3QD Catch-Up: Affective Technology, Georgia on My Mind

Whenever I publish a new article at 3 Quarks Daily I also publish a somewhat shorter post here at New Savanna. That post links to the 3QD post and comments on it, or perhaps adds some further thinking. But that doesn’t always happen. I’ve missed giving notice for my 3QD articles in July, August, and September. 

The articles for July and August continue the series on Affective Technology that I began in June. That first article was about Poems and Stories. In July I published Emotion Recollected in Tranquility. The phrase is from Wordsworth: “I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” That is, there is an emotion that we experience at some moment in time. Then, at a later time, when we’re doing something else, or perhaps nothing beyond lazing about as we let our mind wander as it will, that emotion calls to us. We hear it, take hold of it in words, and bring it back, creating a poem in the process. But before that I talk about state-dependent memory, the idea that our ability to remember something depends, in part, on our mental state at the time of remembering. Remembrance works best is there our current mental state resonates with our mental state during the original experience; this resonance is (hypothesized to be) a function of neurochemistry. But what if you can’t establish that resonance? Does that mean that your memory of that experience is gone, at least until you can establish resonance? I conclude by discussing Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, “The Expense of Spirit.” 

That sets us up for the third article in the series, Coherence in the Self, which I published in August. If our memories are neurochemically sensitive, that implies that our ability to remember the events of our lives depends, in part, on establishing neurochemical resonance with past states of mind and the events that engendered. If we can’t establish that resonance, then those events are lost. Our autobiographical self is shattered, a topic I take up with a discussion of dissociated identity disorder (DID), aka “split personality.” I then go on to argue that, by presenting us with a wide range of emotions, literary texts (and, by implication, other expressive culture) help us to construct neurochemical “scaffolding” that helps us keep in touch with our past. This strikes me as more fundamental than the (moral) improvement folks are forever attributing to (good) literature, though there may be a bit of that as well. Who knows? After discussing play I conclude considering Kenneth Burke on how we use literary texts to make sense of our lives. 

September’s post is a bit different. I discuss five recordings of “Georgia on My Mind”: the original by Hoagy Carmichael, Ray Charles’s 1960 version, a harmonically-dense version by Jacob Collier, a beautiful jazz rendition by Dexter Gordon (tenor sax), and I conclude by another jazz version, this one by trumpeter Lew Soloff. That video is why I wrote this post. Notice that he begins with an a cappella trumpet line he took from the intro to the Ray Charles version. 

 

Soloff’s style is interesting. It’s not swing, bebop, hard bop or cool, but it’s not modal or free either. In a way, it’s a kind of 1960s mainstream, but extended and opened-up (such as Soloff’s passage with only his mouthpiece or his use of the plunger mute) with a freedom that hardly existed before free jazz. That’s what makes it so interesting, that and Soloff’s soulfulness.

Emotion Recollected in Tranquility [affective technology]

I originally published this in The Valve in May of 2009, where it is followed by an interesting conversation. Keith Oatley elaborated at OnFiction, citing relevant empirical studies.

* * * * *

I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.

—William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads

In his 1997 best-seller, How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker suggested that, however important art may be to humans, it is not part of our specifically biological nature:

We enjoy strawberry cheesecake, but not because we evolved a taste for it. We evolved circuits that gave us trickles of enjoyment from the sweet taste of ripe fruit, the creamy mouth feel of fats and oils from nuts and meat, and the coolness of fresh water. Cheesecake packs a sensual wallop unlike anything in the natural world because it is a brew of megadoses of agreeable stimuli which we concocted for the purpose of pressing our pleasure buttons. Pornography is another pleasure technology. In this chapter I will suggest that the arts are a third. (p. 525)

This triggered a backlash of arguments asserting that, no, the arts are not mere mental cheesecake, they are an essential component of human nature, our biological nature.

I was somewhat bemused by the whole fracas. While I have a long standing interest in the neural basis of the arts, I find thinking about biological adaptation to be frustratingly difficult, something I’d prefer to ignore. My editor for Beethoven’s Anvil, William Frucht, however, thought otherwise. And so I dutifully joined the parade of those who shilled for the biological bona fides of art and argued that music was indeed biologically adaptive. Specifically, music reduced anxiety in the group and thereby made it more fit to encounter real challenges and dangers. More recently, and inspired by Pinker's own The Stuff of Thought, I argued that story-telling allows us to share perceptions, feelings, and values that we cannot talk about.

I now have another proposal to offer, one based in a line of thinking I began entertaining in the mid-1970s when I learned about state-dependent memory. I first learned about state dependence when I read a review of the literature on altered states of consciousness in which Roland Fischer reported an experiment originally performed by D. Goodwin (“The Cartography of Inner Space” in Hallucinations, Siegel and West, eds. 1975, p. 199). Subjects were first made drunk and then asked to memorize nonsense syllables. When their recall was tested while sober they performed poorly. Their recall dramatically improved, however, if they once again became drunk. More recently, Daniel L. Schacter has written of mood-congruent memory retrieval: “Experiments have shown that sad moods make it easier to remember negative experiences, like failure and rejection, whereas happy moods make it easier to remember pleasant experiences, like success and acceptance” (Searching for Memory, 1996, p. 211). Recall of experience is best when the one’s brain is in the same state it was in when one had that experience. That is what is meant by state dependence.

 

Given that motivation and emotion are mediated by over a hundred neurotransmitters and neuromodulators (Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience, 1998), the state dependent nature of memory has profound implications for our ability to recall our personal experience. As I have previously argued:

If records of personal experience are [biochemically biased], especially in the case of strongly emotionally charged experience, then how can we get a coherent view of ourselves and of our world? The world of a person who is ravenously hungry is different from the world of that same person when he or she is consumed with sexual desire. Yet it is the same person in both cases. And the apple, which was so insignificant when sexually hungry—to the point where that apple wasn't part of the world at all—becomes a central object in the world once sexual desire has been satisfied and hunger asserts itself. Regardless of the person's [biochemical state], it is still the same apple.

