metonymy4u

Zeno’s paradoxes raise the question of: if motion, then how stasis? Or if stasis, then how motion? Forcing us to choose between a set of dichotomous models, motion is abandoned (Zeno was a student of Parmenides). Later on the British Empiricists of the Enlightenment held up the other side of the paradox: embracing the perpetual motion of the senses and abandoning the stasis of reason as mere metaphysical mysticism. But the history of the 20th century can be written as the history of dialectical synthesis. For example, Einstein clearly demonstrated how both motion and stasis exist at the same time. We just have to drop the common sense “prejudices that we acquired by the age of 18.” Therefore, in “space-time,” objects simply move until they don’t. Everybody can do as they please until they hit the cosmic speed limit “c”….stasis and motion are synthesized at last….How cool is that?

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When I “multiply” a number by zero and get zero, this is the universal natural contingency eliciting my “not giving up” behaviors……like a cosmic “keep trying” signal. how sweet.

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The supposition that certain types of behavior necessarily precede and therefore cause other types of behavior is a commonly encountered hypothesis of the “post hoc” variety. I find this metaphor to be neither accurate nor useful. I frequently notice that I have emitted a behavior long before I become aware of any process called “thought” or “thinking.” The notion that our behaviors are caused by our thoughts, or by “intentionality,” and that therefore we need to learn to control them in order to be “good,” “virtuous,” “useful,” or “skilful” (a common metaphor of the neo-Platonic-Abrahamic tradition) is nothing more than the age old search for the authority of thought over behavior, a veritable hegemony of “mind.”

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in a world of smart bombs and drone planes, extraordinary renditions and car-jackings, how do we teach ourselves to express urgency without anger mixed in? i know the urgency is often important, sacred, needful, useful. anger…not so much.

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we live in a context which continually reinforces us for “micromanaging” our own lives in response to some unsatisfactory “other.” bored in the car? turn on the radio. can’t sleep fast enough? take a pill. socially anxious? have a beer. hate your life? get new shoes or a new car. someone in your way? push them aside or bomb them. in the end a faustian deal which cannot but betray us. the constant search for little improvements, microscopic bits of “perfection,” “credit,” “freedom,” or “cause” has us running away from where life actually happens: right there in your place. we’ve forgotten that, really and truly, the past was not preparation for anything “better.” its shame, if there is any in any case, needs no reconciliation, no resolution, no absolution, no reparation, no expiation, no explanation and no justification. life is NOT elsewhere. it is here. it walks in your shoes every breath of every moment.

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if we take kant’s suggestion seriously: to drop our age old metaphors of cause and effect and instead search merely for our experience in an unstructured world, then it seems to me this can be applied to our own endeavors within clinical psychology. what would it be like to drop even the radical behaviorist notion of a controlling variable and instead focus merely on a description of our experience within whatever “system” we appear to be a part of in the moment? in such a model, “tacts” are no more than features of a relatively heterogeneous system of verbal operants and “mands” are no more than features of a relatively homogenous system. they are not “controlled” or “caused” by anything in particular, being merely events that we notice and may want to change in some way, relative to other events. “radical genuineness” then describes one way of participating in a system without judging it, without tossing in a huge boulder, mindfully slipping into the water and knowing with certainty whither we would swim.

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i think one thing that would change politics forever if we could find a way to bring it to the fore-front of our awareness more often is the fact that all the atoms in our body, every single one, came from some dying star somewhere, probably billions of years ago. and in another billion years we’ll probably all be back inside some other star.

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for example, stephen hawking has proposed his famous chronology protection conjecture which states that stable worm holes allowing macroscopic transportation of matter through time would be instantly destroyed in the moment of their creation, even though general relativity predicts their theoretical possibility due to the curved nature of spacetime. he makes this assertion to preserve a notion of cause and effect in which causes always precede their effects. without such a “time always flows forward”-rule, he supposes, the universe would collapse upon itself because without such a rule, events could become their own undoing. yet the notion that the universe requires some sort of guarantee of existence is nothing more than yet another rationalist metaphor. kant pointed out long ago that it is a mistake to view “existence” as a predicate condition, i.e. an attribute of something. to say that the universe needs time to always flow forward it to say that the existence of the universe is a predicate condition requiring something to guarantee it. in other words, the chronology protection conjecture is just another word for “god.” straight line metaphors often seem to carry this flavor of the divine. certainly i can concede to professor hawking that such a notion seems to be indispensable to our understanding of our own limited experience. but who are we to claim to know the mind of god?

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one could very well then ask: what do you propose to put in place of cause and effect? a metaphor of correlation? a metaphor of systemic selection of adaptive variations (contingency dependent shaping)? does this not just dress up cause and effect in different clothing? well perhaps it does. from a god’s eye view it’s indeed possible that talking about “systems” instead of “causes” amounts to the “same thing.” problem is, i don’t have a god’s eye view and for me to invent new metaphors i seem bound to use some of the language of old metaphors. kant’s effort to synthesize the dialectic of rationalism vs. empiricism required him to use the language of both, and i suspect he used a bit more of the former than the latter due to the context in which he matured and lived his entire life. metaphors don’t seem to change overnight—neither do neural connections. we know that to change a system requires energy. the universe left “on its own” seems to favor entropy. randomness. the question for me is: how can we act in such a way that “the system” develops novel characteristics, and do these take us in the direction we want to go?

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these days i am trying to be less drawn toward using the metaphor of cause and effect. instead i’m trying to stick to describing my experience and figuring out what i want to be different in the future. why is a very seductive word for me. i’m beginning to see that it’s often a fruit best left untasted.

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