Essays – MarkCleaveland.org

The Qualia of Grief

Emotions, like any category of perception, are not unitary things. Let’s hold up grief. We use the word “grief” to describe a state that has a range of causes and functions. Discombobulated tears might accompany the death of a loved one, or appear for a parent during a child’s wedding. They might occur when one is alone, or they might occur only when surrounded by others. And a psychologist would use these differences to suss out the causes and functions of grief. Is it a behavior that strengthens social relationships? Does it prune painful memories via an associative process? Is it a by-product of a homeostatic process? Does it follow a regular time course. Does it follow culturally bound display rules?

This is the science of grief where there is no single “grief” in the same way that vision does not exist to perceive a single object. There are depths, shapes and colors — all actively working away within the nest of vision. So it is with emotions. They are collectives, not singular things, to which the buzzing of science (itself a collective) applies iteself, bending the universe towards a place of prediction and control. The logical. The rational. The process-oriented.

But is that all there is? Does that miss anything of value?

There is a reason why the logical, rational, and process-oriented approach of science feels so alien in relation to our emotions. To feel is to live, after all. “Are you a robot or a human being?” Emotions are just processes. Emotions are just functional states. True. …And? Isn’t there more to be said? Are they not also something felt? Don’t they possess a qualia? They are how we know we breathe, these feelings. They are how we know we are awake, are headed towards purpose. So, what would death be, but an absenting of all feeling?

Again, let’s hold up grief, because if anything stands in opposition to the void, it is grief — that assertion of the unique living moment, or friend, or future, or loved one, or self, in the face of loss. It is the bulwark against the contaminating encroachment of dissipation and mere time. There is a reason why it shares so many qualities with disgust, another emotion centered on the purging of poisons. Grief purges, but within a different digestive realm, the realm of the historically accumulated, subjective self, the subjective identity layered as an associative thicket.

With that in mind, I’m going to take a slightly different approach with this post. To try and consider grief on its own terms. Not pinned down in a scrapbook. Not to make a point, or rather yes, to make a point, but in the same way that the emotions that reside within us make their points: indirectly, lyrically, and laid out like the tesserae of a mosaic. It is ironic that I am going to use words to do this, because the language of emotions is not that of words. There is a reason why emotions and music reside conceptually together rather than emotions and language. But we use the tools we have.

***

So, what does grief tell us — that feeling of convulsions and dry heaves when the world sleeps, and a voice (your voice) blurts out, “No! No, no, no, no, no, …” It is as if identity itself were a corporal force intent on the impossible — an expulsion of absence. The self again and again convulsed and emptied. Emptied yet again. Gasps and then being crumpled into a respite, only to be convulsed and drawn fetally to the floor once more. It is a feeling more complete than any after-party black out. Except here it isn’t a stomach’s attempt to empty out poison, but the body coming to the rescue of mind — it’s the body’s hand reaching into the mind’s darkness to pull out that which is missing. Grabbing and clenching it scrapes away for a thing that can’t be found, shuddering as the breaches appear again, and again.

When I was younger I thought that there was only one way to turn grief into meaning — that grief had but one act. The solution was to cordon it off from language and lock it down. To express trauma was to belittle it. To express grief would be to dissect “it” (that necessary “it”) from the body, and wound’t this just compound loss with but another loss? Unspoken, at the very least, the necessary presence could remain, in the same way that the ink of an etching carries in it the impression of the now-absent wood. It is the room left unchanged when the children go off to college. It is Iago at the end of Othello declaring that from this point forward he will say nothing. A defiant flag planted as an ode to darkness — that shadowed landscape in which motivations and their contingent wreckage have no comprehension or sense within the breath of living. The burned images left behind after the bombs took away the living. There is that. At least there is that. A preserved totem pointing to an empty chair. To speak would be to share, and to share would be to re-experience loss by handing it over to others who can only nod, and mm-hmm, and then eerily go about their own busy lives. As eerily as robots. Here, at least, kept within the shadows they remain, ever pointing to that which was lost.

Within that refusal there is a type of purity, or a solitary imprint of purity crystalized against the tides of convenience. That is is the purpose of each convulsion. The loss will stay within, and to carry those remains, space must be made. All must be jettisoned, hollowed, and extracted. To do otherwise is to lose even more, and to lose is to no longer be. Holding on to the emptied space within is existential. As the mind laments, the body comes to the fore.

“Breathe taking.” We use the phrase to describe an encounter with that which defies language — those bones thrown out as augury when the stars and darkness impose their weight. Maybe it is the way her form once weighted itself next to you. Maybe it was the bump of shoulders on a walk in the woods. Maybe it was the furniture to be assembled and placed within the living room of a future. Maybe it was a voice — that voice — her voice — doing a silly sing-song over the telephone. “Breath taking.”

Maybe this why you gasp and shudder. A body plunging into the dark water where all else is silenced in the long sub-surface swim. The body holds its breath in the only pontomine of living that remains. At least it is something. Words? They are not breath taking. The are breath giving. A camera set back in motion. The house sold to a new family. The furniture replaced. Bulldozers brought in to build a subdivision where the orchard once spread. The large trucks arriving to cart off the detritus to time’s indiscriminate heap.

Words? They are slippery, changeable things. Breath held? This is grief’s first act. Give me silence of such weight that the record skips and the earth ceases its turning. Time grinds to a halt to a point where loss can have no meaning. The images remain. The voices remain. They will remain.

***

When I was in my 20’s the book The English Patient made an impression on me. The title character was burnt beyond recognition – his only identity held within the echoes of Herodotus’ Histories. Its pages interleaved by his own clipped and glued additions and added observations. In the book, his is the negated vortex — an intensity existing solely within its essential absence.

