Arsis: Why Edward Slingerland is dangerously wrong in "What Science Offers the Humanities." / Thesis: There is no such thing as the subconscious. The only neuroses are imbalances between the representation systems of the two cortical hemispheres.

PREAMBLE
This all poured out of me in complete form just moments ago after a long time searching. It all came together. I foolishly did not capture it in direct form and instead went to procure materials. I should have known, I've read the parables...

Luke Nickel's written a piece of music called "Whole Beauty Now Lies in Memory..."

This is an echo, then, reconstructed as is necessary:



I've been taking a seminar course at McGill University where the assigned reading is Edward Slingerland's What Science Offers the Humanities. The course is about "consiliance," or reuniting all the domains of scientific and humanistic research in one. This post should mostly make sense if you haven't read the book.

I have serious misgivings about the position Slingerland advances given my own explorations on the subject, and I can can explain these by looking at what he states his position to be and the gestures that he makes in the first three chapters of the book. I think that he is mistaken in the same way as a great deal of other people so if we can shed light on this it may be of great use to the ongoing project of bridging the current obvious cultural divide.

And we begin with the existence of a divide, which I know to exist given my history studying both musical composition and neuroscience. It is best characterized in my view by the ANALOG-DIGITAL divide. I think it's essential to the universe... or at least how we see it. It's the particle-wave duality in physics. It's the difference that drives apart researchers in the sciences and the humanities:

ANALOG - DIGITAL

full colour - black and white

intuition - rationality

lunar/night - solar/day

holistic - reductionist

territory - map

ontology - empiricism

subjective - objective

patterning - material

form - structure

oral - written

"right-brain" - "left-brain"

"sacred feminine" - "sacred masculine"

wisdom - knowledge

context-rich - context-independent

qualitative - quantitative

French culture - German culture

verbs - nouns

spirit - matter

more or less - all or nothing

dream-world - outer world

plural - binary

dynamics - taxonomy

Plato - Aristotle

LOVE - POWER

The goal of the project of reconciliation, the place to which we ought to strive to propel our culture, in my opinion, is best summed up by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, given the above connotations I've added to the words. Dr. King understood a thing or two about the universe, which is why he could do the things he did:

"Power without Love is reckless and abusive, and Love without Power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is Love implementing the demands of Justice, and Justice at its best is Power correcting everything that stands against Love."

We could turn that into:

"Science without Humanity is reckless and abusive, and Humanity without Science is sentimental and anemic. Science at its best is Humanity implementing the demands of Justice, and Justice at its best is Science correcting everything that stands against Humanity."

But I'll get to that. It's the Tao. Here is the switch I want to make in people's thinking:

The analog-digital divide is happening in your brain right now, I think. There has been much ado made about the "creative" right brain and the "analytic" left brain, and now research has shown that those characterizations are mistaken - both lobes are used for analysis.

What if there are TWO ANALYTIC LOBES, one verbal, and one symbolic? One reductionistic, the left lobe, and one holistic, the right lobe. Both are doing analysis, just one on local details and the other on global trends. The "creative mode," then, is the cross-talk between the two lobes and the mode in which the balances are found and creative energy is released through the equalization of the two analytic processes which have driven apart from each-other through their polarized ways of looking at the world?

That would make the analytic mode the front-back motion in the brain and the creative mode the left-right motion. There has long been an association between analytic, scientific might and masculinity, and compassion and creativity with femininity. And lo and behold:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/different-brain-wiring-in-men-women-could-explain-gender-differences/

Obviously there is a bit of each research style in both, and everyone is using both modes of thinking to some extent. Most people on both sides agree on that. But you can pigeonhole authors and researchers by counting the number of times they use the words on either side of my list, and counting positive and negative uses separately. Michel Foucault is pretty far left, as is Judith Butler (not that I've read either). The far-right thinkers are the ones refuted in the first chapter as being "objectivists" and the far-left are the "post-modernists." Slingerland is probably further right than he realizes.

