difesa del Tao - II

Piero della Francesca, Madonna col Bambino e quattro angeli, dettaglio, 1475-1482, Clark Art Institute

Defenses of Faith

But to say that consciousness may make impossible some desired sequence of events is only to invoke familiar experience – a common substitute for explanation in the behavioural sciences. Credibility may thereby be established, but mystery remains.
The road to explanation lies first through abduction and thence to mapping the phenomena onto tautology. I have argued elsewhere that individual mind and phylogenetic evolution are a useful abductive pair – are mutually cases under similar tautological rules.
If you want to explain a psychological phenomenon, go look at biological evolution; and if you want to explain some phenomenon in evolution, try to find formal psychological analogies, and take a look at your own experience of what it is to have – or be – a mind. Epistemology, the pattern which connects, is, after all, one, not many.
I therefore shall analyze the flaw in the Lamarckian hypothesis and compare it with the problem of the Ancient Mariner. It is so that ―inheritance of acquired characteristics‖ would induce into biological evolution the same sort of confusion and blockage that sending the Ancient Mariner to the South Seas to find sea snakes would introduce into the process of his escape prom guilt? If the comparison be valid, it will surely throw light on both the evolutionary and the human mental process.
I am interested, at this moment, only in the formal objections to the Lamarckian hypothesis. It is no doubt correct to say that (a) there is no experimental evidence for such inheritance and (b) no connection can be imagined by which news of an acquired characteristic (say a strengthened right biceps brought about by exercise) could be transmitted to the ova or spermatozoa of the individual organism. But these otherwise very important considerations are not relevant to the problem of the Ancient Mariner and his self-consciousness In these respects there is no analogy between the Ancient Mariner and the hypothetical Lamarckian organism. There is plenty of evidence for the assertion that conscious purpose may distort spontaneity and, alas, plenty of pathways of internal communication by which such messages and injunctions may travel. I ask instead, what would the whole of biology look like if the inheritance of acquired characteristics were general? What would be the effect on biological evolution of such a hypothetical process?
Darwin was driven to the Lamarckian fallacy by time. He believed that the age of the earth was insufficient to provide time for the vast sweep of evolutionary process and, in order to speed up his model of evolution, he introduced into that model the Lamarckian hypothesis. To rely only on random genetic change combined with natural selection seemed insufficient, and Lamarckian inheritance would provide a shortcut, speeding things up by introducing something like purpose into the system. And, notably, our hypothetical procedure for the cure of the Ancient Mariner‘s guilt was likewise an introduction of purpose into that system. Should the Ancient Mariner go purposeless on his voyage, or should he deliberately search for sea snakes with the purpose of blessing them and so escaping from his guilt? Purpose will save time. If he knows what he is looking for, he will waste no time in scanning the arctic seas.
What then is a shortcut? What is wrong with the proposed shortcuts in evolution and in the resolution of guilt? What is wrong, in principle, with shortcuts?
In a large variety of cases – perhaps in all cases in which the shortcut generates trouble – the root of the matter is an error in logical typing. Somewhere in the sequence of actions and ideas, we can expect to find a class treated as though it were one of its members; or a member treated as though it were identical with the class; a uniqueness treated as a generality or a generality treated as a uniqueness. It is legitimate (and usual) to think of a process or change as an ordered class of states, but a mistake to think of any one of these states as if it were the class of which it is only a member. According to the Lamarckian hypothesis, an individual parent organism is to pass onto its offspring through the digital machinery of genetics some somatic characteristic acquired in response to environmental stress. The hypothesis asserts that ―the acquired characteristic is inherited‖ and there the matter is left as though these words could be meaningful.
It is characteristic of the individual creature that, under environmental conditions of use and disuse, etc., it will change. All right. But this is not the characteristic that is supposedly passed on; not the potentiality for change but the state achieved by the change is what is to be inherited, and that characteristic is not inherent in the parent. According to hypothesis the offspring should differ from the parent in that they will show the supposedly inherited characteristic even when the environmental conditions do not demand it.
But to assert that the man-made hypothesis of the inheritance of acquired characteristics is semantic nonsense in not the same as to assert that if the hypothesis were true, the whole process of evolution would be bogged down. What is crucial is that the individual creature would be inflicting upon its offspring a rigidity from which the parent did not suffer. It is this loss of flexibility that would be lethal to the total process.
