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.”)

How Do Things Happen When There Is No Agency?

Human consciousness systems for modeling the world are completely dependent on the idea of agency; that some agent wills or otherwise directs events.  And since agency as we conceive it is completely illusory, we are doomed to be ‘wrong’ (also an agency dependent idea!) in the vast majority of our actions in the world. 

When we began as a species this was not a concern since our illusions of agency were functioning in a world utterly dominated by biophysical Reality; our notions of agency simply connected dots in that reality at a speed and volume unavailable to other organisms, giving our species a decided advantage.  Later on, the illusion became increasingly understood as reality to the point today when we cannot even imagine another origin for action or order.

Our notions of agency derive from an adaptation that formed through evolutionary processes which operate by principles devoid of agency.  It is these processes that mediate changes and apparently, to humans, changes that have direction and purpose.  The Consciousness System of Order (CSO) is organized around the illusion of agency; a device what functions to a particular advantage in the evolutionary process.  The capacity of the CSO to generate actions that have no precedent in the history of biophysical Reality, in the largest view, will be part of the consequence structure that permeates biophysical systems; like the bringing together of a formulary of chemicals that mix, act and react to become new forms that can exist in the ambient conditions.

I said a moment ago that the CSO was “a device what functions to a particular advantage in the evolutionary process.”  And at the same time I am suggesting that it has “gone wrong” in some way, that it is no longer functioning to advantage.  There are two parts to this observation.  One is that many adaptations “go wrong” as ambient conditions change: for example if the acidity of water increases, then calcium carbonate shells – so efficient and useful in conditions of near neutral pH – become a route to extinction.  The second part is that this adaptation is unprecedented in the history of the universe, has barely begun to be refined by the evolutionary process and, uniquely, by its own information handling designs; it may actually contain the possibility of true agency.

But before getting too much into the complexities of our present confusions it is important to get a sense of how the world functions without agency as humans typically understand it.  The first hurtle is that language is steeped in the structure of the agency illusion: an agent imagines, wishes, designs and implements; it is just “obvious” that that is how the world works.  Little thought or attention is given to the plain fact that the universe and solar system formed, life began and evolved all billions of years before there was human or any other “known agency.” What was functioning to give order and change, even directional change, before the structures and processes that underlie the CSO?  And more importantly, what is it that continues to be the actual functional order within which the CSO needs to comport?  The two questions, of course, have the same answer.

* * *

The question should not be, ‘How can the world work without agency?’ It should be, ‘How can agency possibly work in a world of simple event causation?’  But we think that we understand agency and not causation without it, so that is a natural place to begin.

The substance of the universe is in motion; motion is an essential condition of a universe of energy (by substance I don’t just mean matter, but all the “stuff” that is the universe, known or unknown to humans). When the various forms of substance interact by the physical laws, a probability system forms and a reaction process/product occurs corresponding to the probabilities. After a time the composition and structure of a region changes to represent the most stable population of reaction process/products as determined by the ambient forces of the region: examples: hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water molecules when ambient energies are low enough; atoms are reduced to free protons, electrons and neutrons when temperatures are high enough; molecules of many types form, combine and recombine when conditions of stability, especially in an aqueous environment, endure for millions and billions of years.

Given enough time everything with a positive probability, almost no matter how small, will happen.  In a world of essentially infinite numbers even the clearly finite acts infinitely.  The earth’s oceans are a thin layer spread over much of the thin rocky crust.  How many drops of water are in the finite ocean?  There are about twenty drops of water in a cubic centimeter; a thousand trillion cubic centimeters in a cubic kilometer; almost 1.4 billion cubic kilometers of water in the oceans – and that single drop of water has about ten thousand million trillion molecules of water.  So the number of water molecules on the earth is more than ten thousand million trillion times a thousand trillion times l.4 billion times twenty… pretty soon you get into numbers of some real size (magnitude 10 to the 47^th power for you power-of-ten people).

