Minds have ideas and minds make plans. Most people intuitively agree that minds, ideas and plans are insubstantial, with no solid physicality (until we act on them). But how can that action happen? Without any kind of hand, how do minds affect the stuff which makes up the physical world? We can't lift a cup of tea with thought alone, or even warm the water. So how does the decision to jump actually generate the chemical and electrical nerve signals involved in an actual jump by actual legs?
Some evidence seems to suggest that ideas and plans actually follow (if only by a fraction of a second) the action they intend. I find this a bit depressing, because it says that my sense of being a conscious creature with free will is entirely illusory: just a story I tell myself to explain why I've done what I did.
But perhaps the experimenters weren't looking in the right place.
They were looking in the brain, the location designated as a safely scientific venue for the mind. But maybe we actually do the thinking
with the heart, or the gut, or something else entirely, and only process our decision in the brain. The trouble is that questions of mind shade into spooky and religious territory and is a bit of a dangerous subject for serious scientists.
But mind really does seem to affect body directly, causally and repeatably in the placebo effect. Nobody disbelieves in the placebo effect (where people get genuinely and measurably better in
respond to pretend medicines). Even hard-headed pharmaceutical companies fund additional work in every
trial to discover how much of the apparent effect is caused by their
medicine, and how much is (merely) placebo.
However, as far as I can tell, little serious research is conducted into how placebo operates - although there is a bit of fun dabbling into whether red or blue pretend medicines work better for particular ailments. Instead of being a focus for study of the interface between mind and body, placebo is simply used as a kind of hygenic screen separating the real (ie currently understandable) science from the weirdness, subjectivity and the other inexplicable 'noise' that life imposes over the pure conceptual framework of hard science.
Science serves us well, but few of the remaining questions are more fundamental than how minds gain real traction on the material world. Surely it's time to risk raising the screen and find out what is really going on. We might even find out how to lift a cup of tea by thought alone.
Sunday, December 20, 2015
Sunday, December 6, 2015
A hidden dimension
Pairing up opposites orders the world so that we can think about it. Hot versus cold. Nice versus nasty. Screen time versus real world activity. Very little is black and white, but we can place things along the dimension which stretches between our opposites - is this more geeky, or more fashionable, and where shall we put geek-chic? We do this in all kinds of contexts from plotting data on graphs to scoring movies with 0-5 stars.
Thousands of these dimensions exist running across and alongside each other. Sometimes a big, clear opposition can contain within it another, subtler one, the operation of which may slip by unnoticed. Saying 'yes' versus saying 'no' to things holds within it the dimension which stretches between Adventure (by which I mean the attitude of enthusiasm for new opportunities and experiences) and Focus (which, as Steve Jobs famously said, is about saying 'No').
Recognising that direct tension exists between Focus and Adventure isn't easy, because so many adventure stories feature a rugged and focused hero who appears to collapse the dimension down to a single point. This (generally male) character is not distracted by physical discomfort, not disheartened by difficulty and remains fixed in his purpose. He is supremely focused on achieving his aims and we admire him for it.
Confusingly he seems terribly adventurous as he penetrates jungles, navigates oceans, and scales mountains, but of course he is not. He has adventures, sure, but they serve to conceal from the reader the relative poverty of his inner life, which is hyper-focused on his objective (finding treasure, escaping from baddies, you know the kind of thing). In the jungle our hero doesn't really notice the plants, except as obstacles, or sources of food, shelter or poison, and on the ocean he doesn't think about the life in the waters below, unless one of them sends up waving tentacles to pluck him from his raft.
Adventure stories follow our hero's focus, because focus provides a plot line, onto which can be threaded a bunch of adventurous exploits. The writer and the reader both savour this adventurous window-dressing more fully than our hero. We mull over his escape from the giant octopus when it's over, but he's busy tackling the next part of his 'adventure'. How could you even tell a story about someone who is not focused on an aim, who explores any opportunities which come their way? Their plot is continually being drawn off in tangents. It's all trailers and no movie.
I like watching trailers, but I have experience of seeing movies which helps me imagine the kind of experience the trailer is trailing. If you've never seen a movie, a trailer can't tell you what it's like, to park your body in the dark for 100 minutes while your mind visits a bright imaginary world.
We love adventure, we intrinsically say 'yes' to new things. We are curious, exploring monkeys and we are drawn to what we get offered by adverts, pinterest, facebook. It's addictive - you get a little imaginative rush from each new idea. I spend probably too much time pinning things that inspire me - new techniques to try, new ideas to mull over, new places I might explore. But although Adventure beckons, it's only a starting point. To actually have the adventure takes focus.
If I'm going to decoupage that chair, I need to stop pinning, gather materials and devote several hours to the project, over a period of a few days, until it's finished. Otherwise I just have a big mess. Or an item on a To Do list which never gets done. More often than not, I stay where I am, comfortably imagining trailers of a life I'm not actually living.
Recognising that direct tension exists between Focus and Adventure isn't easy, because so many adventure stories feature a rugged and focused hero who appears to collapse the dimension down to a single point. This (generally male) character is not distracted by physical discomfort, not disheartened by difficulty and remains fixed in his purpose. He is supremely focused on achieving his aims and we admire him for it.
Confusingly he seems terribly adventurous as he penetrates jungles, navigates oceans, and scales mountains, but of course he is not. He has adventures, sure, but they serve to conceal from the reader the relative poverty of his inner life, which is hyper-focused on his objective (finding treasure, escaping from baddies, you know the kind of thing). In the jungle our hero doesn't really notice the plants, except as obstacles, or sources of food, shelter or poison, and on the ocean he doesn't think about the life in the waters below, unless one of them sends up waving tentacles to pluck him from his raft.
Adventure stories follow our hero's focus, because focus provides a plot line, onto which can be threaded a bunch of adventurous exploits. The writer and the reader both savour this adventurous window-dressing more fully than our hero. We mull over his escape from the giant octopus when it's over, but he's busy tackling the next part of his 'adventure'. How could you even tell a story about someone who is not focused on an aim, who explores any opportunities which come their way? Their plot is continually being drawn off in tangents. It's all trailers and no movie.
I like watching trailers, but I have experience of seeing movies which helps me imagine the kind of experience the trailer is trailing. If you've never seen a movie, a trailer can't tell you what it's like, to park your body in the dark for 100 minutes while your mind visits a bright imaginary world.
We love adventure, we intrinsically say 'yes' to new things. We are curious, exploring monkeys and we are drawn to what we get offered by adverts, pinterest, facebook. It's addictive - you get a little imaginative rush from each new idea. I spend probably too much time pinning things that inspire me - new techniques to try, new ideas to mull over, new places I might explore. But although Adventure beckons, it's only a starting point. To actually have the adventure takes focus.
If I'm going to decoupage that chair, I need to stop pinning, gather materials and devote several hours to the project, over a period of a few days, until it's finished. Otherwise I just have a big mess. Or an item on a To Do list which never gets done. More often than not, I stay where I am, comfortably imagining trailers of a life I'm not actually living.
So, now I know that 'saying yes to life' is not actually an absolute good. Indeed, it's not even possible. There's too much life: saying yes to any of it involves a massive amount of saying no, something which never makes it into the fancy quote jpegs. But Focus-No is the necessary setting for the gem of Adventure-Yes, and if we neglect it the meaning of our adventures falls away.
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