Responses 006 (May 2013)

#6 says: Can we know when to trust our emotions in the pursuit of knowledge? Consider history and one other area of knowledge.

It might seem obvious, but the question is not "Can we trust our emotions... ?" but "Can we know when to trust... ?" This is not as easy as it seems.

On one level, the "Can we know... ?" kind of question is somewhat facetiously answered all the time, by people who should know better, with "No, of course not, how can anyone know that they know anything?" On a slightly higher level, the point of asking a 'can I know' question is so that one can argue whether or not one has a reasonable chance of knowing something — it's not a 'will I know' question either.

To extend the idea further, let's ask this: "Can we know when to trust X in the case of Y?" It's a question about the reliability or validity of the approach, and there are two main ways of trying to answer it.

The first is inductive, a historical-legal approach based on the evidence of precedents and antecedents. Supposing that trusting X has always led to success or truth or knowledge in the case of Y. Then clearly we can know when to trust X — it's whenever Y is the case. But the problem of the inductive approach is that at any time, a 'black swan' might appear — a fluke that happens and shows that prior performance is no guarantee of future success. How much can you trust something based on its history? Does the 100% reliability of the past continue into the future?

The second is deductive, a philosophical-logical approach based on reasoning. If Y is such that Y is susceptible to success when using X, then we can always trust X based on the nature of Y. Then we clearly can also know when to trust X — it's whenever Y (or something with the X-related properties of Y) occurs. However, the problem of the deductive approach is that it depends on our first assumption or axiom being true. If we think Y is such, but it isn't, then all our subsequent reasoning is flawed. How much can you trust something based on logical conclusions that are worked out based on an assertion that might not be valid?

Now let's consider 'pursuit of knowledge... history and one other AOK'.

History can be defined as the construction of a narrative based on verifiable events in generally chronological order, so as to explain the present in the light of the past. History should make no attempt to predict the future; it is a sense-making exercise based on things that have already happened and are far enough away that we can begin to gather a fairly comprehensive collection of evidence concerning those things. (You can probably find useful definitions of other AOKs elsewhere in this blog.)

So how would we know when to trust our emotions when in the pursuit of historical knowledge? Clearly, the evidence must be verified by sense and reason to a large extent. But the pursuit of historical knowledge consists of different types of evidence: witnesses and reports, archaeological finds, ideas from the other human sciences (sociology, anthropology etc) about how humans normally behave.

Some of those kinds of evidence require us as humans to respond as humans — to try to understand by empathy and emotion why people did things. This is what emotion as a way of knowing is all about — it is the body's complex physiological and biochemical response to incoming material, giving us a sense of how other humans might feel about it and thus altering or forming our psychological perspective on it. We then interpret what we see in the light of what we feel. In this way, the history we then construct therefore makes more sense to our readers and may be closer to a true explanation of why humans did something. How do we decide WHEN to trust emotion in this way? If we can decide at all, that's the answer to part of the original question.

And that's the beginning of the argument you need to construct. Enjoy!

Sanctimony Redux

If love makes the world go round and sanctimony makes the world go mad, then it might be interesting to map human responses against the shape of the world. We would be able to develop a geography of emotion, a dark grimoire which uses the spiky bits of the human mind as keys to the lumpy bits of the universe.

Mindkiller

Excessive stress and all its causes, these are the things that are bad for you. Fear, as Herbert said, is the mindkiller.

But in what sense is the mind killed?

The mind is the phenomenon of perceived cognition that operates out of the body. The body is overly stressed, it becomes dysfunctional. Since emotion is the physiological response to circumstance as mediated by biochemistry, it also manifests abnormally.

So the mind becomes a phenomenon of perceived dyscognition, and thus is seen as disabled, and in the ultimate extrapolation, killed.

Haha. All this, from the phenomenon of perceived personal experience.

Emotion as a Way of Knowing

Let us define emotion: it is the sum of the changes of your body as it experiences things; it is the product of those changes as the standpoint of your mind shifts, like shadow of a sundial as clouds cover the sun.

If emotion is a way of knowing, what knowledge does it lead us to? If it is a way, what kind of way — is it a broad thoroughfare or a narrow lane, an iron bridge or a wooden plank?

I sit and try to feel. There is no emotion that does not have the tides of the body, blood, bone, brain, brawn throbbing and pulsing behind it. There can be feelings without emotion, but no emotions without feelings. And each tendril of the emotional experience changes the world.