And that is just the water.  Dissolved in the water are all the elements and compounds that can be formed in billions of years on a chemically and thermally stable planet; even the rarest of the rare will be there by the billions of trillions of trillions.  Imagine a molecule that forms by the chance action of interaction that can speed up the forming of another molecule like itself, then that particular molecule will increase in abundance; or another molecule that tends to break down a common molecule.  With these kinds of numbers interacting 100s and 1000s of times per second for millions and billions of years every combination that can happen will happen.

Some of those combinations will form systems of interactions; some of these systems of combinations will become self-sustaining.  The essence is that systems and molecules that are stable increase in number.  Systems and molecules that tend to increase the probability of their own formation increase in number.  In conditions of great variety, stability and duration these tendencies produce increases in complexity in the organization of substance.

This accounts for the forms of matter that we see, for the design of galaxies and solar systems, for the structure and natural history of stars and other celestial bodies, for the structure and physical systems of the earth and the other planets, for the origin of life and the evolution of the earth’s life forms… in other words, this accounts for almost everything. The only thing not accounted for is the behavior and imaginings of one species of life that has only been around for a few hundred thousand years at the most.  And that species is only not accounted for because of a unique adaptation (that I am calling The Consciousness System of Order) that gives the species the option to believe and disbelieve a process that every other species, ever in existence, simply lives.  Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the behaviors of that species are not accounted for by the imaginings of that species because of the limitations of the Consciousness Order, because its evolutionary design was to speed up and increase the detail of response to environmental events, not to understand the world.

What is not generally realized is that the changes and multiplication of objects and processes associated with humans are no more than the speeding up of the combinations of possibilities.  Our notions of agency are but illusions that mollify the weakness of our capacities for comprehending the true complexities of Reality.

Just as children do not require, and even benefit from simplifying, Reality so long as adults are around to deal with real events, so humans have been protected from their failures to comport with Reality by biophysical Reality itself.  But also like spoiled children who grow up, our species has grown to such powers that not even biophysical Reality can challenge our hubris short of denying us its continued stability and services.

It is now that we will discover if humans can muster true agency or if we are utterly without it and only the creatures of events like all other species.

The philosophy and psychology of agency has been a major concern of human thought, spawning everything from gods, ghosts, and a remarkable volume of almost completely impenetrable prose.  I hope to play with some of that silly putty shortly.

The Story: The Pen and the Sword

I am finding it more and more difficult to write in these pages.  It is not so much that I have less to say, although I admit to being less clear on how to say my increasingly non-language conceptions, comprehensions and feelings, but I have said most of it before and perhaps better.  There is not a constant stream of new things to say.  There never has been.  Certainly, every day events take place that, from one point of view, can be considered new, though in Reality they are only another turn of the same wheel that must be dressed up to avoid the “dog bites man” appellation.

Drawing the picture created by the dots of individual events has always been the sine qua non of the human condition: doing it well has meant easy survival and doing it badly has often meant one of the several forms of disastrous failure – with large helpings of good and ill fortune thrown in.  Someone such as myself, who has neither the resources of material, energy or interest to do original reporting or the status of ‘expert’ to do detailed evaluation of day-to-day events can only reasonable offer, hopefully evocative and perhaps innovative ways for seeing the events that inform and plaque us.

And we desperately need ways of organizing present experiences that can comport with the realities that confront us.  The model is simple, executing it ‘in reality’ is not.  Reality will always elude us, we have no facility for it, but we have the adaptive process of “Story” that, when functioning properly, designs a significant body of our community members and their behaviors into satisfactory relationships with Reality.  There is, however, a great and terrible caveat:

A metaphor that I have used before: a juggler violates “reality”; with only two hands it ‘should not be possible’ to suspend 3 or more objects in controlled flight.  And, in fact, it is only possible for a short period of time.  For most people only seconds, for some, minutes, and certainly this “violation” of reality can only be carried on for a short number of hours by even the most talented.  And so it is with the human treatment of the biophysical world: we are juggling its many properties, keeping more balls in the air than possible in the long run, but have become completely dependent on the juggling for the survival of both our numbers and the way most of us live.  It is not unnatural in such a circumstance to see the juggling as more real and vital than the Reality in which such juggling is, in evolutionary time, a short-term aberration.  It should be noted that thousands of generations may live out their lives during the juggling phase, only a few will be part of the falling down.

