Chapter 2     Blind Spots, Knowing and Not Knowing

You and I are connecting with one another through our minds, to a greater or lesser extent, as you read this book and it is this experience of yours that imbues what is written here with some meaning. Turning experience into meaning is the work of our mind and I refer to it as the process of knowing. How it happens that we come to know and also the great importance of not knowing will be the subjects of this next stage of our interaction. The story is not only about what we see, but about what we don’t see as well.

Autopoiesis – the first principle

The relatively new science of second-order cybernetics and an open-ended way of thinking about the mind equip us well to build a biological story that is coherent and therefore satisfying. The first and foremost biological principle for this story is what Maturana called autopoiesis, which literally means self-producing. The way Maturana described it to me was that he had been talking with a friend (J. Bulnes) who had written an essay about Don Quixote de la Mancha's dilemma of whether to follow the path of arms (praxis, action) or the path of letters (poiesis, creation). After this conversation he recognised that the autonomous nature of the living organism signified a continuous process of re-creation (through doing) and could be captured by the term: self-creation or self-producing. It was the kernel of the answer to his first question: what is the nature of a living system?

The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought now defines autopoiesis thus: "In cybernetics, a term coined by Humberto Maturana for a special case of homeostasis in which the critical variable of the system that is held constant is that system's own organisation." The concept of an autopoietic organisation draws together the biochemical activity of a living cell in a new way by putting a conceptual boundary around the system. Then it can be shown that this system, bounded in this way, is open to matter and energy from outside, but it essentially runs itself and maintains itself by replacing its molecular components through the activity of its molecular components. At the same time it is absolutely dependent on its connection with the medium in which it lives to provide the flow-through of its source material.

In the previous Chapter I mentioned the distinction between organisation and structure within a system. The autopoietic organisation of a living thing is its crucial property so this must be kept constant – it is not negotiable - but the structure can change in whatever way is necessary to maintain this organisational stability. That structural change occurs according to the ever-changing connections it makes with its surrounding medium. Maturana and Varela called that associated principle ‘structural coupling.’ The diagram below shows an autonomous unity at the top, a representation of the environment in which it lives in the wavy line on the bottom and the essential connectivity as a two-way arrow in between.

 

Figure 1. Diagram representing an autonomous unity that is structurally coupled to its environment on order to maintain its autopoietic organisation.

 

This is why I emphasised the ‘great connector’ role for the mind in the previous Chapter. As long as we have our mind we can be autopoietic by reconnecting with our world at every moment according to the flow of external change that we encounter and the flow of internal changes we must make to keep our organisation intact. Any adequate description of our mind must include the interconnectedness that is involved in its operation. Think of a blind man walking with a stick. His vision is the connection that the stick makes between his brain and the objects of the outside world. Think of how you and I would exist for one another if we were in the same room at this moment. We exist not only in our respective places in this room, but you exist in my mind also and I exist in your mind; unless, of course, you are not paying any attention. We are connected by our minds.

The term autopoiesis is not only a brilliant abstraction of the living system process. It is also a concept of great philosophical importance, I think, because it underpins the holonomic way of thinking which will be crucial if we are to understand and solve the huge ecological problems we have in the world today. I hope these ways of thinking will grow on you as this story of the mind proceeds and they are developed further.

The three essentials for a living system

Mary E. Clark does not say much in her books about autopoiesis or Maturana, but the way she described the basic principles of a living system matches beautifully with his explanation. She said there are only three basic necessities of life for a human being (or, for that matter, any living system) and these are also the three basic propensities of life. These propensities are for bonding, for autonomy and for meaning; firstly to be bonded, to belong or connect, e.g. to a group and yet, secondly, to have a personal identity and autonomy and thirdly, to have a meaningful purpose and be able to make meaning. Elaborating on this (recognising that the order of 1 and 2 is interchangeable): a human being must have (1) autonomy – being oneself; (2) connection (belonging to and being part of something bigger), and (3) the ability to make meaning. The third one depends on the first two. Maturana and Varela had said exactly this, only in a different way: a living system is autopoietic (autonomous) and structurally coupled (connected) so as to have the property of knowing (cognition). One of their most famous quotes is: “living systems are cognitive systems and living as a process is a process of cognition.”