If this is how the nervous system works, then how does one achieve a state of mind in which one can as easily remember an apple as a sexual object? That is to say, how does the brain achieve a biochemically “neutral” state of mind from which one can recall or imagine any kind of experience?

I suggest that story-telling is a way of accomplishing this. Parents tell stories to children in a setting that is comfortable and safe and those stories are generally calibrated with a sense of what interests and pleases the child, but is not too frightening. Children hear stories in which characters are hungry or thirsty, but eventually find food and water, in which characters are lost and frightened, but then found, in which important relationships are imperiled, but restored, in which new relationships are formed and, in time, in which important relationships may be lost forever. They are allowed to experience a wide range of emotional behavior in a context where they are safe.

In the course of arguing that literary works trigger emotionally-charged personal memories, Patrick Colm Hogan tells about a two-old boy’s use of the Peter Rabbit story (The Mind and Its Stories, 2003, p. 67):

Kurt . . . hears the Peter Rabbit story and becomes fascinated with it. He listens to the story repeatedly. He then retells the story, such that “real-life events that Kurt had experienced . . . in the company of his mother and grandmother . . . are attributed to Peter Rabbit and his mother.” The fact that Kurt integrates his own memories into his retellings of the story – his explicit “personalization” of these stories . . . suggests that memories played a part in his enthusiastic response to the story initially.

Yes. But also, and in view of biochemical reality, I suggest that the story gives him a way of accessing and organizing those memories.

And not only young children, but teens and adults experience stories in ways that ensure communal approval. In oral cultures, stories are experienced among friends and familiars. One hears the grunts and murmurs of approval of our fellows, the common laughter, but also the communal sighs of disma; these mingle together and establish the story itself as a good and necessary pleasure. In literate cultures we may read stories in private, but we discuss them among our friends, or in school. Theatrical performance, movies and television are frequently experienced in the company of others. In one way or another, literary experience is institutionalized as shared communal experience.

My argument is that this communal experience of stories helps us to create neural circuits that give us the ability to recall a wide range of experience without our having to be in a neurochemical state approximating that which mediated that experience. Stories – as well as poems and plays – allow us to experience a wide range of desires and feelings in an arena where our personal lives are secure and protected, where our experience is socially approved. Without the constant experience of emotionally charged stories, our memories would be captive to the current mood.

Thus we do not have to be sexually aroused to recall occasions of sexual arousal, nor do we have to be have to be angry or grieving to recall occasions of great anger or the darkest grief. The stories we have learned in the company of others have created a “level playing field” in the mind, neutral ground from which we can survey the full range of human experience. If we can, perhaps in private, step back from the living of life to recall and examine our feelings and actions, that is because our experiences with stories have created a rich weave of mental prototypes through which we can recall and interrogate even the most densely emotional of our experiences. Conversely, if we cannot do this, then how can we construct a coherent view of ourselves? If the sexually aroused self has trouble recalling any life episodes other than those involving sexual arousal, and the vengeful self can recall only incidents of vengeance, and the thirsty self has little sense of any geography beyond that leading to water, then how can we see ourselves and our fellows whole? Such a life would seem to be one of almost constant dissociation (cf. my article on the self in life and fiction).

This view is different in emphasis from the common notion that stories are useful because they allow us to gather and share information. My argument is not about the usefulness of the information enfolded in stories, but about how the social situation of story telling facilitates our ability to recall incidents of a kind captured in stories. The usefulness of that information is of little or no account if we cannot access that information except from within very specific states of mind. Story-telling creates a mental arena in which we can review and become self-consciously aware of the full range of our feelings and behaviors, where we can see them in relation to one another.

* * * * *

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to consider the implications of this idea for the value of psychoanalysis both as therapeutic practice and as a theory of mind.

Consciousness, reorganization and polyviscosity, Part 1: The link to Powers

The nature of consciousness is one of the big mysteries of contemporary thought. The best account of consciousness I know of is that offered by William Powers in Behavior: The Control of Perception (1973). That’s what this post is about. My objective is simple, to link Powers’s account of consciousness to the concept of polyviscosity that I offered about a week ago, The structured physical system hypothesis (SPSH), Polyviscous connectivity [The brain as a physical system]. Unfortunately, Powers’s concept, while basically simple, is simple only in the context of his overall model of mind, and that is not something that can readily be conveyed in a single blog post. Thus this post is mostly for my own benefit.

Powers’ model consists of two components: 1) a stack of servomechanisms – see the post In Memory of Bill Powers – regulating both perception and movement, and 2) a reorganizing system. The reorganizing system is external to the stack, but operates on it to achieve adaptive control, an idea he took from Norbert Wiener. Powers devoted “Chapter 14, Learning” to the subject (pp. 177-204). Reorganization is the mechanism through which Powers achieves learning.

Here’s an extensive passage that gets at the heart of the present matter (pp. 199-201):

To the reorganizing system, under these new hypotheses, the hierarchy of perceptual signals is itself the object of perception, and the recipient of arbitrary actions. This new arrangement, originally intended only as a means of keeping reorganization closer to the point, gives the model as a whole two completely different types of perceptions: one which is a representation of the external world, and the other which is a perception of perceiving. And we have given the system as a whole the ability to produce spontaneous acts apparently unrelated to external events or control considerations: truly arbitrary but still organized acts.

As nearly as I can tell short of satori, we are now talking about awareness and volition.

