metonymy4u

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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more and more these days humans are experiencing events that contradict our traditional way of thinking about the world. einstein’s theories took away our belief in the constancy of mass, time and space and quantum mechanics took away our traditional ideas of cause and effect. so what then can we depend on, in this world of instability and chaos? nothing but courage, which is the belief that no matter what happens, if we learn to depend on each other and the world around us we can develop the love, compassion and creativity necessary to meet each challenge one day at a time.

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What amazes me about humanity is that we can be so clever as to figure out how to live in the deepest oceans, on the highest mountains, in the hottest deserts and in the frozen vacuum of space, yet we cannot seem to figure out how to live in peace with our own minds. The roiling cauldron of what Nietzsche called the Dionysian, Freud called the id, Buddhists call dukkha and Linehan calls emotion mind continues, as it has for thousands of years, to confound, frustrate and mystify us. One model for approaching this phenomenon is what I call the knowledge based model: if we only once we could grasp the truth of our “other” we could master it. To this end, Plato created dialectics, Descartes created skepticism, Kant created transcendental idealism, Nietzsche created the myth of eternal return, and Freud created psychoanalysis. And whether the wish is to create a new species called “the over-man,” “philosophical man,” or “analyzed man,” the goal, I believe, is the same: to use Truth to save ourselves from ourselves.

Looked at from another angle though, don’t these approaches make the same mistake over and over again? That is, don’t all of these theories have in common the age old belief that the process is the product, that knowledge (Platonically understood) is its own reward and that “the truth will set you free” – a favorite slogan of the platonist/christian academics of the middle ages? What the Buddha said, on the other hand, was that the end of suffering, though a desirable goal, was not an automatic product of understanding the causes of suffering. The 4 en-nobbling truths according to Buddhist tradition require that the cause of suffering be understood and then actually let go of. Behaviors don’t just change because we’ve decided we want them to. Actual productive and systemic changes require an active input of energy–thank you very much, 2nd law of thermodynamics!

So it seems to me that what we learn from the Plato-Freud tradition is the need for understanding. And what we learn from the Buddha-Linehan tradition is the need for wise action. If anxiety is indeed the dizziness of freedom then I think the question we face is whether we will dare that abyss, tolerate once again the arrow of endeavor and brave the vertigo of our awareness that would forever distract and control and frighten us? In such a project I am inspired by figures like Mahatma Ghandi, or Martin Luther King, who insisted that thinkers become active members of a community, refusing the punishment of public hope and daring to embody the demands of a private, all-too private, irony.

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the beauty of kierkegaard’s work for me is that even though he accepts hume’s radical skepticism about the ability of our thoughts to capture an external reality, he does not allow this to throw him into the pit of despair. the question for me now is how can i face each and every one of my experiences — turning away from any a priori “should” and towards the opportunity for emotional growth?

so tell me something right now without thinking: “why,” are you trying to communicate?

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A long time ago Socrates sat in the Athenian market and talked with people about definitions. He was interested in how people thought about the world, and in challenging their ideas. He proposed, or his student Plato did, that we think about definitions as things that help us get to the essence of an issue. What is the essence of virtue? Or justice? Or the good? The problem is that this brough…t him in conflict with the dominant cultural paradigms (“definitions”) of his community. He died defending his right to question. The story of his life and death then became a special sort of paradigm for the Abrahamic religions: A glorious example of what it means to be a noble seeker of truth, a humble man endowed with superior insight into the nature of things, sacrificing everything for redemption in the clear light of faith, exemplifying the very essence of an authentic (i.e. “divine”) life. But do definitions really help us to get to the essence of a thing? Try this and see what you think: …define the word “love”….?

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