Give me a map and I’ll build you a city. Give me a pencil and I will draw you a room in South Cairo, desert charts on the wall. Always the desert was among us. But… our room never appears in the detailed reports which chartered every knoll and every incident of history. (p. 145)

The English Patient is a “breath taking” book. That is its gravitational center – the collapsed weight of a grief so total that nothing now remains but the husk of this patient now restricted and compartmentalized to a hospital bed while the battle lines of WW 2 pass forward and into the distance. Detritus, that is the English Patient. A book centered on the unpacking of a loss — which is grief — but it is also a book of the singular individual still there, alive in a hospital bed — a tangle of words that leave behind the dewed webs of morning and no spider found. Because grief is not for the generic, but the particular. And how can we account for the particular but through words?

You used to be like those artists who painted only at night, a single light on in their street. Like the worm-pickers with their old coffee cans strapped to their ankles and the helmet of light shooting down into the grass (English Patient, p. 55).

Yes, it is a dilemma. There is indeed a noble purity in grief’s first act. There is a beautiful rebellion. A refusal to give in to the “decay” and the loss of the valued particular — that single entity made possible by her, by him, by this. There is a courageous refusal in grief to bend to the universe’s authority by letting go of the now-gone. Grief is Hamlet’s declaration that he will hold on to that which is more than, purer than, and more essential than the “windy suspiration of forced breath.”

Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, that can denote me truly. these indeed seem. …But I have that which passes show. (Act 1, Scene 2)

To hold on to that purity, Hamlet will famously refuse to act. And that is the endpoint of grief’s first act.

***

Here is “Hamlet” contacting the real estate agent weeks after being told that the woman he had built his life around needed another man. She wants Hamlet, she tells him, but needs to do this for herself. So, why then is he visiting the real estate agent? What delusion is he holding on to?

Here is “Hamlet” making a picnic – crackers, cheeses, frois gras, and cold drinks to take on a hike that is the agreed upon first-time-in-a-month. They have been practicing distance and limiting calls — being friends. So why the picnic? Because the next day is the Qixi Festival. He won’t say that he knows, and in their chatting… their perfectly friendly chatting, it is never mentioned, neither by him, nor by her. He doesn’t want to ask if she knows. He doesn’t want to hear that she might not.

Here is “Hamlet” purchasing two tickets to see a show in a month. He is alone at home now, and she lets him know that she is seeing another. She tells him that she’s sorry. Again, and again she uses that word. And he does hear it, and he does understand. She means what she says. There is no malice. But it is a form of grief that makes him buy those two tickets — the phantom limb still felt when the eyes alight on absence. Except, how can it still be grief when grief was once his act of defiance — the dark grip tightened against dissolution?

Now it begins to sink in to poor “Hamlet” that his acts of defiance are less an assertion, and more a dissipation. The held-on-absence now eating at the holder. A Polaroid slowly bleaching itself back into a void. His acts have now become an emptying of self, not a protection of the other’s purity.

“Wasn’t grief’s gold,” he asks no one, “to hold on defiantly to the unique against contingency’s encroachment? Wasn’t it that heroic insistence that denoted me truly?”

Yes.

A simple whisper now, grief.

Yes.

But that was only the beginning, dear Hamlet.

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart
Absent thee from felicity awhile
and in this harsh world draw thy
breath in pain to tell my story. (Act 5, Scene 2)

Here we see “breath taking” giving way to “breath giving.” The importation from grief (Hamlet) to speak. The graved object granted a new living. Awkwardly at first. Breath held for so long must begin with gasps — the faces of the audience perplexed. But the attempt must be made or else that which has been lost, will only sink with the swimmer.

Read him slowly dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did… Think about tithe speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old paragraph its is otherwise (English Patient, p 94).

Yes.

In the suspirations of weeping one will find grief’s second act. The curtain slowly rising to reveal the actor returning to account. A calling of the nightingale against the eternal slumber.

***

Once Upon a Time

Once upon a time…

Once upon a time from outside the window, far below the cricket players set up their pitch. And the commuter train rattled out its clockwork. She was this. To him she was this; as well as birds in the wood and water that spilled over moss-covered rocks next to a hiked path. She was the dusk view from the fire tower and the scramble back to a car as darkness settled. She was breath taking and breath giving. Words. And words, and words, and words passed back and forth between them, sitting on the carpeted floor with a spread of dishes, and faces inches away, and in the passenger seat of a road trip, and disembodied while carried over the Pacific ocean, bouncing between satellites.

Once a blizzard thickened over the highway, and they slowly retreated their increasingly helpless car to a small parking lot. And there they sat. A thickening of specked white on the windshield and windows. The flashing light of bulldozers clearing the lots of the nearby stores. Until they decided to risk it, together, white knuckled and attuned to every slip, every utterance, every turn and dip. From her phone she declared, “We just need to make it another mile, and then it should clear.” And later, hours later, while walking the bricks of a city street, they would feel connected and impressed by what they had come through together.

So it was. It was always a hunt with these two. Returning to a neighborhood to look for the black cat with white paint it its fur. Entering a phone booth in search of the secret entrance of a speakeasy. Once the correct number was dialed, a back door opened to reveal bookcases stacked high up to a ceiling, cushioned chairs, and candles. And there were ciphers and scavenger hunts that began with Tarot cards and ended with a gifted pair of socks hidden in a lab’s operant chamber. And maybe that, indeed, is a story worth telling. A ridiculous, wonderful story.

For, once upon a time…

It was her birthday, and they traveled into the nearby city. She wore a new dress that sparkled and he wore a tie. And through a window, the stacked lights of the buildings stood like trees. And later in the nighttime they hurried across the city to catch the last train, running through throngs in the station, holding hands and laughing. And when the train’s doors closed, and seated, they weighted against one another as the compartment rocked and clacked the two of them, and, the other tired revelers, who when the station arrived, dispersed themselves breathless and breath-filled into a summer evening.

