*
"OUTSIDE
WORLD" AS CONJECTURE
Jeremy Hayward
We must now turn to consider the role of the "outside
world" in
perception. The traditional assumption of the division of
nature into
an organism which is perceiving and an "outside"
which it perceives is an arbitrary, although useful, division which the organism
makes in
order to survive. It is an aspect of the "I"
conjecture. But it is arbitrary;
it is by no means an absolute division of nature, or one on
which we should base a broader view of perception, as we will see in
this chapter.
The Nervous System as an Autonomous Unit
In the previous chapter we saw that the nervous system,
particularly
the brain, is a tremendously complex system that has interconnections
at all levels. It seems to function as a unit. Any change in any subsystem of
the brain results in adjustments throughout the entire system.
Based on these considerations,
Varela has suggested that it is
more useful, and appropriate to the organism, to speak of the
nervous system as an autonomous unit, an operationally closed system. This
system passes through its own internal states (its conjectures), for which
interactions with the "external world" act as triggers. We do not
"know" the external world; we know our internal states, or perhaps we
should say that the internal states know themselves. But these are in a constant
state of change, and that change is triggered by "interactions" which
we refer to as the "external world" or "reality." To help us
visualize the sense in which the organism passes through its own internal
states,
Maturana and Varela use the analogy of an airplane pilot in a terrible
storm with zero visibility trying to land his plane with instruments. To the
pilot there is no difference at all between this situation and a simulated storm
in the safety of the training cabin. When the plane lands and everyone
congratulates him for making such a beautiful landing in the fierce storm, he
might say, "It felt just like the hundred practice landings I did." He
was responding to the internal states of the plane, which were triggered by
messages from the airport control tower, but he was not responding to the storm
itself. As an analogy for the human interaction with its environment, a plane
landing on automatic pilot might be better: we are not assuming that the human
has a "little man" inside him, separate from the body/mind and guiding
it, i.e., we are not assuming a soul, or a separate "mind." The
various states that the airplane can go through in response to the messages from
the control tower, such as angles of wing elevations and so on, are a function
of the internal structure of the plane itself. (1)
Like the automatic pilot, the
nervous system, Varela suggests, is responding to its changing environment by
passing through states which are constrained by its own structure as well as the
history of
previous pathways of states it has passed through in previous
interaction with the environment. The important point is that
from the
point of view of the nervous system its available states are
not by any
means a direct mirror of the "outside world." As
Varela says, "[This
research] means moving away from viewing the brain as a
device
which takes input in the form of information to act on.
Rather it means
moving towards viewing the brain as a system characterized,
not by its inputs, but by the operational closure of its dynamics of states,
defined as a relative balance of activity between neural surfaces in a manner
such that every change of state of the system can only lead to another change of
state of the system itself. . . For us, the origin of
knowledge and the making of sense, does not resemble the
design of a system which is optimized to match a given external standard [like a
camera taking snapshots of the 'outside world']. We could say it resembles,
rather, a tinkering, a dynamic sculpting, a building of
structures from the materials available to an organism that
it puts
together as they appear in a drift which follows one of many
possible
paths."
Varela points out that this point
of view applies not merely to some nervous system we are studying, but also to
our own nervous
system itself. He concludes, "If we are right, our human
life, our
experience right now, is but one of the many possible creodes
[pathways] of knowledge, where the immense background of our
biological structure and social practices is inseparable from
the
regularity we discern in both world and self. When we follow
this logic
all the way through, we can understand the world in which we
find ourselves as neither separate nor distant. But also, as one where we
have no fixed reference points left."
Criteria For Mental Process
Let us look further at how mind or mental process might arise
in this
dynamic process of interplay of an organism with its
environment. To
do this I would like to discuss the view of Gregory Bateson
which also
takes us to a much deeper level of explanation where, as we
shall see, the absolute distinction between nature and mental process is
questioned. Gregory Bateson worked during the early part of
his life,
in the early 1930s, observing and participating in the
cultures of New
Guinea and Bali with Margaret Mead. In the 1950s he worked as
a psychiatrist and began to apply the newly developing insight of information
and communication theory. During this phase, he developed the double-bind theory
of schizophrenia, and also continued his lifelong exploration of social and
cultural behavior in humans and animals. Toward the end of his life, this wise
and gentle man was mentor to a large number of young scientists working in many
fields: neuroscience, cognitive psychology, ethology, information theory. He was
elder to many of the young people living through the confusing upheavals of the
1960s and 1970s.
