Gift Ideas

No exchanges allowed. – Human beings are forgetting how to give gifts. Violations of the exchange-principle have something mad and unbelievable about them; here and there even children size up the gift-giver mistrustfully, as if the gift were only a trick, to sell them a brush or soap. Instead, one doles out charity, administered well-being, which papers over the visible wounds of society in coordinated fashion. In its organized bustle, the human impulse no longer has any room, indeed even donations to the needy are necessarily connected with the humiliation of delivery, the correct measure, in short through the treatment of the recipient as an object. Even private gift-giving has degenerated into a social function, which one carries out with a reluctant will, with tight control over the pocketbook, a skeptical evaluation of the other and with the most minimal effort. Real gift-giving meant happiness in imagining the happiness of the receiver. It meant choosing, spending time, going out of one’s way, thinking of the other as a subject: the opposite of forgetfulness. Hardly anyone is still capable of this. In the best of cases, they give what they themselves would have liked themselves, only a few degrees worse. The decline of gift-giving is mirrored in the embarrassing invention of gift-articles, which are based on the fact that one no longer knows what one should give, because one no longer really wants to. These goods are as relationless as their purchasers. They were shelf-warming junk from the first day. Likewise with the right to exchange the gift, which signifies to the receiver: here’s your stuff, do what you want with it, if you don’t like it, I don’t care, get something else if you want. In contrast to the embarrassment of real gifts, their pure fungibility still represents something which is more humane, because they at least permit the receiver to give themselves something, which is to be sure simultaneously in absolute contradiction to the gift.
In relation of the greater abundance of goods, which are available even to the poor, the decline of gift-giving may appear unimportant, and reflections on it as sentimental. However, even if it became superfluous in a condition of superfluity – and this is a lie, privately as well as socially, for there is no-one today whose imagination could not find exactly what would make them thoroughly happy – those who no longer gave would still be in need of gift-giving. In them wither away those irreplaceable capacities which cannot bloom in the isolated cell of pure interiority, but only in contact with the warmth of things. Coldness envelops everything which they do, the friendly word which remains unspoken, the consideration which remains unpracticed. Such iciness recoils back on those from which it spread. All relations which are not distorted, indeed perhaps what is reconciliatory in organic life itself, is a gift. Those who become incapable of this through the logic of consequence make themselves into things and freeze.
- Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (21)

Incomplete Nature by Terrence W. Deacon

(Cross posted from my

bookblog

.)

(I read this book while at the same time reading 

Dynamics in Action

 by Alicia Juarrero. I finished Deacon's book first. I decided to read them together, because Juarrero has formally accused Deacon of plagiarism. You can read about that 

here

 and 

here

. Read the comments on the latter for more. Anyways I'm trying to get my head around the ideas first.)

Daniel Dennett's 

review

 from last December is a good place to start. There are many other reviews of this book around the web, so I won't struggle too much with trying to summarize the ideas. I got a big kick out of reading Deacon's other book, Symbolic Species (

link to my write up

). That book was about the dialectical co-evolution of language and the brain, and this newer book (2011) is in a way about the co-evolution of self-organizing forms. Both of these books seemed very "dialectical" to me, but I honestly still don't know if I'm using that word correctly or if I'm only using it in my own private way. Anyhow the idea is that as simple material forms work through their thermodynamic changes they can come together in mutually supportive ways to create new meta-forms (like what happens with crystals or whirlpools), which can then combine to form more complex forms-of-forms-of-forms which can be said in a extremely primitive way to look after themselves, to work to persist in their current arrangement of forms, and to reproduce and evolve. Deacon calls this primitive life-form an "autogen." (Juarrero sometimes uses the phrase "structured structuring structures" which I guess she got from Antonio Damasio.) It only really exists in theory, but his point is that it's not a totally crazy idea that something like that could have come together billions of years ago on Earth. It doesn't violate the laws of physics.

I associate this kind of "leveling-up" or differentiation with dialectics. In 

Symbolic Species

 the 3-part dialectic you needed to get your head around was Charles Peirce's icon > index > symbol. In this book, there's another nested 3-part structure: thermodynamic > morphodynamic > teleodynamic. (Peirce again makes a few cameos here.) The complex lifeforms we know and love evolved after billions of years of teleodynamic activity. There are also difficult chapters that discuss the concepts of information and work in terms of this dialectic.

Deacon discusses how in theory this dialectical geometric logic could unfold in simple material systems, and then towards the end discusses how this logic can apply to what we know about brains and consciousness. The sections on brains were of course what I was interested in. They felt intuitively right to me, for what it's worth, and the parallels with Buddhist ideas were obvious and exciting to see.

He argues against the idea that consciousness and life are to be understood in merely linear terms, such as mechanism/function, or information/computation. Instead we should pay attention to how life emerges from forms of thermodynamic and morphodynamic energy flows which use geometrical arrangements to pit physical processes against each other in order to perpetuate far-from-equilibrium structures. Thus new formal arrangements become new efficient causes. The parts affect the whole, the whole affects the parts. As new arrangements of forms persist, new possibilities arise for new systems and relationships between forms to emerge, and as these affect the ability of the sub-forms to survive and reproduce the new meta-arrangements persist insofar as the sub-forms which support them are selected to perpetuate them. Wholes support parts which support wholes. In this way forms "level-up" into new meta-forms (these are my words for thinking about it). Once these forms (which at this point are no longer merely material, but are self-perpetuating forms-of-forms, and so exist as it were in the spaces between matter, and are "absential" (to use one of Deacon's many neologisms)) found ways to use the patterns of DNA and RNA molecules to integrate different areas of themselves they got really good at generating different architectures for staying alive and reproducing. At this level the material form of the organism is in a sense beside the point—the point is the whole dynamic arrangement of self-perpetuating form (which is parasitic on matter but also paradoxically independent in the sense that it is a dynamic matter/form combo, "more than the sum of its parts" at any one moment, emergent and absential).

