metonymy4u

Trying to figure out the logic of a disagreeable emotion is like trying to figure out the logic of catching the flu. It can be more effective to figure out how to recover from the illness, rather than figuring out all the whences and wherefores. Our obsession with causes is a feature of our Judeo-Christian-Freudian-Quest-Messianic cultural habits of the past 2500 years. Modern science has become quite comfortable with the fact that we know that we don’t know. For example, we now know that we can’t know everything there is to know about the electron: we can know its position but not its velocity or we can know its velocity but not its position (the Heisenberg uncertainty principle). These days, science uses probabilistic models as readily as deterministic models. I believe we would be well served by learning to apply this approach to our thoughts and emotions as well.

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The idea that the truth will set you free is nothing more than a slogan that has been chanted here in the west for the past 2500 years. This idea often takes the form of the quest story. A noble quest is undertaken to discover that which we need but do not have. Often those who are chosen for the quest must be ritually pure to merit God’s endless bounty, rumored to lie at the end of the spiritual rainbow. Indeed, the quest often becomes a test of that purity and upon its success or failure depend both the immortal souls of the adherents and humanity’s eternal redemption.

Another perspective would propose the notion that, in fact, the quest came to an end on the day of your birth.

I remember a story of a monk who was assigned to sit on a platform at the top of a 100 foot pole for a period of time. When the assignment came to an end the monk felt proud of his accomplishment and asked his teacher what reward he would receive for his success. The teacher replied simply, “proceed.”

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If we consider for a moment the simplest of questions we will see immediately the absurdity of our thought. Consider the question of whether the universe is bounded or unbounded in time and in space. If we presume that the universe is unbounded based on the notion that the universe is that which is infinite, then we come to the conclusion that it had no beginning in time and is thus infinite in both space and time (since space is a measure of time). Yet, if it is indeed infinite in both space and time, it could not have had a precise point of creation, and thus could not exist, because something that was never created cannot be said to exist. So it appears that if the universe exists, then it must have a specific time and place of creation, and therefore is not infinite.

However, if it had a specific time and place of creation, there must have been cause of that creation, and that cause must have done something to create the universe at a specific place and time and thus that cause must have itself existed at a specific place and time. Of course, the cause of the cause also must have existed at a specific place and time, and likewise the cause of the cause of the cause, and also the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause, and so forth and so on. So in fact it looks like the sum of all these causes of causes of causes, which might conveniently be called “the universe” has no specific beginning point in space and time, and so in fact the universe is infinite.

If we take a moment to step back and wonder what the hell is going on here, we will see quite quickly that there is something wrong with how we are asking these questions. The contradictions outlined above are probably as old as the history of human language, and philosophers have been banging their heads against them for millennia. The problem is that we are asking fundamental questions about the nature of existence. The question comes down to one of “how can existence exist?” or “how can existence get going in the first place if we believe that to exist it must have been created by something else, but that something else cannot be said to exist, because then it would already be a part of existence and could not be the cause of existence?” One solution to the problem is offered by a model which posits the existence of a being which can be its own self creation, i.e. “God.” Another solution lies in an understanding of the very nature of the brain which puzzles over ideas like this.

The 19th century philosopher and mathematician Henri Bergson proposed that our brains are predisposed to think about the world of experience in terms of “duration.” Duration was his term for our internal sense of the passage of this abstract thing called “time,” which until Einstein came along people actually believed was constant and unchanging. Duration for Bergson came in two flavors: the sense that moments in time are similar (our quantitative sense) and the sense that moments in time are distinct (our qualitative sense). The former gives us our ability to count objects in any arbitrarily defined set, and the latter our ability to sense changes like emotion. The problems in thought about the infinite character of the universe come about because we fail to see that our quantitative sense is in fact just an illusion, though admittedly a very useful one (numbers are very useful “tools”). In fact, if you think about it, no two moments are actually the same, and so it really does not make sense to count them, because to count implies the notion that things can be in some idealized sense, if not themselves identical, then at least representative of somethings that are, ideally, identical. Counting consists in mapping objects which may or may not appear identical, onto hypothetical idealized objects which are ideally identical, thus allowing their enumeration.

Plato proposed this model as the theory of forms 2500 years ago, and he thought it had major problems even as he proposed it. However the history of the west is the history, at least until recently, of swallowing such theories hook, line and sinker, and so we ran with it. The problem as Bergson sees it is that by inventing this idea of similarity (quantitative sets) and using it to try to account for difference (qualitative sets) we have built a contradiction into our model which creates the very problems we are grappling with. Let’s return to the question of the universe and see how Berson’s model handles the problem. The problem according to Bergson is one of using our concept of similarity to count backwards through each moment in time to discover the moment at which a qualitative difference emerged. That is, we hypothetically try to think our way backwards through a series of identical time moments in an effort to hypothesize whether there was a single moment in which something that didn’t exist transformed its character into something that did exist and became the universe we know and love. The problem is that we hope to move from an assumption of similarity to a discovery of difference. How absurd is that?

