David Bohm: Thought as a System

David Bohm a physicist that worked with Einstein developed a philosophy of thought that considers human thought an interrelated system.

From Thought as a System:

“What I mean by “thought” is the whole thing – thought, felt, the body, the whole society sharing thoughts – it’s all one process. It is essential for me not to break that up, because it’s all one process; somebody else’s thoughts becomes my thoughts, and vice versa. Therefore it would be wrong and misleading to break it up into my thoughts, your thoughts, my feelings, these feelings, those feelings… I would say that thought makes what is often called in modern language a system. A system means a set of connected things or parts.

Similarly, thought is a system. That system not only includes thoughts, “felts” and feelings, but it includes the state of the body; it includes the whole of society – as thought is passing back and forth between people in a process by which thought evolved from ancient times. A system is constantly engaged in a process of development, change, evolution and structure changes…although there are certain features of the system which become relatively fixed. We call this the structure…. Thought has been constantly evolving and we can’t say when that structure began. But with the growth of civilization it has developed a great deal. It was probably very simple thought before civilization, and now it has become very complex and ramified and has much more incoherence than before. (P. 18-19)”

If we use this lens to consider our world today we may realize that this “system” is continuously growing larger and becoming more complex as more people begin to communicate with each other around the world thanks to the availability of telecommunication networks (e.g. telephone, web etc).

If we use an organism (a type of system), as a metaphor for thought, we may say this period in our culture is “Spring” where thoughts from around the world are cross-pollinating each other. Ideas are growing “synapses” connecting each other in new ways. New, hybrid ideas are spawning every second. We are not making much fuzz about it, but in a way, we are living in a period of time that is akin to a “new renaissance”.

The concept of thought as a system may sound a bit strange to begin with but if you entertain the idea for a minute and then you consider that you’re reading this in a blog (a thought system on itself) on the web (an interdependent and interconnected system of thought and technology expressed through bits and pixels) then we may realize that Bohm’s concept is more true today than ever before.

Source:
From Wikipedia’s profile on David Bohm , quoting from Thought as a System. 11-24-07

1992. Thought as a System (transcript of seminar held in Ojai, California, from November 30 to December 2, 1990), London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-11980-4.
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-Daniel Montano
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Keyword: Daniel Montano, Dan Montano, user experience design, information architect

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature

“The Stuff of Thought” explores the duality of human cognition: the modesty of its construction and the majesty of its constructive power. Pinker weaves this paradox from a series of opposing theories. Philosophical realists, for instance, think perception comes from reality. Idealists think it’s all in our heads. Pinker says it comes from reality but is organized and reorganized by the mind. That’s why you can look at the same thing in different ways.

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature – Steven Pinker – Books – Review – New York Times
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-Daniel Montano
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Keyword: Daniel Montano, Dan Montano, user experience design, information architect

Nonduality and either/or thinking

“Science is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense-experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought…The sense-experiences are the given subject-matter. But the theory that shall interpret them is manmande…hypothetical, never completely final, subject to question and doubt.” – Albert Einstein.

“The world we have made as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far creates problems we cannot solve at the same level at which we created them” – Albert Einstein

“The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.” – Einstein

Nonduality may be a very important term for our time. Since most of our logic systems and most of our knowledge are based on either/or binary thinking one way to move towards a balance may be to recognize the phenomena of nonduality in our systems.

“The term nondual is a literal translation of the Sanskrit term advaita, (meaning not two). That is, things remain distinct while not being separate.”…”Nondualism may be viewed as the belief that dualism or dichotomy are illusory phenomena.” (from Wikipedia)

The nonduality of matter and energy. Matter = energy = matter

Einstein was well-versed in philosophy and I can’t help but to wonder if he was aware of this term. I am inclined to believe that he used nondual thinking in his theory of matter and energy. When Einstein came up with E=mc² he basically explained that matter is energy in another state. Or more specifically, how matter reverts back to energy when you place it at the speed of light.

In pedestrian terms, matter and energy are just two states of energy- just like water, has the states of liquid, solid and a gas. This may be hard to understand when you’re trained to think of everything through either/or thinking. Through either/or thinking you usually get stuck in arguments like: “Well, is it matter or is it energy?”

Multiple states and process
The belief that conceptual duality, nonduality, pluralism and holism are mirrors of the cycle of convergence-divergence. In other words, one process may be incomplete without the other. Together, these tendencies form a cycle. That cycle is just one of many others.

