Blog Archives

Abram on Mind Arising

31/1/2013

"The human body, in itself, is no more autonomous - and no more conscious - than an isolated brain. Sentience is not an attribute of a body in isolation; it emerges from the ongoing encounter between our flesh and the forest of rhythms in which it finds itself, born of the interplay and tension between the world's wild hunger and our own.

...
Mind arises, and dwells, between the body and the Earth and hence is as much an attribute of this leafing world as of our own immodest species."

David Abram
Becoming Animal

Starfish and 5-Way Symmetry

30/1/2013

Bateson from Mind and Nature:

"ideas about... how we can know anything. In the pronoun we, I of course included the starfish and the redwood forest, the segmenting egg, and the Senate of the United States.

And in the anything which these creatures variously know, I included "how to grow into five-way symmetry," how to survive a forest fire," "how to grow and still stay the same shape," "how to learn," "how to write a constitution," "how to invent and drive a car," "how to count to seven," and so on. Marvelous creatures with almost miraculous knowledges and skills."

Brittle Stars Move Like Humans

25/1/2013

"Starfishlike brittle stars have five thin arms and no central brain, but even so, they move in a carefully coordinated fashion similar to four-limbed animals (including humans).
Symmetry is at the heart of the mystery of brittle star movement.

Symmetry influences how an animal moves about. Animals with bilateral symmetry, like humans, have bodies specialized to move in one direction — forward. Many animals with radial symmetry don't move or do so slowly. When they do travel, most of these animals do so in a direction determined by their body's central axis, defined by the location of their mouths. Think of a jellyfish moving up and down in the water column.

This is why brittle stars are strange. Despite their five-way symmetry, the stars don't move according to their central axis. Instead, they move perpendicular to it using their five multijointed limbs to propel them along the seafloor.

Henry Astley, at Brown University, filmed 13 blunt-spined brittle stars crawling in an inflatable pool and digitized their movements to better analyze them.

He found that, about 75 percent of the time, brittle stars oriented their movement around a central limb, which pointed the way for the rest of the body. The left and right forelimbs made large, coordinated movements. To turn, the brittle star simply picked a new lead limb.

When not "rowing" forward, the brittle stars reversed, with a central limb trailing and the other four making large movements.

While these patterns of movement resemble that of a bilaterally symmetrical animal, the brittle stars do not alternate limbs as many four-limbed animals do. (When walking, for example, you alternate between your left and right foot; the brittle stars moved both of their forelimbs at the same time.)

The study is detailed in the Journal of Experimental Biology."

Live Science

Bateson on Pattern

24/1/2013

"What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all the four of them to me? And me to you? And all the six of us to the amoeba in one direction and to the back-ward schizophrenic in another?

...What is the pattern which connects all the living creatures?

The parts of a crab are connected by various patterns of bilateral symmetry, of serial homology, and so on. Let us call these patterns within the individual growing crab first-order connections. But now we look at crab and lobster and we again find connection by pattern. Call it second-order connection, or phylogenetic homology.

Now we look at man or horse and find that, here again, we can see symmetries and serial homologies. When we look at the tow together, we find the same cross-species sharing of pattern with a difference (phylogenetic homology). And, of course, we also find the same discarding of magnitudes in favor of shapes, patterns, and relations. In other words, as this distribution of formal resemblances is spelled out, it turns out that gross anatomy exhibits three levels or logical types of descriptive propositions:

The parts of any member of Creatura are to be compared with other parts of the same individual to give first-order connections.
Crabs are to be compared with lobsters or men with horses to find similar relations between parts (i.e., to give second-order connections).
The comparison between crabs and lobsters is to be compared with the comparison between man and horse to provide third-order connections.

We have constructed a ladder of how to think about – about what? Oh, yes, the pattern which connects.

My central thesis can now be approached in words: The pattern which connects is a metapattern. It is a pattern of patterns. It is that metapattern which defines the vast generalization that, indeed, it is patterns which connect."

Mind and Nature

Bateson on Spirals

22/1/2013

"...all spirals in this world except whirlpools, galaxies, and spiral winds are, indeed made by living things. There is an extensive literature on this subject, which some readers may be interested in looking up (the key words are Fibonacci series and golden section).

What comes out of all this is that a spiral is a figure that retains its shape (i.e., its proportions) as it grows in one dimension by addition at the open end. You see, there are no truly static spirals.

But the class had difficulty. They looked for all the beautiful formal characteristics that they had joyfully found in the crab. They had the idea that formal symmetry, repetition of parts, modulated repetition, and so on were what teacher wanted. But the spiral was not bilaterally symmetrical; it was not segmented.

They had to discover (a) that all symmetry and segmentation were somehow a result, a payoff from, the fact of growth; and (b) that growth makes its formal demands; and (c) that one of these is satisfied (in a mathematical, an ideal, sense) by spiral form.

So the conch shell carries the snail’s prochronism – its record of how, in its own past, it successively solved a formal problem in pattern formation (see Glossary). It, too, proclaims its affiliation under that pattern of patterns which connects."

Mind and Nature

Bateson on Transference

21/1/2013

"Now I come to the analyst, this newly important other who must be viewed as a father (or perhaps antifather) because nothing has meaning except it be seen as in come context. This viewing is called transference and is a general phenomenon in human relations. It is a universal characteristic of all interaction between persons because, after all, the shape of what happened between you and me yesterday carries over to shape how we respond to each other today. And that shaping is, in principle, a transference from past learning.

This phenomenon of transference exemplifies the truth of the computer’s perception that we think in stories. The analyst must be stretched or shrunk onto the Procrustean bed of the patient’s childhood stories. But also, by referring to psychoanalysts, I have narrowed the idea of "story." I have suggested that it has something to do with context, a crucial concept, partly undefined and therefore to be examined.

And "context" is linked to another undefined notion called "meaning." Without context, words and actions have no meaning at all. This is true not only of human communication in words but also of all communication whatsoever, of all mental process, of all mind, including that which tells the sea anemone how to grow and the amobea what he should do next.

I am drawing an analogy between context in the superficial and partly conscious business of personal relations and context in the much deeper, more archaic processes of embryology and homology. I am asserting that whatever the word context means, it is an appropriate word, the necessary word, in the description of all these distantly related processes."

Abram on Mind Arising

Starfish and 5-Way Symmetry

Brittle Stars Move Like Humans

Bateson on Pattern

Bateson on Spirals

Bateson on Transference

Author: Andrew

Archives

Categories