Just before he died in 1980,
Bateson finished Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, in which he offered
us the fruition of more than fifty years of participation and observation of the
life and behavior of animals, including humans. (2) Bateson's main thesis is
that the patterns in mind are a reflection of the patterns in nature, and that
it is these patterns and only these patterns that we can "know," in
the ordinary sense of "have direct experience of." We cannot
"know" the things-in-themselves, nor can they know each other.
Therefore, the
regularities in these patterns are the closest we can come to
"ultimate
truth."
Bateson proposed a detailed set of
criteria as a response to the
question: of all the forms of life, learning, and mental
process which
we know, what is the pattern which connects them?
1.
A mind or any living system is
composite
— it has
interacting parts
— and only when we look at a system as an
aggregate of such parts can we determine the presence or absence of mental
process. There are not isolated "atomic minds" or "atomic living
systems" but only process of interaction. Minds are not "things,"
"monads," "pure cognizing agents," or anything else of a
separate and unitary nature.
2.
The interaction between parts of
the mind is triggered by
difference. That is to say, one part of mind
responds to a difference
between two other parts, not to one of the other parts alone.
For
example, our own eyes are constantly making short movements.
If
somehow they could be kept absolutely still while we were
looking at
an unmoving scene, we would quickly become temporarily blind.
That
is, our eyes are actually responding to difference caused by
their rapid movements. A simple example: it appears that a frog literally does
not see a fly until it flies.
The important point here is that
differences, too, are not "things." Nor are differences localized. It
is the difference between the blackness of this print and the whiteness of the
page which provides meaning for us as we read, yet these differences are not
themselves localized on the page. This differs radically from the idea of
"cause" in physical systems, which can be attributed to the impact or
force exerted by a part of the system on another part. Such a "cause"
is always energetic
— accompanied by the transfer of energy, and this is the
only kind of cause recognized by physics. In the case of difference, there may
be no energy exchange at all. Bateson points out that an event that does not
happen, such as our forgetting to send in our tax forms, can make a difference
(which can alert the auditors).
3.
The energy for the mental
process is triggered or fired or released by the energy of the change; the
latter energy does not feed directly into the mental process. For example, the
energy of the frog's jump comes from the internal processes of the frog and is
triggered by the motion of the fly. The fly does not directly supply energy to
the frog until the frog eats it. This supplies energy for later jumps, but it is
at a lower level of order than the energy by which the frog
jumped,
until the frog has digested the fly and transformed the
energy of
nourishment into energy stored in the order of its neural and
muscular system.
Thus the energetic relationship
between parts of a mental system are interlocking relationships between
self-actualizing subsystems which go through their own internally coherent
changes of state in response to differences. There may be a wide range of
internal states available as response to any trigger. This emphasizes the
difference between mental systems and inert "things" which are not
self-actualizing. Bateson points to the "pathetic fallacy" of
confusing the two either by, for example, attributing mind-like qualities to
subatomic particles, or by attributing thing-like qualities to humans, dogs, and
other animals. Such confusions may seem to be only styles of speech, but as we
have seen, styles of speech may hide much deeper confusions. The first
confusion, attributing qualities of "charm," "strangeness,"
and so on to particles, may be relatively harmless. The second, however,
attributing thing-like, machinelike qualities to minds, could be dangerous, as
well as being, according to this discussion, simply wrong.
4.
Mental processes require
circular (or more complex) chains of determination. This is a very important
point. Bateson gives the example of a man chopping a tree with an axe. The
mental or living
process involved must be thought of as including the entire
circuit:
man's brain, muscular system, the axe, the cut in the tree,
man's visual system.
Such circuits provide the dynamic
stability and self-correction of
mental processes. For example, each successive stroke of the
axe is
corrected in response to the result of the previous stroke in
a
completed feedback circuit. We cannot isolate a partial arc
of one of
these circuits and attribute all of the mental process to
that arc. Bateson speaks of the necessity of taking into account the complete
circuit, particularly in relation to our idea of the "self."
