We Are What We Perceive

(This essay was written 20 years ago and forms the basis of everything I’ve thought and done since.  For this reason I put it out there from time to time.)

What we perceive can be viewed as the raw material for our information processing machinery.  It is the stuff from which we build an image of the world around us and which supplies us with the moment by moment adjustments needed to stay in touch with what is "real".  In the modern world we need to gain control over sensory input; what is out there is so varied and cacophonous that it no longer supplies reliable adaptive order.  Since perception can be considered the ingestion of the mind, the evolution of a creature's relationship with nutrients and their relationship with perceptual habits may well have common elements.

In fact, food is an almost perfect analogy.  In the development of humans and for every animal it was necessary to consume what was available, thus the "balanced diet" came to be the nutrients that were possible.  If "essential" amino acids and vitamins were not easy to come by in a normal diet they would not be essential, i.e., organisms lost the ability to make the “essential” nutrients because they were so abundant in the diet.  Organisms ate what was available for the work they were willing to do to get food.  All one need do is live off the land for a few days to realize that plants are the stuff of life.  Birds hide their eggs (when there are eggs), animals run away and hide; the meat part of meat and potatoes is very energy and time consuming to come by.  Not every plant can be eaten, but quite a number can. They are there; they don't run away.  They have to be collected and processed; that's all.  They contain, when eaten in sufficient amounts, all the nutrients for a healthy life.

And today?  All manner of foodstuff is available, thousands of apparent choices rather than one or ten.  And what is more (and very odd) these choices are competing to be chosen, so they must be made desirable to the taste.  Food did not compete evolutionarily to be picked or dug up to be eaten.  Plants may have competed to be planted, moved around or pollinated and may have used supplying some sustenance as a way to attract interest, but to be chosen to be eaten was not the point.

But today's food must be desirable, that means it must contain what served us well to have the greatest drive for, what in the wild is rare and difficult to come by; lots of calories, especially in the form of fat.  The only way to overcome this twist of the human taste is to be very selective and to make an active effort to eat, take into the body, a "balanced diet", the way we would naturally just by getting enough to eat if we ate off the land as hominids did for 99.5% of their existence.

The most severe deviations from a "balanced diet" result in death.  Less severe deviations lead to ill health of various kinds--deficiency diseases.  And still less severe deviations result in that plethora of complaints of modern life, obesity, heart trouble, cancers and various behavioral distortions.  Not that we would not have complaints if we all ate better, but they would not be the same ones.

What does this have to do with perceptional input? Everything! Everything that has been said about nutrients is true of perception.  We evolved to input all the information that we could get from the environment.  Input that was consistent in a geological/ecological time-frame, we came to depend on as essential inputs for establishing mental order--day/night, cycles of the moon, seasons, gravity, the least harmful parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.  These were built right into our bodies. 

Just as with food what we call essential is what was a given.  Other parts of the world that changed only very slowly we used to guide us.  We knew our world with mental maps that could be relied on.  We took mental order from the order of nature.  What we needed to know was there to be learned and once learned could be used and refined and used some more.  We listened for every sound, we watched for every visual change, we felt the air, we sought for every smell, we used every nuance of taste and we paid sustaining attention to that thing that has been called the sixth sense--the bringing together of all the evidence of senses and experience for some total impression which is truly more than the sum of its parts--a basis for action that could not reliably come from one sense alone, a kind of personal representative democracy bringing together all the evidence for a real time state of awareness.

As with specific nutritional insufficiency, a person might feel the need for some special form of information in the same way that he or she might be "hungry" for a particular root or berry.  This felt need could arise from the intuition recognizing the insufficiency of the available data to create a balanced sense of conclusion or closure needed to create the conditions for action.   To satisfy such a need the person would seek through perceptual input with greater attention or become very quiet and meditative or go beyond the usual to let the mixing and remixing of perception and experience take as many forms as possible (called in Native American tradition a vision quest).

 

The key always was attention, a quiet practiced attention that placed everything without judgment on the table.  Just as with food, what mattered was what was there.  If a creature tried to eat what was not there, it starved.  If a creature tried to act on what was not there to perceive, it often died from its inappropriate behavior.  For most animals it was an article of biological faith that sufficient amounts of substances that they could not manufacture (e.g., essential amino acid) would always be available in a diet that had enough calories to stay alive, so it was not necessary to retain the physical equipment to make that substance.  For humans it became a matter of biological faith that close attention to the world would supply information and the order needed to use that information so it was not necessary to retain the stricter forms of genetic control of behavior.

* * *

Just as sailors die on a diet of salt pork and crackers, so we die as human beings on a perceptual diet of consumption, violence and sexual titillation.  For me this observation leads to two questions.  First, what is meant by 'die as human beings' if a person is not dead in body?  And second, what is a balanced perceptual diet?

Not to be alive as a member of a species and yet to be biologically alive is an important distinction which when not understood can lead to sad treatment of ourselves and other species.  It is a little like the question of life and death of a brain-dead person: a person whose body can be offered an environment in which it will continue to perform biological activities very like those of the person before they became brain-dead.   The wish for the person to be fully alive and interactive is not enough to make it be and the resemblance of the person to their prebrain-dead self is an illusion.  Something is alive, but it is not the person who was.  It is not Jim or Maggy or Jose or Liz if those names are to be attached to smiles and ideas and habits and mischiefs.  The living thing is a bunch of cells that still has the shape of Jim or Maggy or Jose or Liz.  And those cells can still metabolize so long as someone feeds them and cleans them and delivers them oxygen; they are like the cells in a tissue culture, like the cells growing on agar.

      

Think for a moment about how you would define a hawk or a salmon or a bobcat.  They can be described by their appearance and they can be described by their behaviors.  A hawk has a hawk's body in a cage or when riding a thermal that it has sensed out of the unseeable air.  But the hawk is much more than its body, it is the whole collection of behaviors and skills that 100 million years of raptoring has led to.  A salmon in a farm pond is a pound of fish, but it is not the powerful instincts and equally powerful sensing tools of the fish returning to a spawning stream.  A bobcat's body in a zoo smells disorder, hears cacophony and goes insane, leaping in mad repetitive circles; behaviors unlike any bobcat's body would perform in the forest of its ancestry.  I would say, in the cage, in the farm pond or in the zoo, that these animals' behavioral part is ill or dead.  The behaviors that their bodies are built to support cannot happen and so only a piece of the animal is there.

