Half a century before her, Leo Tolstoy — who befriended a Buddhist monk late in life and became deeply influenced by Buddhist philosophy — echoed these ancient truths as he contemplated the paradoxical nature of love: “Future love does not exist. Love is a present activity only.”
That in love and in life, freedom from fear — like all species of freedom — is only possible within the present moment has long been a core teaching of the most ancient Eastern spiritual and philosophical traditions. It is one of the most elemental truths of existence, and one of those most difficult to put into practice as we move through our daily human lives, so habitually inclined toward the next moment and the mentally constructed universe of expected events — the parallel universe where anxiety dwells, where hope and fear for what might be eclipse what is, and where we cease to be free because we are no longer in the direct light of reality.
Alan Watts, early 1970s (Image courtesy of Everett Collection)
Drawing on his admonition against the dangers of the divided mind — the mindset that divides us into interior self-awareness and external reality, into ego and universe, which is the mindset the whole of Western culture has instilled in us — he writes:
The meaning of freedom can never be grasped by the divided mind. If I feel separate from my experience, and from the world, freedom will seem to be the extent to which I can push the world around, and fate the extent to which the world pushes me around. But to the whole mind there is no contrast of “I” and the world. There is just one process acting, and it does everything that happens. It raises my little finger and it creates earthquakes. Or, if you want to put it that way, I raise my little finger and also make earthquakes. No one fates and no one is being fated.
This model of freedom is orthogonal to our conditioned view that freedom is a matter of bending external reality to our will by the power of our choices — controlling what remains of nature once the “I” is separated out. Watts draws a subtle, crucial distinction between freedom and choice:
What we ordinarily mean by choice is not freedom. Choices are usually decisions motivated by pleasure and pain, and the divided mind acts with the sole purpose of getting “I” into pleasure and out of pain. But the best pleasures are those for which we do not plan, and the worst part of pain is expecting it and trying to get away from it when it has come. You cannot plan to be happy. You can plan to exist, but in themselves existence and non-existence are neither pleasurable nor painful.
Stripped of the paraphernalia of circumstance and interpretation, our internal experience of being unfree stems from attempting impossible things — things that resist reality and refuse to accept the present moment on its own terms. Watts writes:
The sense of not being free comes from trying to do things which are impossible and even meaningless. You are not “free” to draw a square circle, to live without a head, or to stop certain reflex actions. These are not obstacles to freedom; they are the conditions of freedom. I am not free to draw a circle if perchance it should turn out to be a square circle. I am not, thank heaven, free to walk out of doors and leave my head at home. Likewise I am not free to live in any moment but this one, or to separate myself from my feelings.
Without the motive forces of pleasure and pain, it might at first appear paradoxical to make any decisions at all — a contradiction that makes it impossible to choose between options as we navigate even the most basic realities of life: Why choose to take the umbrella into the downpour, why choose to eat this piece of mango and not this piece of cardboard? But Watts observes that the only real contradiction is of our own making as we cede the present to an imagined future. More than half a century before psychologists came to study how your present self is sabotaging your future happiness, Watts offers the personal counterpart to Albert Camus’s astute political observation that “real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present,” and writes:
I fall straight into contradiction when I try to act and decide in order to be happy, when I make “being pleased” my future goal. For the more my actions are directed towards future pleasures, the more I am incapable of enjoying any pleasures at all. For all pleasures are present, and nothing save complete awareness of the present can even begin to guarantee future happiness.
[…]
You can only live in one moment at a time, and you cannot think simultaneously about listening to the waves and whether you are enjoying listening to the waves. Contradictions of this kind are the only real types of action without freedom.
Only with such a recalibration of our reflexive view of freedom does James Baldwin’s insistence that “people are as free as they want to be” begin to unfold its layered meaning like a Zen koan, to be turned over in the mind until the deceptively simple shape unfolds its origami-folded scroll of deep truth.
In what may be the most elegant refutation of the particular strain of hubris that embraces determinism in order to wring from it the self-permission for living with delirious freedom from responsibility, Watts writes:
There is another theory of determinism which states that all our actions are motivated by “unconscious mental mechanisms,” and that for this reason even the most spontaneous decisions are not free. This is but another example of split-mindedness, for what is the difference between “me” and “mental mechanisms” whether conscious or unconscious? Who is being moved by these processes? The notion that anyone is being motivated comes from the persisting illusion of “I.” The real man*, the organism-in-relation-to-the-universe, is this unconscious motivation. And because he is it, he is not being moved by it.
[…]
Events look inevitable in retrospect because when they have happened, nothing can change them. Yet the fact that I can make safe bets could prove equally well that events are not determined but consistent. In other words, the universal process acts freely and spontaneously at every moment, but tends to throw out events in regular, and so predictable, sequences.
Only by such a misapprehension of freedom, Watts observes, do we ever feel unfree: When we enter a state that causes us psychological pain, our immediate impulse is to get the “I” out of the pain, which is invariably a resistance to the present moment as it is; because we cannot will a different psychological state, we reach for an easy escape: a drink, a drug, a compulsive scroll through an Instagram feed. All the ways in which we try to abate our feelings of abject loneliness and boredom and inadequacy by escaping from the present moment where they unfold are motivated by the fear that those intolerable feelings will subsume us. And yet the instant we become motivated by fear, we become unfree — we are prisoners of fear. We are only free within the bounds of the present moment, with all of its disquieting feelings, because only in that moment can they dissipate into the totality of integrated reality, leaving no divide between us as feelers and the feelings being felt, and therefore no painful contrast between preferred state and actual state. Watts writes:
So long as the mind believes in the possibility of escape from what it is at this moment, there can be no freedom.
[…]
It sounds as if it were the most abject fatalism to have to admit that I am what I am, and that no escape or division is possible. It seems that if I am afraid, then I am “stuck” with fear. But in fact I am chained to the fear only so long as I am trying to get away from it. On the other hand, when I do not try to get away I discover that there is nothing “stuck” or fixed about the reality of the moment. When I am aware of this feeling without naming it, without calling it “fear,” “bad,” “negative,” etc., it changes instantly into something else, and life moves freely ahead. The feeling no longer perpetuates itself by creating the feeler behind it.