But this metaphor must be examined more closely before despairing – if one considers the metaphor prescient and thus worthy of despair.  The juggler may be convinced to divest him or her self of the suspended objects one at a time until the juggling is ended and the objects are all completely in the thrall of the most direct laws of nature.  And, and this is important, the juggling can be made to go on in well-controlled and regulated ways that, while risking some failures, are all designed for controlled endings after short forays into improbability.  This would be a most human way to approach life on a sustainable planet.

For this to happen we need a new Story, one in which there is real democracy, equity and social justice; by ‘real’ I mean both that these qualities of community actually exist in a functional form and that communities struggle with the real difficulties that they present.  It is my goal to, in the smallest of possible ways, to help generate that Story.  It is the way available to all of us: to tell the new Story to others.

In this new Story the central pillars of the present Story, wealth and property, are seen not as unquestionable, but as cognitive structures gone wrong and used to build structures of repression and destruction, the greatest acts of juggling in human history.  Wealth and property have historical antecedents that account for their present form rather than being the absolute and correct culmination of human economic and political thought.  From God-kings, to kings, to the struggle for the commons, property has been a great confusion.  Locke, Blackstone, Smith and Marx did their part in trying to rationalize the issues; they were just jugglers good enough for a little while.

We are seeing the consequences in international corporations and in wealth accumulations that give absolute impunity to a few millions of people – and generally people the least well equipped to empathize with and act responsibly toward the rest of humanity and the life on the earth that receives the down stream effects of that impunity.  There are only two forces that allow the present construction: the force of arms and the force of the present Story that makes the gaining of wealth and property acceptable and desirable.  If that Story were eroded sufficiently, then only the force of arms would be left – and that has never been enough.

Many of those who live and act in the Land of Impunity know these things and spend vast amounts of their wealth to control the Story, but the Story is not an army that does as it is told; Story, like a tattered mimeographed sheet passed from hand to hand in East Berlin, can prepare a revolution.  It was the Story, shared by so many, that let the Berlin Wall fall in one night as an incomprehensible, outlandish party.  It is very likely that the people didn’t even know that they had come to share a Story of such power, waiting only to be catalyzed by events.  This is the process to which we must contribute, even if we don’t know what to say or how to say it.

Human Exceptionalism and The Madness

(This a new editing of an essay published in the Dissident Voice in about September, 2008.  It is exactly what I wish to say today.)

If an invasive species spreads ‘out of control’ because of adaptations new to a region and lack of any evolved relationships that inhibit it, we use a disease model for the ecology.  If a group of cells goes “mad” and reproduces uninfluenced by the existing order of organs and metabolic function, we call it a cancer; cells made by the body, but “foreign” and deadly to its proper functioning.  The hominid genus, Homo, developed a new, powerful adaptation that overrode historical evolutionary function, rapidly spread into all bio-zones and ultimately began geometrically increasing in population, and increasing on a variety of other measures.  These changes we humans have claimed with pride: our spreading growth and dominance of the earth’s physical space and material sources.

Every species acts in the world as an ‘exceptional’ entity; that is, no species is shy and retiring in the face of ecological success.  But every species is on essentially equal footing with all other species in the sense that they are using the same basic tools for adaptation and are functioning on the same basic time scale.  One species might evolve a generation length that speeds up adaptation rates, but only a little.  Another might increase the costs for breeding, making more demands on the quality of the individual genotype, but again within the same order of magnitude typical of other species.

But, Human Exceptionalism is the result of an actually exceptional condition.  The human adaptation is new to our immediate region of the universe.  We are not on an equal footing with the other species of living things.  Our capacity to respond to environmental conditions has gone from the generational change rates of biological evolution (DNA/protein mediated) to the change rates of Consciousness Order processes (mediated by ‘story’).   This new process of adaptation is orders of magnitude faster, it is also orders of magnitude more fine-tuned to detail and it confers levels of power to action previously impossible for biological entities.

