Chapter 5     Two Ways of Explaining

We do a lot of explaining in the course of this book. We humans seem to have a need to explain things, firstly to ourselves so that they fit reasonably comfortably into our story and also to others so that we can bond reasonably well with them. Somewhat mischievously, I suspect, Maturana likened our pleasure in explaining to that of a baby taking its pacifier (or dummy, as they are called sometimes). It soothes our mind to have formed a satisfying explanation.

At this point we are in a position to reflect upon what we have covered so far and to relate the business of explaining to our actual experience by which I mean the way you and I have been actually using our minds along the way. The first thing to note about explaining is that we use language to do it. In the following Chapters we will be talking about the way we use language and what it is that language is doing for our mind when we are using it. For the moment let me restate the obvious: we cannot explain anything without using a form of language; if not words, then images or movements that could have words attached to them.

The basic question is: what is it we are explaining? There is a blind spot here that I think is important. We say we are explaining something separate from us, e.g. Maturana’s biology or the structure and function of the eye, but it would be more accurate to say we are explaining our experience of that something. We address certain aspects of biology or the eye one at a time. We actively bring a certain aspect into view, as it were, for the purpose of explaining it. This is our experience of it at that point in time.

The observer

Here we are acknowledging the duality of what we are doing and our special role as an observer. In the act of explaining something we are able to separate it from our immediate experience and view it from the standpoint of an onlooker so that we can make a better description of it and establish the meaning of it for ourselves as autonomous unities. The explanations we make are made in our capacity as observers and they are frequently shared with or passed on to others who are also acting as observers. So what we are explaining is our experience mixed together with our observing of that experience. The resources at our disposal to do the explaining also come from our experience – from previous encounters with similar circumstances in our lives. Although it may sound a little strange, let us say that we live our lives observing and explaining our experience and we do so by drawing on our experience.  Obviously, the explanation is not the same as the experience in the same way that the menu, although its words may stimulate your senses when you read it, is not the same as the taste and texture of the food.

Explanations exist in a different domain, if you like, from that which is being explained. This is undeniably true, but it is a bit hard to swallow because we would like to equate those two domains if possible. It might seem simpler not to worry about the observer being a separate part of the story. To do so would be a mistake, however, because it makes the scientific story of our mind more confusing. The phrase I used in the last session - ‘bringing forth our own worlds’ – is a Maturana expression arising from his insistence that we be aware of our role as an observer. Notice that we did not say we create our own worlds, nor are we saying anything about the existence of a world other than the one we bring forth. In fact we may recognise the existence of many different worlds brought forth by the many different people with whom we coexist. I hear you saying, though, we are still avoiding the question: what is reality or what is the world really like?

Objectivity and subjectivity

As a scientist I have a high regard for what is known as objectivity. This is a particular way of observing and explaining in which the personal bias of the observer is prevented, as far as possible, from influencing the description of what is being observed. In other words it is meant to be a value-free, emotion-free, totally impersonal account so as to reveal exactly what is happening, what is there or what the world is really like, in its own right. Even though we cannot entirely dismiss the fact that everything we say is a comment or a reflection about what has happened rather than the happening itself, this notion of objectivity has served us rather well for making progress through scientific investigation and for conducting much of the business we do together. It is usually contrasted with what is known as subjectivity, that being merely one’s personal impression of a world that should preferably be known to us in its own right, but at the moment is not.

Quite a lot is made of the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity in our society and the former is more highly regarded in most of our serious social and professional intercourse because the removal of personal bias is usually seen as leading to better decisions and more sound judgments, even though this is not necessarily so. Subjectivity is tolerated – even welcomed – with regard to artistic or aesthetic assessments and also in communicating our deepest feelings to one another, but is considered suspect where more pragmatic social interactions are concerned.

The difference between the two is often exaggerated, particularly in the scientific or pseudo-scientific activities that are so prevalent in our culture today. When I was researching animal behaviour I spent many days and nights simply watching what the animals did – when they slept, when they ate, where they moved and so on. Although I was as objective as possible my findings were sometimes criticised in comparison to those of a colleague whose data were delivered to him by a fancy machine in his laboratory. It was thought that I might have been a bit subjective whereas the machine could not be biased, but of course it could. This argument does not hold up because the machine could be influenced to favour one reading over another, depending on how it was set up. An archeologist friend told me that his largely intuitive ability to recognise various stone artifacts would sometimes be questioned by others whereas the carbon dating results from the laboratory would not, although they could be wildly inaccurate in some circumstances.

