de-formed Tao

Ray and Maria Stata Center, MIT, Cambridge, US

Noam Chomsky

 Ray and Maria Stata Center

mental Tao components: structures

© Robert Fathauer, Infinity

In the system components description of states of consciousness Tart, after introducing the first two - awareness and energy - describes the third: structures.

Structures

The mind, from which consciousness arises, consists of myriad structures. A psychological structure refers to a relatively stable organization of component parts that perform one or more related psychological functions. We infer (from outside) the existence of a particular structure by observing that a certain kind of input information reliably results in specific transformed output information under typical conditions. For example, we ask someone, "How much is fourteen divided by seven?" and he answers, "Two." After repeating this process, with variations, we infer the existence of a special structure or related set of structures we can call arithmetical skills. Experientially, we infer (from inside) the existence of a particular structure when, given certain classes experienced input information, we experience certain transformed classes of output/response information. Thus, when I overhear the question about fourteen divided by seven and observe that some part of me automatically responds with the correct answer, I infer an arithmetical skills structure as part of my own mind. We hypothesize that structures generally continue to exist even when they are not active, since they operate again when appropriate activating information is present. I again know that fourteen divided by seven equals two, even though I stopped thinking about it for a while. The emphasis here is on the structure forming something that has a recognizable shape, pattern, function, and process that endure over time. Ordinarily we are interested in the structure's overall properties as a complete structure, as a structured system, rather than in the workings of its component parts. Insofar as any structure can be broken down into substructures and sub-substructures, finer analyses are possible ad infinitum. The arithmetical skill structure can be broken down into adding, subtracting, multiplying, or dividing substructures. Such microscopic analyses, however, may not always be relevant to an understanding of the properties of the overall system, such as the state of consciousness, that one is working with. the most obvious thing that characterizes an automobile as a system is its ability to move passengers along roads at high speed; a metallurgical analyses of its spark plugs is not relevant to an understanding of its primary functioning and nature. Our concern, then, is with the psychological structures that show functions useful to our understanding of consciousness. Such structures can be given names—sexual needs, social coping mechanisms, language abilities. Note that some structures may be so complex that we are unable to recognize them as structures. We see only component parts and never understand how they all work together. A psychological structure may vary in the intensity and/or the quality of its activity, both overall and in terms of its component parts, but still retain its basic patterns (gestalt qualities) and so remain recognizably the same. A car is usefully referred to as a car whether it is moving at five or twenty-five miles an hour, whether it is red or blue, whether the original spark plugs have been replaced by spark plugs of a different brand. We anticipate an understanding of a state of consciousness as a system here. Some structures are essentially permanent. The important aspects of their functioning cannot be modified in any significant way; they are biological/physiological givens. They are the hardware of our mental system. To use an analogy from computer programming, they are fixed programs, functions built into the machinery of the nervous system. Some structures are mainly or totally given by an individual's particular developmental history; they are created by, programmed by, learning, conditioning, and enculturation processes that the individual undergoes. This is the software of the human biocomputer. Because of the immense programmability of human beings, most of the structures that interest us, that we consider particularly human, are in this software category. Permanent structures create limits on, and add qualities to, what can be done with programmable structures: the hardware puts some constraints on what the software can be. The physiological parameters constituting a human being place some limits on his particular mental experience and his possible range of programming. Our interest in relatively permanent structures, one that are around long enough for us conveniently to observe, experience and study. But all the theoretical ideas in this book should be applicable to structures that are not long-lasting, even though investigation may be more difficult. Structure, for the outside investigator, are hypothesized explanatory entities based on experiential, behavioral, or psychological data. They are also hypothesized explanatory concepts for each of us in looking at his own experience: I know that fourteen divided by two equals seven, but I do not experience the arithmetical skills structure directly; I only know that when I need that kind of knowledge, it appears and functions. Since I need not hold on consciously to that knowledge all the time, I readily believe or hypothesize that it is stored in some kind of structure, someplace "in" my mind.

the sweet sound of Tao

Soprano: Inva Mula;London Symphony Orchestra

Il dolce suono mi colpi di sua voce!

Ah, quella voce m'e qui nel cor discesa!

Edgardo! io ti son resa, Edgardo, mio!

fuggita io son de tuoi nemici.

Un gelo me serpeggia nel sen!

trema ogni fibra!

vacilla il pie!

Presso la fonte meco t'assidi al quanto!

Ohime, sorge il tremendo fantasma e ne separa!

Qui ricovriamo, Edgardo, a pie dell'ara.

Sparsa e di rose!

Un armonia celeste, di, non ascolti?

