Life is like a box of chocolate.
– Forrest Gump
Overture
By now you should be able to identify what affect, emotion, perception, and memory feel like in the body. We might say they compose different dispositional states, or arise from different arousal energies, or are different streams of flow, or activate different kinds of flux in those streams. In this module, we are going to make another discernment in our bodies between those modes, and the modes we call imagination, primarily, but I will make the case that imagination depends on a kind of inner synaesthesia*.*
Note that I am spelling this word differently from its normal spelling (synesthesia) because I am alluding to a different experience. Ordinary synesthesia is when the stimulus of one sense organ activates another sense-organ’s qualia. For example, when I hear a sound, say major C, I may also “see” it as the color blue. Many synesthetes see letters and numbers as colors, and some see the months of the year or days of the weeks as colors. 1
By contrast, synaesthesia is the way that neurotypical minds work. (I actually consider synesthesia to be the explication of synaesthesia. Synaesthesia is meant to connote both the synthetic or combinatorial nature of the imagination, the kinaesthetic sensibility, and the aesthetic nature of the imagination. This is to say that the nature of the imagination is to combine things in ways to make them more beautiful, or pleasing. Here “pleasing” can be construed at base level as the “satisfaction of arousal energy,” or in more complex ways. It might be “pleasing” to imagine a whole convoluted story about people, with lots of drama in it, in the same way that people find watching TV series pleasing.
I think this notion of synaesthesia is important for a new theory of the body, because I believe we are on the verge of an epochal shift in the kinds of minds we have--- namely turning away from the dialectic-synthetic rationality and turning towards a pragmatic and inductive-synaesthetic reasoning. 2 But first, we must start with the imagination.
Imagination
As we build our taxonomy of embodied experience, it is important to distinguish what we mean by “imagination” from what we mean by “virtual perception.” Virtual perception is the simulation of the real external environment in one’s mind. Imagination manipulates virtual perceptions into forms, or varietes that one has never encountered in the real world.
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I can have a virtual perception of a horse, but I have to imagine a green and orange spotted unicorn with lipstick on riding a skateboard through Manhattan
Tying this back to our sessions on memory, then, we can see that memory involves re-collecting virtual perceptions, of past real events, but often also includes imaginary components in order to satisfy the present conditions. 3 We noted before that animals can run simulations in their environment, in order to solve real-world problems without having to go through all the trouble of physical trial and error. These simulations draw on memory, and add novel events to achieve hypothetical results. We work out what might be better and worse approaches to the situation, by adding imaginative content to the simulation— the what if?
Imagination is also extremely helpful in revealing absences --- the *what is missing? *By imagining “counterfactuals” --- an intentional use of what is not the case, but could be the case, we can imagine new ways to think and act in the world. We can imagine a future that follows an existing trajectory (with the help of narrative memory) or we can carry ourselves forward, imaginatively, by entering a simulation of a reality that doesn’t yet exist. In philosophy, this is called “speculative philosophy.” Probably more than anyone, Whitehead emphasized the power of speculative ontology --- imagining new worlds, new bases for reality:
Whitehead took great pains to outline a practical methodology for speculative ontology. For him, speculative ontology means to form a theory of reality, with a freely acting, imaginative mind. Taking speculative ontology as a serious philosophical pursuit means the possibility of disclosing worlds that could be possible, which otherwise do not seem possible, given the set of constraints on the metaphysics of ontology conventional to one’s domain, culture and/or milieu. Whitehead believed that speculative philosophy could be productive of important, undiscovered knowledge if one “endeavor[ed] to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience [could] be interpreted”.
He thought that speculative philosophy, if done right, could be a work-around in lieu of the logical positivists’ efforts to found a metaphysics of reason based on strict categories of logic and mathematics. Instead, Whitehead emphasized imagination, intuition, experience and essence. “Here is what we have in our intuition and experience,” he might have spoken in a casual conversation. “How can we use our imagination to derive a theory of essence that accounts for them?” He could have said, without any special inflection, “Suppose we assume we know nothing about reality. Yet here it is, this existence. It holds together. There must be some essential necessities. And here it is, this inquiring mind, these feelings of curiosity and intimacy. They must be adequate and applicable to them.”
