|  Author | Topic: Beyond Ken Wilber: DeGracia's "Beyond the Physical (Read 1,344 times) |
don salmon
Guest
|  | Re: Beyond Ken Wilber: DeGracia's "Beyond the Phys
« Reply #15 on Dec 12, 2011, 5:51pm » | ![[Quote]](http://images.proboards.com/new/buttons/quote.png "[Quote]") |
..
| |
|
don salmon
Guest
| | Re: Beyond Ken Wilber: DeGracia's "Beyond the Phys
« Reply #16 on Dec 13, 2011, 9:21am » | |
.
| |
|
anon
Guest
| | Re: Beyond Ken Wilber: DeGracia's "Beyond the Phys
« Reply #17 on Dec 13, 2011, 1:40pm » | |
| |
|
don s
Guest
| | Re: Beyond Ken Wilber: DeGracia's "Beyond the Phys
« Reply #18 on Dec 21, 2011, 9:34am » | |
This book by Iain McGilchrist seems to me to be very much in sync with what DeGracia writes in "Beyond the Physical'. I find it also sheds light on the reason why there is so much confusion about ken Wiber's views on evolution. Wilber himself seems to mix up in a very confused way what McGilchrist refers to as "left mode" and "right mode" thinking, then Wilber's critics attack him solely from the perspective of "right mode" thinking and muddy the subject still further. If it is true (as I wrote in "Shaving Science With Ockham's Razor") that there is not a single finding in all of science which precludes the possibility that virtually everything in the universe is "moved" by consciousness, then it is absurd to use arguments from the data of evolutionary biology to argue against Eros as the prime evolutionary Force. This is using left mode thinking to attack a right mode way of seeing.
The Master and his Emissary:
The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
by Iain McGilchrist (2009)
Reviewed by David Lorimer, 2009
first published in Network Review No 101
Read interview with Iain McGilchrist in TOWARDS December 2011 Issue 1
Twenty years in the making, this seminal book has been well worth the wait and could scarcely have been researched and written in less time. It has to be one of the most significant books published in 2009, since it addresses so directly the ways in which we understand the world and the systemic predicament of Western culture. I first met Iain in the early 1980s when his brother, like myself, was teaching at Winchester College. Iain was coming to the end of his seven-year prize Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. In 1982, he published his first book, Against Criticism, in which he argued against what he saw as the destructive analytical tendency in literary criticism, which failed to recognise that the initial apprehension of a work of art or literature was intuitive, on which subsequent analysis was built. This theme reappears in his new book, as will become clear below. The present book is arguably the most important contribution to come out of the interdisciplinary brilliance of All Souls in a generation, and is a tribute to the possibility of wide reading that the fellowship enables. Ironically, the dreaming spires are mainly focused on what Iain characterises as left hemisphere thinking, and yet this book is a triumph of the integration of both hemispheres, which is as education should be.
Readers will have read the articles based on the book, published in April and in this issue, and will be familiar with the outline of the argument. To recap, the book falls into two parts, the first of which deals with the neuroscience of the two hemispheres, and the second with the cultural implications of the relative dominance of one particular hemisphere in a historical period. The divided brain of the title indicates that human beings have two distinctive takes on the world, mediated by the left and right hemispheres respectively. There are evolutionary reasons, explained in the book, for why this should be the case, right the way through the animal kingdom.
Iain explains that the right hemisphere gives the overall context, apprehends things as a whole and is able to take in the new. The proper cooperation of the hemispheres involves the grounding and integrating role of the right hemisphere, with detail added by the left hemisphere and returned to the right for a further integration, or, as the Germans put it, Aufhebung. This means that philosophy should begin and end in the right hemisphere rather than being a purely left hemisphere activity as it tends to be, especially in Oxford. A particularly striking chapter argues for the primacy of the right hemisphere, an idea which may initially come as a surprise to the reader, who is used to hearing the left brain referred to as the dominant hemisphere. The primacy of the right hemisphere implies the primacy of the whole over the part, of the implicit over the explicit and of experience over abstraction.
Philosophy (and indeed science) as practised, however, is a largely left hemisphere activity. As Iain points out, philosophers spend a good deal of time inspecting processes that are normally implicit, unconscious and intuitive, which means that they examine life of the right hemisphere from the standpoint of the left. This leads to a startling observation that philosophers, like schizophrenics, have a problem with the sense of self, a theme which is elaborated at length later in the book on the relation between madness and modernism. The left hemisphere, although it uses mechanistic metaphors, does not really understand the nature of metaphor, which can carry us across (as is its real meaning) a gap that language itself creates: ‘metaphor is language’s cure for the ills entailed on us by language.’ Philosophers like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Scheler and Wittgenstein were aware of the limitations of linear, sequential analysis and sought to go beyond it, with descriptive philosophy, in a sense, giving way to evocative poetry.