Challenging thingness

Everything is changing – but our human tendency is to attempt to trap everything into boxes, into words, into documents, into static states. Our tendency is to interpret processes as static, one or two-dimensional ‘things’. This is another form of reductionism. The same way we attempt to explain the entirety of life with a single frame of time. Or our tendency to explain the entirety of human experience with a few cells or genes.

Of course, static thinking has functional value but it also has anti-functional value and degrees of value in between. Static thinking may help us in one way but it may hinder and ‘trap’ us in other ways. We need to be aware of this changing dynamic. All elements of life are part of ever-expanding and ever-changing processes – we can deny this – but we do it with high risk.

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” -Einstein

Links

Wikipedia: Either/Or fallacy >>

Wikipedia “nondualism” >>

Wikipedia “monism” >>

Wikipedia “reductionsm” >>

Wikipedia “pluralism” >>

Related

Einstein quotes >>
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-Daniel Montano
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Keyword: Daniel Montano, Dan Montano, user experience design, information architect

Hearts and minds: science, thought and emotion

The following are some highlights from an article on thought and emotion.

“Hearts & Minds – Since Plato, scholars have drawn a clear distinction between thinking and feeling. Now science suggests that our emotions are what make thought possible.

“Ever since Plato, scholars have drawn a clear distinction between thinking and feeling. Cognitive psychology tended to reinforce this divide: emotions were seen as interfering with cognition; they were the antagonists of reason. Now, building on more than a decade of mounting work, researchers have discovered that it is impossible to understand how we think without understanding how we feel.

“Because we subscribed to this false ideal of rational, logical thought, we diminished the importance of everything else,” said Marvin Minsky, a professor at MIT and pioneer of artificial intelligence. “Seeing our emotions as distinct from thinking was really quite disastrous.”

This new scientific appreciation of emotion is profoundly altering the field. The top journals are now filled with research on the connections between emotion and cognition. New academic stars have emerged, such as Antonio Damasio of USC, Joseph LeDoux of NYU, and Joshua Greene, a rising scholar at Harvard. At the same time, the influx of neuroscientists into the field, armed with powerful brain-scanning technology, has underscored the thinking-feeling connection.

“When you look at the actual anatomy of the brain you quickly see that everything is connected,” said Elizabeth Phelps, a cognitive neuroscientist at NYU. “The brain is a category buster.”

But the computer metaphor was misleading, at least in one crucial respect. Computers don’t have feelings. Feelings didn’t fit into the preferred language of thought. Because our emotions weren’t reducible to bits of information or logical structures, cognitive psychologists diminished their importance.

When Damasio first published his results in the early 1990s, most cognitive scientists assumed that emotions interfered with rational thought. A person without any emotions should be a better thinker, since their cortical computer could process information without any distractions. But Damasio sought out patients who had suffered brain injuries that prevented them from perceiving their own feelings, and put this idea to the test. The lives of these patients quickly fell apart, he found, because they could not make effective decisions. Some made terrible investments and ended up bankrupt; most just spent hours deliberating over irrelevant details, such as where to eat lunch. These results suggest that proper thinking requires feeling. Pure reason is a disease.

In 2004, Harvard psychologist Joshua Greene used brain imaging to demonstrate that our emotions play an essential role in ordinary moral decision-making. Whenever we contemplate hurting someone else, our brain automatically generates a negative emotion. This visceral signal discourages violence. Greene’s data builds on evidence suggesting that psychopaths suffer from a severe emotional disorder — that they can’t think properly because they can’t feel properly.

“This lack of emotion is what causes the dangerous behavior,” said James Blair, a cognitive psychologist at the National Institute of Mental Health.
. . .

This new science of emotion has brought a new conception of what it means to think, and, in some sense, a rediscovery of the unconscious. In the five decades since the cognitive revolution began, scientists have developed ways of measuring the brain that could not have been imagined at the time. Researchers can make maps of the brain at work, and literally monitor emotions as they unfold, measuring the interplay of feeling and thinking in colorful snapshots. Although we aren’t aware of this mental activity — much of it occurs unconsciously — it plays a crucial role in governing all aspects of thought. The black box of the mind has been flung wide open.

The increasing use of sophisticated imaging is clearly the direction in which the field is moving, scientists say. And yet some cognitive psychologists worry that this “trend to integrate with neuroscience” means that some aspects of cognition will be neglected.

The lasting influence of the cognitive revolution is apparent in the language used by neuroscientists when describing the mind. For example, the unconscious is often described as a massive computer, processing millions of bits of information per second. Emotions emerge from this activity. Feelings can be seen as responses to facts and sensations that exist beyond the tight horizon of awareness. They can also be thought of as messages from the unconscious, as conclusions it has reached after considering a wide range of information — they are the necessary foundation of thought.

As Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia, recently wrote, “It is only because our emotional brains work so well that our reasoning can work at all.”

Source
Credit: Jonah Lehrer – Jonah Lehrer is an editor at large at Seed magazine. His first book, “Proust Was a Neuroscientist,” will be published in November. Boston Globe. Boston, Mass.: Apr 29, 2007. pg. E.1
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-Daniel Montano
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Keyword: Daniel Montano, Dan Montano, user experience design, information architect

Languages are complex dynamic systems

Gloria Capelli, a teacher and researcher at the University of Pisa has an interesting post on language:

“…languages are complex dynamic systems within which different types of structures act as organizers in order to make it possible for cognition to handle the immense amount of information involved in the communicative process. Within this view…words act at the same time as cues of mental representations, triggers of ad hoc conceptual constructions, and anchors which prevent meanings from verging on the border of chaos.”

Link
Go to the blog post on Gloria Capelli’s blog >>

Related in this blog
The unconscious mind, a communication system? >>
The human tower of babel (intra-human communication systems) >>

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-Daniel Montano
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Keyword: Daniel Montano, Dan Montano, user experience design, information architect

(Possible) cycle of consciousness

Diagram: “The Cycle of Life” by Toru Sato.

Summary of “A (potential) Cycle of Consciousness pt.1″
(summarizing a blog posting from May)
We begin life without consciousness of the “self” and we move to a point where we once again discover how interconnected we are to everything and everyone else in the world. This awareness may lead to the end of the “micro self”. This may also become the beginning of a “macro-self” that includes humanity and the environment at large; (maybe more?)

Today I found this diagram by Toru Sato. According to the blog posting where I found it, [1] it is from a book called The Ever-Transcending Spirit, [2], and it deals with the “cycle of life”.

This diagram mirrors the (potential) cycle of consciousness I described above.

(Thanks to folks at the Unurthed blog for finding this great diagram.)

[1] Blog posting found at: Unurthed blog >

[2] The diagram is from diagram from Toru Sato’s The Ever-Transcending Spirit. (WorldCat Link)

Related in this blog:
A possible cycle in consciousness pt.1 >
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-Daniel Montano
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Keyword: Daniel Montano, Dan Montano, user experience design, information architect

The age of machine-mediated empiricism

Traditional human-based empiricism as we knew it through many years ended with the advent of technology. It shifted and became a hybrid of linear mechanics and phenomenology. Today it is another type of hybrid it, is a hybrid of human phenomenology and digital phenomenology.

Since science leads our concept of reality and science uses quite a bit of technology to gather and interpret data the resulting empiricism is what we may call hyper-empirical.

This name reminds us that the science we produce today is pre-packaged with the limitations and ideologically-based algorithms of our technology. In other words, the limitations of our technology contributes to the limitations of our perceptions – and eventually to the perceptions of our reality.

Our current concept of hyperreality needs to go beyond the concept of the simulacrum. It may go beyond the copy of copies. Today we have to recognize that digital systems are directly involved in the construction of reality itself (a growing trend).

Hyper-empiricism has become the extension of human senses. This is all based on ideas, concepts and assumptions about the way we think. (some of these need to be challenged).

In other words, how we think informs the way we process knowledge, and the way we decide machines should work in order for them to think for us and/or help us think.

The end of pure human empiricism
We need to understand a couple of things:
1. pure (unadulturated) empiricism may not exist. Machines are expressions of philosophies. Science is an expression of philosophies. So are methodologies, interpretations etcc.
2. pure (unadulturated) rationalism (innate ideas), may not exist. As long as we intermingle our innate ideas (cognition) with sense experience and digital empiricism it will be hard to show an innate idea being strictly “pure”.

This means that orthodox attempts insisting in “purity” (on both sides of the binary fence) may be a bit off. The great thing is that we have a mixture of these two in between them.

The new sense organs of reality
I think that both, science and the companies devoted to creating our new “sense organs” (computers) – need to collaborate in interdisciplinary teams that include specialists in many different theories of thought. This in a way will lead to the synthesis of empiricism with other forms of thinking – including forms of thought that are not traditionally considered to be empirical.

Like it or not this is a political process as much as anything else in human sytems. Reality is partially a product of politics. But as long as we are able to think and move, politics will be present. Our awareness of the role of politics in our reality is an essential awareness in our modern consciousness. Not to know this could be a dangerous type of ignorance.

This is why I keep repeating myself: The future of humanity depends on its ability to think (and act) in a humane and sustainable manner.