Ah, l'inno suona di nozze!

Il rito per noi s'appresta! Oh, me felice!

Oh gioia che si sente, e non si dice!

Ardon gl'incensi!

Splendon le sacre faci, splendon intorno!

Ecco il ministro!

Porgime la destra!

Oh lieto giorno!

Al fin son tua, al fin sei mia,

a me ti dona un Dio.

first encounter with Tao

© Philip Hyde

After the acceptance of Don Juan to teach him about peyote, called by him Mescalito, Castaneda for the first time takes the dried buttons and by them one of the most powerful hallucinogens - mescaline; the resulting experience in the Tart terminology starts with the transition from the ordinary baseline consciousness state b-SoC into a deep altered state d-ASC to be back, with a difficult transition, to the b-SoC:

Monday, 7 August 1961
I arrived at don Juan’s house in Arizona about seven o’clock on Friday night. Five other Indians were sitting with him on the porch of his house. I greeted him and sat waiting for them to say something. After a formal silence one of the men got up, walked over to me, and said, “Buenas noches.” I stood up and answered, “Buenas noches.” Then all the other men got up and came to me and we all mumbled “Buenas noches” and shook hands either by barely touching one another’s finger-tips or by holding the hand for an  instant and then dropping it quite abruptly.
We all sat down again. They seemed to be rather shy—at a loss for words, although they all spoke Spanish.
It must have been about half past seven when suddenly they all got up and walked towards the back of the house. Nobody had said a word for a long time. Don Juan signalled me to follow and we all got inside an old pickup truck parked there. I sat in the back with don Juan and two younger men. There were no cushions or benches and the metal floor was painfully hard, especially when we left the highway and got onto a dirt road.
Don Juan whispered that we were going to the house of one of his friends who had seven mescalitos for me.
I asked him, “Don’t you have any of them yourself, don Juan?”
“I do, but I couldn’t offer them to you. You see, someone else has to do this.”
“Can you tell me why?”
“Perhaps you are not agreeable to «him» and «he» won’t like you, and then you will never be able to know «him» with affection, as one should; and our friendship will be broken.”
“Why wouldn’t he like me? I have never done anything to him.”
“You don’t have to do anything to be liked or disliked. He either takes you, or throws you away.”
“But, if he doesn’t take me, isn’t there anything I can do to make him like me?”
The other two men seemed to have overheard my question and laughed.
“No! I can’t think of anything one can do,” don Juan said.
He turned half away from me and I could not talk to him any more.
We must have driven for at least an hour before we stopped in front of a small house. It was quite dark, and after the driver had turned off the headlights I could make out only the vague contour of the building.
A young woman, a Mexican, judging by her speech inflection, was yelling at a dog to make him stop barking. We got out of the truck and walked into the house. The men mumbled “Buenas noches” as they went by her. She answered back and went on yelling at the dog.
The room was large and was stacked up with a multitude of objects. A dim light from a very small electric bulb rendered the scene quite gloomy. There were quite a few chairs with broken legs and sagging seats leaning against the walls. Three of the men sat down on a couch, which was the largest single piece of furniture in the room. It was very old and had sagged down all the way to the floor; in the dim light it seemed to be red and dirty.
The rest of us sat in chairs. We sat in silence for a long time.
One of the men suddenly got up and went into another room.
He was perhaps in his fifties, tall, and husky. He came back a moment later with a coffee jar. He opened the lid and handed the jar to me; inside there were seven odd-looking items.
They varied in size and consistency. Some of them were almost round, others were elongated.
They felt to the touch like the pulp of walnuts, or the surface of cork. Their brownish colour made them look like hard, dry nutshells. I handled them, rubbing their surfaces for quite some time.
“This is to be chewed [esto se masca],” don Juan said in a whisper.
I had not realized that he had sat next to me until he spoke.
I looked at the other men, but no one was looking at me; they were talking among
themselves in very low voices. This was a moment of acute indecision and fear. I felt almost unable to control myself.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said to him. “I’ll go outside and take a walk.”
He handed me the coffee jar and I put the peyote buttons in it.
I was leaving the room when the man who had given me the jar stood up, came to me, and said he had a toilet bowl in the other room.
The toilet was almost against the door. Next to it, nearly touching the toilet, was a large bed which occupied more than half of the room. The woman was sleeping there. I stood motionless at the door for a while, then I came back to the room where the other men were.
The man who owned the house spoke to me in English: “Don Juan says you’re from South America. Is there any mescal there?”
I told him that I had never even heard of it.
They seemed to be interested in South America and we talked about the Indians for a while.
Then one of the men asked me why I wanted to eat peyote. I told him that I wanted to know what it was like. They all laughed shyly.
Don Juan urged me softly,” Chew it, chew it [Masca, masca].”
My hands were wet and my stomach contracted. The jar with the peyote buttons was on the floor by the chair. I bent over, took one at random, and put it in my mouth. It had a stale taste. I bit it in two and started to chew one of the pieces. I felt a strong, pungent bitterness; in a moment my whole mouth was numb. The bitterness increased as I kept on chewing, forcing an incredible flow of saliva. My gums and the inside of my mouth felt as if I had eaten salty, dry meat or fish, which seems to force one to chew more. After a while I chewed the other piece and my mouth was so numb I couldn’t feel the bitterness any more. The peyote button was a bunch of shreds, like the fibrous part of an orange or like sugarcane, and I didn’t know whether to swallow it or spit it out. At that moment the owner of the house got up and invited everybody to go out to the porch.
We went out and sat in the darkness. It was quite comfortable outside, and the host brought out a bottle of tequila.
The men were seated in a row with their backs to the wall. I was at the extreme right of the line. Don Juan, who was next to me, placed the jar with the peyote buttons between my legs.
Then he handed me the bottle, which was passed down the line, and told me to take some of the tequila to wash away the bitterness.
I spat out the shreds of the first button and took a sip. He told me not to swallow it, but to just rinse out my mouth with it to stop the saliva. It did not help much with the saliva, but it certainly helped to wash away some of the bitterness.
Don Juan gave me a piece of dried apricot, or perhaps it was a dried fig—I couldn’t see it in the dark, nor could I taste it—and told me to chew it thoroughly and slowly, without rushing. I had difficulty swallowing it; it felt as if it would not go down.
