Category: Words and Life

A western redcedar stands barely six feet outside my second-floor office window, its trunk denuded of branches on the side facing the building. It presents a lonely and spindly presence, forced to accommodate a site far removed from its preferred forest habitat.

Despite its name, it is not really a cedar, but a member of the cypress family, and an entirely different genus from the true cedars found to the north and east of the Mediterranean, the trees of the mythical forest that blanketed the lands around ancient Sumer, the forest that was home to the monster Humbaba in the tale of Gilgamesh.

Like its namesake in the Lavant, however, the cedar outside my window is an intensely social tree, with a strong inclination to congregate in clusters with others of its kind, its roots intertwined with its neighbors and its branches collecting with theirs into a tall, gloom-casting canopy over a thick floor of fragrant brown sprays where little else grows, a rarified space surrounded by a gradually increasing population of squat, shade-adapted understory plants, forming a dimly lit cathedral where all the furniture has been piled into the periphery.

Along the ground below my window the transition zone between building and tree is the antithesis of a cathedral, bright and narrow and cluttered, a flat, thinly mulched space dotted with “ornamental” plants (ornamental being horticulture-speak for plants indigenous to someplace else, or plants that have been modified through selective breeding into something barely resembling their indigenous forms, or both of these). The mulched space ends abruptly a few short feet from the cedar’s trunk, and becomes first a heavily weathered concrete curb bespeckled with chipped yellow caution paint, and then a curved lane of asphalt connecting two parking areas. 

The view through the window, through the just barely discernible ultraviolet tinting of the glass and across six feet of visually unoccupied airspace to the curling coils of peeling bark on the branchless side of the trunk, is not entirely transparent, with reflected echoes of nearby objects in the room around me. And there is something about the nearness of the tree and the faint reflection of the office interior that renders the above-ground transition on my side of the window intolerably immediate.

This midair transition zone is easily dismissed as trivial. What is there of importance that could flourish in the emptiness between the upper regions of terrestrially-rooted objects? But the space between the window and the tree is not empty; for all of its airiness, it is nonetheless alive with potential, a space of communication and transit and a venue for activities of immensity and necessity. It is a space filled with flying and floating and drifting things. It is a world of birds. It is a world of spider silk. It is a world of tiny winged creatures who dance in and out of the tree’s shadow. It is a conduit for wind-blown seeds and pollen, a channel for the transmission of pheromones and gasses, a medium for countless unseen signs and signals.        

The zone is reduced to a strictly visual world from my insulated perspective. All external sounds are muffled by the building’s exterior wall, and the tangy astringent fragrance of cedar is blocked entirely. Everything on my side of the glass is calm and still in both their solid and reflected forms. But the cedar and the branches of a more distant oak and the tops of trees beyond them are in perpetual and unpredictable motion on this particularly cold and breezy spring afternoon.

The transition is as much psychological as it is physical, as much active mental presentation as passive sensory experience. The physical separation between inside and outside makes the world through the glass into a virtual world, a world experienced in real-time but semi-vicariously, a world in which I am not a wholly engaged participant, a world I can fully inhabit only through imaginative projection, through my body’s memory of bitter spring breezes upon the skin of previous versions of me.

Yet even for the me who is present now, the ephemeral space between the glass and the cedar is a crowded place. There are things in my memory that find this space particularly abundant, despite its apparent emptiness—because of its apparent emptiness. It is a field of affordances, a chasm that begs to be traversed, a threshold that beckons. My eyes reach through the window and grasp hold of what my hands cannot.

And in a similar way, with what I write here, my thoughts reach out, refracted into the shape of words that collect in stacked rows across the screen in front of me, toward a world in which words on screens and office windows—and buildings next to cedar trees—are entirely unnecessary.  

The term comes from Iris Murdoch, a twentieth century British novelist and moral philosopher. But I suspect the concept is an ancient one that has likely been around since the earliest humans first began to dabble in concepts.

For Murdoch, unselfing is a feature of the experience of beauty. It can occur when in the presence of great art. But it also occurs in the presence of the natural world. To look up and see a bird outside the window can be enough to temporarily yank us outside of what has become our default mode of thought, our ruminating self-absorption.

Echoes of Zen philosophy in this, perhaps.

Unselfing, she claims, has moral implications: to make unselfing a more frequent feature of your posture to the world is to become a more virtuous person—in the Hellenistic, rather than the Buddhistic, sense of virtue; Murdoch was apparently a big fan of Plato and his crowd.

As I want to understand the term, unselfing is distinctly different from empathy. To be empathetic is to feel along with the other, to suffer in your own person a measure of what the other suffers. But this empathetic suffering-for-the-other can, paradoxically, involve an intensification and amplification of the self: the other imagined into the self, incorporated as part of your present self-experience. The pain you feel, real or imagined, can never belong to anyone but yourself. Despite platitudes to the contrary, pain is not something that can be shared.

