In the last post, we looked at the assumption, so embedded in the scientific objective paradigm, “If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist.” This is not just a subconscious assumption in our culture. It is deeply embedded in our scientific research methodology. The statistical methods used in hypothesis testing cannot show that something does not have an effect. They can only show that something does have an effect, or they can fail to show an effect. Failing to show that something has an effect is not the same as showing that it has no effect, but science does not like ambiguity, so our statistical methods assume that there is no effect. They assume that “If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist.” In technical terms, they “assume that the null hypothesis is true.” Researchers then look at the results of the experiment to see if it clearly demonstrates that there is an effect. If not, they keep the null hypothesis that there is no effect even though that is not what the experiment showed.
I don’t want to get off on too much of a tangent, but I do want to point out that there are those in the scientific community who seriously question the validity of some of our basic statistical methodology (Gigrenzer, 2004) For example, “I believe the almost universal reliance on merely refuting the null hypothesis … is a terrible mistake, is basically unsound, poor scientific strategy, and one of the worst things that ever happened in the history of psychology” (Meehl, 1978, quoted in Gigerenzer, 2004, p. 600). We don’t need to put scientific knowledge on a pedestal and treat it as the only legitimate type of knowledge.
There is nothing wrong with saying “If you can measure it, then it exists,” but the proper negation of this would be, “If you can’t measure it, then it may or may not exist.” I am not trying to deny the usefulness of science. The scientific objective paradigm is useful in many contexts and only becomes problematic when it claims to be all-encompassing.
I was introduced to an alternative perspective by my movement teacher, Jessica Wolf. One of the basic assumptions of Jessica’s work is, “If you can experience it, it’s real.” The first time I heard her say that in class, it just nailed me. I had grown up deeply immersed in, “If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist.” While I had obviously been working for years to get out of the confines of that paradigm, to hear this alternative perspective stated so clearly and so directly turned my head around about three times. In a culture that by and large denies the validity of subjective experience, this is a radical departure. Yet, if you think about it, if you can experience it, it is—if nothing else—a real experience. Thus, it is real. Our concepts, ideas, and belief structures that we create to try to integrate that experience into our understanding of the world are another matter, but if you can experience it, it is a real experience.
The heart of conscious artistic practice, the essence of the practice, is the conscious choice to honor our subjective experiences as both valid and valuable, to treat them as essential aspects of our lived experience, as fertile ground for exploring what it means to be human. Although it may be subjective, our direct experience is the most undeniable aspect of our lives. The conceptual structures that we create to explain those experiences, the conclusions that we draw, the stories that we tell are all quite questionable. But the actual lived experience, just as it is, is undeniable.
In my initial post for this blog, I defined a “mystic” as “someone who consciously decides to develop a relationship with those aspects of his or her experience that are beyond the boundaries of their conceptual understanding.” The mystic relationship is with aspects of our experience and the boundaries we are stepping beyond are the boundaries of our conceptual understanding. Our culture tends to think of mystics in terms of people with crazy ideas and concepts that are outside of our normal understanding. I try to keep myself as grounded as I can be staying close to, intimate with, lived experience.
Admittedly, our lived experiences are subjective, and in a world that is focused on objectivity, saying, “That’s subjective,” is seen as equivalent to saying, “That’s invalid.” But why this obsession with objectivity? As Heinz von Foerster says, “Objectivity is the delusion that observations could be made without an observer.” (1) And what does this objectivity teach us about our lived experiences? That they are not real, that we are just imagining them, that they aren’t important.
Artistic practice is a way to engage with, to interact with, our subjective lived experiences without needing to abstract them and turn them into concepts. We can notice what we are experiencing and we can respond to it with our body, with our voice, with the sound of a musical instrument. However we respond, our response will itself become part of our experience, will change our experience, and we can respond to that. We can engage in a continuous ongoing dialogue with the experience of being alive. This is the heart of the practice of improvisation, the heart of the practice of a conscious artist.
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In the last post, we noted that 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. It measures the new experience and tries to categorize it as an instance of something it has experienced before, as an instance of something known. In Zen practice, and probably in most any contemplative practice, we learn to quiet down this categorizing and conceptualizing process and we begin to be aware of our experience of the world before this categorization and conceptualization takes place. When this happens, it is tempting to think that we are experiencing the world “as it really is,” but actually, we are just being aware of our experience, although, as we noted earlier, if we can experience it, it is at the very least a real experience.
