Welcome to the last part of this four-part series wherein I describe what I am calling the Cosmic Castration—systematically castrating body from mind. As a backdrop I have been summarizing the last chapter in neurologist Antonio Damasio’s 2010 book Self Comes to Mind. Damasio’s last chapter is entitled Living With Consciousness. In part IV, I’ll be focusing in on one of the last sections of the last chapter, a section entitled Educating the Cognitive Unconscious. Throughout his book Damasio argues that consciousness arises or emerges as body-based systems interact with mind-based systems. Damasio goes so far as to suggest that the body-mind split is an unfortunate dichotomy (traced back to Descartes) that, in reality, does not exist (more on this in a moment). The following quote by Damasio captures the dynamic nature of interactions between body and mind:
Taking the time to analyze facts, to evaluate the outcome of decisions, and to ponder the emotional results of those decisions is the path to building a practical guide otherwise known as wisdom.
In essence, Damasio argues that when body-based systems dynamically interact with mind-based systems, the result is greater wisdom. Knowledge, then, is data cutoff from the realm of the body, the realm of emotion. So, one can find huge amounts of knowledge in a data repository like the Internet, but one probably will find very little wisdom there. It is up to the individual to bring the knowledge of the Internet back to the body, back to the biological-based value system that would be the emotions. Before we look at how Damasio views “educating the cognitive unconscious,” a quick word on the body-mind split.
Before we start, I have to announce that I am pulling the following ideas from Ernest Keen’s 2000 book Chemicals for the Mind—Psychopharmacology and Human Consciousness. Keen argues that the body-mind dichotomy is a conceptual dichotomy. Keen argues that we conceptualize the body (or the material) differently than how we conceptualize the mind (or the immaterial or spiritual). Keen has good reason to frame the body-mind dichotomy in conceptual terms. At the risk of reducing the body-mind issue to the point of libel, body can only go in one direction at a time whereas mind can go in many different directions at the same time. Whereas mass can only occupy a unique space and time, many minds can occupy the same space and time. Empathy is the process of a “mind being in the mind of another.” Empathy violates the physical principle known as the conservation of mass. Ergo, as Keen points out, we use one conceptual system to conceptualize the material world, and another to conceptualize the mental or spiritual world. Keen further points out that huge conceptual problems arise when we try to use one conceptual system—either material or spiritual—wholesale in an attempt to create a monism (as compared to a dualism). Damasio tries to get past all of this by simply saying that brain (the material) and mind (the spiritual) are one in the same and should be conceptualized as such. Conceptually, I have no problem with Damasio’s approach. But, practically speaking, Damasio’s approach makes little sense. Again, the mind can go in any number of directions at the same time (see the 2002 book The Way We Think—Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities for examples of how we can mentally meet ourselves coming and going on the same path at the same time). In contrast, the body can only go in one direction at one time and only occupy one unique space. Damasio’s attempt to make brain and mind the same glosses over the practical and conceptual issues that Keen brings out. I’m not a big fan of John B. Watson—arguably the father of behaviorism—but I cannot fault him his attempts to create a science around the “one body, one path” part of the body-mind dichotomy. Essentially Watson said something like, “Once you’re finished going in multiple mental directions at the same time, call me as you start to move down a single path.” Writing in his 1989 book Mechanical Man—John Broadus Watson and the Beginnings of Behaviorism, Kerry Buckley makes the following observation:
[Watson] contended [that] psychologists had become lost in a wilderness inhabited by philosophers, pseudo-scientists, and other wandering souls. Watson proclaimed behaviorism to be the means by which psychology could achieve the status of a rigorous experimental science that would discover and apply the laws governing human behavior [that is, one path behavior].
In essence, Watson viewed any movement or activity within the mental world to be like wandering around in a wilderness. Watson was a materialist and discounted anything approaching mind, consciousness, spirituality, philosophy, etc. Watson, at the turn of the last century, ushered in the age of the Cosmic Castration. Today, the Internet allows us to remain stationary (materially speaking) while at the same time move in many different directions mentally. Can you imagine Watson trying to observe kids surfing the Internet. I can only imagine him shouting in exasperation, “My God, they don’t move, they don’t behave; they just sit there autistically tapping on what looks like a paddle, moving around what looks like a puck of some kind. When they start moving around, call me.”
