All posts by anomalogue

Naive realism

When we show someone a new way to see something, we not only call attention to new aspects of that thing, but also show how it looks if we downplay or disregard other aspects.

In other words, learning a new perspective means unlearning to emphasize what we are accustomed to emphasizing. It means remapping one’s sense of relevance.

This runs counter to many conceptions of learning, which understands knowledge to be a cumulative process. More and more facts are gathered and systematized according to one’s existing conceptions. But this kind of factual accumulation serves only to reinforce the conception by which the knowledge has been ordered.

It is incredibly difficult to unlearn this cumulative conception of learning, and many people are entirely unable to do it. This inability is called “naive realism”. Naive realists confuse their own perspective with reality itself, and therefore think without empathic considerations.

When large groups share a common naive realist perspective, they are unable to learn anything new. They can continue to absorb facts, but they cannot absorb them in any new way that places them in different relationships. They collectively ignore what doesn’t make sense to them, agreeing among themselves that it is nonsense with no sense to understand. And they also agree that what they what does make sense to them collectively is correctly understood, which means looking into the matter further is a waste of time. And because they fail to look into things with any rigor or thoroughness, they fail to see any evidence of the inadequacy of their understandings.

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When we as individuals are unsure of our opinion, what do we do? We check in with our neighbor. When we as members of an organization are unsure of our organizational opinion, what do we do? We check in with our neighbor, a fellow member of our organization. This is the basic mechanism of mass insanity: “Madness is rare in individuals–but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.”

What if the ordinary naive realism of the business world is such a form of mass insanity? What if the very mode of naive realism we teach our children in schools, reinforce in our popular culture and news media, and enforce in the workplace is a self-destructive delusion?

What if? To anyone not caught up in it, it is obvious.

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To naive realists, other people are understood in the factual manner one understands everything. Learn what behaviors they perform, what goals and what opinions influence the behaviors, in what context these behaviors are performed and how that context influences the behavior, and add it all to the stock of one’s knowledge. Oh — and don’t forget feelings: now we’re empathic because we’ve added subjective experience to the mix.

Our very conception of subjectivity is distorted by our naive realism.

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The irony of naive realism: in moderation this intellectual impairment appears to be an attractive personality characteristic. This is because naive realism permits a greater concentration of will.

Naive realists have powerful convictions, act decisively, speak plainly without equivocation or qualifications, and stay the course, even when those with invalid opinions question them.

We reward naive realism with power and respect.

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“The Second Coming”

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

– W. B. Yeats

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Actually, naive realism is not the problem. It is completely necessary that the majority of people be naive realists.

The problem always lies in the specific mode of naive realism. From time to time, for the continuance of culture, reality must be reconceived, which means the naive realists must be provided with a new, fresher, more productive, less destructive conception of reality, which must be mistaken for reality itself. Without this basic faith, humanity would lack all will and would never move mountains, build cities, establish institutions — or even make art of any kind, including philosophy. But reality is a living thing. It is born from an older reality, lives, has children, but eventually dies. Conservatives will keep the old reality alive at all costs, even if it means that reality must be forcibly sustained against nature, on an iron lung of dittoed conviction and selective eye blurring.

Project(ion)

Who a person is determines what he makes of things.

Give a research project to three different people with three different temperaments, you’ll get three different results based on how each person views what he is doing.

A project manager will make a research project into the orderly execution of a process. The activities, the output and the sign-off are all milestones to be reached.

A designer will make a research project into the creation of a deliverable. The research findings populate the diagram, and give it content.

A scientist will make a research project into a gathering of verifiable and defensible facts.

A philosopher will make a research project into an opportunity to learn something new. Everything that is done is turned into acquisition of knowledge — preferably disruptive knowledge that reveals old understandings to be insufficient or outright wrong.

A businessman — assuming he is actually a businessman, and not a project manager, designer, scientist or philosopher — will make research into something that helps his business, either through the discovery of opportunities or the uncovering of flaws or the development of a better understanding of his business’ stakeholders.

Intimacy

Discussing one’s life story, beliefs, hopes and loves over a candle-light dinner is far less intimate than collaborating on a shared practical life problem — which is why most people prefer the former to the latter, and it is also why soul-mates get divorces.

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Without active involvement in the world with others, subjectivity is limited to the self. This is why those who need to cultivate their faith withdraw from practical life.

