Gestalt

Imagination does not breed insanity.  Exactly what does breed insanity is reason…Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite.  The result is mental exhaustion.

The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

The madman’s explanation of a thing is always complete and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory.  Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable...  If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do… Nevertheless he is wrong.  But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed.  Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle.  A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle, but though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large.  In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large.

In these cases it is not enough that the unhappy man should desire truth; he must desire health…A man cannot think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent.  He can only be saved by will or faith.  The moment his mere reason moves, it moves in the old circular rut; he will go round and round his logical circle, just as a man in a third-class carriage on the Inner Circle will go round and round the Inner Circle unless he performs the voluntary, vigorous, and mystical act of getting out at Gower Street.  Decision is the whole business here; a door must be shut for ever.

                                            G. K. Chesterton

Teleology:      1. the study of final causes

                     2. a belief that natural phenomena are determined not only by mechanical causes but by an over-all design or purpose in nature.

Gestalt:          1. pattern

                     2. a unified whole which is greater than the sum of its parts. 

                For a long time I just could not understand why so many Christians saw the theory of evolution as a threat.  At face value, evolution seems like the most teleological theory out there.  In contrast to the second law of thermal dynamics, where the universe is energetically slowing down, we’ve got this random planet where life is simply exploding.  Put Shcroederian parameters or leave evolution utterly random, the fact remains that life keeps building more and more complex patterns.  Something is driving the system.  When I began making the connections between emergence and Quality and how it flows different than a Truth dominant, transcendent God, I understood better the threat of evolution, however subconscious.

                Let’s back up to Plato.  He divided the universe into noumenon and phenomenon.  The Noumenal realm was the world of ideas and the mind.  That which could be perceived without use of the senses.  The phenomenal realm was the reality that we perceived with our senses.  The noumenal was populated by Ideas, the most famous one being that of Chairness.  We know chairs to be chairs because they participate in the idea of chairness.  This is in contrast to an emergence concept that we see enough chairs in our life that we develop and idea of the category of chair.  For Plato, there was also an Idea of the Ideas, which was the One.  There was the projection of the One called the Demiurge, and a projection of the Demiurge called the world-soul, which provided the liaison between ‘spiritual’ and corporal world as creator of phenomenon.  This is obviously a precursor to the eventual Christian trinity.  Yes, I oversimplify, but my main point is this chasm between the world of Ideas, of Mind, of Spirit, and the physical world.  It takes two beings removed from God to even interact with our world of biology, of sounds and smells.  And the flow is up/down.  What things are is determined by what exists in the upper world.  Horses exist only because they are some sort of manifestation of the Idea of Horseness in the world of the Mind.  In this scenario, mutations and changes are not beautiful, because they aren’t matching up to the ideals.  In this context evolution is synonymous with degradation. 

                One of the biggest criticism of evolution stems from the gaps in the fossil record.  Darwin’s natural selection process seems to need vast, vast amounts of time for evolution to transform species as different as fish to mammals.  The fossil record seems full of explosions in relatively short geological time.  Keep in mind a short geological explosion could be over a million years.  I’m no scientist, but it sounds plausible to me that the same mechanics of change that drive scientific theory and knowledge could be mirrored in the evolutionary process.  When Copernicus was wrestling with his new heliocentric paradigm, it was not a gradual conversion going on in the scientific community where his theory of earth revolving around the sun was simply the next step in a progressing logic at the time.  The scientific community, headed by the Christian church was not kind to those like Galileo, Copernicus, and Kepler.  They were indeed, diametrically opposed.  These scientists engaging with the alternative heliocentric model had to rise above the accepted thought patterns around them in a sort of mental leap.  Not that this leap happens in a vacuum.  When one system of thought is pushed to its limits, you get to the margins where failures and discrepancies pop up.  Those in tune to the pre-intellectual Reality sense this discord and begin fishing for alternatives.  All these discrepancies act like a supersaturated solution.  The pieces have been stewing there for a while, but no one has picked out the pattern.  Some catalyst sets off someone like Copernicus and in a mental leap he has Gestalt.  He sees the whole of it and the beauty of the new model is irrefutable.  We also know that it is not just thought that leaps.  In the concept of the Quantum leap, electrons leap from different energy levels instantaneously.  So why wouldn’t this process show up in evolution?

                I don’t want this to be a defense of evolution, but I bring it up because it’s a great example of how transcendent, Platonic thinking, clashes with emergent thinking in a very culturally volatile way.  Just a reminder as much to myself as to anyone reading that these concepts are not just lofty tinkering, but affect us both on the individual level as well as a society.  I enjoy pointing out the fractal nature of these patterns, whether we recognize it in our history of science, electrons, or the grand, long-term view of evolution.