Getting back to Damasio, he asks us to be neither full-blown materialists like Watson, nor full-blown mentalists like kids (and many adults) surfing the Internet and living in virtual worlds. Damasio calls for a wisdom that allows us to tap into both worlds at the same time using emotions and feelings (and, as we will see, an autonomous self) as a bridge. I would suggest that we should view emotions and feelings as “reminders,” reminders that we are both body and mind. I hate to be a broken record but it was John Bowlby who took up the middle ground between body and mind and tried to get us to consider the possibility that the attachment behavioral system was the royal road to balancing and harmonizing body and mind. As we move out to explore the many possible worlds that await, we also plot a single path back to home. What better way to bridge body and mind than to live them at the same time through attachment behavior. In volume II of his trilogy on attachment, Bowlby points out how Watson’s theory of behaviorism is simply, well, too simple and does not take into consideration behavior motivated or modulated by attachment. For more on Bowlby’s take on behaviorism, see my December 21st, 2011, post entitled Take That Thumb Out of Your Mouth and Respond to That White Mouse—Now Kid.
So, all this to say that Damasio’s recommendations for “educating the cognitive unconscious” only apply if you wish to take up a middle ground between radical materialism or behaviorism on one side, and radical spiritualism on the other. One of the best ways to bridge these two worlds is to have a safe and secure attachment relationship. But rather than “prescribe” a safe and secure attachment relationship, society prescribes all manner of attachment substitutes: cognitive-behavioral therapy, behavioral drugs, food, consumerism, therapy in general, parentified kids, addictions, etc. Here are Damasio’s thoughts on taking up the middle ground between the material and the spiritual:
1) Damasio points out that “insufficient education of non conscious processes probably explains … why so many of us fail miserably to do what we are supposed to do regarding diet and exercise. We think we are in control, but we often are not, and epidemics of obesity, hypertension, and heart disease prove that we are not.” Again, I would add all of the various addictions here as well. As Damasio puts it, “One reason so many individuals become addicted to all manner of drugs, not to mention alcohol, has to do with the pressures of homeostasis,” that is to say, the pressures to balance body with mind.
2) To counter the above, Damasio calls for “ritualized skill building.” Unfortunately, skill building takes a considerable amount of time. You know the old saying: How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice. As Damasio points out, addictive behavior is a “rapid correction of suffering” designed to circumvent the long and arduous process of building a skill, like building social skills or nurturing a longterm, committed attachment relationship. Sir Richard Bowlby (John’s son) will often tell audiences that it takes at least two years of hard work for an attachment relationship to form between adults. Sir Richard is talking about face-to-face, engaged work mind you. In her 2011 book Alone Together, MIT researcher Sherry Turkle describes how kids can play multiplayer games with other avatars for several years without forming any real attachment ties. Sadly, attachment researchers have not begun to scratch the surface of investigating what affect the Internet is having on the formation of safe and secure attachment relationships. It would make for some fascinating research (hint, hint).
3) Damasio makes the point (mentioned in earlier parts of this series) that “civilization, and in particular the aspect of civilization that has to do with justice, revolves around the notion that humans are conscious in ways in which animals are not.” Damasio would have us believe that being moral is a skill set that has to be developed over a long period of time. Being moral requires gaining access to wisdom (e.g., bridging body to mind) and will not come about by simply gaining access to knowledge or data. Damasio gives us this “bottom line”: “[L]awyers, judges, legislators, policy-makers, and educators need to acquaint themselves with the neurobiology of consciousness and decision-making.” I would say that the same applies to the psychology of attachment. And this is where I see attachment researchers falling flat: they are not out there selling Bowlbian attachment and how the theory can help with matters centered on bridging body to mind (i.e., developing wisdom, developing moral thinking, developing critical thinking, reducing addictive behavior, increasing skill sets, etc.). Sadly, though, castrating body from mind is the foundation upon which consumerism and the digital age rest. It is no wonder that Watson eventually ended up in advertising.
4) If you do decide to influence convention, then you must also arrive at a plan that allows new conventions to “find a way into the cognitive unconscious in order to permeate the [collective] action machinery,” quoting Damasio. He continues, “[W]e need to facilitate that influence.” This is why, in my opinion, anarchy movements are so dangerous—they don’t want what currently is convention, but they have no plan for bringing about new conventions. Over time I find myself increasingly viewing the current Occupy movement in this light. However, in the same way Watson believed that behaviorism was the way toward bridging homespun ruralism to industrialized urbanism, maybe, just maybe anarchism will prove to be the answer paving the way toward bridging industrialized urbanism to atomized virtualism (e.g., increasingly living in virtual worlds with their focus on viralism). It’s just a guess but maybe it will be the new Renaissance Man or Woman—one who can balance rural, urban, and virtual demands—that will have the best chance of adapting to changing social conditions. Imagine Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond—trains zipping by—with a WiFi connection. (For more on this theme, see William Powers’ Hamlet’s BlackBerry.)