Awareness seems to have the same character whether one is being aware of his finger or of his faults, his present automobile or the one he wishes Detroit would build, the automobile’s hubcap or its environmental impact. Perception changes like a kaleidoscope, while that sense of being aware remains quite unchanged. Similarly, crooking a finger requires the same act of will as varying one’s bowling delivery “to see what will happen.” Volition has the arbitrary nature required of a test stimulus (or seems to) and seems the same whatever is being willed. But awareness is more interesting, somehow.

The mobility of awareness is striking. While one is carrying out a complex behavior like driving a car through to work, one’s awareness can focus on efforts or sensations or configurations of all sorts, the ones being controlled or the ones passing by in short skirts, or even turn to some system idling in the background, working over some other problem or musing over some past event or future plan. It seems that the behavioral hierarchy can proceed quite automatically, controlling its own perceptual signals at many orders, while awareness moves here and there inspecting the machinery but making no comments of its own. It merely experiences in a mute and contentless way, judging everything with respect to intrinsic reference levels, not learned goals.

This leads to a working definition of consciousness. Consciousness consists of perception (presence of neural currents in a perceptual pathway) and awareness (reception by the reorganizing system of duplicates of those signals, which are all alike wherever they come from). In effect, conscious experience always has a point of view which is determined partly by the nature of the learned perceptual functions involved, and partly by built-in, experience-independent criteria. Those systems whose perceptual signals are being monitored by the reorganizing system are operating in the conscious mode. Those which are operating without their perceptual signals being monitored are in the unconscious mode (or preconscious, a fine distinction of Freud’s which I think unnecessary).

This speculative picture has, I believe, some logical implications that are borne out by experience. One implication is that only systems in the conscious mode are subject either to volitional disturbance or reorganization. The first condition seems experientially self-evident: can you imagine willing an arbitrary act unconsciously? The second is less self-evident, but still intuitively right. Learning seems to require consciousness (at least learning anything of much consequence). Therapy almost certainly does. If there is anything on which most psychotherapists would agree, I think it would be the principle that change demands consciousness from the point of view that needs changing. Furthermore, I think that anyone who has acquired a skill to the point of automaticity would agree that being conscious of the details tends to disrupt (that, is, begin reorganization of) the behavior. In how many applications have we heard that the way to interrupt a habit like a typing error is to execute the behavior “on purpose”—that is, consciously identifying with the behaving system instead of sitting off in another system worrying about the terrible effects of having the habit? And does not “on purpose” mean in this case arbitrarily not for some higher goals but just to inspect the act, itself?

That, then, is consciousness as Powers conceives it. It is correlated with reorganization. If we are to reorganize a perception or action, we must be aware of it. The fact that we spend most of our lives in some state of consciousness implies that we are always learning or, perhaps, maintaining ourselves in a state of readiness to learn.

What has this to do with polyviscosity? Here I am thinking of neural connectivity. It is polyviscous in that some connections are highly resistant to change while others change readily. Reorganization, that is to say learning, requires that neural connectivity change. Connections of various levels of viscosity are likely to be intermingled in any given volume of cortical tissue.

Now, consider this passage from a 1988 paper by Fodor and Pylyshyn, Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical Analysis (pp. 22-23):

Classical theories are able to accommodate these sorts of considerations because they assume architectures in which there is a functional distinction between memory and program. In a system such as a Turing machine, where the length of the tape is not fixed in advance, changes in the amount of available memory can be affected without changing the computational structure of the machine; viz by making more tape available. By contrast, in a finite state automaton or a Connectionist machine, adding to the memory (e.g. by adding units to a network) alters the connectivity relations among nodes and thus does affect the machine’s computational structure. Connectionist cognitive architectures cannot, by their very nature, support an expandable memory, so they cannot support productive cognitive capacities. The long and short is that if productivity arguments are sound, then they show that the architecture of the mind can’t be Connectionist. Connectionists have, by and large, acknowledged this; so they are forced to reject productivity arguments.

Physically, the nervous system appears to be connectionist in character. And so adding new items to the system is physically problematic. That’s the problem that is solved by polyviscous connectivity – see my post, Physical constraints on computing, process and memory, Part 1 [LeCun] (Note: in that post I use the term “hyperviscous” rather than “polyviscous”). Some connections must remain stable while others change. The stable connections maintain the overall structural integrity of the network while the changing connections introduce new items into that structure.

Here's a recent article that’s relevant, though it doesn’t use the term “polyviscious”: Poonam Mishra and Rishikesh Narayanan, Stable continual learning through structured multiscale plasticity manifolds, Current Opinion in Neurobiology 2021, 70:51–63, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.conb.2021.07.009

Abstract: Biological plasticity is ubiquitous. How does the brain navigate this complex plasticity space, where any component can seemingly change, in adapting to an ever-changing environment? We build a systematic case that stable continuous learning is achieved by structured rules that enforce multiple, but not all, components to change together in specific directions. This rule-based low-dimensional plasticity manifold of permitted plasticity combinations emerges from cell type–specific molecular signaling and triggers cascading impacts that span multiple scales. These multiscale plasticity manifolds form the basis for behavioral learning and are dynamic entities that are altered by neuromodulation, metaplasticity, and pathology. We explore the strong links between heterogeneities, degeneracy, and plasticity manifolds and emphasize the need to incorporate plasticity manifolds into learning-theoretical frameworks and experimental designs.

Mood regulation and national sentiment [indigenous peoples meet Columbus]

First, what is mood affiliation? As far as I know, the term was coined by Tyler Cowen in a blog post on March 27, 2011, Meta-ethics, realism, and intuitionism. Here is how he defined it:

People who believe that ethics is objective and intuitive are often quite keen to make a lot of detailed pronouncements about the content of those ethics. The agnostics tend to be relativists or subjectivists. It seems to me that people are first choosing a mood or attitude, and then finding the disparate views which match to that mood and, to themselves, justifying those views by the mood. I call this the “fallacy of mood affiliation,” and it is one of the most underreported fallacies in human reasoning. (In the context of economic growth debates, the underlying mood is often “optimism” or “pessimism” per se and then a bunch of ought-to-be-independent views fall out from the chosen mood.)