Writing alongside the great logical positivists, Whitehead was adamant that useful metaphysical principles were not to be captured by logical reasoning, but rather, through flashes of insight that propagated through “the play of free imagination, controlled by the requirements of coherence and logic”. This, “true method of discovery” he likened to the flight of an airplane: “It starts from the ground of particular observations; it makes a flight into thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation”. from Why Metaphysics Matters, Bonnitta Roy
Imagination, thus far described, arises from an arousal state and flows toward satisfaction either by working out a problem, decreasing anxiety by carrying forward the present into the future, revealing absences, or creatively entertaining alternative worlds. This we might call pragmatic imagination.
Imagination also plays a crucial role in dreaming which occurs in periods of REM sleep. In dream states, the imagination is not pinned to hypothetical real-world considerations. Rather, in dream states we simulate novel environments by mixing fragments of some memories with fragments of others. This is an important method for accelerating learning in animals. Research done around rats learning mazes, has clearly shown that while dreaming, rats simulate novel mazes, constructed of parts of different mazes they have learned, and learn how to run the simulated mazes. Hence, given that there is a high probability that they will be exposed to new mazes, they have already learned how to navigate in different sequences.
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Dreaming is imagination untethered to present needs or future expectation.
Imagination slips into day-dreaming in much the same way. Day-dreaming is less pragmatic, and more like fantasy. Imagination gets us into trouble when it moves into fantasy but we mistake that fantasy for pragmatic purposes. Fantasy can de-couple our imaginations from habituated patterns that get us stuck, much like going on vacation to get a new perspective on life. Once you get back into pragmatic purposes, you hope to find your imaginative powers to be more fluid, more relaxed and more creative, but you don’t want to fall back into fantasy.
While Whitehead adamantly argued for the role of the imagination, he was no fool, and warned of getting swept away into flights of fancy by reifying the imaginative ideas. Imagination is one of the creative arts, and imaginative ideas are its creations. He warned us of philosophical sophists who “wallow on the hook of reification while nibbling on the bait of imaginative reasoning:”
Right up front in his introduction to his magnus opus, Process and Reality, he cautions us:
“There remains in the final reflection, how shallow, how puny, and imperfect are efforts to sound the depths in the nature of things. In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement, is an exhibition of folly. (Roy, Why Metaphysics Matters)
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Put my eyes out: I can still see: slam my ears shut: I can still hear, walk without fret to where you were, and tonguelss, speak you into being. Snap off my arms: I’ll hold you hard in my heart’s longing like a fist; halt that, my brain will do its beating, and if you set this mind of mind aflame, then on my blood I’ll carry you away.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Synaesthesia
I first came to think about the possible transformation in consciousness assynaesthesia, from a book I read over 20 years ago: Harry T. Hunt’s On the Nature of Consciousness. Although he himself was a transpersonal psychologist and mystic, Hunt dedicated his project to “the necessity of physical metaphor for any description of consciousness, with its implications of an inseparability of consciousness and world.”
Hunt wanted to integrate ideas from transpersonal psychology, meditative and altered states of consciousness, mystical experience with the views of consciousness in cognitive science, neurophysiology and animal psychology, and he put perceptual awareness as the core of consciousness as shared across species, and viewed human self-referential symbolic consciousness as continuous with that by reason of being based on a capacity for cross-modal translation and transformation among multiple perceptual modalities.
In other words, Hunt had a hunch that human consciousness was a result of more interconnections and cross modal interactions between the different perceptual systems, including the kinesthetic and other bodily sensations. Put simply, human consciousness arises not because we have more wires in our perceptual brains, but because those wires are crossed many more times over. 4
Hunt’s idea predates the work of Lakoff and Johnson (among others) who see semantic properties of human cognition as arising from “metaphors” and “conceptual blending.” These “linguistic constructions” occur at the subconscious level and we will take them up in the next module of the course.5 Hunt said something deeper was happening at the unconscious level. He said that metaphorical thinking and conceptual blending come from the fact that our perceptual systems are already blending information among themselves.
