Tao revised

René Magritte, La Clairvoyance, 1936

The witch, the sapta, the mystic, the schizophrenic, the fool, the prophet, the trickster, and the poet are all variants of the bus. (The witch traditionally has freedom in three dimensions. He or she is perhaps best symbolized by some flying, lurching, and dizzy vehicle such as a helicopter.) They all share a partial freedom that sets them at odds with the conventional world.

Long ago, in 1949, when psychiatrists still believed in lobotomy, I was a new member of the staff of the Veterans Administration Mental Hospital in Palo Alto. One day one of the residents called me aside to see the blackboard in our largest classroom. A lobotomy meeting had been held there that afternoon and the board was still unerased.

This was thirty years ago, of course, and nothing of the sort could happen today, but in those days lobotomy meetings were great social occasions. Everybody who had had anything to do with the case turned up – doctors, nurses, social workers, psychologists, and so on. Perhaps thirty or forty people were there, including the five-man Lobotomy Committee, under the chairmanship of an outside examiner, a distinguished psychiatrist from another hospital.

When all the tests and reports had been presented, the patient was brought in to be interviewed by the outside examiner.

The examiner gave the patient a piece of chalk and told him, “Draw the figure of a man.” The patient went obediently to the blackboard and wrote: DRAW THE FIGURE OF A MAN

The examiner said, “Don‘t write it. Draw it.” And again the patient wrote: Don‘t write it draw it The examiner said, “Oh, I give up.” This time the patient revised the definition of the context, which he had already used to assert a kind of freedom, and wrote in large capital letters all across the blackboard:

VICTORY

Innocence and Experience

101 Tao: 26

26. Trading Dialogue for Lodging

Provided he makes and wins an argument about Buddhism with those who live there any wandering monk can remain in a Zen temple. If he is defeated, he has to move on. In a temple in the northern part of Japan two brothers monks were dwelling together. The elder one was learned, but the younger one was stupid and had but one eye. A wandering monk came and asked for lodging properly challenging them to a debate about the sublime teaching.
The elder brother, tired that day from much studying, told the  younger one to take his place. 'Go and request the dialogue in silence,’ he cautioned.
So the young monk and the strange went to the shrine and sat down. Shortly afterwards the traveler rose and went in to the elder brother and said: 'Your young brother is a wonderful fellow. He defeated me.' 'Relate the dialogue to me,' said the elder one. 'Well,' explained the traveler,' first I held up one finger, representing Buddha, the enlightened one. So he held up two fingers, signifying Buddha and his teaching. I held up three fingers representing Buddha, his teaching, and his followers living the harmonious life. Then he shook his clenched fist in my face, indicating that all three come from one realization. Thus he won and so I have no right to remain here.' With this, the traveler left.
'Where is that fellow?' asked the younger one, running in to his elder brother. “I understand you won the debate.' 'Won nothing. I'm going to beat him up.' ‘Tell me the subject of the debate,' asked the elder one. 'Why, the minute he saw me he held up one finger, insulting me by insinuating that I have only one eye. Since he was a stranger I thought I would be polite to him, so I held up two fingers congratulating him that he her two eyes. Then the impolite wretch held up three fingers, suggesting that between us we only have three eyes. So I got mad and started to punch him, bur he ran out and that ended it.’

Tao components: awareness and energy

© Edgar Mueller

Introduced in the system analysis of the states of consciousness the three system components: awareness - energy and structures, Charles T. Tart illustrates their characteristics and interactions:

Awareness and Energy

We begin with a concept of some kind of basic awareness — an ability to know or sense or cognize or recognize that something is happening. This is a basic theoretical and experiential given. We do not know scientifically what its ultimate nature is, but it is where we start from. I call this concept attention/awareness, to relate it to another basic given, which is that we have some ability to direct this awareness from one thing to another.

This basic attention/awareness is something we can both conceptualize and (to some extent) experience as distinct from the particular content of awareness at any time. I am aware of a plant beside me at this moment of writing and if I turn my head I am aware of a chair. The function of basic awareness remains in spite of various changes in its content.

