ART & ORGANISM

[note: this page needs to have its several entries organized and integrated]

“The student of adaptation has to sail a perilous course between a pseudoexplanatory reductionist atomism and stultifying nonexplanatory holism”

Ernst Mayr (1983:329)

(connect this pithy idea to the problem of generalizing and particularizing? see A&O notes on ABSTRACTION)

As Burghardt (1997) pointed out, “…however characterized, mental events and experiences are products of physiological, materialistic processes dependent on the nervous system. Thus any stated contrasts between physiological and psychological aspects of behavior refer to different levels of analysis, traditional dichotomies that probably still have their heuristic value in many contexts (such as cell biology and molecular biology) or the language, methods, and interests of the scientists themselves. That is, a classification useful in discourse does not need to reflect a fundamental metaphysical dichotomy. (p254)

Genes as influenced by their immediate environment organize cellular chemistry. The information that is manifest then trickles or charges through multiple levels of organization becoming slightly more organized at each level. Natural selection or lucky happenstance increases the effectiveness or efficiency of information transfer at each level but the consolidation of a pattern depends on the manifest expression of one of all the implicit potential pathways to evoke a way of successfully coping with a specific selection pressure—that is one or more of the environmental circumstances that determine inclusive fitness. Researchers can work from the genes to the action, or back from the action to the genes—bottom-up or top-down analyses.

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Diverse particulars are presumed embedded in or developmentally precede larger generalities.. . a mantra of art theory is the high virtue of seeing UNITY in DIVERSITY

“Always to see the general in the particular is the very foundation of genius”

(Arthur Schopenhauer quoted by Ernest Jones (1957) in “Nature of Genius”)

THIS is to see across levels of organization

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OVERVIEW of A&O from LEVELS of ORGANIZATION:

Any understanding we believe ourselves to possess emerges from a narrow range of the levels of organization which appear to pervade the universe: we are ORGANISMS and our current nature is structured by our capacity for MEMORY and IMAGINATION: competencies that emerge from a “lower” (=”less complex”) PHYSIOLOGICAL level of organization–our nervous system. An in itself, its capacity for neuroplasticity during DEVELOPMENT is derived from a combination of congenital (evolved) and acquired (learned) genetic programs–some more-or-less sensitive to their ECOLOGY (as in more-or-less “open- or closed-genetic programs). Our qualities as an organism are also the products of our “selves” as ECOSYSTEMS: our bodies in collaboration (and hopefully harmony) with the countless other organisms –microbiota and parasites that live within us. This is a challenging view for biologists that believed that nature is an endless competition, “red in tooth and claw.” While there is certainly competition, it is cooperation that advances species to their position. As with development (“a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal”), cooperation and competition are in balance there is a balance — both within individuals as they pursue their adaptive needs and individuate and between them as conflicting patterns find an accord during socialization.

A seductive metaphor for our capacity to understand resembles (for me) our capacity to perceive the nature in which we find ourselves: the limits on wave-lengths of light or frequencies of sounds.

BUT limits on cognition, doesn’t dampen our disposition to dig as deeply as possible into the cascades of causation (and to hypothesize as much as possible into the likely consequences–the futures) has led some unexpected places: in physics we now believe that there are no static entities, but that the ultimate phenomena are clouds of probabilities that we used to call subatomic particles. A recent visualization that was devise to help us accept some counter-intuitive beliefs is PROCESSES not CORPOREAL OBJECTS (https://aeon.co/videos/to-see-the-universe-more-clearly-think-in-terms-of-processes-not-objects). Take a look

Thinking in terms of processes rather than objects may help maintain a dynamism in our pursuit of insight, but our minds (mine, at least) benefits from concrete examples-snapshots of the process held static enough for long enough for our minds to embrace them. But “LEVELS” themselves deserve study as levels, and here is where concepts such as EMERGENCE seem reasonable. As we construct maps of processes at any one level, the question arises about transferring energy to other levels: we seek connections within and between levels, a pursuit that gives them at least tentative boundaries which are traversed only because surges of energy are necessary to do that (in the few examples we can muster from the study of physiology: surges from one level of neurology created by feed-forward that are necessary to activate a higher level–as in alerting higher levels (such as conscious awareness) of activity at lower levels (such as subconscious awareness)–does this echo the processes of creativity? ).