                While most people have at least heard of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, not so many are familiar with Pirsig’s sequel, Lila.  While Zen spent a great deal of time deconstructing in order to get to the source behind our thought, Lila is more about building a metaphysic, or a lens in which to view our world.  Pirsig has set up the concepts of Dynamic Quality, which drives the systems by leaps, and static quality, which provides structure to sustain these new ‘energetic levels’.  A structure that holds and is sustained is understood as a static pattern.  Pirsig sees our world divided into four grand systems or static patterns.  Inorganic patterns, biological patterns, social patterns, and intellectual patterns.  He emphatically says they are not continuous, and though the higher levels are built on the lower patterns, they are not an extension of the lower patterns.  Having jumped or leaped to the higher static pattern rather than by extension, this means that the relationship between these different levels can be complex, even adversarial at times.  Pirsig makes fantastic use of a computer metaphor.  First you have the inorganic components.  A computer is made of metals and plastics and circuits and resistors, and capacitors (I am way out of my depth here).  These components are storing either a 1 or a 0.  Above this level are the basic programs.  It struck Pirsig that programmers have no need to understand the lower level of circuits in order to write their programs.  So then you have me writing on some sort of word processing program trying to grapple with concepts of emergence and leaps and gestalts.  Look into the program or look even deeper into the 1’s and 0’s, and you won’t find what I’m communicating.  The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  As human beings, we encompass all these different levels, the different patterns of inorganic, biological, social, and intellectual.  And with these patterns not being extensions of each other, yet still being essential, things get very complex.  It’s worth the read to see how Pirsig fleshes his ideas out.

                Now, I believe, I can finally get back to Chesterton.  The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason… his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle.  A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle, but though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large…In these cases it is not enough that the unhappy man should desire truth; he must desire health.  I think about this often when I talk with my conservative Christian family members.  

Family says: the Bible is inspired by God and is infallible. 

I say: How do you know that’s true?

Family says: the Bible says it’s inspired by God.  That means it’s authoritative.

I say: you can’t pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.

Family says: well, the Holy Spirit confirms it your heart.

I say: so, something outside the Bible authenticates it.

Family says: Absolutely not.  Peter says Paul’s writings are Scripture.

I say: who says Peter is right?

Family says: Paul tells Timothy that all Scripture is inspired, and Peter is in the Bible.

I say: Who decided which books to but in the Bible?

Family says: God inspired a group of church leaders to decide which books were inspired.

I say: But it wasn’t unanimous and not everybody was invited to the council to decide.

Family says: now you’re just being ornery.  It just makes sense that God would preserve his Word so that we would know who He is.  QED.

                You can argue until your blue in face, but even using scripture itself to show a contradiction will not get the third-class carriage out of the old, circular ruts.  The irony is that in raising Truth to the ultimate pedestal, it causes the believer’s organ of thought to become diseased.  And unless there is some remaining desire for health, some longing for Beauty, some awe for the integrity of a gestalt, then the proud reason, the staunch defense of truth will keep the individual a prisoner of her narrow, circular cage. 

                I kind of rushed this last part, (it’s late) so let me know what needs clarifying.

Sin boldly

It makes no sense to ask if the metric system is true or the old systems of measurements are false, or if Cartesian coordinates are true and polar ones false.  One geometry cannot be more true than another: it can only be more convenient. 

Jules-Henri Poincare

The universe is derived from an ultimate principle of spiritual consciousness, the one and only existent from eternity.  Accepting this, you become an affirmer of The Void, which is to be understood as the Primordial Nothingness: that is, the raw stuff out of which all is created as well as the background against which every creation can be discerned.

                                                Frank Herbert, Destination: Void.

Because emergence is essentially saying the Creative Force is driving forward and upward, rather than pulling from up above, it is important to get a sense of what that Quality is and when and how it manifests itself as a driving force.  Personally, I believe that developing the faculty to recognize Quality, that sixth sense that “sniffs” out the reality behind the structures, is what becoming a fuller human being is all about.  And I don’t think of this as a separate sacred category that is accessible primarily through the mind.  Just the opposite.  This faculty, I believe, instructs the mind and is applicable as easily (perhaps even more easily) when working wood, maintaining a motorcycle, or raising animals, than it is in some academic or religious arena.  