A second basic theoretical and experiential given is the existence, at times, of an awareness of being aware, self-awareness. The degree of self-awareness varies from moment to moment. At one extreme, I can be very aware that at this moment I am aware that I am looking at the plant beside me. At the other extreme, I may be totally involved in looking at the plant, but not be aware of being aware of it. There is an experiential continuum at one end of which attention/awareness and the particular content of awareness are essentially merged, and at the other end of which awareness of being aware exists in addition to the particular content of the awareness. In between are mixtures: at this moment of writing I am groping for clarity of the concept I want to express and trying out various phrases to see if they adequately express it. In low-intensity flashes, I have some awareness of what I am doing, but most of the time I am absorbed in this particular thought process. The lower end of the self-awareness continuum, relatively total absorption, is probably where we spend most of our lives, even though we like to credit ourselves with high self-awareness.

The relative rarity of self-awareness is a major contributor to neurotic qualities of behavior and to the classification of ordinary consciousness as illusion or waking dreaming by many spiritual systems... The higher end of the continuum of self-awareness comes to us even more rarely, although it may be sought deliberately in certain kinds of meditative practices, such as the Buddhist vipassana meditation...

The ultimate degree of self-awareness, of separation of attention/awareness from content, that is possible in any final sense varies with one's theoretical position about the ultimate nature of the mind. If one adopts the conventional view that mental activity is a product of brain functioning, thus totally controlled by the electrical-structural activity of brain functioning, there is a definite limit to how far awareness can back off form particular content, since that awareness is a product of the structure and content of the individual brain. This is a psychological manifestation of the physical principle of relativity... Although the feeling of being aware can have an objective quality, this conventional position holds that the objectivity is only relative, for the very function of awareness itself stems from and is shaped by the brain activity it is attempting to be aware of.

A more radical view, common to the spiritual psychologies, is that basic awareness is not just a property of the brain, but is (at least partially) something from outside the workings of the brain. Insofar as this is true, it is conceivable that most or all content associated with brain processes could potentially be stood back from so that the degree of separation between content and attention/awareness, the degree of self-awareness, is potentially much higher than in the conservative view.

Whichever ultimate view one takes, the psychologically important concept for studying consciousness is that the degree of experienced separation of attention/awareness from content varies considerably from moment to moment.

Attention/awareness can be volitionally directed to some extent. If I ask you to become aware of the sensations in your left knee now, you can do so. but few would claim anything like total ability to direct attention. If you are being burned by a flame, it is generally impossible to direct your attention/awareness to something else and not notice the pain at all, although this can be done by a few people in the ordinary d-SoC and by many more people in certain states of consciousness. Like the degree of separation of attention/awareness from content, the degree to which we can volitionally direct our attention/awareness also varies. Sometimes we can easily direct our thoughts according to a predetermined plan; at other times our minds wander with no regard at all for our plans.

Stimuli and structures attract or capture attention/awareness. When you are walking down the street, the sound and sight of an accident and a crowd suddenly gathering attract your attention to the incident. This attractive pull of stimuli and activated structures may outweigh volitional attempts to deploy attention/awareness elsewhere. For example, you worry over and over about a particular problem and are told that you are wasting energy by going around in circles and should direct your attention elsewhere. but, in spite of your desire to do so, you may find it almost impossible.

The ease with which particular kinds of structures and contents capture attention/awareness varies with the state of consciousness and the personality structure of the individual. For example, things that are highly valued or are highly threatening capture attention much more easily than things that bore us. Indeed, we can partially define personality as those structures that habitually capture a person's attention/awareness. In some states of consciousness, attention/awareness is more forcibly captivated by stimuli than in others.

Attention/awareness constitutes the major energy of the mind, as we usually experience it. Energy is here used in its most abstract sense — the ability to do work, to make something happen. Attention/awareness is energy (1) in the sense that structures having no effect on consciousness at a given time can be activated if attended to; (2) in the sense that structures may draw attention/awareness energy automatically, habitually, as a function of personality structure, thus keeping a kind of low-level, automated attention in them all the time (these are our long-term desires, concerns, phobias, blindnesses); and (3) in the sense that attention/awareness energy may inhibit particular structures from functioning. The selective redistribution of attention/awareness energy to desired ends is a key aspect of innumerable systems that have been developed to control the mind. The concept of psychological energy is usually looked upon with disfavor by psychologists because it is difficult to define clearly. Yet various kinds of psychological energies are direct experiential realities. I am, for example, full of energy for writing at this moment. When interrupted a minute ago, I resented having to divert this energy from writing to dealing with a different issue. Last night I was tired; I felt little energy available to do what I wished to do. Those who prefer to give priority to observations about the body and nervous system in their thinking would tell me that various chemicals in my bloodstream were responsible for these varied feelings. But "chemicals in my bloodstream" is a very intellectual, abstract concept to me, while the feelings of energy and of tiredness are direct experiences for me and most other people. So we must consider psychological energy in order to keep our theorizing close to experience.