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The collaborations that most demand intimacy are the ones that cause the most anxiety, and arouse the strongest aggressive impulses. In such cases, whoever is in a position of power will be faced with the temptation to impose his own vision on the situation and force others involved in it to accept it whether they like it or not.

 

How to make the world a better place

Imagine a world where we are all finally living together harmoniously under the best form of government. A world where people can live the lives they really deserve. A world where children are well-educated and well-parented. A world where the market shapes our lives to the degree it ought to, and is regulated only where regulation is helpful. A world where employers are fair to their employees. A world where we have solved the problems of healthcare and unreasonable tax policies. A world where individuals and communities are granted their rights of self-determination within appropriate limits. A world where each individual behaves virtuously, as instructed by correctly interpreted holy scripture. A world where humankind and nature and divinity are put in their proper order. A world where we take seriously only the true claims of science and reject the pseudo-science of ideologues. A world where the bad guys have been vanquished, and the good guys are firmly in charge.

Who could imagine such a world and not want to make it a reality?

If we are serious about making this happen we will need an army of well-trained scientists, mathematicians and technologists capable of bringing it about.

It is time to get serious about education.

Midas

Education has been touched by the Midas finger and made into vocational training. Children are taught to do useful things that make large quantities of money for themselves and others. And of course, professors are also expected to bring in grant money. Universities are businesses, albeit businesses of a special kind. Like all businesses, universities need money. This is why most university presidents spend more time thinking about fund-raising than education. When you set sentimentality aside and think about it rationally, which is more crucial to the existence of a university, money or education?

Government has been turned to solid gold. It is an instrument of collective economic prosperity — prosperity for its own sake.

And of course business has always existed to make money for its owners and employees. What other purpose could business serve, besides making money?

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(Sometimes idealists claim that businesses should serve some purpose higher than profits. But businesses that do not make money do not survive. To claim that businesses do not exist to make money is as absurd as claiming that human beings do not exist to breathe air.)

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In a world made entirely of gold, gold can only buy more gold.

 

Foreign occupation

I’m pretty sure most people welcome having an occupation, because they have nothing else to occupy their time, and human nature abhors a vacuum. Such people cannot comprehend how anyone could mind being assigned a purpose.

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When people occupy me with tasks they want done according to their defined procedures, or with making products they want made to their defined specifications, that is an occupation of my time, of my energy, of my mind and of my self-identity that I welcome just about as much as a nation welcomes an occupation by a foreign power.

Maybe the etymology of the world “occupation” can shed some light on the essence of its meaning.

ORIGIN Middle English : formed irregularly from Old French occuper, from Latin occupare ‘seize.’ A now obsolete vulgar sense, to have sexual relations with, seems to have led to the general avoidance of the word in the 17th and most of the 18th cent.

That sounds about right.

How truth loves

A question from a couple of weeks ago:

Nietzsche asks: “Supposing truth is a woman–what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? that the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman’s heart?”

At which point we must ask: What does it look like when one has won the heart of truth? What does it look like when truth rejects one’s advances? What kind of truth is it that can return love?

 

One answer: when we approach truth with our ideas, and our ideas are absorbed by truth and seem intrinsic to truth — when our conceptions develop into perceptions — that is when the thinker’s love is requited.

When we insist on imposing our conceptions on truth, and we disregard how we perceive reality and prefer our explanations to our primary experience, truth does not love us.

In other words, authentic metanoia* is the requited love of truth.

Dogmatic faith of the kind that is held despite contrary evidence of perception (isn’t this the popular definition of “faith”?), as much as it pretends to be love of truth, is in fact nothing more than love of one’s own preferred image of truth. And as anyone who exalts this type of “faith” will tell you, truth does not change, and continues to defy and betray us at every opportunity. The truth we experience — the “truth of this world” — is contrasted with the reality of the “world to come” which will not betray us and cannot betray us.

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Metanoia is a Greek word commonly translated as “repentance”. It literally means “after knowing”. It is a re-knowing of truth that changes one’s relationship to life as a whole, theoretically, practically, morally and aesthetically.

Philosophy in business

When a problem obviously exists, but clarity to articulate it is lacking, no amount of effort in solving the problem will produce a solution. It only produces more unclarity.

But this does not stop us. We create tons of alternative clarity to distract us. We execute clearly defined processes in clearly defined plans. We produce clearly defined documents. We follow clearly defined best practices. We define objectives, key performance indicators, metrics, scorecards and track to those rather than think about whether the problem (whatever it is) is actually resolved or just ignored.

