With respect to ontology, let us say that there is no “it,” no independent reality that is exclusive of the observer. This is a basic insight from second-order cybernetics: the observer must always be included in the observed. Despite this, of course, we do have much talk and thinking about “it” that does not take the observer into account—we are very interested in the “what” of the universe, but have a fairly difficult time illuminating our own nature. But this is okay, because ultimately the talk about “it,” the pointing to “it,” (not the thought of the “it” itself) is more fundamental to “it” than anything else, because it is the relations that are primary. We can say that thingness is a subset of relatedness. Following Eugene Gendlin’s (1997, p. 22) process-concept of “interaction-first,” we can conceive of relations not as forming between two already-existing “things,” but rather as being recursively self-generated between other relations. In this sense, things are the precipitate of relations, a hardening out of a more fluid state.
Going further than Gendlin, we can take a cue from the process-language of alchemy (Miller, 2008) to see how relations themselves are a precipitate of the tension between complementarily opposing potentials, made by a distinction out of the whole. This corresponds to the recursive ontological alchemical sequencing of the elements from Fire (the whole) to Air (polarity) to Water (relation) to Earth (thing), to Fire (a new, transformed whole). Relations are to opposing potentials of a distinction as things are to relations. Opposing potentials are themselves a precipitate of the whole by virtue of distinction (of Fire by Fire), and work alongside each other within the whole simultaneously. Each step from the whole is a kind of step-down transformation; ontologically we could say that beginning with level N, we move to level N-1. Each level is pulled out of simultaneity by an act of distinction within the whole, of the whole, by the whole. A cascading of levels of distinction thus yields the ontology of “things.” (more…)
Okay, I had to post this, as I found it to be … weirdly fascinating. Google has a tool that allows you to search for terms and see how they have trended over time based on global search volume. The service is called Google Trends, check it out.
Here is the result for the term “epistemology”:
Apparently interest for the term “epistemology” follows a strong yearly cycle, with two maximum values in October and Feb/March and one strong minimum in July. Interestingly, the same basic pattern applies to the closely related term “ontology” (“close” if you are in philosophy, that is):
Gregory Bateson (1991) famously said that we “cannot claim to have no epistemology. Those who so claim have nothing but a bad epistemology” (p. 178). Bateson is calling for self-reflection in our epistemology. He wants it to be recursive, so that in our production of knowledge we do not delude ourselves into thinking that the means of production is independent of what is produced. Bradford Keeney, cybernetic epistemologist, family therapist, modern day New Orleans-style shaman, and student of Gregory Bateson, notes that recursive epistemology has roots in second-order cybernetics and the recognition (1983) that “any distinction drawn is drawn by an observer. … An observer observes by drawing distinctions. … The starting point of epistemology is therefore an observer drawing distinctions in order to observe” (p. 24). This leads us to a fundamental recursion or non-linearity at the very start of any epistemological endeavor. While non-recursive epistemologies try to mitigate this kind of loopiness, cybernetic epistemology embraces it as the very heart of knowing, using it as a creative generator of change and transformation. Working with a non-lineal epistemology leads to a different kind of knowing, one which “emphasizes ecology, relationship, and whole systems. In contrast to lineal epistemology, it is attuned to interrelation, complexity, and context” (Keeney, 1983, p. 107).
The consequences of lacking a self-reflexive epistemology are dire, leading to real practical and ethical dilemmas. The structure of the sequence often goes something like this:
Knowledge is produced on the basis of a non-reflexive epistemology (Bateson’s “bad” epistemology). Ex: You performed an act found to be illegal.
The knowledge produced is thus assumed to be “objective” and “true” (i.e. independent of the means of its production; ignorant of its genesis). Ex: It doesn’t really matter why you did what you did, you are beholden to the law as written.
This tends to have a psychologically limiting effect with respect to alternative knowledge and especially alternative modes of knowledge production. One’s viewpoint becomes ossified. Ex: The judicial system limits its treatment of you as a whole human being only to what is allowable within the strictures that the law defines. You become identified with your act.
The unreflective assumption of the “truth” of the knowledge becomes justification for its projection, often forcefully, onto other people and processes in the environments surrounding the knower. A sense of conviction that the world is “like this” leads to inflexible protocols in our institutions and in our modes of interaction with others. In other words, outer processes are also ossified; they become sclerotic. Ex: Now, instead of being a whole human being who with a completely full and complex life that included the illegal act, your identity shifts to that of a criminal. Your identity shifts, and you are now identified with the label “criminal,” and the judicial system creates places called prisons designed largely to maintain this distinction of your new identity.