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In the 17th century, Blaise Pascal asked, “for in fact what is man in nature? A Nothing in comparison with the Infinite, an All in comparison with the Nothing, a mean between nothing and everything. Since he is infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes, the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from him in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing the Nothing from which he was made, and the Infinite in which he is swallowed up. (Pensées sect. II, 72)

Levels of organization are typically defined in terms of each other and their relative levels of complexity. In other words, they refer to phenomena of relative complexity where it appears that more complex phenomena are composed of hierarchically subordinate units: so biochemistry is organized in organelles and cells which are organized into tissues or organs which are organized into organisms or even societies. The human disposition to characterize unknown entities by interpolating or extrapolating from better known phenomena –that is characterizing the unknown in terms of the known—can even extend these hierarchical relationships upward to ecosystems and the earth itself (Gaia) and the cosmos — or “downward” to progressively smaller units such as atoms and sub-atomic particles. In both cases–looking up or looking down– our search for connections can rapidly lead to levels about which we can only speculate.

The embedding of one level within another led to Arthur Koestler’s concept of the holon (discussed below).

EMERGENCE. “The unpredictable –or at least unexpected—natures of higher orders of organization are characterized as emergent phenomena. This appears to increase complexity and give a direction to levels. Seeking insight by discovery and description of the presumed less complex phenomena is termed reductionism, and those phenomena that could not have been predicted from our most complete knowledge are regarded as emergent” (from A&O page on EMERGENCE)

HOW DEEPLY can we dig into the causes of things–for example to The Cosmological Argument, the END of the INFINITE REGRESS, prime mover, the primal cause of all causes? Is it “turtles all the way down?”

The intuitive practical engagement with this problem is PHYSICS, but that is a slippery slope– before you know it you’re speaking of metaphysics and the unknowable. “The closer you look, the more the materialist position in physics appears to rest on shaky metaphysical ground.” look in on “Minding matter” by Adam Frank (2017) It seems to deal with “What’s everything made of?” (see Charles Seben’s (2019) essay in Aeon) that says, “To answer whether the fundamental building blocks of reality are particles, fields or both means thinking beyond physics”

(In the 1920’s, physics was getting progressively “deeper.” Niels Bohr said, in conversation with Werner Heisenberg, “We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.“)

WOULD WE, when going sufficiently deep, intuit as Walt Whitman did, that “A vast similitude interlocks all, All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets, comets, asteroids, All distances, however wide, All distances of time – all inanimate forms, All Souls – all living bodies, though they be ever so different, or in different worlds, All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes – the fishes, the brutes, All men and women – me also, All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages, All identities that have existed, or may exist, on this globe or any globe, All lives and deaths – all of past, present and future, This vast similitude spans them, and always has spanned, and shall forever span them, and compactly hold them. [Leaves of Grass, 12]

REDUCTION and INTEGRATION, analysis and synthesis … we tend to look in one direction at a time and see things in terms of its constituent causes and likely consequences. It reflects our deep sense of the directionality of time. Within us, we register experiences and remember their causes and imagine their consequences. To complete the sense of flow, we extrapolate or interpolate phenomena we haven’t experienced directly but suppose are real because they fit the flow so well. Indeed, the nervous system itself is constantly “filling in” gaps in narratives. Our neurophysiological equavalent of “nature abhors a vacuum,” attributed to Aristotle [LINK]. At the levels of integration approaching social sharing (with its need for coherent conveyance of ideas through language) We can look at cerebral mechanisms–The “interpreter” of Gazzaniga and LeDoux identified in an organ of coherence in Greenberg (1999) [LINK]

The study of constituent parts as an indissoluble whole is termed holism.