As Poincare points out, it is in the extremes, whether macro or micro, where we usually get discrepancies of a paradigm.  I often think of these as the margins, or the edges, so that the same principle can also be applied in areas other than the material world.  If I understand Poincare right, he says the pursuit of knowledge and principles is about finding experiments or cases where the theory will fail.  In the subsequent discrepancies, we are forced to find more universal, more encompassing theories.  But Poincare is also very aware that there is some other process going on within the scientist that is guiding her to know where these margins are, where the discrepancies might show up.  Same for the inventor who has an instinct of what to try and what not to bother with.  What guides the scientist or mathematician is at times labeled “beauty”.  In other words, that sixth sense of recognizing the pre-intellectual Reality is a faculty of aesthetics.  

The history of science is precisely this story of great men and women pushing our understanding to new heights by means of following their sense of aesthetics.  The rest of us are eventually won over, but again not because of logic, but because we too, sense the alignment of the new structure with reality.  I like the example of Keplar.  Astronomers had long noticed the “wandering stars”, eventually called planets, which broke from the normal pattern.  There were geocentric formulas, though extremely complex, which were mathematically true in that the paths of the planets could be plotted, even predicted.  Keplar, building on the Copernicus revolution, came up with a relatively simple formula based on elliptical orbits.  At this point in history, it was all abstraction; no image-taking spacecraft had documented anything outside our atmosphere.  Both the geocentric and the heliocentric formulas worked.  The difference was in simplicity.  Particularly that kind of simplicity that we feel when a piece of the puzzle fits just right.  When the interrelationships of things, such as planets and suns, are explained well, we recognize that sort of simplicity or even efficiency in the pattern.  We have participated, perhaps fractally, in these efficient interrelated patterns before and recognize it when the convoluted is compared directly with the simple.

Even though I point to great scientists and historical breakthroughs, I still maintain that this sixth sense is something we should practice constantly in ordinary life.  We may not be choosing between geo- and heliocentric models of planets, but we make hundreds of choices daily that require, what was called as I grew up, discernment.  Whether you are doctor, carpenter, mechanic, professor, accountant, butcher, baker, candlestick maker, you make aesthetic choices.  Personally, I hate doing our business’ accounting.  Quickbooks was not made with our business model in mind and when doing data entry I always feel that discord of patterns.  Cramming numbers into categories that just don’t quite reflect the reality.  So I do my best to make the ‘truest’ choice, but in the end it lacks the integrity of the puzzle pieces making a clear whole.

If you are good at what you do, or have been doing your job well for a long time, your choices are made so fast you no longer become aware of them.  And when you find a system that works, 95% of the time it’s smooth sailing.  But we still run into the margins at times.  Someone in tune to Quality, will recognize these edges immediately and reassess.  In fact, for a great deal of our life, we work under “untrue” paradigms because they function better.  Scientifically we know better, but there is no reason not to work within the framework of sunrise and sunset.  Scientifically we know better, but Newton’s laws are much more applicable to ordinary life.  Yes, sure, time and space are relative, but when you’ve got a business meeting to attend it doesn’t pay to act like it.  

Morally, I believe it holds true as well.  It’s a good principle not to lie and to live honestly.  But when the Nazis knock on your door looking for Jews…  I don’t think I’m the only one who has had a discussion with a fundamentalist who insists that you should still not lie in these situations.  God told us not to lie, so if you obey him, He’ll take care of the rest.  It is a very logical conclusion.  My rejection of it is an aesthetic one.  First, it does not resonate with my own experience, and second, it sounds like the passing of the buck for a hard situation.  I have even heard it argued that telling the truth nonchalantly would throw the Nazi off and the soldiers would probably leave not expecting anyone to admit in such a fashion.  This individual refused to see the irony in that they were advocating a proper way of deception by holding fast to the rule that one should not lie.  A convoluted way to appeal to the spirit of the law as a way to uphold the letter.  That puzzle piece came from an entire puzzle altogether and no matter how it was argued, it was not going to fit in with the interrelating pieces.

Another way to rephrase the issue is to say that when Truth and Goodness seem at odds, it is important to remember which proceeds from the other.  On the Truth side, moral law tells me not to lie.  So if I believe that Goodness proceeds from Truth, I am good when I don’t lie, even to Nazis.  However, if Truth proceeds from Goodness, then it leads me to ask why I am told not to lie.  Personally I think it has something to do with honoring your fellow person.  Once I understand the spirit, or have a feel for the pattern of what’s behind the law, it is a simple, straightforward moral obligation to lie, and to lie as best as I can, because that too, has something to do with honoring my fellow person.  

If you don't mind it doesn't matter

  Quality is not a thing.  It is an event…It is the event at which the subject becomes aware of the object.  And because without objects there can be no subject—because the objects create the subject’s awareness of himself—Quality is the event at which awareness of both subjects and objects is made possible.   