Science, too, as ordinarily practised, is largely a left hemisphere activity. The very metaphor of the body and brain as a machine is quintessentially left hemisphere, as it makes the organism into a non-living thing, abstracting it from the immediate world of experience. Moreover, the left hemisphere is self-referential, only comfortable dealing with familiar ideas and intensely suspicious of the new. This has far reaching implications for paradigm shifts, with which most readers will be familiar: a rigid dogmatism that refuses to countenance a new way of understanding, and is inordinately sure of itself. As Iain remarks on a couple of occasions, ‘the only certainty is that those believe they are certainly right are certainly wrong.’ All this means that the basis of the mechanistic metaphor is not questioned by the left hemisphere. The absurdity of this is revealed in some split brain experiments where it becomes apparent that the structure of a syllogism is more important as a criterion of truth than the components of the argument. It is the right hemisphere that understands jokes, irony and context.
None of this should give the impression that the book is simply an apologia for the right hemisphere, and that Iain does not believe in the crucial importance of rigorous analysis. If his points come across strongly, it is because we are in a severely unbalanced cultural situation. A further critical theme is that of empathy, another quality intrinsic to the right hemisphere. As Iain indicates, empathy is intrinsic to morality, linking us to others so that we may ‘imaginatively inhabit’ their experience, which is the lived basis of imitation. Anglo-American philosophers and scientists do not understand empathy, untouched as they are by European phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty, who understand mutuality, reciprocity and fellow-feeling as expressed through the body and the emotions. All this helps the reader realise that the category of Being is critically absent from British philosophy, which has confined itself to (a rather disembodied) mind. Culturally, if we had an empathic connection with Nature, then we would be incapable of devastating our habitat in the way we have. Here, the left hemisphere science of manipulation meets the economics of exploitation and the politics of short-term expediency.
It is hard in a short review to convey the staggering erudition and scintillating intelligence of this book. There are 135 pages – in small print – of notes and bibliography. In the first half, the reader not only learns about functions of left and right hemisphere thinking, but also considers the origins of language in relation to music, the nature of time, and the way in which Greek logical paradoxes are resolved by a right hemisphere perspective which does not divide time up into discrete points. The arguments for the primacy of the right hemisphere are I believe persuasive, as are his explanations for the triumph of the left hemisphere. We realise that a sense of depth is incompatible with cold detachment, as illustrated in a commentary on the 18th century paintings of Claude Lorrain. Lorrain is one of a great many artists referred to and indeed illustrated.
In the second half, which is a book in itself, the reader is taken on a journey through the evolution of Western culture, beginning with the ancient Greeks, moving through the Renaissance and the Reformation, then to the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Industrial Revolution, before arriving at the modern and post-modern worlds. One understands how the primacy of the hemispheres as understood in particular cultures has alternated, usually between a more or less balanced situation and over-predominance of left hemisphere thinking, which reflects our current cultural situation. There are etymological digressions on the meaning of Greek terms referring to knowledge, reflections on pre-Socratic philosophers, especially Heraclitus, the implications of Plato’s separation of the eternal from the phenomenological, the association of Cartesian philosophy with schizophrenic attitudes, the scientific work of Goethe and the parallels between the Reformation in which the ‘Flesh became Word’ – the triumph of the literal – and the rise of scientific materialism and the infallible Word of Science, which has inherited a corresponding dogmatism unless allied to the subtle reconciling properties of the right hemisphere.
One remedy lies in the notion of betweenness or transparency; for mediaeval Catholics, the symbol was transparent to the transcendent, but Protestants swept this all away as idolatry, rejecting metaphorical understanding. Wordsworth and Hopkins understood this relation of betweenness, as did Goethe, whose poetry and scientific writings are quoted. Also Hegel, whose articulation of individuation within union is extraordinarily acute. Music provides an exemplar of betweenness in its interplay between silence and sound. The right hemisphere pays attention to the other, generating this relationship of betweenness, which turns out to be crucial to our happiness, depending as it does on the breadth and depth of our social connections. Interestingly, betweenness implie what he calls ‘necessary distance’, the foundation of empathy. So, for instance, in the development of Greek culture, both these processes proceeded together, with a remarkable development of empathy and philosophical acumen.