"The total self-corrective
unit which processes information, or, as I say, 'thinks' and 'acts' and
'decides,' is a system whose boundaries do not at all coincide with the
boundaries either of the body or of what is popularly called the 'self or
'consciousness'; and it is important to notice that there are multiple
differences between the thinking system and the self as popularly conceived.
a. "The system is not a transcendent entity as the 'self'
is
commonly supposed to be.
b. "The ideas are immanent in
a network of causal pathways along which transforms of differences are
conducted. The 'ideas' of the system are in all cases at least binary in
structure. They
are not 'impulses' but 'information.'
c. "This network of pathways is not bounded with
consciousness but extends to include the pathways of all
unconscious mentation
— autonomic and repressed, neural and hormonal.
d. "The network is not bounded
by the skin but includes
all external pathways along which information can travel. It
also
includes those effective differences which are immanent in
the
'objects' of such information. It includes the pathways of
sound and
light along which travel transforms of differences originally
immanent
in things and other people
— and especially in our own
actions." (3)
5. "The relation between the
differences and the mental
processes they trigger should be regarded as the relation
between a map and its territory. That is to say, an object, event, or difference
in the world 'outside' an organism triggers changes within the organism
which are not identical in type to the outside events, but
are analogous to them as landscape is to a map. As we have seen, the work of
Maturana and Varela suggests that the relation between possible states of the
organism, considered as an autonomous system, and the triggers in the
"outside world" is somewhat different from the one-to-one
correspondence, the "representation" of a territory by its map. In
fact, even what constitutes a "trigger" depends on the previous
history of the interactions of the organism and on the immediate conditions of
the present interaction.
6. Such relationships between
changes or differences in
mental processes form hierarchical levels of order. Each
level of order involves the recognition of the context of the lower order, the
context of the context, and so on.
Bateson elaborates this notion of
hierarchies of order in mental
processes by describing different types of learning process.
(4) The first level. Learning 0, is that of the amoeba which responds
automatically, according to a genetically fixed response, to the presence of
food or an irritant
— it simply moves toward or away from it. It has no choice,
and the "learning" has already taken place at the species level. The
next level. Learning I, is that of Pavlov's famous dog. A bell rings whenever
the dog is presented with food. The dog salivates at the sight and smell of food
according to the level of learning of the amoeba. However, after several such
incidents, if the bell is rung without food, the dog salivates. The dog has
learned to recognize the context in which food is presented, the context
being a ringing bell.
The next level. Learning II, which
Bateson calls "learning to learn," is illustrated in a delightful
story Bateson tells about a dolphin. A female dolphin in Hawaii was being used
by a trainer to demonstrate simple Pavlovian learning. The trainer would watch
the dolphin, and when he saw her do something he wanted her to repeat (say, a
tail flip), he blew a whistle and then fed her. Within three trials the dolphin
would do a tail flip whenever a whistle was blown. She would then be sent back
to the holding tank to await the next demonstration. Of course, in order for the
demonstration to be effective, the trainer would have to select a new trick each
time, which the dolphin would dutifully learn to repeat. Between the fourteenth
and fifteenth trial, the dolphin was observed to appear very excited in the
holding tank, swimming to and fro as if agitated. When she returned to the
exhibition tank for the fifteenth time, Bateson says, "she put on an
elaborate performance that included eight conspicuous pieces of behaviour of
which four were new and never before observed in this species of animal."
Bateson suggests that the dolphin, between the fourteenth and fifteenth
sessions, had realized the context in which all these trials had been
taking place, namely, that the trainer wanted her to learn new tricks.
The set of possible Learning II
type responses available to a person constitutes his or her
"character": dependent, hostile, anxious,
narcissistic, energetic, bold, humorous, fatalistic, etc. All
of these
describe the patterns of a person's habitual transactions
with his
environment. For example, a "fatalistic" man might
be one whose
patterns of interaction with his environment could have been
acquired
through a history of Pavlovian or Skinnerian experiences. It
follows
that the type of world a person experiences himself to be
living in is
also determined by the history of his Learning II type
interactions.
Bateson comments, "No man is 'resourceful,' 'dependent'
or 'fatalistic' in a vacuum. His characteristic, whatever it be, is not his but
is rather a characteristic of what goes on between him and something (or
somebody) else." Thus a person's character, as well as his feeling of
"reality," arise as a result of his history of
Learning II experiences. A
person brought up in a predominantly Pavlovian type of
environment
will tend to structure the contexts of his perceptions and
actions to
perpetuate a Pavlovian or fatalistic "reality."