So – if there be formal analogy between the case of Lamarckian ―inheritance‖ and the conscious purpose that might block the release of the Ancient Mariner from his guilt, we should look in the latter case for an error in classification that would prevent the desired change – error in which a process is treated as a state. It is precisely the conscious reification of his guilt in the Albatross that makes it impossible for the Ancient Mariner to get rid of his guilt. Guilt is not a thing. The matter must be handed over to more unconscious mental processes whose epistemology is less grotesque. (And if the Mariner is to solve his problem, he must not know he is doing so).
Consciousness is necessarily very limited. That it is so limited is perhaps best demonstrated by an example from a set of experiments on perception that were pioneered by an ophthalmologist, Adelbert Ames, Jr., now, alas, deceased. He showed that in the act of vision you rely on a whole mass of presuppositions, which you cannot inspect or state in words – such abstract rules as those of parallax and perspective. Using them you construct your mental image.
It is epistemologically inaccurate to say that "you see me". What you see is an image of me made by processes of which you are quite unconscious.
It would be nonsense, of course, to say that "you" make these images. You have almost no control over the making of them. (And if you had that sort of control, your trust in the images that perception displays before your inner eye would be much reduced.)
So we all make – my mental processes make for me – this beautiful quilt. Patches of green and brown, black and white as I walk through the woods. But I cannot by introspection investigate that creative process. I know which way I aim my eyes and I am conscious of the product of perception, but I know nothing of the middle process by which the images are formed.
That middle process is governed by presuppositions. What Adelbert Ames discovered was a method of investigating those presuppositions, and an account of his experiments is a good way of arriving at a recognition of the importance of these presuppositions of which we are normally unaware.
If I am travelling in a moving train, the cows on the embankment seem to get left behind while the distant mountains seem to travel with me. On the basis of this difference in appearances, an image is created in which the mountains are depicted as farther from me than the cows. The underlying premise is that that which gets left behind is closer to me than that which seems to go along with me or which is more slowly left behind.
...
The Ames experiments can be used to demonstrate two important notions, first that the images we experience are not "out there," and second that we are, perhaps necessarily, unaware of what is going on in our own minds. We think we see, but actually we create images, all unconsciously. What then is one to make of Descartes‘ famous conclusion, cogito, ergo sum?
The cogito is ambiguous. At what level are we to interpret it? What does it mean? What is it to think? What is it to be? Does it mean "I think that I think, and therefore I think I am"? Can I in fact know that I think? And are we, in reaching such a conclusion, relying on presuppositions of which we are unaware?
There is a discrepancy of logical type between "think" and "be." Descartes is trying to jump from the frying pan of thought, ideas, images, opinions, arguments, etc., into the fire of existence and action. But that jump is itself unmapped. Between two such contrasting universes there can be no ergo – no totally self-evident link. There is no looking before the leap from cogito to sum.
Parallel to the cogito is another deep epistemological generalization: I see, therefore it is. Seeing is believing. We might roughly Latinize this to include the other senses, even though sight carries the greatest conviction for most people, as percipio, ergo est.
The two halves of Descartes'cogito refer to a single subject, a first person singular, but in the percipio there are two subjects: I and it. These two subjects are separated by the circumstances of imagery. The "it" which I perceive is ambiguous: is it my image which I make? Or is it some object outside of myself – the Ding an sich of which I make an image? Or perhaps there is no "it".
In English the separation is forced upon us by the structure of our language, but the Latin makes no explicit cleavage between the event of thinking and the thinker. It does not separate the pronoun from the verb. That separation could come later, much later, and raises another set of epistemological problems.
The first miracle is the event of thinking, which can (also later) be named. The problems multiply as we explore further. Warren McCulloch long ago pointed out that every message is both command and report. In the simplest case, a sequence of three neurons – A, B, and C – the firing of B is a report that "A recently fired" and a command: "C must quickly fire". In one aspect the neural impulse refers to the past, in the other aspect it determines a future. B‘s report is, in the nature of the case, never totally reliable, for the firing of A can never be the only possible cause of B‘s later firing: Neurons sometimes fire "spontaneously". In principle, no causal network is to be read backwards. Similarly, C may fail to obey B‘s injunction.