George Henry Lewes, the 19th-century English philosopher of science, distinguished between resultants and emergents—phenomena that are predictable from their constituent parts and those that are not (e.g., a physical mixture of sand and talcum powder as contrasted with a chemical compound such as salt, which looks nothing like sodium or chlorine). The evolutionary account of life is a continuous history marked by stages at which fundamentally new forms have appeared: (1) the origin of life; (2) the origin of nucleus-bearing protozoa; (3) the origin of sexually reproducing forms, with an individual destiny lacking in cells that reproduce by fission; (4) the rise of sentient animals, with nervous systems and protobrains; and (5) the appearance of cogitative animals, namely humans. Each of these new modes of life, though grounded in the physicochemical and biochemical conditions of the previous and simpler stage, is intelligible only in terms of its own ordering principle. These are thus cases of emergence.” (Encyclopedia Brittanica on-line)

“Levels” encourages a systems approach to the flow of information in living systems. The level of organization of the problem you choose to solve affects the specific questions you ask, the methods used to answer them, and even standards of evidence. [More on RESEARCH METHODS] [link needs repair]

“Bertalanffy [1967] applied general systems theory not only to biology, but to psychology, economics, and social science as well. In his view, old-fashioned science “tried to explain observable phenomena by reducing them to an interplay of elementary units investigatable independently of each other.” Contemporary science, on the other hand, recognized the importance of “wholeness,” defined as “problems of organization, phenomena not resolvable into local events, dynamic interactions manifest in the difference of behavior of parts when isolated or in higher configuration, etc.; in short, ‘systems’ of various orders not understandable by investigation of their respective parts in isolation.” And this remains an effective definition of systems biology as practiced today with the integration and application of mathematics, engineering, physics, and computer science to understanding a range of complex biological regulatory systems. (excerpted from Chong and Ray 2002) [More on SYSTEMS BIOLOGY]

Here the Janusian perspective is particularly powerful as our two ways of understanding a phenomenon–in terms of causes or consequences which conconstitute our sense of what we are experiencing: Indeed, the nervous system itself constructs a model of the consequences of actions as we act and thereby maximizes the effectiveness of the process. [more about “Janusian Thinking”]

What goes on at those different levels of organization?:

OUR SOCIAL WORLD: “Me against my brother, my brother and me against our cousins, we and our cousins against the enemy.” (Pashtun saying^[ii] (cited by Isabel Hilton New Yorker Dec 03 2001 p59) (connect to a not on sociality of songbirds: Songbirds help friends and family, but not strangers (“Some songbirds are more likely to help other birds in their close social circles than casual acquaintances or strangers, according to a study published in Current Biology. Researchers examined how superb fairy wrens respond to distress calls, discovering that the birds will aid those in their same breeding group but ignore calls from those they don’t recognize — a multilevel society social arrangement also found in human hunter-gatherer societies.”)Full Story: Forbes (tiered subscription model) (3/27) (from A&O notes on Individuation and Sociality)
OUR SENSORY WORLD: “… the baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion…” (William James (1890) Principles of Psychology in the middle of James’ chapter titled, “Discrimination and comparison.”; but see John Hawks);
OUR CELLULAR WORLD: “If one could peek inside a cell… “your senses would be assaulted by a boiling tumult of chemical activities…” Some of this activity comes from a cell’s enzymes, which can complete thousands to millions of precise chemical reactions per second. (quote from Nurse in rev by Erin Garcia de Jesus in SN Mar 27 2021 p28) Read A Journey to the Center of Our Cells By James Somersin The New Yorker, March 7, 2022 Issue

An Extraordinary Connection

The slime mold, Dictyostelium “is like a society of amoebas that come together for a common cause, for which some will sacrifice themselves.

The organisms respond to starvation by rushing together by the thousands into a single blob. The blob stretches out into a slug-shaped mass about one millimeter long (one twenty-fifth of an inch), which then crawls like a worm toward light.

Once it reaches the surface of the soil, the slug undergoes another transformation: Some of the cells turn into a stiff stalk, while the others crawl to the top and form a sticky ball of spores. They stick to the foot of an animal and travel to a hospitable place.

Inside the slug, about 1 percent of the amoebas turn into police. They crawl through the slug in search of infectious bacteria. When the amoebas find a pathogen, they devour it. These sentinels then drop away from the slug, taking the pathogen with it. They then die of the infection, while the slug remains healthy.