He elaborated on that definition four days later, The fallacy of mood affiliation (March 31), and has used the idea ever since.

Here’s an interesting example from a New York Times article on seven women who’d voted for Trump in 2016 and are reconsidering that choice:

Yet their disgust with the president was palpable. A well-spoken woman with grown children from central Pennsylvania appeared to have mentally rewritten the history of the last election to justify her vote. She’d opted for Trump, she said, thinking that it would be “refreshing” to have a president with a business background. In her recollection, it was only after he won that he revealed his true character.

“His Twitter, his comments, things that he was recorded saying, his misogyny — I was just, like, horrified and embarrassed,” she said. Looking back, she didn’t think she knew about the “Access Hollywood” tape before she voted: “I certainly hope that I didn’t, because it was a disgusting comment. I would think that had I known that might have given me pause.” She’s now considering voting for the Libertarian candidate, Jo Jorgensen.

I strongly suspect she’s remembering wrong — the “Access Hollywood” story would have been very hard to miss in October 2016. But it’s telling that she can no longer quite imagine how she could have supported Trump after hearing him boast about his penchant for sexual assault. It’s another tiny piece of evidence that 2020 could be the year Trump’s misogyny finally catches up with him.

Here’s a different example, representing a different region of the political spectrum, from the article that prompted this post). The article appeared in 3 Quarks Daily this past Monday (Oct. 12) and is by Eric J. Weiner. Here is the opening paragraph:

Today in the United States is Indigenous Peoples’ Day, a time to bear witness and remember the savagery of Christopher Columbus and other European explorers when they first encountered indigenous peoples throughout the Americas. It’s also a day to recognize and celebrate the courage, knowledges, and cultures of indigenous peoples throughout the world. It coincides with Columbus Day, a national holiday that triggers a day of protests and celebratory parades, rekindles debates about removing statues of Christopher Columbus from parks, squares and circles throughout the United States, and provokes critical discussions about the kind of stories we should be teaching the Nation’s children about his earliest encounters with indigenous communities.

The rest is in a similar vein and is a critique of Trump’s efforts to bias the teaching of history in a narrow nationalist it way. Weiner argues that history is more complex than that.

And rightly so. Still, I wonder if:

A. He could write, “Columbus’s first voyage in search of India was an act of courage and imagination,” in any context, without:

B. Immediately following with qualification like, “and it lead to unspeakable cruelty toward the indigenous people.”

I think both propositions are true, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Weiner would admit that as well. That’s not the issue.

Nor am I quite sure about just how to state the issue. It does seem to me that we should be free to explore A – should we not teach children stories about what Columbus had to do to assemble an expedition and cross the Atlantic? – without immediately and always following it with B. And, for that matter, vice versa. My guess is that, when he wrote his article, Weiner was in a mood, to use Cowen’s word, that could not countenance A at all. At this point in his life is he ever in a mood that could countenance A? I don’t know. Could Donald Trump countenance B at all?

Juxtaposing these two in the way I have done is risky business. Donald Trump is a demagogue for whom mood affiliation is a working method, his only working method. Weiner is a professional scholar, he is at Montclair State University in New Jersey, and as such is committed to rational discourse. What counts as rational discourse is not at all easy to define. And when that discourse is about history, we’re in a domain where objectivity is problematic and ideological affiliation ever tempting. Trump wants the telling of history yoked to nationalist sentiment. Does Weiner want the telling of history freed of any sentiment at all, or does he merely wish to affiliate it with a different sentiment. If so, what?

It is easy enough to say that the telling of history should be freed of any sentiment whatever. That is more easily said than done. It is not simply a matter of a good will and a good heart. It is a matter of method, and that is tricky.

Meanwhile we have that voter who has apparently edited her Trump-centered memories of 2016 to fit her current assessment of him, and of herself. She is not, I assume, a professional scholar in any discipline, nor are most citizens. They are people trying to make their way in the world as best they can. What role does national sentiment play in their lives? How do they use it to make sense of the world? What is the difference between national sentiment and nationalist sentiment?

THAT is what interests me.

* * * * *

Early in my undergraduate career I read an essay that Talcott Parsons published in 1947, “Certain Primary Sources of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World” (reprinted in Essays in Sociological Theory), which has influenced me a great deal. Parsons argued that Western child-rearing practices generate a great deal of insecurity and anxiety at the core of personality structure. This creates an adult who has a great deal of trouble dealing with aggression and is prone to scapegoating. Inevitably, there are lots of aggressive impulses which cannot be followed out. They must be repressed. Ethnic scapegoating is one way to relieve the pressure of this repressed aggression. That, Parsons argued, is why the Western world is flush with nationalistic and ethnic antipathy. I suspect, in fact, that this dynamic is inherent in nationalism as a psycho-cultural phenomenon.

Parsons, as you may know, was heavily influenced by psychoanalytic theory, which has come down in the world since Parsons was writing. While I’m not as skeptical of psychoanalytic theory as many, I do think it needs reconstruction in contemporary intellectual terms and so with the old essay. What’s important in that essay is that Parsons links the events of a person’s personal affairs with national sentiment.

Of course, our society devotes a great deal of effort toward inculcating national sentiment in its citizens. School children in the United States regularly recite the Pledge of Allegiance every day in school. Various holidays celebrate the nation. Such practices seem both proper and necessary to me. A nation could not function without them.

