One of the foundational assumptions of the scientific objectivist paradigm that our modern culture is centered around is, “If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist.” This assumption begs any number of interesting questions, such as, “Did Abraham Lincoln have DNA in his body?” The answer, based on this assumption is obviously, “No, because at that time, it didn’t exist.” But this doesn’t seem right because we assume that reality is stable across time, so we modify our answer to be “Yes, he did have DNA in his body, but nobody knew about it at that time because it hadn’t been discovered, it could not yet be measured.” And from this, we can conclude that there are things right now that exist but have not yet been discovered, things that we have not yet figured out how to measure.
Scientists are discovering how to measure new things all the time and there is no sign that this process is going to reach an end point where we have measured all that can be measured, there is no sign that this process is slowing down, and actually, this process is accelerating as our science becomes more technically sophisticated. The obvious conclusion from this is that the number of things that cannot currently be measured—but have potential to be measured and come into scientific “existence”—is infinite. And our human knowledge, the number of things we can measure, is finite. The number of things that cannot currently be measured, but have the potential to be measured, is thus more than a hundred times bigger, more than a thousand times bigger, more than a million times bigger, than the number of things we can measure. Our concept of the reality, “what we think the reality is” from a scientific perspective, is limited to those things that can be measured, which is a small fraction of the things that exist but are not yet measurable.
If you think about it, the assumption “If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist,” is a fairly arrogant perspective. It allows humans to, tautologically, claim that they can measure everything that exists. It also puts scientists in a god-like position of causing things to come into existence by figuring out how to measure them. There is a deep humility that comes with the realization that reality is not what we think it is, no matter what we think it is.
When I understood how the world worked My world was bounded by the limits of finite human intelligence.
When I realized that I understood very little, I still knew everything I knew when I understood, But the world grew bigger by several orders of magnitude
But when I realized that I knew nothing at all The world had the space to become Vast, multi-dimensional, and infinite.
Cliff Dansa
*****
I began to understand this when, in graduate school, I encountered the writing of Ernst von Glasersfeld. Von Glasersfeld had an interesting life. He grew up in northern Italy with Austrian parents who spoke both German and English. As a child, he spoke both German and English at home and Italian on the streets. He went to a boarding school in Switzerland, where he learned French. At a fairly young age, he started noticing
To get into another language required something beyond merely learning a different vocabulary and a different grammar. It required another way of seeing, feeling, and ultimately another way of conceptualizing experience.
If language had something to do with the structure of my experience and therefore to some extent with the world that I considered to be real, I could not for long avoid asking the question, what the real reality behind my languages might be like and how one could know and describe it. (von Glasersfeld, 1995, p. 3)
He began his university studies in 1936 in Vienna, decided to take the spring semester off to take a job teaching skiing in Australia, and thus was out of the country when the Nazis invaded. He spent the war years in Ireland, horse-farming and reading philosophy, and then after the war, returned to northern Italy. There, he connected with a group that was interested in philosophy and language, which ultimately led to working with the United States military on the beginnings of machine translation (the military was trying to more efficiently translate Russian to English). This eventually led him to the United States, to the University of Georgia where, when the translation work ended, he became involved with one of the first research projects to teach a primitive language to a chimpanzee, which he worked on for six years. When that project ended, a friend pointed him towards the writings of Jean Piaget, and he spent seven years reading Piaget. Piaget published eighty-eight books and Von Glasersfeld not only read them all, he was able to read them in the original French. He also started working with mathematics educators on applying Piaget’s ideas to the field of mathematics education, which explains why I encountered his writing in graduate school.
Although von Glasersfeld himself credits most of his thinking to Piaget, he also points out that his interpretation of Piaget is not the only possible interpretation and is somewhat subjective. I would add that my interpretation of Von Glasersfeld is heavily influenced by my experiences with Zen, with dance, with music and is only one possible interpretation of Von Glasersfeld. His ideas did, however, open up my understanding of cognition and the nature of ideas in ways that were essential to the development of my understanding of the relationship between artistic expression and human experience.
It doesn’t matter to me whose ideas they are. They resonate deeply with me and have helped me integrate the experiences of Zen practice into the rest of my thinking and my life. Von Glasersfeld’s “constructivism” and the teachings of Zen start from very different points of view, yet come together “like two arrows meeting in mid-air,” to quote eighth century Chan (Zen) master, Shi-tou. (see footnote)
We can begin by noticing that everything that we experience comes to us through our bodily experiences, through our eight senses. In addition to our five senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, we have proprioception (aka kinesthesia), the sense of where our bodies are in space—of vital importance to us as dancers; we have interoception, the sensation of what is happening in our organs and our bodies in general; and we have the vestibular sense, the sense of balance.