Products in the post-empirical era
This means that constructing a product is no longer an act of pure innovation but rather an act of transdisciplinary collaborative thinking. In other words, your product may work wonders but as long as it is not evaluated from different perspectives it will not succeed for long. (as you may have guessed I am personally mostly thinking about sustainability-related philosophies that contribute to positive user experiences)

The short version: Transdisciplinary Holism
Another way: Holistic Literacy, Holistic consciousness, Holistic awareness

In more detail: (this is where you start designing..but here are some ideas)
• Holistic education: Encourage transdisciplinary thought across all branches of education and in business.
• Holistic thought and action: balance specialities with transdisciplinary education (in continuous cycles)
• Thought literacy: Everyone should be aware of the hundreds of types of thinking that we have available for our use (see also:Philosophy
• Sustainability Literacy : Learn about sustainability
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-Daniel Montano
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Keyword: Daniel Montano, Dan Montano, user experience design, information architect

Non-conscious and Lower levels of cognition ?

Every once in a while a science sub-divides into another science and becomes more specialized. 10, 20 years go by, research is done, papers are written, dissertations are bound and PhD’s go out the door.

But sooner or later there is another wave of research that points to how that specialized branch of knowledge is missing an important part of the picture.

It’s a pattern. It repeats over and over again. Do we need to keep repeating it?

Specialization can lead to myopia and in my opinion, specialization is only half of a more developed equation. It’s akin to using convergent thinking only to solve problems. What about using: specialization and transdisciplinarity, Convergence and divergence both acts complimenting each other towards more holistic perspectives.

Related
This just in from the Human Factors International Newsletter: (my comments inside [brackets])

“For many years usability professionals have focused on a cognitive view
of usability. What are the users thinking about? What is their mental
model? How does the visual design relate to the mental model? Even our
methodologies (thinking aloud during usability testing) rely on cognitive processing. [...linear interpretation of possible non-linear processes and then re-processed through linear language (speech)...] I’m not suggesting that we ignore our cognitive roots, but the research is building that we can’t rely on these roots exclusively. It’s time for us to dig in and explore the research on non-conscious processes and how this affects our heuristics, recommendations for interface design, and even our industry methodologies.”

Read the whole thing>>

Questions
Do we really need to switch from cognition to non-conscious thought? Can we possibly do both and move towards a more holistic perspective?

Could there be varying degrees of consciousness?, (all shades of grays between the possible false dichotomy of conscious vs. non-conscious>>

Where does thought begin? Is thought/cognition a pre-requisite for communication?
Cell Signaling>>

How is consciousness related to thought / cognition?
Consciousness>>

Related to cognition
http://www.combusem.com/CAPRA4.HTM”>From the book: The Web of Life by Fritjof Capra. by Berkely Physics professor, FRITJOF CAPRA. The Santiago Theory of Cognition. THE IMMUNE SYSTEM OUR SECOND BRAIN
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-Daniel Montano
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Keyword: Daniel Montano, Dan Montano, user experience design, information architect

Explaining Complexity

Folks at Cognitive Edge have some interesting presentation slides on the topic of complexity in dynamic systems. I think they may be helpful as teaching tools.

If you decide to read these keep in mind one point: humans are already operating within a system that is far from balance (the natural system).  Any man-designed system built with a goal to stage a far-from-balance dynamic will be compounding the existing natural imbalance. As a result, this will add unnecessary complexity (obstacles) for human potential and human success. This is my opinion and perspective, all I ask is that you keep it in mind.

Cognitive Edge Presentations>>  http://www.cognitive-edge.com/presentations.php
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-Daniel Montano
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Keyword: Daniel Montano, Dan Montano, user experience design, information architect

Robert Wright, Complexity and Intelligence (video link)

“Author Robert Wright argues that history has an arrow: That humans have continued to evolve — if not biologically, than culturally and technologically — toward greater complexity and intelligence. He also explains the concept behind his book, “Nonzero”: That life is a nonzero sum game, where there can be more than one winner, and that civilization evolved thanks to such endeavors, which reward cooperation, rather than competition. His guarded optimism is tinged with a deep worry over the growing prevalence of grass-roots hatred. His hope: that the intelligent pursuit of self-interest will actually be the world’s salvation. Robert Wright is author of The Moral Animal and NonZero. He also hosts an excellent interview series called meaningoflife.tv. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 19:54)”

Source:

TED Talks: – http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=r_wright

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-Daniel Montano
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Keyword: Daniel Montano, Dan Montano, user experience design, information architect