Planting a new flag

We speak of “planting a flag” in the same way that we speak of gardening. A flag is planted on the moon. Flags are ritually raised over Mt. Everest. A Russian sub plants a flag on the seabed under the North Pole. A US flag is planted over Iwo Jima. Territory. Accomplishment. Claims of ownership. Courage. Pride. Ego. Challenge.

It is difficult to believe that just under a year ago, the Mississippi State flag still incorporated elements of the Confederate flag. Almost 150 years after a civil war in which, yes, one side fought for the right to enslave and degrade fellow human beings, the symbols of such degradations were still being revered.

This and the photo below are taken from a three-part article entitled “The Ol Miss We Know: Wealthy alums fight to keep UM’s past alive” in the Mississippi Free Press. Read the whole thing! It’s a wonderful window into how large state universities placate the fragile, entitled egos of wealthy alums. This photo and the one below come from the University of Mississippi’s yearbook: 1958 and 1983, respectively.

This Radiolab story chronicles the fitful and emotional last gasps of a symbol – a state flag. It contains the perspective of a former colleague of mine, Kiese Laymon. A piece of cloth colored in a particular pattern. And yet, listen to the story of John Hawkins, the first Black cheerleader at Ol Miss. In 1982 John Hawkins refused the “tradition” of running out on to football fields carrying a Confederate flag. Innocuous. Reasonable. As John said in 1982:

While I’m an Ole Miss cheerleader, I’m still a black man. In my household, I wasn’t told to hate the flag, but I did have history classes and know what my ancestors went through and what the Rebel flag represents. It is my choice that I prefer not to wave one.

For this he received death threats. His college room was set on fire. He was kept at safe houses before football games where he was booed. The Klu Klux Kan staged a march, and a mob marched to and surrounded his fraternity.

A piece of cloth waved before the start of a game.

Or listen to the screaming of an adolescent white girl – who would go on to be a high school valedictorian — during a public referendum in 2001. Such forums were being held all around Mississippi as they “discussed” a referendum to remove confederate symbolism from the state flag.

Where would the slaves in America be today if it weren’t for slavery?” They’d probably still be in Africa enslaved. Or other European nations. Another person asked me to point out most — not all — of the African American race living in America today got their last name from their masters. Are you prepared to give up your name? I don’t think you are. Because if you get my flag I will get your name.

A piece of cloth.

And in its defense a young woman threatens a group in her community with an erasure of identity, as if that is not exactly what slavery entailed. Note the ownership and exclusion. “My flag.” “The African American race” who just happen to be “living in America today.”

For me, though, one of the most heartbreaking aspects of the Radiolab story is the contrast. As the reporters point out, the John Hawkins and Black attendees of the public referendums “dressed in their Sunday best” and spoke calmly and respectfully. In the end approximately 2/3 of those that voted on the referendum voted to keep flying symbols of enslavement over their fellow community members.

In 2014 Tamir Rice was shot by a white police officer – a Black boy with a toy gun in a park in Cleveland, and Eric Garner died after being choked by a white police officer for selling cigarettes in New York City. In 2015 nine Black worshipers were murdered in a church in Charleston by a white supremacist with a real gun. And on May 25, 2020, George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer whose knee pressed down on George Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. This is some of what it took for Mississippi to eventually change patterns on a piece of cloth.

Well, that and football. On June 20, 2020 the Southeast Conference announced that it would consider banning post-season athletic events from Mississippi if the flat was not changed. On June 22 Conference USA did the same, and on June 28 the Mississippi legislature finally voted to change the state flag, i.e., remove symbolism that pointed to the degradation and enslavement of fellow Mississippians.

It’s easy to roll our eyes at the passion plays happening somewhere else. Of course, that “somewhere else” implies a privilege – the privilege of ignoring another’s history and choosing who counts and who doesn’t. “Somewhere else,” after all means “someone else.” Sure, there are sound reasons for choosing what to care about. Time is limited. Our resources are limited. We are all bounded, and such boundaries define our agency. And yet, history matters. It informs identity. It creates the social and environmental contingencies through which each of us navigates in the present. It is memory, and it is detritus, and it is a lens of perception – something that we cannot escape, however much we might wish to, and something which must be listened to and acknowledged in order to understand one another. To some extent Sophocles was right. We aren’t born free, and the furies are out there.

But so is grace.

After the Charleston church shootings, then President Obama gave a eulogy in front of the congregation. He spoke of grief. He spoke of courage. He sang. And he spoke, I would suggest, of new flags that needed planting.

According to the Christian tradition, grace is not earned. Grace is not merited. It’s not something we deserve. Rather, grace is the free and benevolent favor of God. As manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowal of blessings. Grace — as a nation out of this terrible tragedy, God has visited grace upon us for he has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind.

He’s given us the chance where we’ve been lost to find out best selves. We may not have earned this grace with our rancor and complacency and short-sightedness and fear of each other, but we got it all the same. He gave it to us anyway. He’s once more given us grace.

But it is up to us now to make the most of it, to receive it with gratitude and to prove ourselves worthy of this gift.

For too long, we were blind to the pain that the Confederate Flag stirred into many of our citizens.

It’s true a flag did not cause these murders. But as people from all walks of life, Republicans and Democrats, now acknowledge, including Governor Haley, whose recent eloquence on the subject is worthy of praise. As we all have to acknowledge, the flag has always represented more than just ancestral pride. For many, black and white, that flag was a reminder of systemic oppression, and racial subjugation.

We see that now.

Removing the flag from this state’s capital would not be an act of political correctness. It would not an insult to the valor of Confederate soldiers. It would simply be acknowledgement that the cause for which they fought, the cause of slavery, was wrong.

The imposition of Jim Crow after the Civil War, the resistance to civil rights for all people was wrong.