I cannot deal in any detail with psychological energy at this stage of development of the systems approach, for we know little about it. Clearly, changing the focus of attention (as in trying to sense what is happening in your left knee) has effects: it starts, stops, and alters psychological processes. Also, attention/awareness is not the only form of psychological energy. Emotions, for example, constitute a very important kind of energy, different in quality from simple attention/awareness shifts, but interacting with attention/awareness as an energy. So while this book deals concept of psychological energy is much more complex and is one of the major areas to be developed in the future.

Note that the total amount of attention/awareness energy available to a person varies from time to time, but there may be some fixed upper limit on it for a particular day or other time period. Some days, we simply cannot concentrate well no matter how much we desire it; other days we seem able to focus clearly, to use lots of attention to accomplish things. We talk about exhausting our ability to pay attention, and it may be that the total amount of attention/awareness energy available is fixed for various time periods under ordinary conditions.

Tao psicothesis

Sigmund Freud has done great work in creating psychoanalysis, but it is only half.
The other half is psychosynthesis done by Assagioli – but it too is only half, the other half.

It is not that he is right and Freud is wrong; both are wrong taken separately.
They are right only when they are put together.

Psychothesis* is the whole. 
* Thesis, latin, from greek ϑέσις (position, something which is placed), derivation of τίϑημι, set, placed.

Tao neither supernatural nor mechanical - II

The beliefs of the counterculture and of the human potential movement may be superstitious and irrational, but their reason for being and indeed the reason for the growth of that whole movement in the 1970 was a good reason. It was to generate that buffer of diversity that will protect the human being against obsolescence. The older beliefs have ceased to provide either explanation or confidence. The integrity of leaders in government, industry, and education who live by the old beliefs has become suspect. The dimly felt obsolescence is central to – and at the root of – the epistemological nightmare of the twentieth century. It should now be possible to find a more stable theoretical stance. We need such a stance to limit the excesses both of the materialists and these who flirt with the supernatural. And further, we need a revised philosophy and epistemology to reduce the intolerance that divides the two camps. “A plague on both your houses!” Mercutio exclaims as he dies.

And I assert that we know enough today to expect that this improved istance will be unitary, and that the conceptual separation between mind and matter will be seen to be a by-product of – a spin-off from – an insufficient holism. When we focus too narrowly upon the parts, we fail to see the necessary characteristics of the whole, and are then tempted to ascribe the phenomena which result from wholeness to some supernatural entity. People who read what I have written too often get from my writing some support for supernatural ideas which they certainly entertained before they read my work. I have never knowingly provided such support, and the false impression which, it seems, I give is a barrier between them and me. I do not know what to do except to make abundantly clear what opinions I hold regarding the supernatural on the one hand and the mechanical on the other. Very simply, let me say that I despise and fear both of these extremes of opinion and that I believe both extremes to be epistemologically naive, epistemologically wrong, and politically dangerous. They are also dangerous to something which we may loosely call mental health. My friends urge me to listen to more stories of the supernatural, to subject myself to various sorts of experience, and to meet more practitioners of the improbable. They say I am being narrow-minded in this connection. Indeed so. After all, I am by bent and training sceptical, even about sense data. I do believe – really I do – that there is some connection between my experience and what is happening out there to affect my sense organs. But I treat that connection not as matter-of-course but as very mysterious and requiring much investigation. Like other people, I normally experience much that does not happen out there. When I aim my eyes at what I think is a tree, I receive an image of something green. But that image is not out there. To believe that is itself a form of superstition, for the image is a creation of my own, shaped and colored by many circumstances, including my preconceptions.

Tao neither supernatural nor mechanical - I

we all have a Tao to cry for

Perigeo

Tony Sidney (guitar)

Bruno Biriaco (drums)

Giovanni Tommaso (cello and bass)

Claudio Fasoli (sax)

Franco D'Andrea (keyboards)

forms of the Tao mind

After defining the phenomenological-epistemological horizon of their guidelines Varela, Rosch and Thompson outline the several approaches and paradigms of the cognitive sciences:

What Is Cognitive Science?