A lot of this is standard evolution stuff, but what I guess Deacon is saying is that the important thing is to follow the formal logic of nested spiraling yin/yangs of presences and absences all the way down to the basic level of thermodynamics and back up again in order to see how life and consciousness are best understood in terms of a dialectic of dynamic processes. The higher levels at which information and function and consciousness seem paradoxical only make sense if you take into account the whole multi-dimensional dialectic of presence and absence.

So did Aristotle nail it? All four causes are accounted for and back in action. There's a lot of discussion of Aristotle in this book and 

Dynamics in Action,

 which I look forward to finishing. Greek science's turn toward the timeless and mathematical and away from the contextually embedded narrative description is a big issue in that book. What about Lao Tse? "Clay is fashioned into vessels but it is on their 

empty hollowness

 that their use depends.” (Deacon quotes this too.) Deacon also discusses the "discovery" of zero as analogous to what he is trying to say about absential "things." (More often he uses the word "ententional" to refer to these absent forms that make a difference. I don't think that word is going to catch on.)

I haven't mentioned how difficult to read this book is yet. It's not super bad, but it's pretty difficult. He coins a lot of new words, which normally I'm fine with, and even wish more writers would do, but other reviewers have felt it was a bit much. You need to have a pretty basic understanding of physics and biology. I'm no master wordsmith but I couldn't help but feel at times like he could have explained things more clearly and that he was making it more difficult than was necessary. I'd love to take a crack at diagramming or drawing comics about the ideas in this book and Juarrero's book. Deacon throws in a few diagrams, but it seems to me like visualization would really help. Saying "figure/background reversal" over and over doesn't quite drive the point home without an illustration, like one of 

these

.

Mirrors of Nature

Here's some diagrams I drew while reading Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature by Richard Rorty last year. I don't expect these diagrams will necessarily make much sense to anyone since I'm using my own, like, private language, which is still under construction. Nor will they clear up anything about the book, which is anyways already pretty clear, I think. In other words, I didn't draw them to illustrate the book. (Though I would like to do more comics or diagrams to clearly illustrate philosophy or nonfiction books someday. If you're looking to put out an edition of Mirror of Nature with illustrations by Kevin H, please give me a call!) But these fall more in the category of "inspired by" or notes to myself. All the stuff about dialectics are my own ideas and I'm not even sure I know what I'm talking about yet. Ideally I would type out some paragraphs trying to explain what you're looking at, but I think I'll just put them up as is for now. 






Mindfulness Meditation



The way it went for me was, I read Mindfulness in Plain English and it's pretty good, but it's not like the best thing ever, so don't expect that. It is a very good introduction. It resonated with me as an introvert and a person full of fear and anxiety, but it's for everyone.

The activity of mindfulness is very simple (deceptively): "be aware of what is happening, and don't get lost in thought"——so the book (and much of mindfulness teaching) can seem repetitive. It's often like, "what if you feel pain? Be mindful of the pain. What if you feel bored and annoyed? Examine what it is like to feel bored and annoyed. What if I think this is stupid? Be mindful of what it's like to think mindfulness is stupid." etc. 

I think the book is available as a pdf, or you know, where you get books.

After the first time I read the book, I meditated off and on for a year, but not consistently. Then one day I decided to re-read the book and also started listening to podcasts by this guy named Gil Fronsdal (recommended by Dan Benjamin), and after listening to Introduction to Mindfulness Meditation, Part 1, I pretty much stuck with it every day since. 

Here are four of my favorite podcasts from when I was starting out. Start with Introduction 1 (direct link to MP3), and then I liked Introduction 5, then Concentration Part 2, and then Meditation as a Mirror. You can find many more here. 

There are other good teachers you might like more than Gil Fronsdal, though he has a genial, Mr. Rogers-like way about him I like a lot. These are all on Itunes also——search for "audio dharma." 

The important thing is to actually meditate, so try to do it along with them in the "Introduction to" podcasts. On my own I started out doing it daily 10 minutes, then 20 minutes, and now I do 25 minutes, using a timer. Some days it goes well and I get concentrated and some days I sit and just think about stuff and try to relax. It's one of those things that can sometimes seem like a chore, but you never regret doing it. It gets better the more you do it, like exercising any skill. 

There are different meditation techniques besides mindfulness, so you if you want to try something else, or keep it fresh, there is, for instance, "concentration," which I guess is more like focusing and moving into altered states of mind*, and there's "lovingkindness" (where you sit and think generous thoughts about everything, I think?) and there's of course Zen, which is Zen. I don't know that much about any of this, so I might not have this right. 

There are guided meditations which are really helpful, where they walk you through it. When I was starting out I sat through some guided meditations which were amazing, and I thought to myself, "I'm going to keep meditating for the rest of my life, because this is pretty great." I highly recommend doing guided mediations because you learn tricks for later, when it's just you on your own. There are some here. 

The video mentioned in the third panel above is here. 

For further views (by Westerners) of Buddhist approaches and teachings, and how it is a secular and practical way of life, I found the one on Blasphemy pretty interesting, made around the time of all the Benghazi madness, and also this one on The Importance of Questions by Thanissaro Bhikku (also see here for a good series of talks) is a kind of basic introduction to what was the deal with the Buddha.

*UPDATED 9/1/14: What I say about concentration isn't right, so please just ignore this sentence. I've been meaning to fix this. Now I see it differently, but it's hard to explain. It doesn't really matter. Stick with meditating.