Hunt surmised that the transpersonal and mystical were heightened, or hyper-active versions of cross-modal synesthesia--- which I am now referring to as synaesthesia. 6 Hunt also equates human collective intelligence with the ability for people to enter synaesthetic compositions with each other, which are capable of translating different cultural, experiential and perspectival difference into a richly blended synaesthetic collective consciousness. 7
Accordingly then, synasthetics precedes the metaphor, because it is born in the perceptual and sensorial organs of the body, before it rises “up the hierarchy” into the fields of the imagination. Like rising dough due to the activities of living yeast, imagination begins in the activities of the sensorial and perceptual organs which are already entangled and inter-interactive; begins to rise from the cross-modal echoes of them, and finally coalesces as virtualized representations in the mind.
Of course, the process doesn’t stop there, as the virtual representations further function as stimuli that arouse the body sensorium into novel states of cross-modal processing, generating a virtuous cycle (or viciously psychical) imaginal creativity.
Since the imaginal comes from the body sensorium, few scientists ever detect where or how their breakthrough ideas come from, given the strong bias they have against the “lower” processes of the animal bodymind. The philosopher-psychologist Eugene Gendlin, however, built his entire legacy around the experience of these factors and processes, which he called the felt sense.
Now we have a rigorous way to discern what is happening when people claim to be following Gendlin’s “TAE” (thinking at the edge) process, and when they are not. TAE must start in the body sensorium, not in the patterns of memory, imagination or thought. When memory, imagination or thought predispose the body sensorium to activate cross-modal processing, the practice is effectively driven from top-down, not bottom-up, as is necessary in Gendlin’s work. Furthermore, “bottom-up” doesn’t mean from the depths of your body up. It requires participation of body sensorium at the depths of world itself. The better one is at getting to these depths, the more one experiences the felt sense as something the world is saying, not something my body is saying. The saying, therefore, lives in the world, and opening up the felt sense is fundamentally like opening up a communications cable at the interface of self and world.
Gendlin’s other practice “focusing” then becomes a process of opening up a communications cable at the interface of self and world, *in the presence of another *who is also communicating directly from the world in the same way. Notice that this is not inherently dialogic or intersubjective, it is the world opening up to itself. Hence it is transubjective and *aperspectival. *In his life work, Gendlin had often argued for “a new theory of the body”, which he believed would come through the power of thinking at the edge. Until Gendlin, there were two competing theories around bodily relation with the surrounding world: “mediational” and “contact.”
According to the first, we have no meaningful relationship to the outside world except through intermediate terms (for example, sense data, images, representations); for the second, we are directly contiguous with the world at all time, and this basic contact sanctions knowledge about its contents.8 Eugene Gendlin took up a third approach whereby:
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the body ingresses into its environment
Empathic Projection
One of the most powerful ways we can use our synaesthetic capacities, avoids using imaginary (virtual) images to articulate our felt-sense, but to hone our perceptual organs such that what we are perceiving “in the outer world” is creating an empathic resonance in our own felt sense. In this vein, instead of perception giving us the feeling that objects are “out there” being perceived, we get the distinct and clear impression that the objects are being invited to indwell in our own being. There is a continuous flow from self to world, but the more precise word is “flux” since every ingress is a transformational moment for the self both as subject of experience and subject to the experience of the world.
Too few people are expressing this capacity, which for me is a thousand times more sacred and significant to the kinds of “spiritual” excursions into “liminal space” that seem to serve only the self-obsessed ego, tripping out on its own capacities for entertaining state experiences. Empathic projection has the power to mend the fragmentation and alienation between self, other and world, offering a path toward planetary healing, human thriving, and a flourishing life force, not to mention how it automatically re-enchants the world.