It would be one step in an honest accounting of America’s history, a modest but meaningful balm for so many unhealed wounds.

On Being a Neighbor

The other week I was having lunch with a friend. This was just as fear of the COVID-19 pandemic was beginning its tidal flow here in the U.S. – an approaching moon’s gravity pulling at our collective conscious. My friend asked me what I thought it would mean to be a “good neighbor” during a pandemic. It’s a great question: what does it mean to be a good neighbor? Here is Mr. Rogers’ version of the question:

I have always wanted to have a neighbor just like you,
I’ve always wanted to live in a neighborhood with you.

So let’s make the most of this beautiful day,
Since we’re together, we might as well say,
Would you be mine?
Could you be mine?
Won’t you be my neighbor?

Won’t you please,
Won’t you please,
Please won’t you be my neighbor?

by Dr. François S. Clemmons is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

The request to be a neighbor is a question of values, not beliefs. To answer Mr. Roger’s question in the affirmative is to choose a value, because to choose to be a neighbor is something independent of feelings. In fact values, as I am defining them, exist in spite of feelings. Let me explain what I mean.

In many of the posts I’ve put up on this blog so far, I have spoken of beliefs. I’ve suggested that perceptual illusions exist because of “beliefs,” and that reflexes exist as “beliefs,” and that emotions are “visceral beliefs.” When a doctor taps my knee, and my foot jerks forward, this behavior shows a “belief” that maps the stretch of a ligament with falling. When I see the Mueller-Lyer lines as being of unequal length, this judgment shows a “belief” that maps angles to depth. And when I feel fear or anger or disgust, these are visceral beliefs that map a situation to perceptions of particular types of risk and that elicit avoidance / elimination behaviors.

Here is an important distinction, though: beliefs are not the same as values.

A belief is a perceptual conjecture or a hypothesis about the causal structure of the world – one that originates from each individual’s unique set of experiences and/or our species’ shared evolutionary experiences. Beliefs are inferences updated (or not) from experience. Values, though, are aspirational. They are less a conjecture about the world, and more a hope for the world. This is a crucial point, especially when it comes to our emotions / feelings. So let me state it again: feelings (visceral beliefs) are not values.

We have visceral beliefs, i.e., “feelings,” that pertain to status, relative self-importance, relative need for resources, and so on. If I feel that I am of a higher status than another individual, I might also feel that my needs are more important, or that actions that harm that other person are justified. These beliefs are not so much chosen as they are free-floating in the contingencies of our environments. (Remember, “contingencies” refer to the selective forces of history). Just as we don’t choose to see a visual illusion, we don’t, in the moment, choose our feelings. They simply happen.

Feelings or values?
A group of teenage girls scream obscenities in front of their Montgomery, Alabama school against desegregation, 1963. (Photo by © Flip Schulke/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images). Used with permission.

Values, though, are those principles which we have self-chosen, from within the boundaries of our individual contexts, of course. They define how we would like to act. They are our ideals — the person we would hope to be.

Values might coincide with visceral beliefs (feelings) and/or they might conflict with these beliefs. It is easy to be gracious from a position of strength. Less so from a position of vulnerability. This is why Rambert in the section from The Plague says, “You two,” he said, “I suppose you’ve nothing to lose in all this. It’s easier, that way, to be on the side of the angels.” Rambert, remember, has been seeking to escape the quarantine of the plague in order to return to his love in Paris. He is stating that it is easy for the Rieux and Tarrou to courageously stay and take care of the sick because they have no cost. In this sense, their beliefs align with their values. For Rambert, though, the visceral love he feels for his wife is at odds with staying to help combat the plague. At the end of the section I provided in the last post he learns that he is mistaken.

I bring this up because crises trigger feelings – some heroic and some shameful. We have leaders inciting fear and directing it at others. So, we have President Trump speaking of the “China Virus,” we have Secretary of State Pompeo speaking of the “Wuhan Virus,” we have senators darkly hinting that SARS-CoV-2 was released from a secret Chinese lab, and we have accusations from Chinese officials that covid-19 was brought to China by the American military. Closer to home (for me, at any rate), we see individuals attempting to escape the horror of widespread, indiscriminate death by linking it to “positives.” So, the President of Vassar College recently tweeted out “How many lives has coronavirus saved in China due to less pollution? Ironic” (Tweet has since been deleted). To her credit she immediately apologized, and I suspect she regrets the feelings that motivated the original posting. Further, it is also quite possibly feelings that lead one to “smugly” point out that the “Spanish Flu” that killed millions world-wide in the early 20^th c. occurred in Kansas, or suggest that isn’t it ironic that the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001 momentarily decreased oil consumption because of the aviation shutdown. As if this helps anything — raises one’s status or makes one appear more knowledgeable.

Again, to refer back to the quote from The Plague, it is indeed like a single record that gets played over and over and over. Blame. Diversion. Dry intellectualization. The desire to be “right.” However, I would be hesitant to judge any of these reactions. After all, although the the reactions are perhaps problematic, they are also tragically human — behaviors, comments, and tweets driven by the machinery of our Homo sapien psyches.

Here, after all, is the reality of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy. Warning, the video shows individuals suffering…it also shows doctors and nurses doing their part to care for those who are suffering. And here is an image that shows a row of military vehicles lined up along an Italian street. Are they bringing in needed resources? No. They are carrying away bodies.

And here is an image of Dr. Li Wenliang, who died in the service Chinese patients, many of whom also succumbed from COVID-19. As Rieux says in The Plague, “There’s no question of heroism in all this. It’s a matter of common decency. That’s an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of righting a plague is common decency.”