When the slug is ready to make a stalk, more amoebas must die so that others can live. They climb on top of one another and transform their insides into bundles of cellulose. Twenty percent of Dictyostelium cells die this way, allowing the survivors to climb up their lifeless bodies and become spores.”

Read Carl Zimmer’s (2011) excellent essay from The New York Times: Can Answers to Evolution Be Found in Slime? (October 3, 2011, Permalink) DEEP ETHOLOGY READING archive version

The HOLON

Can’t see the forest for the trees! (or is it the other way around?) We frequently contrast seeing the forest or the trees — it is a common observation that all levels of organization cannot be simultaneously perceived at the same level of resolution. It recalls an optical illusion where our mind shifts from one interpretation to another. I’m always concerned that there a phenomenon might better be interpreted in terms of an alternative I never really perceived. In nature, organisms struggling to survive must often make “snap” decisions. Considering alternative interpretations in pursuit of the “best one” for a given situation is a luxury enjoyed by science and its system of open sharing of information and bringing many minds to bear on possible interpretations. That is one of the reasons that scrupulously detailed and precise DESCRIPTION is so valued.

WHY we should respect each level: It is often assumed that any particular level represents either a deconstruction of a more complex level or an assemblage of units from a less complex level. BUT AT EVERY LEVEL there may be unique (“emergent”) properties that previous questions and methods cannot address.

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts? An emergent phenomenon or property is one that could not have been predicted even if one had a perfect knowldege of the individual causes that converged on evoking it. Epiphenomena are also hard to predict but the chain of causation is it principle accessible. Generally it is a medical term referring to “something that appears in addition; a secondary symptom (e.g., fever) –a collateral or incidental consequence. BUT in psychology it has (since Henry James 1890) referred to consciousness “as a by-product of the material activities of the brain and nervous system.” Consciousness or even life itself seems trivialized by regarding it as a by-product of one or more other phenomena, but everything came from something, and once constituted, often develop their own machinery of self-perpetuation. It can even create an evolutionary context –new selection pressures– in which it its development as a favorable trait would be progressively selected for. Remember that at every stage of information processing, our brain (all brains?) has mechanisms for validating and accepting (or not) incoming information before it is passed on–this begins at the very beginning of the path, from sensory input through selection of alternative actions in response. This creates cascades of recursive loops.

LEVELS of ANALYSIS. “Confusion over explanatory levels and ensuing inconclusive arguments nag all branches of biology, and the literature is full of examples. A classic is the so-called ‘nature-nurture’ controversy (e.g. Lorenz 1950 versus Lehrman 1953), which arose over whether certain behaviours of chicks are innate ‘or’ acquired through experience. After two decades of unenlightening debate, it became apparent to Mayr (1961), Tinbergen (1963) and Lehrman (1970) that the lack of consensus was mainly due to semantic and conceptual issues, rather than to discrepancies of fact. In his 1961 paper, Mayr observed that life scientists conceptualize research questions in two ways: functional biologists study ‘proximate’ causality, and evolutionary biologists concentrate on ‘ultimate’ causes. Proximate factors operate in the day-to-day lives of individuals, and ultimate causes derive from evolutionary history. Tinbergen (1963) suggested that each of these categories should be subdivided. Thus, proximate or ‘how?’ questions require investigations of both individual ontogeny (e.g. effects of age and experience) and physiological substrates, including neuronal, hormonal and biochemical mechanisms. Ultimate or ‘why?’ questions require understanding both evolutionary origins and current adaptive value. Answering the former entails unravelling the history of phenomena in geological time, while the latter involves comparing the fitness consequences of naturally occurring variants in ecological time.” (Paul W. Sherman. 1988:616)

Sherman correctly characterizes some of the conflicts in terms of semantics but seems only to be relating to “explanatory” levels — in fact, attention to the levels of DESCRIPTION of the phenomenon of interest — the temporal or spatial scales in which the question or problem is framed — would probably go a long ways to resolving these hollow quarrels.