To dissolve into this total reality of the moment is the crucible of freedom, which is in turn the crucible of love. In consonance with Toni Morrison’s insistence that the deepest measure of freedom is loving anything and anyone you choose to love and with that classic, exquisite Adrienne Rich sonnet line — “no one’s fated or doomed to love anyone” — Watts considers the ultimate reward of this undivided mind:
The further truth that the undivided mind is aware of experience as a unity, of the world as itself, and that the whole nature of mind and awareness is to be one with what it knows, suggests a state that would usually be called love… Love is the organizing and unifying principle which makes the world a universe and the disintegrated mass a community. It is the very essence and character of mind, and becomes manifest in action when the mind is whole… This, rather than any mere emotion, is the power and principle of free action.
When Robert Hooke looked at a piece of cork through an early handcrafted leather-and-gold microscope in 1665, he named the strange irregular “pores” of its honeycomb-like tissue structure cells, after the small adjacent spaces in which monks spend their voluntary solitary confinement. It would take another two centuries for scientists to discover that cells are the basic biological units of life, that they are in constant osmotic communication with one another, and that they replicate themselves to become new cells, each a whispered word from the language in which life talks to the future.
Cork structure from Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, 1665. (Available as a print.)
Biological and social, our interdependence is a defining feature not only of our civilization, not only of our species and all living species, but of life itself — life the physiological process and life the psychosocial phenomenon. “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” Walt Whitman exulted in the golden age of chemistry — the new science he saw as “the elevating, beautiful, study… which involves the essences of creation.” Meanwhile, the development of cell theory was revolutionizing biology, making of this philosophical field as old as Aristotle an even newer science that illuminated the essence of life. Cells became to biology what atoms were to chemistry. Biology ushered in the revelation that every cell belonging to me as good — as healthy, as vital, as fit for replication — belongs to you.
That delicate interdependence of life and lives, with its tangled roots in biology and cultural history, is what Eula Biss explores in On Immunity: An Inoculation (public library) — a book of penetrating and poetic insight, drawn with that rare scholarship capable of correcting the warped cultural hindsight we call history; a book of staggering foresight, conceived in the wake of the H1N1 flu pandemic, yet speaking with astonishing prescience to the complex epidemiological realities and social dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic unfolding more than five years after its publication.
For Biss — the daughter of a medical scientist and a poet — even her own biological inheritance as a universal donor with type O negative blood becomes a potent metaphor for the mechanism of vaccination, a lens through which to view the permeable membrane between the biological and social realities of immunity. With an eye to the blood banks that collect her donations to save other lives, she writes:
If we imagine the action of a vaccine not just in terms of how it affects a single body, but also in terms of how it affects the collective body of a community, it is fair to think of vaccination as a kind of banking of immunity. Contributions to this bank are donations to those who cannot or will not be protected by their own immunity. This is the principle of herd immunity, and it is through herd immunity that mass vaccination becomes far more effective than individual vaccination.
It is a rather unfortunate term for an unassailable scientific principle — we humans, especially in this culture of rugged individualism nursed on the Emersonian ideal of self-reliance, bristle at thinking of ourselves as members of a herd. In our long history of thinking with animals, herd animals have been the butt of our derogatory metaphors for mindless conformity.
And yet inside the unfortunate linguistic container, an unfaltering biological reality resides: On large enough a scale, even a fairy ineffective vaccine that fails to produce immunity in some individuals will slow down the spread of infection in the community; as the virus fails to replicate itself in more and more new hosts, the vaccine will eventually halt it altogether. In consequence, even such a mediocre vaccine will protect all members of the community, even those for whom inoculation has not worked as intended on the individual level. This is why it is more dangerous to be the vaccinated animal amid a largely unvaccinated herd than the other way around. Biss writes:
The unvaccinated person is protected by the bodies around her, bodies through which disease is not circulating. But a vaccinated person surrounded by bodies that host disease is left vulnerable to vaccine failure or fading immunity. We are protected not so much by our own skin, but by what is beyond it. The boundaries between our bodies begin to dissolve here. Donations of blood and organs move between us, exiting one body and entering another, and so too with immunity, which is a common trust as much as it is a private account. Those of us who draw on collective immunity owe our health to our neighbors.
With an eye to the origin of herd immunity theory — a theory developed in the 1840s by a doctor treating smallpox, which has taken manyfold more human lives than any other infectious disease in the history of our species and which has since been eradicated — Biss proposes an alternative, both more poetic and more precise, to the imperfect term that so perfectly describes the biosocial reality:
Herd immunity, an observable phenomenon, now seems implausible only if we think of our bodies as inherently disconnected from other bodies. Which, of course, we do.
The very expression herd immunity suggests that we are cattle, waiting, perhaps, to be sent to slaughter. And it invites an unfortunate association with the term herd mentality, a stampede toward stupidity. The herd, we assume, is foolish. Those of us who eschew the herd mentality tend to prefer a frontier mentality in which we imagine our bodies as isolated homesteads that we tend either well or badly. The health of the homestead next to ours does not affect us, this thinking suggests, so long as ours is well tended.
If we were to exchange the metaphor of the herd for a hive, perhaps the concept of shared immunity might be more appealing. Honeybees are matriarchal, environmental do-gooders who also happen to be entirely interdependent. The health of any individual bee, as we know from the recent epidemic of colony collapse, depends on the health of the hive.
Diagram of bee anatomy by French artist Paul Sougy, 1962. (Available as a print.)
Biss quotes a succinct summation by her father, a doctor:
Vaccination works by enlisting a majority in the protection of a minority.
No one person has done more to undermine this vital mutuality of protection than Andrew Wakefield — the British gastroenterologist who, in the 1990s, infected the hive mind with his causal claims linking vaccines and autism. Preying on the understandable human impulse toward concretizing blame for amorphous and ambiguous problems, the theory went viral before multiple subsequent studies debunked his results, before it was exposed that Wakefield was paid for his research by a lawyer readying a lawsuit against a vaccine maker, before the General Medical Council of the United Kingdom concluded its investigation with the verdict that Wakefield had been “irresponsible and dishonest” in conducting and publishing his work.