                                                     Pirsig

     What is essential to understand at this point is that until [the Greek philosophers] there was no such thing as mind and matter, subject and object, form and substance.  Those divisions are just dialectical inventions that came later.  The modern mind sometimes tends to balk at the thought of these dichotomies being inventions and says, “Well, the divisions were there for the Greeks to discover,” and you have to say “Where were they?  Point to them!”  And the modern mind gets a little confused and wonders what this is all about anyway, and still believes the divisions were there.

            

                                                      Pirsig

     What evidence do we have that the dialectical question-and-answer method of arriving at truth comes before anything else?  We have none whatsoever.  And when the statement is isolated and itself subject to scrutiny it becomes patently ridiculous.  Here is this dialectic, like Newton’s law of gravity, just sitting by itself in the middle of nowhere, giving birth to the universe, hey?  It’s asinine.

    

                                                     Pirsig

In college I joined the bandwagon of Robert Pirsig fans when I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  No one had spelled out Cartesian dualism so relevantly as Persig did with his presentation of the tension between the dynamic and static forces of the world.  Cartesian dualism is a bear, developed by philosophers all the way back from Plato and reinforced by monotheistic religions.  Gnosticism is only one of many monsters this western dualism has spawned over the millennia.  Pirsig does an impressive job of trying rise above the strangling opposition of subject and object, mind and matter, static and dynamic, by pointing us to the mystical pre-intellectual reality he names Quality.  I can think of nearly dozen discussions relating to Persig’s metaphysics, but I’m trying to stick to the deconstruction of the dualism, specifically the Gnosticism I grew up in and that which is still so prevalent today.

In Pirsig’s terminology, the fundamentalists of today are champions of the static.  Of the mind.  Of the sacred.  Of Truth.  Of the Word.  So deeply imbedded in our culture, we hardly see it, though we swim it in constantly.  We typically have a staunch belief in the ultimate power of the written word, whether it’s the constitution, court of law, science, or scripture.  Let me provide an example.  Western medicine places such a strong emphasis on word that they rename all the body parts in Latin.  Many doctors I know are notorious for using the least vernacular name of a muscle or disease in order to set them apart to make sure, you the lowly laymen, realize they have knowledge to set them apart.  (Your epidermis is showing!)  The very essence of medical education makes it hard not to adopt a gnostic stance towards the whole field.  I’ve heard the comparison of doctors to priests, western medicine to religion, hospitals and clinics to temples.  Anyone who has sat half-naked on that cold table/bed/chair thing, crinkling the paper cover, your feet dangling and wondering where the hell everyone has gone, has experienced the truth of the metaphor.  You’re the poor supplicant helplessly waiting for the priest to come save you.  And damn, don’t we pay out the nose for it.  And the diagnosis is as stubbornly gnostic as anything else.  You got to first name the ailment or sickness.  Only then will you know the right, the true, path to curing the patient.  

I’ve had the opportunity to be treated by some who practice Traditional Chinese Medicine.  In contrast to western medicine, TCMer’s are much more empirical in their approach, at least the ones I have had interaction with.  Sure, they attempt some sort of diagnosis when the patient comes in with certain symptoms, but it’s just to give them some momentum.  If one paradigm of viewing the body is not really curing the problem, they’ll shift to another school of thought.  The important thing is to bring the body back to health. It would be like a mathematician, when having trouble reconciling a complex problem, is willing to try and solve it using a non-Euclidean geometry.  The systems of logic are to serve the greater Good.  Other contrasts between oriental and western medicine hit me psychologically as well.  The realm of the mind and knowledge is often depicted as a barren, cold, and remote.  Seeing a western doctor, you may easily go through your whole appointment and never come into contact once.  Nurses, yes—seeing as they took your vital signs and stuff.  But the high priest maintains minimal contact, using his vast knowledge to decide which medicine is the correct one for your case.  And did I mention that cold, paper-crinkling, feet-dangling, table/bed/chair thingy?  In contrast, the TCMer’s I’ve known spend the majority of the appointment healing with their hands in a sort of painful “massage” called tui na.  And they make sure you stay warm, because that’s important for the blood to circulate freely.  Sure there are herbs and sometimes acupuncture and weird fire cup thingies, but the heart of it is human contact, changing your disjointed energies with their hands.  