We normally associate our mind with the ability to make meaning, which is only made possible by the paradoxical combination of our first two propensities as living things – our being autonomous and our being connected. So a more complete definition of mind is that which connects us to one another and our world, while at the same time enabling us to maintain our autonomous existence. To successfully manage this inevitable tension referred to earlier - to be oneself, but also belong to the wider community – is the poignantly tricky task of the human mind.

Living things need a mind

Viewed in this light, therefore, mind is essential to life. Living things could not exist without it. Knowing is synonymous with living. That is the common element of the two basic biological questions that Maturana posed: (1) what is the nature of a living system? (2) what is the process of perception/cognition? He summed up many years of complex research with the very simple conclusion that living systems are cognitive systems and cognition is what a living system does. For Maturana cognition is about knowing in its broadest biological sense. It does not require a brain or nervous system to know, although these obviously add greatly to the scope and flexibility of the mental process. The most basic biological approach to the study of mind is to acknowledge that every single cell has an ability, by virtue of its autopoietic function, to know what to do.

A single-celled organism, even a bacterium, which is the simplest type of cell, does not live at the mercy of the elements around it. It does what all living things do. It eats, digests, breathes and excretes by virtue of its autopoietic operating system. It also senses where food is present and moves towards it and knows to move away from toxic materials that it has detected nearby. In other words, the simplest kind of living cell displays a kind of intelligence, as Bruce Lipton put it. It has a mind, albeit in the most primitive form. Later we will explore how this elementary mind might operate and compare that to the operation of individual cells within our own body. Advances in cell biology in recent years make it possible to explain this autopoietic function in more detail than ever before.

This wonderful autopoietic system that you and I are relies for its operation on the same principle that the first living organism did – its ability to connect with other life and with its world. Such a system is not only self-organising, it is also self-referring through its ongoing series of connections with its external environment. You can know yourself and be self-governing so long as you are not cut off from your supply of raw materials or too isolated from what is happening in the world at large. What makes this possible is your mind, but this mind has to be an integral part of your body for these connections to occur. Bear in mind that Maturana and Varela referred to this connection as a ‘structural coupling.’ So we begin to get a picture of the mind and body working together and belonging to the same unit. Varela described cognition as ‘embodied action’ or ‘enaction.’

The ability to make meaning, the third of these life essentials, is also the one we are most interested in because through it we experience our mind in action. We think of our mind as that which we need to make meaning of anything we encounter. When you think of the mind as the instrument of connection it follows that meaning arises from connection as, for example, when you connect the dots to make a picture or relate one event to another or one story that you have heard to another story so you can build a more complete or more meaningful scenario in your mind.

The brain is a story-making organ

The internal structure of the human body can be visualized as an interconnected network in which the connectivity pattern is constantly changing. Trillions of nodes are involved at the molecular level, virtually every cell in the body and the clusters of cells that constitute organs, vessels, glands and nerve plexuses. The pattern changes as the flow between different nodes varies. Imagine an incredibly complex switchboard lighting up with a withering array of different patterns. Of course, the brain is the most complex, but it is worth noting that this pattern of connection involves the whole body. The brain and spinal column form what is known as the Central Nervous System (CNS) which is the hub for many of these connections.

Another way of visualising the connectivity of the human body is to try to understand it at the electromagnetic level as well as the dense chemical level. In this case you can think of one or more invisible energy fields, something like the field you imagine to exist around the end of a magnet that gives it its force of attraction. This has been studied much more in association with Eastern medicine (acupuncture, etc.) than in Western scientific thinking, but we can’t ignore it and I will mention it again later in the book.