(Also, obviously the terms I've used in the list above don't all line up perfectly, that's just kinda how things work. Some are stronger than others and there are perhaps a few that I'm completely mistaken about, but that's how it is. Things are subject to revision.)

What the discovery of a holistic analytic lobe does, though, is to give neurobiological credit do people doing holistic research on form and the fluid nature of relationships, who present their work in the form of poetry or art - or "theory", opposite the gap to Edward Slingerland. And we can trace the motions Slingerland has made to arrive at his position. Imagine there's a landscape with a gap in the middle:

Reductionistic Analysis                                                                                Holistic Analysis

|---S------------------------------------   (the gap)    ------------------------------------------|

Slingerland (S) starts at the far left, in chapter 1: "The disembodied mind: Problems with objectivism." He states that the reductive, word-based scientific technique is unfounded because science now acknowledges that our thoughts and behaviours are not completely rational. He also does away with "Descarte's Error," the division between body and spirit. He outright denies the existence of spirit. But things are amiss, while claiming to be critiquing objectivism the most devastating effects are for the most Holistic thinkers, those who use spiritual language. By the end of the chapter, Slingerland has moved towards the gap. He is still on the side of the objectivists but he is peering across:

|---------------------------------S-------   (the gap)    ---L--B-----------xxxxx (does not exist) xxxx-|

Across the gap, he spends chapter 2 describing who he sees, and pushing them farther away from the gap. He starts with post-structuralism, which we all agree by now was a silly idea if the goal was to explain how things really are, but that was never the goal, the goal was social liberation. He says it's not reductionistically founded, and well, he's right. But eventually he gets to Latour and Bourdieu, whose philosophies are as close to the gap as his, just on the other side. Using an argument about the "slide into relativism" he casts them off as being more extreme than they are.

|---------------------------------S-------   (the gap)    ---------------| (fundamentally illogical, bad)

Then, in chapter 3 he starts off by showing all the ways in which the verbal analytic mode is incompatible with the holistic one - because the holistic mode requires things like local incoherence and self-refutation to function properly. Therefore, he widens his horizon to one that would only be understood and sympathized with by a person with the same Western Analytic mind as his! And he starts building the bridge to take over the territory on the other side. This project is a continuation of the colonial mindset.



But, we need a thesis - why is this all happening and what should we do about it. And I think it's because of incoherence between the representation systems of the two modes. Jung said that all neuroses arise when the consciousness and the subconscious drive in opposite directions. I would instead suggest that the neurosis happens when the words we use to describe our situation to ourselves and the things that we imagine seeing when we play it out in our head are not in sympathy. I think that both are directly accessible to consciousness, just in different modes, rational and irrational ones.

 I don't think my argument completely holds together at this point, especially the last bit. I know what I mean, I wish I had captured it when it came to me... I'll have to think more, like usual. There's more to be said but I'm tired and this is long! But we're getting somewhere.

What this especially means for the discussion at hand about reconciliation is that if there are indeed different brain STRUCTURES (there I finally used the word) that give rise to different experiences for different people, we can't have a single person proclaiming his own viewpoint as the way forwards and accusing others of lacking analytic capacity....  Because they -are- lacking analytic capacity. And his perception is limited in a way that theirs isn't.

Also, I really need a graphics editing program.


(One last thing. If you still don't believe me about holism being legit, go here and read until you start to understand. The crystal people are experiencing something you're not.
http://theastrarium.com/crystal-basics/)

I'm so thrilled to see these Idle No More protests happening. Voices are being raised and people are coming together. It's been a long time since there was a big popular movement for the good in our society and I would love to live through another period of positive transformation. It's time to talk about a revolution, and that's what Chief Spense is saying by asking to speak to the very top of our established hierarchy.

The problem is that a revolution is not something that happens in isolation. The current protests will not have the desired effect until there is an effective communication of the underlying philosophical shift that is being demanded. A revolution needs NEW IDEAS to thrive. What is lacking is an understanding of WHY we need to protect the First Nations cultures, for their own sake, above and beyond the atrocities they experience and the myriad other reasons that we presently have to rise up. We need to understand that they actually do have a different way of seeing the world that defies a lot of the things that our society takes absolutely for granted.