LEVELS of ORGANIZATION. (from A&O – DEEP ETHOLOGY)

it is worth keeping in mind that a behavioral pattern is a biological phenomenon at the ORGANISMIC level and there are levels below and beyond. Tight correlations with phenomena that cause behavior and others that are likely consequences work together to create a narrative: a story that starts (someplace) has action (more-or-less) and ends (someplace). Taken together, “causes” (such as activity in a set of muscles controlled by cells in the brain) It is the key set of CONNECTIONS that organizes our conscious awareness and it can be exquisitely sensitive to conditions of the surrounding environment within the body and in its “outer” environment.

The interaction of the body and the brain in causing behavior is the topic of EMBODIED COGNITION.

The term “embodied cognition” celebrates the fact that cognition cannot exist apart from a nervous system and its immediate context, the physical body in which it resides and with which it interacts closely in a multiplicity of mutually influential—even defining—processes. A further level of mutually influential processes is the environment in which the physical body resides. Like nesting dolls, layers of causation and consequence are at different levels of organization (as in from cell to tissue to organ to organism) and can be identified and separated for closer individual scrutiny, particularly considering that there are different resources needed to enable communication within and between levels.

Relentlessly followed to all possible levels of organization of causes and consequences leads, ultimately, to metaphysics. Our understanding is good at our organismic level, but the deeper or further we go, the more we approach the imperceptible and questions. for scholars of the infinitesimal (physicists) and of the vast (cosmologists) . Both will ask whether the information we seek in unknown or unknowable (and raise issues that are most likely in the realm of metaphysics). The opt-out for some biologists is that we do not really have to know it all, just enough to meet ultimate biological need for self-actualization . The problem with opting out is that historically (and intuitively) the mere pursuit of such knowledge has led to many unanticipated inventions and discoveries that have dramatically improved our potential for self actualization.

LEVELS of ORGANIZATION are sometimes best exemplified in the progressively more complex ways of dealing with a sustained STRESSOR–in integrated collection of processes that enable our efforts to cope with real or perceived challenges to one’s ability to meet real or perceived needs. Stress involves a cascade of communications from cell-signaling to responses of specific organs through to manifest expression of processes that act on one’s environment.

When the exigencies of circumstance cannot be accommodated at one level, they communicate with and evoke coping activity in the next level of complexity for support. Unresolved, the cascade my reach our highest capacities for coping: cognition and consciousness.

Problems that must be accommodated in the course of signalling between cells recall issues of TRANSLATION. At the genetic level, translation is the process by which the information in a molecule of messenger RNA synthesizes a protein*. [Translational medicine involves reciprocal communication between basic research findings and clinical applications]

The processes that allow animals to survive and hopefully prosper in a given environment represents and unknowable depth of accumulated adaptive changes at every level of organization.

read Emerson on Circles

A related idea, “supervenience, is a relation that is used to describe cases where (roughly speaking) the upper-level properties of a system are not determined by its lower level properties. Some philosophers hold that the world is structured into a kind of hierarchy of properties, where the higher level properties supervene on the lower level properties. According to this type of view, social properties supervene on psychological properties, psychological properties supervene on biological properties, biological properties supervene on chemical properties, etc. That is, the chemical properties of the world determine a distribution of biological properties, those biological properties determine a distribution of psychological properties, and so forth. So, for example, mind-body supervenience holds that “every mental phenomenon must be grounded in, or anchored to, some underlying physical base (presumably a neural state). This means that mental states can occur only in systems that can have physical properties; namely physical systems.”^[1] However, mental states cannot be reduced to physical properties.” (Wikipedia)

“The physical world is “largely illusory,” an editorial in The New York Times announced on Nov. 25, 1944. Wishful thinking on a depressing day? No. Had The Times gone mad? Not quite. It was discussing the ideas of Sir Arthur Eddington, an eminent British astronomer and popularizer of science, who had just died.

Eddington began his best-known book, “The Nature of the Physical World,” by explaining that he had written it at two tables, sitting on two chairs and with two pens. The first table was the familiar kind: It was colored, substantial and relatively long-lasting. The second was what he called a “scientific table,” a colorless cloud of evanescent electric charges that is “mostly emptiness.” Likewise the two chairs and two pens. Only the scientific objects were really there, according to Eddington. Hence the idea that our familiar world is a deception on a grand scale.