In its widest sense the term cognitive science is used to indicate that the study of mind is in itself a worthy scientific pursuit. At this time cognitive science is not yet established as a mature science. It does not have a clearly agreed upon sense of direction and a large number of researchers constituting a community, as is the case with, say, atomic physics or molecular biology. Rather, it is really more of a loose affiliation of disciplines than a discipline of its own. Interestingly, an important pole is occupied by artificial intelligence - thus the computer model of the mind is a dominant aspect of the entire field. The other affiliated disciplines are generally taken to consist of linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, sometimes anthropology, and the philosophy of mind. Each discipline would give a somewhat different answer to the question of what is mind or cognition, an answer that would reflect its own specific concerns. The future development of cognitive science is therefore far from clear, but what has already been produced has had a distinct impact, and this may well continue to be the case.

From Alexandre Koyre to Thomas Kuhn, modem historians and philosophers have argued that scientific imagination mutates radically from one epoch to another and that the history of science is more like a novelistic saga than a linear progression. In other words, there is a human history of nature, a story that is well worth telling in more than one way. Alongside such a human history of nature there is a corresponding history of ideas about human self-knowledge. Consider, for example, Greek physics and the Socratic method or Montaigne's essays and early French science. This history of selfknowledge in the West remains to be fully explored. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that precursors of what we now call cognitive science have been with us all along, since the human mind is the closest and most familiar example of cognition and knowledge.

In this parallel history of mind and nature, the modem phase of cognitive science may represent a distinct mutation. At this time, science (i.e., the collection of scientists who define what science must be) not only recognizes that the investigation of knowledge itself is legitimate but also conceives of knowledge in a broad, interdisciplinary perspective, well beyond the traditional confines of epistemology and psychology. This mutation, only some thirty years old, was dramatically introduced through the "cognitivist" program (discussed later), much as the Darwinian program inaugurated the scientific study of evolution even though others had been concerned with evolution before.

Furthermore, through this mutation, knowledge has become tangibly and inextricably linked to a technology that transforms the social practices which make that very knowledge possible-artificial intelligence being the most visible example. Technology, among other things, acts as an amplifier. One cannot separate cognitive science and cognitive technology without robbing one or the other of its vital complementary element. Through technology, the scientific exploration of mind provides society at large with an unprecedented mirror of itself, well beyond the circle of the philosopher, the psycholo gist, the therapist, or any individual seeking insight into his own experience.

This mirror reveals that for the first time Western society as a whole is confronted in its everyday life and activities with such issues as: Is mind a manipulation of symbols? Can language be understood by a machine? These concerns directly touch people's lives; they are not merely theoretical. Thus it is hardly surprising that there is a constant interest in the media about cognitive science and its associated technology and that artificial intelligence has deeply penetrated the minds of the young through computer games and science fiction. This popular interest is a sign of a deep transformation: For millenia human beings have had a spontaneous understanding of their own experience - one embedded in and nourished by the larger context of their time and culture. Now, however, this spontaneous folk understanding has become inextricably linked to science and can be transformed by scientific constructions.

Many deplore this event, while others rejoice. What is undeniable is that the event is happening, and at an ever increasing speed and depth. We feel that the creative interpenetration among research scientists, technologists, and the general public holds a potential for the profound transformation of human awareness. We find this possibility fascinating and see it as one of the most interesting adventures open to everyone today. We offer this book as (we hope) a meaningful contribution to that trans formative conversation.

Throughout this book, we will emphasize the diversity of visions within cognitive science. In our eyes, cognitive science is not a monolithic field, though it does have, as does any social activity, poles of domination so that some of its participating voices acquire more force than others at various periods of time. Indeed, this sociological aspect of cognitive science is striking, for the "cognitive revolution" of the past four decades was strongly influenced through specific lines of research and funding in the United States.

Nevertheless, our bias here will be to emphasize diversity. We propose to look at cognitive science as consisting of three successive stages ... to help orient the reader, we will provide a short overview of these stages here. We have drawn them in the form of a "polar" map with three concentric rings:

The three stages correspond to the successive movement from center to periphery; each ring indicates an important shift in the theoretical framework within cognitive science. Moving around the circle, we have placed the major disciplines that constitute the field of cognitive science. Thus we have a conceptual chart in which we can place the names of various researchers whose work is both representative and will appear in the discussion that follows .