Unselfing has perhaps more to do with the psychological idea of flow than with empathy. As with flow, unselfing involves an immersive state of attentional focus linked with the momentary disintegration of self-awareness. Murdoch seems to suggest this connection between flow and unselfing, pointing out how immediately following an unselfing experience, the anxieties and concerns we were wrapped up in just moments before are no longer as compelling as they were, a clear parallel to the cathartic state of calmness a person can experience when emerging from a protracted period of flow.

But it’s the potential ethical and moral implications of unselfing that I find most interesting. That, and the strong suspicion I have that unselfing—like flow—was at one time a much more commonplace experience, that unselfing is yet another human rule that civilized life has rendered an exception.

The idea that brains produce conscious experience runs up against an unsolvable logical problem: how can the same brain that is generating the experience also experience the experience.

Cognitive psychology came upon this early on with something called the homunculus infinite regress problem. If the idea of mental representation—a foundational principle in cognitive psychology—is taken seriously, then you need both the process that is creating the representation, and a “something else” that it is being represented to. But in order for this something else to know what it is observing when it interprets the representation, it needs a way of representing the representation, and so on in an infinite regress.

Stated in neurological terms relative to consciousness, in order to be conscious, you need something to be conscious of (the output of brain activity) and something (other brain activity) to register the awareness of it. But this registration of awareness is just more brain activity and not the awareness itself. For that you need something else, which can only be additional brain activity requiring yet an additional something else and so on.

It’s turtles all the way down.

The only real solution to the infinite regress problem is to dislodge consciousness from the organism. Material engagement theory reflects one interesting attempt to articulate this. In (grossly) simplified terms, material engagement theory (MET) considers conscious experience as a phenomenological property of the three-way interaction (interpenetration?) between culture, the person, and the material world. [In his book, How Things Shape the Mind, Lambros Malafouris provides an in-depth look at material engagement theory, and, in particular, how it relates to human tool use.]   

But the notion that consciousness is a brain product is a hard one to shake for most folks. Part of the reason for this may have to do with the way civilized life is structured, and the fact that (a point that MET drives home) the way we think about the world is not independent of what we are actually doing and how we are doing it.

Consider how a logical error called the mereological fallacy plays into this. The mereological fallacy, as it applies to living organisms, is the tendency to ascribe characteristics of the whole creature to a single component part. For example, to say that stomachs digest, or that legs run, or that brains remember. The world of cognitive neuroscience is replete with examples of this logical error, conscious brains being just one.     

The mereological fallacy reflects a thoughtform that is endemic to the civilized mind, and its parts-standing-in-for-the-whole nature reflects the constituent partitioning of civilized activity. Civilization is a mechanistically structured, systemized way of living in which various parts of the system are designed to play circumscribed roles or carry out specific isolated functions. In addition, the civilized perspective ascribes ontological priority to abstract categories rather than to concrete material events. In reality, of course, consciousness is just an idea, a concept, an abstraction. Awareness is never without content. Awareness is not to be found outside of the content. But consciousness is nonetheless mistaken for a thing in itself, is reified, is granted “thingness,” and its existence then becomes a problem to be solved.

So, what difference does it make how we think about consciousness? What does it matter and why should anyone care?

Seeing consciousness as something produced by brains, something happening inside us, something separate and independent of the world itself, supports the irrational notion that our experience exists somehow independent of the various environments that we inhabit, that we could be who we are independent of the larger contexts in which who we are expresses itself, that we could somehow exist outside of any context at all, or in an artificial context of our own choosing. Not only does this predispose us to undervalue the rest of living nature, but it can ultimately lead to absurd and potentially dangerous notions such as the crazy idea that physical reality doesn’t matter at all, that we could, for example, upload our consciousness into an artificial medium and become an inhabitant of an electronic “metaverse.”   

Consciousness doesn’t happen in brains. First-person experience is not actually first-person, but something that emerges from our shared participation in a world inhabited by numerous others. And, perhaps most importantly, who we are at any point in time depends critically on those numerous others.  Those numerous others are, in the most intimate and inseparable sense, us.  

According to a recent theory, the capacity for conscious awareness traces to the evolution of primitive brain areas designed to predict the organism’s likely future movements by generating a dynamic simulation or model of the organism itself. The appearance of the cortex added a whole new layer (literally) to the complexity and sophistication of this self-simulation ability, and consciousness emerged as a result.

A somewhat compelling theory, perhaps. But describing brain areas and their putative activities says absolutely nothing about consciousness.