These questions suggest the dilemma: (1) Is such an exceptional adaptation a disease on the body of the biological world?  The human species has increased from a few hundred thousand living by evolutionary rules to 7 billion as our adaptation expresses its geometric growth potential. (2) Can an exceptional adaptation be inhibited to remain within the restraints of the biological world and still be exceptional?  Other species with powerful adaptations fit into the biological order, but none have been as revolutionary as this one. (3) The Consciousness Order adaptation contains the enigmatic capacity of awareness with the seeming potential to decide how to use our adaptation; how might we, and can we, decide to self-limit our total impact on the biological world?

Our actual exceptionalness fuels the dangerous Exceptionalism of our behaviors and beliefs.  This is really tricky: We are truly exceptional with the most powerful adaptation, as far we know, in the whole universe, yet for the survival of our world we need to be humble in the face of our completely obvious totally huge outrageous wonderfulness.  Basically, we can do anything we want and it seems that nothing can stop us.  We have learned the rules of physics – except for a few that we will get soon enough.  We are learning to make genes dance for us.  We can suck the energy right off the sun and stuff it into computers that can do a billion billion calculations a second.  We’ve got TV and refrigerators.  Perhaps there really is no reason that we should be humble!

Except for one little thing; well, maybe two or three.  The surface of the earth is the ultimate Exception in the universe, not us. We humans are only passengers on, and in, a space that is among the most rare of physical stabilities. Even in the fullest explosion of our hubris there is no way that we could, with our own efforts, make the earth’s surface a living place or sustain it if the subtle designs of our solar system began to change.  We, as the saying goes, ‘live at the pleasure’ of our biosphere. That is Reality.

And yet, we do not act in that reality.  Consistently failing to believe and function in The Real is insanity.  The natural Exceptionalism of a species to act in its own interests (this a part of the living condition and not to be confused with its counterpart in the Consciousness Order) is compounded by our ability to tell stories about how special we are.  The design of belief as a guide for behavior allows us to hold such stories as truth… and voilà: Human Exceptionalism at a pathological level.  Our real and remarkable capacities lead us to believe in imagined powers far beyond our true relationship with our world.  A thing of great power, with little appreciation for the consequences of that power and almost no ability to control itself is a great danger to itself and others.

There are, of course, many ways that we are not exceptional.  Our form and function are biologically based, we are animals with an evolutionary history that powerfully guides our behaviors.  We are food for other organisms just as other organisms are food for us – part of the food web.  Plants supply us, along with every other aerobic organism, with oxygen and glucose (at base, the only food there is on earth); there is no other source. 

It is unimaginable that a “primitive” tribal community could forget that they depend on the land, water and air to sustain them and yet we “moderns” forget; we even argue that it somehow isn’t so. Almost nothing could be crazier.  There is no question that the vastly complex societies in which we live separate us and seem to protect us from an unfamiliar and potentially dangerous natural world upon which we depend. 

That world is difficult to know about and to care about when we have so little experience of it, when we have so little occasion to learn to love it: When the cost of food is going up, the mortgage payment is a little harder to get together each month and your kid gets sick.  Some tiny disembodied half-figure yells from the TV screen that the problems will be fixed if you let them control the world, or some part of it.  It seems silly, with such pressures, to think about plants making the oxygen that we breathe.  Truly, the Madness is compelling.  Ask any recovered madman or addict.

My argument is not to change the world.  There is no way to move from the Madness that envelops our societies and our species.  I think our trajectory is set.  But I recognize this understanding in hundreds of people, and know that there are millions and even possible billions that feel these things; people who suspect that what they see and live is madness; wonder at their own sanity for wondering about the world they live in.  I want to say to them that there is a way to live with at least some dignity and with less than more of Madness.