These images evoke feelings, and some of those feelings are unpleasant, meaning our psyches recoil and search for ways to escape their input. Blame. Raise the drawbridge. Dehumanize. Ignore. Become wary. And these reactions may in fact align with one’s values. They do not, though, align with values that recognize every individual, regardless of status and tribe membership, as unique, valued and equally bounded by death. Values centered on healing, self-sacrifice, and the preciousness of our limited time, rather than self-protection and self-aggrandizement.

Does psychology have anything to say about this interaction of “feelings” and values? It does actually, and I’ll get to that in the next post.

Maps, not modules

Among certain psychologists, there is a belief that the mind is composed of “modules” that have been designed by evolution to account for very specific tasks. This kind of thinking has also been linked to the assertion that the mind is a computer, resulting in the natural rhetorical extension that “modules” are essentially equivalent to the “apps” we have on our phones. Just as your digital device has apps for banking, socializing, navigating, and finding restaurants, your mind has “modules” for tracking resources, socializing, and foraging, or so the argument goes. My own approach to and training in psychology is highly comparative and mechanistic. So, I am sympathetic to the “brain = computer, mind as modules” approach to psychology. I don’t think it is correct, though.

Let’s think this through – and not in an overly academic way. First of all, the brain is not a computer. Both might be machines that deal with inputs and outputs, but many systems deal with inputs and outputs. The solar system, is a collection of matter that handles inputs and outputs in a particular way. A hammer is a system that handles inputs and outputs in a particular way. This does not make the solar system or a hammer computational systems, at least not in any profound way. Similarly, sure, brains and computers share some descriptive features. Both make use of “memory,” both are energy intensive and need a regular replenishment of resources, and both transform information in particular ways. But this does not make brains and computers the same thing. Brains are not computers, even if the brain computes. Ultimately, computers are tools designed by humans for particular tasks. Brains are tools for… well, we’ll get to that.

Secondly, the brain is not composed of modules, even if it is modular. Sure, as we learned in the last post, perception is assembled from “products” that have been created in different areas of the brain. In other words, perception is a distributed process. However, it is a distributed process of shared networks. Just as we discussed with reference to supply chains, different visual “products” do not come from isolated modules. There is no “face” module or “chair” module. Instead, there is a system of shared networks that assemble faces or chairs.

Still, one strength of taking a modular approach to psychology is that it emphasizes the adapted qualities of our psyches. There are indeed deep currents given to our psyches by natural selection. We do seem predisposed to detect cheaters, learn languages, use tools (at least more so than other animals), see and hear a particular range of frequencies, have a sensitized disgust response during the first trimester of pregnancy, and on, and on, and on. Even the most religiously inclined must come to terms with the animal in which each soul resides. Through natural selection, our bodies and minds have been designed to encounter and assemble their worlds in particular ways. This is where the utility of thinking in terms of modules comes in. It allows mind scientists to cleanly carve up their subject matter into the traits and adaptations that allow for research. Every science needs its units, after all.

But let’s not forget that the assembly that is done by our minds is done for a particular reason. Fundamentally the psyche is designed to locate the organism within a problem space. Where am I within this space, and what do I need to do? These are the questions that the psyche faces at every moment of its limited existence. And to answer these questions, the psyche is composed not of modules, but of maps. Perception is essentially a means of creating landmarks, directions, and layers of information on maps. Yes, the supply chains of our perception assemble “percepts,” but on some level, all supply chains, themselves, are mappings of inputs onto outputs. We are not “modules all the way down;” we are maps all the way down. It is not a collection of goods that give our psyches meaning, but directions. Our psyches are composed of, and designed to assemble maps, and in doing so, our psyches search for and achieve meaning.

Our minds are composed of maps, not modules, even if those maps show modularity. Maps locate the organism in problem space, and it it through this that we define meaning.

It’s a bit ironic

It’s a bit ironic that walking along the sidewalks this morning, I looked up to see a sign advertising the Chattanooga Design Studio. A wide crosswalk. A few homeless. Young couples Sunday sleepy, and then I was walking through the old Read House building where a Gospel Breakfast was taking place. Design. Beliefs. The Bible Belt. That’s as good a place to start this post as any, and what’s a belt for but to hold up a pair of trousers? And what are a pair of trousers but beliefs with which we clothe portions of our being?

First though, a mea culpa. I didn’t *plan* on blog posts that would end up going on and on about design, history, contingencies, or words-as-objects, and yet here I am. There’s another bit of irony for us, though. Planning…or lack thereof, and design. Sometimes the plan only emerges from the doing, and so there is hope that some sense will emerge – sense or hot mess.

“Pollock”by Piutus is licensed under CC BY 2.0

So, in my last post I suggested that our psyche is a designed thing. Indirectly, to be sure, but the idea is in there. The logic goes like this: all objects have a history, history is the accumulated processes that led to the object existing – some might go so far as to add “…and provided its purpose,” but let’s not go there just yet. Words are objects as much as can openers or bible belts – objects shaped by the happenstance of their histories. The same, though goes for our psyche. It’s an object, too. One that we happen to inhabit, and one that sticks to the skin like a wet shirt on some days, but nonetheless, an object. And if we want to talk about the history of a psyche, well, what we are talking about is the science of psychology.

Psychology is a science. I think anyone reading this knows that, but I’d like to take a moment to make sure that we all know what a science is, exactly, because to put it bluntly, science is a process for designing beliefs. A cabinet maker designs and crafts cabinets. A tailor designs and creates clothing. Scientists design and create beliefs. Particular sort of beliefs, to be sure, but beliefs, nonetheless, that emerge from the contingencies of their craft.

Now, science isn’t the only process for designing beliefs. There are lots of others. Let me give you an example.

Gone Phishin’

About three months ago I was targeted by a phishing exploit. I received an email that seemed to be from my Department Chair, and the whole thing went like this:

“Hi. Sorry. I’m in a meeting. Could you do me a favor?” “Sure. I’m not available until 10:00, but can help out then.” “I’ll still be in the meeting.” “No problem. How can I help?”