What is true for the hawk, the salmon and the bobcat is true for humans, we are cut from the same living cloth.  This is not hocus-pocus.  A body is there for the purpose of getting the behaviors done.  Without the behaviors there is only the body like the body of the poor brain-dead person kept alive by a special environment of food tubes and respirators.

* * *

The second question; what is a balanced perceptual diet, can be seen now to have additional parts.  What are the defining ancestral ways of humans?   What is the nature of perception in human ancestral behavior?  What is a balanced perceptual diet and how can it help to restore our defining ancestral behaviors so that we might be more fully alive as human beings.   And, is it possible in the "modern" world to be a human being in the sense used here; alive in body, ancestral ways and in the spirit of our origins?

We are, each and everyone, human and contain within us the sustaining biological and genetically conferred behavioral wisdom of our species.  What humans seem to do more than any other species is to incorporate consistent perceptual input into ordering systems through which their biological natures manifest.  In other words, the expression, "What you see is what you get," turns out to be the highest wisdom.

When our distant prehuman ancestors evolved away from instinctual hard wired control of behavior toward a way of doing business that let the world around them supply much of the information that gave flesh to bare bone propensities and drives, they took a fateful step.  To anthropomorphize outrageously, they said, "Environment, we know you are greatly varied, and we know you change slowly over time.  We are giving ourselves over to you in the trust that you will remain consistent over at least a few of our generations.  We will change as you change, directly without having to go through the intermediary of the evolution of behavior".  

It was a deal well struck, and worked wonderfully for prehumans and humans for millions of years.  Our ancestors slowly, in what is normal time for evolution, became less instinctual and more integrated into the information (energy) flows of the environment.  Each individual became a deep reservoir of experience, for the most part personal and private, useful to the group only when that individual was present and attentive.  But enter language and all-human breaks loose!

We were able to evolve a way to be deeply integrated into the information from the environment precisely because the environment was constant over long spans of time.  If the world rapidly changed its rules of engagement, no intelligent animal could have happened.  It is no accident that organic life times are infinitesimal in geologic and ecologic time.

The answer to a couple of the questions begin to form.  Perception for humans is not the collection of discrete informational bits to be acted on by a genetically programmed brain.  Perception is the information gathering part of the way that we organize our structure of mind and it implies that if our perceptions change, our structure of mind will change.  As everyone knows, early childhood experience is the most important time for setting patterns, and this must be recognized, but even such early deeply ingrained organizing habits can be very much influenced by consistent perceptual experiences in our present.  Put another way: We are what we are able to organize out of our perceptions.  If our world is consistent and meaningful, our organization will be consistent and meaningful (‘meaningful’ means that our understandings and actions fit the events taking place around us).  If our world is inconsistent, disorienting and chaotic, our organization will tend to be inconsistent--or we will attempt to create order from inherent disorder by selecting, for no particularly valid reason, an organizing principle (this means that our understandings and actions will fit at some acceptable level, for some amount of time, a limited set of the events taking place around us, if we are lucky).  This is why people kill for what they call ideas!

Even the best laid plans of mice and prehuman anthropoids….  We, actually our prehuman ancestors, let go of the rope of instinct for the freefall of real-time perceptual intimacy with the environment.  And it worked great and then too well.  The environment "kept its part of the bargain".  The environment has not increased its rate of change beyond the expected geological/ecological time scales, but we humans became so good at fitting the available environment that we became the agents of change.  And we have escalated that rate of change for 50,000 years until today significant changes in essential aspects of the environment can happen in months, and the power exists in our technology to make huge changes in seconds.

When we, our prehuman ancestors, let go of the rope of instinct for the freefall of real-time perceptual intimacy with the environment it was not a free fall in the beginning.  If fact, nothing happened except that we did better and better at everything.  The more the world informed us the more accurately we acted in it.  The less instinct dominated action the more action became a function of finer and finer nuance of environmental information.  Experience became the canvas for the perceptions of the present and experience was formed from the consistent perceptions of the past.

Certainly there were dramatic changes in the moment.  A river would flood, an elder would die, but the abiding order remained.  Disease would wipe the slate all but clean and we would start again and the abiding order remained; a nourishing perceptual consistency.  Vitamin C was always in the fruit, day followed night, the moon waned and waxed with attendant consequences, plants grew in season, animals appeared and disappeared in regular ways, a warm wind from ‘that way, in this season,’ had its meaning.

And as we were hungry for food, we became hungry for input.  Listening, seeing, smelling out every sensation for its uses and it was all good.  Patterns of regularity were the fat of the fresh kill or the succulence of a new berry harvest.  Predator animals tried to trick us with sneakiness designed by their instinct to fool instinct; they would starve if we were their only food.  Food animals tried to outwit us with their instinctual powers of deception only to become greasy leavings licked eagerly from our fingers.  If the other creatures could have only known what they were up against, but of course they could not.  We were only just beginning to have the barest inkling; we had our powers long before we recognized them as special. And by the time some of us began to recognize our powers, we had long since lost control of their implications (if it even makes any sense to talk of control!).  The way had been set for humans to succeed, then succeed wildly, and then to dominate the thin film of life space that covers the earth so completely that even we would be dominated completely by what we had become.

Perceptual diet

But today sensation comes in cacophonous abundance.  The natural environmental sources of sensation are so totally overwhelmed by those produced by human beings as to be an insignificant percentage, and even that which is noticed is very often judged to be more inconvenience than informative.