Reflecting on our somewhat bleak contemporary cultural landscape, Iain shows how the predominance of left hemisphere thinking has pervaded the visual arts, music, philosophy and science. Modernist concepts and mechanistic metaphors are rife, as is reductionism, alienation, fragmentation and decontextualisation. The parallels between madness and modernism, featured in the work of Louis Sass, are particularly striking, especially given the increase in mental illness over the last 50 years. Our bureaucratic systems are impersonal, aiming at control and manipulation, a dehumanising the individual and imposing a drab uniformity. Body, spirit and art are all under attack, as is beauty; however, the sense of beauty is not culturally bound, but is rather intrinsic to human perception.
It is no exaggeration to say that this quite remarkable book will radically change the way you understand the world and yourself. Ironically, some left hemisphere dominated reviewers of this book have already unwittingly proved its thesis by reacting to it in exactly the way in which the book predicts, taking exception to the legitimate criticisms of exclusively left hemisphere thinking. It must be obvious to most readers that our culture is seriously out of balance, not only in itself, but also in relation to Nature. More of the same kind of thinking will not move us forward. We need less detachment and more empathy, recovering our connection to ourselves, each other and the world around us. As Iain observes, both science and art need to become more human and humane. Reading this book, to which you will want to return on a regular basis (one reading cannot possibly exhaust its multifaceted insights) will help you better understand reality and the way we experience and represent it. It is a genuine tour de force, a monumental achievement – I can think of no one else who could have conceived, let alone written a book of such penetrating brilliance.
| |
|
don s
Guest
| | Re: Beyond Ken Wilber: DeGracia's "Beyond the Phys
« Reply #19 on Dec 21, 2011, 9:36am » | |
ah, it would be nice if these postings could be edited. I wrote that Wilber's critics attack him using "right mode" thinking; I meant "left mode".
here's the website for the review: http://towardsmagz.org/?page_id=1425
| |
|
don s
Guest
| | Re: Beyond Ken Wilber: DeGracia's "Beyond the Phys
« Reply #20 on Jan 9, 2012, 7:43am » | |
Beyond the Physical: Chapter 19
(From the back cover: “The Western mind is enamoured – nay – hypnotized with what it perceives outside of itself.”
I thought I'd jump ahead to the next to last chapter, Chapter 19: The Ultimate Meaning of Things: Discourse on the Uses of Music. I'm not going to say too much about the specifics, just touch on something that Don mentions - “to the scientist music represents the endless combinations of physical matter. To the occultist music is a constant reminder of the endless and myriad forms and dimensions that fill the inner life of the human being.”
Right before looking at this chapter, I happened to glance at one of Frank Visser's commentaries on Ken Wilber's writings on evolution. I was struck in particular by Frank's closing remarks (I'm sorry; I don't remember just now the date or title of the essay; I'll try and find it and will post the source later). Frank selected some of Wilber's more grandiose remarks about the creativity involved in the evolutionary process, and something about the profound spiritual implications of the evolutionary process.
Frank then compared this with some comments from an astronomer about the beginnings of the universe, starting with the “Big Bang” and providing some very precise details about the emergence of elements and other physical facts. In his conclusion, Frank compared the amazing amount of “information” provided by the astronomer to the paucity of content (not quite Frank's word, but it was something like that, I think) in Wilber's writings on evolution (and by implication, in most attempts to give evolution and spiritual context).
I'm not sure I can convey clearly my reaction to Frank's essay - I think I'd be able to do it better in conversation, as the feeling I have reading this is quite hard to convey in words. I'm afraid I'm going to be rather roundabout in responding to this and hope I don't end up making you more confused.
*****
The “digital”, or “objective”, or “view from nowhere” or what people think of as “scientific” mode of thinking has become, in our time, so much the touchstone for understanding “reality”, that it's almost impossible – or it seems so to me – to get across the idea that once upon a time, there were other ways of talking about reality that were not just equal, but considered more accurate.
****
Sri Krishna Prem once said, partly tongue in cheek, but also very seriously, that it might be more accurate to describe what people think of as “abstract” as “concrete”, and describe what people think of as “concrete” as pure abstraction.
Here's another passage from Krishna Prem that conveys this turnaround in what people think of as real:
“It is simply not true that Osiris is a vegetation, or Apollo a solar myth. Rather, if we must talk like this, we should say that vegetation is an Osiris myth and the sun a myth of Apollo, since Apollo and Osiris and all such names refer to facts of a higher order than those with which physical scientists deal.”
***
Computer scientist Marvin Minksy once said that of all things he had studied, music was the most baffling to him as a scientist. He couldn't imagine what function it served, or what it was so pervasive in human culture throughout the history of the species. Psychologist Steven Pinker has more recently said very similar things about music, wondering what evolutionary purpose it could possibly serve. The answer usually comes to something to do with sex, though it's a little bit hard to see how this covers everything from Lady Gaga and Madonna to Palestrina and Prokofiev.