After a short pause the bottle went around again. Don Juan handed me a piece of crispy dried meat. I told him I did not feel like eating.
“This is not eating,” he said firmly.
The pattern was repeated six times. I remember having chewed six peyote buttons when the conversation became very lively; although I could not distinguish what language was spoken, the topic of the conversation, in which everybody participated, was very interesting, and I attempted to listen carefully so that I could take part. But when I tried to speak I realized I couldn’t; the words shifted aimlessly about in my mind.
I sat with my back propped against the wall and listened to what the men were saying.
They were talking in Italian, and repeated over and over one phrase about the stupidity of sharks.
I thought it was a logical, coherent topic. I had told don Juan earlier that the Colorado River in Arizona was called by the early Spaniards “el rio de los tizones [the river of charred wood]”; and someone mis-spelled or misread “tizones”, and the river was called “el rio de los tiburones [the river of the sharks]”. I was sure they were discussing that story, yet it never occurred to me to think that none of them could speak Italian.
I had a very strong desire to throw up, but I don’t recall the actual act. I asked if somebody would get me some water. I was experiencing an unbearable thirst.
Don Juan brought me a large saucepan. He placed it on the ground next to the wall. He also brought a little cup or can. He dipped it into the pan and handed it to me, and said I could not drink but should just freshen my mouth with it.
The water looked strangely shiny, glossy, like a thick varnish.
I wanted to ask don Juan about it and laboriously I tried to voice my thoughts in English, but then I realized he did not speak English. I experienced a very confusing moment, and became aware of the fact that although there was a clear thought in my mind, I could not speak. I wanted to comment on the strange quality of the water, but what followed next was not speech; it was the feeling of my unvoiced thoughts coming out of my mouth in a sort of liquid form. It was an effortless sensation of vomiting without the contractions of the diaphragm. It was a pleasant flow of liquid words. I drank. And the feeling that I was vomiting disappeared. By that time all noises had vanished and I found I had difficulty focusing my eyes. I looked for don Juan and as I turned my head I noticed that my field of vision had diminished to a circular area in front of my eyes.
This feeling was neither frightening nor discomforting, but, quite to the contrary, it was a novelty; I could literally sweep the ground by focusing on one spot and then moving my head slowly in any direction. When I had first come out to the porch I had noticed it was all dark except for the distant glare of the city lights. Yet within the circular area of my vision everything was clear. I forgot about my concern with don Juan and the other men, and gave myself entirely to exploring the ground with my pinpoint vision.
I saw the juncture of the porch floor and the wall. I turned my head slowly to the right, following the wall, and saw don Juan sitting against it. I shifted my head to the left in order to focus on the water. I found the bottom of the pan; I raised my head slightly and saw a medium-size black dog approaching. I saw him coming towards the water. The dog began to drink. I raised my hand to push him away from my water; I focused my pinpoint vision on the dog to carry on the movement, and suddenly I saw him become transparent. The water was a shiny, viscous liquid.
I saw it going down the dog’s throat into his body. I saw it flowing evenly through his entire length and then shooting out through each one of the hairs. I saw the iridescent fluid travelling along the length of each individual hair and then projecting out of the hairs to form a long, white, silky mane.
At that moment I had the sensation of intense convulsions, and in a matter of instants a tunnel formed around me, very low and narrow, hard and strangely cold. It felt to the touch like a wall of solid tinfoil. I found I was sitting on the tunnel floor.
I tried to stand up, but hit my head on the metal roof, and the tunnel compressed itself until it was suffocating me. I remember having to crawl toward a son of round point where the tunnel ended; when I finally arrived, if I did, I had forgotten all about the dog, don Juan, and myself. I was exhausted. My clothes were soaked in a cold, sticky liquid. I rolled back and forth trying to find a position in which to rest, a position where my heart would not pound so hard. In one of those shifts I saw the dog again.
Every memory came back to me at once, and suddenly all was clear in my mind. I turned around to look for don Juan, but I could not distinguish anything or anyone. All I was capable of seeing was the dog becoming iridescent; an intense light radiated from his body. I saw again the water flowing through him, kindling him like a bonfire. I got to the water, sank my face in the pan, and drank with him. My hands were in front of me on the ground and, as I drank, I saw the fluid running through my veins setting up hues of red and yellow and green. I drank more and more. I drank until I was all afire; I was all aglow. I drank until the fluid went out of my body through each pore and projected out like fibres of silk, and I too acquired a long, lustrous, iridescent mane. I looked at the dog and his mane was like mine. A supreme happiness filled my whole body, and we ran together toward a sort of yellow warmth that came from some indefinite place. And there we played. We played and wrestled until I knew his wishes and he knew mine. We took turns manipulating each other in the fashion of a puppet show. I could make him move his legs by twisting my toes, and every time he nodded his head I felt an irresistible impulse to jump. But his most impish act was to make me scratch my head with my foot while I sat; he did it by flapping his ears from side to side. This action was to me utterly, unbearably funny. Such a touch of grace and irony; such mastery, I thought. The euphoria that possessed me was indescribable. I laughed until it was almost impossible to breathe.
I had the clear sensation of not being able to open my eyes; I was looking through a tank of water. It was a long and very painful state filled with the anxiety of not being able to wake up and yet being awake. Then slowly the world became clear and in focus. My field of vision became again very round and ample, and with it came an ordinary conscious act, which was to turn around and look for that marvellous being. At this point I encountered the most difficult transition. The passage from my normal state had taken place almost without my realizing it: I was aware; my thoughts and feelings were a corollary of that awareness; and the passing was smooth and clear. But this second change, the awakening to serious, sober consciousness, was genuinely shocking. I had forgotten I was a man! The sadness of such an irreconcilable situation was so intense that I wept.

