, a soul-full life – friends, food, home, stories, the architecture of our living spaces for example. Everything about sharing, and about really experiencing our every day reality – what I’ve mentioned in this blog a number of times using the French phrase “emerviellement du quotidien” – the wonder, or amazement, of the every day….

If you ever get a chance to hear Thomas, grab it! You’ll have a soul-full evening!

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Harmony

Posted in from the reading room, life, philosophy on August 24, 2011| Leave a Comment »

I’m a long time subscriber to Resurgence magazine. It’s usually a very beautiful production and comes at things from both a “green” and a spiritual angle. The current issue flags up the theme of “harmony”, which is a great concept to rally around. Here’s a bit from Satish Kumar, the editor, in his lead editorial –

at the Tagore Festival, the Iranian Sufi scholar Hossein Ghomshei explained what he understood by the word ‘harmony’: “Harmony is the existential principle of the universe. Knowledge of universal harmony is science, expression of it is the arts, and the practice of harmony is religion. Which means there is no conflict between science, the arts and religion – all three operate within the context of the universal harmony.” The sun is in harmony with the soil and the seeds, the oceans are in harmony with the land, bees are in harmony with flowers, and the five elements harmonise and cooperate with each other to maintain life on Earth. We are all related. “Reality is not a thing, reality is relationship amongst things,” says Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and his Emissary. Reality is reciprocity and mutuality; dark and light, below and above, left and right complement. And, in the words of E.M. Forster, all we have to do is “only connect”.

Oh yes, I like this. I often think about health, and what it is, playing with words like holistic, integrative, vitality, resilience etc….but for some reason I hadn’t considered the word “harmony”. What I love about harmony is, like beauty, or wellbeing, you just know it when its there. It’s both holistic and intuitive. Harmony is also produced by the fitting together of different elements. It’s not about everything being the same, so it’s completely consistent with the “integrative” idea of a good relationship between well differentiated parts.

We are such complex creatures, and the idea that healthy working together, or relating of the multiple different parts, is “harmony” is very appealing. In fact, we are embedded creatures, in constant relationship with others and with our environment. To be in “harmony” with others, with the rest of Nature, with the planet, (hey, even with the universe!) strikes me as an excellent goal.

I particularly like Hossein Ghomshei’s mention of science as knowledge of harmony, art as its expression and religion as the practice of harmony. Wonderful echoes of Deleuze and Guattari’s three ways of thinking – science about function, art about affects and percepts, and philosophy about concepts. And then a great quote from the magnificent Iain McGilchrist – “Reality is not a thing, reality is relationship amongst things,”

So, is my Life in harmony?

And, how can I work towards greater harmony?

On a daily basis, with each choice I make, is that choice likely to produce greater harmony? Or to produce discord?

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Out of Our Heads

Posted in books, from the reading room, life, neuroscience, philosophy, science on July 24, 2011| 1 Comment »

Alva Noë’s “Out of Our Heads” [ISBN 978-0-8090-1648-8] makes a strong case for understanding consciousness as a phenomenon, not produced by the brain (in the way that the stomach produces gastric juices, as he says), but rather….well, this is how he puts it –

Consciousness requires the joint operation of brain, body, and world. Indeed consciousness is an achievement of the whole animal in its environmental context.

He rejects completely a reductionist view that you are your brain –

The subject of experience is not a bit of your body. You are not your brain. The brain, rather, is part of what you are.

and, further,

Brains don’t have minds; people (and other animals) do.

This way of thinking is entirely consistent with what Dan Seigel teaches from a perspective of “Interpersonal neurobiology” – we can find neural correlates of mental phenomena, but we have no way of proving either causation or direct linkage between the two. This is also consistent with those who argue for both and “embodied” and, in particular, an “extended” mind (see Andy Clark’s work). I particularly liked the phrase Alva quotes in his book (attributed to his colleague Susan Hurley) –

…the skull is not a magical membrane; why not take seriously the possibility that the causal processes that matter for consciousness are themselves boundary crossing and, therefore, world involving?

I love that. We are all deeply and intimately connected as open systems with our environments – our physical, social and semantic environments. The flows of energy and life flow into us, through us, out of us. They create us in interaction with our own bodies and minds. As Alva paraphrases Merleau-Ponty –

…our body is ours – the place where we feel and the means by which we act – insofar as the current of activity that flows toward the world passes through it.