The solution of course is to understand that if we build a model based on similarity, it is probably going to be difficult to discover difference, and so if we want a model that accounts for difference, it is going to have to be a model based on difference.

What would such a model look like? Well the Buddhists have just such a model, in which the difference of each moment is one of the basic assumptions. This is the idea of impermanence, or “anicca.” In such a model the universe has no beginning and no end, existence has no beginning and no end. Equally well one could say that the universe is beginning and ending all the time, since all that we experience are causes and conditions of other causes and conditions and we suffer precisely because we fail to see the nature of this reality and instead cling to some false sense of permanence, constancy, similarity, or “countability.” Delusion for a Buddhist is the belief that there is constancy, and thus the attempt to discuss the beginning of everything is based in delusion. The solution is to change models, to see that in fact the universe lives and dies in each moment and our that past and future are illusory creations of our minds. To be sure, they are useful illusions if one is trying to accomplish certain tasks like coordinating market days, baby feeding times, class room meetings or work schedules. However, if one is trying to understand other issues like suffering and the end of suffering, this notion of past and future seems to simply perpetuate more of the same. Letting go of notions of past and future, the Buddhists do their best to live in the ever present and unarticulated now. Why do they do this? Because it works!

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Have you noticed lately, our culture has some really strange ideas about human behavior? For example, parents often talk to me about their teens “making bad choices” and needing to “learn responsibility and respect for others.” Likewise, our criminal justice system is based on the notion that human behavior is determined by something called “free will.” The irony of a “deterministic free will” model notwithstanding, what these two approaches to human behavior have in common is the belief in rational free will as perhaps the salient feature of the human landscape. As if “responsibility” were something that we build up inside of ourselves, independent of any actually observable behaviors, as if this internal “thing,” once acquired will guarantee the “rightness” of behaviors in the future. This approach to human affairs holds that our actions are caused by something called our “choices” or our sense of “duty” or “responsibility” and these choices are the product of a rational, mind based will imposing itself upon the behaviors of the body. And in cases in which this is not the case, such as an impulsive violent act, the criminal justice system still holds that the person “should” have exercised their free will, and that the absence of this choosing behavior was in itself a choice for which the individual is justly “held responsible” and punished.

The problem with these approaches is that they cleave to a model of human behavior which modern psychology tells us is just invalid. Modern psychology teaches us that human behavior, far from being a deterministic phenomenon that follows from readily identifiable individual “choices” is in fact a probabilistic phenomenon multiply determined by a whole range of factors, many of which are completely unrelated to the internal architecture of the individual. We now know that the most salient variables impacting human behavior are the genetic inheritance and the particular learning history of the individual. For example, take someone exposed to early childhood trauma and just try to teach them to “trust” others. Even in the most objectively safe environment, free from any hint of the past traumas, free from any possible cues associated with the traumatic memories, the individual’s nervous system has been conditioned to be in such a heightened and perpetual state of fight or flight that I guarantee you for a significant number of these people their heart rates will remain persistently elevated for hours on end. Recovery from trauma is a time consuming, energy requiring process of replacing old learning with new learning.

Our behaviors are the result of our genes and our environments, and are often very hard to predict with 100% certainty. There’s just nothing you can do to activate some hypothetical internal “will” to overcome the facts of our biology! We can, though learn to pay closer attention to the factors which influence the frequency of any given behavior, whether we call that behavior “bad” “immoral” or “irresponsible,” by way of just indicating “I would like to decrease the probability of this behavior in the future.” Likewise, we can also target behaviors for reinforcement, which means their probability increases moving forward, and thus give rise to overall patterns that we might enjoy calling “trustworthy,” “responsible.” However, it is important to realize that things like “trust” and “responsibility” are the result of behaviors, not the cause of them. So the notion that people act responsibly from some sense of “duty” which causes them to “make the right choices” (there’s that whole strange idea of a free will forcing us to do the “right” thing again….) is simply outmoded thinking. Isn’t it time we moved beyond the use of freedom and responsibility as models of human behavior?

