System Guidance (TW .3)

·3 System Guidance

When we talk about guidance in the abstract, or about somebody's ‘path’ through life, we know implicitly that we are talking about much more than changes of location in 2-D or 3-D space. —Of course, we say, using an idiom which shows that we habitually think of our habits in terms of courses or paths. (We could also say ‘That's obvious’ – and the ‘path’ or ‘way’ idea is still there, by way of the Latin via.) When we speak of ‘the straight path’ through life, or of ‘the Way’ intimated by a sage or guru, we are using metaphors for moves in behavior space – not merely physical moves and not merely disembodied thoughts, but acts of meaning. Human behavior space includes (or maybe is) the semiosphere of Lotman (1990). It is multidimensional, involving relationships with other systems and other processes at other scales in spacetime, plus cultural spaces. Moves on a chessboard are trivially simple by comparison, and the trajectory of a flying object even simpler. But since a guidance system has to simplify, mapping multidimensional moves onto ‘paths’ on flat ‘maps’ is very handy.

Lotman's semiosphere includes all of human culture; Hoffmeyer (1993) uses the term in a way that includes Lotman's but also extends beyond it to includes the entire semiotic universe (Deely 2001, 629).

A viable guidance system must, first, be robust enough (embody enough constancy of purpose) to continue on its way without being diverted by surprises; and second, must be flexible enough to respond to changing circumstances with internal changes.

The development of bodymind is guided by genes; the expression of genes is guided by somatic circumstance; somatic circumstances are guided by habits; habit formation (learning) is guided by development.

Perhaps the most literal implementation of structural coupling is the behavior of allosteric proteins, which fold into one of two three-dimensional structures depending on the presence of a molecular ‘partner’ and thus couple with complementary shapes. This allows them to act as ‘switches’ to facilitate chemical reactions within living cells; and ‘everything that gets done in an organism or by an organism is done by proteins’ (Loewenstein 1999, 72).

Before the beginning of guidance, you are here now, there is nowhere else. Guidance begins when a difference appears between where you are and where you are heading: then you have forward and backward, front and back, start and finish. Guidance develops as paths proliferate.

So there you are, trying to confabulate a story in which you might be a character who makes a difference – or at least, even if you're only an extra, a story with a plot, one that goes somewhere.

True guidance (the ‘straight path,’ the mother book) is implicit.

What is truly portable from context to context is not explicit. Indeed the explication of guidance often marks an occasion where implicit guidance has failed: see Tao Te Ching 38.

Repent: and so bear fruit worthy of repentance (ποιήσατε οὗν καρποὺς ἀξίους τῆς μετανοίας —Luke 3:8, Matthew 3:8). To be conscious means to be able to rethink your habits and thus to improve on them. But you must be able to form (take, make, ..... ) your own habits before you can reform them. This ability is characteristic of life itself. To form habits is to form a self: autopoiesis, self-making. To be a self is to be guided by your own habits rather than mechanically manipulated by external forces. To be alive is to be guided from the inside.

To be alive is to be guided by internal systems coupled with external systems.

In biology, the lineage continued by the passing on of the genetic text is called the genotype; the actual body of that lineage that lives and reproduces itself in the world is called the phenotype. Semiotically, individual organisms are instances or tokens of those types. —Usually the boundary between phenotype and environment is taken to be the animal's skin. Dawkins (2004, 157-161, summarizing his own 1982 book) points out that many structures outside the animal's body can be considered part of its extended phenotype. For instance, the beaver's dam, and the lake created by the dam, are expressions of the genotype, since the behavior which produces them is coded for in the genome just as surely as the shape of the beaver's tail. From this perspective, it would seem artificial to draw a sharp line between the human body and its cultural artifacts. In this sense we humans are Natural Born Cyborgs (Clark 2003). Gendlin's Process Model goes even deeper in considering body-environment as a single process.

The more the bow is bent, the straighter the flight of the arrow.

Guidance systems also produce judgments about whether others are well guided or not. As Mark Twain remarked, ‘Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.’

The genome is the body's internal instruction manual for becoming what it needs to be in order to pass on the instructions. This text has been ‘designed’ by the billion-year dialogue between the organism's ancestors and their changing circumstances. We have to put ‘design’ in quotes because developmental and evolutionary processes are unlike expert human designers in one crucial respect: they incorporate a measure of vagueness and indeterminacy, rather than specifying the structure of their devices to suit their intended function. This is a key difference between a deliberately designed machine (such as a ballistic or cruise missile) and a living organism such as yourself. If the purpose (or ‘meaning’) of a life were already fully determined, nothing new could ever happen among the living, except maybe novel styles of failure.

Unlike the genetic type of text, the external symbolic type can be reproduced, modified and shared almost at will. The symbolic species (see Deacon 1997) can thus develop an external guidance system – or a multitude of them, one for each culture and subculture. Such a system amounts to a shared universe which remains external to the individuals sharing in it. Each of them can read and internalize its symbolic ‘maps,’ incorporating them as habits and expressing them in real time as actual behavior. If the maps or texts fall out of synch with current experience, they can be changed promptly and purposefully – no more waiting for natural selection to guide the development of the guidance system. In this way cultural evolution makes a jump to warp speed, so to speak, compared to its biological predecessor.