There is so much to stimulate your thinking in this book – about consciousness, about a sense of self, about habits, language, how we create the world in constant interaction with that changing world. I’ll just highlight two other parts of the book for you. Firstly what he says about science and biology –

Science takes up the detached attitude to things. But from the detached standpoint, it turns out, it is not possible even to bring the mind of another into focus. From the detached standpoint, there is only behaviour and physiology: there is no mind.

..you can’t do biology from within physics. To do biology, we need the resources to take up a nonmechanistic attitude to the organism as an environmentally embedded unity. When we do that – and now we come to my critical claim – we also secure the (at least) primitive mentality of the organisms. The problem of mind is that of the problem of life. What biology brings into focus is the living being, but where we discern life, we have everything we need to discern mind.

…once you see the organism as a unity, as more than just a process, you are, in effect, recognising its primitive agency, its possession of interests, needs, and point of view.

I feel this is crucial if we are to achieve a better understanding of these big issues of life, mind and consciousness. We have to see people as whole organisms in constant exchange with their environment. There’s something inherently inhuman about the attempts to reduce biology to physics, or the attempts to reduce human beings to physiology and behaviour.

Finally, I could pick many, many paragraphs to make this point, but let me end with this one –

We are partly constituted by a flow of activity with the world around us. We are partly constituted by the world around us. Which is just to say that, in an important sense, we are not separate from the world, we are of it, part of it. Susan Hurley said that persons are dynamic singularities. We are places where something is happening. We are wide.

 

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The space within

Posted in books, from the reading room, life, neuroscience, philosophy on July 23, 2011| Leave a Comment »

 

Once in a while, I get shocked into upper wakefulness, I turn a corner, see the ocean, and my heart tips over with happiness – it feels so free! Then I have the idea that, as well as beholding, I can also be beheld from yonder and am not a discrete object but incorporated with the rest, with universal sapphire, purplish blue. For what is this sea, this atmosphere, doing within the eight-inch diameter of your skull? (I say nothing of the sun and the galaxy which are also there.) At the center of the beholder there must be a space for the whole, and this nothing-space is not an empty nothing-space but a nothing reserved for everything.

This quote from Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift is used as an epigraph for the last chapter of Alva Noe’s excellent “Out of Our Heads”. As he concludes –

I hope I have convinced you that there is something perverse about the very idea that we are our brains, that the world we experience is within us. We don’t need to have the world within us: we have access to the world around us; we are open to it. I take this to be the import of Bellow’s language in this chapter’s epigraph.

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Life flows

Posted in life, philosophy, tagged on July 17, 2011| 2 Comments »

Life……is essentially a current sent through matter, drawing from it what it can.

Henri Bergson, the French philosopher worked on three major areas of thought – duration, memory, and what he termed “élan vital”  – the vital tendency.

There’s a Life Force – not a “thing”, but real nevertheless.

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Close to the edge

Posted in perception, philosophy, science, Uncategorized on June 22, 2011| 1 Comment »

20110622-012637.jpg

Where are the edges?
If its true that becoming, rather than being, is the core phenomenon of life (and I think it is) then the attempt to divvy up reality into pieces is misguided.
I was interested, therefore, to come across a piece of research looking into the issue of water’s boundary between liquid and gas phases. It turns out it’s just about impossible to draw the boundary.

The researchers concluded that the change between air and water happens in the space of a single water molecule.
“You recover the bulk phase of water extremely quickly,” Benderskii said.
While the transition happens in the uppermost layer of water molecules, the molecules involved change constantly. Even when they rise to the top layer, molecules for the most part are wholly submerged, spending only a quarter of their time straddling air and water.
The study raises the question of how exactly to define the air-water boundary.

Where do I end and you begin?

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Lighten, brighten and enlighten

Posted in creativity, from the consulting room, from the living room, from the reading room, health, life, personal growth, philosophy on June 16, 2011| 3 Comments »

passing the light

June is the month of the light. Next week in Scotland, it’s midsummer’s day – the shortest day of the year (you’d never know we’re in the middle of summer, given all the rain and wind we’ve had!). So, I’ve been thinking again about light.

Candle light in particular reminds us how sharing light increases it. Have you ever lit one candle from another? When you do, the first candle doesn’t get any dimmer. By lighting one candle from another, you end up with more light.