****
The composer Milton Babbitt, in 1957, wrote an article entitled, “Who Cares If You Listen?” He was responding to people who said that composers - “classical” or “art” composers as much as “popular” music writers – should write music people want to listen to. Since Schoenberg in the early 20th century, “art music” composers had increasingly written music that audiences – including classical music audiences – didn't want to listen to. When I went to music school in the early 70s, there was a growing movement away from this kind of cerebral dissonant music among “art music” composers, but in the late 50s, when Babbitt wrote his article, it was considered the height of high culture to think of music along the lines of mathematics, with composers carefully calculating the intervallic relationships (a phrase often used by one of my composition teachers) with exquisitely complex polyphonic counterpoint using dodecaphonic (12 note) scales. It was enough, Babbitt thought, that other highly trained specialists could “understand” his music – it did not matter at all whether ordinary people listened to and “liked” his music. It's interesting to note – I didn't know this until years after reading Babbitt's infamous article – that he had, in the late 40s, wanted to write for musical theater but could never make a go of it.
***
I remember one day in my psych graduate program, we were studying a very highly mathematized interpretation system for the infamous 'Rorschach” ink blot personality test. There were hundreds of ways to assign a specific, quantifiable value to the many kinds of spontaneous interpretations that people gave when being given the ink blot test. During one of the classes, a student next to me said, “Finally, now we're actually learning something”. I couldn't swear that I know exactly what he was thinking, but my sense was that all of the qualitative, literary type language that is generally used in clinical psychology just seemed so – vague, non factual, subjective, to him, and now that we were engaged in quantification, this seemed like “real” learning (never mind the fact that the quantitative approach to the Rorschach seemed to some – or at least, to me – to be based on very flimsy evidence, the main purpose of which was to make the Rorschach feel more “scientific” - that is, objective, factual, and ultimately, quantifiable)
****
I don't remember the exact quotation, but somewhere the French scientist Laplace (he's the one who, when asked what role was left for God in regard to the movement of the planets, replied, “I have no need for that hypothesis”) said that quality is nothing more than imperfect quantification. In other words, there really are no “qualities” in the universe – which as far as I can understand it, since the vast majority of scientists still will admit – at least under pressure – that they haven't a clue how the “quantified” vibrations of light, sound, etc become qualitative experience “in the brain”. Which means that for LaPlace, as with Dennett and others who don't believe in a universe of qualities, that there is essentially no universe at all. Try it – take away all qualities, and try to describe a coffee cup, a chair, a television, this computer you're looking at, your body, etc. I don't see how it can be done. The scientists aren't, as far as I can see, talking about the “real” universe either.
***
A similar thing seems to be happening in the field of psychotherapy in general. All that talk about feelings and memories and mental frameworks, beliefs and assumptions that shape the way we think and feel and respond to events – it all sounds so vague, so subjective, so almost – unreal. In the last 10 years, a new field has emerged, “Interpersonal neurobiology”. Almost single-handedly, psychiatrist Daniel Siegel has mapped out the parts of the brain associated with various psychological experiences. Since he took a workshop in mindfulness meditation a few years ago, his approach has become the smash hit of the mindfulness community and of therapists around the world. Now a patient can be shown a model of the brain, and instead of thinking that he is jumpy and easily startled because of memories and associations with traumatic experience(s), he can understand how the functioning of the pre-frontal cortex is overwhelmed by heightened limbic, brain stem and ANS activity. And now, best of all, the patient understands that something “real” is happening to him.
****
Again, along similar lines, I just read that researchers largely agree that the explosion of diagnoses in depression has been largely due to the fact that with the serotonin hypothesis, many more people are willing to be diagnosed, because now, instead of some socially taboo label (mental illness), they have a physical disease, a chemical imbalance. It's quite a testament to the power of pharmaceutical companies that there has never been a single scientific study validating the theory of a chemical imbalance, yet doctors around the world continue to present this hypothesis to their patients without fear of being seen as charlatans.
*****
Krishna Prem says somewhere that an individual trained as a physical scientist would have enormous difficulty comprehending what is meant by occult science, as it involves an attitude toward the world that is not just different from but almost at odds with the one cultivated by modern scientists – the view characterized by philosopher Thomas Nagel as a “view from nowhere”.
****
One of the exercises I devised when I was training a group of a dozen people to have more lucid dreams was to “feel” the world, the dynamic flow of experience, as music – and music not just as “dynamic flow of patterns” - one of the ways that people using chaos, complexity or systems theory often try to show that science is as “spiritual” as anything else – but rather, music as an expression of a spiritual Reality, a living, conscious, intelligent Reality. Sounds terribly vague, subjective and mythical, doesn't it? It did help people have more lucid dreams, but that doesn't “prove” anything, of course.