Evolution has speeded itself up before, for instance with the advent of sexual reproduction. This innovation enlarged the space for variation of the genetic code: now each new individual represented a remix of the genotype, consisting of parts drawn from two genetic texts. Space for variation (or polyversity) is a prerequisite for evolution to be guided by selection; the advent of cultural variation, mediated by symbolic coding, entails a leap into hyperspace. But it also entails the challenge of learning to navigate this greatly expanded space. Navigation, as before, is guided from within the organic system, so an external guidance system has to be internalized in order to do its job. To inhabit a cultural universe, to read it selectively and thus develop healthy habits, takes time. As the technology of producing, transferring and retrieving texts improves, they proliferate far faster than they can be incorporated into our behavior. No wonder we humans are so much more bewildered than our wild cousins, who aren't distracted by symbolic media or inundated by floods of information. Unfortunately, many of them suffer annihilation as a side effect of our bewilderment and our proliferation.

We are bewildered because we are still wild at the biological core of our being, and the core process of all learning – including evolution itself – works by trial and error. Cultural evolution through the proliferation of external guidance systems has enormously amplified the possibilities of trial, the polyversity of success, and the effects of error. The question now is whether we can learn enough from our trials to avoid being overtaken by the consequences of our errors.

One early attempt to map the urgency of this complex situation onto a simple graphic device was the Doomsday Clock, introduced by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1947. On this clock, ‘midnight’ stood for a nuclear holocaust, and the imminence of the danger of such a catastrophe was represented by the position of the minute hand. Starting at 7 minutes to midnight, the Clock (i.e. the minute hand) was moved forward or back every few years to indicate changes in the global situation, as seen by conscientious members of the scientific community. In January 2007 a new dimension was added: the clock was moved up to 5 minutes to midnight (closer to ‘Doomsday’ than it had been since 1988), taking into account this time the threat of a gradual global-warming holocaust along with renewed dangers of a sudden nuclear catastrophe. The irony in all this is that the faculty which enables us to reduce such a complex situation to a simple symbol is the same faculty which enables us to make such a mess of the situation in the first place. By learning to map the implicit intricacy of life onto simple explicit symbols, we set the stage for artificial intervention into complex natural processes. Now we are learning how lethal such intervention can be.

Living systems exist in a state of dynamic tension, and thus take the double tension embodied in bow and lyre to a higher level. And if you don't mind taking polyversity to a higher level, we can make a double multilingual pun with the fragment of Heraclitus (quoted in Chapter 3) about the ‘bending back of the bow and the lyre.’ In one version of this fragment, ‘bending back’ translates παλιντροπος, while another version has παλιντονος (translated ‘inverse harmony’ by Wheelwright 1959, 153). The bow here is τοξον (not the older word βιός used in the Heraclitean pun presented earlier), and the lyre is λυρα. So now we can say that the ‘higher level’ to which life takes dynamic tension is both lyrical and toxic.

According to Alfred Huang, ‘the Tao of I, the essence of the I Ching … holds that when events proceed to their extremes they give birth to their opposites’ (Huang 1998, xvi).

This is an era of unprecedented human impact on the environment. You could say, as do Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry (1992, 4), that ‘the human has taken over such extensive control of the life systems of the Earth that the future will be dependent on human decision to an extent never dreamed of in previous times.’ But this is a strange kind of ‘control’. First, the planet is still much bigger than we are, and its responses to our impact on it continue to affect our lives much more than our conscious intentions do. Besides, in a world of six to ten billion humans, no one of us makes much of a difference in what ‘the human’ does on a global scale. And on top of that, we have failed so often and so grossly to anticipate the consequences of our collective activity that any claim to be in ‘control’ of the planet's life systems would seem the very essence of vanity. Maybe the delusion of control, or the lust for it, is the whole problem; or maybe there is an ambiguity hidden in the heart of control, a contradiction inherent in life itself.

In the meantime, we have to live with the consequences of our decisions, and with the unpredictability of those consequences, and with the fact that – due to circumstances beyond our control – we have no choice but to make choices.

The need for control is felt by all of us, not just by those obsessed with power. The feeling of having at least some control is a component of ‘flow,’ and works as a ‘coping’ mechanism even after real control has ceased to exist. This is part of our biological heritage; a 2006 study conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health identified a ‘circuitry of resilience’ in the rat brain which functions so that ‘experiencing control over a stressor immunizes a rat from developing a depression-like syndrome when it later encounters stressors that it can't control,’ according to the NIMH news release.

Being the manipulative species that we are, we have mixed some notions of domination into our everyday concept of control.

Heraclitus was quoted as writing, around 600 B.C., that ‘the wise is one, knowing the plan (ἐπίστασθαι γνώμην) by which it steers all things through all (πάντα διὰ πάντων).’ The ‘knowing’ verb, ἐπίστασθαι, usually connotes mastery (literally ‘standing over’). But the exact form of the ‘steering’ verb being uncertain (see Kahn 1979, 170), we might also translate ‘the thought by which all things steer themselves through all things’. ‘Steer themselves’ would translate κυβερναται, one of the most plausible readings of the text: being in the Greek middle voice, neither active nor passive, this reading is compatible with the concepts of autopoiesis, self-organization and enaction.