The unintended effects of this kind of lineal process knowledge production could fill multiple volumes, from the most subtle aspects of daily life to world-historical events. But recursive epistemology is not in opposition to lineal epistemology; it is rather meant to be a way of maintaining complexity and subtlety (and ideally, wisdom) by calibrating the linearity of standard epistemological practices through higher-order recursion.
Calibration and Self-Calibration.
But what does it mean to have a self-reflexive epistemology? The difference between the two types of epistemologies, non-self-relfexive and self-reflexive, can be described by the first and second order difference. A non-self-reflexive epistemology is a first-order epistemology, a process of creating knowledge that operates in a linear fashion. The knowledge it generates is not explicitly connected to the process of its generation, and thus does not act as a potential corrective to its mode of production. Epistemology is a tool for knowing; but with a non-self-reflexive epistemology, the tool’s operation does not change the tool, so that no matter what job it is called to do, it re-instances any new creations in the manner and style of its past processes—regardless of what might be new in the situation it encounters. The kind of newness that comes from a linear epistemology is (more…)
– There is no “it”, but there is talk about “it”. Ultimately the talk about “it”, the pointing to “it”, is more fundamental to “it” than anything else, because it is the RELATIONS that are primary: thingness is a subset of relatedness. Relations are not between two “things” but are recursively self-generated between other relations – things fall out of relations (things = Earth, relations = Water). Relations themselves are a precipitate of tension between complementarily opposing potentials (Air). Relations are to opposing potentials as things are to relations. Opposing potentials are themselves a precipitate of the whole, and work alongside each other within the whole simultaneously. Each step from the whole is a step-down transformation, we could say that beginning with level N, we move to level N-1. Each level is pulled out of simultaneity by an act of distinction within the whole, of the whole, by the whole. A cascading of levels of distinction yields the ontology of “things”, and simultaneously an epistemology of “knowing” activity, which together yield the whole of cosmology.
– This can be approached in another way. We can begin first with a problem of the modern condition, made apparent most strongly by both postmodernism and deconstructionism. The problem is that language is (more…)
One thing that struck me as interesting was that feedback, as a concept, seems to assume two things (and probably more): 1) step-wise time (and thus some kind of “state” in which a system can be identified, and thus 2) some kind of ‘levels’ within and between systems, in part based on their “state”.
So feedback, at least in the way that I’ve been thinking about it up to now, is this idea that state A of a system precipitates state B in some way, but that state B has non-trivial links ‘back’ to processes that help create state A. But of course because we are talking about the evolution of systems, this idea of ‘back’ may be better understood inversely, as ‘forward’, in the sense that there is a real distinction between state A, state B(sub-A), which is the state of system B-as-influenced-by-A, and then state A(sub-B,sub-A) the state of A-influenced-by-B-which-is-already-influenced-by-A…. And this goes on, so we have something more like a system-of-relations (S) at various points, which are distinguished by virtue of the feedback relations between its states A and B.
Here’s an attempt at a table explicating the pattern of what we mean by “feedback”:
S1 A
S2 B(A)
S3 A(B(A))
S4 B(A(B(A)))
S5 A(B(A(B(A))))
You can see the pattern unfolding infinitely — the thing is that when we think about it in this way, the pattern that is unfolding is one that does so on the basis of these ‘moments’ (S1, S2, …). But these moments are always arbitrary; there doesn’t seem to be any ontological significance to them outside of the context of their actual identification by someone thinking about cybernetics. Our knowledge of the system becomes apropos when we question it, when a need for knowledge arises… and not otherwise.
If this is true, it’s kind of misleading to have the idea of “a system” that exists “in a state” and that this state influences some other system’s state, and so forth. It’s too reductive… and it seems to fall prey to Whitehead’s fallacy of misplaced concreteness. (Others familiar with quantum physics, and specifically the Einstein-Bohr debates may see some parallels with this line of thinking.)
When thinking about TIME and evolving systems, we run into some serious complexities, because different information flows through a given portion of a system at different rates depending upon the nature of that part of the system and the nature of the information being carried. Heat flows at one speed through a specific material, at another speed through another material. Information carried by light moves still differently, as does linguistic meaning, different types of sensation, etc. etc. etc.. Just about every ‘channel’ of information has its own unique set of variables in this regard, so there is no way to divvy up a given system into “state A” or “state B” with complete certainty, because at any arbitrary snapshot point, an important bit of information from one part of the system might be ‘on its way’ but not yet resulting in any modification elsewhere in the system in a significant way — in other words feedback has an analog character. We can create digital systems in which feedback appears to operate step-wise, but this is always an oversimplification… (perhaps not if we get to the quantum level, but even then I have a suspicion that something, perhaps not either analog or digital, has a role to play in what is now left out of the loop entirely, i.e. is attributed to ‘randomness’). In any case any macroscopic digital process always (?) includes analog processes (on higher and lower levels). The point is that it is misleading to speak of “states” at all.