Emotion teaches you how a body, in all its chemical and biological and physical complexity, responds to the world of sense and being before the straitjackets of sensibility and reason confine it. Emotion bypasses the careful chalice of language, and spills that fluid into the world.

If emotion is a way of knowing, it leads us to knowledge of self, and how the self is the mirror of the other. It helps us to know the world without thinking about what it means in itself, but what it is, and what it means, to us.

Emotion is the manifold path which blazes like fire or spins like web across the forest of complexity. It joins point to unconnected point, it defies the voice of (t)reason. It outraces the slowness of induction, which teaches by accumulated experience and example; it outflanks the lethal thrust of deduction, which teaches by rule and law. It helps us to an intuitive conclusion before the unfolding of the story is complete.

And, if it is all that, it is also unreliable, sometimes scornful of validity, on occasion spectacularly unuseful. But it is the truest portion of ourselves, the bulk of what we are inside.

The Moment of Impact

Last night I saw two moments of impact. The first was enormous, the second was on a much more personal level. It seemed facetious to compare the two; only an accident of timing had brought them anywhere near each other and they shared little in common.

In the first, the Nazca plate off the coast of Chile thumped yet again into the underside of the South American plate. The result was an earthquake measuring 8.8 on the Richter scale (about 10x the magnitude of the one that hit Haiti earlier). The reverberations resulted in tsunami warnings for places as far away as Japan. Despite the intensity of the quake, the death toll is not expected to cross 250.

In the second, promising Welsh player Aaron Ramsey took a hit from a horrified Ryan Shawcross in the Stoke City-Arsenal soccer match. Shawcross missed his tackle and fractured Ramsey's lower leg so badly that the foot was hanging loosely off the joint. It was clear that players from both teams were badly shaken. Ramsey is 19 years old, 5'11"; Shawcross is only 22, 6'5" and was just called up for England.

How can you compare the two? You can't. The first is a natural event in which more than 200 people lost their lives. The second is an unnatural event in which a young man has broken his leg. But the fact is that they are juxtaposed in our consciousness, and human empathy is such that it is easier to imagine breaking your own leg badly than to imagine the agony of 200 deaths.

When I saw the first event in the media, it was hard to assess my immediate emotional response. I must confess I felt relieved that relatively few people had died. When I saw the second, my heart sank. When the cameras pan away from the scene and the last thing you saw was a crunching impact that leaves someone's leg looking wrong, there's a more visceral sensation.

That highlights the difference between an objectified event and a subjectified one. The former was big, and you felt you ought to feel bad for victims of such a disaster. But the latter was more personal. You felt bad at once. You felt bad later when you realised you honestly felt worse for Aaron Ramsey than for Chile. Emotion is a funny thing.

Yearning

Recently I found myself in a discussion about that peculiar emotion known as 'yearning'. Someone said that yearning does not by itself prove that the thing yearned for exists. Someone else said that if a thing existed, we might yearn for it. For me, I've come to realise that sometimes we take our yearnings and we make a mental image of what it is that we yearn for.

One of the well-known, and to my mind somewhat spurious, arguments for the existence of God is that there seems to be a yearning for something higher and better than us. That is why, the argument goes, we invent gods. It's a ridiculous argument, because it's possible to yearn for stuff no one else has ever yearned for, and it's possible to have a yearning you cannot describe, and it's possible to claim that you have a yearning and never describe it the same way. And these are just three reasons why it's a ridiculous argument.

It's also possible to claim that when you meet something that satisfies you, you might realise that it is the object of your indescribable yearnings. Well, that's like saying you have no statement of hypothesis, you gather some experimental data, and amazingly the data supports the hypothesis that you didn't state.

Frankly, I believe that you can yearn for God, but I don't think it is proof of His existence. In fact, as I have argued elsewhere, the main reason why you shouldn't indulge in arguments aimed at proof or disproof of God's existence is that God actually cannot objectively prove His existence within the strictures that He has created for himself.

I've expounded on this elsewhere. Briefly, one problem is that if God exists, it wouldn't be possible to have an objective proof related to him; another problem is that a comprehensive proof of His existence would render free will (as we conceive of it) and meaningful faith impossible; a third problem is that it isn't possible to prove the extent of the superset from the subset without common rules that bind both. There are even more problems than that.

Nevertheless, I will honestly say that for me, belief in God gives me a meaningful existence. Some will say that's very sad, and some will say that's very good. For me, it's just very true. I don't really feel yearning, what I feel is impatience to complete the examination that is this life, and move on to the postdoctoral stage.