Anything to avoid struggling honestly with an undefined, unarticulated, yet clearly existent problem. This kind of struggle is philosophy, and very few people care to deal with it, even so far as to admit it is ever valuable, or even necessary.

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Wittgenstein: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.'”

Philosophy’s response to such situations is to learn — and not learn particular facts, but rather to learn to make sense of the facts that exist, because the problem is not incomplete facts, but how we are attempting to make sense of those facts.

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If you think about it, philosophy and innovation have a lot in common. They’re both about new and unfamiliar ground — about seeing things in a new way.

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Occasionally a charitable soul tries to scrounges for something good to say about philosophy, and says “philosophy teaches people how to think clearly” as if it is like logical QA for ideas. But that is an unphilosophical misunderstanding.

Philosophy, when it is actually philosophy, teaches us how to think about things we don’t yet know how to think about. But understanding what “thinking about things we don’t yet know how to think about” means itself requires philosophical understanding. It presupposes a level of insight into how thinking is done, and how thinking participates in our perceptions of the world and our experience of life.

So maybe it would be better just to say: when something’s going seriously wrong but in a way you can’t quite pin down, and nobody can communicate to anyone else without causing unaccountably intense distress, and everyone wants to follow a different course of action for different reasons, but nobody can agree on which reasons are most relevant — hire a philosopher, even if you don’t know what the hell he could possibly do about any of it.

Einstein quote

“‘The external conditions’, writes Einstein, ‘which are set for [the scientist] by the facts of experience do not permit him to let himself be too much restricted, in the construction of his conceptual world, by the adherence to an epistemological system. He, therefore, must appear to the systematic epistemologist as a type of unscrupulous opportunist…'”

The autistic organization

It is interesting that Temple Grandin naturally sympathizes with animals, and through this sympathy has been able to design better experiences for them, while remaining unable to sympathize with “neurotypical” human beings.

With great effort, she has been able to derive rules to help her interact with other people and make sense of their behavior in a highly exteriorized way, resembling a physicist’s understanding of the behavior of matter under different conditions. But for all her diligent observing, pattern-finding and rule formulation, she cannot empathize. She has said that when she is in the presence of “neurotypicals” she feels like “an anthropologist on Mars”.

This offers some clues on the precise difference between empathy and sympathy. It is not that Grandin lacks all capacity for sympathy and intersubjective relationship. She easily sympathizes with animals, in a way many others find nearly miraculous. It is that she is sympathetic only to forms of subjectivity that resemble her own.

“Neurotypical” subjectivity on the other hand has greater capacity to acquire a degree of intuitive intersubjective relationship with people unlike themselves. But this is built on a foundation of sympathy. Neurotypicals intuitively sympathize with the empathic intuition of other neurotypicals. Both parties understand — or assume — that a mutual intuitive understanding is being sought — that each is attempting to intuit the other’s intuition. This assumption is false in the case of Grandin, who has no experience of this kind of mutual coming to understanding, and so she seems strange and can be misinterpreted as rude, and all sympathy is withheld.

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In my experience, organizations tend to be oblivious to all perspectives other than that of its industry. Some fortunate organizations serve customers like themselves, who already share their perspective. Here, the organization naturally sympathizes with its customers in the way Grandin sympathizes with cattle. Other organizations are in industries so powerful, with so few real alternatives, (such as insurance, medicine, and government) that customers are forced to learn their perspective in order to deal with them. This kind of organization doesn’t have to sympathize.

But other companies differ from their customers and suffer from it. Though they are blind to the fact that perspectival differences exist at all (let alone differ) — they usually become aware of the material consequences of the difference. For instance, they may start to lose market share to more sensitive, responsive organizations, despite having an equivalent offering.

If such companies attempt to acquire an understanding of customers, more often than not they acquire an externalized, rule-based, explicit understanding similar to that of a high-functioning autistic person. That is, acquire only the kind of objective data that Grandin would seek.  Indeed most organizations work very hard to function as autistically as possible. Or to put a more positive spin on it, they strive to be scientific. To the greatest possible extent, they execute according to defined formal processes, guided all the way by validated objective facts. Whatever is “merely” intuitive, whatever cannot be operationalized, quantified and measured, is rejected on principle. Implicit, language-resistant understandings, like tacit know-how, feelings, aesthetic sensibilities and values — precisely the stuff empathy needs  — are filtered out by the processes, or distorted into facts for easier comprehension and handling.