Various forms of κυβερναω were commonly used in a ‘standard metaphor of cosmic steering’ (Kahn 1979, 272) even before Heraclitus. In the mid-20th century, the same Greek word was used to name the new field of cybernetics.

If Heraclitus did use the middle voice, this would open up a curious connection with another discipline developing earlier in the early 20th century, generally called phenomenology. According to Henry Corbin:

The etymological meaning of the word ‘phenomenon’, taken in the precise technical sense of phenomenology, is very much the original meaning of the Greek word phainomenon. This is the present participle of a verb in the middle voice; i.e., the subject is manifesting, appearing, and being shown to itself and for itself. It is the middle, the medium, the medial voice of the verb.
— Corbin 1948 (1998, 24)

There could be a more-than-verbal connection between the middle voice and the semiotic concept of mediation (Peirce's Thirdness), or the ‘middle way’ of Nagarjuna and Mahayana Buddhism. But getting back to English, that ‘pirate language’ – since it lacks a middle voice, our notion of ‘appearance’ tends to split into ‘subject’ and ‘object’, while ‘control’ tends to split into a controller (active) and a controlled (passive). Cybernetics was defined by Norbert Wiener as ‘the science of control and communication, in the animal and the machine’ (Ashby 1956, 1). To many outsiders, the discipline looked more like control of the animal (and human) by mechanical means, which was certainly not the intention of the early cyberneticists.

Three centuries earlier, Descartes had used the same nautical metaphor, but without the sense that the living body steers itself; for him the body was merely a passive mechanism, and guidance was done by a separate mind or soul, the spiritual captain of the physical ship. This particular dualism has infected our thinking ever since. Intentionally or not, the word control tends to conjure up the dualistic vision of a controlling agency – captain, director, governor, dictator, boss – and a relatively passive subject (subject in the political sense of one who is governed). Once institutionalized, this becomes a domination system (Borg 2001) rather than a self-guidance system. Jean-Pierre Dupuy criticizes ‘the unfortunate choice of the very name “cybernetics”’ as ‘implying a theory of command, governance, and mastery’ (Petitot et al. 1999, 558). Even the notion of self-control seems to split the whole self into two parts, with one imagined as controlling the other. I have tried to avoid some of these misconceptions by using the word guidance rather than control because it seems less suggestive of dominance.

Setting aside word choice, though, it seems that cybernetics (at least in its early days) was working with the same central ideas of closure and circularity that later found their way into autopoiesis theory and into this book.

Cybernetics might, in fact, be defined as the study of systems that are open to energy but closed to information and control – systems that are ‘information-tight’ (Ashby 1956, 4).

—or to put it another way, systems that are self-informed – ‘autonomous agents.’

Introducing an article about her father (Gregory Bateson) and mother (Margaret Mead), Mary Catherine Bateson provides this concise retrospective view of cybernetics:

Both my parents played important roles roles in the early development of cybernetics, participating for over a decade in the search for ways of thinking about the behavior of systems, their formal similarities and interactions, that could connect biology and the social sciences and inform various kinds of engineering and design … The way an organism adjusts to circumstances has similarities to the way a ‘smart’ missile stays on course, so by the time of my parents' deaths the term had largely been usurped by engineering and computer science and had become associated in popular usage with mechanical, inhuman constructions.
— M.C. Bateson (2004, 44)

Polanyi (1962) was already associating the term with such mechanistic models. Likewise Robert Rosen (2000, Chapter 19) lumps cybernetics with information theory, ‘bionics’ and ‘artificial intelligence’ as developments of the organism-as-machine metaphor which goes back to Descartes. According to Rosen, ‘mechanical constructions’ were of the essence of these disciplines right from the beginning, because they never treated systems as complex in Rosen's sense of the word. They were all simple because they were mechanical, whereas for Rosen ‘organism and machine are different in kind’ (2000, 295). The difference between Rosen's perspective and Bateson's on this episode in history can serve to remind us that understanding what is meant by ‘complex’ in any given context is anything but simple. Rosen himself says that his own usage of the term ‘is completely different from that employed heretofore. This is unfortunate, but there were no other terms that could be used. In von Neumann's terminology, every system is simple in my sense; what he calls complex I would merely call complicated’ (2000, 292). It was von Neumann who developed methods of quantifying ‘complexity’, says Rosen (2000, 289), ‘and complexity in this sense became an explanatory principle for the characteristics of life’ – all of which kept ‘life’ firmly within the mechanical domain. But Rosen (2000, 303) also observes that a system controlling the system's response to its environment amounts to a model of the environment – which brings us back to the meaning cycle.