The final level. Learning III,
Bateson suggests is likely to be rare even in humans. Something of the sort may
occur in psychotherapy, religious conversion, meditation practice, and whenever
there is profound reorganization of character. Quoting William Blake's
"Without contraries is no progression," Bateson suggests that the
creature is driven to Level III by "contraries" generated at Level II,
that it is the resolving of such contraries that will constitute positive
reinforcement at Level III, and that such resolution can take many forms. We may
be reminded here of the possible responses of Prigogine's self-organizing
structures to sudden increases of energy input. Einstein and
Bohr both provide
examples of the resolution of "contraries" in their scientific work
and in their private lives.
Bateson speaks eloquently of the
characteristics of Level III
learning in relation to self-identity: "If I stop at the
level of Learning II, 'I' am an aggregate of those characteristics which I call
'my character. 'I' am my habits of acting in context and shaping and perceiving
the
contexts in which I act. Selfhood is a product or aggregate
of Learning II. To the degree that a man achieves Learning III, and learns to
perceive and act in terms of the context of contexts, his 'self will take on a
sort of irrelevance. The concept of 'self will no longer function as a model
argument in the punctuation of experience.' (5)
These levels of ordering should not
be mixed. It is such mixing, or collapsing of various levels into each other,
that can give rise to mental illness. This is the basis of Bateson's double-bind
view of schizophrenia, which, he suggests, is the result of a person's being
repeatedly exposed to contradiction between direct. Level I,
messages, and the contextual. Level II, messages. Such
collapsing of
levels is also responsible for tremendous confusion about the
nature of learning and of mental processes altogether. If we connect criterion 6
with criterion 4, the full description of such a level of learning or
"minding" must include the entire chain of
determination, e.g., an
organism plus its environment. This, then, is a model of
"living" or
mental process in which we have to say that such process is
not
localized "within" the body. In fact, Bateson
contends that "the
phenomena which we call thought, evolution, ecology, life,
learning and the like occur only in systems that satisfy these (6)
criteria." We see that in looking for evidence of mind or mental process we
must include the whole perceptual circuit. Bateson provides us with a way of
understanding that mind itself is embodied in the higher order patterns in
nature. Mind is not a "something" separate from nature. It is
identical at various levels of order with all of nature, not solely with
individual brains. It emerges as a characteristic of processes of nature at a
certain level of evolution. It is therefore futile to look for evidence of
mental process as located purely in the brain of an individual organism. We must
look for such evidence in the entire network of patterns of interaction which
that organism has with its environment, or which a group or society of organisms
has with its environment. As Bateson says, "The individual mind is immanent
but not only in the body. It is immanent also in the pathways and messages
outside the body; and there is a larger Mind of which the individual mind is
only a subsystem. This larger Mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some
people mean by 'God' but it is still immanent in the total interconnected social
system and planetary ecology." Bateson is not talking here of a theistic
idea of "A God" or "A "Mind." Rather, he is saying that
when we realize that mental processes are patterns in appearances, rather than
entities, then these patterns cannot be localized only in the human body.
The Fallacy of the Localized Mind
This localization of mind is perhaps the main fallacy in the
idea that
mind will be understood only in the circuits of the brain,
analogous to
a computer. Such insistence on the body as the sole locus of
mind is a subtle return of the soul theory because it insists on the
centeredness of thought and perception. Of course, it is more nihilistic than
eternalistic in that it is usually agreed that the body is impermanent.
Nevertheless, the insistence on trying to interpret perception in terms of a
central locus is as anthropocentric as was the earth-centered model of the world
before Copernicus and Galileo. And there seems to be no good grounds for it
other than the personal wish to be at the center of things. We might note that
among Bateson's six criteria of mental process, there is not one about a center.
We believe that awareness is in our body because our perceptions seem to
terminate there and because if we move from room to room our perceptions change
while we feel they are in the same body. Thus we give primacy to the clear and
distinct highlights of our immediate perceptions. But what of the awareness that
there is something at all? We may question the assumption that the totality of
awareness is located in the body. But if awareness is not localized in the body,
is it localized in space-time at all? What could it mean to say that awareness
is not localized in space-time? We should perhaps distinguish between awareness
which is not localized and self-consciousness which is. We will return to this
later.
There are other possible models of
mind which seem to accord
with what we know just as well as does the computer model. We
could model the brain more on the lines of a television, than a video player.