I wonder what kind of light I bring into this world? You might like to wonder about what you pass on to others too, because, although we might not physically pass light to each other, we certainly pass our emotions, our attitudes, our way of being onto to those around us and spread them the way that light can spread.

Around the turn of the year, when I was thinking about my Life (with a capital “L”), I played with this idea of light and I thought, actually, what I try to do, as a doctor, can be captured in three verbs about light.

Firstly, I try to lighten others’ loads. I try to ease their suffering. If I didn’t achieve at least that, I’d not be much of a doctor. I hope that everyone I see has their life, or the burdens in their life, lightened a bit as a result of my care.

But that’s not enough for me. I don’t want patients to come back and just say they feel a little lighter. I want their lives to be brighter. By that I mean I hope their days become better days, more fulfilling, more colourful, brighter days. I hope for others, and I hope for me, that life becomes brighter, and by that, I really mean an increase in that “emerveillement du quotidien“.

But even that’s not enough for me. I hope, at best, to enlighten, to show new possibilities, to support and stimulate new growth. I just love when I hear that a patient’s life has become lighter, brighter and, yes, transformed – that they’re experiencing a personal enlightenment.

If you think about light this month, why not think of it as a metaphor, as well as a physical phenomenon? What metaphors of light seem most relevant in your life?

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What’s going on?

Posted in from the reading room, philosophy, science, tagged on May 24, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Do you ever ask yourself “what’s going on?” I’m sure you do. There’s a trend which seems to be at it’s peak just now (at least, I’m hoping it’s about to decline!), which you can trace back to Enlightenment, the development of positivism as a philosophy and, emerging from that background a belief in the power of capital and reductionist science to produce both our globalised financial/political power elite and scientism (the belief that science, and only science, can reveal “truth”).

I recently watched Inside Job. If you haven’t seen it, I urge you to do so. It’s the clearest explanation of the 2008 financial crash and its roots I’ve read or heard. The frustrating thing about Inside Job is how it reveals that the same elite is still in power, still in the money, and still in control.

Then I read an article by Sam Harris in The Nation.

More a habit of mind than a rigorous philosophy, positivism depends on the reductionist belief that the entire universe, including all human conduct, can be explained with reference to precisely measurable, deterministic physical processes. (This strain of positivism is not to be confused with that of the French sociologist Auguste Comte.) The decades between the Civil War and World War I were positivism’s golden age. Positivists boasted that science was on the brink of producing a total explanation of the nature of things, which would consign all other explanations to the dustbin of mythology. Scientific research was like an Easter egg hunt: once the eggs were gathered the game would be over, the complexities of the cosmos reduced to natural law. Science was the only repository of truth, a sovereign entity floating above the vicissitudes of history and power. Science was science.

What’s the connection between this and the financial crises? –

During the past several decades, there has been a revival of positivism alongside the resurgence of laissez-faire economics and other remnants of late-nineteenth-century social thought. E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology (1975) launched pop-evolutionary biologism on the way to producing “evolutionary psychology”—a parascience that reduces complex human social interactions to adaptive behaviors inherited from our Pleistocene ancestors. Absence of evidence from the Pleistocene did not deter evolutionary psychologists from telling Darwinian stories about the origins of contemporary social life. Advances in neuroscience and genetics bred a resurgent faith in the existence of something called human nature and the sense that science is on the verge of explaining its workings, usually with reference to brains that are “hard-wired” for particular kinds of adaptive, self-interested behavior.

Beginning to see the connections?

Then along comes Adam Curtis’ new documentary on BBC2, All Watched Over by Machines of Love and Grace. What a strange title! It comes from a poem of that title by Richard Brautigan. It’s a three part series, and this first episode focused on Ayn Rand and her disciples, including the still influential Alan Greenspan. What a disturbing piece! I found it alarming to see such an emphasis on selfishness, such disdain about altruism, and such delusional belief in the power of “rationalism” to control outcomes. But these ideas still seem to be the foundation of the current power base in the world.

When I started this blog, and titled it “Heroes not Zombies”, I wrote about how to make zombies – and, later, I wrote about limits to control. Are there signs of change?

I do think the next wave will be based on an understanding that the world is not predictable, not controllable, and that human beings are not best served by being dominated by power elites, or so called “experts” (“scientific” or otherwise!)

But it’s a long road ahead……!

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