These changing conceptions of ‘control’ and ‘complexity’ have taken yet another turn with the advent of infodynamics, linking information and thermodynamics. Salthe defines infodynamics as

the science of information changes in systems, especially in systems that are informed primarily from within. A combination of nonequilibrium thermodynamics and information theory based on the idea that, just as energy transformations lead to an increase in entropy, so do they, at least when viewed from within a system, lead to increases in information.
— Salthe (1993, 315)

The term (first used by David Depew and Bruce Weber in the late 1980s) reflects the twin sources of the concept. It differs from Shannon's original information theory by focusing on nonequilibrium thermodynamics, a field not yet developed in Shannon's time. While it remains a mathematical model, the ‘view from within’ or ‘internalist perspective’ embodied in infodynamics (Salthe 1993, 2004) may afford a way to model dimensions of meaning not reflected in Shannon's information theory.

Peirce, as we have seen, defined ‘real things’ as those ‘whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them’. Prigogine (1997, 154), taking a similar view, quotes Nabokov: ‘What can be controlled is never completely real; what is real can never be completely controlled.’ The work of psychologist Marcia K. Johnson on ‘reality monitoring’ confirms that when we need to distinguish between the real and the imaginary, we take our sense of control over things or events as evidence that they are not real (see also Wegner 2002, 234). Our everyday notion of causation – that is, of ‘cause and effect’ – is likewise derived from the core experience of control, as Howard Pattee explains:

I believe the common, everyday meaning of the concept of causation is entirely pragmatic. In other words, we use the word cause for events that might be controllable. In the philosophical literature controllable is the equivalent of the idea of power. Bishop Berkeley thought it obvious that cause cannot be thought of apart from the idea of power (e.g., Taylor, 1972). In other words, the value of the concept of causation lies in its identification of where our power and control can be effective. For example, while it is true that bacteria and mosquitos follow the laws of physics, we do not usually say that malaria is caused by the laws of physics (the universal cause). That is because we can hope to control bacteria and mosquitos, but not the laws of physics. When we say that the lack of vitamin C is a cause of scurvy, all we mean is that vitamin C controls scurvy. A fundamental understanding or explanation of malaria or scurvy is an entirely different type of problem.
— Pattee (1997)

This would explain why a group organized to change the existing social or political order, or gain some control over it, is also called a ‘cause’. In a similar vein, Karl Popper links the experience of manipulating objects (which begins in infancy) with the notion of determinism:

Our inclination to think deterministically derives from our acts as movers, as pushers of bodies: from our Cartesianism. But today this is no longer science. It has become ideology.
— Popper (1990, 24)

The sense of control and the derived concept of ‘cause and effect’ help us to cope with a complex world by reducing the vast interbeing of reality down to a few pragmatic control points. As Wegner (2002) shows, the experience of conscious control is such an expedient – it is an illusion to take it as a real explanation of our decisions. Erving Goffman, concluding his study on The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, says much the same about the sense of self:

In our society the character one performs and one's self are somewhat equated, and this self-as-character is usually seen as something housed within the body of its possessor, especially the upper parts thereof, being a nodule, somehow, in the psychobiology of personality. I suggest that this view is an implied part of what we are all trying to present, but provides, just because of this, a bad analysis of the presentation. In this report the performed self was seen as some kind of image, usually creditable, which the individual on stage and in character effectively attempts to induce others to hold in regard to him. While this image is entertained concerning the individual, so that a self is imputed to him, this self itself does not derive from its possessor, but from the whole scene of his action, being generated by that attribute of local events which renders them interpretable by witnesses. A correctly staged and performed scene leads the audience to impute a self to a performed character, but this imputation – this self – is a product of a scene that comes off, and is not a cause of it. The self, then, as a performed character, is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, and to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented, and the characteristic issue, the crucial concern, is whether it will be credited or discredited.
— Goffman (1959, 252-3)

The belief that microscopic agencies in the brain control or ‘cause’ our conscious experience is an even deeper illusion, introjecting the deterministic ideology. Freeman (1999b) concurs with all this, arguing that our concept of cause and effect is pragmatically useful only within a framework of linear thinking – which cannot accommodate the ‘circular causality’ by which mind and body are reciprocally guided. A fully developed model of living guidance must include a hierarchy of systemic levels, at least those immediately above and below the focal level of the organism.

Our attempts to amplify and project the feeling of conscious control often lead to confusion about the relationship between the phenomenal world and the physical world (for instance, the ‘mind-body problem’ and the attempt to explain how experience is ‘caused’ by brain dynamics). They also lead to our tendency to trash the planet, as Gregory Bateson insisted in a provocative lecture called ‘Conscious Purpose Versus Nature’ (Bateson 1972).

Guidance, as used here, is the more comprehensive concept; the steersman's control of the ship is only one small aspect of what guides it to port, and all of nature has some role in creating the circumstances in which that control can be meaningful. In the same vein, we could say that context guides meaning. This implication may be reflected in other pre-Socratic uses of the cyber- root besides those of Heraclitus (above). For instance, Aristotle says that Anaximander (among other early speculators about nature) held that the apeiron (‘infinite’ or ‘indefinite’) ‘surrounds and steers’ all things (Kirk and Raven 1957, 114). This is clearly what Pattee calls a ‘universal cause’ rather than a control point like the ship's rudder.