Suppose an intelligent person completely unfamiliar with twentieth-century
technology and knowing nothing about electromagnetic waves were to examine
functioning TV and video machines side by side. He or she would think that in both
cases the picture and sound were created entirely within the machine. If we then
told him that the TV set but not the video machine was picking up invisible
messages from space, he would think either that we were referring to one of his
gods, or that we were crazy. In this model the brain is one part of many loops
which are thought or perception, and include all of the environment.
In Bateson's example of a man
cutting down a tree with an axe, the whole circuit of man, tree, and axe must be
regarded as the basis of mental process in that act. The man himself is only
part of it. Thus,
rather than say that the man is perceiving the tree and his
arm
swinging the axe, we could describe this situation in a way
which
would be more in keeping with the actuality of it by saying
that the
whole circuit is self-perceiving. The locus of this
self-perception is felt
by the man himself to be "inside" him. In our own
culture he takes this
locus to be in his head; in other cultures it is taken to be
the heart or the ham, the abdomen. Yet any act of perception always includes
some aspect of the world. Without the world the man could not perceive at all.
Edwin Land has put this well:
"Ordinarily when we talk about the human as the advanced product of
evolution and the mind as being the most advanced product of evolution, there is
an implication
that we are advanced out of and away from the structure of
the exterior world in which we have evolved . . . This mechanism has no
separate existence at all, being in a thousand ways united
with and
continuously interacting with the whole exterior domain. In
fact, there
is no exterior red object with a tremendous mind
linked to it by only a ray of light. The red object is a composite product of
matter and a
mechanism evolved in permanent association with a most
elaborate
interlock
— so that there is no tremor in what we call the
'outside world'
that is not locked by a thousand chains and gossamers to
inner
structures that vibrate and move with it and are part of
it." (6) Land is, of
course, no mere professional philosopher but an inventive
genius who developed the Polaroid camera. He came to the conclusion we quoted as
a result of a lifetime's work on perception of color and stereo vision. Thus, to
think of mind as located in particular organisms is helpful for the survival of
those organisms but false from the viewpoint of the whole of nature. As Bateson
says, mind and nature are a necessary unity: "Break the pattern which
connects and you lose all meaning."
We should emphasize that the
patterns of organization which are mental process do not necessarily have
to be patterns in "matter" as we think of it on the scale of ordinary
human life. Such patterns could exist at scales as small as a single cell or
perhaps even the genetic material. Such patterns could also exist on a galactic
or cosmic scale. Physicist Gerald Feinberg and biochemist
Robert Shapiro have
argued that life could be based on interstellar plasmas, electromagnetic field
energy, magnetic domains in neutron stars, and so on. We might note that the
estimated number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy is almost identical to the
estimated number of neurons in the human cortex. The possibilities for exchange
of organization or information within and between galactic systems are great.
The level of complexity and order in such systems could certainly be as great as
that of the human brain. As Paul Davis, professor of physics at the University
of Newcastle, says, "We could describe this state of affairs by saying that
nature is a product of its own technology, and that the universe is a
mind. Our own mind could then be viewed as localized 'islands' of consciousness
in a sea of mind." (7)
There have been, throughout the
ages, various views on the
relation between mind and matter. Some have said that mind
and
matter are the same substance. This substance may have the
qualities of matter, with mind being simply a complex arrangement of matter and
subjective experience an illusion. This is the materialist view. Its most
sophisticated expression today is the identity theory that mind is identified
with certain functions of the brain and that subjective experience is simply the
"inner" sense of this functioning which from an "outer" or
"objective" viewpoint is seen to be merely the product of material
brain activity. This approach is also very closely related to
"realism," that is, the view that assumes the "reality" of
an objective world entirely uninfluenced by the perceiving subject. Other
theories, the idealist theories, say that the one substance has the quality of
mind or ideas and that matter is merely an illusion, another idea. A third group
of theories suggests that the one substance has the qualities of neither mind
nor matter, but that these are accidental characteristics of a more fundamental
substance. This is neutral monism proclaimed by Bertrand Russell in one of his
phases, and by Spinoza.
An entirely different group of
theories proposes that mind and
matter are essentially separate, different substances. This
is dualism,
or pluralism, if we think there may be many mind-like
substances.
Descartes was the most influential proponent of dualism in
modern
times. He argued that mind substance and matter substance
could not interact and that their only connection was through the beneficence of
God. In more recent times, Karl Popper has argued for a pluralist view. He
maintains that his World 2 (subjective feelings and ideas) and World 3
(objective theories, works of art, etc.) have existence independent from the
world of physicality. World 1. With Eccles he tried to show how Worlds 2 and 3
might be connected to World I through the speech center of the brain.
