Neurophenomenology

[Diane]

This is definitely something we/I need to pay attention to, a system of thought already in existence, populated by some names with which I and others am/are already familiar, have already been attracted to, whose work has already been placed in SomaSimple's A-list. Ramachandran. Varela (recently). Maturana (recently). (http://www.somasimple.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4688) Dennett. Damasio. Here is a small page defining neurophenomenology (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/neurophenomenology).

It's good and it makes sense. I think it is our only real hope of making any kind of sense of what we do as human primate social groomers. It's a path I'm going to wander down for awhile this month, as I allow my undermind to turn over its accumulated compost and rest. I'll keep you posted here, in this thread. If anyone else wants to add, feel free.

Check this (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/phenomenological) out: Phenomenological "things" are not commonsense objects or sense data but the phenomena in their presentation, grasped as intentional objects.

For something a bit more substantial, check out the attached paper, translated from French.

[Diane]

Here is the Razor's Edge (http://www.somasimple.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4688) thread, that I've been engrossed in lately. This ties in with a blog series (http://humanantigravitysuit.blogspot.com/2007/12/tree-of-knowledge-part-i-intro.html) I started today, which provides a bit more background to this thread which I hope will add a deepening.

Here is a blogpost on pain as aporia (http://humanantigravitysuit.blogspot.com/2007/11/pain-as-aporia.html), a concept favored by Quintner et al. (http://www.somasimple.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3633), here (http://www.creativepain.com.au/index.htm), and here (http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bsc/pme/2007/00000008/00000007/art00014). All this is related to neurophenomenology, to which I will return next time. This post is just my attempt at mental housekeeping.

[Diane]

In the Tree of Knowledge (http://www.amazon.com/Tree-Knowledge-Humberto-R-Maturana/dp/0877736421), the chapters and their subheadings are arranged visually as a series of squares in a circular arrangement, depicting a flow clockwise of "knowingness", starting with "Daily Experience" and a deconstruction of that, moving round through varying levels of third person knowing and first person knowing, through the nervous system and on through culture, and finally, back to daily experience. This same image is presented at the beginning of each chapter (http://www.somasimple.com/forums/showthread.php?p=42796#post42796), with a box appropriate to the chapter highlighted. It's a brilliant way of organizing complex material, of showing interconnectedness of idea domains while preserving boundary. It echoes what the authors are trying to convey, that wholeness of knowledge cannot be trimmed back to an elite view of who can have it and who cannot, which organisms must have cognition and which do not. They suggest that life in any way, shape, or form, cognizes. If we are to deal with biology without pretense or prejudice, we have to acknowledge that we cannot place barriers that suggest that humans are anything special when it comes to this ability we call "cognizing".

The first chapter is called "Knowing How We Know", and the first idea to be deconstructed is "certainty". The authors say, ..this whole book is a sort of invitation to refrain from the habit of falling into the temptation of certainty... if the reader does not suspend his certainties, we cannot communicate anything here that will be embodied ... as ... effective understanding of the phenomenon of cognition. On the other hand, what this book aims to show, by scrutinizing the phenomenon of cognition and our actions flowing from it, is that all cognitive experience involves the knower in a personal way, rooted in his biological structure. There, his experience of certainty is an individual phenomenon blind to the cognitive acts of others, in a solitude which, as we shall see, is transcended only in a world created with those others.

[Diane]

This small bit of observation appears on page 24: Reflection is a process of knowing how we know. It is the only chance we have to discover our blindness and to recognize that the certainties and knowledge of others are, respectively, as overwhelming and tenuous as our own.

This special situation of knowing how we know is traditionally elusive for our Western culture. We are keyed to action and not to reflection, so that our personal life is usually blind to itself. It is as though a taboo tells us: "It is forbidden to know about knowing." ...

Maybe one of the reasons why we avoid tapping the roots of our knowledge is that it gives us a slightly dizzy sensation due to the circularity entailed in using the instrument of analysis to analyze the instrument of analysis. It is like asking an eye to see itself....

We have no alternative, however, because what we do is inseparable from our experience of the world with all its regularities. This is a great book.

[Diane]

P. 25: What we do intend - and the reader should make it a personal task - is to be aware of what is implied in this unbroken coincidence of our being, our doing and our knowing. And: We shall put aside our daily tendency to treat our experience with the seal of certainty, as though it reflected an absolute world. I can't tell you what a relief this book is. On this second time through, I realize that the first time through I was in my usual scan mode, looking for facts to string together, looking for "certainty". Confronted by my own "need to know" and dissonance related to my own uncertainty, I didn't take in that first bit, where they say, "throw certainty away before you even start reading this book." I read it, thought, oh, that's nice, and barreled along. I didn't actually get (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1B3GGGL_enCA226CA227&q=define%3A+grok&btnG=Search) that these authors are in fact suggesting a different way of being with various apprehensions - instead of stringing facts immediately onto a contrived string, a metaphor from Luke in the Dissonance and Holism (http://www.somasimple.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4736) thread, in his post #11 (http://www.somasimple.com/forums/showpost.php?p=42836&postcount=11), the authors are saying, no, don't get out the string. Sit with the beads. Just sit with the beads and let's have them all loose in the bowl for awhile. We think these beads can string themselves, so let's watch together to see if that happens.