I take it that Parsons was talking about something different. He assumes national sentiment – for what it’s worth, I’m just now making this up and so it must be regarded as provisional – and argues that it is being assimilated to the task of regulating one’s personal affect. Is that how nationalism functions, using national sentiment as a device for regulating affect arising in actions having nothing to do with the nation?

* * * * *

What of Columbus Day and Indigenous People’s Day? Columbus Day is one of those holidays celebrated on behalf of the nation. Do the Lakota celebrate Indigenous People’s Day on behalf of the Lakota, but not, say, the Seneca, and vice versa? Or is that question impertinent and wrong-headed? As far as I can tell, I don’t have a drop of Indian blood in me. Should I celebrate Indigenous People’s Day at all? I’m sure Weiner thinks I should. But why? What about Bastille Day, should I celebrate that? I’m not French, but perhaps I could celebrate it to thank the people of France for the Statue of Liberty.

Or is the celebration of Indigenous People’s Day an attempt to get outside the orbit of nationalism altogether? If so, then it needs to free itself from (apparent) opposition of Columbus Day.

More later.

* * * * *

Addendum [meta]: The second section, on Parsons, was not on my mind when I started writing this post. I wasn't thinking about Parsons at all, though that essay has been very influential in my thinking. That only came up in the course of writing the post. In retrospect, though, that section is what I got out of this post. In a sense, you might even say it's why I wrote it. The final paragraph asserts, in effect, that nationalist sentiment is established through one dynamic and, once established, can be put to more general use in affect regulation.

The subjective nature of meaning

Note: You may consider this to be deep background for my ongoing examination of Michael Gavin’s recent article on Empson, vector semantics, and Milton [1]. But it may also be understood independently of that discussion

It seems to me that the meaning of literary texts, as studied by literary critics, is ineluctably and irreducibly subjective. But we must be careful about that word “subjective”, for it has come to imply (often wild) variation from one person to another. While meaning may well vary from one person to another – the meanings literary critics discover through so-called close reading certainly vary among critics – that is not what interests me here. By subjective I mean simply that it is a phenomenon that exists in the mind of, you know, subjects. Whether or not meaning varies between subjects is a different matter. Color is subjective in this sense, though it is pretty constant across different people, color blindness providing the major exceptions.

(You might want to consult John Searle on subjectivity and objectivity in the ontological and epistemological senses. I am here asserting that meaning is ontologically subjective and leaving its epistemological status out of the conversation.)

Walter Freeman's neuroscience of meaning

The later Walter Freeman was interested in such things. I want to look at two paragraphs from a collection of his papers: Walter J. Freeman. Mesoscopic Brain Dynamics. London: Springer-Verlag Limited, 2000. 

These paragraphs are from the Prolog, which introduces the papers. One paragraph is fairly technical in its content while the following one is more accessible and can, in fact, be understood without having read the first one. So, I’m going to start with that second paragraph and then give you the first one. Moreover, I’m going to give you the first one twice. I insert some interpretive remarks into the repetition.

Here then is what Freeman has to say about meaning in the brain (pp. 9-10):

The point here is that brains do not process “information” in the commonly used sense of the word. They process meaning. When we scan a photograph or an abstract, we take in its import, not its number of pixels or bits. The regularities that we should seek and find in patterns of central neural activity have no immediate or direct relations to the patterns of sensory stimuli that induce the cortical activity but instead to the perceptions and goals of human and animal subjects. Far from being fed into our cortices in the way that we program and fill our computers, everything that we know and can remember has been constructed by the global self-organizing dynamics of activity within our brains.

That paragraph interprets this more technical and more specific one (p. 9):

... the bulbar AM patterns do not relate to the stimulus directly but instead to the meaning of the stimulus, as shown in several ways. The simplest way is to switch a reward between two odorants, so that the previously rewarded stimulus is no longer reinforced and vice versa. Both AM patterns change, though the two odorants do not. So also does the spatial pattern for the control segments in back- ground air. So also do all pre-existing AM patterns change when a new odorant is added to the repertoire. The AM patterns for all odorants that can be discriminated by a subject change whenever there is a change in the odorant environment. Furthermore, when rabbits are trained serially to odorants A, B, C, D, and then back to A, the original pattern does not recur, but a new one appears (Freeman and Schneider 1982; Freeman 1991a). This property is to be expected in a true associative memory, in which every new entry is related to all previous entries by learning, because the context and significance are subject to continual and unpredictable change.

Now I insert some interpretive remarks in italics:

... the bulbar AM patterns do not relate to the stimulus directly but instead to the meaning of the stimulus, as shown in several ways.

“Bulbar” refers to the olfactory bulb, a cortical structure involved with smell. “AM” is amplitude modulation. Freeman is recording electrical patterns from an array of electrodes touching the surface of the olfactory bulbs of “small laboratory animals”, Freeman’s phrase, generally rats or rabbits. Think of the AM patterns as signals.

The simplest way is to switch a reward between two odorants, so that the previously rewarded stimulus is no longer reinforced and vice versa. Both AM patterns change, though the two odorants do not. So also does the spatial pattern for the control segments in background air.

Note that the olfactory bulb is “upstream” from the olfactory receptors in the nasal cavity. Those receptors “relate to the stimulus directly”, while the bulbar AM patterns are suffused with meaning.

So also do all pre-existing AM patterns change when a new odorant is added to the repertoire. The AM patterns for all odorants that can be discriminated by a subject change whenever there is a change in the odorant environment.

That is to say, when a new odorant is learned a new pattern must be added to the existing array of patterns. But it is not merely ADDED TO array, leaving the existing one unchanged. All the preexisting patterns change.

Furthermore, when rabbits are trained serially to odorants A, B, C, D, and then back to A, the original pattern does not recur, but a new one appears (Freeman and Schneider 1982; Freeman 1991a). This property is to be expected in a true associative memory, in which every new entry is related to all previous entries by learning, because the context and significance are subject to continual and unpredictable change.