Life has always been a crapshoot.  But living as a full member of the species of your birth can make it a purposeful and fulfilling one – no matter how it goes down.  It can be done!  Every one of us has the human pedigree. We were all born as full-fledged members of the honorable human, hominid, primate, mammalian, vertebrate, animal, multicellular, living lineage.  We all have the absolute right to specieshood, it is really our only inalienable right; and it is the basis from which we can act with sanity for a sustainable biosphere. It should inform our political and economic actions and responsibilities. And that would make us very special indeed.

We have been led to this pass in part by the sense of our exception from nature.  And yet the greatest expression of our powers would be in reconnecting with the realities of the biophysical order.  If one or a hundred successfully recover their specieshood, there is no gain for all, though there is for each of them.  If it should be a thousand or a million not only is the quality of their lives better – even in a dangerous world – but more might discover how to join in.   The realist in me says that the personal gain is well worth the effort, but there is no hope for the multitudes of us.  The dreamer says that this is the only way: discover and become again a member of your own species, and if enough succeed the world will be changed.

Being Aware of Awareness

Preamble: There is but one paradox: that there can be paradoxes; all the rest are the spawn of this one.  Just as with the equations of General Relativity, the very most potentially interesting explorations give impossible solutions.  Awareness is “impossible,” yet it is what informs these words and allows the passing on of these “ideas” to another nervous system.  Our only “solution” has been to assume that the universe, itself, is aware, that some how this capacity of matter has been concentrated in the human species to such an extent that we have generated the whole consciousness process.  But, of course, this is just easy foolishness: the first second-level paradox is that awareness is the only tool with which to study awareness.

Awareness is compellingly real, but is not directly observable.  The physiological counterparts are broadly obvious – brain is necessary and electrical/chemical action can be correlated in various ways.  There is every reason to believe that nervous system processes are causal. But, what does it mean when a measurable process “causes” something as insubstantial as awareness?

The evolution of structures, processes and behaviors can offer some clues: Bird flight became possible because of the design of the down covering of the nascent temperature regulating of dinosaurs.  Bones are owed to cartilage framed fishes needing to store calcium for trips into calcium poor freshwater, as a way to avoid sea predators – added stiffness, along with an equally complexly originated structure, the swim bladder, allowed for the teleost fishes to be so successful; and created the base from which came the land vertebrates.

Awareness may be of analogous origin.  But before considering that option; one of the most common arguments made today is that awareness (often considered equivalent to consciousness) is the natural consequence of complexity and thus even attributable to cells (or perhaps even responsive protein).  There are many occasions when increases of quantity result in a change of quality – too much of an essential nutrient can turn it into a poison – and examples in which changes in quantity retains a relationship with quality, i.e., the more quantity the more quality (within the normal range of occurrence).  However, it is more likely, when this argument is used for awareness, that several aspects of responsiveness and behavior are being conflated.

The vast majority of living responsiveness is more parsimoniously analogized with a lever than with what we call conscious agency.  Evolutionary process is, itself (even with the newest understandings of genetic complexities and integrations of function), ultimately driven by the relatively simple proposition that the phenotype must perform satisfactorily in the totality of the ambient environment to remain alive and to send its genotype on to the next generation.  The new evidence that the genotype can be more directly responsive to selected aspects of the environment doesn’t change that basic formulation.

Homo sapiens, and very possibly other members of the genus, began using information in a new and unprecedentedly powerful way.  I call this the Consciousness System of Order (CSO) and treat it as a design of order, not as a subjective product of nervous system complexity.  And while there is ample to play with in this less ambitious model, we have not even begun to recognize or explore this potentially comprehensible idea, rather we are drawn to the confusions and paradoxes of being aware of our world.

It is here that I have to attempt to disarticulate consciousness and awareness.  It is clear that other species from other genera and families, even other classes and possibly other phyla, have some elements of awareness, but significantly do not function within the CSO [1].

The great apes, the dogs and even complex mollusks like octopus show behaviors that suggest awareness, that is, they “rush” to the solution of problems without going through (obvious) random problem solving processes; and these solutions seem to be mediated by learning: stored experience seems to organized in such a way that it can be quickly scanned and options selected relevant to the perceived problem.  While this may not suit everyone’s notion of awareness it does describe the behaviors that we humans typically judge as “aware” behavior in ourselves and other organisms: that is, complex, situation relevant behaviors that are not organized and driven solely by genetically based instinct or random actions stumbling on to behavioral solutions [2].