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Those of us who have experienced un-grieved childhood trauma can understand, as perhaps few others can, that the problem becomes one of relationship. If I was an information processing theorist, I would say that we construct a rule that says, “other people are worthy of existing and I am not.” As Paul Russell pointed out in a 1970s essay that I read when I was 15 (and felt that it described my life precisely – a notion that my mother, one of my abusers, was unable to fathom at the time despite the fact that it was she who had given me the essay to read), “relatedness–any kind of relatedness at all–is the unmastered task of the borderline.” Russell’s essay is wonderfully prescient in that he anticipates much of what we now know about borderline personality disorder, though he was not able to go far enough. The situation as we now understand it is that relatedness is also the unmastered task of the environment. To quote Marsha Linehan, “The notion that there might be a fatal flaw in the social fabric—in the human and social relationships of the society in which the person finds herself—is frequently not considered.”

What the radical genuineness of DBT and FAP do for me is that they help me undermine the habits of a lifetime, modeled to some extent by those sentences, but also captured in the metaphor of the hungry tiger—the tiger I learned to survive for the first 20 years of my life. That was my developmental task, to survive chronic physical and emotional abuse—abuse that stemmed from the hunger of those around me to use me for their own purposes: the adolescents who threw me in a hole in the ground when I was 6 and tried to drown me, the parents who chronically invalidated my emotional experiences to safeguard their own emotional vulnerability, the peers that branded me the “trouble maker” or the “scape goat” so they would (perhaps) not have to face their own terrifying inadequacies. The skills I learned from them served me well – I survived years of suicidal urges, self-invalidation, avoided grief, losses that should have killed me or turned me (like many in my family), into an alcoholic—all before I discovered DBT as a therapist. My peers in medical school used to joke that I “was going to be the one in the bell tower someday,” and I don’t think they were wrong.

Once when I was sitting retreat with the Tibetan lama Mingyur Rinpoche, I asked him what he thought of a person like Hitler, given the Buddhist assumption that we are all trying our best at all times? Was the Hitler who wiped out my grand-father’s family in the ghettos of Nazi occupied Poland also trying to do his best to secure happiness for himself, like all sentient beings? And does such an episode indicate that it is time for humanity to move beyond the bounds of the good vs. evil dichotomy? To the first question he responded by pointing out that Hitler committed suicide at the end of his life, thus highlighting the universal presence of suffering. He ignored the last question. I think now that he did so because the question of human relationship is not just such a problem. It is something else entirely.

I believe that what happens to survivors is that our lifetime habits are influenced by a constant, never-ending anxiety of violence – the actual violence that I survived and the potential violence that, I fear, I too am capable of. However, just as I know now that the shame of others’ violence towards me is not mine to bear, I also know that the value of the good/evil metaphor cannot be cashed in for some sort of existential redemption. In our crash and burn world, the dogs will go on with their doggy lives aboard ships that have somewhere to get to. And for that, I am grateful.

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Kierkegaard saw that what Kant was trying to reconcile through his critical philosophy was the problem of the universal in human affairs. This is the problem of how to reconcile our sense of ourselves as individuals with our sense of events that transcend our individual lives. For example, we have a sense that 10 marbles and 10 pigeons have something in common, a more universal aspect of the experience of seeing 10 marbles or 10 pigeons, something that we capture with the word “number,” or the inscription “10.” The problem of universals was first comprehensively articulated in the west by Plato in his famous theory of ideal forms. What Kierkgaard perceived was that Kant’s version of this model could be transformed through its actualization in the lives of real, existing people. What we see as the result of Kierkgaard’s reading of Kant is that the problem of universals actually crops up in all spheres of human endeavor including art, science, education, ethics and religion. All domains face their own particular form of the apparently universal problem of universals. In science we see the problem of creativity vs. empirical confirmation, in ethics private irony vs. public hope, in art metaphor vs. comprehension, in religion inwardness vs. tradition. What Kierkgaard wants us to understand is that Kant had put his finger on THE human problem of the ages and proposed a radically different solution than all his forbears. Cutting us off from absolute knowledge in a final decisive blow, Kant sets us free in a universe of brute force and unending anxiety. Kierkegaard believes that authors like Hegel have attenuated Kant’s teaching by re-presenting another systematized, sanitized, holistic, rationalistic vision of the universal, which for Kierkegaard both cheapens the message and unstrings the bow of human longing. For if anxiety is nothing but the dizziness of freedom, then system making is the closing of the eyes and the chanting of comforting mantras. What Kierkgaard wants to do instead is set us on a path of endless wandering resdescription after rediscription, each generation building on their forbears, doing its best to grapple with the eternal human problems, problems which the relativism of his age had largely abandoned thanks to the enervating urges of enlightenment reason and liberal political theory. In this context, Hegel’s system was nothing more than the mythical belief that the workings of history could forever resolve the problem of the universal, thus bringing the conditions of the satisfaction of the one eternally in line with the conditions of satisfaction of the many. The belief that the one could permanently be reconciled with the many was for Kierkegaard just one more rationalist pie in the sky. The problem for Kierkegaard starts when we take our words, mere hints and signs of what might be coming round the bend, as concepts that anchor us to an unchanging world out there. For if we start to believe that truth is elsewhere, how will we ever learn to describe it as we experience it right here and now?