So what? Well, our very ability to speak about feedback seems to presuppose a conceptual reliance upon “states”. Hmmmmm. What if we got rid of “states” and started to look more at the processes? What if we slipped out of the subtle reification of “statehood” and into the flowing of flows? The processes of processes? It seems then impossible to consider anything but the whole; everything is a whole, evolves-as-whole, is-always-whole-ing, and never ‘just is’.
For example in an old-style mercury thermostat, the state changes from “on” to “off” to “on” again. The way it does this is through a process of feedback between the temperature of the room and the curvature of a bi-metallic strip. When the temperature is too cold (given a specific calibration point to begin with), the bimetallic strip curves in on itself, causing mercury (a conductive liquid)to fall to one side of its containing vial, where it closes an electrical circuit, making the heater go on. When the temperature is warm enough, the bi-metallic strip expands and causes the vial to tilt the other way, so that the mercury ends up in the other side of the vial, breaking the circuit and causing the heater to go off. Wash, rinse, repeat, over and over.
This is the ‘classic’ case of a feedback system. The system of the room+thermostat includes a feedback “mechanism” by which information ABOUT the “state” of the system is influential in determining the BEHAVIOR of the system. But there is something arbitrary about thinking of the system as composed of a room and a thermostat. We could divide things up into any number of different configurations, which would give slightly different perspectives on the whole. For example we can distinguish the temperature of different volumes of air, the internal components of the thermostat, the volume of air in the heating ducts and their placement, etc. “The thermostat” and “the room” are just cognitive shortcuts for more complex interrelations that, on the one hand, can be usefully summed up by such shortcuts, but which on the other hand deflects awareness from the process by which the making of the distinctions occurs, and its interactive, contingent, on-going nature. This is a general issue that crops up around epistemology.
Exploring a bit further, it would then seem that if we take such an idea to heart, it becomes much more difficult to speak of “levels” that are clear and distinct (to borrow a pithy and dangerous phrase from Descartes)–for the basis for any such distinction is some clarity about difference, and the basis for clarity is the distinction of difference. Alchemically, this is like the operation of precipitation, where a flowing, dissolving, ever-changing substance becomes punctuated by moments of particularly which separate themselves off from the activity of being-in-process with the rest of the solution. Identity becomes not only possible but fitting: here we have the formation of a crystal. It is here, it is this size, it is moving like this, it is not any of these other equally separate and identifiable crystals. (In terms of the alchemical language of process, this is the Earth element at work.)
In other words, the concept of feedback works well by virtue of its implicit reliance upon the tendency to make distinctions in complex wholes: this “part” of a system and that “part” of a system, this “state” at one time and some other “state” at another. Such distinctions may represent an a-ontological punctuation of difference within a field of activity that admits–without the activity of the distinguisher–of no such intrinsic difference. That is to say, distinctions have a certain amount of… freedom to them. Our distinguishing of one state or part of a system may not be rooted in some kind of ontologically independent “reality” which can, on its own hold up the validity of that distinction. Such validity always requires the situated contextuality of the distinguisher. (In terms of the alchemical language of process, this is the element of Water at work).
One can think of the thermostat/room system as a homeostatic one, which brings the room temperature towards some specific target through negative feedback. But this ‘stasis’ is somewhat illusory; it is accomplished by continual change. No matter how the system is constructed, it is change that creates the stasis. So it’s more accurate to think of the thermostat/room system as evolving around a cyclic attractor, where the temperature regularly fluctuates above and below a certain average (the ‘target’ temperature). It is also the stasis that creates change; the curling and uncurling of the bimetallic strip can only occur if the ambient temperature has some aspect that is constant (in this case, that the temperature STAYS above or below the target value–you’ll notice that this is a case of higher-order constancy, a constancy that is possible on the basis of change that maintains a difference).
So we sometimes make a distinction about levels: on a ‘higher’ level the system is essentially constant, while on a ‘lower’ level it is continually in flux. But again these are cognitive shortcuts for interweaving processes which do not admit of such self-distinction. The ‘levels’ are identified BY us FOR us. Just as the identification of ‘states’ is contextually contingent and not necessarily ontological, so it is with the identification of ‘levels’.
