The Stupidity of Rationalism

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Administrator

Last weeks edition of ‘In Our Time’ (BBC Radio 4) discussed game theory and gave a telling account of a scenario called The Prisoners Dilemma. Imagine that Jo and Jack have been arrested for a crime. The police know they’re guilty but can’t prove it, so they split them up and make each of them an offer: “If you admit guilt and incriminate the other person, you’ll get 6 months jail and they’ll get 12 months”.

According to game theory, the most rational decision for either prisoner is to confess and incriminate their partner in crime. If either Jack or Jo say nothing, they risk getting 12 months, but the first to confesses gets a reduced sentence. There’s an acknowledged paradox here, because if they both stay quiet neither of them will go to jail. But, according to the rationally that underpins game theory, they won’t do that.

A game of Scissors, Paper, Stone.

Scissors, Paper, Stone. (Image from BBC website)

The Prisoners Dilemma illustrates what I’m provocatively choosing to call the stupidity of Rationalism. Traditional Western philosophy – the philosophy of Rationalism - splits reason from emotion, just as it splits nature from culture and mind from body.

From an embodied standpoint, that’s really stupid. Most posts in this blog could serve as an illustration of why, but for now consider just a sliver of the evidence from neuroscience.

Damasio’s research demonstrates that reason cannot be split off from emotion; in fact emotion is integral to cognition (Damasio, 1994). Furthermore, Lakoff and Johnson claim that “What our bodies are like and how they function in the world … structure the very concepts we can use to think” (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). As Johnson explains, reason itself is embodied: The way we conceptualize and reason depends on “the kinds of bodies we have, the kinds of environments we inhabit, and the symbolic systems we inherit, which are themselves grounded in our embodiment” (Johnson, 1987).

According to games theory, both Jack and Jo will get at least 6 months behind bars. According to embodiment theory, Jack and Jo might just be smart enough to get away with their crime. That conclusion may not be moral satisfying, but it isn’t stupid either.

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Floating

Posted on March 31, 2012 by Administrator

I’ve been exploring how bodymind and place are woven together, but what happens when there is no place for the bodymind to be in?

The floatation tank was originally developed by John Lilly, who was - amongst other things – a psychoanalyst and philosopher. It’s basically a sound and light-tight tank of salt water at body temperature. The water is so salty it’s impossible to sink, so you float. In this weightless, silent and dark space there’s virtually no sensory input; you’re effectively in no place. The effects can be remarkable! At the very least it’s deeply relaxing, but using a tank can enhance creativity, sharpen sensory awareness and help with personal growth.

Michael Hutchison’s “Book of Floating: Exploring the Private Sea” provides numerous suggestions for how the tank works, including harmonising brain wave patterns and stimulating the production of endorphins. Clearly it’s a combination of many factors, all of which emphasise how integrated our bodymind system is.

There are some key aspects of floating that Hutchison doesn’t discuss. In the tank the bodymind goes completely off-line – something I touched on last year in the context of eating toast. More importantly, floating encourages our awareness to slide down what I call the cognitive iceberg into the ‘deep body’ – a potential source of profound wisdom.

There’s a classic comment from Rich Doyle in the video below. He doesn’t really appreciate his first tank session. He was “pretty sceptical” and the tank doesn’t seem to do whatever he expected it to. When he goes swimming the next day he gets it: “I realised that I had been thinking about the tank as a mental thing whereas in fact it’s a bodymind thing”.

I’ve been using a floatation tank for years and I’ve barely skimmed its potential. Try it: it usually takes a few sessions to settle in, but I’d bet  your first float will be the most relaxing hour you’ve ever had.

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Sun and ice: The power of weather

Posted on March 19, 2012 by Administrator

The Spring weather is as mad as a March Hare! We’ve had summery sun one day and winter chill the next, so this changeable season is ideal for sensing how the weather influences our sense of self.

I was walking to the station during an icy phase and became aware of an uncomfortably resigned mood. I’d had a long day at work and it felt like my projects were all on hold; it was a time to sit tight and wait for things to change. Then I noticed that I was walking with hunched shoulders and a slightly bowed head, using small careful steps across the icy pavement.

Our language makes it hard to discuss my experience; I want to resist talking about how ‘my body’ was or suggest that the cold icy weather ‘made me’ feel that way.  Yet how I held myself and how I moved – so careful on the slippery ice! –  in short, my embodiment, emerged in response to the conditions of time and place. Body, mind and place were woven into one, as they almost always are.