If the navigator asks not only how to get to Egypt, but also, as Plato wanted, why go there, and what purposes are worthwhile, naturally that would seem to disorganize the science of navigation. (Or would it get us out of the bind of technological splits between how and why, facts and values, physical and human, and so on? Would it lead to new concepts that could apply across?)
— Gendlin (1998, VIII-B)

And so we find

the seagoer, when he bore down in his perry boat he had raised a slide and shipped his orders and seized his pullets and primed their plumages, the fionnling and dubhlet, the dun and the fire, and, sending them one by other to fare fore forn, he had behold the residuance of a delugion: the foggy doze still going strong, the old thalassocrats of invinsible empores, maskers of the waterworld, facing one way to another way and this way on that way, from severalled their fourdimmansions. Where the lighning leaps from the numbulous; where coold by cawld breide lieth langwid; the bounds whereinbourne our solied bodies all attomed attaim arrest: appoint, that's all. But see what follows. Wringlings upon wronglings among incomputables about an uncomeoutable (an angel prophetethis? kingcorrier of beheasts? the calif in his halifskin? that eyriewinging one?) and the voids bubbily vode's dodos across the which the boomomouths from their dupest dupes were in envery and anononously blowing great.
— FW 367

Antonio Damasio (1999, 230-33) elucidates the intimate connection between conscience and consciousness. He points out that whereas English and German have separate words for them, the Romance languages typically use the same word for both, so that one relies on context to determine which meaning is intended. In order to ‘do the right thing’, one must in the first place be conscious in a distinctively human sense, which Damasio calls extended consciousness. This endows us with a range of abilities not shared with other animals.

Among this remarkable collection of abilities allowed by extended consciousness, two in particular deserve to be highlighted: first, the ability to rise above the dictates of advantage and disadvantage imposed by survival-related dispositions and, second, the critical detection of discords that leads to a search for truth and a desire to build norms and ideals for behavior and for the analyses of facts. These two abilities are not only my best candidates for the pinnacle of human distinctiveness, but they are also those which permit the truly human function that is so perfectly captured by the single word conscience.
— Damasio (1999, 230)

The concept of conscientia is the original root concept from which all later terminologies in Roman languages and in English have developed. It is derived from cum (‘with,’ ‘together’) and scire (‘knowing’) and in classical antiquity, as well as in scholastic philosophy, predominantly referred to moral conscience or a common knowledge of a group of persons, again most commonly of moral facts. It is only since the seventeenth century that the interpretation of conscientia as a higher-order knowledge of mental states begins to dominate. Because cum can also have a purely emphatic function, conscientia also frequently just means to know something with great certainty. What the major Greek precursor concept of συνειδήσις shares with conscientia is the idea of moral conscience.
— Metzinger (2003, 171n)

The Greek συνειδήσις, like Latin conscientia, compounds a verb meaning ‘to know’ with a prefix meaning ‘together with.’ The shorter word συνεσις, literally ‘a coming together’, could also mean ‘conscience’ as well as ‘sagacity’ (LS). In classical Greek the verbal form of suneidesis was sometimes used with a reflexive pronoun, so a literal translation would say ‘I know with myself’ (that some action is good or bad). This highlights the intimate connection with self-consciousness (often called simply ‘consciousness’ in English). This is interesting in conjunction with the Jaynes (1976) hypothesis that the Greeks of classical times were the first humans to be conscious – that is, the first to recognize that the guiding ‘voices’ which they heard were coming from themselves. According to Jaynes, humans before this point hallucinated these voices coming from distant or departed authority figures, or from statues of them, when in fact they were generated by the right hemisphere of the brain; thus they had ‘bicameral minds’, divided between thoughts or ‘voices’ which they took to be their own and voices which they heard as coming from Others. This way of seeing (or rather hearing) things broke down when the Greeks internalized the voice of conscience.

The more current concept of consciousness, as explicated by Damasio, Metzinger and many others, would place it at the top (i.e. the inside) of a specification hierarchy, which Damasio here calls an ‘enchainment of precedences’:

the nonconscious neural signaling of an individual organism begets the proto-self which permits core self and core consciousness, which allow for an autobiographical self, which permits extended consciousness. At the end of the chain, extended consciousness permits conscience.
— Damasio (1999, 230)

In our Salthean notation:

{neural signaling {proto-self {core self {autobiographical self {ext. consciousness {conscience}}}}}}

Damasio remarks that humanity has always been concerned with conscience, but the ‘preoccupation with what we call consciousness is recent – three and a half centuries perhaps – and has only come to the fore late in the twentieth century’ (231). Science is thus working its way from the basic level (conscience) back down the hierarchy, which also leads toward the microscopic scale. For a closely related study focussing on the evolution of morality, see Goodenough and Deacon (2003).

To William Blake, ‘conscience’ was the voice of God (i.e. of the Human Imagination) rather than the equivocal voice of reason. In Blake's Milton, the Bard sings

According to the inspiration of the Poetic Genius
Who is the eternal all-protecting Divine Humanity

– and whom Blake frequently identifies with Jesus and with Mercy, as opposed to the vengeful and oppressive ‘moral law’ which is always trying to restrict human impulses and imagination. These views were surprisingly similar to C.S. Peirce's (recall the comparison and contrast of these two in Chapter 7), though their usage of the word ‘conscience’ was quite different.