Digital computers do not use associative memory. Items in computer memory are accessed through their addresses. In associative memory there are no addresses independent of items in memory. Associative memory is said to be content addressed.

Note that Freeman thus has an objectively way of examining of phenomenon that is fundamentally subjective. But then students of color perception have been doing that for years.

Are all psychological phenomena thus (ontologically) subjective? How could they not be?

Mode & Behavior 1: Sonnet 129

I'm bumping this to the top of the queue because it's useful in an argument I want to make about the importance of descriptive literary criticism to the sciences of man. 

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Justly is shame very specially connected with this lust; justly, too, these members themselves, being moved and restrained not at our will, but by a certain independent autocracy, so to speak, are called "shameful." Their condition was different before sin. . . . because not yet did lust move those members without the will's consent; not yet did the flesh by its disobedience testify against the disobedience of man. For they were not created blind, as the unenlightened vulgar fancy; . . . Their eyes, therefore were open, but were not open to this, that is to say, were not observant so as to recognize what was conferred upon them by the garment of grace, for they had no consciousness of their members warring against their will. But when they were stripped of this grace, that their disobedience might be punished by fit retribution, there began in the movement of their bodily members a shameless novelty which made nakedness indecent.

— St. Augustine, The City of God, Book 14, Chapter 17.

This is the first in a series of posts about the concept of behavioral mode that David Hays and I adopted (and further developed) from one of the grand old men of neuroscience, Walter McCulloch. Rather than start from McCulloch, I want to motivate the concept by discussing one of the best-known and most discussed sonnets in the English language, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, “The expense of spirit.” The discussion is revised and adapted from two by now ancient papers of mine, “Lust in Action: An Abstraction” (1981) and “The Evolution of Narrative and the Self” (1993), and from an old post, Emotion Recollected in Tranquility. You might also want to look at my article, First Person: Neuro-Cognitive Notes on the Self in Life and in Fiction, which also talks about the neurochemical dynamic I discuss in this post.

Here’s the sonnet, with modernized spelling:

1 The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
2 Is lust in action, and till action, lust
3 Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
4 Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
5 Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight,
6 Past reason hunted, and no sooner had,
7 Past reason hated as a swallowed bait
8 On purpose laid to make the taker mad:
9 Mad in pursuit and in possession so,
10 Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
11 A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe,
12 Before, a joy proposed, behind, a dream.
13   All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
14   To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

Let’s set the final couplet aside for a moment and consider only the first twelve lines. These direct our attention back and forth over the following sequence of actions and mental states:

Desire: Protagonist becomes consumed with sexual desire and purses the object of that desire using whatever means are necessary: "perjur'd, murderous, bloody . . . not to trust" (ll. 3-4).

Consummation: Protagonist gets his way, having "a bliss in proof" (l. 11)

Shame: Desire satisfied, the protagonist is consumed with guilt: "despisèd straight" (l. 5), "no sooner had/ Past reason hated" (ll. 6-7).

Just to solidify the point, let’s look at some lines. Line 4 looks at Desire (“not to trust”), then line 5 evokes Consummation followed by Shame. Line 6 begins in Desire then moves to Consummation, followed by Shame at the beginning of line 7, whose second half begins a simile derived from hunting. Now line 10, which begins by pointing to Shame, then to Consummation, then to Desire, and concludes be characterizing the whole sordid business as “extreme.”

The poem’s final couplet asserts, in effect, that reason is powerless in this situation. Knowing that rancid meat can make you ill will prevent most people from eating rancid meat, but the knowledge that sexual desire will lead you to guilt and disgust is not powerful enough to prevent you from walking to the trap.

The question I want to ask is: Why, why is reason powerless? How could it be that foreknowledge is powerless? One might offer the observation that, when one is in the pursuit of sex, one simply doesn’t think about the guilt-driven aftermath. Accepting that as true, it explains nothing. Why does sexual pursuit make it difficult or even impossible to imagine consequent guilt and recrimination? That’s the question.

Literature, Emotion, and Unity of Being

I've uploaded a new working paper. Here's the SSRN link:

http://ssrn.com/abstract=2495398

Abstract and introduction are below.

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Abstract: Unity of being is both an aesthetic and an ethical ideal and it is about organizing desire, action, and emotion into a pattern of overall coherence. Such patterns are necessarily culture specific and somewhat arbitrary in their disposition of underlying biological materials. Stories involving often painful and embarrassing aspects of human behavior provide a means of publicly acknowledging and affirming the bewildering diversity of our behavior. Thus publically affirmed, these nonfictions are the means of constructing the neural 'scaffolding' on which we recall and organize the events of our lives.

Introduction: Unity of Being Through Literary Experience

When I first introduced the term “unity of being” it was a placeholder. I needed a concept and I knew why I needed that concept, but I didn’t quite know to define or discuss it. So I named it and talked around it. This set of notes is an initial attempt to discuss unity of being.

Unity of being is central to my thinking about literature and my thinking about the disciplines of literary criticism, for it is at the border between naturalist criticism and ethical criticism, connecting and dividing them at the same time. One central task for the naturalist critic is to infer a culture’s realization of unity of being through an examination of its literary texts. But the naturalist critic is not in the business of asserting what unity of being should be, not for his or her own culture, much less for any other culture.

That is the job of the ethical critic. What is beautiful? What is the good life? What texts advance the good and the beautiful, and why? Those are the central pursuits of ethical criticism. They are about how one should achieve unity of being.

A given critic may, of course, practice both naturalist and ethical criticism. But they are different disciplines with different requirements. We must learn to make the separation so that we can deliberately choose to function in the naturalist or the ethnical mode, as the occasion demands.