There are great advantages and great dangers in approaching life with the various forms of “awareness.”  Instinct has been genetically tested, random actions are not fooled by misperceptions, but when the nervous system is organized to sort through experiences related to the present ambient perceptions, appropriate behaviors can be formed far more rapidly than by any other method when dealing with a complex environment.  Or… the organism can be misled, guided in directions so misdirected that behaviors systematically fail when selected by “aware” solutions.  There is nothing about awareness that assures veridicality.  In fact, awareness is the only source of disconnection from Reality.

* * *

Awareness is such a consistent feature of our experience that it is impossible to imagine an experiential life in any other form, but experience, in the broadest sense of information storage and change in response to events, is a feature of all living things.  Even our subjective experience of “knowing about” and “evaluating” perceptual and thought events may very well not be unique to humans.  When my son’s dog “wants” to play ‘chase the ball’ she first brings me a ball and drops it at my feet, then, if I make no appropriate response, she touches the ball with her nose and ‘dances’ a bit with her front legs.  That failing she then pushes the ball toward me usually bouncing it off my foot and then chases it for the foot or two that it rolls.  And finally she will try to set the ball on my foot.

This is unlike the instinctual behavior of a sandwasp that digs a hole, finds and stings a spider, returns to hole, plants the spider with her egg in the bottom, covers the hole and flies away; if the wasp is interrupted in any way it must start over again from the beginning. The dog can pick up her behavior at any point in the normal sequence, change the sequence in response to my actions, extend or shorten parts, leave at any point or opportunistically take advantage of circumstances to press her case, like setting the ball on top of me without any of the preliminaries if I lie down on the ground.

All of my ‘operational’ assessments of awareness are meet, short of the dog saying, “Hey you, get off your butt and throw the damned ball.”  And she almost does that by getting agitated, when ignored, to the point of making snappy little barks.  I have, therefore, reason to believe that she is seeing the world in designs around her desires in ways not remarkably dissimilar to mine other than that I filter my perceptions through the artifice of language.

It is not unreasonable to suspect that the subjective experience of awareness, that we even more reasonably believe to be common to almost all humans, is experienced in varyingly similar forms by many other creatures with complex nervous systems.  Certain other species may, possibly, experience direct environmental awareness to a greater intensity than typical of most humans since we run so much of our “awareness” through the variously distorting veil of language processes.

* * *

If awareness existed only in the human species, its consideration would be deeply problematic; but since it is completely reasonable – even compelling – to assume that awareness has an evolutionary history, then we might usefully apply the typical biological questions to its development and function.  We may still be at our limits to understand awareness directly – as we might, say, understand the function of the immune system – but we can, perhaps, recognize (I have to avoid saying things like ‘be made aware of’) the naturalistic and functional origins of a biological capacity with survival value.

This separates awareness from the Consciousness System of Order, which, while it requires awareness processes, is a completely new way of identifying, selecting, organizing, storing, distributing and implementing information; and is unique to our genus.

[1] If everyone had a different name for everything, the discovery of the process of evolution or any other systematic process would have been unlikely if not impossible; we need to have a consistent (and accurate) taxonomy of consciousness experience in order to develop a veridical theory and understanding of awareness and consciousness processes.

[2] For science and philosophy to deal with an idea the terms of that idea must be operationalized, that is, they must be defined as objectively measurable behaviors.  It needs to be realized that general considerations of ideas do the same the thing only without transparency; each person has “operations,” often in the form of analogies, underpinning concepts and ideas that are believed to be broadly understood, but deeper examination usually shows that common terms are not supported by the same analogies, metaphors or other operators for the ideas. 