Emotion and Reason

Quite often, I have mystified students. It's almost as if they have embraced mysticism rather than rationality as far as thinking about themselves is concerned. One thing which triggers this state is when they have to think about emotion.

"What's emotion?"

"Err... it's feelings, right?"

"OK, it's feelings. So how come we think of emotion as a way of knowing?"

"It helps you know how you feel!"

"OK, so your feelings teach you how you feel?"

And so on.

The point is a really simple one. An emotion is a physiological response to a situation, that is linked to a change in psychological perspective. It distills a situation down to a complex but concentrated social package, based initially on 'feelings' (but also on the input of your senses) and tells you whether something is 'good', 'bad', or any one of maybe five or six other basic categories. Sometimes it does this very quickly for something that the reasoning mind cannot cope with easily, simply because the situation is too complex.

At this point, students often ask, "What about love? It's only a physiological response?!"

Well, not only that, but the emotion one calls 'love' certainly does not exist without a physiological response that is linked to a change in psychological perspective. If X says he loves Y and you hook him up to a machine that measures these responses, he will certainly show certain kinds of physiological changes when he's asked to think about Y. If he doesn't show any of the known likely changes, then he doesn't love Y in any sense, simple as that.

But is it possible to love someone purely rationally, without messy emotions getting in the way?

No, actually. Even loving some thing requires emotion. If a person truly loves money, then the sight of a $50k cheque made out to bearer will trigger a bunch of physiological responses linked to a change in psychological perspective. With loving someone, it engages the social parts of the brain even more.

Some say that it's emotion, the social response package, that has made the human brain the size it is; we spend a lot more time feeling than using logic. We make snap judgements about how we feel about people (and things, and situations) almost all the time, and it's so much a part of us that we don't consciously think about it. In short, our feelings are actually the brain making sense of our physiological responses (the 'gut feel', the 'sinking feeling', the uneasiness which you can't pinpoint, the chill down your spine, the crawling of the skin, the hair standing on end, the blush of the cheek, and many more).

We aren't creatures of pure reason. We can't be. The brain is too heavily involved in emotion for any of our thoughts not to have any feelings associated with them at all. An honest person will admit it; only the worst kind of pseudo-scientific thinker will assert otherwise.

Second Wind

I don't understand why people are disgruntled when they don't win all the time. On one hand, I am surrounded by groaning, gasping people who claim they have no time to do all the things they need to do. On the other hand, they are dismayed by not being Number One all the time.

The solution comes from distance running. In a long-distance race, you cannot go flat out and expect to win. Rather, you keep a reasonable pace, play it strategically and occasionally tactically. You can be a few strides behind the leader, being second or even third or fourth at every bend, slowly sucking the momentum from your competitor. When you finally raise your pace and blast past the leader, having conserved energy since you gained your second wind, it gives you a great feeling.

And what if you don't? To me, only losers say there are no prizes for second place. Of course there are. Or there would only be one person left standing in every competition. It appalls me, this stupidity of primacy. Rather, accept your strengths, your weaknesses, your talents. Do what you can and call on your innermost life of the spirit to fill in whatever gaps remain. And the rest is in the hands of God. For the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but time and chance happen to them all.

Autofocus

Yes, here I sit, idly messing around in a sea of old paper. And look what I've found! Shudder.

=====

Look out on the empty land
Think of what should be
Pluck it out into your hand
And you'll see you see

For one eye is all you need
Just one eye alone
Let the empty socket bleed
Like a cave of bone

Trade the orb in for a crown
Of the scepter'd isle
Never let them pull you down
On the martyr's mile

For one eye is all you need
Just one eye alone
Let the empty socket bleed
Like a cave of bone

You can see behind the mask
Of each shining face
Ready for the cleansing task
In the hero's place

For one eye is all you need
Just one eye alone
Let the empty socket bleed
Like a cave of bone

Pay the price for vision true
One eye is the key
You can see as well if you
Let one eye go free

For one heart is all you need
Just one heart alone
Leave it all alone to bleed
In its cave of bone

=====

1984. I guess we were all emo in some way once upon a time. Her name was Patricia. It's funny how these things return to haunt you. Heh.

History Stole My Date

It's the day after Valentine's Day. And I, as often happens at this time of year, am drawn to remember two very specific Valentine's Days.

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1977. I am a curious and energetic little ten-year-old kid. I am running around outside school, a little steamed from playing football in dangerous places. Then... I bump into my grandfather, who is coming out of Bible House on Armenian Street. He has an odd expression on his face, and a big bright smile.