There are gaps in this process, which make the sequential firing of neurons unsure; and there are multiple such gaps on the way to propositions like the cogito that are at first glance "self-evident". In the aggregates of propositions that are called "faiths," or religious creeds, it is ultimately not the propositions that assert indubitable and self-evident truth but the links between them. It is these links that we dare not doubt – and indeed doubt is comfortingly excluded by the logical or quasi-logical nature of the links. We are defended from doubt by an unawareness of the gaps.
But the jump is always there. If I look my through my corporeal eyes and see an image of the rising sun, the propositions "I look" and "I see" have a sort of validity different from that of any conclusion about the world outside my skin. "I see a sun rising" is a proposition that indeed, as Descartes insists, cannot be doubted, but the extrapolation from this to the outside world – "There is a sun" – is always unsure and must be supported by faith. Another problem is that all such images are retrospective. The assertion of the image, qua description of the external world, is always in a past tense. Our senses can only tell us at best what was so a moment ago. We do in fact read the causal sequence backwards. But this fundamentally unreliable information is delivered to the perceiving self in the most convincing and indubitable form as an image. It is this faith – a faith in our own mental process – that must always be defended!
It is commonly thought that faith is necessary for religion – that the supernatural aspects of mythology must not be questioned – so the gap between the observer and the supernatural is covered by faith. But when we recognize the gap between cogito and sum, and the similar gap between percipio and est, "faith" comes to have quite a different meaning. Gaps such as these are a necessity of our being, to be covered by "faith" in a very intimate and deep sense of that word.
Then what is ordinarily called “religion,” the net of ritual, mythology, and mystification, begins to show itself as a sort of cocoon woven to protect that more intimate – and utterly necessary – faith.
By some admirable and mysterious skill, some miracle of neural circuitry, we form images of that which we see. The forming of such images is in fact what we call "seeing." But to base complete belief upon the image is an act of faith. This faith is, in a healthy mind, involuntary and unconscious. You cannot doubt the validity of your images when these are accompanied by that extra tag of information which says that the material for the given image was collected by a sense organ.
How lucky we are, how good is God – that we cannot perceive the process of our creation of our own images! These miraculous mental processes are simply not accessible to tour conscious inspection.
When you are dizzy and the floor seems to heave up towards you, only by the exercise of trained determination can you act upon your "knowledge" that, of course, the floor is remaining stationary, as it should. Indeed, that greater faith accompanied by will, whereby we resist the response to dizziness, is I think always supported by a conscious scepticism regarding the visual-kinesthetic imagery. We can say to ourselves, "I know that this swirling floor and walls is a misleading product of my processes of image formation." But even so, there is no consciousness of the processes by which the swirling images were made – only a consciousness that they are indeed artefact. We can know about the processes of perception, but we cannot be directly aware of them. [Even at this level, however, consciousness opens the door to tinkering.]
If we had continual awareness of our image-making processes, our images would cease to be credible. It is indeed a merciful dispensation that we know not the processes of our own creativity – which sometimes are the processes of self-deceit.
To be unconscious of these processes is the first line of our defense against loss of faith. A little faith in perception is vitally necessary, and by packing our data into the form of images, we convince ourselves of the validity of our belief. Seeing is believing. But faith is in believing that seeing is believing. As Blake said of the "corporeal", which we believe we know, "It is in Fallacy, and its Existence an imposture."
Still, all of this is familiar. It is platitude to assert that every perception and every link between perception and motion is made possible by faith in presuppositions. Hamlet reminds his mother, "Sense sure you have, else you could have no motion."
The links between sense and motion are indispensable to living, but the links depend always upon presuppositions that are commonly either absolutely inaccessible to consciousness, or momentarily left unexamined in the immediacy of action. There is no time for more than a little consciousness.
The matter becomes more subtle, more coercive, and somewhat more mysterious when we ask formally analogous questions about larger systems, such as groups of organisms, and particularly about families, communities, and tribes, constellations of organisms who (partially at least) share what anthropologists call "culture."