Despite the scientific and ethical denunciation of Wakefield’s study, its ideological meme had already spread beyond retrieval. (Richard Dawkins coined the word meme in 1976 by borrowing from biology — a word that came alive anew a quarter century later in the context of “viral” content on the internet, which has its own roots in epidemiology.) A quarter century later, echoes of Wakefield’s disproven falsehoods bellow with formidable vocality. That group of voices is often referred to as the anti-vaccination movement, but I find the term movement extremely ill-suited — such groupthink is not in movement but static, frozen in time and frozen with fear, petrified in the cultural amber of a time before the Age of Reason and lashed about by the same errors of magical thinking, willful blindness, and confusion of causation and correlation that made our medieval ancestors take comets for indisputable omens of future events and left-handedness for indisputable evidence of possession by the Devil.
Biss is more generous in her own assessment of anti-vaccination:
Those who went on to use Wakefield’s inconclusive work to support the notion that vaccines cause autism are not guilty of ignorance or science denial so much as they are guilty of using weak science as it has always been used — to lend false credibility to an idea that we want to believe for other reasons.
Writing shortly after the birth of the Occupy movement — the self-described “99%” launching “an ongoing global protest of capitalism” — she considers a friend’s half-joke, half-koan about vaccination as a matter of “occupy immune system,” and reflects on the basic moral syllogism of anti-vaccination as a political stance claiming to protest the capitalist forces behind modern medicine:
Immunity is a public space. And it can be occupied by those who choose not to carry immunity. For some… a refusal to vaccinate falls under a broader resistance to capitalism. But refusing immunity as a form of civil disobedience bears an unsettling resemblance to the very structure the Occupy movement seeks to disrupt — a privileged 1 percent are sheltered from risk while they draw resources from the other 99 percent.
[…]
We are justified in feeling threatened by the unlimited expansion of industry, and we are justified in fearing that our interests are secondary to corporate interests. But refusal of vaccination undermines a system that is not actually typical of capitalism. It is a system in which both the burdens and the benefits are shared across the entire population. Vaccination allows us to use the products of capitalism for purposes that are counter to the pressures of capital.
Emissary by Maria Popova
In a lovely antidote to the tragic human tendency toward cynicism — that touchingly misguided and ineffective effort at self-protection, that particularly virulent strain of cowardice to which our culture has grown increasingly hospitable as it has grown increasingly impatient with the slow and vulnerable work of nuance — Biss adds:
That so many of us find it entirely plausible that a vast network of researchers and health officials and doctors worldwide would willfully harm children for money is evidence of what capitalism is really taking from us. Capitalism has already impoverished the working people who generate wealth for others. And capitalism has already impoverished us culturally, robbing unmarketable art of its value. But when we begin to see the pressures of capitalism as innate laws of human motivation, when we begin to believe that everyone is owned, then we are truly impoverished.
As war drums reverberated across Europe in 1939, the head of France’s military intelligence service recruited an unlikely spy: France’s most famous woman—Josephine Baker.
Jacques Abtey had spent the early days of World War II recruiting spies to collect information on Nazi Germany and other Axis powers. Typically, the secret service chief sought out men who could travel incognito. Then again, nothing was typical when it came to the American-born dancer and singer.
Born into poverty in St. Louis in 1906, Baker had grown up fatherless in a series of rat-infested hovels. She had only sporadic schooling and married for the first time at age 13. Stung by discrimination in Jim Crow America based on her skin color, she left at the age of 19 to perform as a burlesque dancer in the music halls of Paris where her risqué dance routines while clad in little more than a string of pearls and a rubber banana skirt made her a Jazz Age sensation. After branching out into singing and acting in films, she became Europe’s highest-paid entertainer.
A celebrity of Baker’s stature made for a most unlikely spy candidate since she could never travel surreptitiously—but that’s exactly what made her such an enticing prospect. Fame would be her cover. Abtey hoped Baker could use her charm, beauty and stardom to seduce secrets from the lips of fawning diplomats at embassy parties.
Having found in France the freedom that America promised on parchment, Baker agreed to spy for her adopted country. “France made me what I am,” she told Abtey. “The Parisians gave me their hearts, and I am ready to give them my life.”
The cries of “Go back to Africa!” she had heard from fascists while performing across Europe also fueled her decision. “Of course I wanted to do all I could to aid France, my adopted country,” she toldEbony magazine decades later, “but an overriding consideration, the thing that drove me as strongly as did patriotism, was my violent hatred of discrimination in any form.”
Baker Uses Star Power to Learn Secrets
Josephine Baker, c. 1945ullstein bild/Getty Images
Baker started her espionage career by attending diplomatic parties at the Italian and Japanese embassies and gathering intelligence about the Axis powers possibly joining the war. Showing no fear of being caught, the neophyte spy wrote notes of what she overheard on the palms of her hand and on her arms under her sleeves. “Oh, nobody would think I’m a spy,” Baker said with a laugh when Abtey warned her of the danger.
In the weeks after German forces roared into France, Baker continued her nightly performances in Paris, sang to soldiers on the warfront over the radio and comforted refugees in homeless shelters. When the invaders closed in on Paris in early June 1940, Abtey insisted that she leave, so Baker loaded her possessions, including a gold piano and a bed once owned by Marie-Antoinette, into vans and departed for a chateau 300 miles to the southwest. As Nazi troops goose-stepped down the Champs-Élysées and occupied her Paris home, Baker hid refugees and French Resistance members in her new quarters.
In November 1940, Abtey and Baker worked to smuggle documents to General Charles de Gaulle and the Free French government in exile in London. Under the guise of embarking on a South American tour, the entertainer hid secret photographs under her dress and carried along sheet music with information about German troop movements in France written in invisible ink. With all eyes transfixed on the star as they crossed the border to Spain on their way to neutral Portugal, the French security chief, who posed as Baker’s secretary, garnered little notice from German officials. The limelight that Baker attracted allowed Abtey to travel in the shadows.
