Primacy of the Abstract / Cognitive Hermeneutics / Wushin
I've been reading and re-reading Hayek's essay on "The Primacy of the Abstract" and am once again struck by both his depth of insight and the importance of his peculiar way of thinking in obtaining those insights. The subtle nugget in this case is that while we tend to think of mental activity as involving a progression from concretes to abstracts-apples, stop signs, and male cardinals all being subsumed under the class of "red things", for example-the reality is that what we think of as concrete things are actually superimpositions of a large number of abstract categories-red thing, round thing, smooth thing, soft thing, etc.-and that neurologically it's abstracts that are the primary elements out of which our experience is constructed.
The cognitive illusion that makes us think of concretes as primary is a combination of two things, one an inevitable consequence of the way consciousness works and the other a peculiarly human accident: First, the rapidity with which the brain orders sensory categorizations into a coherent model makes the process appear introspectively instantaneous to us; secondly, humans have developed a specialized brain subsystem that takes these pre-processed mental representations and indexes them to a subset of other, simpler representations, re-abstracting them as a way of readily conjuring their referents when those referents happen to be absent. (You know, words.) And as Quine says in the first page of Word and Object:
"Linguistically, and hence conceptually, the things in sharpest focus are the things that are public enough to be talked of publicly, common and conspicuous enough to be talked of often, and near enough to sense to be quickly identified and learned by name; it is to these that words apply first and foremost."
Language carves the world at its joints, chunking your mental model into familiar middle-sized objects, and secondary/reflective consciousness depends on language, so no wonder we treat objects as fundamental conceptual elements. And this leads to a third fact that conspires to hide the primacy of the abstract from us, which is that until we've developed some crude semantic capabilities we can't have declarative memory, which is why you don't remember what it was like to be a newborn and thus can't remember a time before your sensory order was reasonably well developed. If you could, you'd probably remember it as being a little like living in a cubist painting.
That simile wasn't plucked out of the air, either: In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks recounts the tale of a patient, Dr. P, who had a tumor that progressively consumed most of the right hemisphere of his brain. He was a music professor and an artist, by all accounts a sharp and articulate person, but as the years went on he started making some very queer mistakes in his day-to-day navigation of the world around him-patting a fire hydrant on the head as if it were a child, for example. He gradually lost his capacity for holistic thinking: If you handed him a complex object and asked him what it was, he'd describe it exhaustively in very abstract terms-"this is a long narrow shaft, it's flexible, it's green, there's a soft bulbous growth at one end", that sort of thing-but often wouldn't be able to tell you what it was qua object (e.g. "this is a flower").
He was unable to recognize faces and had to guess at who someone was by individual salient features-bushy eyebrows, tone of voice, gait, and so forth. He could quote, from memory, descriptive passages from books without being able to show any concrete comprehension of what the phrases were describing. In order to get through something as simple as eating and getting dressed in the morning, he had to formulate an algorithmic routine (using music he'd hum or whistle to keep himself on schedule) and if any interruption threw him off he'd freeze up and become utterly lost until someone nudged him back into the point where he left off. (The similarity to a computer program is almost too obvious.)
His artwork over the period of the tumor's progression tells a revealing story, once you know what to look for: It starts out very realist and full of readily identifiable objects, then going forward in time becomes increasingly cubist and eventually abstract to the point of unintelligibility. What others took to be an artistic progression was in fact the progression of neurological damage; the suggestion Sacks draws from this is that as his capacity for holistic conceptualization degraded, out of necessity he had to lean more and more heavily on the more linear, abstract reasoning faculties of his brain, which by Hayek's lights would bring him back full circle to a more primitive way of experiencing the world (with the added benefit of language and the added constraint of only being able to process things serially). When faced with things we would instantly recognize, what Dr. P saw was, to quote Ashby yet again, "not a thing but a list of variables".
Which is precisely the mirror image of samadhi, the state of mind that follows when the linguistic centers of your brain responsible for reflective thought quiet down, whether due to intense focus, total mental relaxation, or struggling to exhaustion, leaving you only with primary awareness. But they don't generally stay quiet for long, and when your secondary consciousness comes back online it can be a hell of an experience: "That movement of coming out of samadhi, and seeing it for what it is, that is satori." (D.T. Suzuki)
In trying to make sense of this experience, there's a big opening for confusion, which is why the old Zen master Suigan Shushi famously said that "the monk who attains satori goes to hell as straight as an arrow". I've seen modern commentators on Buddhism, including some like Watts who really should know better, misleadingly refer this experience as "direct perception of reality". But the above considerations should bring home that it's nothing of the sort, at least not in the sense of granting you access to das ding an sich-nothing can do that, short of actually being das ding in question. And there's the trick: Satori is not the conferral of anything new but rather the removal (if only momentarily) of something that was there before-it's the state of your nonlinguistic brain processes being unblocked by your linguistic ones; a state of being aware yet not trying to grasp. What it gives you is wushin, your own mind unfiltered by the leaky net of linguistic re-abstraction, including the abstraction you refer to as "I".