In 1885, Peirce wrote a review of Josiah Royce's Religious Aspect of Philosophy, in which he says that a ‘sentiment’ of ‘christian charity’ is a much better guide to conduct than moral reasoning or ‘conscience’:

The moral stand-point from which every man with a christian training sets out, even if he be a dogmatic atheist, is pretty nearly the same. He has a horror of certain crimes and a disapproval of certain lesser sins. He is also more or less touched with the spirit of christian love, which he believes should be his beacon, and which in point of fact, by its power in his heart, shall and will govern him in all questions of disputed morals. More or less, in all of us, this sentiment replaces and abolishes conscience; like Huckleberry Finn, we act from christian charity without caring very much whether conscience approves of the act or not.
This is the state of mind of the ordinary man or woman who will open Dr. Royce's book. And now Dr. Royce proposes that this person shall ask himself the question, what validity or truth is there in the distinction of right and wrong. To me, it plainly appears that such a person, if he have a clear head, will at once reply, right and wrong are nothing to me except so far as they are connected with certain rules of living by which I am enabled to satisfy a real impulse which works in my heart; and this impulse is the love of my neighbor elevated into a love of an ideal and divine humanity which I identify with the providence that governs the world.
(EP1:238)

Divine humanity? This might have seemed a blasphemous idea to a believer in orthodox Christian theology (could this have been a factor in Peirce's review being rejected by the editor?); but as you can see above, this is a central idea (and a phrase often used) in Blake – who also, like Peirce, criticized the official religious establishment as being indifferent or opposed to genuine ‘christian charity’. (Maybe Peirce left ‘christian’ uncapitalized in order to distinguish it from official ‘Christianity’?) Of course Blake, in true prophetic style, expressed his aversion to the ‘27 Churches’ more emphatically than Peirce. In Jerusalem (38:19-23), the Christian churches are described as

Brooding in holy hypocritic lust, drinking the cries of pain
From howling victims of Law: building Heavens Twenty-seven-fold.
Swelld & bloated General Forms, repugnant to the Divine-
Humanity, who is the Only General and Universal Form
To which all Lineaments tend & seek with love & sympathy
All broad & general principles belong to benevolence
Who protects minute particulars, every one in their own identity.

Blake also used the word ‘providence’ in much the same sense as Peirce, referring to ‘Divine Providence as opposd to & distinct from Divine vengeance’ in A Vision of the Last Judgment. In his annotations, Blake objected that Swedenborg's ‘Providence’ was really predestination – another idea to which Peirce was opposed, although for different reasons. An early taste of Peirce's evolutionary cosmology, in its connection with ‘the providence that governs the world’, appears earlier in the same review quoted above: ‘I think that the existence of God, as well as we can conceive of it, consists in this, that a tendency toward ends is so necessary a constituent of the universe that the mere action of chance upon innumerable atoms has an inevitable teleological result’ (EP1:236).

The concept of poiesis (as in autopoiesis) covers a broad range of behavior and includes ethical implications, as did the complex of Greek verbs formed from the root poie-. Consider for instance the classic Gospel statement of the ‘golden rule’ (Matthew 7:12 and Luke 6:13): ‘And the way you want people to treat you, that is how you treat them.’ The Greek verbs translated ‘treat’ here are forms of poie-.

The auto- prefix can also cause confusion, especially in words like autonomy. According to Varela, ‘the key to autonomy is that a living system finds its way into the next moment by acting appropriately out of its own resources’ (Varela 1992, 11).

Gary Marcus (2004) explains how the genes work to guide the development of the body, and of the brain in particular, so that it can serve as guidance system for the body. He calls the current understanding of how genes work ‘Autonomous Agent Theory’: ‘Every gene is a free agent authorized to act on its own’ (60). He means by this that there is no central authority telling the genes what to do; but it seems a rather odd sort of ‘autonomy’, considering that ‘no gene works on its own. Complex biological structures – whether we speak of the brain or of hearts or kidneys – are the products of the concerted actions and interactions of many genes, not just one’ (80).

On top of that there is mutual, reciprocal, interactive guidance going on between gene expression and external events:

The reason that animals can learn is that they can alter their nervous systems on the basis of external experience. And the reason they can do that is that experience itself can modify the expression of genes.
— Marcus (2004, 98)

‘Experience’ here refers not to to subjective consciousness but primarily to the effect on an organism of interaction with its environment. But interaction can happen even when the experience is internally generated (108), so the epistemic cut needed to describe this process does not necessarily fall between organism and environment.

Whence it is a slopperish matter, given the wet and low visibility (since in this scherzarade of one's thousand one nightinesses that sword of certainty which would indentifide the body never falls) to idendifine the individuone …
— Finnegans Wake (51)

On the smaller-scale process of brain development, neurons migrate to specific locations, and project their axons to specific targets, as guided by a complex system of chemical signals which modify gene expression (Marcus 2004, Chapter 6).