In Portugal and Spain, Baker continued to harvest details about Axis troop movements at embassy parties. Squirreling away in bathrooms, the secret agent made detailed notes and attached them to her bra with a safety pin. “My notes would have been highly compromising had they been discovered, but who would dare search Josephine Baker to the skin?” she later wrote. “When they asked me for papers, they generally meant autographs.”
Baker Continues Spying Even When Ill
Josephine Baker (right) pictured in her military uniform as a member of the Fighting French Women’s Corps in North Africa.George Rinhart/Corbis/Getty Images
Ordered to Morocco in January 1941 to set up a liaison and transmission center in Casablanca, Abtey and Baker sailed across the Mediterranean Sea. The performer brought along 28 pieces of luggage and a menagerie of pet monkeys, mice and a Great Dane. The more conspicuous Baker’s travel, the fewer suspicions it generated.
In North Africa she worked with the French Resistance network and used her connections to secure passports for Jews fleeing the Nazis in Eastern Europe until she was hospitalized with peritonitis in June 1941. She underwent multiple operations during an 18-month hospitalization that left her so ill that the Chicago Defender mistakenly ran her obituary, penned by Langston Hughes. He wrote that Baker was “as much a victim of Hitler as the soldiers who fall today in Africa fighting his armies. The Aryans drove Josephine away from her beloved Paris.” Baker quickly corrected the record. “There has been a slight error, I’m much too busy to die,” she told the Afro-American.
Even as Baker convalesced, the spy work continued as American diplomats and French Resistance members convened at her bedside. From her balcony she watched as American troops arrived in Morocco as part of Operation Torch in November 1942. After she was finally discharged, Baker toured Allied military camps from Algiers to Jerusalem. By day, she rode in jeeps across the scorching deserts of North Africa. At night, she bundled up and slept on the ground next to her vehicle to avoid land mines.
Following the liberation of Paris, she returned to the city she loved in October 1944 after a four-year absence. Dressed in her blue air auxiliary lieutenant’s uniform punctuated with gold epaulettes, Baker rode in the back of an automobile as the throngs along the Champs-Élysées tossed her flowers. No longer just a glamorous revue star, Baker was a patriotic heroine.
She donned her uniform once again in 1961 to receive two of France’s highest military honors, the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor, at a ceremony in which details of her espionage work were revealed to the world. A teary-eyed Baker told her countrymen, “I am proud to be French because this is the only place in the world where I can realize my dream.”
Phenomenology is the study of appearances. Let’s consider an example of the simplest kind: the situation of a person gazing attentively at some physical object, such as a coffee cup. There are two parts of the situation. One is the cup itself. Another is the seeing of the cup, the cup as it appears to the viewer. The former is a physical thing, and the latter a mental thing. (Perhaps the mental thing emerges from the physical thing that is a brain, but it is still of a different character and structure than the cup itself.) The mental thing is called a phenomenon (plural phenomena), in the jargon of the school of philosophy known as phenomenology, founded in its modern form by Edmund Husserl early in the twentieth century.
If the phenomenon arises from an object seen in the world, as in this example, then the phenomenon can be said to have spatial content: it includes an estimate of the object’s shape, a perceived hierarchical structure of parts, each with its own shape estimate and placement. The object is also placed in space relative to other objects, including the viewer’s own body. The space I refer to is phenomenal space — space as we experience it within our minds. Finally, if the object can be identified — say as a tree, cup, or shoe, then that identification is present within the phenomenon.
Is phenomenal space the same as “real” space as Euclid, Descartes, Newton, and Einstein have given us to understand it? Of course not! For one thing, the curvature discovered by Einstein does not come into the matter. But the differences go beyond that. All things in phenomenal space are finite in nature — they are approximations if that is the right word. No position has infinite precision, very far from it. In addition, perceived space is centered on the body of the perceiver, and contains only those things visible from that position and direction of gaze. Perceived space is only one kind of phenomenal space. There are also spatial memories, anticipations, and imaginings. But each of these is modeled on perceptual space, with a degradation in detail. Their structure is the same.
Phenomenal space is occupied by phenomenal objects, that is, by the phenomena that arise from perception of physical objects. Most of these are assigned categories (shoes, trees, cups, etc.). This partition of what is seen into individual phenomena with their categories is something imposed by the mind. A physicist’s space is occupied only by quantum fields.
Finally, phenomena contain patterns — regular repetitions, grids, textures, musical patterns, and so forth. As we will see shortly, those patterns cannot be identified with structure that occurs in the objects that give rise to the phenomena; the patterns live within the phenomena.
Despite this, phenomenal space retains some of the structure of outward space. It is still three dimensional — there is still up and down, side to side, and near and far. Rigid objects transform in the same way, via translations and rotations. Distance makes sense in both realms. Etcetera.
The important thing is to realize that phenomenal space is something real of its own kind, and distinct from Newtonian space. However, phenomenal space shares some mathematical structure with external space. The concepts that help us to understand the latter apply to the former.
Furthermore, We can investigate these properties without becoming entangled with qualia. Here is an explanation of the latter concept:
Phenomenal objects have color. Color is not a substance from physics, although there is a complex connection between color as experienced and the physics of light and its interaction with surfaces. Red, for example, is a name for a phenomenal property. It has its own specific nature, and is directly present to our minds when viewing a red object. It seems a primitive substance of our experience. It is ineffable in the sense that it could never be explained to a blind person. Communication about it among sighted people relies on identifying commonalities in experience. Colors are defined by pointing rather than describing. In the philosophy of mind red is called a “quale” (plural “qualia”). What is this mysterious substance, and how can it arise from neurons firing within the darkness of our skulls? This stands in for the general question: “how can experience arise from the physical world?”. This ancient problem has been known in recent times as the hard problem of consciousness.