Finally, I want to make the distinction between reverence and reverie. Reverie is a state experience that takes you out of the world, and into a state of bliss. It is most often a dissociated state. Reverence is a perceptual embrace of the world and other beings as sacred. It pulls you toward belonging and communion and kinship, based on a first-person exchange of inner-being to inner-being. It is the foundation of what is called “inner-beingness” or “interbeing” or “interpenetration” often conceptualized as “symbiogenesis” or “sympoeisis.”
On Being Blue (William Gass) - a synaesthetic excerpt
[A good exercise would be to read this out aloud to yourself, and see if you can stream with all the modal changes.]
So to the wretched writer I should like to say that there’s one body only whose request for your caresses is not vulgar, is not unchaste, untoward, or impolite: the body of your work itself; for you must remember that your attentions will not merely celebrate a beauty but create one; that your is love that brings its own birth with it, … and that you should therefore give up the blue things of this world in favor of the words which say them: blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings, the language of birds, bees, and flowers as sung by longshoremen, that lead-like look the skin has when affected by cold, contusion, sickness, fear … chant and pray, since the day may begin badly, in a soggy light that moistens the soul before consciousness has cracked so every thought is damp as an anxious forehead, desire won’t spark, and the morning prick is limp … consequently speak and praise, for the fall of the spirit, descending like a diver toward the floor of the ocean, is marked by increasing darkness, green giving way to navy, then a hair-wide range of hues which come to rest, among the snowing fish and plants pale as paper, in a sightless night; and our lines are long when under water, loose and weedy, running back upon themselves like the legs of a dying spider; we grow slack of feature in our melancholy, and the blue which marks the change is heavy, thick as ooze … so shout and celebrate before the shade conceals the window: blue bloods, balls and bonnets, beards, coats, collars, chips, and cheese … while there is time and you are able, because when blue has left the edges of its objects as if the world were bleached of it, when the wide blue eye has shut down for the season, when there’s nothing left but language … watered twilight, sour sea … don’t find yourself clergy’d out of choir and chorus … sing and say … despite the belly ache and loneliness, new bumpled fat and flaking skin and drunkenness and helpless rage, despite dumps, mopes, Mondays, sheets like dirty plates, tomorrow falling toward you like a tower, lie in wait for that miraculous moment when in your mouth teeth turn into dragons and you against the odds what Demosthenes did by the Aegean: shape pebbles into syllables and make stones sound; thus cautioned and encouraged, commanded, warned, persist … even though the mattress where you mourn’s been tipped and those corners where the nickles roll slid open like a slot to swallow them, clocks slow, and there’s been perhaps a pouring rain, of factory smoke, an aging wind and winter air, and everything is gray.
~ William Gass, September, 1975
One of the most common and primal versions of synaesthesia is how musical chords come to be felt as emotions. See for example
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Footnotes
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It is interesting to note that what colors are associated with which letters, numbers, months or days varys wisely across synesthetes. For a fascinating example, see Daniel Tammet, the man who could recount pi to 22,000 numerals, by painting a landscape in his mind
See
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As you may remember, the dialectic-synthetic is an upward path that starts with thesis, antithesis, and resolves them into a higher, more complex, synthetic whole. This new term, functions as a new thesis, which must face its own antithesis. Ad infinitum.
Unlike the dialectic-synthetic rational mind, the new mind does not construe reality as sets of opponent parts (dualism) --- which had been comprehensively laid out since the days of Plotinus. With process philosophy, Hartshorne demonstrated a new relationship between categories of “ultimate contrasts” (ex: one/many; subject/object; whole/part), by parsing relationships into mutually dependent asymetrical pairs and discerning the difference between internal and external relations. With this move also comes the shift from judgmental rationalism --- which is a severe kind of cut between the good, the true and the beautiful, to evaluative reasoning --- which is a process of discernment between things seen as related. Here, instead of the faculty of rational judgment, the mind draws more on the faculty of aesthetic judgment. The difference being that rational judgment evaluates things as mutually exclusive (right or wrong) whereas aesthetic judgment evaluates the experience of things as we are in relation to them. Aesthetic judgment can appreciate the art, but it cannot adjudicate one masterpiece over another. We will come back to this when we talk about the moral animal, and the incommensurability of values. Here, also, we don’t see categories in terms of contrasts, but in terms of processes of enfoldment and unfolding in a kind of rolling-tumbling over iterative way. As Whitehead famously said “The many become one and are increased by one.” which is a beautiful, but somewhat cryptic way to say the many become one and then are once again increased by one, to begin the becoming-many arc of the cycle. These will be important concepts as we proceed. Just keep them in the back of your mind for now. ↩
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There is a collective memory version of this, too: Walter Benjamin wrote of collective historical memory’s motivation to “blast a unique experience of the past out of the continuum of history” in order to wrestle meaning from the past for the present.