My message is that there has indeed been something brewing under the surface for decades now, that there is a big philosophical shift ready to happen if enough people make the connections. It's started already if you know where to look. It's the revolution that the dynamical systems and chaos theorists have been calling for for decades, with ideas that challenge reductionist science for its lack of context and its failure to exist in the complexity of the real world. Atheism is the first thing to go. Spirit is a thing that exists, even though it's not really a thing, it's more a way of moving. Once you understand, it's everywhere, you just can't pin it down. The Natives understand and they're showing us the way.

The traditional Native American life is a holistic and intuitive relationship with the land (the land is so important) that is manifested with variations in the oral cultures of the Nations that exist in all of the Americas and worldwide, which has allowed them to thrive since time immemorial. Therefore, they place a lot of importance on metaphor and extended verbal discussion - hense Chief Spense's hunger strike and her request to speak for "seven days or two weeks". As non-natives who are enthusiastic about this movement, we need to recognize that we are witnessing a big communication gap accross cultures. The dialogue is finally beginning, and slowly we will come to understand the ways that these people live in spiritual harmony with the land, in a great web, with "all our relations." Their approach is decentralized and ecosystemic, and it aims to describe things as they really are, rather than creating a reduced theory to project onto the system. It is about many different complex real-world identities interacting desirably, which is what's meant by "Nation to Nation discussions." It will only be when our cultures can speak to each other with genuine understanding that that the social change we seek will come.

Oh, and this is what the Occupy Movement is waiting for, too. This is all-encompassing.

I must explain who I am to make these claims. My name is Jamie Webber, I am studying degrees in Neuroscience and in Music Composition at McGill University in Montreal. I am 23 years old. I'm an intellectual anarchist, a free-thinker, and someone who feels a deep need to challenge the status-quo.  My intent is to be as diverse and plural in my approach as possible, to really see the world from all angles. By studying both the cutting edge of science and the timeless traditions of art I have have found similiar problems, intriguing alignments and frustrating incompatibilities that the people who specialize in a single domain will never recognize. As I searched more and more I began to find resonances in my own language with that of the First Nations people. Therefore, I recently acquired a copy of a book called Native Science by Gregory Cajete. The book explains the ways that traditional native cultures gathered knowledge about the world and made new discoveries. I found that it aligned perfectly with the complex argument I have been building against the edifice of Science, the hegemony of the modern world.

Our society needs now to understand and appreciate holism and oral culture and all that they can do for us. What I hope to explain... in my life, I guess, is that this will allow us to see spirituality as applied intuition and to appreciate certain amazing behaviours of the brain and of the universe that exist but are fundamentally inaccessible to scientific inquiry. These systems exhibit qualities that emerge from the interactions of the whole network, qualities that cannot be quantified or detected by only studying smaller brain areas or reduced components of whatever the object of investigation. The new ideas will bring to science a greater understanding of the work of artists and show that in certain elegant and highly elusive states, miraculous things can happen. New ideas are often uncomfortable. The First Nations have traditions that can inform us greatly and help our entire society work in a way that is more harmonious with itself and where creativity flows much more freely. After centuries of assimilation, it is time for us to be assimilated by them in return.

Next post - Why Anti-Galileo?
After that - Why do they always talk about the land? (or, Towards a Cognitive Neuroscience of Spirituality)


post-word

I want to make a declaration of ignorance. I am trying to explain something that I don't yet understand. I've only really been learning about the First Nations for a few months now and I'm afraid that I'm almost definitely projecting my ideas onto theirs. I'm sure this blog will be full of all of my youth and that I will take steps off the path and make claims that are unsubstantiated. It is certainly a dangerous game to try to make statements about another's culture, but the impetus that I feel is of having a voice that can say things that are not yet heard. I feel that the time to speak up is immediately, and this blog will be a learning process.

Sources:

http://www.amazon.ca/Native-Science-Natural-Laws-Interdependence/dp/1574160419/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1357362069&sr=1-1

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2013/01/04/pol-idle-no-more-friday.html