For the most part we take in the sensation that is delivered based on volume, contrast and repetition; in other words, we are not really selecting, at least not critically selecting.  But we have needs for patterns and qualities of sensation in the same way that we have needs for specific qualities and quantities of nutrients.  Ultimately these needs are non-negotiable just as nutritional needs are non-negotiable.

Human and hominid life for most of the existence of our genus has had a major meditative component, exercise, regular contact with biophysical reality, problem solving and exploring, 3 to 5 servings a day of language free activities and so on.  But, this is only a suggested beginning. 

Take charge of your perceptual diet the way that you might take charge of your nutrition; actively select what you allow to come into your sensations.  Avoid poisonous sensations that weaken and sicken you. Discover your essential sensations, those that make you well when you add them to your perceptual diet.  But, more than anything else, actively select what you allow into your brain.  We no longer live in a world where we can “take it all in” and process it.

The Never-never Land of Narrative

Before the genus Homo there were no stories. The world does not operate by narrative, but humans do [1].  Therein lies the essence of a conflict (an element of narrative!) that is poised to manifest as an event of geologic importance.

Historical geology is concerned, broadly, with the condition of the earth over the whole span of its existence; not only its rocks and landforms, but also the larger conditions of climate and the chemical and biochemical processes of the surface and atmosphere (including the living things).  Humans have made these changes into a story.

But there is no story, no narrative operating the earth.  There is no place in the design of the earth, solar system, galaxy or universe to store the story, and a story must be stored in some tangible form from which it can be reconstructed and told anew.  In fact, it is the very repetition of a narrative that insures its disassociation from reality.

Narrative begins, before human consciousness, in a molecule, or better, a molecular system, the nexus of DNA and protein: because an organism is nothing more that a story ‘told,’ as a biological construction, over and over again, from the stored form in the DNA.  The beauty of this form of limited narrative is its intimate and system based association with the non-narrative events of the universe (especially as manifest on the surface of this little planet).  The “fit” of the ‘story’ to the events and conditions of the planet is mediated by the processes of evolution, which have become timed to the typical rates of change associated with this tiny piece of the universe.

The biophysical stories that are living things are directly limited by the laws of physics and chemistry, limited by having to fit the narrative into the designs of a single molecular system that has the singular process of biological growth to implement its design.  But even then the range of possibilities is staggering: viruses to blue whales, slime molds to peacocks, honey bees to humans; with vast numbers of archaebacteria and the dinosaurs thrown in for good measure.  But this is really all the same story, told over and over again, with many slightly varied alternative endings.

One of those slightly varied endings as been an organism with a new design for creating, storing and implementing pure narrative; the creation of true narrative out of the quasi-narrative of life; just as life formed as a quasi-narrative from the fixed relations of physics and chemistry [2].

This is not an elective understanding, not just one of the many options for how one might view the human condition. This is like relativistic formulas for gravity and space travel: it is like knowing basic blood chemistry when deciding tissue donors.

More generally, a narrative is a map, a pattern that allows the actual randomness and arbitrariness of the world to be organized into a form to which we can respond with some degree of prescience. Many animals have the capacity to map various degrees of detail and amounts of physical space in such a way that they can move “purposely” in that space; human narratives serve to allow such “purposeful” movements in time also, a capacity that, for other animals, has been under genetic (instinctual) control for the whole of life’s existence on the earth.

Returning to the first sentence of the above paragraph: the stories that we tell, giving order to the processes and events of the biophysical world, vary on two dimensions: (1) the degree to which they predict correctly and (2) the degree to which the details of the stories correspond to the detailed functioning of the world.  These are correlated dimensions, but by no means are they in lockstep.  It has been most common in human history for stories to be created that guide with reasonable precision, stories that are utterly without veridical correspondence to underlying processes.  It is also possible, and has happened many times, that elements of a story can match closely biophysical reality, but be put together in ways that fail to comport with that reality.  However, in general, the greater the degree to which the details of our stories have basis in details of environmental reality, the more likely the conclusions, as represented in our actions, will be successful.

This last generality has one major, almost overwhelming, exception.   When a society has composed an integrated complex story that functions in an social/ecological bubble, then it is possible and even likely that more veridical story details will be rejected.  That is the situation in which we find ourselves today.

The present story that we tell of ourselves, and that is the map to our future, is patently foolish, but foolishness does not naturally disqualify a social narrative.  No sane thoughtful person can believe that economic expansion can continue on forever – or in any recognizable form, beyond the end of population growth and the peaking of mineral and energy resources; all only one generation away – and yet belief in such growth is a major element of our story.

No sane thoughtful person can believe that a non-material being holds all the universe in some consciousness-like form manipulating it for some purpose – and yet such a belief (or public statement of such a belief) is an absolute requirement to be in government and other occupations in much of the world and certainly in the USA [3], And there are some places in the world where public agreement with this element of story is required so as not to be injured or killed. 

No sane thoughtful person can believe that humans are supposed to dominate, or even can dominate, the world’s ecology without the catastrophic failure of local ecologies and the collapse of the biophysical systems that support complex life on the earth – and yet the belief in human exceptionalism underlies almost everything we have done and continue to do.

No sane thoughtful person can fail to recognize that humans have incredible power to change the environment in which they live, that that power for change is proportional to our technological development – and yet our story tells us that the earth is infinite either in fact or in light of economic concepts (a detail of story) of substitution.

No sane thoughtful person can believe that they and their “tribe” are a chosen people – and yet, American Exceptionalism is a national religion not to challenged, many Jews hold Palestine as their natural right and many, if not most, human societies have, at least, a secret belief in their subtle superiority.

The fit of our present story to the real world processes and events surrounding us has become unsurpassed in its incapacity.  And in a natural paradox, among a legion of paradoxes, the degree of unfitness makes it even harder to move on to a better story; so many people have come to depend, both materially and emotionally, on the present story – and the distance has become so great to any other story that even begins to make sense – that there is no clear way forward.  In other words, the improbability of the stories we might construct for how to move to more satisfactory national narratives seems crushing. 