And as a consequence, many organizations begin to take on the personality characteristics of the stereotypical physicist. Their movements are stiff, calculated and unnatural — simultaneously excessively self-conscious and self-unaware. And they also have the same rule-fixations, the same overpowering need for repetition, regularity and predictability that autistic people tend to display. These are not qualities normally associated with charm and charisma.

But no problem. At the last minute, the marketing department comes in and dresses the physicist up in a Hawaiian shirt, slathers his head with hair gel, teaches him teenage hipster slang, and gives him a crash course in pick-up artistry. Off he goes into the world, to acquire customers.

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If companies wish to learn to empathize with customers, they will have to unlearn a lot of 17th and 18th century philosophical prejudices, and learn the new art of organizational dialogue.

 

Can truth love?

Nietzsche asks: “Supposing truth is a woman–what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? that the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman’s heart?”

At which point we must ask: What does it look like when one has won the heart of truth? What does it look like when truth rejects one’s advances? What kind of truth is it that can return love?

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When we face an enemy, we concern ourselves with the enemy’s mind. Understanding his mind is a means to the end of anticipating his actions. Respecting our enemy makes us stronger opponents.

When we love, we are concerned with actions as a means to the end of understanding someone’s mind. Love pursues the significance of every word and act, for the sake of what is behind it.

Lust, as much as it might resemble love, is actually more similar to the attitude one takes toward an enemy.

Three non-goals

When I try to figure out what is worth living for and sacrificing for, I find it hard to put into words. The more the manifest sense of meaning is actually present, the less tempted I am to try.

But I can say with complete certainty that the three grand goals most within reach, the three most tempting answers to the question “Why?”, are false, however satisfactorily solid they feel in the hand of comprehension. These are goals founded on 1) magical speculation, 2) sound biological functioning (a.k.a. health or comfort), or 3) the acquisition of social/political/economic power.

When we offer these goals as justification for our actions we find approval and company in the world, and we find the goals achievable.

What, How, Why, Who

What: Facts can be memorized and recalled.

How: Skills can be practiced and used.

Why: Meaning is ephemeral. It comes and goes as it will. We must petition it to return to us.

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We possess What and How.

Why possesses us.

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Many of us believe only in What and How.

What and How are always at hand when we reach for them, and the fingers of the comprehending mind can wrap comfortably around them. Why is incomprehensible. According to comprehension Why is nonexistent.

Or sometimes What and How conspire to verbalize Why, and then confound the verbal image with that to which it points.

What and How present a pseudo-why of What I must believe and How I must behave.

“Why?” Because of cause and effect. “Why?” Because this is what works best. “Why?” Because that is how it is. “Why?” Because I said so.

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Why is heard and felt. Why moves us to words and actions. But Why is never reducible to words or actions.

Why cannot be justified.

Why justifies.

Why is justification.

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Who — how does this relate to Why, How and What? You’ll rarely see Who discussed when this triad is framed out.

Back to ethics

Understanding of alterity — the understanding of that which is “not I”, whether it takes the form of intersubjectivity or of objectivity (which is, in my opinion, simply a form of mediated intersubjectivity) — is a crucial matter. However, it is just as crucial not to allow concern for “the Other” to drag a thinker back into the old antithesis of self-vs-other. That line of thought inevitably leads to the modern disease of spasmodically oscillating between the antithetical extremes of autism and borderline.

What each of us must do is relate our own experience as we really experience it (trickier than it sounds!) to that which points beyond it, without slipping from methodological “bracketing” into practical denial, and without sliding outward into self-alienation in the name of service.

This relating/integrating activity, the attempt to conceive what it is that makes knowing and living worthwhile, and considering how to actualize it practically and concretely, not shortsightedly, but in the longest terms possible, which means involving others in that actualization — (this is where alterity enters the scene) — is the practice of ethics.

Below is a series of passages offered as support for ethical remojofication…

Continue reading Back to ethics

Confabulation

Jonathan Haidt, in The Happiness Hypothesis describes a fascinating psychological phenomenon called confabulation:

A second division was discovered by accident in the 1960s when a surgeon began cutting people’s brains in half. The surgeon, Joe Bogen, had a good reason for doing this: He was trying to help people whose lives were destroyed by frequent and massive epileptic seizures. The human brain has two separate hemispheres joined by a large bundle of nerves, the corpus callosum. Seizures always begin at one spot in the brain and spread to the surrounding brain tissue. If a seizure crosses over the corpus callosum, it can spread to the entire brain, causing the person to lose consciousness, fall down, and writhe uncontrollably. Just as a military leader might blow up a bridge to prevent an enemy from crossing it, Bogen wanted to sever the corpus callosum to prevent the seizures from spreading.