My point is that we can investigate the structure of phenomena, such as spatial phenomena, without becoming entangled with qualia. We can start from this position: Yes, experience exists. Yes it possesses mathematical structure. Yes, we can investigate that structure. No, the problem of qualia is not thereby addressed. So, there is no claim that mathematical structure will ever give a complete account of phenomena — it seems evident from qualia that this is not possible. And perhaps there are other aspects than qualia which lie outside the grasp of mathematical thinking. Still, mathematical structure is present in phenomena, and can be investigated for its own sake. This kind of investigation is what I am calling mathematical phenomenology. The problem of phenomena is thereby partitioned into structure (mathematical)and substance (qualia), and the latter is left for another time.
Aside: there is also the project of investigating the phenomena involved in mathematical thought — — that is, the phenomenology of mathematics. That is not the enterprise under consideration here. I am concerned, rather, with the use of mathematics in investigating phenomena of whatever kind.
As you’ll see later in this note, mathematical phenomenology, in combination with mathematical realism, can shed some light on the hard problem, even if qualia are not touched.
There is another aspect of mathematical structure of phenomena beyond 3D geometry: pattern. We are as adept at introducing this aspect into our phenomena as is the case for three dimensional geometry or categorization of objects. This pattern-imposition is present for perception of two-dimensional images, a simpler context within which to investigate the process than the natural 3D world. Consider the following image.
Image 1
This image exhibits a pattern of an abstract kind. With a glance, you know all about it. If I asked you to describe it, you would likely come up with something like: “It is a grid with short red horizontal lines at the centers of cells. White lines consisting of the left and top boundaries of grid cells zigzag up and to the right across the grid, but there is also a horizontal band half way down where all four boundaries appear as lines, and a vertical band half way across with the same property. ” All of these aspects are available in your experience of the image within a second or so of seeing it. This is very close to an exact mathematical description of the image, in that it could easily be rendered in formal terms by someone with knowledge of geometry and predicate logic. That is, the phenomenon that the image induces in your mind has a mathematical structure, and that structure is built immediately upon attending to the image. If this were not the case, no such description would be possible.
Note that I am practicing phenomenology, not psychology, here. The primary technique of phenomenological investigation is to carefully attend to one’s own phenomena exactly as they present themselves. The technique also involves “bracketing”. Bracketing consists of placing aside any consideration of the external objects which give rise to phenomena, and even of whether there are such external objects. It is not those externals that are the topic of investigation, but the phenomena, just as they are. In considering the phenomenon associated with image 1, I was able to detect its mathematical nature. To do this required some training in mathematics on my part, but the phenomenon in itself has this nature independent of the mathematical training of the individual in which it occurs. The phenomenon must have a mathematical nature for everyone, because everyone can come up with the sort of description that I alluded to, but only those with some mathematical background will detect the description’s mathematical nature.
Husserl calls the the standpoint that we take in every day life when we are not philsophising “the natural attitude”. In this state of mind, it feels as if you see objects and images “as they are”; there is no thought of a phenomenon separate from what is seen. But, philsophising once more, we can see that the phenomenon and image have very different content, as the following example will show.
Images 2 and 3
Are the left and right images different? They are, but this requires study. The phenomena that arise immediately from the two images are identical. In fact there are 69 differences in the angles of lines. This is not apparent because the common phenomenon to which the two images give rise does not contain the orientations of the individual line segments. Instead, the phenomenon is captured by the description “a square grid of randomly oriented white line segments on a field of black”. By randomly is meant: “with no pattern that I can detect”. Again this is close to a complete mathematical description. What is missing is the exact length and width of lines as a fraction of grid cell size, and the dimension of the grid by cell count. These details are present in the phenomenon as rough estimates, not exact quantities. I can say this because the phenomenon is present to me, so I can gauge its basic properties.
Another thing that I have left out: at any moment I am aware of the orientations of a few line segments at foveal position, but only if I attend to this, and only until I move my eyes (via a saccade ). The important thing to realize is that the phenomenon is a description of the image, not a copy. The nature of the the description, is, again, mathematical.
Despite the missing angles in the phenomenon, it does seem, in the natural attitude, that all of those lines are present to me, even if I do not know anything about them except the “randomly oriented” property. This shows that the feeling of presence, and actual presence in the phenomena, are two different things. Daniel Dennett calls the former “the representation of presence” and the latter, “the presence of representation”. To repeat: present in the phenomenon are 1) the description, and 2) a detailed capture of the part of the image which is projected on the fovea. The detail is overwritten on each shift of gaze. However, the description persists for longer, since it is held in short term visual memory. The representation of presence is the illusory feeling that images are present to us in full detail. See this paragraph for a concise formulation of Dennett’s views.
There is something else missing from the phenomenon: the patterns highlighted in red below:
Images 4 and 5
The images 4 and 5 are identical to images 2 and 3, except for the red highlighting . From this we see that patterns of a simple kind were present in the images 2 and 3, but not present in the initial phenomena. This makes the simple but important point that the patterns that we see reside within our minds. The presence of a pattern in the outer world, however simple, is no guarantee of its arrival in phenomena. It goes the other way too: patterns can appear in our phenomena that have no counterpart in the external world. This is apophenia. To paraphrase Luke 17:21, the kingdom of pattern is within you.
Neuroscience, Emergence, and Mathematical Realism
Now, I’ll switch gears entirely. Instead of taking the phenomenological view, in which phenomena are investigated from the inside as they appear to us, I will move to the exterior view — the view of the scientist who studies the brain as a physical system. But I will not forget the results of my phenomenological investigations. Even viewed from the outside, we need to make sense of why biological systems (we humans) report phenomena, and the forms that those reports take.
Consider again the various mathematical structures associated with images 1–5. One speculation is that these structures are encoded in the activity of my brain when I attend to the images. An equivalent formulation is that the structures are emergent entities of the brain’s activity.
What might be the nature of this emergence/encoding? It is premature to make any concrete claims. Only very simple kinds of encodings of mental content by neural activity are currently understood.