Chao-chou: What is Tao?
Nan-chuan: Your everyday mind!
The cognitive illusion that makes us think of concretes as primary is a combination of two things, one an inevitable consequence of the way consciousness works and the other a peculiarly human accident: First, the rapidity with which the brain orders sensory categorizations into a coherent model makes the process appear introspectively instantaneous to us; secondly, humans have developed a specialized brain subsystem that takes these pre-processed mental representations and indexes them to a subset of other, simpler representations, re-abstracting them as a way of readily conjuring their referents when those referents happen to be absent. (You know, words.) And as Quine says in the first page of Word and Object:
"Linguistically, and hence conceptually, the things in sharpest focus are the things that are public enough to be talked of publicly, common and conspicuous enough to be talked of often, and near enough to sense to be quickly identified and learned by name; it is to these that words apply first and foremost."
Language carves the world at its joints, chunking your mental model into familiar middle-sized objects, and secondary/reflective consciousness depends on language, so no wonder we treat objects as fundamental conceptual elements. And this leads to a third fact that conspires to hide the primacy of the abstract from us, which is that until we've developed some crude semantic capabilities we can't have declarative memory, which is why you don't remember what it was like to be a newborn and thus can't remember a time before your sensory order was reasonably well developed. If you could, you'd probably remember it as being a little like living in a cubist painting.
That simile wasn't plucked out of the air, either: In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks recounts the tale of a patient, Dr. P, who had a tumor that progressively consumed most of the right hemisphere of his brain. He was a music professor and an artist, by all accounts a sharp and articulate person, but as the years went on he started making some very queer mistakes in his day-to-day navigation of the world around him-patting a fire hydrant on the head as if it were a child, for example. He gradually lost his capacity for holistic thinking: If you handed him a complex object and asked him what it was, he'd describe it exhaustively in very abstract terms-"this is a long narrow shaft, it's flexible, it's green, there's a soft bulbous growth at one end", that sort of thing-but often wouldn't be able to tell you what it was qua object (e.g. "this is a flower").
He was unable to recognize faces and had to guess at who someone was by individual salient features-bushy eyebrows, tone of voice, gait, and so forth. He could quote, from memory, descriptive passages from books without being able to show any concrete comprehension of what the phrases were describing. In order to get through something as simple as eating and getting dressed in the morning, he had to formulate an algorithmic routine (using music he'd hum or whistle to keep himself on schedule) and if any interruption threw him off he'd freeze up and become utterly lost until someone nudged him back into the point where he left off. (The similarity to a computer program is almost too obvious.)
His artwork over the period of the tumor's progression tells a revealing story, once you know what to look for: It starts out very realist and full of readily identifiable objects, then going forward in time becomes increasingly cubist and eventually abstract to the point of unintelligibility. What others took to be an artistic progression was in fact the progression of neurological damage; the suggestion Sacks draws from this is that as his capacity for holistic conceptualization degraded, out of necessity he had to lean more and more heavily on the more linear, abstract reasoning faculties of his brain, which by Hayek's lights would bring him back full circle to a more primitive way of experiencing the world (with the added benefit of language and the added constraint of only being able to process things serially). When faced with things we would instantly recognize, what Dr. P saw was, to quote Ashby yet again, "not a thing but a list of variables".
Which is precisely the mirror image of samadhi, the state of mind that follows when the linguistic centers of your brain responsible for reflective thought quiet down, whether due to intense focus, total mental relaxation, or struggling to exhaustion, leaving you only with primary awareness. But they don't generally stay quiet for long, and when your secondary consciousness comes back online it can be a hell of an experience: "That movement of coming out of samadhi, and seeing it for what it is, that is satori." (D.T. Suzuki)
In trying to make sense of this experience, there's a big opening for confusion, which is why the old Zen master Suigan Shushi famously said that "the monk who attains satori goes to hell as straight as an arrow". I've seen modern commentators on Buddhism, including some like Watts who really should know better, misleadingly refer this experience as "direct perception of reality". But the above considerations should bring home that it's nothing of the sort, at least not in the sense of granting you access to das ding an sich-nothing can do that, short of actually being das ding in question. And there's the trick: Satori is not the conferral of anything new but rather the removal (if only momentarily) of something that was there before-it's the state of your nonlinguistic brain processes being unblocked by your linguistic ones; a state of being aware yet not trying to grasp. What it gives you is wushin, your own mind unfiltered by the leaky net of linguistic re-abstraction, including the abstraction you refer to as "I".
Chao-chou: What is Tao?
Nan-chuan: Your everyday mind!