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Supervenience is a way of describing the relationship between two sets of properties. Consider property set A and property set B. Saying that A is supervenient with respect to B is saying that for there to be a difference in A properties we must have a difference in B properties. A corollary to this is that if all B properties were found to be identical, we would find all A properties to be identical. An anti-corollary is that if all A properties were found to be identical, this does not imply that all B properties are necessarily identical.

Consider a concrete example: Numbers are properties of sets. We can have 10 pigeons or 10 marbles. The numerical properties (i.e. “how many there are in the set”) are supervenient upon the constitutive properties (i.e. “what the set is made of”). A properties (numerical properties) are supervenient upon B properties (constitutive properties). Thus, we cannot have a change in the numerical properties of either set without changing the number of pigeons or marbles (“A differences imply B differences”). If two sets (both composed of either pigeons or of marbles) have the same number of pigeons or marbles, then they will have the same numerical properties (“B identicality implies A identicality.”). However, for two other sets, one composed of 10 pigeons and one of 10 marbles, even though they have the same number of marbles as pigeons (“A identicality”), this does not mean that those numbers are the product of the same set of things (“B properties not identical even though A properties are identical”).

Another example: liquidity as a property of matter. Water at room temp is liquid, which means that if you shake your water bottle, the water sloshes around inside. Liquidity is supervenient with regard to the micro-molecular structure of H2O at room temperature. To change liquid behavior, we must change the micro molecular structure. If the micro molecular structure is sufficient to produce liquid behavior, then liquid behavior will be observed. However, liquid behavior is certainly not only seen in bottles of water at room temperature. It can also be seen in molten metal or glass in a kiln, for example. Thus, A properties are determined by B properties but are not absolutely and essentially reducible to B properties.

This model is useful for explaining the relationship of so called subjective experiences (“mind”) to so called objective experiences (“body”). It allows us to describe a relationship between mind and body that avoids both the problems of property dualism and the problems of epiphenomenalism. Property dualism is avoided because the mind is not defined as something separate from the body, any more than a number is something separate from a set or liquidity is something separate from water sloshing around in a bottle. Epiphenomenalism is avoided because the mind is not “reduced to” the body. Supervenience describes a real relationship between sets of properties that, though it describes a type of dependence of one upon the other, a real causal relationship, it does not make one set of properties infinitely determined by another.

Some may be tempted to accuse me of re-packaging property dualism and supporting a computer functional model of the mind, since this notion seems to imply that a mind in principle could be realized in another arrangement of micro molecular structure, just as liquidity can be realized in multiple forms. For example, we might conclude that a computer that is smart enough to beat a human in a game of jeopardy qualifies for just such “mind status” designation. The question of the multiple realizability of minds however, is a question not of what is theoretically possible but one of actual accomplishment. For example, I have never met a computer that has emotions or theory of mind, two essential properties of minds. And according to the theory of supervenience, if the A properties are different (in this case emotions and ToM as properties of “minds”) then the B properties must be different. Thus, if a computer does not exhibit properties that we consider essential to minds, it cannot be a mind. This does not, however, imply that someday we won’t be able to create a mind out of silicon chips, just that the arrangements of silicon chips we have created so far are not, in fact, minds, though they may behave at times in ways that make us think otherwise.

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Speakers of English often struggle to understand the difference between the words effect and affect. Used as verbs, the first means to create and the second means to alter. At the root of our confusion lies a metaphysical distinction between content and process which I suspect we are slowly learning to outgrow. The original notion was that the world contains substances whose essence is superficially affected, in appearance only, by the accidents of spatio-temporal existence. Underlying the surface effects of a contingent and ever changing experience were supposed to be the more enduring sources of life, the universe and everything. And of course, the idea of God is nothing more than the notion of the most perfect of these self-effecting causes, an essence eternally immune to the affectations of this mortal coil. The problem with this model is, of course, the effect on us as living, suffering beings who are more and more aware of the emptiness of abstraction. What solace can we ever derive, in our loneliness, from some unattainable, eternal golden affect forever underwriting all the effects of this imperfect, beautiful and tragic world?

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