On the strength of its complexity at least, the human brain is the ultimate connectivity device. There are at least one hundred billion nerve cells in this rather floppy blob of pink matter (often known as grey matter) that you could just about hold in one hand. Ultimately they are all interconnected, but the fact that each nerve cell has a direct functioning connection with thousands of others makes this the most incredibly complex web of connectivity that we humans have ever imagined – so far. I will mention different regions of the brain and talk about what they do, but the overall picture of the human brain that I offer for you to think about at this stage is its ability to form different patterns of connection. This gives us a way of thinking about meaning as something that might roughly correspond with the patterns of connection arising in our brain and in our body as a whole.

The physical connectivity of the brain can be visualised to some extent nowadays with modern scanning technology, but it is still so incredibly complicated and variable that these pictures cannot be related directly to the meaning we experience. Perhaps that will never be achieved; anyway it seems a long way off. There is a simple way of bridging this gap, however, with our imagination. Mary Clark suggested that we think of the brain as a story-making organ that organises our experience at all times into what we would call a story. The roots of this approach lie more directly with Roger Schank who wrote The Connoisseur's Guide to the Mind. He was influential in cognitive psychology in the 1970’s and 1980’s and wrote that “humans are not ideally set up to understand logic; they are ideally set up to understand stories.” The main stream of neuroscience at the time thought cognition consisted of the manipulation of symbols according to pre-established rules whereas Schank felt that memory took the form of meaningful stories and that problem-solving relied on using examples from these stories stored in memory.

The experience of making and relating stories is very familiar to us because it forms a large part of our daily living. Stories are the best vehicle our experience has devised to carry a flow of meaning and keep it together in a satisfying way. They also provide, for our autonomous existence, a distinctly personal account of everything that has happened in our lives so far. We need our own story of who we are, where we came from and where we might be going, because it provides that sense of coherence that we call sanity. It is not surprising that we will vigorously defend and protect our own story against disruptive forces that may threaten its existence from time to time. As a society the sharing of our stories provides a sense of shared meaning that is crucial for our group coherence and the establishment and maintenance of our culture and community values.

It can be helpful, therefore, to think of the brain as a story-making organ. Taking this very broad view does not demean the awesome abilities of our mind. It is a useful simplification because it enables us to stand back from and speak about what is happening in our own minds. Everything I write in this book has the potential to be accommodated into your story, to add another chapter or complete an unfinished section, but each of our stories is so different that what I say might fit easily into one person’s story yet not find a place within the established story of another person who reads the same words. Each if us will take on board what we need and desire to incorporate in our own stories and simply reject or pass by what we do not want to include within the precious sanctity of our own story. This is as it should be. There is no expectation on my part that it should be otherwise.

My aim is to connect, as I said, and I do so by sharing my story with you in the best way I can. I am not relating to you the whole chapter and verse of cognitive science, of course, but just a fragment of what is known – just the mind-body science story as I can tell it. This story lives in me and I try to give it life for you by preparing the topics in a particular order, creating some sense of flow and a little suspense so that the story unfolds throughout the book and reaches some satisfying conclusions along the way.

What we know can be thought of as a story, but it is a story with pictures and sounds (even smells!) – a multi-media experience. It is also a story with feelings; what story is not! Antonio Damasio wrote about what I am calling knowing: “Consciousness begins when our brains acquire the power, the simple power I must add, of telling a story without words. . . . I suspect consciousness prevailed in evolution because knowing (i.e. being aware of) the feelings caused by emotions was so indispensable for the art of life.” We will plumb the rich depths of the emotional mind in this book as we get further into the business of knowing.

The inevitable blind spots

The basic difficulty about knowing is that you don’t know what it is you don’t know! The American humourist and writer, Mark Twain, put it like this: “It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.” He also had some other things to say about the mind such as: “I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up!” The first quote captures the problem we all experience that you sometimes think you know something until some new event or information comes to light and you find that what you knew was not correct. In the continual process of knowing there is an inevitable area of blindness.