When we encounter a set of sensory stimuli—a new experience—the first action that the brain takes is to try to fit the new experience into an already existing conceptual structure (known in constructivist language as a “schema.”) It measures the new experience memories of previous experiences and tries to categorize the new experience as an instance of something it has experienced before, as an instance of something known. (In constructivist terms, this is called assimilation) If the brain can do this, we respond in ways we have successfully responded to this experience, object, or situation in the past. If this leads to the expected result, our conceptual equilibrium is maintained, and everything is fine. However, if our actions create an unexpected result, or if we simply cannot fit this new experience into our existing conceptual structures, we realize that our existing conceptual structures are not adequate for dealing with this new set of stimuli. This creates a sense of mild (or not so mild) confusion perhaps best summed up by the current acronym, “WTF.” In constructivist learning theory, this is referred to as “disequilibrium.” We then modify our conceptual structures to incorporate the new stimulus, perhaps trying out our new structures, our new understanding, several times, until we are comfortable that our new understanding can incorporate the new experience. Equilibrium is thus restored, and everything is fine again. This process of modifying existing conceptual structures in order to resolve a state of disequilibrium is known in constructivist terms as accommodation, but in everyday terms, we can call it “learning.”
An amusing example from von Glasersfeld will perhaps clarify this.
An infant quickly learns that a rattle it was given makes a rewarding noise when it is shaken, and this provides the infant with the ability to generate the noise at will. Piaget sees this as the “construction of a scheme” which, like all schemes, consists of three parts.
1) Recognition of a certain situation (e.g. the presence of a graspable item with a rounded shape at one end);
2) association of a specific activity with that kind of item (e.g. picking it up and shaking it);
3) expectation of a certain result (e.g. the rewarding noise).
It is very likely that this infant, when placed in its highchair at the dining table, will pick up and shake a graspable item that has a rounded shape at one end. We call that item a spoon and may say that the infant is assimilating it to its rattling scheme; but from the infant’s perspective at that point, the item is a rattle, because what the infant perceives of it is not what an adult would consider the characteristics of a spoon but just those aspects that fit the rattling scheme.
Shaking the spoon, however, does not produce the result the infant expects: the spoon does not rattle. This generates a perturbation (“disappointment”), and perturbation is one of the conditions that set the stage for cognitive change. In our example, it may simply focus the infant’s attention on the item in its hand, and this may lead to the perception of some aspect that will enable the infant in the future to recognize spoons as non-rattles. That development would be an accommodation, but obviously a rather modest one. Alternatively, given the situation at the dining table, it is not unlikely that the spoon, being vigorously shaken, will hit the table and produce a different but also very rewarding noise. This, too, will generate a perturbation (we might call it “enchantment”) which may lead to a different accommodation, a major one this time, that initiates the “spoon banging scheme” which most parents know only too well.
(Von Glasersfeld, 1989, p. 5)
The above quote is one fairly amusing example involving a small child, but we are all doing this all of the time. This is how we function. Or brains are constantly being bombarded with sensory information from our bodies. The first thing that the brain does, when it receives this information, is to try to match it up with some previous experience, to categorize it, to name it, to thus fit it into the conceptual structures created by our past experiences. We might identify this set of sensory information as “chair,” as “table,” as “apple,” as “knife.” Since these are things we have seen before, the brain can “make sense” of them and tell us how to respond. We may decide to sit at the table and cut up the apple with the knife. However, if the brain cannot fit the new information into existing conceptual structures, it must modify the existing conceptual structures or create new ones. If the new conceptual structures allow us to integrate this new information, don’t conflict with our existing conceptual structures, and allow us to function in a way that is acceptable to us, equilibrium is restored. We learned something.
It is important to notice here that the criterion that the brain uses to evaluate a conceptual structure is not whether it is “true” in the sense of matching with reality, but rather whether or not it is “viable,” whether or not it is useful for allowing us to function in the world. Von Glasersfeld puts it this way,
Constructivism drops the requirement that knowledge be “true” in the sense that it should match an objective reality. All it requires of knowledge is that it be viable, in that it fits into the world of the knower’s experience, the only “reality” accessible to human reason. (1996, p. 310)
Knowledge in the constructivist way of thinking never has to match the world but it has to fit into it. Fit in the sense that it is the kind of thinking, the kind of doing, that will allow you to achieve whatever goals you have chosen at the moment. (1988)
This perspective is actually very consistent with the scientific method. Scientists have experimental results that current theories cannot explain (disequilibrium), so they modify their ideas about how the world works until they can come up with a theory that can explain all of the available experimental data. This then, becomes the new theory that will stand as “truth” until some new experimental observation comes along that it cannot explain, and then the process will be repeated. The point is that the criterion by which a given idea is considered to be “true” is whether or not it works, whether or not it explains the available experimental data.