I want to be clear that I’m not presently advocating eastern monism—that all is one.  It may very well be true metaphysically, but to bring monism to bear at this point of the discussion is way too impractical for me.  We are very analytic creatures.  Our culture has built a civilization based on the division of mind and matter.  I believe the path that returns to sanity is not one that just chucks everything into a cauldron to try and mix it together inseparably, but rather to acknowledge the categories and come to an understanding of how they can interrelate in a healthy symbiotic matrix rather than the historically antagonistic struggle for dominance.  So…back to the fundamentalists and religion.  The Muslims take it farthest with their scripture.  For them, the Quran is not just human writing inspired or even dictated by God, but is the actual thoughts of God written down by the Prophet.  Consequently, the real hardliners are opposed to even translating the Quran from the Arabic, because inevitably that would not hold exactly true to God’s thoughts.  Many Christians of today come quite close to the Muslim attitude towards scriptures.  In general, our culture believes that we learn what is right and wrong from the law, civil or religious.  Secular law still is understood by many to be good law according to the criteria of whether it functions well to serve the people.  However, here in America, a nation “under God”, the cultural mindset is conducive to bringing religious fervor to the constitution and subsequent law.  Fundamentally, it is a belief that the interrelationship between Truth and Goodness is that the latter flows from the former.  The mind forms matter.  The static informs and controls the dynamic.  God spoke and, through the logos—the rational, logical Word—created the world.  

Pirsig suggested that the reality is much different.  Behind the categories of static and dynamic is the pre-intellectual Quality which manifests itself on both sides of the perceived schism.  There is static quality and there is dynamic quality.  However, Pirsig capitalized Dynamic Quality, because it is much closer to the source, closer to Quality.  Though more remote, more rigid, the static is needed to provide structure to the dynamic, the creative, the pulsing quickening of life.  Without the controlling structure of the static quality, the Dynamic Quality would tear itself apart into chaos.  It needs to be controlled to be sustained, but it remains the driving force.  To name and analyze something is to attempt to control it.  Properly done, this is important in order to sustain life.  With this construct, Goodness becomes the driving force, and Truth and law is simply there to structure it.  Also, mind attempts to control and mold matter, but ultimately the movement is down/up and not up/down.  Societies, intelligence, morality is not so much created by some transcendent being, but rather is a sustainable structure that emerges out from the Dynamic Quality.  In this sense, matter emerges into mind.

The Knowledge of Good and Evil

"I myself serve the law of God with my mind,

 but with my flesh I serve the law of sin."  Romans 7:25

A few years ago, I joined a discussion on the internet where the topic had turned to the need of missionaries to connect with the native people they were ministering to in order to contextualize their message.  I brought up the issue of the inherent tension between making relationships and having a mission with the same people.  Inherently, I surmised, being a missionary, regardless of whether you are proclaiming the gospel, the virtues of Islam, or democratic principles, means you have goals other than wanting to befriend a person, so that relationships will always be mercenary.  I tried hard to be clear that I wasn’t saying all missionaries are bad people that don’t give a hoot about relationships, but that when in “missionary mode” relationships become secondary to the final goal that they are commissioned to do.  My two cents weren’t received all that well, but I bring up the subject because it highlights some of my basic, deeply held beliefs.  

First, I set extreme value in integrity.  In fact, I think the vast majority of us instinctually do.  Particularly kids.  Consciously or not, kids sniff out hypocrisy in a flash and tend to show deep contempt of this “vice”.  By the age of high school, I believe kids have seen so much hypocrisy they are parched for any sort of authenticity.  Second, to build on the issue of integrity, I firmly believe we need to value and pursue things or activities for the sake of themselves.  So in the case of relationships, a friendship, I believe, has in and of itself enough value that it needs no justification.

A third belief is a primarily a reaction to Gnosticism.  Back in the infancy of Christianity a branch of believers were labeled Gnostics (Greek root of gnostic = knowledge) because they placed higher moral value on knowledge than on the things of the material world.  These believers were heavily influenced by the Pauline scriptures that emphasize the renewing of the mind and the rejection of the things of the flesh.  I believe this is an inherent weakness of any monotheistic religion, mainly due to the strong held belief in God’s transcendence.  When God, as Other, is spirit, the best the material world can be is a good second.  Personally, in my thinking, I stretch the gnostic label to include any separation of our lives into the two categories of sacred and ordinary.  Even when modern believers do their best to affirm the goodness of the material world, I still consider the prevalent separation of sacred and ordinary as a gnostic attitude.  And this attitude has caused a great deal of damage throughout the last few millenniums.

At first glance, I wouldn’t blame you if you thought these beliefs were solely a reaction to the Evangelical upbringing that I obviously had.  But’s it’s more than a knee-jerk reaction.  At least I sure hope so.  And I do have bachelor’s degree in philosophy to try and back it up.  Something for next post, I think.