But such a problem only exists when your personal story requires that you take some responsibility for the national narrative.  It may well be that the most and best you can do it is to try and free yourself from the dominate narrative when it is recognized as destructive.  And then make that courage a part of your story, sufficient to tell the story of your discovery.

[1] I suppose that we could, if we wished, call the physical laws a narrative (that is, claim that making them part of our story makes them a story in the first place), they are utterly unlike human narratives or what humans are doing when they tell stories.  It is possible, though unlikely, that real stories have only ever existed here on the earth, and only for a few hundred thousand years on this tiny planet located on an out-of-the-way arm of this galaxy; less than a blink in 13.7 billion years and in such a vanishingly small part of ‘it all’ as to not even be here.

[2] The narrative capacity, once formed, could escape into other designs.  The Consciousness System of Order (CSO) capacity is not dependent on the human brain; it is only there that it began.  The primary functional aspects of CSO can eventually be made to work in what we call machines, but these workings would be without the foundational structure of a biological instinctual platform – I can imagine almost nothing more dangerous.

[3] Of course, it is much worse than that! In the USA it required that a politician publicly believe (regardless of personal behavior) that a semi-non-material being came to earth to mitigate the wrath of a vengeful father who was actually him, in the first place, and some other thing called a Holy Ghost.  The details of belief that expand out from this delicate beginning are nothing short of mind boggling.

Basic Nature of Conservatism Invites Co-option by Plutocracy

For all the folderol about the conservative and liberal minds, we can say without contention that there are certainly differences in the underlying history or biology of people who end up manifesting quite different reactions to the world around them, many of these differences unrelated to the details of belief.  And it is my deepest suspicion, increasingly supported by brain studies, that different ones of us are made differently in subtle ways resulting in a variety of reactions to the social conditions in which we live (see Chris Mooney’s book, ‘The Republican Brain’). 

How much these differences can be summarized into simple patterns is still a question, but a most basic distinction, independent of specific beliefs is really not so difficult: conservatives want and need everyone to be like them and liberals are not displeased when some people are different from them.

There are two types of liberals in this model, those who have learned by experience that everyone can’t be like them, even if they might want them to be, and those who are actually invigorated by the differences of others. Conservatives are of two types as well, those who see difference as a discomfort and social inconvenience to be avoided as much as reasonably possible and those who see difference as a danger and a crime for special condemnation.  It is important to note that the details of the difference are not the issue so much as the simple fact of difference.

It is a mistake to get caught up in the details of difference; detail is not the point, but only the definitional force of difference itself that matters.  The detail is only a means to an end [1], a condition of membership and not an adaptation to reality.  And because the details of belief are conditions of membership, these positions must be held with much greater fervor and certainty than other ‘elements of truth’ would ever be in actual practice.

A corollary condition follows: liberals are not primarily concerned with being like those around them, focusing more on events and evidence for decisions, while conservatives are more deeply sensitive to fitting in with what they perceive as prevailing attitudes.  The major method for influencing attitudes and decisions for them is to show that many people “just like them” think a certain way. 

These were both very useful habits of thought and action in our originating tribal life…when both attitude systems were represented with some equality and there were social expectations for honesty and fairness.  Conserving existing attitudes is important for social coherence and responding to culture-free evidence is vital for adaptation to the larger Reality.  However, if each system is isolated from the other and is allowed to form the view that its own result is absolutely correct while the other is absolutely wrong, neither system of thought can fully function in the total social context: the essential functional role of adapting species behavior to the larger exigencies of life on the earth. 

And it must be noted that in their most aggressive forms the conservative view must reject liberalism while liberalism can accept the differences presented by conservatism, though rejecting its absolutism as, at a minimum, counterproductive and distorting of reality; and finally noted that conservative rejection can be expected to be strident and liberal rejection of conservatism can be expected to be compliant and issue based [2]. Conservatives seem to try to understand liberals by trying to see what liberals do to make everyone think the same and liberals try to understand conservatives by studying how conservatives relate to reasoned, logical presentations of evidence; both, therefore missing the essential qualities of the other.

* * *

The principles of philosophical and scientific decision making have been considered in great depth for thousands of years and need not be labored with here.  And the ways of those who are invigorated by the differences of other people function quite differently than fear of difference.  For now it is the process of ‘being like everyone else’ and ‘everyone else being like you’ – an essential tension – that is interesting.  It is unlike the “easy” discoveries of difference among people who value, or at least accept, difference.  How does one go about displaying one’s views, basic congenial communication, when to do so risks that the views may be seen as different from those around them?  There have to be coded processes, learned and practiced, that let a thought be exposed and then quickly withdrawn if it is suspected of divergence; a sort of ‘now you see it now you don’t,’ with a 2-second no foul rule. 

One of the consequences is that everyone can believe that everyone else thinks just as they do – and can, therefore, live in the perfect bliss of a completely accepting world.  A select group of opinion makers are appointed or self-appointed; people, who by virtue of their talents at perceiving, distilling and projecting the coded forms of many popular views, instruct others in how to say and how to do those things that support the common code (think tanks, for example).  The irony is, of course, that the attempt to manage a ‘completely accepting’ world is made by creating unspoken rules and codes by which differences are rejected.

Have you ever been around a monumental construction built of playing cards, experienced the tension and narrowed limits of movement required to allow the construction to have some permanence of existence?  First, the reason for the ‘castle’ is not questioned, but taken as a given reality.  And second, acquired from the first, all the behaviors required to avoid endangering the ‘castle’ are also considered essential.  The zone of influence expands from the table on which the construction sits to the allowable patterns of movement around the room, to the opening and closing of windows, to which doors have to be closed and opened in a given order, to the passing of trucks on the highway, to the flushing of a toilet in an upstairs bathroom, to…

A difference between this metaphor and the coming to a common pattern of conservative “reality” is that in the metaphor the movement of influence can be plainly seen.  However, the “I can only be safe if I am just like my neighbor and my neighbor is just like me” idea leads as irrevocably to the rejection of science, to a 6,000 year old earth and to religious fundamentalism…just as irrevocably as the requirement of having “no breezes around the card castle” leads to having to be sure that the door to the kitchen be closed before going onto the porch.