“Good” science and philosophy operationalizes concepts in ways that thoughtful people can understand and often agree with; “bad” science and philosophy operationalizes concepts with behaviors that don’t apply meaningfully to the concepts.  This has been an especially difficult problem for the concept of awareness.  There are people who don’t want any organism other than modern humans (and supernatural beings!) to be aware and so they operationalize the meaning of awareness in conditions that only humans can meet.  The goal should be to operationalize awareness in behaviors that best distinguish it from the behaviors that are central to other concepts.

Human Happiness

There is a longstanding disputation between the acquisition of material comforts and possessions and the attainment of personal and interpersonal happiness; but even as we might write about or think about these things symmetrically, they are not at all in symmetry.  It is possible to attain material possessions while having little or no personal or social happiness; on the other hand, it is impossible to attain happiness without some reasonable, though often small, measure of material comfort and safety.  This difference is at the root of a terrible confusion.

Because some level of material ‘wealth’ is necessary for happiness, a weakness in human logic accepts the possibility that increases in wealth might be the very basis of that happiness: if a little wealth is required to be happy, then perhaps greater wealth will allow even greater happiness…because, ultimately it is happiness, in all its various forms, that we desire to be the primary condition of our lives. 

Who would not agree with this: “If I could be fully satisfied with the conditions of my life, comfortable with its past and happy with its continuing form, there is little more that I could think to wish for beyond perhaps having these experiences with a pleasurable passion.”  Since this leaves out any detail of what might insure these forms of happiness, I might be led to assume that any opportunities in life that would lead to the greatest personal satisfaction would be our most desired options.

But, you can imagine that many people would say: “If I had to choose between the perfect new car and being really happy, I’d pick being happy for sure!”  Then they go right on doing a wage-slave job with an authoritarian boss, damaging their health with stress and lack of sleep, and try to soothe their discomfort by getting the perfect new car. 

Their neighbors see the early moments of excitement and pleasure and assume that the new car really made them happy, since even though they live only a few feet away they have never talked about anything of personal importance.  Its ‘Joe Versus the Volcano’ without the (unhappy) rich guy sending Joe on an ocean trip with a (unhappy) beautiful woman.

Of course, it is not this simple, while, of course, being just this simple.  First, the not so simple part: the complexities of the world that we have made – for we have made it, there is no getting away from that – have made the discovery of and the recognition of happiness and satisfaction difficult, even without the temptations of material possessions. A remarkably large number of people don’t even know what happiness is or what they might do to pursue it.

This has come about by both accident and design. The accident is that humans have the capacity to change faster than they can keep up, but do not have the capacity to realize it or to slow down; of course, some individuals do, just not the species as a whole.  The design is that a confused, unhappy public is much easier to prey upon than an engaged, informed public.  The accident is that as the world gets more complex due to our numbers, technologies, economics and politics the effort required to keep the public grounded in reality grows exponentially and finally beyond possibility.  The design is that the power of the masses is nullified by their confusion and disarray to the studied advantage of an elite; an elite no more grounded in reality, but more organized to dominate – controlling the world is their ‘new car.’

And just as simple…  The life in the body is the same life that animated a Cro-Magnon, the same life that first crossed the Bering land bridge, the same life that buried the dead of the black plaque, the same life that marched with Grant or Lee to Appomattox, the same life that gave birth to all the billions born and the same life as in all the billions born.

We cannot live life for another, we never could.  If we take the abundance of life that we are born with and demand that it have opportunity, we will be living in a way to honor those that carried life to us through the struggles of time.  We are born without a promise other than the chance to live as the species that we are; the rest is peacock feathers and foolishness.

Understanding in this way will not change the world, but may change your life; and changing your life is the only way to change the world.  If you stay the same and most others follow suit, then how ‘in the world’ could there be any change?  If change is left to others, then the changes will derive from their understanding, needs and desires, not yours.

See your life as large; it has come to you from 4 billion years of unbroken struggle and determination, through the billions of individual lives and the millions of species that formed it and allowed it to be.  Realize what it is for; it is not to be miserable, but blissful, and if it is not blissful – and in these times it will often not be – then begin the process of discovery to make your life as happy and blissful as possible in this time.  A hint to begin: blissfulness will not come by doing more of what makes you miserable.