****
Michael Dowd, in his “cutely” titled book, “Thank God for Evolution”, insists there is no conflict between the religious understanding of evolution and the scientific one. The problem is, he says, that people think that religions are talking about “facts”. No, religion uses “night” language, and science uses “day” language. The 5 nobel prize winning scientists (all of whom are experts at the “day” language of science, no doubt) who praised his book appear to be delighted with his reconciliation of science and religion, though from their words on religion, don't appear to have any idea what they mean by religion except a vague feeling of meaningfulness in the humanistic assertion of the values of goodness and compassion (which are also, of course, ultimately the result of non-intelligent, non-meaningful and purposeless evolution). This is a problem for occult science, since occultism claims to deal with facts, though with facts of a very different order than physical science. But that's not really true either – occultists also deal with physical facts, but do not see them as having any meaning or reality apart from the reality of Consciousness, something which seems at best foolish and at worst delusional to the scientist dedicated to the view from nowhere.
***
And finally, back to Frank's astronomer. I really should find the exact text, because the astronomer makes so many mistakes – mistakes, at least, from the point of view of what Krishna Prem would call “Reality” - that his comments are almost worthy of a textbook explaining what it is that is holding back science from making significant progress in understanding what things are about. Here I'll just address the feeling that Frank conveys at the end of his essay. I think – I may be wrong Frank, I'd be interested to hear what you think – that Frank is conveying the same feeling my classmate had in the Rorschach class – that with quantification, we have something real, something solid, something you can grab onto. It's kind of the feeling Samuel Johnson had when he responded to Bishop Berkeley's claim that the world has reality only as an idea – and Johnson, in what appears to be a fit of fury, kicks a rock and exclaims, “I refute it thus!”
I'll see if I can find the exact text of the astronomer's comments – they were really quite interesting.
| |
|
don s
Guest
| | Re: Beyond Ken Wilber: DeGracia's "Beyond the Phys
« Reply #21 on Jan 16, 2012, 10:50am » | |
I’ve recently read the commentary on “Beyond the Physical” – “Seance, Psi-ence and Science” – published over at integral world http://www.integralworld.net/smith36.html. I also recently read a critique of Buddhist “contemplative scientist” Alan Wallace here: http://speculativenonbuddhism.com/2011/12/27/feast-interrupted/, by Tom Pepper. After reading these two essays, I’m not sure how much good a verbal commentary can do in regard to the topics in “Beyond the Physical.”
It’s funny, I came to the same conclusion at least a year before I put together “Shaving Science With Ockham’s Razor” this past summer (2011). That is, I thought, looking at the various critiques of materialism/physicalism and seeing the responses, that perhaps an audio-visual format would work better than verbal critiques, as it might reach past the usual roadblocks that make it so difficult to communicate a different way of – I’m not sure even what word to use. But my desire to say something got the best of me, so here I am after writing a series of articles for integral world over the past 6 months.
Anyway, the two articles mentioned above lead me to think it best to take a break from this ongoing look at Don DeGracia’s book. I hope someone else is inspired to take some time looking into it. There’s a lot of valuable stuff in it. I’m thinking of starting a new thread about this difficulty – the problem of how to communicate the problems of physicalism without using the kind of perception/thinking/understanding that shapes physicalism. It seems almost an impossible problem, but it also seems the only way ahead – not just for science, but for humanity.
I’ve thought of calling the new thread “Ear Training for Stephen Batchelor”, but if you know what I’m getting at, that may sound too insulting. The problem is, if “tone deafness” really is someone’s problem, is it an inappropriately judgmental thing to point it out?
| |
| |
|
![[Home]](http://images.proboards.com/new/menu/home.png "[Home]")
![[New Topics]](http://images.proboards.com/menu/topics.png "[New Topics]")
![[Help]](http://images.proboards.com/new/menu/help.png "[Help]")
![[Search]](http://images.proboards.com/new/menu/search.png "[Search]")
![[Login]](http://images.proboards.com/new/menu/login.png "[Login]")
![[Register]](http://images.proboards.com/new/menu/register.png "[Register]")
![[Search This Thread]](http://images.proboards.com/new/buttons/search2.png "[Search This Thread]")
![[Reply]](http://images.proboards.com/new/buttons/reply.png "[Reply]")
![[Share Topic]](http://images.proboards.com/new/buttons/share.png "[Share Topic]")
![[Print]](http://images.proboards.com/new/buttons/print.png "[Print]")
Logged