Of course, we all have our systems for measuring and informing others about what we are willing to talk about and willing to do at the various levels of relationship, that is not at issue, but it is the systematic process maintaining the illusion and reality that ‘you believe as me’ and ‘I believe as you’ acting as a primary social construction that defines a major part of the conservative constituency.

Conservatism is a way of life in a way different from liberalism, which is more a habit of thought.  The rejection of difference requires complete systems of control for all aspects of life in ways that the acceptance of difference does not.  It is really this ‘way of life’ that we so often hear is in need of defending.

This leads to present so-called conservative positions, while based on these quite deep human habits of thought and attitude, being co-opted purely as devices to herd people into groups that can be manipulated for the crassest reasons of power and influence.  But this simple and cynical fact doesn’t change the reality that these are fundamental ways to approach the experience of life.

A conservative-liberal synergistic dynamic works when liberalism supplies the belief system and conservative process maintains it; conservatism is uniquely ill-equipped to supply its own beliefs since its function is not to respond sensitively to the variations in reality, but rather to standardize beliefs for purposes of social cohesion. Liberalism does not produce social cohesion by its normal functioning. For these reasons, today’s “conservative” and “liberal” constituencies must contain their own actual conservative and liberal parts.  In a terrible perversion, the “liberal” function in American Conservatism, and increasingly elsewhere, has been taken over by the plutocracy (and as total plutocratic power increases it becomes more and more a “reality to be dealt with” in liberal consideration).

Since self-identified groups of humans require some means of feeling connected together by common habits and beliefs, then great influence can be had by supplying the form of those habits and beliefs. The obvious “enemy” of such an ascension to power would be those who might question both the elements of detail and whole idea of difference in the first place – who might wonder at the efficacy of a card castle in the living room – the liberal frame of mind.

And so an effective pincer-movement forms naturally, a movement that is episodic in human history, the conservative mind’s drive to eject difference is met in symphony with the powerful’s need to prevent any questioning of their devices of domination; and it always takes on a recognizable form: ‘kill the heretic.’  However, it is vital to recognize and keep clearly in mind that one set of forces is coming from the habits of the conservative mind and that another, using the same language and devices, is coming from the cynical forces of the powerful.  Unfortunately, this is a difference that the construction of the conservative “reality” is perfectly designed to obscure.

[1] It is a mistake to get caught up in the evaluation of detail, certainly a part of the liberal thought habit to look at statements for their content.  The detail of religious position, taxation, infrastructure repair and development, sexual issues, class issues, education issues, wars, sources of and responses to terrorism, ad infinitum, are means to ends and can be added to, subtracted from and changed endlessly without affecting the basic role of the rejection of difference as a way of solidifying a social construction.

[2] We see this so clearly in the conservative opinion makers, following the election, literally yelling that acceptance of the election result is not possible.  They will never compromise, never admit defeat beyond agreeing that it has happened (though for nefarious reasons).

A Mediation on a Pool of Water

I was hiking in the low desert hills, built up by hundreds of small volcanic vents over millions of years – this is not only description, but also essential context. The late summer monsoons had rained well over portions of the area and while most of the water had run off or soaked down through the volcanic gravels, in places where the old lava was on the surface, pools had formed in basins of solid rock – watery mini-ecosystems in the desert.

Deserts are not like Disney movies: there is little highly animate life to see there.  Unlike the Florida subtropics of my youth with alligators, herons, gulls, snakes and myriad insects measured in hundreds per yard, a desert walk of many miles may have only the excitement of the flies-in-season or a female sparrow of indeterminate species. The times when water holes are reliably found, however, offer up a rare abundance.  It was such a day.

I stopped to observe, more meditatively than an act of science, a pool of brown-yellow water in what had been, up to 8 thousand years ago, a permanent stream flowing out of the higher volcanic hills to the east.  Little black dots appeared and disappeared over its surface. Tiny yellowish comets (fairy shrimp for the curious) came up from the hazy yellowish depths and with spiraling turns descended again. A mix of water bugs, shiny black bodies, sprinted about. Water striders, spidery-looking insects, walked on the water with God-like ease.  It was a complete world from the energizing algae to its top predators, tadpoles and damselfly larvae.  Of course, the few birds used its water for baths and nibbled a bit at its inhabitants, but these were largely externalities. Dead flies, moths and butterflies slid around the surface driven by swirling breezes. It was wonderful.

Soon the patterns of activities began to show; responses to shadows passing over the surface, one local flurry of action would follow another, moments of quiet. Seemingly random motion would bring nearly all the tadpoles to the surface at once, more than a hundred squirming black dots concentrated toward the center of the pool, and then they would appear in numbers half that or less.  In the bigger pools I had seen minnows, but not in this one.

If the rains were done for a time, this pool and others like it would dry in a few weeks, evaporating into several tiny puddles and then gone.  The animals watched today would all be dead, their eggs secreted away in rock crevices and the mud, soon to be dust. 

I could not, and did not wish to, fight off the sensation/intuition/thought of the thousands of seasons of these pools, the sensation of the kaleidoscopic spiraling of events from this moment back to the flowing stream, to the flowing lava and to the moving earth.  All of these were contained in the DNA of these little beasts before me – as certainly as the warmth of the sun and cool of the shade.  And yet they had only incorporated a tiny part of those changes – just those that let them carry on from this year’s pool to next year’s pool.

From were I sat at the edge of the water I could see very little of my own pool: there was a bit of ancient barbed wire fence along a near ridge, con-trails in the sky and, if I allowed myself to see them, the tracks of some rock-crawler truck in the old river bed beside the basalt altar that held the mud-yellow water.

When the river ran in this now dry canyon, dry except of the September pools, my own species had just come to this land as bands of stone-tooled hunters. My own direct ancestors were living in villages across middle Europe only a stone’s throw in time from the Neanderthals that they displaced.