One of the meanings of that overworked word is the local epistemology, the aggregate of presuppositions that underlie all communication and interaction between persons, even in dyads, groups with only two members.
[It is at this point that our discussion of perception links up with the discussion of inheritance, for in each case the fact that many presuppositions are inaccessible to examination or alteration results in a certain conservatism, since that which is outside of awareness is also unquestioned. It may be useful, then, to examine the conservatism characteristic of all such systems of presuppositions and the mechanisms by which such systems are maintained and kept stable.]
Young men-in-a-hurry may be impatient of such conservatism, and psychiatrists may diagnose conservatism as pathological rigidity, etc., etc. But I am not concerned at the moment to reach judgements of value, only to understand the processes and their necessity.
Of all interactional conservative devices, undoubtedly the most fundamental – most ancient and profound, and most instructive as providing a diagram of what I am talking about – is sex.
We forget so easily – and by forgetting we preserve our presuppositions unexamined – that the prime function of the sexual component in reproduction (literally the production of the similar) is the maintenance of similarity among the members of the species. And here similarity is the necessary condition for viability of communication and interaction.
The mechanism and its goal become identical: that compatibility which is necessary for interaction is maintained by creating a test-tube trial of similarity. If the gametes are not sufficiently similar, a zygote formed from their meeting cannot survive. At the cellular level every living organism is the embodiment of a tested sharing of biological presuppositions.
Tests against the outside world will come later – many of them. At the moment of fertilization – fusion of gametes – each gamete is a validating template for the other. What is surely tested is the chromosomal constitution of each, but no doubt the similarity of the whole cellular structure is also verified. And not that this first test is not the meaning of the chromosomal message, the process of epigenesist and the later outcome in the developed individual or phenotype that will be tested by the need to survive in a given environment. The test is just a proofreader‘s trick, comparing the format of one text with that of the other, but ignoring the nature and meaning of the message material which is being tested. Other tests will come later and will not be exclusively conservative.
Samuel Butler famously asserted that "the hen is an egg‘s way of making another egg." We might amplify that to say that the hen is the proof (the test) of the excellence of the egg; and that the moment of fusion between two gametes is the first proof or test of their mutual excellence. Note that excellence is in some sense always mutual; the conservatism whose mechanics I am discussing is always interactive.
From these very elementary generalities, it is possible to proceed in several directions, which can only be suggested here. There is the undoubted truth that the relations between presuppositions (in some widest sense of that word) are never simply dyadic. We must go on to consider a greater complexity. It is not a matter of simple dyadic comparison as my reference to sexual fusion might seem to suggest. We can begin by considering a pair of gametal characteristics that meet in fertilization. But always each must exist in the context of many characteristics, and the comparison will not be a simple yes-or-no test of similarity but a complex fitting or wrestling together (in real time) of related but never totally similar networks of propositions, which must combine in a coherent set of injunctions for the epigenesist and growth of the organism. There is room for – indeed there is benefit from – a little variation, but only a limited amount.
That‘s one component of the picture – the increasing complexity as we go on from dyadic to more complex relations between the items of presupposition. (We could use an alternative term that is virtually synonymous and speak of "preconceptions" – in a literal, prezygotic sense!)
The second pathway of increasing complexity we are invited to follow by the infinitely complex and systemic biosphere is a spin-off from the way systems are nested within systems, the fact of hierarchical organizations. For instance, as natural historians on the family we face a more than dyadic constellation of persons. To the nondyadic tangle of related presuppositions, we must add the nondyadic tangle of persons in which the family is the mechanism of cultural transmission. In looking at human beings we deal not simply with genetics, the digital names for settings of the bias of the system, but with another order of change – the facts of learning and teaching. (And do not forget that in what is called "cultural transmission," parents learn from and are as much changed as their children!)
The complexity of the phenomena is beginning to run away with us and whenever that happens, the correct and orthodox procedure is reductionism – to stand off from the data and consider what sort of simplified (always oversimplified) mapping will do least damage tot eh elegant interconnections of the observed world.
We must take care, however, to preserve in our theories at least the biological nature (cybernetic, hierarchic, holistic, nonlineal, systemic nature – call it what you will) of the world and our relations to it. Let us not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped onto the characteristics of billiard balls.

difesa del Tao - I