Anthony Gottlieb recently (2016) reviewed Sean Carroll’s “THE BIG PICTURE: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself” and pointed out that “… phenomena may usefully be investigated at many levels. You can consider the individual atoms in a box of gas, for example, or you can instead treat the gas as a liquid and study its fluid properties. Similarly, the actions of a person may be described psychologically, in terms of his or her desires and beliefs, or in terms of physiology. Underlying all these scientific stories, there is, he insists, a rock-bottom level of description: “a quantum wave function, or a collection of particles and forces — whatever the fundamental stuff turns out to be.” But Carroll rejects the sort of reductionism that says all valid descriptions can be deduced from fundamental physics. That venerable idea seems to have been a mirage.”

Instead, Carroll defends what he calls “poetic naturalism.” “Naturalism,” because there is nothing above and beyond nature. In particular, there are no gods or spooks to transcend or interfere with natural laws. So Einstein’s dice are rolling themselves. “Poetic,” because “there is more than one way of talking about the world.” True enough, but “poetic” is a bit of a stretch. Carroll might just as well have called his position “romantic reductionism” or “fragrant physicalism,” since what he’s trying to convey is a stance that is hard-nosed yet soft to the touch — a kinder, gentler, more capacious science.” (Carroll 2016)[i]

THE LEAP OF FAITH?

From an objective level such as logic or reason to a transcendent subjective and incommunicable level

RESONANCE? movement from one level to another requires energy beyond the dynamic contained within a level– it must “jump” to the higher level. This is a kind of reasoning that might energize the LEAP of FAITH. (“The phrase is commonly attributed to Søren Kierkegaard; however, he never used the term, as he referred to a qualitative leap.”) Such a leap can move one from “historical, finite knowledge” to knowledge of a transcendent state (“God’s existence and nature.”)

Notes from “The Phenomenological Ethologist:”

It is difficult to not get lost amongst the levels of organization: read TS Eliot’s opening chorus from The Rock (1934): “

The endless cycle of idea and action, Endless invention, endless experiment, Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness… Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

Now look at TS Eliot and the Pyramid of Organisational Knowledge & appreciate that in our pusuits, we may find ourselves knowing more and more about less and less.

Levels of Organization. The complexity and diversity of processes that occur …beneath the surface of cognition and action, is bewildering not only because it often uses unfamiliar language and concepts, but because it embraces multiple levels of organization, the navigation of which is an inexhaustible source of difficulty and which, when followed as far as possible leads us to metaphysics.[i] From molecular processes through behavior (and below and above for those of us with an adamantly reductionist or integrative dispositions) our dueling congenital biases for the simplicity of holism or the imagination of reductionism tend to see remote levels of organization—as in anthropomorphism—in terms of familiar ones. (Boroditsky & Ramscar 2002)^[ii]^,[iii]

Putative causal factors can regress from the immediate (“proximate”) factors through progressively subordinate layers of connectivity of information and causation. For example (common in introductory biology), the levels beneath the organism may be organ systems, then organs, then tissues, then cells, etc. Arguably one can “drill down” to levels that might be irrelevant for understanding the phenomenon of interest, although there is a profound bias based on the belief that there is always a cause (Hume[iv])[v] and that all things are connected (Greenberg A&O website on CONNECTIONS).

In a cascade of levels, we may arguably find ourselves enjoying the challenges of the inaccessible expressions of deep metaphysics and first causes. It is this disposition that drives the human pursuit of first causes and unified theories. Further, it creates an essential tension between the real and the ideal, the existence of Sartre’s existentialism versus the essence of his philosophical predecessors (l ‘existence précède l’essence)[vi]. Issues of cascading causes are ancient and are regarded as irresolvable (“turtles all the way down”)[vii] or irrelevant. The idea that there are unsolvable problems likely inspired Browning when he wrote, “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, /Or what’s a heaven for?” (1855)[viii]

The more deeply one goes, the more likely common denominators for diverse phenomena can be discerned. (“If you prick us, do we not bleed?”) Going “deep” refers to examining the contributions provided by or framing of subordinate levels of organization.