At this point I received a message asking if I could go get a gift card for $500, write down its code, and email it back. To my credit, when I read the ask for a gift card, I became suspicious. However, NOT to my credit, this suspicion didn’t immediately kick in. It took a moment to wade through a variety of other beliefs. There was the irritation about the presumption of being asked to do such a strange favor (“The favor is for me to get a gift card?!”) There was the self-criticism for having agreed to do the “favor” in the first place (“How could you be such a sap?”). At the same time there was a bit of ego patting related to being “the person” that my chair was turning to for a favor. Yeah, I wanted to believe that I was the type of person that others could count on.

All of those thoughts and emotions were triggered and played themselves out over 10s of seconds, and only then, did another belief begin to arise. “Wait. Am I being played?” This belief then led me to check the real email address of the sender. My mail client only showed a name as the originating email. But my chair’s name had been spoofed, so that hers was the name displayed on the “From” line of the email. Digging out the actual email address, though, provided the evidence I needed to realize that the emails were coming from a stranger. Who exactly I was communicating with, I have no idea. Only that they were trying to take advantage of the way that I construct my beliefs about the world, and that for a moment, it had worked. I had been led to believe that I was communicating with a particular person.

Sadly, these experiences with scammers are becoming more and more frequent. Buttons pushed. Psychological dials turned. And out pops a belief.

Here’s another one, which isn’t all that different from the frequent phone calls some of us get from the “IRS” telling us that we have urgent back payments to make.

Your in trouble, but we can get you out of it. Just provide your password, and everything will be a-ok!!

Now of course, as long as we aren’t the one who fell for the scam, it can be tempting to mock those that did. “OMG, how could someone fall for that!? What idiots!!” For that matter, let’s throw in the belief that a race of reptiles is secretly running the world, that the Denver airport is the nexus of a New World Order, or that Jimi Hendrix made a pact with the devil that allowed him to play the guitar in the way that he did. [Head palm] How can anyone be so stupid?

It reminds me of one of the great smack downs in literature, a fantastic scene in Hamlet in which Hamlet tears into the puffed up, suck-ups Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me. You would seem to know my stops. You would pluck out the heart of my mystery. You would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass. And there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak? ‘Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me.

“Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me.” Take that scam artists, fake news, conspiracy peddlers, propagandists, and politicians. You won’t fool us.

And yet…

… we all do have beliefs, and our beliefs do come from somewhere. Most of us would claim that our beliefs, unlike so many others, are grounded in evidence. Except that what qualifies as evidence never gets much examining and our belief about ourselves being guided by evidence also doesn’t get much questioning. Hamlet believes that he cannot be played upon like a pipe, and yet there are many instances in which he is played. He believes that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are merely playing at being his friends. He believes that his Uncle murdered his father, he believes that others have tried to play upon his love for Ophelia in order to pump him for information, and he believes that Ophelia allowed herself to be so used. In other words, Hamlet swims in currents of beliefs that have been triggered by processes of some sort while mocking the processes that would have him embrace particular beliefs. In another part of the play he spits out, “Seems madam? Nay, it is; I know not “seems,” as if to say, “everyone else’s beliefs are wrong, but not mine. Mine are capital-T true.”

Imagine that each lit node is a belief that is currently “turned on” by the circumstances of experience

If we take a moment, it is relatively easy to become aware of at least some of the processes that design our beliefs. In other words, to become aware of the manner in which all of us are “played like a pipe.” The preacher stands before the congregation and states that god is love and we accept this statement because the preacher is an authority figure. He stands alone before a group, with the other group members apparently attentive. He often is positioned above everyone else and wears robes that indicate a particular status and area of expertise. He is a particular age, has a particular color of skin, way of arranging his hair, and uses terms and phrases that make sense because they are said with inflections that we hear as conviction or urgency. Most of us, if we take a moment to reflect on our own thinking, would recognize that all of these “triggers” construct a potential belief that “here is a person that I can trust and whose own beliefs I will use to guide my own.”

This says nothing about the rightness or wrongness of the beliefs, by the way. That’s not something I care to get into. The important point for right now is to simply recognize that beliefs don’t just spontaneously occur. They are built from particular processes that act on all of us. It is these processes that scam artists conduct like an orchestra. It is these processes that build up, brick-by-brick, the conspiracy theories that haunt the internet. But really, these histories of belief are ubiquitous. They lead the child to blame themself for their parent’s divorce. They haunt the teen who looks in the mirror with self-disgust. They spur the athlete to run just one more lap. The bonds of trust and friendship that make our day-to-day living more meaningful and the superiority complex of the psychopath – all are the clothing of belief.

I’ll get back to the particular sorts of beliefs that science constructs, but I think maybe I’ll sit with beliefs just a bit longer. For example, it is a common misconception that beliefs are “stated things” – a sort of creed or set of values to which we pledge allegiance. For a psychologist, that statement is true: creeds and values are beliefs, but not all beliefs are explicitly stated things. In the same way that a dinner jacket is only one category of clothing, creeds and values are only one category of belief. There are many other types that emerge from the factories of our psyche’s design. Perhaps we keep them hidden, and speak them only to ourselves, but perhaps not, because we don’t have the words to speak them. Yes, some beliefs reside within the realm of words. Others might more accurately be said to lie within the body: emotional beliefs, reflexive beliefs. We also have what we might as well term perceptual beliefs: beliefs that give us, for example, the meaning in a visual scene. And finally, when beliefs are combined with judgments of value, then we have moral beliefs that guide us to approach, avoid, defend and eliminate – sometimes others, but yes, sometimes ourselves.