5) “Nervous systems developed as managers of life and curators of biological value,“ writes Damasio, “assisted at first by untrained dispositions but eventually by images, that is, minds.” Again, Watson dismisses the images arising from mind and only focuses in on unminded dispositions. Watson denies evolution to a large extent by focusing on the material. He denies that evolution created a hugely powerful survival mechanism in the form of mind and its associated images. But the same could be said of those who only focus in on spiritual or virtual worlds. They too reject evolution. Materialism and New Agism are two sides of a Janus head. They deny evolution in their own particular way. In my 2011 book Bowlby’s Battle, I argue that we can see materialism short-circuiting against postmodernism through the myriad forms of posthumanism—people desiring to become machines.
6) Damasio now makes a pitch for the importance of an autonomous self, a pitch that permeates most of Bowlby’s work as well. Damasio writes, “A simple protagonist [e.g., a single autonomous self] was a clear [evolutionary] advantage because it generated a firm connection between life-regulation needs [of the body, like attachment] and the profusion of mental images that the brain was forming [and were being stored in the form of cultural artifacts] about the world around it.” In Damasio’s world (as well as Bowlby’s), it is the self that bridges the material needs of the body with the mental images of the mind. This is a fascinating idea: the self as protagonist tying together the unconscious, unimaged biological needs to the conscious, imaged social needs. And all the while emotions and feelings reminding us of the need for such connections and bridges. Here I will agree with Damasio: it is the single self that is at once material and immaterial. Again, behaviorism denies the self, and postmodernism embraces the idea of multiple selves. Both deny the importance of the Bowlbian autonomous self. (I would argue that one reason Bowlby did not care for the concept of self-esteem was because it did not encourage any purposeful or goal-directed bridging between body and mind.) Here’s a quick thought experiment. Consider the following narrative:
An adult, loss, moving, a few kids, darkness.
Watson’s reaction: “Let me know when someone starts displaying overt observable behavior.”
A postmodern person’s reaction: “Kwel.”
The reaction of a person with an autonomous self: “Are these people related in some way? Who experienced the loss? Moving … in what direction? Where are they? Are they all together? Are the kids lost? Are they alone? Are they all trying to find each other? Is the darkness creating a problem for them?” What’s the story that makes sense out of all of this?
Both attachment researchers and Damasio focus in on the autonomous self as a key bio-psycho-social element bridging body to mind. Freud said that it is a strong ego that mediates between the desires of the body (the id) and the desires of the culture (the superego). Even Jung proposed that archetypal patterns across time and cultures are the principal mediators of body and mind. So, what happens if you deny the self, say, through behaviorism, or embrace multiple selves, say, through postmodernism? On a simple level, the balance between body and mind will become dysregulated. We should see appetites run amuck (which we do) and images run rampant as well (which we also see). I just read that over 300,000,000 pictures are uploaded to Facebook every day. That’s a staggering figure. According to Damasio, an autonomous self “depends on the brain’s ability to communicate mental states, especially feeling states, through gestures of body and hands, as well as through the voice, in the form of musical tones and verbal language.” How well are we communicating mental states when all we do is send text messages and upload images that, for all intent and purpose, are random? Both behaviorism and New Agism threaten the balance and harmony that evolution has taken millennia to bring about. We have no choice but to embrace quick and dirty forms of balance and harmony, like food, sex, drugs, alcohol, violence, parentified kids, etc.
Here’s Damasio’s final word:
[T]he arts prevailed in evolution because they had survival value and contributed to the development of the notion of well-being. They helped cement social groups and promote social organization; they assisted with communication; they compensated for emotional imbalances caused by fear, anger, and grief; they probably inaugurated the long process of establishing external records of cultural life as suggested by [the ancient cave art of] Chauvet and Lascaux.
Here’s my final word (question really): As philanthropists, how much do we value the Bowlbian autonomous self with its focus on a single protagonist and a single coherent narrative? If the answer is “not very much,” then behaviorism or New Agism would be good worldviews to embrace. If the answer is “very much,” then I would recommend thinkers (and their worldviews) like Bowlby and Damasio, and even Keen for that matter. If as a society we do not value the Bowlbian autonomous self, then we should repent for the Cosmic Castration is upon us.