Going more deeply involves tracing the paths of communication within – but especially between levels.

The accessibility of these paths to scientific scrutiny is very variable; In some cases, we may emphasize the now-known chemical influences on epigenetic phenomena [that control or suppress gene activation], the chemical products of gene activity, and the effects of these products on the structure and processes manifest in overt, adaptive behavior. These are often discovered in the context of dysfunctions of physiological or behavioral processes that we may recognize as a clinical disorder, thereby recruiting our attention and interest.

From my diary:

Monday, October 15, 2018 How often I am taken with an idea as I speak it in ways I had not expected as I prepared to say it! So I ran into something that fit this idea about how new meaning is extracted as an idea moves from wherever it is conceived to its explicit expression—as from concept to preverbal, to subverbal, to verbal expression. Illich and Sanders, speaking of The Education of Henry Adams (which they regard as the first genuine autobiography), say, “Here is a truly extraordinary development: the literary creation of the self has assumed enough life of its own to instruct and educate its creator …” (Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders. (1988). ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind. Vintage Books, N.Y. p79)

NEUROLOGICAL: in the context of epilepsy, levels of organization were nicely described by Tucker & Holmes(2011):

“A first principle of neuropsychological function is basic enough that it is easily overlooked. The human brain’s psychological operations are organized in relation to its general architecture, which comprises a nested hierarchy of the evolved structures of the vertebrate brain. This hierarchy can be described as a vertical dimension of neural organization: More recently evolved structures are stacked on top of more primitive ones(see Figure 2).As seen most clearly in the still-forming brain of the human fetus, the cortex is dependent on the major circuitry of the subcortical telencephalon, including the limbic circuits and those of the basal ganglia. These telencephalic (end brain) systems are in turn dependent on regulatory influences from the thalamic and hypothalamic divisions of the diencephalon (interbrain), which sits on top of the brain stem and provides a gate for the traffic into and out of the telencephalon. The functions of the diencephalon are in turn dependent on ongoing support from the brain stem’s mesencephalic, metencephalic and myelencephalic levels of organization, regulating primitive but essential functions such as breathing, heartbeat and the brain’s level of arousal.” (Don M. Tucker, Mark D. HolmesFractures and Bindings of Consciousness. Amer Sci 2011 Jan-Feb (“Observing how awareness breaks down in epileptic seizures provides clues to its normal workings in the brain”) link

visit

LEVELS OF ORGANIZATION IN HUMAN SOCIALITY

INCLUDING

Lao-tze’s critical observation from the Dàodé Jīng

AND THE GREAT DISCIPLINES?

Shiva’s Cosmic Dance at CERN

(https://www.fritjofcapra.net/shivas-cosmic-dance-at-cern/ JUNE 20, 2004) and https://neilgreenberg.com/ao-reading-nataraja-at-cern/

On June 18, 2004, an unusual new landmark was unveiled at CERN, the European Center for Research in Particle Physics in Geneva — a 2m tall statue of the Indian deity Shiva Nataraja, the Lord of Dance. The statue, symbolizing Shiva’s cosmic dance of creation and destruction, was given to CERN by the Indian government to celebrate the research center’s long association with India.

In choosing the image of Shiva Nataraja, the Indian government acknowledged the profound significance of the metaphor of Shiva’s dance for the cosmic dance of subatomic particles, which is observed and analyzed by CERN’s physicists. The parallel between Shiva’s dance and the dance of subatomic particles was first discussed by Fritjof Capra in an article titled “The Dance of Shiva: The Hindu View of Matter in the Light of Modern Physics,” published in Main Currents in Modern Thought in 1972. Shiva’s cosmic dance then became a central metaphor in Capra’s international bestseller The Tao of Physics, first published in 1975 and still in print in over 40 editions around the world.