This book just sort of slid along under my eyes until I got to the "Razor's Edge" section where suddenly I got what it was about. From there it went into more comfortable turf (for me) factoids and juicy stuff... and I realized I was going to have to go through again, and use fresh eyes. Now I'm learning to use new "neurophenomenological" eyes to read this book, and it's sinking in better - way better.

[Diane]

I remembered this old thread on neutral monism (http://www.somasimple.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1983) and decided to bring it here to this one. Housekeeping...

[Diane]

The authors continue: ...underlying everything we say is this constant awareness that the phenomenon of knowing cannot be taken as though there were "facts" or objects out there that we grasp and store in our head. What? Here all my life I thought that was it exactly. We knew "things", facts as objects. The things were the same as the knowing of the things. They weren't any different whether they were inside my head, someone else's head, or just out in the room, like a chair, or a factoid in a book. The "knowing" was what naturally came after "learning" - learning was a verb and knowing was a noun. If you didn't "know" something after you had "learned" it, it was because your brain was too small to fit everything in and something fell out. These people are saying that "knowing" is something different?

They are.

They say there is an inseparability between a particular way of being and how the world appears to us, a connection between action and experience, a circularity. They make this astounding statement: Every act of knowing brings forth a world.

Then they make two more:
1. All doing is knowing, and all knowing is doing.
2. Everything said is said by someone.

On p. 27: This bringing forth of knowledge is commonly regarded as a stumbling block, an error or an explanatory residue to be eradicated. This is why, for instance, a colored shadow is said to be an "optical illusion" and why "in reality" there is no color. What we are saying is exactly the opposite: this characteristic of knowledge is the master key to understanding it, not an annoying residue or obstacle. Bringing forth a world is the burning issue of knowledge. It is associated with the deepest roots of our cognitive being, however strong our experience may be. And because these roots go to the very biologic base - as we shall see - this bringing forth of a world manifests itself in all our actions and all our being. ...there is no discontinuity between what is social and what is human and their biological roots. The phenomenon of knowing is all of one piece, and in its full scope it has one same groundwork.

Whew. Something to just sit with for a little while.
Ramachandran aligns himself with what these guys are saying. Dennett does. Damasio does. This gives me all sorts of hope that the authors are onto something very good.

[Diane]

In the razor's edge thread I provided this long quote from the authors: Now, these two extremes or traps have existed from the very first attempts to understand cognition, even in its most classical roots. Today, the representational extreme prevails; at other times the opposing view prevailed.

We wish to propose now a way to cut this apparent Gordian knot and find a natural way to avoid the two abysses of the razor's edge. By now the attentive reader has surmised what we are going to say because it is contained in what we said before. The solution is to maintain a clear logical accounting. It means never losing sight of what we stated at the beginning: everything said is said by someone. And thus, they tie in what they are getting at in their whole development of neurophenomenology (see most recent post). The solution, like all solutions to apparent contradictions, lies in moving away from the opposition and changing the nature of the question, to embrace a broader context. Sublation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_philosophy), in other words. As per Hegel (in German originally as aufhebung).

The situation is actually simple., As observers we can see a unity in different domains, depending on the distinctions we make. Thus, on the one hand, we can consider a system in that domain where its components operate, in the domain of its internal states and its structural changes. Thus considered, for the internal dynamics of the system, the environment does not exist; it is irrelevant. On the other hand, we can consider a unity that also interacts with its environment and describes its history of interactions with it. From this perspective in which the observer can establish relations between certain features of the environment and the behavior of the unity, the internal dynamics of that unity are irrelevant.

Neither of these two possible descriptions is a problem per se: both are necessary to complete our understanding of a unity. It is the observer who correlates them from his outside perspective. It is he who recognizes that the structure of the system determines its interactions by specifying which configurations of the environment can trigger structural changes in it. It is he who recognizes that the environment does not specify or direct the structural changes of a system. The problem begins when we unknowingly go from one realm to the other and demand that the correspondences we establish between them (because we see these two realms simultaneously) be in fact a part of the operation of the unity - in this case, the organism and nervous system. Is this not the big cognitive error still operating in PT these days? We try to squash function in with structure, try to make it true that by treating "structure" we will automatically be treating function. We secretly believe that correlation = causation. And we screw up bad. Big time.