The first of the actual experiments you are invited to carry out is to locate your own individual blind spot and discover how your brain deals with this physiological reality.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 2. To find your blind spot: cover your left eye, look directly at the + with your right eye while moving your head back and forth in front of this picture. When the picture is a certain distance away the black spot will disappear from view. It will reappear when you move closer or further away.

The second experiment is the same as the first except that there is a line through the black spot and grey shading on both sides of the picture. See what happens to the line and the shading when the spot disappears and also try reversing the process to make the + disappear instead of the spot and see what happens to the shading.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 3. In this case, what happens to the line when the black spot disappears?

 

The explanation of this blind spot is quite simple. There is a small area about 30 - 50 cm in front of your face where each eye individually cannot see what is there because the light rays entering the eye happen to fall on a small blank spot where there are no sensory nerve endings to detect the light. As you probably know there are, broadly speaking, two types of nerves: those which detect, perceive or sense something – like the nerve cells on your skin or in the back of your eye on the retina and many other places. They are generally called sensory (or receptor) nerves. When they sense something they pass on electrical and chemical activity to the Central Nervous System. Then there are a lot of other nerves which flow out from the brain through the spine and all over your body which make something happen – they make a muscle contract to move your arm or close your eyes or even, do subconscious things like gut rumbles to move your food along or chest movements to flow your breath in or out. Those are called motor (or effector) nerves.

 

So the blind spot is a normal feature of your body simply because there are no sensory nerves at the point where the optic nerve trunk connects with the retina at the back of your eye. Now you might say: that can’t be very important because it doesn’t affect my life – and you’re right – but there is an interesting lesson we can learn from it. In that experiment, when there was a line through the spot, after the spot disappeared, the line was still there. That line was not visible to your eye, but your brain filled it in anyway because it decided the line should be there. Similarly the background shading was filled in as if it existed in place of the missing spot. Your brain is in the business of making a story. Its process is to preserve the wholeness of the story as it encounters new experiences and to do this it often has to make things up in order to fill in the gaps.

Try reading the following passage:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer inwaht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Clearly, your brain has the ability to recognise a whole word even when many of the letters are incorrect. It only needed a clue from the first and last letters and was able to make up the rest. Filling in the gaps to maintain the coherent wholeness of the story is the normal way of operating for our brain and mind.

This is the point about blind spots. You don’t know they are there because the mind’s process compensates for the deficiency without you realising it. Heinz von Foerster was one of Maturana’s close friends and associates. He used to tell an interesting story about a medical case from World War II. A soldier who was shot through the back of the head, had a little brain damage at the back end near the visual cortex, but healed up quickly. After returning to normal life, however, he found that he stumbled a lot and dropped things. This became worse, but his tests showed all motor systems functioning normally. It took some detective work to find that the problem was due to a severely restricted visual field. He had a greatly enlarged blind spot without realising it. His sensory-motor coordination gradually broke down because he was relying on visual clues that were no longer there, although his brain was behaving as if they were. After realising this he could retrain his behaviour accordingly.

There is a parallel here with any form of psychotherapy which consists of uncoupling people from relying on clues that are no longer there. Victor Frankl, who wrote that wonderful book, Man’s Search for Meaning, treated a man with severe depression after his wife died by conversing about a new, identical wife until the man realised he was living through an imaginary relationship now that she was no longer there. In von Foerster's inimitable words: "when he could see that he was blind, then he could see!"

So a blind spot is something that you didn’t know you didn’t know. Awareness of our blind spots and the ability of our mind to ‘paper them over’ will be a theme running through this book and we will come back to it from time to time. It is part of the bigger picture regarding knowing and not knowing.