At first glance this was an insane tactic. The corpus callosum is the largest single bundle of nerves in the entire body, so it must be doing something important. Indeed it is: It allows the two halves of the brain to communicate and coordinate their activity. Yet research on animals found that, within a few weeks of surgery, the animals were pretty much back to normal. So Bogen took a chance with human patients, and it worked. The intensity of the seizures was greatly reduced.

But was there really no loss of ability? To find out, the surgical team brought in a young psychologist, Michael Gazzaniga, whose job was to look for the after-effects of this “split-brain” surgery. Gazzaniga took advantage of the fact that the brain divides its processing of the world into its two hemispheres — left and right. The left hemisphere takes in information from the right half of the world (that is, it receives nerve transmissions from the right arm and leg, the right ear, and the left half of each retina, which receives light from the right half of the visual field) and sends out commands to move the limbs on the right side of the body. The right hemisphere is in this respect the left’s mirror image, taking in information from the left half of the world and controlling movement on the left side of the body. Nobody knows why the signals cross over in this way in all vertebrates; they just do. But in other respects, the two hemispheres are specialized for different tasks. The left hemisphere is specialized for language processing and analytical tasks. In visual tasks, it is better at noticing details. The right hemisphere is better at processing patterns in space, including that all-important pattern, the face. (This is the origin of popular and oversimplified ideas about artists being “right-brained” and scientists being “left-brained”).

Gazzaniga used the brain’s division of labor to present information to each half of the brain separately. He asked patients to stare at a spot on a screen, and then flashed a word or a picture of an object just to the right of the spot, or just to the left, so quickly that there was not enough time for the patient to move her gaze. If a picture of a hat was flashed just to the right of the spot, the image would register on the left half of each retina (after the image had passed through the cornea and been inverted), which then sent its neural information back to the visual processing areas in the left hemisphere. Gazzaniga would then ask, “What did you see?” Because the left hemisphere has full language capabilities, the patient would quickly and easily say, “A hat.” If the image of the hat was flashed to the left of the spot, however, the image was sent back only to the right hemisphere, which does not control speech. When Gazzaniga asked, “What did you see?”, the patient, responding from the left hemisphere, said, “Nothing.” But when Gazzaniga asked the patient to use her left hand to point to the correct image on a card showing several images, she would point to the hat. Although the right hemisphere had indeed seen the hat, it did not report verbally on what it had seen because it did not have access to the language centers in the left hemisphere. It was as if a separate intelligence was trapped in the right hemisphere, its only output device the left hand.

When Gazzaniga flashed different pictures to the two hemispheres, things grew weirder. On one occasion he flashed a picture of a chicken claw on the right, and a picture of a house and a car covered in snow on the left. The patient was then shown an array of pictures and asked to point to the one that “goes with” what he had seen. The patient’s right hand pointed to a picture of a chicken (which went with the chicken claw the left hemisphere had seen), but the left hand pointed to a picture of a shovel (which went with the snow scene presented to the right hemisphere). When the patient was asked to explain his two responses, he did not say, “I have no idea why my left hand is pointing to a shovel; it must be something you showed my right brain.” Instead, the left hemisphere instantly made up a plausible story. The patient said, without any hesitation, “Oh, that’s easy. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.”

This finding, that people will readily fabricate reasons to explain their own behavior, is called “confabulation.” Confabulation is so frequent in work with split-brain patients and other people suffering brain damage that Gazzaniga refers to the language centers on the left side of the brain as the interpreter module, whose job is to give a running commentary on whatever the self is doing, even though the interpreter module has no access to the real causes or motives of the self’s behavior. For example, if the word “walk” is flashed to the right hemisphere, the patient might stand up and walk away. When asked why he is getting up, he might say, “I’m going to get a Coke.” The interpreter module is good at making up explanations, but not at knowing that it has done so.

Science has made even stranger discoveries. In some split-brain patients, or in others who have suffered damage to the corpus callosum, the right hemisphere seems to be actively fighting with the left hemisphere in a condition known as alien hand syndrome. In these cases, one hand, usually the left, acts of its own accord and seems to have its own agenda. The alien hand may pick up a ringing phone, but then refuse to pass the phone to the other hand or bring it up to an ear. The hand rejects choices the person has just made, for example, by putting back on the rack a shirt that the other hand has just picked out. It grabs the wrist of the other hand and tries to stop it from executing the person’s conscious plans. Sometimes, the alien hand actually reaches for the person’s own neck and tries to strangle him.