In many meaningful ways, our experiences and our perceptions constitute the world in which we live. We can assume that there is some sort of “reality” that this experience is reflecting, but that requires a bit of abstraction, a bit of separation from our actual experience. There is no way for us to really know the nature of the “reality” behind our experiences, but that’s not a problem.
This process of categorizing new stimuli as instances of existing conceptual structures is known in constructivist terms as “assimilation.” Von Glasersfeld points out that “when an organism assimilates, it remains unaware of, or disregards, whatever does not fit into the conceptual structures it possesses” (1989, p. 63). In other words, the brain will filter out sensory input that does not fit into its existing conceptual structures. This filtering process is readily observable in Zen practice because, as the mind quiets down, the filter becomes less active and the experience of life becomes much more vivid. This is especially obvious during and immediately after a week-long Zen intensive (sesshin). Most Zen students will agree that the most intensely flavorful meal that they have experienced was simple rice and vegetables on the third day of sesshin.
Artistic practice can be a way of engaging with our experience before the mind starts to categorize it, before we filter it. We experience the world more directly, more vividly, we experience things with finer detail than we were previously able to. We experience the world differently, and since we live inside the world of our experiences, this changes the world in which we live. We are both able to experience beyond the filter and also to come forth, to engage with the world in a way that is more direct than we can when our actions are based on the abstractions of our concepts. We become more intimate with our life. As ninth century Chan (Zen) master Dizang pointed out, “Not knowing is most intimate.” (Dizang)
This “not knowing,” this realization that our thoughts, our ideas, our concepts, cannot be “true” in the sense of matching reality, is somewhat problematic if we are basing our lives on our concepts and ideas, if we are living in a way that is considered “normal” in our idea-based culture. Von Glasersfeld does not address this and I think that this is one of the reasons that Von Glasersfeld’s ideas didn’t have that much influence on western philosophy, which is very much focused on discovering the “truth.”
How do we figure out what to do when we realize that all of our concepts and ideas are not “true” in the way that we thought they were? To paraphrase fourteenth century Zen master Dogen, we find a good place, we put down a cushion, and we sit down. In more artistic terms, we go into the studio, we feel what we are called to do, and we do that. We dance, we sing, we play an instrument. This shift in our perception of our concepts and ideas in no way interferes with our ability to be present with the experience of our lives; it may even enhance it.
We can also realize that although our concepts and ideas may not be “true,” they are useful in the same ways that they have always been useful. We still “know” everything that we knew before, we just have a different sense of what that means. We can still use our concepts and ideas to function in the world; that is their purpose. We don’t need to, or even want to, get rid of them. We still have our conceptual understanding of the world; we just realize that it is a useful tool, and not reality itself.
This shift does, however, open us up in some interesting ways. We can move past the limitations of true and false, right and wrong. From the perspective of the culturally normative idea of truth, there can only be one truth; only one concept of reality can be correct. However, it is no problem for several different concepts of reality to be useful. As Von Glasersfeld points out, “no matter how viable and satisfactory the solution to a problem might seem, it can never be regarded as the only possible solution” (1996, p. 310). We might realize that a particular conceptual understanding may be useful in some contexts and not so useful in others. We can become less attached to our ideas and find it easier to drop a particular way of understanding if we encounter another one that appears to be more useful (this is called “learning”). We can become more comfortable with paradox, with seemingly contradictory understandings that both seem valid. I personally have grown to love paradox because it forces us to let go of our pedantic attachment to our ideas.
And speaking of pedantic attachment, what about this whole constructivist perspective? Aren’t we getting fairly attached to that? How do we know that constructivism is true? Von Glasersfeld himself addresses this, saying, “Radical constructivism cannot claim to be anything but one approach to the age-old problem of knowing” (1996, p. 310). This was when I started to trust him.
The question that we need to ask about constructivism, or any conceptual understanding that we are examining, is not “Is it true?” but rather “Is it useful?” And exploring this question quickly leads us to realize that the question is not, “Is it useful?” but rather, “How is it useful?” How does this conceptual understanding change my experience of my life, and is that change desirable? Different people may have different answers. We can only answer these questions by taking on different perspectives—different ways of understanding the world, stepping inside of them, and paying attention to our experience. This is at the heart of the work of a conscious artist.