I don’t claim that the brain is like a computer in any way except that the ideas of encoding and emergence apply. But to explain what I mean by emergence, it is helpful to consider an analogy from computing. Consider a computer running CGI (computer generated imagery) software, and displaying a textured sphere. The activity of this system can be described at a number of levels:
Each of these levels is independent of those above and below it in that the laws that govern each level, and make its activity comprehensible to us, can be formulated without mentioning the other levels. The user of the CGI system need not know programming, the person who writes the source code needn’t know machine code, nor circuit design, nor the relevant physics, etc. These differing descriptions apply to the same object.
These levels of description exist objectively independent of any observer. One objective measure of emergence is Eric Hoel’s effective information (EI), which, roughly, characterizes the levels of a system by the degree to which they preserve information through time. If one system H is defined in terms of a lower level system L — as circuits(H) are defined in terms of physics(L) — the former may possess more effective information than the latter, even if the latter level incorporates much more detail. EI provides a measure of the degree to which a proposed level of description has its own coherence, independent of its basis in lower levels. The above example from computer graphics provides extreme examples. The middle levels are perfectly causal : the past determines the future via the laws of operation that pertain to the circuit, machine, and source code levels. The existence of these causal levels is an objective mathematical fact about the system, no observer needed. (By the way, high EI does not require determinism).
The brain might admit this sort of layered description. Indeed, it is already known to. Some neuroscientists study the brain at the level of biochemistry, others at the level of firing of individual neurons, others at the level of circuits involving many neurons. These levels are not as strictly separable as in the our computer graphics case, but a causal analysis at varying levels is still possible. Many such levels remain to be discovered, very likely.
To complete this investigation of phenomena from the outside, I require one more ingredient: mathematical realism.
Mathematical realism (also called mathematical platonism) is the view that mathematical structures exist independent of the mind. Other positions view mathematics and its objects as, in one sense or another, human creations or interpretations. Nominalists deny the existence of mathematical objects, and provide reformulations of mathematical statements in other terms. Intuitionists regard mathematical objects as mental constructions. Mathematical realism is not monolithic. For example, finitists take a realistic view of finite mathematical objects such as trillion digit numbers or the monster group, but not of completed infinities. Note that even the realism of finitists is wild in a way, in that it posits the existence of unbounded numbers of mathematical structures that are bigger and more complex than the physical universe.
Although I am a mathematical realist myself, I will not argue the case here, but discuss a consequence of realism : it provides a way of thinking about the substance of which phenomena consist.
A mathematical realist can visualize a sort of cloud of mathematics around physical things. This cloud consists of the mathematical objects that exhibit systematic correlations to the things in question. This supports the following way of talking about the mathematical structure of physical reality. One interprets “physical thing X exhibits mathematical structure Y”, as meaning “there exists the mathematical structure Y that exhibits such and such correlation to the physical object X”. This way of putting matters takes the realistic view towards the mathematical object: it is an existent in its own right which correlates to the physical. For example, for each elementary particle there is the corresponding Lie group. Actually, physicists almost always use the formulations of mathematical realism. This may seem like a distinction without a difference, but please read on.
Now consider a structure which exhibits levels of description, as in the computer graphics example above. The levels are mathematical structures clothing the physical system. From the mathematical realist’s point of view, these structures exist — and this is as true for the higher levels, as for the lower. Furthermore, they are, in the case of our CGI example, causal structures, whose behavior is determined through time by laws which operate at their own level.
Now for the hypothesis: suppose that the brain admits multiple levels of description, and that the mathematical structures which we apprehend in phenomena actually exist in the mathematical realist’s sense, at some level. Might not these structures actually be the phenomena, at least in part? Such a hypothesis does not solve the hard problem of consciousness. It says nothing about qualia. But it is relevant to the problem, and provides a partial answer (but only for us mathematical realists).
If phenomena are partly constituted by mathematical structures, they are structures with causal force. Phenomena are accessible by a wide range of mental processes, such as attention, evaluation, memory, decision making, action selection and verbal report. Their properties can be queried by these processes. Phenomena resemble computing’s data structures in this respect — but I do not mean to imply any other similarity whatever.
Consciousness must exist at a single level, since its contents are unified, as described above. The global workspace model of consciousness, proposed by Bernard Baars in 1988, is relevant, because of its formlation of this unity. Stephen Dehaene and others have since proposed neuronal implementations of the global workspace architecture.
Do All Phenomena Have Mathematical Structure?
So far, the examples have been simple. But what about images such as these:
At first glance, this looks like 3 copies of the same image. In other words, the initial phenomena for the three images are the same. But inspection of local detail will show that most rectangular blocks differ in color from image to image. At the pixel level, the images are entirely different. I doubt that you noticed that there are 9 vertical bands in the central image, but 8 on the side images. (Because 8 is above your subtizing threshold).
The phenomena, again,are not copies of the images, but descriptions. In earlier examples I was able to articulate descriptions in English, and discern their mathematical nature. Here, I cannot do that. Clearly the systems of description for visual phenomena are immensely complex. One of many aspects: it seems that a dictionary of elements which recur (such as the vertical bands)is assembled, and then the pattern of their recurence is formulated. This is a recursive process. At each stage of the creation of a description, details are replaced by summaries.
To repeat the question, do all phenomena have mathematical structure? There are two ways this might be so. First, it might be that mathematical structure is the only form that structure(as opposed to substance) takes. Are there known exceptions? Second, brains might rely on such structure for their role in existence — to preserve the life of their hosts. They might need to populate their higher level descriptions with mathematical structures (models) which allow them to minimize surprise, as Karl Friston would have it. This is an evolutionary account.
That said, it would be radically premature to conclude that all phenomena have a structure that can be captured mathematically. But some do!
Two Varieties of Causal Structures and Their Models
As remarked above, phenomena are causal structures in that we can act and report on them. Our examples have involved geometric and logical descriptions. The descriptions do not specify exact structures, but summarize them.
There is another kind of structure involved than descriptions. Phenomena of the spatial world (which arise from the auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile senses, in addition to vision) are embedded within a general theory of space and spatial action. This theory tells us that at all times we can shift our gaze and body to look at things more closely, and, more generally, navigate through a spatial context. Just as shapes and patterns are present to us via their descriptions, we are aware of the partial nature of our view of any object. We always know that there is more to the object than we can see (or touch) at any moment, and that by use of our body, if only by shifting our gaze, we can access a different part of the object.
