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Archive for the ‘science’ Category

Are memories stored as material traces?

Posted in books, from the reading room, life, science on February 27, 2012| 2 Comments »

Rupert Sheldrake in his excellent “The Science Delusion“, challenges a number of basic tenets (or dogmas) of science as it is most commonly practiced and preached. The key belief he challenges is that everything in the universe is material and mechanical – the universe and everything in it is “stuff”. One of the most thought provoking chapters is about memory. He asks “Are memories stored as material traces?”

You’ll be familiar with the idea. Memories are stored in the brain. When we want to recall a memory we find it in the brain somewhere and call it up somehow so we can examine it. Analogies such as filing cabinets are used – all that has ever happened to us is filed away somewhere in the brain and we have some kind of amazing google-type search engine which goes and finds things for us inside our own brains.

In this model, whatever happens, whatever we feel, whatever we think leaves some kind of physical trace –

footprint

Maybe that trace is a network of neurons which fire off together, or maybe it is a storage area of groups of neurons. The trouble is that despite millions of pounds of research and thousands of researchers using a multitude of technologies and methods, we can’t find such traces. Nobody has managed to discover where the physical traces are which are accessed by our search engines.

Sheldrake proposes a different model. One of resonance.

pool of resonance

In this model, the brain is more like a tuner, and memories are more like the radio or tv signals which surround us all the time. Recalling something is a matter of tuning in to those signals. (No not the radio and tv signals!)

Rupert Sheldrake’s “big idea” is “morphic resonance”. He suggests that in memory we tune in to our own personal “morphic fields”. We, in a sense, tune in to our past selves, our past experiences, which remain as fields in the universe. Whatever you think about the morphic fields idea, this idea of memory being more like a tuning in to fields which are not contained within individual brains is a fascinating one.

Think about it.

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Never unconnected

Posted in from the reading room, philosophy, science, Uncategorized on February 16, 2012| Leave a Comment »

ripples

We live with a view of ourselves as separate entities, made up of tiny, distinct, independent parts. This idea, this kind of atomism, has been around for centuries.

Now, however, we’re coming to understand that reality isn’t like that.

Lynne McTaggart writes in “The Bond”

The universe contains an indeterminate number of vibrating packets of energy that constantly pass energy back and forth as if in an endless game of basketball with a quantum sea of light. Indeed they aren’t even there all the time, but are constantly popping in and out of existence, making a brief appearance before disappearing back into the underlying energy field.

This is our emerging model of reality, one where there are no “things”, there is no “material” or “substance” distinct from energy. One where everything is constantly changing and nothing is separate.

Thomas Berry writes

We live immersed in a sea of energy beyond all comprehension. But this energy, in an ultimate sense, is ours not by domination but by invocation.

What a lovely phrase. This atomism has led us to believe that we are not only separate from each other but from Nature itself, and that has led to an unhealthy relationship with the Earth – one where we’ve been believing we can dominate and control. But we can’t. There is no separateness.

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You are a celebration

Posted in books, from the reading room, science on February 13, 2012| 1 Comment »

Have you ever thought of yourself as a celebration?

Thomas Berry, in his “The Great Work”, writes

While the universe celebrates itself in every mode of being, the human might be identified as that being in whom the universe celebrates itself and its numinous origins in a special mode of conscious self-awareness.

The theme of “The Great Work” is the amazing evolutionary story of the universe. Thomas Berry points out that we can discern three core principles, or characteristics, flowing through the evolution of the universe from its origins to the current day where human beings have populated the Earth. These themes are

differentiation, subjectivity, and communion

In other words, ever increasing complexity and diversity, the capacity to have inner experience, to respond spontaneously, and the ability to form connections and bonds.

This is a beautiful story. It’s dynamic, flowing and developing. As we follow through the story from the formation of stars like our sun, of the planets which orbit it, of the emergence of simple life forms, and onwards to the development of ever greater levels of consciousness, we see that in the human being the universe has achieved the ability to reflect on itself, to see itself, to celebrate itself.

You.

You are the universe celebrating itself.

What a lovely idea. See how it feels today to become aware of yourself as a celebration.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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