Our first-person experiential awareness of the world is simply not something that can be explained by what happens inside brains. Consciousness cannot be found lurking within neural connections or patterns of brain activity. No matter how complex or nuanced or sophisticated this brain activity is, it is still just organized clusters of neurons engaged in interactive twitching.

Now, I understand and accept that my conscious awareness is correlated with the activity and structures of my nervous system. Pull out parts of my brain, and my conscious experience is likely to change. But that doesn’t mean that my conscious experience is being created by neural activity.

Perhaps, as panpsychic theories claim, consciousness is an imminent feature of the universe itself, a fundamental quality of matter, something that permeates everything, part of the substrate of reality, a primary feature of what the universe is, and physical brains act to compartmentalize this universal consciousness, temporarily sequester slivers of it.

Panpsychic notions seem at least as reasonable as the idea that the organized twitching of neurons can summon consciousness out of the void. And there are likely other possibilities that are just as reasonable, but that have yet to be conceived.

To explain consciousness in terms of brain activity is merely to restate the question.

Edit: here is a good, easy-to-understand article about the ridiculousness of thinking about brains as computers.

Not too long ago I was listening to an hour-long presentation on Zoom about the importance of relationships on campus—relationships with colleagues, relationships with students. And when it got to the part about how this information should be applied in the classroom, what specific things I should be doing, my levels of irritation became almost unbearable.

Relationship, or what is meant by that term in this context, is a basic, primary, fundamental, and fundamentally human thing. Relationships are things that develop and grow and change organically. Educational institutions are machines. They are inhuman, mechanical, artificial things. There is no humanity lurking inside the procedural structure of an educational program. There is nothing human in a bureaucracy. There are no relationships in an institutional system, only connections, contacts, and conduits.

And so what the folks (institutional servomechanisms) running the presentation were doing, what they were trying to say, was something along the lines of: “OK, people are suffering a little bit because the relationship thing is missing because we are dealing with contrived connections and mechanical activities and there is nothing human in any of that (only they weren’t saying it that way), so what we need to do is we need to add ‘human’ back, and here are the techniques for doing that, here are the mechanical changes you can make to how you act within the system so that people can feel (experience the illusion) that there is some sort of actual relationship there; here’s how you can make relationship happen—how you can manufacture relationships.”

The absurdity of this should be glaringly obvious to everyone, and the fact that it’s not is more than just a little frightening to me.

I’m sure you have seen those political compass memes that attempt to display political ideology in terms of a two-dimensional grid, with economic left and right on the x axis and level of individual freedom, from authoritarian down to liberal, on the y axis. What results is four quadrants that can be labeled “authoritarian left,” “authoritarian right,” “liberal left,” and “liberal right.”

Although this seems on the surface like a reasonable way to sort out mainstream political affiliation, I can’t seem to find a place for me in this simplified political landscape. Most of my friends, and many of my casual acquaintances as well, identify as “progressive,” and fall somewhere in the left-most regions of the “liberal left” quadrant. But I don’t fit in this quadrant. Nor do I seem to fit in any of the others. As a result, participation in friendly political discussions has proven to be somewhat difficult at times.

Although I am somewhat sympathetic with the radical left, I am not progressive. Neither do I consider myself politically liberal in even a general sense. I am extremely anti-authoritarian, and no one would ever place me amongst the fascists occupying the authoritarian right, but I have occasionally been confused for libertarian, an occupant of the lower right quadrant, ideological territory that I find particularly repulsive.

It recently occurred to me that the reason I don’t seem to fit in (on the compass and in most mainstream political discussions) is that I don’t accept the underlying premises that the two dimensions in question are based upon.

Economically, I don’t think that the system should be collectivized. Neither do I think that it should be based on free market competition. As a primitivist, I don’t think there should even be a system to begin with. And when it comes to the question of how much freedom the individual should be allowed, as an anarchist, I consider “legitimate authority” to be an oxymoron, and that no one (either individual or collective) should have the power to impose restrictions on anyone else.

Further, the presence of each of these things, authority and a complex economic system, depends on the presence of the other in a way that makes thinking of them as separate dimensions problematic in the first place: without authority, there can be no sustained economic system; remove the system, and you eliminate the substrate through which authority operates.

Not really a great insight, I suppose. And none of this really matters, of course. It’s just a silly meme, after all. And its two-dimensionality is just a reflection of the simplistic flat-screen-friendly ways that social media has conditioned people think about themselves.   

I have long believed that humans are goal-directed problem-solving creatures by design. But now I am no longer so sure.

It is clear that most of our actions can be interpreted in terms of goal-pursuit, and can be seen as means to various ends. But I am no longer sure that this reflects something built into us by design, that to call humans either “goal-directed” or “problem-solving” captures something fundamental about our species’ character.