Off in the distance I could see, from the top of nearest low hill, a city of 80,000 people. Down the slope was the yellowish pool with its thousands of inhabitants; off to the east was my own pool with its thousands of inhabitants.

These walks into the desert are always wordless meditations; to turn them into language with its meanings and rules of construction both gives them more tangible form and diminishes them toward insignificance.  The clarity of understanding is, however, not completely lost when I say that all the comprehensions about the muddy little pool were seen as absolutely the same for the city.

The simplicity of the pool, its origin seemingly owed solely to a monsoon rain, was belied by the complex biology of its inhabitants and the millions of years of evolution that made the rain their immediate source, but stoked the new water with a subtlety of DNA’s design come to by all the sophistication of that molecule – just so for the city. 

The fate of the pool, so certain and immutable: when the water is gone, the whole beautiful construction of life is gone.  I can easily see in my mind’s eye the city’s margins contracting, the contiguous sprawling dividing up into a dozen smaller isolated centers, those centers disappearing one by one until the rocks and little trees of the hill sides above the city spread uninterrupted out to the volcanic plains and hills where I am standing; the city dried up and gone, and without even leaving the eggs of its inhabitants ready for the next iteration.

Teaching and Learning Math

(Written in the 1990s when I was substitute teaching in the math dept. in high school.)

It is generally recognized that teaching and learning mathematics has special problems.  Many children seem to learn math only with difficulty.  Many teachers of math seem unable to teach the subject beyond the sort of rote process by which they acquired their knowledge of it.  And yet there are some people who seem to have a great affinity for mathematical thinking, who seem to almost know it before they are taught and only need to be shown the meaning of symbols in order to express their understanding.

In almost no other human activity is there such a range of difference than between the mathematically commonplace and the mathematically sophisticated.  It is perfectly possible for there to be two students with essentially equivalent intelligence, one with a limited capacity for mathematical comprehension and so needing to learn specific skills by rote, and another who learns with fluidity and comprehension.

I propose that we compare and contrast language learning with number learning as a beginning exercise in developing a theory for both explanation and method for math learning.  Language has large areas of the nervous system dedicated to it.  The anatomy of the respiratory tract is evolved for language vocalization.  All this suggests the natural conclusion that humans have been doing language for a very long time and that it is part of our physical design.  We know that there are readiness states in infants associated with language learning, further tying it to our biology.

Language is involved in the communication of detailed environmental information, the establishment of social relationships and order and supports the creative process of thought.  We teach language related skills -- writing, reading, verbal comprehension and aesthetic expression -- as a communication tool based in the actual transfer of information.  Even in so simple a sentence as "See Jane run," the nascent reader can, in their mind’s eye, ‘see Jane run.’

Contrast this with number learning.  Initial number learning -- counting -- is a part of local language process and historically most people never move significantly beyond this level.  Number learning and mathematical thinking doesn't have the powerful evolutionary history of language, but is subsumed within it as counting.  Further math instruction has little, if any, communication content and is most often presented as only ‘that which must be learned by rote’ for reasons discussed later.  Yet, It is clear from the math ability of some people that mathematical thinking can be a powerful form of comprehending and communicating about the world.

Just as there are relatively few people with the language sensitivity of the great poets, there are few people with the specialized sensitivities and comprehension of mathematicians.  But this is not the end of it -- or even the beginning.  If you wish to discuss the writing of Yeats or Roethke, you are still within the familiar world of language for which there is a dedication of brain and biology in everyone.  Almost everyone can develop a little tangle, in some a cold sweat, from a sensuous passage by Ted Hughes even if they could never in a lifetime of word tossing make such a line for themselves.  Mathematics is yet again different. 

On the extreme other end of this hazy continuum is the so-called idiot savant with special calculating powers.  Here is a person with often reduced or unusual language expression, but who, with training in symbology and operation, can show remarkable abilities especially with various forms of very complex counting.  If I say, "57349 times 4274!" and if the answer is given immediately as "254,109,626," then I have to conclude that some mathematical processing and judgment occurred somewhere and that this processing preceded by acceptable mathematical rules.  The only reasonable place to find such processing is within the nervous system of the savant.  Ergo, something allows the perception to identify the numbers and to very rapidly associate them through a mathematical process that actually calculates the result by some physical process.  The savant often simply says that they know or see the number in some form or other -- it just comes to them.

If I see ‘8 times 8’ and say ‘64’ without any recognized intervening conscious process, it is a skill I have acquired by rote.  The multiplication of two numbers exceeding a couple of places by ‘recognition’ of the answer requires that the mathematical operation take place somewhere and this is almost certainly not my rote process. 

But we perform mathematical calculations regularly at a very high level.  There is no mechanical analog design between the wad of paper in my hand and the small trashcan 20 feet away, yet I can throw 10 different wads of paper of different weights and compaction reliably into that can.  Each one must be given a different final velocity and arch, the trashcan can be moved and I can throw from different places all with high levels of success.  The force and trajectory calculations are taking place somewhere! Clearly, I must be measuring the distance with my eyes, muscularly weighing the paper wads, visually estimating their density and calculating the final patterns of muscular activity.  Somehow in the normal-order disturbance of the savant, these calculating systems are made more immediately addressable. Mathematical proficiency must be somewhere between the mentally disrupted design of the savant and the exceptional sensitivity of the poet -- think of a three-dimensional space, not a one-dimensional line.

So if this description, in a very rough, almost poetic, way describes the way math ability works in humans, what does it mean for teaching this increasingly important skill?  First, it should be clear that, as a whole, math instruction has been failing our children.  Large numbers of children deeply believe that they are ‘math stupid,’ i.e., the most effective thing being taught to them is that they can’t learn math.  Then there are the small number of children who, given even the slightest chance, will learn math easily, rapidly and often beyond the ability of their rote-learning teachers to teach them.  Another group will dig in, learning by rote exactly what is being taught, be able to use it for exactly those applications shown -- if any -- and think that they have learned math because that is what they will be told.  Think how unlike language learning this is.