“Kayaker at Great Falls, VA”by pthread1981 is licensed under CC BY 2.0
(Cropped)

So sure, all of us are being played, day in and day out. We have all, at least on occasion been led to believe whatever it is that we believe. We’d like to think that we’re the one doing the designing, but at best we participating in design processes that shape our psychology. Even if you are convinced that you base your living on evidence, think of all the “evidence” you never have the opportunity to experience. The saying, “He was born on third base, and believes he hit a triple” emerges, after all, from a narrow read of the evidence – the narrow slice that a single consciousness inhabits — and the goal is to become aware of history, explicitly choose from the objects it offers, and consciously project the meaning that they offer into the future. That’s the goal.

All objects have history

All objects have history, and that goes for words and thoughts and the pile of can openers sitting on a shelf at Target. Of course, objects are only the surface of underlying processes. We see the can opener, but not the processes that molded, shaped, assembled and transported it into our slice of consciousness. Similarly, we encounter a word – hear it, use it – mostly without thought, or if we do give it thought, it’s kind of like this:

Design (n): “A plan or drawing produced to show the look and function or workings of a building, garment, or other object before it is made.”

Or my favorite:

“Purpose or planning that exists behind an action, fact, or object.” “Origin: late middle english from latin designare”

We can then go to find out that the latin designare was used in various ways so that it might be closer to “indicate,” “show,” “point out,” or “designate.” In other words, we end up with something that resembles a genealogical tree, with words sprouting off from one another across time, and it’s the words that we see / hear, just like it is the leaves of a tree and the shade of their canopy that we notice on a hot day.

But like I say, objects – and words are objects – are only the surface of underlying processes. They point elsewhere. Or to use some academic jargon, words are signs, which is just a fancy way of saying that words are “stand ins” for other things – the understudy that gets called up when the original actor comes down with strep throat. However, I’m not referring to that kind of “stand in.” Rather, I’d like us to take just a moment to think about how words are the bubbling output of something hidden. The social interactions across generations; the reverberations of a voice echoed within a womb; the pruned and flowering of an associative network of neurons within a nervous system.

In other words, we’re back to the tree metaphor that once led to designare and spread outward to “designate,” “indicate,” “point out,” and “design.” Each of these a specimen pinned under the glass to be cataloged and characterized. There are other things that could be noticed, though. Like, why did this tree of words grow in this particular way? Why did others take the form that they did? Why did that shoot emerge when it did, and why did that lineage seem to stop growing when it did?

This is a roundabout way to say that history is process, and it is process that throws and churns up the objects that inhabit our living. The poetry that we hear and the ears with which we hear it. The opportunities that we perceive and the mind that perceives them. The emotions that drift across our awareness, and the behaviors that emerge from their approach and departure. And yes, the can opener that sits on a shelf at a local Target. All are objects of history, which is to say that all are designed and open to change.

In psychology we call these historical processes contingencies, and maybe I’ll get around to writing about contingencies more explicitly some day. For right now, though, I’d like to stay focused on the idea of “design.” Because one way to think about contingencies is that they are the processes that mold our awareness, behavior, and all of the objects (animals, plants, roads, cars,…) with which we coexist. This design – or shaping in the psychological lingo — is happening whether we realize it or not, and I think I’d like to spend a bit of time writing about it. Indirectly at first, and then maybe a bit more directly. The idea is to spend some time thinking about a psyche – its habits, emotions, assumptions, self-talk, memories, i.e., all of the psyche’s production – as “stuff” that is available to notions of design.

Maybe. After all, this blog is an experiment.

Let me wrap up this post by quickly describing two stories: one famous and one personal, both of which relate to design. The first is a famous quote by the English theologian and writer, William Paley taken from his book Natural Theology.

“Let’s say you’re walking around and you find a watch on the ground. As you examine it, you marvel at the intricately complex interweaving of its parts, a means to an end. Surely you wouldn’t think this marvel would have come about by itself. The watch must have a maker. Just as the watch has such complex means to an end, so does nature to a much greater extent. Just look at the complexity of the human eye. Thus we must conclude that nature has a maker too.”

A form must have a maker…or at least a process that makes

This quote from over 200 years ago, is an example of what is known as the “intelligent design” approach to understanding the forms of our existence. If you look back up at our dictionary definition of “design,” you immediately see where the quote is coming from: “Purpose or planning that exists behind an action, fact, or object.” In other words the notion of design is closely associated with notions of purpose. If an object is designed, then the object has purpose (and conversely, if a behavior seems to have purpose, then it must be designed). Paley wasn’t the first person to suggest that design implied the workings of a deity; in more ancient times, for example, the Pythagoreans pointed to mathematical regularities as evidence of divine creation. Furthermore, more recently, the notion of design and purpose has been co-opted by evolutionary theorists through assumptions of optimality. The idea is that the processes of design that exist in the natural world will produce forms that optimally solve particular problems. That is their purpose. So, whereas someone like Paley might look at the fin of a shark and inquire as to its divine purpose, an evolutionary theorist would look at the same fin and inquire as to the problem it has been optimized to solve.

Anyway, I’m bringing up Paley and “intelligent design” not to critique their ideas, but to simply point out that there is a long pedigree behind notions of history as process, and process as design. For some, that design (and therefore that history) is ipso facto evidence of a creator, and we, as elements of that creator’s design, possess purpose. For others, that design is evidence of a variety of scientific processes that reside under the umbrella of evolutionary theory.

Let’s get off the high horse, though. Blog post #2 and we’re already re-litigating the Scopes trial. What does design mean on a personal level? The answer to that question might take quite a few blog posts. To start an answer to that question, let me tell a story from when I was a kid.