This is not to say that our distinctions are completely unguided or arbitrary–because we can’t overlook the fact that we ourselves are involved in any system by virtue of our interaction with it. Even if we are ‘just looking’ at a system, we cannot but help look with eyes that see only particularities that evolve with our ability to distinguish them. Even our seeing is cybernetic, involved in recursive looping between the ‘out there’ and the ‘in here’. The seeing is not either ‘objective’ or ‘subjective’, but partakes of both aspects, being guided by outer processes and inner processes simultaneously, and which affects the ‘seeing system’ in multiple ways, some of which may be inconsequential, and some of which may make all the difference in the world.
It’s quite a dilemma – not being able to directly check much of what we are exposed to and presented as ‘knowledge’. Unless we begin to discover our own ways of knowing (a very difficult proposition, but I think possible), then we likely remain wanderers in the fog of our own (and other’s) unconsciousness.
Of course, at least in any near future, it doesn’t seem like subconscious situational effects can be avoided – nor do I think they should be. Much of what we enjoy as part of our everyday capacities for thinking, feeling, and willing are rooted deeply and complexly in unconscious processes. Indeed, what is normally conscious for us is perhaps one of the tiniest slices out of what can be potentially conscious, and perhaps the potentially conscious is just the tiniest slice out of the full depth and breadth of the universe as a whole – or not (because, in accord with what I just said, this is an impossible determination, requiring consciousness to take place).
In any case, pretty much EVERY modern study that follows the basic scientific practices is a study in obfuscation, requiring for its potential success a decided ignorance of as many ‘attenuating’, ‘circumstantial’, ‘probabilistic’, or ‘random’ factors as possible. The more willfully ignorant a study becomes, the more exact are its pronouncements, and the more its knowledge is sequestered from the whole. This is why all studies require additional work to be re-connected to the complex actualities of the world, necessitating interpretation, reframing, and recontextualization.
This suggests a different way of performing ‘studies’, discovered long ago by Goethe and others, in which the situatedness, the contingency, the circumstantial, are all necessarily included aspects of any attempt to work with and understand a phenomenon.
There are some things about creativity that have been on my mind. I have been trying to hone in on the qualitative experience of the creative moment… what does it feel like to be creative? What kinds of qualities distinguish the feeling of being creative from other types of feelings, like the feeling of ‘producing’, ‘innovating’, and so forth? What makes a creative moment creative?
It seems to me that in the experience of the creative moment, there is always a place where knowing runs out… where consciousness finds itself in a state of openness, as if surrounded by space. In particular this feeling seems to be accompanied by the sense that the normal boundaries of the ego are loosened, expanded/expended, but not yet replaced or filled with anything. This is specifically true with respect to the actual genesis of the creative activity, while during the activity this sense can be replaced with a feeling which Mihály Csíkszentmihályi called ‘flow’.
In every case that I can think of (for myself, that is), creative moments are states of being characterizable by a sense of potential, of a sort of future-coming-into-the-present — but notably always without knowledge or specific anticipation. It is a very hard state to even think about because it seems that thinking itself — at least in the normal, ego-centered thinking of much of daily life — is suspended, as if in the air. And even in thinking ‘about’ the creative moment, there is almost a lacuna of consciousness around the creative moment itself, as if consciousness met a border that it could not cross with its normal configuration… so I have the feeling that it is as if some part of consciousness travels ‘underground’ or perhaps ‘above’, into the ‘sense of awaiting’ that permeates the surrounding ‘space’.
You can see that the normal tendencies of speech have a hard time when applied to a moment which seems to transcend encapsulation. One usage of languge serves to delineate, define, demarcate, depict, circumscribe, form, or otherwise pinpoint (alchemically this would be representative of the Earth element). My initial questions are, in a sense, Earth questions, with language leading towards and assuming this Earthy aspect. Yet by its very nature the object of the inquiry is perhaps unable to be Earthed – so I find a contradiction even in the asking of the question. Thus a paradox: if it were possible to actually describe in words the qualitative essence of a creative moment, the creative moment itself would necessarily remain undescribed, even de-described.
Therefore some questions:
Is language as evocative rather than descriptive enough of a tool to allow thinking about creativity to proceed?
Do all creative moments share some specific qualities, perhaps at a meta or meta-meta-level? Or is it impossible for creative moments to be bound at all by any possibile prescription?
With respect to the individual experiencing a creative moment, what kinds of processes occur qua the experienced sense of self/other? That is, what happens to the sense of self in such a moment?
Related: Are creative moments ever something that can be ‘mine’ in the same way that I can speak about (a perhaps naive) experience of ‘my’ pain, ‘my’ thoughts, and so forth?
Also related: To what extent do ‘others’ play a role in creative moments that ‘I’ experience?
Lastly: If we were seers, able to perceive the activities of the spiritual worlds, how would we describe what is experienced by a single human being in a creative moment?