These dramatic splits of the mind are caused by rare splits of the brain. Normal people are not split-brained. Yet the split-brain studies were important in psychology because they showed in such an eerie way that the mind is a confederation of modules capable of working independently and even, sometimes, at cross-purposes. Split-brain studies are important for this book because they show in such a dramatic way that one of these modules is good at inventing convincing explanations for your behavior, even when it has no knowledge of the causes of your behavior. Gazzaniga’s “interpreter module” is, essentially, the rider.

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My current interest in confabulation is related to the everyday conflict I observe in the business world between linear, rational, formal processes (left hemisphere thinking) and nonlinear, informal creative processes (right hemisphere thinking), and the tendency for left hemisphere thinking to explain successes very much in terms of its own contributions, even when the success has little to do with them — or even despite them.  I am thinking about the role of administrators in education, the role of process in research and creative ideation.

 

Fresh realities

One thing that I find nearly impossible to get across to some people is that I never theorize for the sake of theory.

My thinking is urgent. I am trying to find ways to articulate realities that lack language, but which have a deep impact on the quality of my life.

For the majority of people, if you can’t talk straightforwardly about something, it is “subjective”, which means it is non-existent, and outside the bounds of reason. Where words are lacking, no appeals can be made.

My suspicion and hope is that many people experience these realities, but do not experience them as true, because nobody realizes that anyone else experiences them. The same realities sit mute inside all of us, denied all social existence.

Or, sometimes they find a sort of social existence in the realm of literature. There people intimate sharedness of such experiences, but nothing is done to establish them socially, because to do so necessarily coarsens them. But the belief that what is discovered in art, belongs forever in art is to keep our infants imprisoned forever in the nursery out of fear that the weather will toughen their skin. The infant skin of indirect expression must, if it is to have life in the world must toughen up its hide with words that can refer to shared conceptions of roughly analogous realities. And yes — it loses its suppleness and its specificity, but that loss does not come without compensatory gains. As Ricoeur pointed out, polysemy is not a simple lack of precision, but is essential to language. It seems almost cynical to say it, but it might be that the popularity of an idea depends not only on the ability for people to understand it, but also to misunderstand it. It is this that gives it its range. (It is the failure to appreciate the necessity of this misunderstanding that has made so many religions granulate over theological differences.)

Art speaks very specifically about particular things — things that have escaped notice, but which have become significant to the artist — and in doing so inaugurates its reality as something (to some degree) shared. Without shared specific realities, no general realities — no truth — can be conceived, and nothing can be said of it that makes sense to anyone.

We speak to one another about sadness and anger and love all the time, and understand well enough what these words mean, and to refer to them is socially consequential. But whose sadness or anger or love is identical? To find finer identities or to be shown as-yet-unfamiliar nuances of these experiences we go to high art. (To not find them, and to stay strictly within the realm of our own familiar experiences we go to popular art. * See note below.)

So, yes, I know a philosophical handling of delicate things makes them tougher, cruder, more brutish. But this is what it means to mature into something that can survive in a tough, crude, brutish world, and it also represents a fresh infusion of relative suppleness, fineness and humanity to the world outside of art. Art’s loss is the practical world’s gain. And art is inexhaustible, unlike the practical world. Without the perpetually newness of art’s realities the practical world degrades into senility that is somehow simultanously sterile and lecherous.

We need fresh realities.

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Philosophy’s job: To usher inarticulate realities ordinarily found only in art into the practical world.

Picking up the baby trope again, philosophy plays the father role, and art plays the mother role. Art brings young experiential realities into the world, nurtures and protects them while they are small, delicate and vulnerable. Philosophy prepares them for eventual independent life, but the mother doesn’t want to let them go.

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(* NOTE: To not experience the as-yet-tacit — to get the easy, reassuring, reinforcing repetition of the same we consume popular art. The more we live in a popular world and experience things by way of popular expression, the more we all start to see and feel the same. The great value of Facebook is that we no longer just consume popular expression, but participate in it by producing it. This is much more effective way of learning as any constructivist educator will tell you. We live differently when we compose the story of what we are living as we live it. Facebook holds the promise of gently and painlessly eliminating the need for art by simultaneously quietening both the creative impetus and the receptivity for new experiences.)