Glacier and sky. Copyright Adrian Harris

It’s taken science a while to explore the subject, but what research there is confirms what most of us experience – weather affects our moods (Keller et al., 2004).

D.H. Lawrence takes us much further in his evocative short story, Sun. He describes the transformation of Juliet, a mother trapped in a stagnant marriage with no capacity “to feel anything real”. Her doctor recommends a stay in the sun, so she leaves for Sicily. She sunbathes naked everyday, opening to the power of the sun.

By some mysterious power inside her, deeper than her known consciousness and will, she was put into connection with the sun, and the stream flowed of itself, from her womb. She herself, her conscious self, was secondary, a secondary person, almost an onlooker. The true Juliet was this dark flow from the her deep body to the sun.

Juliet’s sunbathing is as far from my icy walk as Sicily is from London, but the theme remains; we both experienced the power of place.

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Performance and the spirit of place

Posted on February 27, 2012 by Administrator

I was delighted to be invited as a respondent for a performance by Fabrizio Manco, an artist who works with sound, place and embodiment. My response focused on the power of the genius loci - the spirit of place – which seems to me to be a key strand of his work.

Fabrizio presented his video How to Explain a Field to a Dead Magpie (?) as part of the performance. In this haunting piece the camera moves across a lonely field in rural Italy where magpies hang on trees as ‘scaremagpies’.

A dead magpie hanging from a tree

How to Explain a Field to a Dead Magpie (?). (Photo: Fausta Muci)

Magpies are often considered birds of ill-omen and the species is plagued by superstition. Ironically, although the farmer was trying to exorcise the magpie spirit, the dead magpies now haunt the field.

At one moment it seemed that the magpie spirit haunted the room we were in too: Fabrizio, wearing a magpie mask, danced slowly across the wooden floor as the video played, and then the sound of a bird screeching echoed around the room. It was not the soundtrack, but the artists shoes squealing on the parquet floor. How appropriate for an artist who references  John Cage’s aleatory music of chance!

Questions remain about what is chance and what is synchronicity – Jung’s “acausal connecting principle”. Classical Western thought is founded on notions of causality grounded in the strict division of ‘subject’ and ‘object’, but an animist viewpoint blurs such distinctions. An animist might well hear the squealing shoes as an echo of the magpie’s cry, especially as it came from a figure wearing a magpie mask.

Animism has long been considered as a primitive notion we can ignore, but it can take us beyond subject/object duality. Merleau-Ponty, for example, refers to “that primordial being which is not yet the subject-being nor the object-being” (1970). Perhaps the genius loci is neither subject nor object, but emerges from the way we are enmeshed in place. As David Abram explains, the human body is “a sort of open circuit that completes itself only in things, in others, in the encompassing earth” (Abram, 1996). Fabrizio explains that in his work place “is posited as process, a simultaneous unfolding before and within us”. He seeks to explore “[h]ow is it possible to co/in-habit through the aural with an environment”. Such explorations can lead us into an animist reality where spirits of place can be heard in a slip of the foot.

 

 

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Connection

Posted on February 12, 2012 by Administrator

I was at the launch of a new ecopsychology anthology last week. Nick Totton, one of the editors, commented that one common theme sang through all the very different chapters; connection.

Book cover of 'Vital Signs: Psychological Responses to Ecological Crisis'

Vital Signs: Psychological Responses to Ecological Crisis

Many of my blogs have explored the interconnectedness of things, and it’s clear to me that our currently crisis stems from our cultural forgetting of that fundamental truth. The main task for ecopsychology – as illustrated by Nick’s comment – is to reveal connection.

But becoming aware of our relatedness to the world really isn’t hard. Participants on our recent Nature Connection Workshop Walk commented how the sensory exercises revealed just how connected they were to the world around them. The sense of separateness that characterises much of our everyday awareness shifts to a realisation that we are “corporeally embedded” in a “living landscape” (Abram, 1996). Cognitive neuroscience is beginning to understand how  “organism and environment enfold into each other” (Varela et al., 1991) and I’ve discussed the dance between research and experience in The power of place: Protest site pagans (Harris, 2011).

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A new sense of place

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Administrator

I’m just home from facilitating a series of Nature Connection workshops for staff and students from the University of the Arts London. The weather was pretty good –  cold but bright.

Imperial War Museum Park

Imperial War Museum Park - Photo: Antony Johnston

Each workshop was only an hour long, yet by the end participants had come to a quite different sense of the green spaces we were in. I was struck by this; how much people’s sense of place changed in such a short space of time! This change is even more remarkable given that most participants were already familiar with the location we were in: the place was old and yet became new.