The essence of language learning is to be able to express new ideas, your own feelings and thoughts, in ways that will, if not excite at least, be somewhat clear to others.  And to be able to receive similar expressions with comprehension and appreciation.  The essence of math learning has been -- well -- to do math as it is prescribed in a book.

What this little analysis suggests about teaching math is that we first recognized that humans have a complex relationship to math learning unlike much of the general learning that we expect of everyone.  In general, math needs to be taught as a form of communication to the vast majority.  All formulations and operations need to be put in a form like language – information, no matter how silly or simpleminded, needs to be presented.  This is not to say that all problems need to be language problems, many of these are just as devoid of communication as is ‘a² + b²=c^2’ for most people (or this equation can be seen as an exquisite and exact communication about the relationships of sides of right triangles – deeply poetic in fact).  When the 60 MPH train from Chicago meets the 55 MPH train from Detroit may have no communication value even though framed in words.  The math work and learning needs to be about real communication.

Certainly there is rote learning required: Sums, times tables, order of operations, the various names of things, etc., but the math itself needs to routinely communicate information.  Numbers need to come from somewhere, be a certain kind, any answers need to actually answer some question.  Operations and formulae need to be driven by the questions. The symbols and operations need to be seen as a language with special properties.

People who use math in their daily lives and work use math in this way.  It is not some meaningless exercise.  There's no reason that it should be taught as a meaningless exercise that only a rare few find the secret of by either special aptitude or accident.

I took my seventh-grade daughters (home schooling) out to some power-lines with tall wooden poles.  The question was, "what is the diameter at the top of the pole?"  We had with us only a 50 foot tape measure.  It was late in the afternoon and the shadow of the pole lay tantalizingly on the ground at their feet.  Many possibilities were considered, but ultimately they collected a series of numbers that were set up as various proportions, assumptions were stated, an answer produced.  Their original, "about this big," demonstrated with the finely metered distance between outstretched palms, had become: "if the pole changes diameter consistently over its length, then the top is 9.5 inches in diameter."  Much multiplying and dividing had been going on as well as various acts of measuring and counting.

While helping tutor some algebra I students with their first graphing assignments, a bewildered young man got it immediately when I asked him to show me the football when it was on the 20 yard line and 10 yards in from the sideline.  He might need some help in the future in understanding that a point is dimensionless, not an oblong ball, but that goal line can be crossed when he gets to it.

It would be nice if there were a series of solid mathematically strong texts that had a communication base with lots of examples of activities and hints for enriching exercises [1]. But existing books can be used as long as teachers understand that the majority of their students are going to learn math best as a communicating tool; that a balance between rote practice and activities that serve a communication function can be struck.  There will always be a few math-poets to challenge the teacher.  The trick is recognizing them, realizing that they experience the numbers and the operations in a different way.  It is not that they are simply smart and other students are not smart; they are processing this highly specialized symbolic system in a different way from those who are using what is essentially a language model to do math.  Every student should be given the chance to become a Fermet or a Bertrand Russell, but the fact is that just as the vast majority of people get along just fine without running a 10 second hundred yard dash, most math students will not make math into a full-fledged, separate, beautifully spoken language.  And quite frankly there are far too few math-poets teaching math to allow for a renaissance in math learning anyway.

These examples are nothing special -- the point is to look for how to frame communication paradigms from minimal mathematical designs.  Certainly the richness of Cartesian coordinates comes from an abstract quality that inheres in concepts of variable.  These concepts are not presented in gridiron examples, but each level of understanding advances toward that goal.

Ultimately the failure of math instruction has to rest at the feet of a system that places teachers without requisite understanding, ability and tools in the classroom, but if we begin to recognize that our very natures as math learners can be remarkably different, we might begin to make a change for the better.  This is not to say that some children can’t and should not learn math—quite the opposite.  All but the most abstract math can be learned and used effectively by people who are taught math as a communication tool inside the design of spoken language.  However, this will not happen if confused teachers teach children that their only available approach to math learning is wrong and that they are somehow damaged goods if they can’t do it the way some text (that the teacher really doesn’t understand either) says to.

The many changes that math education has gone through over the last 50 or so years have been a response to the recognition that math was not being especially well taught and learned as education became more and more factory-like in its design.  It is not that the “old way” is the best way, unless ALL of the old way is made available.  When intimacy and caring were natural to education, many ‘curriculum problems’ went unnoticed.   Today we have little room but to be accurate with how we approach these matters.

[1] When I wrote this piece the Integrated Math Program (IMP) was not generally known.  While far from perfect, this 4 year high school program (I’ve not seen the middle school version) is consciously directed toward many of the concerns presented here.  I took the short-course IMP training and used the program for a time until the school where I was teaching adopted confusion over consistency and lost the courage to follow through with such deviation from existing approaches.

The Nature of Impunity

Humans are subject to a variety of powerful motivators, as are all animals. We are familiar with the list: hunger, sex, safety, various social motives and so on.  But we are the only animal that is also routinely moved by motivations that are purely the product of our imagination.  Of these, one of the most insidious is the desire for impunity of action, a desire that becomes, in the synergy of social interactions, an especially powerful drive.

Impunity does not exist in nature. Every organism’s successful existence is determined by the success of those other organisms that it would apparently, in human terms, dominate.  In a very real sense every species of organism in an ecosystem (natural economic system) must compensate the totality of the ecosystem in such a way that nothing is actually used up or held to exclusion from the flows of material and energy; all elements of the system must be supported by all participants .  The functional relationships in ecosystems, and therefore in the evolution of organisms, is the antithesis of impunity: ecosystems function on accountability and, in human terms, responsibility.

A primary issue for our “modern” systems of impunity is that impunity itself is all about not recognizing, realizing or responding to one’s own actions while it is the absolutely essential structure of ecosystems that all actions be integrated into a whole complex energy/chemical/behavioral flow and process.