To know and not to know

It is obvious that we use our mind for knowing, but what is knowing? What are the different kinds of knowing? Knowing how to do something could be called a procedural kind of knowing. It forms a very large part of our mental activity. Knowing how something works is somewhat different in that it is more theoretical, yet it, too, certainly plays a large part in our daily living and decision-making processes. John Shotter spoke about “knowing of the third kind” (to distinguish it from theoretical or practical knowledge) which he said was knowing how to be in the world – knowing how to interact and relate to others and to changing circumstances. Knowing how to coordinate our actions as members of the community is a kind of knowledge one acquires only from within relationships with others (whether the relationship is real or imagined). Alan Stewart, a professional facilitator and colleague of mine, referred to this ‘knowing of the third kind’ as “an expression of a greater sense of connectedness.” Perhaps you can think of other somewhat mysterious or non-conceptual forms of knowing that you have personally experienced.

Then there is the ancient injunction: know yourself. What does it mean to know myself? Who am I? Perhaps the most basic questions one can ever ask lie in this domain. What about knowing someone else? Who, really, are you? Are you what I think you are? That seems unlikely. Are you what you think you are? As Anthony D’Mello and many others have said in one way or another: I am not my thoughts. They come and go and I am still here. This makes the business of knowing oneself even more poignant and potentially rewarding. We might also consider knowing as experience, e.g. to know pain, to know freedom, to know love or fear.

It will be obvious from what I have already said that we are not the only living things that are knowing? I have often stood and wondered, when I am out in the forest, how the trees know to grow upwards even though a seedling has come out of the side of a rocky ledge; how the large trees grow straight and tall through the undergrowth so their leaves will get enough sunlight; how plant roots know where to go towards water; how all creatures know how to find their food, avoid danger and build their nests and so on. There are names for all these things – geotropy, hydrotropy, phototropy, etc; and they are also called instincts where animals are concerned. My point is they are all to do with knowing. Knowing is not just an attribute of the human brain.

Because words make distinctions for us we cannot consider knowing without acknowledging the phenomenon of not knowing. Not knowing has rather a hard time of it in the world today. It is not at all popular and understandably so. Few of us are willing to admit to not knowing and even fewer actually practice admitting it regularly enough to enjoy the immense benefits that the practice can bestow. One of the possible sub-titles for this book would be The Great Importance of Not Knowing.

The age of specialisation has contributed to this. We have come to rely on the expert in each field to know more than the rest of us about that particular field. For anyone bearing the label of expert, to say I don’t know is tantamount to handing in one’s badge, unless you can argue that the question does not really belong in your field. Most of us will make a valiant attempt at a partial answer, at least, to any question that could possibly fall within our area of expertise. I am painfully aware of this myself, having once been called an expert on knowing and the biology of cognition!

The problem is not confined to that large body of people who are experts on something. Most of us are quite ready to say that, although the question is way beyond our experience, we think and feel such and such about it and the more we have to say on the matter, the greater our knowledge of the subject appears to us to be. Then there are the administrators, managers and politicians who have to act as if they know something in order to keep their jobs. As parents, too, we seem to have a moral obligation to be knowing, even in the face of momentous questions such as where did I come from and the like.

 I would like to be able to say to you that I don’t know anything about knowing, but that would make it too difficult for me to write this book. What I have discovered, however, is the more I tell people everything I know about knowing, the more they seem to appreciate the importance of not knowing! The one thing I can readily admit is that I really don’t know why that happens.

I heard of a Professor in France who started every course by drawing a huge circle on the blackboard - as large a circle as the blackboard would allow. Then he made a tiny dot with the chalk in one corner of the board and said: that dot is the sum total of human knowledge and the circle is all there is to know. In other words, I believe that the unknown is far larger than the known. This is an interesting and, I think, important question to ask ourselves. Do you know all there is to know? Does anyone know all there is to know? There have been some famous statements made by scientists throughout history to the effect that we were on the brink of knowing everything about the mechanisms of the universe so we would shortly be able to predict and control what happens. A most eminent scientist, Lord Kelvin, advised students at the end of the 19^th century not to study physics because he believed that nearly everything in that field had already been worked out. Soon after came the hugely revolutionary new concepts of quantum mechanics and relativity theory!