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig shares this quote from Einstein. “Evolution has shown that at any given moment out of all conceivable constructions a single one has always proved itself absolutely superior to the rest.” The important parts of this quote are “at any given moment,” which notices that things are changing with time, and the idea that a particular set of concepts or ideas is better that the others that are available. In other words, this particular set of ideas is more useful for the available experimental data. Saying that a set of constructs is more useful than all the others is very different from saying that it is “true.”
We conceive of reality the way that we do because these concepts and thought patterns allow us to function in the world in a way that works for us. We created this reality, but we created it in the context of our lived experience. We evaluated every piece of the construction to determine whether it was consistent with our sensory information about the world. If we want to create a reality in which we can walk through walls and move from room to room without using the door, we can do that. But as we try to live based on that reality, our bruised and battered nose will quickly tell us that this conception of reality is not viable, that it is not useful for allowing us to live in the world the way we would like to.
The question of whether this world that we live in is a bunch of atoms and molecules, as the modern scientific viewpoint would tell us, or an elaborate virtual reality created by God (as Berkeley suggests), or something else altogether is totally beside the point. We live inside a world that is the way it is and tends to be fairly unresponsive when we try to tell it that it should be otherwise. We have to assume that this conceptual reality that we construct from our sensory inputs reflects the world we live in in some way, because otherwise the game makes no sense. But it is important to remember that our concepts are abstracted from reality and are not reality. Reality is what it is, even though it is not what we think it is.
Consider, for example, the table in my dining room. I can touch it and feel its surface, I can lean on it and feel it support my weight, I can look at it and see its shape, it’s yellow brown color, and the small scratches reflecting years of use. Out of all of these sensory experiences, combined with my experiences of other tables over the years, I create my concept of this particular table. This concept is viable in that allows me to function and relate to the table as an aspect of my life. It allows me to figure out that I can set my plate and my teacup on it, and that I should use a placemat when I eat so I don’t add unnecessarily to the pattern of scratches.
It is important to notice, however, that my concept of the table is not the table. It is, at best, incomplete. I could not, right now, from memory draw you the pattern of scratches on the table. My concept of the table does not usually include the screws that hold the table together or the sticker from a moving company stuck to the bottom, an artifact of a long-ago move for someone who owned the table before we did. My concept of the table does not include the chemical composition of the varnish, the grain pattern of the wood inside the legs, or the dead bug that was living inside the tree when it was harvested. Nor does my concept of the table include the stories of all the scratches on the table, where they came from, the family dinners, the romantic candlelight dinners, the fights, the scrabble games, everything that this table has experienced.
The amount of information that could be known, even about something as simple as this table, is infinite, and my mental capacity is finite. My concept of this table is thus, at best, an abstraction, a simplification. There are many more things that I don’t know about this table than there are things I know about this table. The number of things I don’t know about the table, being infinite, is more than a hundred times greater, more than a thousand times greater, more than a million times greater, than the number of things I do know.
Reality is not what we think it is, and it doesn’t matter what we think it is; it’s not that.
*****
When I first read Von Glasersfeld in graduate school, I had been a formal Zen student for five or six years and his perspective made total sense to me. Then, after graduate school, at the end of a fairly difficult sesshin (a week-long intensive), I walked out the door, got in my car, and realized that everything had shifted. I knew in the core of my being that the world I was seeing was not the world in my head, that the world was not what I thought it was and it didn’t matter what I thought it was, this was always going to be true.
This realization was powerful, unsettling, and disorienting. Luckily, it was a short drive home on slow-moving residential streets. I was also fortunate enough to be a professor on summer break, so I didn’t have to go to work for a while. I felt as if my whole conceptual framework that I used to orient myself to who and what I was the world had completely fallen apart. Danan Roshi, my teacher at the time, had gone out of town right after sesshin so I was more or less alone with all of this. I did a lot of seated zazen, played guitar, took walks, and spent hours and hours writing in a notebook about everything that I was feeling. Gradually, things settled down and I realized that even though I didn’t know what the world around me really was, I never had, and I’d done okay so far. I realized that I still “knew” everything that I knew before sesshin, that I could still function in the world and do all of the things that I used to do. I could still use my conceptual ideas about the world to allow me to function; the only difference was that now, I was vividly aware that the actual world was something else entirely and that I had no clue as to what that “something else” actually was.
So, what does all this have to do with artistic practice? A very good question. That is where things get interesting. But that will have to wait for the next post.
References:
Shi-tou () From Identity of Relative and Absolute. See https://zmm.org/teachings-and-training/identity-of-relative-and-absolute/
Von Glasersfeld, E. (1988) An interview by Barbara Jaworski of the Open University in England with John Jaworski of the BBC.
Von Glasersfeld, E. (1996). Aspects of radical constructivism and its educational recommendations. In P. Nesher, L. Steffe, P. Cobb, G. Goldin, & B. Greer (Eds.) Theories of Mathematical Learning (pp.307-314). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
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