↩An episode of the past interests us so much only as it becomes an episode of the present wherein our thoughts, actions and strategies are decided… What interests us is that ideas be events, that history will be at all times a break, a rupture, to be interrogated only from the perspective of the here and now, and only politically …
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It appears that cross-modal synaesthesia draws on the role of the hippocampus and the nature of its connections with the Rhinal cortex where somatic and perceptual information “converge” before they reach the hippocampal memory system, and notes that “while the primate neocortex has several convergence zones, fewer such areas exist in the neocortex of other mammals.”
From The Synaptic Self by Joseph LeDoux
↩It’s important to reflect for a moment on the nature of these connections and their implications for what the hippocampus and rhinal areas do. The rhinal areas serve as “convergence zones,” brain regions that integrate information across sensory modalities and create representations that are independent of the original modality through which the information was processed. As a result, sights, sounds, and smells can be put together in the form of a global memory of a situation. (p.104) Convergence zones also allow mental representations to go beyond perceptions to become conceptions--- they make possible abstract representations that are independent of the concrete stimulus. … Because the [human] hippocampus receives inputs from several convergence zones in the rhinal region, it can be thought of as a superconvergence zone. (p.105)
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These linguistic and symbolic constructions are the foundations of representational thinking. They take the form of metaphors which can be of various sorts: Saying “x is like y” , saying “x and y are like z” or saying “x is an instance of y” (or vice versa) or saying “x and y are instances of z”. These constructions form the very possibility of abstract thinking, but are prone to all kinds of errors because they constrain thought to the constructs we use to think. For example, saying “we are in nature” is a metaphorical construction, but what form does it take? Do we mean we are in nature the way candy is *in *a box? Reconstructing, recomposing our way of being in the world depends upon identifying, examining, and re-imagining, from first principles of intuitive knowing, the interaction metaphors we use to make sense of the world and create fields of shared meaning. ↩
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I often wonder if my term has something to do with Gebser’s notion of synairesis, which he construed as a “new kind of statement.” Synairesis comes from synaireo, which means to collect, “notably in the sense of everything being seized or grasped on all sides, particularly by mind or spirit. Like my notion of synaesthetic, Gebser contrasts synairesis with the Mental dialectic-synthetic logics, which always falls apart because the perspectival mind continually fragments the new thesis into new dualistic pairs. Unlike the logos of the Mental structure, synairesis is sympoetic, or mutually enfolding of perceptual elements from an aperspectival vantage point, and gives rise to *diaphaneity, *in which the whole is “seen through” as the illuminated and transparent truth-dimension. ↩
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Reading his book again now, after all these years, I am struck with how resonant his project is with ours today. He writes, “I seek to place consciousness at the defining center of cognition, as a capacity for sensitive attunement to a surround traceable down to protozoa. In the much-debated relation of consciousness and mind, I reduce the latter (mind) to the former (consciousness). Consciousness is not a “mechanism” to be “explained” cognitively or neurophysiologically, but a categorical “primitive” that definds the level of analysis that is psychology. Its existence may become a fundamental problem for a holistic, field-theoretical biology of the future, but for the human sciences, it is the context of our being. ↩
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~ Robert Parker, forward to A Process Model by Eugene Gendlin ↩