Being overly proud of what we know is an intellectual hubris that we older folk often recognise in those younger than ourselves! It can also be the other way around! In practice, we have probably all found from experience, letting go of what we think we know is a necessary prerequisite for learning something new.

We could speak about what we know in a more general sense by calling it our belief system or our world view. The point I want to make here, which we will explore further in later Chapters, is that these provide the framework through which we see and experience the world. We assume that our beliefs are well-founded, of course, but the great Austrian philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, gave us cause to think about that when he said: “At the core of all well-founded belief, lies belief that is unfounded.”

 At the interface between the known and the unknown is where I think our mind is most alive. This is where it does its most wondrous work. We live with uncertainty, of course, and today’s world is often characterised as being more uncertain than ever, which tends to make us feel afraid. Maturana and Varela chose to begin their classic book, The Tree of Knowledge, by speaking about “the temptation of certainty.” The human mind, however, is at its best when dealing with uncertainty. The way we use our mind to relate to the unknown – the working relationship between the known and the unknown – is a major theme of this book.

 One of the most pervasive kinds of blind spot that we all experience is when we miss things because they are too close at hand and too obvious. Wittgenstein made the telling point that “the aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. One is unable to notice something - because it is always before one's eyes.” As we delve into the powerful biological concepts developed by Maturana and others you will get to experience the simplicity of some of them; they sound so ordinary, yet they pack a much more powerful punch than you expect.

 Connecting through conversation

 An important example of this for our story is that, generally, we do not realise how important conversation is. Imagine that you are attending courses I give: you would be sitting at small tables with two or three others and there would be set periods of conversation, which are intended to highlight the fact that this is our main way of connecting in our daily lives and therefore it is a major part of the operation of our mind. We tend to dismiss it as trivial and accidental, e.g. the chat at the office water cooler (which, incidentally, probably influences more corporate decisions than any of the formal meetings) is not seen as the main business of the workplace or of life yet it is much more important than we realise.

 From Alan Stewart’s book, Time to Converse, is this quote from Humberto Maturana: “Human existence takes place in the relational space of conversation. This means that, even though from a biological perspective we are Homo sapiens, our way of living – that is to say our human condition – takes place in a form of relating to each other and the world we bring forth in our daily living through conversation.” This is one of the aspects of knowing we will explore later in the book. In the meantime you might pause for a moment when you are next engaged in conversation and ask yourself: could this be the most important use of my mind? It is a sobering thought.

 A glimpse of what is special about human beings

 One of the basic tenets of biology is that humans evolved from a single-celled organism through many different stages, at first in the sea, then on the land, reptiles through to mammals, which we relate to quite closely in our pets and farm animals, then to primates who stood on two legs and eventually to Homo sapiens sapiens, which we call ourselves today. The human mind is so incredibly wonderful that it is interesting and necessary for our story to look at where it came from, how it developed along the way, and what it is that makes the human mind essentially different from all other animals. In some ways it is the same, but in a very special way it is unlike any other animal as far as we can tell.

This distinctive humanness will be portrayed in detail in this book. The following quote from Humberto Maturana provides a glimpse through his window of what is so special about being human:

“What is a human being? What do we see when we claim someone to be human? I say that a human being is a living system living in conversations, where a conversation is an entwining of language and emotion . . . as the emotion changes, the language changes, as the language changes the emotion changes. I also claim that language is our human manner of living together, and is not a communication tool. It is a coordination, or dance, of behaviour that has become more complex. For instance pointing is an operation in language where we humans look in the direction of the pointing and not at the finger whereas my cat, outside of language, only looks at my finger. I claim it is a coordinated dance . . . that we live in it . . . and that love is central to the development of this increased complexity and therefore to what makes us human.”

As we proceed I will refer back to each of the points made in the above quotation. It contains much of the substance of our course – language, emotion, love and the dance of conversation. In the next session we will explore more of our process of visual perception (how we see) and a little about our hearing as well.

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