Two Meanings

When I introduced the term “unity of being” in a post entitled Unity of Being and Ethical Criticism I gave it two meanings, more or less, as follows:

In real time, unity of being is, well, unity of being. I don’t mean to be perverse, but I don’t know of any general term, though perhaps Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow will do, or the phrase “being in the moment.” As far as I know flow always happens spontaneously in that we cannot flip the mind’s flow switch at will—I rather doubt there’s such a thing as a flow-switch, rather it’s a matter of balance. But we can do things that will increase the likelihood that the mind will flip into flow.

One of those things is to read, in the basic ordinary sense of the word, a literary text. Or listen to a story, watch a play or movie. Whatever. In this sense, unity of being is psychological, it happens in the mind/brain in real time.

But unity of being, I believe, is also a reasonable way to talk about how individuals and peoples live their lives in the large, from years to decades to centuries. One wants everything one does, 24/7/365, to fall into a coherent pattern. A pattern more or less attributed to the nature of the world. To the extent that one cannot achieve unity of being one feels, well, perhaps alienated is the most general concept for it. In that literary texts are (always) about the world, they point toward unity of being in the large.

As far as I know there is no one way of life that yields unity of being in the large nor is there one way of organizing texts that yields it in the small. In the large it is a matter of how one chooses to live, where that one can be an individual or a group. In the small it is a matter of craft and one’s knowledge of its ways and means.

While these two senses – (1) as aesthetic flow, (2) as a coherent way of life – are related in that literary texts are about the world and how we live in it, it is the former sense that most interests me in this brief working paper.

As aesthetic flow, unity of being is a phenomenon that happens in the brain and nervous system. I currently believe, but cannot argue strongly, that this phenomenon can be defined in universal terms but that the means of constructing and enabling it are culturally specific. The means must be discovered by an encultured group and must be learned individuals in the group.

Unity of Being 2: Choosing Life Ways

I ended my previous post on unity of being by suggesting:

In terms of the pluralist metaphysics I have been proposing and exploring, we each live our lives in various Realms of Being. Each society affords its members various Realms of Being, various ways of acting in the world, whether alone or through interacting with others. Unity of Being is the capacity to move fluidly among these realms...In this sense Unity of Being is NOT that all Realms are one and the same, but rather that we can move among them and ourselves remain one and the same.

I now want to elaborate on that suggestion.

I want to start with human biology, thus setting foot into the den of evolutionary psychology. My standard analogy is that of a game such as chess. Biology provides the pieces, the game board, and the rules. Human culture dictates the larger strategy of playing the game.

The constraints of biology are as real as those of chess. Bishops can’t move rectilinearly, rooks can’t move diagonally, and pawns can only move one or two spaces at a time. Similarly, reproduction requires two, death is inevitable, and oxygen is a requirement of life. Unyielding though these constraints are, there is much freedom in playing chess and there is much freedom in organizing human society.

At the end of this post I will offer, in a provisional and somewhat parabolic mode, the suggestion that, while none of us can choose the culture into which we are born and in which we are raised, at some point in our lives we are free to choose the culture in which we will live out our lives and in the context of which we will die. Such a choice, while it is not new, it has been rare in most times and places. In the so-called post-modern world it is becoming almost routine. Indeed, in the face of global warming we may not be able to avoid such a choice.

And THAT is the ethical edge of the pluralism I have been sketching, the capacity, the imperative, to choose, in a non-trivial way, the fundamental armature of our lives. We must choose how we would seek unity of being.

Unity of Being: Conflict and the Self

In the process of formulating a pluralist approach to literary criticism I introduced the notion of unity of being (Unity of Being and Ethical Criticism) and said a few things about it with regard to literature. Now I want to generalize the idea.

The term itself is not at all new, though I have no idea when and where I first encountered it much less how old it is. Nor, of course, is the idea, though just what THAT idea is in THIS context, that’s not obvious. That’s what I want to explore.

In context of literary criticism I had two things in mind: the direct experience of literature and the world as constructed in a given text. The first concerns what it feels like to experience a given text, moment by moment, from beginning to end. The second is how one lives one’s life outside and beyond the text, but in its shadow. That is, the world view embodied in the text. In doing so I simply indicated that those things are what I meant by unity of being.

And that’s how I’m going to proceed, inductively rather than deductively. I could, abstractly considered, proceed by defining being and consequent to that defining unity and disunity of being. Maybe I’ll eventually end up there, but not now. In particular, I may figure out the relationship between “being” in this context and “being” in the general context of pluralist ontology: Are they the same thing or not?

Another Case: Music

So, unity of being and the literary text.

What about, not a verbal text, but instrumental music, or dance? There we have the moment by moment experience, but there is no reference to, construction of, the world? Here unity of being can exist only in the expressive act, for there is no expression of nor reference to a world outside the expressive act.

The case is an important one because I believe it to be fundamental to the evolutionary, psychological, social, and psychological transition from clever ape to proto-human. In making that argument, as I did at some length in Beethoven’s Anvil, I argued that rhythm, not melody much less harmony, is the foundation. And synchronization to a simple beat is the most basic form of rhythmic organization in a group. Fireflies have been observed to synchronize their blinking, certain audiences will synchronize their clapping. And almost all forms of music require that the players synchronize around a single repetitive beat.

Touchstones (Unity of Being)

Now that unity of being sorta popped out of the ether and into a post I figure I'm going to be saying more about it, whatever it is. So, it would be useful to have this bit of my intellectual autobiography posted here. It's about events in my undergraduate and early graduate years. I originally published it in a journal edited by Art Efron: Paunch 42 - 43: 4 - 16, December 1975. You can now download a PDF version.

[I’ve added some contemporary comments in italics, right justified in brackets, like this.]