Within the domain in which these
philosophers choose to define
the problem of "mind" and "matter," they
resolve that problem more
or less satisfactorily. Having conceptually divided the
totality in a
certain way between mind and matter, subjective and
objective, they
create further abstractions to heal the division. Such
divisions have
relative usefulness but ultimately no special validity. From
the point of
view I am presenting, all these theories make the mistake of
looking for substance. Regarding "mind" or "matter" as some
kinds of substances, they then try to decide what kind of substances these may
be and how they may be related. I am pointing out that "mind,"
"matter," and "substance" are all patterns, levels of
ordering that arise from unconditioned nature when a particular perspective is
taken. We have met this view in Bohm's interpretation of quantum mechanics and
will meet it again in Whitehead's process philosophy.
The networks or "patterns
which connect" may include loops deep within the brain, but also go
far beyond these loops. They extend to simple perceptual situations such as the
man, his axe, and his tree. And they extend beyond these to networks involving
one or more other individuals, as in conversing with a friend or in a
therapeutic or teaching relationship. These patterns of connection, of mental
process, also extend to interaction with intellectual structures, such as
scientific theories, through language; to group situations, whether family,
political, or professional; and to the entire mytho-cultural system of a society.
For each of these situations our idea of what constitutes the "mind"
of an individual must be entirely different, since it is defined by the
different networks we, the definers, are focusing on. To illuminate the way in
which "mind" can be variously defined by the circumstances,
Victor
Frankl, author of Man's Search for Meaning, uses the following metaphor:
the shadow of a solid object, such as a cylinder, sphere, or cone can appear
differently, depending on which direction we illuminate it from. (See Figure
11.) Similarly, the mind/nature duality appears in different ways depending on
how the observer makes the division, which questions he is asking, which
networks of interaction he focuses on. (8)
Figure
11
This, then, is a broad view of the
partiality of the central
conception of "I" and the false view it gives us of
mind, nature, and
perception because of this partiality. We are imprisoned
within our
brain, as Mountcastle says, only so long as we identify mind
with
self-consciousness localized in the brain. What we have
uncovered up to this point from our consideration of experiments on the system
of visual perception, in the light of reports from the meditative tradition, is
that at a level of awareness which is more detailed in perception of time
intervals than is usual, our experience would be discontinuous. The appearance
of a continuous world "outside," a world of solid objects, is a result
of conjectures which are averages of many moments of perception. This
discontinuity, combined with the realization that the circuits of mental process
extend beyond the organism, implies discontinuity of the supposed solid world as
well.
I have proposed that the rapid
flickering of our psychobiological
states is a flickering back and forth between, at one moment,
"actuality," form, specific conjecture about
"the world," or the
conjecture of "I" with a concurrent consciousness,
and, at the next
moment, that of which one cannot speak, what is, or a
realm of
unrealized potential. Specific moments in which we perceive
our body
and the material world alternate with moments of unactualized
potentiality, and neither one is more primary.
We might note that this view of how
experience of the world arises also cuts through the traditional philosophical
categories of "realism" and "idealism. " This view is not
"idealism" because the unconditioned moments between each moment of
form and awareness, and the creative process itself by which form and awareness
arise, are not the products of an individual mind or stream of being. However,
it is not "realism" because the forms that arise are conjectures
arising within a particular stream of being, in response to unconditioned
reality, out of the stored memory and experience of that individual stream.
This rapid flickering back and
forth between our own self-organizing internal states and "that,"
whatever extends beyond those states and triggers them, is intimate experience
which, because it happens so fast, is beyond the reach of observation by
ordinary untrained attention. Thus, we have to use the personal language of
contemplation if we are to speak about it directly, as it is experienced.
In a later chapter we will look at
what has been discovered about the arising of thought and experience as a result
of the direct
observation of meditation practice. We will of course be
using a
somewhat different language: the language of personal
experience
rather than "objective" brain processes. But,
nevertheless, we will be
speaking of the same process of perception: the flickering
between
form and unconditioned; the way in which specific forms and
their
awareness arise from thought and memory; and the way the
flickering
is smoothed over by ordinary, coarse-scale self-consciousness
to
produce the appearance of continuity. In the next chapter I
will outline
this same process of perception as it has been described in
the
philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead.
Perceiving
Ordinary Magic