Growing up in southeastern Tennessee with three brothers, my parents were keen on getting us outdoors. For family vacations we camped, went to beaches and canoed. When I got older canoeing turned into white water kayaking, and to this day I love the sound and rush of white water. But it wasn’t always this way. In fact, when I was a kid, canoeing was a bit terrifying! You see, when we went canoeing it was my dad with my oldest brother and me, and it was my mom with my other two brothers. The river of choice was a nearby class 2/3 river named the Hiwassee, and from the perspective of a young boy, inevitably bad things happened when our boats set out on that river. Boats flipped sending sputtering and gasping bodies downstream. Boats flipped pinning sputtering and gasping bodies against rocks. Boats flipped stranding sputtering and gasping bodies on small islands (only to be found much later in the day). It didn’t help that one of the more intense stretches of the river was named the Devil’s Shoal.

“File:Hiwasseerivermap.png”by Kmusser is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5

Anyway, as you can imagine the anxiety would build as the cars with their canoes strapped to their roofs bumped up the gravel road to the put-in. My poor oldest brother developed a genuine phobia.

All of this changed though, one day when a family friend of my parents took me down the river. His name was Dr. Collins, and in my experience he was a kind man, one who would join my father to coach a motley crew of a baseball team one year. On this trip down the Hiwassee he asked me join him in his canoe, and as we paddled and slid down the river, he talked. See the way the river looks there? It means this. Feel the way the boat is being tugged? Look at how the current is filling in behind that rock. See the deep rise of those waves? Hear that rush? …The entire trip down, Dr. Collins urged me to notice bits of the Hiwassee river in a way that I hadn’t before, and in noticing the river became process. There was no overcoming the river and its devil, but there was a way to find purpose within its signs – to design an awareness and set of behaviors that turned anxiety and terror into a sort of collaborative appreciation.

The paddler spoke to the river and the river answered back.

***

What I’m Listening To: The New Mastersounds

Jazzy / Bluesy / Funk at its best. If this music doesn’t make you happy, I don’t know what will. Saw this band perform live in Atlanta at Terminal West. So incredibly tight with rhythm handoffs and musical swagger, and so incredibly loose with their absence of overly scripted patter. If you have a chance to see them live, do yourself a favor and take it!

Something that got me thinking: Ta-Nehisi Coates

This is an interview with Terri Gross mostly about Coate’s new novel The Water Dancer. Coates is incredibly articulate and refreshingly blunt. His points about wanting to write a pulpy / adventure story that didn’t involve the vengeance constructs that are typical of the genre was interesting to me, especially given something like “Django Unchained,” which is a fantasy of pure vengeance. Coates’ angle is that vengeance wasn’t something “socially allowed” in African American history the way it has been in White history. Vengeance was typically and dominantly inflicted on blacks. Coates also raises the idea that the notion of “courage” within an African American pulp narrative would necessarily be different from the mainstream because of the manner in which the individual relates to the social system. I can’t do his ideas justice, though, so listen to the interview!…and then think about what the average superhero movie is saying, exactly.

It’s not that I’m a luddite

It’s not that I’m a luddite. I mean, how can I be with a new blog that is hosted on some computer (or computers) humming away in god knows where? Words brought to you by wires, protocols, and billions of switches clicking away in just the right patterns. Global supply chains of designers, programmers, drivers, and factory workers. It’s more an issue of agency or complacency or simple curiousity.

You see, I left Facebook a few years ago in a fit of disgust. Disgust with the habits of communication that the social media ecosystem seemed to reinforce. Disgust with myself for falling into outrage-neediness cycles. Disgust with Facebook for so clearly representing a form of digital strip mining. It’s called “data mining” for a reason, and just as every unfettered extraction enterprise seems to leave behind swaths of barrenness, it’s no wonder that unregulated data mining might do the same thing. Only the “environmental impact” is harder to pinpoint when it comes to social media…or when it comes to a digital environment in which “free” really hides a quid pro quo in which a service is provided in return for the personal. That data is the coal seam, the oil field, the undeveloped land, and apps and web sites and devices are the drills, the explosives, and the ever more efficient tools for extracting the limited resource of a user’s living.

“NewmontTours_MNApril2016_AB-29” *by MinesCERSE is licensed under* CC BY 2.0 . Cropped from original

The gut feeling I had when I dropped Facebook, and began to examine my use of digital tools and media in general, was mainly that we were all being played for chumps. We did not own what we were posting on social media sites. We might delete photos and posts, but Facebook didn’t. We might forget the multitude of clicks made during a nostalgia-fueled binge of vicarious “lives,” but the swarm of apps surrounding us didn’t. Like the pens of a factory farm, the data was sorted, packed and fed onto the conveyor belts – the end result not much different from the cellophane covered cut of meat we find in the grocery store.

That was my gut feeling, at any rate, and admittedly, I’m not going to presume that it applies to everyone. It could simply be a generational thing, or an age-related thing. Motivations change with age, and my two twenty-something daughters seem to have a much more utilitarian and healthily cavalier attitude towards digital technology.

Let’s stick with the metaphor of a feedlot. It’s not that I’m opposed to eating meat, it’s more that I am uncomfortable with the dominant system that produces meat. An attitude towards living creatures framed by the cells of a spreadsheet, units of efficiency, and narrow metrics of productivity. And that unease extends to the cognitive, behavioral, and moral habits that develop when one exists within such a system. As a psychologist who studies habit formation and adaptive behavior, I’m well aware of how beliefs and behaviors are shaped by the environment. How stated values can be at odds with behavior, and how habits can sneak up on us.

But there are other approaches, and this blog is an attempt to establish my own approach. If I’m going to post photos for the benefit of family and friends, I want it done on my own terms (to the degree that this is possible on a “world wide web”). If I’m going to spend time thinking through an idea, I want to have and to take the time to fumble around until something emerges that feels right. No fishing for “likes” or “thumbs” or “hitting the subscribe button.” No “branding” or zingers that are supposed to “prove” my superiority over another. The attempt is to create a space that is mine and which I will choose to share with others.

Let’s see where this goes.