If we are able to keep our logical accounting in order, this complication vanishes; we become aware of these two perspectives and relate them in a broader realm that we establish. In this way we do not need to fall back on representations or deny that the system operates in an environment that is familiar owing to its history of structural coupling. So the way out of the dilemma the profession is in, and to stop it getting sucked into the whirlpool of trying to link every pain someone may feel in their body with a peripheral bit of structural mesoderm that can be gripped, then pushed or prodded at various angles and depths with differing magnitudes of force and speed, is for each individual therapist/practitioner to stop, sit back, think, breathe, wait, go lighter, wait for the other "organism" to fix itself.

The HPSG professions needs to do this collectively as well. Especially the PT profession. It needn't fear that it will be "out of a job": it may not be able to "prove" one-to-one correspondence between what it can offer so as to provide insurers with perfection... but it will still be a necessary feature.

I look forward to the day when "re-habilitation" starts to mean something closer to what it should: Helping human organisms and their nervous systems get along better so they can "in-habit" each other more comfortably.

[Diane]

The authors define "knowing" in the following way: Knowing is effective action, that is, operating effectively in the domain of existence of living beings.

OK, will someone please make a wall plaque with this on it, that I can hang up in my treatment room?

They move toward a frame they can put around their idea, "explanation". Our objective is... to examine the phenomenon of cognition by considering the universal nature of "doing" in cognition - this bringing forth of a world - as our problem and starting point, so as to show its foundation. Good. :thumbs_up
...what will be our yardstick for saying that we have been successful in our attempt? They are already thinking about outcome measures. :thumbs_up An explanation is always a proposition that reformulates or recreates the observations of a phenomenon in a system of concepts acceptable to a group of people who share a criterion of validation. (Uh-oh. I'm toast. The profession I'm in, adheres rigidly to "Push here (y) and this happens (x)" and is bogged down in trying to manipulate its "science" into proving it. It won't take kindly to any of this kind of explanation, I'm sure... ) Magic, for instance, is as explanatory for those who accept it as science is for those who accept it. !! The specific difference between a magical explanation and a scientific one lies in the way a system of scientific explanations is made, what constitutes its criterion of validation. Thus, we can distinguish four conditions essential to proposing a scientific explanation. They do not necessarily fall in sequential order but do overlap in some way. They are:
a. Describing the phenomenon (or phenomena) to be explained in a way acceptable to a body of observers.
b. Proposing a conceptual system capable of generating the phenomenon to be explained in a way acceptable to a body of observers (explanatory hypothesis)
c. Obtaining from (b) other phenomena not explicitly considered in that proposition, as also describing its conditions for observation by a body of observers
d. Observing these other phenomena obtained from (b).

Only when this criterion of validation is satisfied will the explanation be a scientific one, and a statement is a scientific one only when it is based on scientific explanations. Whew. More to chew.

If I had to close my eyes, twirl around and then point at what I think the biggest glitch is in PT "science", it would likely be the explanatory hypothesis in (b). I think the "explanatory hypothesis" used by most PT researchers, at least the manual therapy ones, is, "Push here (y) and this happens (x)", "...so let's study it".

I think they are conflating a "working" or "treatment" hypothesis with an "explanatory" hypothesis. I suspect the two are very different. I expect important clues to this will be found in this very book.

[Diane]

The authors say, Only when this criterion of validation is satisfied will the explanation be a scientific one, and a statement is a scientific one only when it is based on scientific explanations.

Whew.
The authors go on to say that this sort of 4-part thinking goes on every day, but that what scientists do is try to be wholly consistent and explicit with each one of the steps. And they keep a record.

Here is how the authors present a plan for explaining cognition:
1. Phenomena to be explained: the effective action of a living being in its environment
2. Explanatory hypothesis: autonomous organization of living beings; phylogenetic and ontogenetic drift with conservation of adaptation (structural coupling)
3. Obtaining other phenomena: behavioral coordination in interactions recurring between living beings and recursive behavioral coordination upon behavioral coordination
4. Further observations: social phenomena, linguistic domains, language, and self-consciousness

This is also the way the whole book is organized. As observers, we have focused on cognition as our phenomenon to be explained...

Since all cognition brings forth a world, our starting point will necessarily be the operational effectiveness of living beings in their domain of existence. (...) our starting point to get an explanation that can be scientifically validated is to characterize cognition as an effective action, an action that will enable a living being to continue its existence in a definite environment as it brings forth its world. They say they'll be able to tell when they've reached a satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon of knowing...
When we have set forth a conceptual system that can generate the cognitive phenomenon as a result of the action of a living being, and when we have shown that this process can produce living beings like ourselves..

The authors are deliberately exercising new mental pathways, overlooking nothing, taking nothing for granted, assuming nothing. The entire book is a thought exercise, a primer in thinking scientifically.