I am starting to suspect that “goal-directed” and “problem-solving” express more about the demands of life in modern civilization than about any core feature of human nature. I am starting to suspect that the tendency to see things as problems that beg for solutions reflects a purely civilized thoughtform.   

Uncivilized life is frequently framed in terms of central problems of survival: food and shelter and safety. But to what extent do the uncivilized themselves think of these things as problems to be solved? It seems to me that—Hobbesian delusions aside—finding food and shelter and keeping track of potential threats are all just part of living, no different than breathing or walking.

Yet, for the civilized, even breathing and walking become problems to be solved—with a Fitbit to keep track of your progress.    

Einstein said: “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” But what if the real problem is in the nature of civilized consciousness itself? If the real problem is a mind that has been conditioned to see only problems to be solved, then there is no conscious vantage point from which to craft a solution.  

We live in two worlds: the civilized and the wild. The first is a world designed to be occupied. It is a built place, a place of constructs, both physical and symbolic, a place of prefabricated meaning. It is a place of obligation and commitment. It is a place of unspoken expectations and explicit demands. It is a domesticated place. A place of docility and latent fear. A place of rules and regulations and restrictions and arbitrary consequences. A place of violence. It is a place without a present tense.

The second world is one that we never truly leave because there is no place we could possibly go that is outside or beyond. It is a place without walls or borders or boundaries. It is place without purpose or expectation or demand or commitment. It is a place where the only obligation is to breathe. It is a place of openness and spontaneity and fierce interconnection. It is a wild place. It is a place meant to be inhabited, a place of dwelling. It is a place where the present moment is allowed to express itself fully and on its own terms.

Only one of these places is real, of course. Only one of these worlds has ever had any legitimate claim on us. The other is little more than a lethal form of fairy dust.  

My offering of hope for the emerging new year: as the light begins to spread itself more generously day by day, may we find in ourselves the strength to refuse our forced occupation of the sterile civilized world, the equanimity to reject our coerced participation in the global death machine, and the courage to embrace and reinhabit our true wildness.     

The water’s surface texture, something there, a form that appears nowhere else exactly like that—sometimes in snowdrifts, something similar, but not the same, not fluid. I want to say “diamond” but that is just a cliché. It’s a texture of stacked and dynamic tessellations, each moving in a different way and at a different speed and in slightly—or completely—different directions.

The form that emerges from this, a transcendent configuration that doesn’t correspond to any one part of the water’s surface, any one depth. Not really there at all, perhaps. A reflection, but not a simple recoil of light—a physical reflection, an echo of something deeper, more penetrating than physical. Yet still only echo: ephemeral and transient.

There is a strange persistence despite perpetual movement and change, lagging just behind the wind, transformations in both size and shape, but all through the transition somehow retaining the same elemental form, the same pattern of stacked tessellations.

There is an important message in this. Not mere metaphor. I am convinced that if I can understand this phenomenon thoroughly, completely, not just the physics of it or the underlying Fourier patterning of the various waveforms (those are all meaningless abstractions), but understand it on its own existential terms, in terms of its own expressive being, I will know something of immense importance.   

Or remember something essential that I have forgotten.

This moment now is a phrase that captures the three indivisible facets of authentic experience. Three things, always these, never one without the others.

The popularity of “mindfulness” has put now in the spotlight. Life in consumer civilization renders now of its substance, squeezes it hollow, makes it into just another empty passing point along a continuous array of empty passing points, one thin line in a queue of identical thin lines etched into the face of a clock. The call for mindfulness is an appeal to re-embrace now in its infinite richness, in its astonishing density.

Or it should be that. More often it becomes just another palliative, just another form of self-absorption, just another strategy for distraction and disengagement.

The immersive experience of “flow” is in some sense the inverse of mindfulness. Flow is a word for what happens when you inhabit moment as it expresses itself; flow occurs when you allow your conscious experience to unfold along its own temporal creases. When entering a flow state, moment broadens its shadow, and its artificial borders disintegrate, allowing it to stretch outside of the sharp temporal structuring mandated by systematized routine. Flow is analgesic. When moment is temporarily dislodged from its mechanical moorings and allowed to drift with the currents and eddies of thought, there is an anodyne tranquility that follows re-immersion into the civilized world of coerced commitment and bureaucratic obligation.

Popular psychology has yet to acknowledge the remaining facet, however, failed entirely to notice the third face of the sacred trinity. There is no trendy quasi-sophisticated word for this. But this is indispensable, elemental. The content of now is entirely unique; this has never been before and will never be again. And it is not just any moment; it is this moment.

This is what the civilized are missing most of all.