A special plaque next to the Shiva statue at CERN explains the significance of the metaphor of Shiva’s cosmic dance with several quotations from The Tao of Physics. Here is the text of the plaque:

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, seeing beyond the unsurpassed rhythm, beauty, power and grace of the Nataraja, once wrote of it “It is the clearest image of the activity of God which any art or religion can boast of.”

More recently, Fritjof Capra explained that “Modern physics has shown that the rhythm of creation and destruction is not only manifest in the turn of the seasons and in the birth and death of all living creatures, but is also the very essence of inorganic matter,” and that “For the modern physicists, then, Shiva’s dance is the dance of subatomic matter.”

It is indeed as Capra concluded: “Hundreds of years ago, Indian artists created visual images of dancing Shivas in a beautiful series of bronzes. In our time, physicists have used the most advanced technology to portray the patterns of the cosmic dance. The metaphor of the cosmic dance thus unifies ancient mythology, religious art and modern physics.”

WHOSE CONSCIOUSNESS? Considering at least some states of consciousness as an expression of a higher or even emergent levels of organization, these quotes may be unprovable but provocative to our sentience as well as sapience (There are many levels of organization, and we are to be forgiven if we feel they may be endless).

Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence. (Alan Watts, attributed)

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“The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths; of exquisite interrelationships; of the awesome machinery of nature. The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore we’ve learned most of what we know. Recently we’ve waded a little way out, maybe ankle deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can. Because the cosmos is also within us. We’re made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” (Carl Sagan (1990), Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), [Episode 1, The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean])

[i]Metaphysical: Derived from the Greek meta ta physika (“after the things of nature”); referring to an idea, doctrine, or posited reality outside of human sense perception. In modern philosophical terminology, metaphysics refers to the studies of what cannot be reached through objective studies of material reality. Areas of metaphysical studies include ontology, cosmology, and often, epistemology.

Metaphysical – Longer definition: Metaphysics is a type of philosophy or study that uses broad concepts to help define reality and our understanding of it. Metaphysical studies generally seek to explain inherent or universal elements of reality which are not easily discovered or experienced in our everyday life. As such, it is concerned with explaining the features of reality that exist beyond the physical world and our immediate senses. Metaphysics, therefore, uses logic based on the meaning of human terms, rather than on a logic tied to human sense perception of the objective world. Metaphysics might include the study of the nature of the human mind, the definition and meaning of existence, or the nature of space, time, and/or causality. (from Glossary for Faith and Reason, PBS, 1998. https://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/gengloss/metaph-body.html )

[ii] The Roles of Body and Mind in Abstract Thought. Lera Boroditsky,Michael Ramscar (2002) The Roles of Body and Mind in Abstract Thought. LeraBoroditsky,MichaelRamscar (2016) Psychological ScienceVol 13, Issue 2, pp. 185 – 189. First published date: May-06-2016 10.1111/1467-9280.00434. First PublishedMarch 1, 2002

Abstract. How are people able to think about things they have never seen or touched? We demonstrate that abstract knowledge can be built analogically from more experience-based knowledge. People’s understanding of the abstract domain of time, for example, is so intimately dependent on the more experience-based domain of space that when people make an air journey or wait in a lunch line, they also unwittingly (and dramatically) change their thinking about time. Further, our results suggest that it is not sensorimotor spatial experience per se that influences people’s thinking about time, but rather people’s representations of and thinking about their spatial experience.

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[iii]Abstract knowledge can be built analogically from more experience-based knowledge…. People’s understanding of the abstract domain of time, for example, is so intimately dependent on the more experience-based domain of space that when people make an air journey or wait in a lunch line, they also unwittingly (and dramatically) change their thinking about time. Further, our results suggest that it is not sensorimotor spatial experience per se that influences people’s thinking about time, but rather people’s representations of and thinking about their spatial experience.” (Boroditsky & Ramscar 2002)The Roles of Body and Mind in Abstract Thought. Lera Boroditsky,Michael Ramscar (2002) The Roles of Body and Mind in Abstract Thought. LeraBoroditsky,MichaelRamscar (2016) Psychological ScienceVol 13, Issue 2, pp. 185 – 189. First published date: May-06-2016 10.1111/1467-9280.00434. First PublishedMarch 1, 2002.