The mode by which this theory operates is not yet understood, nor the form that it takes in the mind. However, it is clear that it is entangled with the mathematical theory of space, just as descriptions of individual objects are. I theorize that this aspect of mind exists within the same mathematical level as do descriptions of individual objects — the level of consciousness.
From the standpoint of mathematical realism, there are two aspects of the situation. The causal mathematical structures point to mathematical objects outside of the causal realm. For example, the description “a grid of short white line segments randomly oriented” is a description which applies to a set of mathematical objects: the infinite set of actual dispositions of line segments, with their exact orientations, to which the description applies. Similarly, the general theory of space refers (among other things) to what mathematicians think of when they think of space — an infinitely divisible continuum with three dimensions. In the jargon of mathematical logic these non-causal mathematical objects to which descriptions and theories refer are called their “models”. The causal structures are (presumably) finite, but their models are not.
Here is the point: in the natural attitude, a phenomenon feels present to us not as a description or theory, but as an object to which the description or theory refers. This a variety of Dennet’s “representation of presence”. Our awareness contains the apprehension that we are in the presence of objects in their endless detail, even if that detail never arrives in our minds.
Thus, we feel as if we are in perceptual contact, in many cases, with infinite things. Our mind’s causal contents, however, their descriptions and theories, are presumably finite. These theories and descriptions bring the things to which they refer, their models, in their infinite nature, into our representation of presence. In the natural attitude, these models are taken to be real physical objects. This is the mysterious essence of “being there”.
Let me close this note with a statement of the obvious: The structure of phenomena has been studied, under various rubrics, for more than a hundred years, by the phenomenologists themselves (such as Husserl), Gestalt psychologists, cognitive scientists , neuroscientists, and computer scientists. In many cases, the structures that have been illucidated by these studies is mathematical in nature.
This article presents a summary of some of the basic ideas of Ira Progoff’s “Intensive Journal Process,” and includes a very brief outline of one of his extensive journal-writing exercise cycles: 12 Entries.
Ellery writes: “The first Intensive Journaling workshop I attended in 1981, was two weeks long, 9 to 5, five days a week. At first, I didn’t think I could possibly write about myself for two weeks; at the conclusion of the workshop, I realized I had barely scratched the surface.”
Ellery Littleton teaches several programs at The Haven. His next is Writing up a Storm: Haiku, March 6–7.
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Long before there were analysts’ couches, encounter groups, gestalt, bodywork, and the myriad other approaches to personal growth and transformation, people who wanted to search for meaning and perspective in their lives often wrote their thoughts, feelings and dreams in a journal.
Particularly among creative people – from Leonardo da Vinci to Anais Nin – journal-keeping has historically been a vehicle for releasing tensions, resolving conflicts, working through crises and connecting with the intuitive inner self – the “person within the person,” as philosopher/psychologist Ira Progoff described it, who can be the source of so much sound guidance and wisdom – your best counselor and spiritual advisor, in fact.
Progoff, who died at age 77 in 1998, was the godfather of the contemporary journal-writing movement, which has blossomed incredibly in the last couple of decades. His best-known book, At a Journal Workshop (1975), is the basic text and guide to the application of what he called the “intensive journal process.” It still stands as the best, most complete work in the entire ever-expanding library of journaling guides. It is rather like the King James Version of journal-writing books – long, complex and challenging – the source of many of the most enduring and useful concepts in the field.
Writing in a journal about one’s ideas, feelings and experiences is almost always useful, “but an unstructured journal usually just goes around in circles,” Progoff said. “To become a valuable tool of psychological self-care, a journal needs a design that will help a human being answer the question ‘What is my life trying to become?’ “
A student of Carl Jung, Progoff was committed to the adaptation of humanistic Jungian ideas to the process of journal-writing, and began by encouraging journal-keeping among his private patients in the 1950s to help them “sort out their lives.”
Over the years, these rudimentary journals evolved into the sensitively-structured, multi-layered, cross-referencing set of notebooks which now form the basis for Intensive Journal Workshops, offered across North America and around the world by the New York-based Dialogue House, established by Progoff in the 1960s. Each workshop participant receives a specially-organized looseleaf notebook, which leads them through specific writing guidelines. The process is designed to help people “tap into the underground stream of their interior lives to work out their beliefs, find answers to problems and deeper meaning in their existence.”
“It’s a highly useful, practical method, leading to some profound insights,” Progoff said, “but it’s not a self-concerned approach because the answers usually lie in connection with finding meaning in – and connection to – something larger than one’s self.”
Intensive journal workshops encourage individual privacy, although people are periodically invited to read portions of their journal, so they can experience the emotions that surround reading their entries aloud. No judgments or analyses are invited. “I try to help people get over the habit of constantly judging and diagnosing themselves and others,” Progoff said, “and look at things objectively as they are. The workshops provide a place where you can sit quietly to let the muddy waters of life settle and clarify themselves.”
This atmosphere of meditative silence provides an environment which helps people search deep within themselves, and tune into a larger awareness. “At deep levels within us we know more than we are aware of,” Progoff frequently stated. “The process helps people open themselves to this non-intellectual perception, which draws them fully into their own life story.”
12 Entries
To organize an “intensive journal” based on Progoff’s method, divide a looseleaf notebook into 12 sections. Begin by making entries in the first four sections. Then make entries in other appropriate sections as thoughts and insights arise. Log the date and time of each entry.
Approach the exercise slowly; and once into it, allow lots of time for contemplation and revision. The archetypal Jungian terminology has a way of stirring deep feeling and memory. Allow the process to stretch over several days, or longer, if necessary. You can return to the notebook, and its different sections, again and again over time, expanding and deepening your process of self-observation and awareness.
1. Period Log. Begin by writing “It has been a time in which,” and describe inner and outer events that come to mind about the most recent period in your life. This helps you place yourself within “the rhythm of time.”