Our culture is very attached to the idea of one truth. We want everything to be true or false, right or wrong. Not only does this lead to an immense amount of conflict and suffering, it also limits our development as a culture. Whitehead observes, “The simpleminded use of “right” and “wrong” is one of the chief obstacles to the progress of understanding.” This assumption that every statement is either true or false is referred to as “bivalent logic” and is completely valid within the context of mathematics. In mathematics, we assume that every statement is either true or false before we ever get started.
We should notice, however, that mathematics is fiction. What do I mean by that? Consider for a moment the following two situations. In the first, a person is writing her memories of an afternoon she spent sitting in a sidewalk café. She writes, “A man walked down the street wearing a red t-shirt and blue jeans.” Now, consider an author writing a short story, a work of fiction. She writes, “A man walked down the street wearing a red t-shirt and blue jeans.” Even though these two sentences are identical, the cognitive processes by which they were created are different. In the first case, we start with an actual human walking down the street who is observed by the writer, who then chooses the details that she wants to include in her writing and writes the sentence. In the second case, the man does not exist except perhaps in the author’s imagination and her writing of the sentence causes him to come into being.
Now consider the sentence, “Let triangle ABC be an isosceles triangle with AB equal to AC.” That sentence causes that triangle to come into being just as the short story writer’s sentence causes the man in the red t-shirt to come into being. Mathematics is fiction. A useful fiction, but fiction nonetheless. It is a conceptual structure that follows a set of strict rules—one of them being bivalent logic—that allow mathematicians to construct very complex logical arguments and to know that the conclusions they draw from those arguments are, within the context of mathematics, true. This ability to reliably create long logical chains of “thus” and “therefore” is at best extremely limited when we get outside of the context of mathematics.
There is nothing wrong with having concepts and ideas about what the world is and how it works. That’s what we do as humans. We create concepts and ideas to organize and make sense of our experience. This ability is one of the great things about being human, and it is something to celebrate. Our concepts and ideas can, however, become conceptual prisons when we forget that we created them and start to think of them as reality itself.
Furthermore, these ideas that we create to organize and make sense of our experience do not have to be comprised of words and logic. Whitehead points out, “Some of us struggle to find words to express our ideas. If the words and their order together constitute the ideas, how does this struggle arise?” (1938, p. 35). He continues,
Let it be admitted then that language is not the essence of thought. But this conclusion must be carefully limited. Apart from language, the retention of thought, the easy recall of thought, the interweaving of thought into higher complexity, the communication of thought, are all gravely limited. (1938, p. 35)
Artistic expression is language. Whitehead points out that language has two functions. One is that it allows us to converse with each other and the other is that it allows us to converse with ourselves (1938). This second function of language is often overlooked.
All of the different forms of artistic expression are languages. They allow us to process and make sense of our experiences, to retain them, recall them, to weave them into more complex structures, and to share them with others. We can process our experiences through movement, through singing, through music, through painting. And we can do this in ways that are not bound by concepts and logic. We can process our experiences, exist in the world, and relate to the world in ways that we otherwise could not.
Nothing is wrong with having a conceptual understanding of the world. That’s what humans do. When I was starting to seriously study Zen and working hard to quiet the chatter of the mind, like many beginning Zen students, I went through a time when I started to feel that my thoughts were bad, that there was something wrong with them. My teacher, Danan Roshi, used to tell me, “You can think all the thoughts you want to, think any thought that’s ever been thought, just don’t attach to them.” Our concepts, thoughts, and ideas, both the logical ones and the artistic ones, are integral parts of the experience of being human, but it’s important to know, important to remember, that they are our own creations, and not reality.
References:
Dizang () This is from the Book of Serenity, Case 20. There are lots of good online references for this. Here’s one of them. https://www.treetopzencenter.org/dizangs-not-knowing/
Gigerenzer, G. (2004). Mindless statistics. Journal of Socio-economics, 33, 587-606.
Von Foerster, H. () This quote was given to me by my uncle, but see https://www.azquotes.com/author/21906-Heinz_von_Foerster
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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