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Touchstones

The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties,–this knowledge, this feeling. . .that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense and in this sense alone, I rank myself among profoundly religious Men.

– Albert Einstein, "Science and Religion," Out of My Later Years

In the fall of 1968 I began my Senior year at The (and they are most particular about that "the") Johns Hopkins University, where I was a philosophy major who had become sick of philosophy courses (which is not the same thing as becoming sick of philosophy–that has yet I to happen to me). Since I had enough philosophy credited I to my account it was unnecessary for me to earn any more. And so I found myself studying Romantic Literature, taught by the late Earl Wasserman. This essay is around and about an experience I had while preparing a paper for that course.

First we studied Keats, then Shelley, and finally Sir Walter Scott. The experience, involving the exercise of negative capability, occurred while writing a paper on Keats. But I have not told you enough about myself, not yet.

That was the Fall semester. Enrollment dropped in half for the Spring semester. This distressed Wasserman a great deal–though not graceful in eliciting contact with his undergraduate students, at least not with this hairy bunch, Wasserman valued such contact highly. He therefore decided to teach one of the discussion sections in the course. And I was in that section.

We studied Wordsworth first. Nothing strange happened to me while writing on Wordsworth, no spots of time opening fissures in the surface of my self possession; but that was the best paper of my undergraduate career. Then came Coleridge. That paper contained the seeds of my Master's Thesis, and my doctoral dissertation will be an attempt to propose solutions to problems raised in writing that thesis.

Pursuing Lust in the Web of Language

Relational Networks as a Computational Semantic Model

This post is, in large part, revised and adapted from the “Computation” section of Literary Morphology.

In the middle and late 1960s researchers in cognitive science began investigating natural language semantics using computational techniques. One of the first, and most influential of these was a relational network model proposed by Ross Quillian (1968). His basic idea is an old one, that the meaning of a word resides in its relations with other words, and it is perhaps on that account that Umberto Eco adopted it as his semantic model in A Theory of Semiotics (1976, pp. 121 ff.).

Following Quillian’s path-breaking work a number of researchers developed their own relational network models. My teacher, the late David Hays, was one of them. This post provides a quick introduction to the network formalism and that takes a ‘blitz’ though the work I on did on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 using Hays’s network model. This work is reported in more technical detail in Benzon 1976, 1978, and 1981.

Networks, Path Tracing, and Pattern Matching

One of the primary objects of literary computation is simply to compose meaning, on the fly, from the succession of words in the text. This is not the only computational process – we must also consider the sound and rhythm of those words, we must consider style – but that is what I want to concentrate on here. Following a wide-spread convention, though not a universal one, let us think of lexemes (that is, words) as being organized in a relational (or cognitive or semantic) network (see Figure 1) where the nodes are concepts and the links between the nodes are relations between the concepts. Thus dog would be linked to animal through an ISA link (dog is an animal) and to eat by an AGENT (AGT) link, while in the same subnetwork liver is linked to eat by a PATIENT (PAT) link (dog eats liver), and so forth through all the types of concepts and relationships.

Figure 1: Relational Network of Lexemes

The network fragment depicted in Figure 1 is small and quite simple in form. The networks used in computer simulations of human thinking are quite large, but like that in Figure 1, they a composed of simple parts connected to one another in simple ways. In the work I did with David Hays we distinguished between sensorimotor schemas, on the one hand, and cognitive networks on the other (Benzon 1976, 1978, Hays 1976, 1981). Things like dog, pine tree, walk, salt, and so forth, things one can apprehend with the sense, would be characterized by sensorimotor schemas. Sensory schemas regulate how one sees, hears, smells, touches, and tastes things while motor schemas regulate one’s physical interaction with them.

These schemas, in turn, provide the definitional foundation for nodes in the cognitive network. Thus the dog, eat, and liver nodes in Figure 1 would be associated with corresponding sensorimotor schemas. We also had mechanisms for defining abstract concepts over patterns in cognitive networks (Hays 1976, Benzon and Hays 1990).

These days we would say that our account of semantics was embodied. Words are given meaning by perceptual and motor schemes or patterns defined over those schemas.or our immediate purposes, however, the important point is that two general classes of operations can be defined in networks, path tracing and pattern matching (Hays 1977). In Figure 2 we see some network in which a particular path is highlighted. It might, for example, might trace the opening of Shakespeare’s sonnet 129, “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame/Is lust in action …“ Each node would correspond to a word, or perhaps a grammatical relation, and the path in total corresponds to the pattern of network activation set up by the ‘incoming’ string of words.

Figure 2: Path Tracing

In Figure 3 two areas of the network are highlighted, each consisting of five nodes where the pattern of connection is the same in each network. Though these two subnetworks have different orientations and overall proportions in the 2D representation of the network, those are irrelevant; what matters is the pattern of connectivity, and that is the same in each network. Each consists of four nodes connected by five links in the same configuration. Hence the patterns match. Of course, pattern matching implies a second order network, or some other meta-structure, to recognize the match (Hays 1981).

Figure 3: Pattern Matching

Continuing with Shakespeare’s sonnet, one of those fragments might represent the basic lust sequence at the heart of the sonnet while the other embodies the simile that is introduced in lines seven and eight: “. . . a swallow'd bait/On purpose laid to make the taker mad.” Both of these actions involve a three part sequence and so the network fragments representing those sequences have the same form (see Figure 4).

Figure 4: Lust and Madness

Working in this way we could construct a relational network as the basis for performing the sonnet’s meaning. The meaning of the poem would then arise in the interaction between the text and such a network, where the network is implemented in someone’s brain. Think of that meaning is an ongoing and evolving pattern of resonance in millions upon millions of neurons. Such networks, of course, may differ from one individual to another and even where highly similar, may have different emotional resonance.