Because all this goes on in an organism, it can use salient features of its world as a guidance system – as the indigo bunting, for instance, uses the rotation of the stars to guide its migratory flights.

Humans, when they devote themselves to the service of large-scale artificial systems (such as states, religions and corporations), are capable of a truly sinister dexterity. The joke here is of course in the etymology of the last two words. Sinister and dexter are the Latin words for left and right respectively. Since the right hand is the more skillful for 90% of humans, dexterity came to mean skill in English. Sinister on the other hand came to mean evil, presumably because we can use good for skillful, as in ‘a good craftsman’. However the two words lost their symmetry as they diverged in meaning. On the dexter side, we ended up with the paradoxical term ambidextrous, which ‘literally’ means having two right hands – but consider that if someone was born with two hands which were not mirror images of each other, we would surely find it sinister.

Only now can you change the direction of your life, and only now can you assess the significance of past changes.

By one set of habits you are blinded to what's right in front of you. By another set of habits you can talk with others about what you see. The trick of intimate seeing is to pit these habit-sets against each other and see that neither one wins – that the tension between them is continually refreshed.

No special set of teachings will save the world. The world is only saved by continuous learning. And indeed only learning can redeem the teachings. ‘Learning,’ like ‘meaning,’ is often reified as an accumulation of material; same with ‘teachings.’ Enactively speaking, though, teaching, learning and meaning are all processes, works in continual progress.

We must recognize that the only effective program available as our primary guide toward a viable human mode of being is the program offered by the Earth itself.
— Thomas Berry (1999, 71)

The real source of ‘spiritual’ experience is intimate connection with the matrix of all human experience: the planet Earth, the biosphere – in a word, nature. The technosphere, and even much of traditional religion, seems devoted to cutting us off from that source (or at least distracting us from it) by surrounding us with an artificial cocoon.

Ecologically speaking, the trouble with the human race is that it's getting too big for its niches. Our niche is our ‘house’ (Greek oikos, source of both economy and ecology).

‘It is estimated that to support our present Earth population at the level enjoyed in North America would require two or three planets’ (Berry 1999, 114). The irony is that the ‘level enjoyed in North America’ is not really enjoyed – like any addiction, it simply perpetuates its own craving. Actual enjoyment comes only with mindful experience, with the cessation of craving.

The cure for that addiction lies in the recognition of ‘big mind’, as Shunryu Suzuki called it, and as Bateson developed it when he turn the concept of ‘mind’ inside out.

Freudian psychology expanded the concept of mind inwards to include the whole communication system within the body – the autonomic, the habitual, and the vast range of unconscious process. What I am saying expands mind outwards. And both of these changes reduce the scope of the conscious self. A certain humility becomes appropriate, tempered by the dignity or joy of being part of something much bigger. A part – if you will – of God.
If you put God outside and set him vis-a-vis his creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you. And as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem to be yours to exploit. Your survival unit will be you and your folks and conspecifics against the environment of other social units, other races and the brutes and vegetables.
If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell. You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate, or, simply, of overpopulation and overgrazing. The raw materials of the world are finite.
— Bateson (1972, 461)

The unconscious, then, is not a closet full of skeletons in the private house of the individual mind; it is not even, finally, a cave full of dreams and ghosts in which, like Plato's prisoners, most of us spend most of our lives …
The unconscious is rather that immortal sea which brought us hither; intimations of which are given in moments of ‘oceanic feeling’; one sea of energy or instinct; embracing all mankind, without distinctions of race, language, or culture; and embracing all the generations of Adam, past, present, and future, in one phylogenetic heritage; in one mystical or symbolical body.
— N.O. Brown (1966, 88-9)

Unhealthy as it is for a special interest or subsystem to dominate a system, there is a kind of dominance which may be necessary for the system to act as a unit. For instance,

in human as well as nonhuman species, functions seem to be apportioned asymmetrically to the cerebral hemispheres, for reasons which probably have to do with the need for one final controller rather than two, when it comes to choosing an action or a thought. If both sides had equal say on making a movement, you might end up with a conflict – your right hand might interfere with the left, and you would have a lesser chance of producing coordinated patterns of motion involving more than one limb.
— Damasio (1994, 66)

It does in fact happen to patients whose brains have been surgically split (by cutting the corpus callosum) that the right hand may interfere with or undo what the left is doing, or vice versa. Language functions are dominated by structures in one hemisphere of the brain (for 95% of us, the left hemisphere). On the other hand(!), right-hemisphere dominance is a feature of the somatosensory system, coordinating the various neural ‘maps’ representing the state of the body with reference to touch, temperature, pain, joint position and visceral state. The resulting ‘dynamic map’ is essential to the integrated body-sense required for any whole-body performance. (This may have something to do with Peirce, who was left-handed, preferring diagrams (icons) over words and symbols as aids to the understanding of logic.) Perception of external space also shows right-hemisphere dominance (Damasio 1994, 66) – perhaps a biological basis of the spiritual insight that the world is your body.