2. Twilight Imagery Log. Sit quietly, with eyes closed, and let yourself feel the content of the period just described. Relax and let imagery, impressions and symbols form in your mind. When you are ready, record them. This gives you an interior perspective on your life.
3. Steppingstones. List about a dozen key points that have occurred throughout your life. Select meaningful emotional, physical, occupational and relational milestones. This gives you a sense of continuity and a picture of your life as a whole. Be open to surprises.
4. Intersections: Roads Taken and Not Taken. Select one steppingstone that marks a time when you made an important choice (avoid the most recent). Begin by writing “It was a time when,” and record your impressions and recollections. This may help you sort out unresolved issues, since “things we regret don’t die – they go underground.”
5. Life History Log. Read your “intersections” entry and let it stir specific memories – in detail – about that period. This is a place for collecting past experiences without judgment or interpretation.
6. Daily Log. Think back over the past 24 hours and trace moods, concerns and thoughts. This is an ongoing record of what is happening to you, and an important way to track your awareness. Avoid judging yourself. In the seeing comes the understanding.
7. Dream Log. Jot down dreams as you recall them – without analysis or interpretation. Dreams often contain valuable information about our life, but awareness takes time to surface.
8. Dialogue with Persons. Pick someone – living or dead – of inner importance to your life. Write a statement describing where the relationship is, then list their life steppingstones. Read the entry and record whatever it stirs in you, beginning with the statement, “As I consider your life I feel …” Write the person’s response and continue the dialogue. Let the dialogue script form itself; say what needs to be said; listen carefully. This process can help dramatically to clarify relationships, and is one of the most moving and rewarding exercises in the entire journal-writing tool kit.
9. Dialogue with Works. Pick an activity you care about, and write down your thoughts and feelings about your relationship to it. List the steppingstones in the life of this work as if it were a person; speak to it and let it respond. Read over the dialogue and record your reactions. This helps clarify your relationship to work.
10. Dialogue with the Body. List some remembrances of bodily experiences throughout your life – such as times of strength and accomplishment, illness, sensuality, athletics, food and drug use. Read over the list and write what stirs within you. Let your body speak. This helps you connect with your physical experience. Dialogue with the body, a part of the body, a symptom, a condition, a feeling.
11. Inner Wisdom Dialogue. Pick a person you consider wise – a teacher, counselor, parent, author, spiritual figure. Imagine that person’s presence, speak to him or her about your concerns and record the discussion. This can lead to important behavioral and spiritual insights.
12. Now: The Open Moment. Briefly state a vision, prayer or plan for the next period or stage in your life. This will help you focus on where you are going, sometimes with intense emotional clarity.
“In the struggle to make a memory yield up its secrets, R.H.S. can resemble war–and war can be hell. It takes great confidence to descend into this hell with the expectation of prevailing. One must be able to demand–and accept–the secrets the memory will yield. But again, it all takes place in one’s own Consciousness, and one does indeed have a right to the Truth of whatever’s in there.”
In his powerful bestseller The Soul’s Code, James Hillman brilliantly illuminated the central importance of character to our spiritual and emotional lives. Now, in this magnificent new book, Hillman completes his exploration of character with a profound and revolutionary reflection on life’s second half.
“Character requires the additional years,” declares Hillman. “The last years confirm and fulfill character.” Far from blunting or dulling the self, the accumulation of experience concentrates the essence of our being, heightening our individual mystery and unique awareness of life. Drawing on his grounding in Jungian psychology, Hillman explains here the archetypes and myths that govern the self’s realignment in our final years.
The Force of Character follows an enriching journey through the three stages of aging–lasting, the deepening that comes with longevity; leaving, the preparation for departure; and left, the special legacy we each bestow on our survivors. Along the way the book explores the meanings and often hidden virtues of characteristic physical and emotional changes, such as loss of memory, alterations in sleep patterns, and the mysterious upsurge in erotic imagination.
Steeped in the wisdom of a lifetime, radiant with Hillman’s reading in philosophy, poetry, and sacred texts, charged with a piercing clarity, The Force of Character is a book that will change–and affirm–the lives of all who read it.
Religion in Human Evolution is a work of extraordinary ambition–a wide-ranging, nuanced probing of our biological past to discover the kinds of lives that human beings have most often imagined were worth living. It offers what is frequently seen as a forbidden theory of the origin of religion that goes deep into evolution, especially but not exclusively cultural evolution.
How did our early ancestors transcend the quotidian demands of everyday existence to embrace an alternative reality that called into question the very meaning of their daily struggle? Robert Bellah, one of the leading sociologists of our time, identifies a range of cultural capacities, such as communal dancing, storytelling, and theorizing, whose emergence made this religious development possible. Deploying the latest findings in biology, cognitive science, and evolutionary psychology, he traces the expansion of these cultural capacities from the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (roughly, the first millennium BCE), when individuals and groups in the Old World challenged the norms and beliefs of class societies ruled by kings and aristocracies. These religious prophets and renouncers never succeeded in founding their alternative utopias, but they left a heritage of criticism that would not be quenched.
Bellah’s treatment of the four great civilizations of the Axial Age–in ancient Israel, Greece, China, and India–shows all existing religions, both prophetic and mystic, to be rooted in the evolutionary story he tells. Religion in Human Evolution answers the call for a critical history of religion grounded in the full range of human constraints and possibilities.
Fernando Affonso Collor de Mello (born August 12, 1949) is a Brazilian politician who served as the 32nd President of Brazil from 1990 to 1992, when he resigned in a failed attempt to stop his impeachment trial by the Brazilian Senate. Collor was the first President democratically elected after the end of the Brazilian military government. Wikipedia
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The meaning of freedom can never be grasped by the divided mind. If I feel separate from my experience, and from the world, freedom will seem to be the extent to which I can push the world around, and fate the extent to which the world pushes me around. But to the whole mind there is no contrast of “I” and the world. There is just one process acting, and it does everything that happens. It raises my little finger and it creates earthquakes. Or, if you want to put it that way, I raise my little finger and also make earthquakes. No one fates and no one is being fated.