The magic comes from simple but powerful sensory awareness exercises that can reveal how Nature’s power thrives in the midst of London’s streets.

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Janus January: Looking back and forward

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Administrator

January is a good time to look to the past and the future, so, like the Roman god Janus, I’m casting a look over some images from 2011 and giving a glimpse of 21012.

Looking through leaves at workshop beyond

A Nature Connection workshop

Our Nature Connection workshops went well in 2012 and we’ll be contining to play on the Hawkwood site in 2013.

We were inspired by the glorious countryside near London to start running seasonal Nature Connection walks. The first one took place on a beautiful Autumn day.

People walking on a path through trees

Our Autumn Nature walk

On 4th February we’ll be off on a Winter Walk. The weather is looking distinctly Spring-like at the moment, so we may not have the frost that made our preparation visit sparkle, but who knows? More walks follow for Spring, Summer and Autumn, each one themed to highlight the special qualities of each season.

Close-up of natural objects

Gifts from the Autumn walk

All photographs on this page by Adeline O’Keeffe.
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Time and place: Seasonal thoughts

Posted on December 25, 2011 by Administrator

Christmas is an odd time of year for me. The reasons are various but it’s largely to do with its proximity to the Winter Solstice. Christmas Day is a few days after what for me is the main event and so inevitably feels like an anticlimax.

I’ve celebrated the Winter Solstice every year for several decades, and it’s a special time for me. The celebration of the Solstice is perhaps as ancient as human consciousness. This is the moment when the year turns. Days had been getting shorter since Mid-Summer, bringing increasing darkness and cold. But from the 22nd the days slowly began to lengthen. This is a profound change because the returning light will feed new life and by early February we can sense the promise of the coming Spring.

The half Moon seen through bare trees.

Perhaps we Pagans like palpable, sensual symbols. The lengthening of the days becomes quickly and undeniably apparent: No act of faith is required to recognise that the Sun has been ‘reborn’. But at a deeper level this return of the light can touch our embodied awareness.

By consciously marking the seasonal cycles I become more sensitive to place and time. This is more than the commonplace recognition of Winter’s cold and dark turning to Summer’s sun; it is an intentional attunement of my awareness to place and time. The long term result can be a richer sense of being at home in the world; an embodied engagement with the natural cycles that ultimately govern our lives.

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Occupy the bodymind place

Posted on December 13, 2011 by Administrator

The Occupy London movement have taken over empty offices owned by the banking group UBS. The space – now called The Bank of Ideas - hosts workshops on everything from mindfulness meditation to alternative economics.

Empty office room

Inside the Bank - © Jon Day

I joined a workshop on embodied stress management here on Saturday and was struck by how a space like this can be quickly transformed. Once there would have been clean white walls, ordered desks and computers. Now walls bright with inspiring graffiti frame fluid movement. A space previously filled with the efficient hum of business now echoes with the sound of drums and laughter.

Such transformations are simple enough. Anyone who has attended a training session arranged in a circle rather than rows of chairs can tell you that how we order space is crucial. Sitting in rows at a training session emphasises the a hierarchy of trainer/trainees and creates a strata with the ‘keen’ people at the front. Because we can all see each other when we sit in a circle, there’s more of a sense of community and less focus on stratified hierarchy. The trainer may still see themselves as leading the group, but the way our bodies are placed in the space works against that.

My experiences of the spaces within The Bank of Ideas exemplify the principle that much of our thinking is not only embodied but also situated. I’m not holding out for banks to start putting desks in circles rather than rows, but trainers at least are increasingly aware of the power of space.

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The power of place: Protest site pagans

Posted on November 30, 2011 by Administrator

Research has established that spending time in the wilderness can have profound effects on people. This “wilderness effect” (Greenway, 1995) usually occurs in truly wild places like the Grand Canyon, but my research shows that it can work it’s magic in more urban environments.

Comfy chair in a field

Home comforts

I describe this process in my article on ‘The power of place: Protest site pagans’, which has just been published in the European Journal of Ecopsychology. The article expands on several themes I’ve explored here, notably Eco-Paganism, the spirit of place and the cognitive iceberg. It’s based on my research with protest camps activists and describes how spending extended periods of time in nature can catalyse profound personal change.

The article also explains the model of embodied situated cognition that I’ve described as ‘the cognitive iceberg’ in several posts. In the last section I use the cognitive iceberg model to provide a partial explanation for how the wilderness effect works. I think it works really well as a companion piece to my chapter in The Wanton Green, which is now available.

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