"Hi, Grandpop!"

"Hi, young man. Your mum's doing well in hospital. Guess whether it's a boy or a girl?"

At ten, one tends to guess 'boy' just to spite the other sex. I was wrong. And that is the story of how Valentine's Day first became important to me - it was my sister's birthday.

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1986. I am a curiously energetic infantry recruit. I am stuck in camp. I am hoping like mad to get out of camp to spend some time with the girl who is at that time the love of my life. I don't know it yet, but it is going to be a very long time before I have another happy Valentine's day again. A very very very long time, indeed.

I spend the next two years writing poetry for money. Most of it is for fellow servicemen trying to impress their girlfriends. I have become mercenary about love and other human affections and affectations. I'm good. I can charge $2 a line. It gives me a kind of... perverse joy. At about $10 per verse, or more.

=====

And in between, there are agonizing and embarrassing ones, and those that are sweet and quiet, and those that are tiring and exuberant. At this point in my life, all of them are fond memories, and I thank all those who made such memories possible and indelible. God bless you all, wherever you are.

Reflection

I was 18 and it was a cold rainy night. It was the night of the senior prom, and for the sins of our predecessors, it was being held in the school auditorium instead of at the hotel which they had vandalised.

I spent a lot of time with her and her friends, in the gallery where we sat. My grandfather had introduced us. It was a time of hope; it was a time in which dark things were forever put behind. But I remember one specific thing - I liked her company, and our families were well-acquainted, but there was none of that feeling of... gravity.

Sometimes your heart weighs so much, feels so large with hope, fear, portent or despair. Sometimes it is full of blood, and at other times it is unbearably light with air. And sometimes, it is happy but it feels nothing beyond that. And that was how I passed the night.

It was the other one who greeted the new year with me a month later, when my head had been shorn in the service of my country.

=====

Years passed. I wrote many letters, something that feels somehow so archaic in this age of ubiquitous electrons. I kept their replies. I remembered them, even though my heart had gone on. She owns a restaurant. The other one is a teacher. And I look in that dark mirror of the past, and all I see is clean rain on an open road.

Interlude 4: Self-Portraits

It is the curse of the man of books that when he tries to find words to express himself, he knows that many have expressed his sentiments with purer lines and better turns of phrase. Yet, there is a challenge in that which tempers the iridium-tipped quill and in the end makes it limn an image better.

But here is Browning first, from Andrea del Sarto, called the Faultless Painter:

I, painting from myself and to myself,
Know what I do, am unmoved by men’s blame
Or their praise either. Somebody remarks
Morello’s outline there is wrongly traced,
His hue mistaken; what of that? or else,
Rightly traced and well ordered; what of that?
Speak as they please, what does the mountain care?
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for? All is silver-gray
Placid and perfect with my art: the worse!
I know both what I want and what might gain,
And yet how profitless to know, to sigh
“Had I been two, another and myself,
Our head would have o’erlooked the world!” No doubt.

It is very close to a sketch of myself, or at least the part that interfaces with my work. It has a self-mocking irony that comes with being confident. Such confidence is not the confidence of success, but the belief that failure diminishes the self by very little if at all - the glorious attempt or the truth of self are, either one, sufficient. And having made myself uneasy by the recollection, let us move on to Eliot's The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock:

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

This is the other side of me, the part that interfaces with the world. It has no irony at all; it is genuine self-deprecation, not of false humility, but of consciousness of role. I am no Hamlet, no great Dane. But I make good filler, and I write reports and documents that augment the presence and capability of my superiors. Perhaps the greatest unease is evoked by Ted Hughes, though. Here is an excerpt from his tragic poem, Wolfwatching:

But all the time
The awful thing is happening: the iron inheritance,
The incredible rich will, torn up
In neurotic boredom and eaten,
Now indigestible. All that restlessness
And lifting of ears, and aiming, and re-aiming
Of nose, is like a trembling
Of nervous breakdown, afflicted by voices.
Is he hearing the deer? Is he listening
To gossip of non-existent forest? Pestered
By the hour-glass panic of lemmings
Dwindling out of reach? He's run a long way
Now to find nothing and be patient.
Patience is suffocating in all those folds
Of deep fur. The fairy tales
Grow stale all around him
And go back into pebbles.

Sometimes, this too is part of me. It is an itch I can't scratch. And so, as we stagger towards completion and the end of all things, I pray a lot that the journey will feel worthwhile - for while intellect accepts worth as abstraction, emotion demands value as instantiation.