The necessity of dominance is reflected in the gospel statement that one cannot serve two masters at the same time. We find the Thomas version in Saying 47:

Jesus says:
‘It is impossible for a person to mount two horses and to stretch two bows. And it is impossible for a servant to serve two masters. Else he will honor the one and insult the other. No person drinks old wine and immediately desires to drink new wine. And new wine is not put into old wineskins, so that they do not burst; nor is old wine put into (a) new wineskin, so that it does not spoil it. An old patch is not sewn onto a new garment, because a tear will result.’
— (5G)

The relationships among the various parts of 47 are somewhat vague, though all are related to the general notion of compatibility. The wine metaphor is an interesting choice because new wine is generally considered inferior to the old, whereas new discoveries or revelations seem to be valued above old habits or institutions in this Gospel as a whole. What does this tell us if we apply the wine/wineskin metaphor to the content/form distinction in language? And how does this relate to the clothing metaphor which follows? Those familiar with Chan/Zen Buddhism may connect that final sentence with the frequent references to monastic ‘home-leavers’ as ‘patch-robed monks’, and with Dogen's injunction: ‘According to the usual practice of buddhas, a robe of discarded cloth is regarded as excellent’ (Tanahashi 2000, 84). The monk determined to liberate all beings takes up (redeems, resurrects?) what others have discarded, just as the stone rejected by the builders becomes the cornerstone of the temple.

Several sayings in Thomas (and other gospels) seem to use clothing metaphorically, and here too spiritual value is related negatively or inversely to ‘worldly’ value. Here are three examples:

Jesus says: ‘Why did you go out to the countryside? To see a reed shaken by the wind, and to see a person dressed in soft clothing [like your] kings and your great/powerful persons? They are dressed in soft clothing and will not be able to recognize the truth.’
— Thomas 78 (5G)

Jesus said, ‘Do not be concerned from morning until evening and from evening until morning about what you will wear.’
— Thomas 36 (Lambdin)

His disciples said, ‘When will you become revealed to us and when shall we see you?’ Jesus said, ‘When you disrobe without being ashamed and take up your garments and place them under your feet like little children and tread on them, then [will you see] the son of the living one, and you will not be afraid.’
— Thomas 37 (Lambdin)

You can't leave home (in quest of the living truth) and stay home (conforming to conventional habits) at the same time: you have to choose. Remember that one meaning of habit is ‘a suit of clothes’. We might sum up this complex of thought as follows: The habit of highest value is the one you have yourself renewed after it was old and discarded, not the new one you can buy off the shelf from a merchant.

The prototype of all intimologies in the ancient human journey is tracking.

Tracking an animal is opening the door to the life of that animal. It is an educational process, like learning how to read. In fact, it is learning how to read. Following an animal's trail may bring you closer to the animal physically, but more important, it brings you closer to it in perception.… The more intimate we become with other lives, the more aware we are of how those lives connect with and affect our own. There may be only a few obvious connections at first – two animals in the same woods, hearing the same sounds, smelling the same smells – but as we track the animal farther, we find that its trail is our own trail. As it moves, it affects its surroundings. What changes the animal changes its environment, and thus changes us. There is no separation; its fate is our fate. We are tracking ourselves in a sense.
— Paul Rezendes (1999, 15)

You can read the signs. You've been on this road before.
— Laurie Anderson, United States

Nature's own guidance system must encompass human nature, which in turn must encompass yours and mine. We assume that there is such a universal guidance system because we can read the signs and observe the regularities of nature. Life, according to Gregory Bateson, is ‘a game whose purpose is to discover the rules, which rules are always changing and always undiscoverable’ (Bateson 1972, 19-20). Science is the attempt to state and test rules which would, if they indeed governed natural processes, produce the regularities we observe. As long as these stated rules serve to guide our actions appropriately (that is, to the extent that they enable us to take a next step on the path), we continue to use them. Yet in our moments of waking we know there is always more to discover. Carlos Castaneda (or his ‘Toltec’ mentors) encapsulated this beautifully in the set of precepts called ‘the rule of stalkers’, which is necessary for the ‘warrior's’ life but also ‘applies to everyone’:

The first precept of the rule is that everything that surrounds us is an unfathomable mystery.
The second precept of the rule is that we must try to unravel these mysteries, but without ever hoping to accomplish this.
The third, that a warrior, aware of the unfathomable mystery that surrounds him, and aware of his duty to try to unravel it, takes his rightful place among mysteries and regards himself as one. Consequently, for a warrior there is no end to the mystery of being, whether being means being a pebble, or an ant, or oneself. That is a warrior's humbleness.
— Castaneda (1981, 281)

A similar spirit pervades the four bodhisattva vows of Mahayana Buddhism, though here compassion comes to the foreground:

Sentient beings are innumerable; I vow to save them.
Desires are inexhaustible; I vow to end them.
The Dharma teachings are boundless; I vow to master them.
The Buddha Way is unsurpassable; I vow to attain it.
— Cook (1978, 32)

What is called arousing the thought of enlightenment is the uttering of the vow to emancipate all living beings even while you yourself are not yet emancipated. When one arouses this thought, no matter how humble in appearance one is, one then becomes the guide of all beings.
— Dogen (Cook 1978, 43)