Impunity is a cognitive production.  It is like any other idea derived from human imagination; that is, a creative product of Consciousness Order processes: appearance in the repertoire of thought demonstrates no quality of actual existence, only the possibility.  The conditions for the existence of impunity as a behavioral option resemble other purely cognitive productions such as ghosts, social rules and money economies, some more “real” than others, but all existing only in bubbles of human cognitive frames.  What all of these purely cognitive features share are tortured relationships with the reality of adaptive processes and the pushing off onto other organisms and systems the consequences of some aspects of their purely cognitive form made manifest as actual events [1].

Humans can imagine acting in the world without consequences or responsibility, and then they can attempt to create the conditions that would allow the imaginings [2].  But the absence, in nature, of the relationships that we humans imagine as impunity should be a clue that, at the least, we should be very careful.  The failure to respect the fundamental Realities of the biophysical world might immediately seem foolish, but the nature of impunity is to be free, or to imagine being free, of such fundamental restraints.

Since impunity as goal and behavior is so “unnatural”, how it is that it has become such a force in present human social, political and economic action? We have a hundred ways of saying it and we have a thousand excusing descriptions of why we do it, but it comes down to one thing only: we want to act in the world without restraint.  This begins in infancy. 

I realized as I watched my first child, from his first breaths, that he had two driving goals.  The first was to suckle at his mother’s breast and the second was to take over the world. 

Human infants are not frightened little bunnies, but devouring creatures inhibited only by their incapacities.  Just think of the terror and destruction if the intelligence and willfulness of a human 1½ year old were to invade the body of a grown gorilla… or for that matter a human adult.  And since it does actually happen some of the time that a human grows up without the dampening of the infantile nature, we have a name for that condition; we call it psychopathy, meaning simply, a pathology of the soul.  But we need not be so metaphysical; it is really that some part of the person has not grown beyond the natural desires of infancy.  If fact, we all still want to act in the world without restraint, but have learned through, primarily, a vast array of “punishments” that we cannot.

The desire for and the acceptance of impunity as a real condition of life is an immature conception.  No fully formed, competent adult human being would accept that actions can be performed without consequences or responsibility – even if the most dangerous and dramatic forms of the consequences can be arranged to be delivered to others in the present or to the future. Ultimately it is all of us, as the species and the extended system, that must absorb the effects. Still, there are always some members of a community that will seek impunity of action and so attempt to drive the social order to include the possibility.

Once impunity exists (seems to exist) in a social system, then it begins to control the system as more and more people and collectives strive to find ways to act without having to deal with the consequences and responsibilities of their actions.  It must be understood that this is inevitable in human process since it is in the design of the Consciousness Order to discover work-arounds, deny, delay or otherwise avoid dangers and challenges. 

In a community that fully accepts as a solid principle that nothing and no one can function with impunity, the work-arounds are still sought and are seen as community functions; but as soon as individuals realize, and the opportunity exists, that they too can act with impunity, the social process enters a new phase with some individuals and groups attempting complete impunity at the cost of the social order. (This is important: human communities can attempt to function with impunity, but by their design, as long as the people are “held to account” within the community, then the community will adapt within the ecological process. It is when individuals are free to act with impunity, beyond community influence, that there are no longer any feedback systems to mediate adaptation.)

* * *

On a more mundane level: no politician has gone wrong telling people that he or she will see to it they can act without restraint.  This has many forms, but basically falls into two categories: being told that what you believe is right and that what you do is right.  Beliefs and actions have detailed adaptive histories and so can have many forms that may make little sense in a world of rapidly changing circumstance.  As the functioning of the world leaves beliefs behind, the people holding them are easy prey for the psychopaths who would really act with impunity – by claiming to offer impunity to others.

Just one example: Right To Work – that is a restraint-free formulation.  You want to work, well by God, you have a right to work.  But that is not what it means.  It means that the impunity of action is really in the hands of the employer, it means that the employer decides what to pay you, whether to hire or fire and the conditions under which you work; your restraint-free action is only whether you will take the job or not.  With a large and hungry labor pool the employer is freed from the consequences of unlivable low wages, would be freed from the consequences of dangerous working conditions and would not have to consider the other interests that actual human beings might have in the qualities of an activity to which half or more of their waking lives are devoted.

All such arguments are formed on a similar model: “We promise you freedom from the tyranny of the restraints imposed by the needs of community (containing some people who are not like you) at the cost of supporting the real impunity of the economic elites.

Imagining that actions can be taken without unpleasant consequences is natural only to Consciousness Order processes; it is then part of those processes to attempt to discover ways of accomplishing that result.  In the long history of this human method of adapting, the attempt has been to reduce unpleasantness to “acceptable” levels, but the possibility of complete impunity has come to be easily imagined, even if also considered unrealistic. As long as the possibility for impunity of action exists in a society, impunity will be the determining quality of that society, even as communities may attempt other options, the promise of freedom from responsibility will finally dominate decision and action.

There can be no solution to our current dilemmas as long as whole classes of people can function with impunity, so long as wealth confers an absolute impunity of power.  And no one voluntarily gives up the unlimited power to act without consequences or responsibility.  These are simple truths; these are first things first. While it may not be possible to take direct, effective action, it is possible to have the understanding from which action can be formed.

[1]These cognitive productions produce actual events and processes that very often have no comprehensible connection to the imaginings upon which they are based and, thus, go almost completely either unrecognized or misapprehended.  As a further distortion the discoverable consequences are often used in the construction of tertiary explanations for their existence that have almost nothing to do with anything other than accidents of association.

[2] A few examples of Imaginings of impunity:

To kill dangerous animals without danger.

To have any human, animal, plant or inanimate do what I wish.

To act with or on myself in any way without damaging consequence.

To take and/or control any object or resource for my own purposes.

To go anywhere I want, as quickly as I wish (in space or in time).

To ignore the power of others and to dominate them.

To be free of the responsibilities and consequences of all of my actions.

To act on the world and to treat others exactly as I wish.

To buy, sell or trade without limitation.

That no normally existing source of power can stop me from doing as I want.

My wishes and desires are all that matters.

(you might note that these are all forms of the infantile assertion, “I want what I want when I want it.”)