Some textbook representative of the reductionist-cognitivist-interactionist approach to the consciousness and the Self.
The Minsky text is the paradigm of the symbolic approach to the mind and the basic text for Artificial Intelligence.
The Damasio text is the classic (and the only possible) "from bottom" approach to the emergence of the consciousness and Self  practicable in the neurosciences field: the Self existence is taken for granted (since it is an obvious common and consensual experience) and then proceeding to define several parts and qualities liable to research.
The Popper and Eccles text is a mixture between epistemology and neuroscience, where it is hypothesized the existence of the "ghost in the machine", that is that there are secret recesses within that hide an existing Self and which don't allow a complete neuroscientific explanation.
The Crick text, the founder of molecular biology, takes in materialism terms that consciousness (and even the soul hypothesis) may be completely explained on a neuroscience basis.

We begin … with the center or core of cognitive science, known generally as cognitivism. The central tool and guiding metaphor of cognitivism is the digital computer . A computer is a physical device built in such a way that a particular set of its physical changes can be interpreted as computations . A computation is an operation performed or carried out on symbols, that is, on elements that represent what they stand for. (For example, the symbol "7" represents the number 7.) Simplifying for the moment, we can say that cognitivism consists in the hypothesis that cognition-human cognition included-is the manipulation of symbols after the fashion of digital computers. In other words, cognition is mental representation: the mind is thought to operate by manipulating symbols that represent features of the world or represent the world as being a certain way. According to this cognitivist hypothesis, the study of cognition qua mental representation provides the proper domain of cognitive science, a domain held to be independent of neurobiology at one end and sociology and anthropology at the other.

Cognitivism has the virtue of being a well-defined research program, complete with prestigious institutions, journals, applied technology, and international commercial concerns. We refer to it as the center or core of cognitive science because it dominates research to such an extent that it is often simply taken to be cognitive science itself. In the past few years, however, several alternative approaches to cognition have appeared. These approaches diverge from cognitivism along two basic lines of dissent: (1) a critique of symbol processing as the appropriate vehicle for representations, and (2) a critique of the adequacy of the notion of representation as the Archimedes point for cognitive science.

The first alternative, which we call emergence … is typically referred to as connectionism. This name is derived from the idea that many cognitive tasks (such as vision and memory) seem to be handled best by systems made up of many simple components, which, when connected by the appropriate rules, give rise to global behavior corresponding to the desired task. Symbolic processing, however, is localized. Operations on symbols can be specified using only the physical form of the symbols, not their meaning. Of course, it is this feature of symbols that enables one to build a physical device to manipulate them. The disadvantage is that the loss of any part of the symbols or the rules for their manipulation results in a serious malfunction. Connnectionist models generally trade localized, symbolic processing for distributed operations (ones that extend over an entire network of components) and so result in the emergence of global properties resilient to local malfunction. For connectionists a representation consists in the correspondence between such an emergent global state and properties of the world; it is not a function of particular symbols.

The second alternative … is born from a deeper dissatisfaction than the connectionist search for alternatives to symbolic processing. It questions the centrality of the notion that cognition is fundamentally representation. Behind this notion stand three fundamental assumptions. The first is that we inhabit a world with particular properties, such as length, color, movement, sound, etc. The second is that we pick up or recover these properties by internally representing them. The third is that there is a separate subjective "we" who does these things. These three assumptions amount to a strong, often tacit and unquestioned, commitment to realism or objectivism/subjectivism about the way the world is, what we are, and how we come to know the world. Even the most hard-nosed biologist, however, would have to admit that there are many ways that the world is-indeed even many different worlds of experience - depending on the structure of the being involved and the kinds of distinctions it is able to make. And even if we restrict our attention to human cognition, there are many various ways the world can be taken to be.s This nonobjectivist (and at best also nonsubjectivist) conviction is slowly growing in the study of cognition. As yet, however, this alternative orientation does not have a well-established name, for it is more of an umbrella that covers a relatively small group of people working in diverse fields. We propose as a name the term enactive to emphasize the growing conviction that cognition is not the representation of a pregiven world by a pregiven mind but is rather the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs. The enactive approach takes seriously, then, the philosophical critique of the idea that the mind is a mirror of nature but goes further by addressing this issue from within the heartland of science.