Tao reflections

cognitive Tao within the circle

M.C. Escher, Dragon, 1952

Defined the cognitive science main approaches Varela, Thompson and Rosch introduce the specific basic characteristic for the study of the mind: the circular recursion of the operational closure of the autopoietic living systems characterized by their autonomy and cognition becomes maximum and paradoxical when with the mind one attempts to investigate the mind; the result is in an endless recursion between the describing mind and the described mind, where the distinction between subject and object disappears. For the enactive point of view proposed by the authors this circularity is central and should be integrated with experience:

Cognitive Science within the Circle

We began this chapter with a reflection on the fundamental circularity in scientific method that would be noted by a philosophically inclined cognitive scientist. From the standpoint of enactive cognitive science, this Circularity is central; it is an epistemological necessity. In contrast, the other, more extant forms of cognitive science start from the view that cognition and mind are entirely due to the particular structures of cognitive systems. The most obvious expression of this view is found in neuroscience, where cognition is investigated by looking at the properties of the brain . One can associate these biologically based properties with cognition only through behavior. It is only because this structure, the brain, undergoes interactions in an environment that we can label the ensuing behavior as cognitive . The basic assumption, then, is that to every form of behavior and experience we can ascribe specific brain structures (however roughly). And, conversely, changes in brain structure manifest themselves in behavioral and experiential alterations. We may diagram this view as in figure: (In this diagram and those that follow, the double arrows express interdependence or mutual specification.)

Interdependence or mutual specification of structure and behavior/experience.

Yet upon reflection we cannot avoid as a matter of consistency the logical implication that by this same view any such scientific description, either of biological or mental phenomena, must itself be a product of the structure of our own cognitive system. We may diagram this further understanding as in figure:

Interdependency of scientific description and our own cognitive structure.

Furthermore , the act of reflection that tells us this does not come from nowhere; we find ourselves performing that act of reflection out of a given background (in the Heideggerian sense) of biological, social, and cultural beliefs and practices. We portray this further step as in figure:

Interdependency of reflection and the background of biological, social, and cultural beliefs and practices.

But then yet again, our very postulation of such a background is something that we are doing : we are here, living embodied beings, sitting and thinking of this entire scheme, including what we call a background.

Plainly, this kind of layering could go on indefinitely, as in an Escher drawing . This last move makes it evident that, rather than adding layers of continued abstraction, we should go back where we started, to the concreteness and particularity of our own experience - even in the endeavor of reflection . The fundamental insight of the enactive approach as explored in this book is to be able to see our activities as reflections of a structure without losing sight of the directness of our own experience.

The Theme

This book is devoted to the exploration of this deep circularity . We will endeavor throughout to keep in mind our theoretical constructs about structure without losing sight of the immediacy of our experience.

Some aspects of the basic circularity of our condition have been discussed by philosophers in various ways at least since Hegel. The contemporary philosopher Charles Taylor refers to it when he says that we are " self-interpreting animals" and so wonders "whether features which are crucial to our self-understanding as agents can be accorded no place in our explanatory theory " The usual response on the part of cognitive scientists is well put by Daniel Dennett when he writes that "every cognitivist theory currently defended or envisaged . . . is a theory of the sub-personal level . It is not at all clear to me, indeed, how a psychological theory - as distinct from a philosophical theory - could fail to be a sub-personal theory." For Dennett, our self-understanding presupposes cognitive notions such as believing, desiring , and knowing but does not explain them. Therefore, if the study of mind is to be rigorous and scientific, it cannot be bound to explanations in terms of features essential to our self-understanding.

For the moment we wish simply to emphasize the deep tension in our present world between science and experience. In our present world science is so dominant that we give it the authority to explain even when it denies what is most immediate and direct- our everyday, immediate experience. Thus most people would hold as a fundamental truth the scientific account of matter/space as collections of atomic particles, while treating what is given in their immediate experience, with all of its richness, as less profound and true. Yet when we relax into the immediate bodily well-being of a sunny day or of the bodily tension of anxiously running to catch a bus, such accounts of space/matter fade into the background as abstract and secondary.

When it is cognition or mind that is being examined, the dismissal of experience becomes untenable, even paradoxical. The tension comes to the surface especially in cognitive science because cognitive science stands at the crossroads where the natural sciences and the human sciences meet. Cognitive science is therefore Janus-faced, for it looks down both roads at once: One of its faces is turned toward nature and sees cognitive processes as behavior. The other is turned toward the human world (or what phenomenologists call the "lifeworld") and sees cognition as experience.

When we ignore the fundamental circularity of our situation, this double face of cognitive science gives rise to two extremes: we suppose either that our human self-understanding is simply false and hence will eventually be replaced by a mature cognitive science, or we suppose that there can be no science of the human life-world because science must always presuppose it.

These two extremes'summarize much of the general philosophical debate surrounding cognitive science. At one end stand philosophers such as Stephen Stich and Paul and Patricia Churchland who argue that our self-understanding is simply false. (Note the Churchlands'suggestion that we might come to refer to brain states instead of experiences in actual daily discourse.) At the other end stand philosophers such as Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor who seriously doubt the very possibility of cognitive science (perhaps because they often seem to accept the equation of cognitive science with cognitivism).

The debate thus recapitulates - though with new twiststhe typical oppositions within the human sciences. If, in the midst of this confusion, the fate of human experience has been left to the philosophers, their lack of agreement does not bode well.

Unless we move beyond these oppositions, the rift between science and experience in our society will deepen. Neither extreme is workable for a pluralistic society that must embrace both science and the actuality of human experience. To deny the truth of our own experience in the scientific study of ourselves is not only unsatisfactory; it is to render the scientific study of ourselves without a subject matter.

But to suppose that science cannot contribute to an understanding of our experience may be to abandon, within the modem context, the task of self-understanding. Experience and scientific understanding are like two legs without which we cannot walk.

We can phrase this very same idea in positive terms: it is only by having a sense of common ground between cognitive science and human experience that our understanding of cognition can be more complete and reach a satisfying level. We thus propose a constructive task: to enlarge the horizon of cognitive science to include the broader panorama of human, lived experience in a disciplined, transformative analysis. As a constructive task, the search for this expansion becomes motivated by scientific research itself, as we will see throughout this work.

the last pianoTao