We trust technology so blindly that we rely heavily on the data output from recording and measuring instruments. Quite apart from the obvious possibility of a mechanical or electrical defect giving an erroneous result, it is too easy to forget that the machine is just an extension of the human mind that designed it or is using it. When I look through a telescope or a microscope it is still my human eye that sees, albeit with much finer resolution, and my human mind that has to do the knowing about what is there. Watching a heart monitor draw its flowing graph can tell a nurse much more about the patient than she could know directly from her senses, but it is still her human monitoring that interprets what is happening. The distinction between objectivity and subjectivity is not as important in real life as people often say it is.

Two different ways of explaining

There is a much more important distinction that only comes into our knowing by studying the biology of perception as we are doing here. We now know that, strictly speaking, we bring forth our own individual worlds in the process of perceiving them. The basic choice we have when it comes to explaining is whether to take full responsibility for this or not. One option is to have regard for the apparent similarity between the world I bring forth and the world everyone else brings forth and consider this to be a given reality that is endowed to us and already exists quite independently of my perceiving of it. This we will call an objective reality or option [1]. The other option is to have regard for the constructed nature of what we perceive and bring forth, individually, in the course of our living. We will call this a personal reality or option [2]. The terms Maturana used to describe these two ways of explaining were “objectivity without parentheses” for the first and “objectivity in parentheses” for the second. This may sound awkward, but the idea of simply putting objectivity in brackets when taking personal responsibility is a very useful notion. For one thing it emphasises the point that a personal reality is not the same as subjectivity. Maturana also used the terms ‘transcendental’ for option [1] and ‘constitutive’ for option [2]. So, in summary, the two ways of explaining our experience in language - or we might also say two different views of reality - are:

• [1] Objective: reality is given, pre-existing, transcendental, i.e. objectivity without parentheses.

• [2] Personal: reality is arising, constitutive, individual, i.e. objectivity in parentheses.

In daily life most of us will use both of these alternatives and move between them according to our preference at the time. I am not saying that one is right and one is wrong; we need both. The preference you or I might have for one or other of these will depend on many factors, not least of which is our emotional state at the time. We will return to that later. What is important is that these two have very different consequences for our society and for our individual lives. Which one we choose has a profound effect on the dynamics of our coexistence with others and the way in which we connect with our world generally, i.e. on the operation of our human mind.

Firstly, I hope it is clear that this personal reality is not the same as subjectivity. Subjectivity belongs to the path of objectivity because it is a personal assessment that is made with reference to a supposedly objective reality. When we are being subjective we imply that we know there is only one true version of reality and our personal version has no validity compared to that; it is an inferior and more or less private indulgence. What we are calling option [2] or personal reality, however, is a perfectly valid way of knowing and a very different way of regarding knowledge. It is not merely an individual’s interpretation of an otherwise objective world.

The most obvious virtue of objective reality is its technological convenience because it provides us with a reference point outside of ourselves. Rather than referring to one another for firm ground in which to work together we can refer to the solid foundation that is given to us all in the form of objective reality. Even accepting the idea from physics that the observer influences what is observed, it is still very convenient, in all technological matters anyway, to behave as if there is an external reality which is independent of us. Our culture is such that we are very accustomed to doing this despite any limitations we feel it might have.

Two different sets of consequences

The limitation that we minimise or ignore in doing this is that this approach necessitates a belief in a universal validity which is independent of the observer. In other words the criteria for validating this reality are outside of human knowing; hence the term, transcendental. For practical purposes this requires some form of authority, which may be religious, scientific or philosophical, that can represent the truth about what is so in the world (to the best of our knowledge anyway). The ability to know what is true is considered to be an endowment; it is taken as given. This carries with it a particular set of consequences: (1) this knowledge may be appropriated by individuals or institutions and hierarchies of knowledge may be established accordingly; (2) there has to be either agreement with this authority or negation of it in the form of disagreement; (3) individuals become dependent on this authority, no longer exercising responsibility for their own knowing (in some affairs, at least).

This makes a stark contrast with the personally constructed or constitutive reality where the ability to know anything is very much a personal responsibility and something that we bring forth in our living. Whether what we know individually is the truth or not is not considered to be the issue here. In this case, all our realities will automatically be different and, strictly speaking, there will be no such thing as disagreement. Instead, there will only be individual preferences, which are simply differences in culture that have been constituted through the operation of the observer. This kind of higher awareness can be considered as a second-order operation, i.e. knowing we are doing what we're doing and taking responsibility for it. The notion (from mathematics) of second order means, in a very general sense, observing from a higher level. For example when I look at a tree that is a first-order operation, but when I come to consider myself looking at the tree that is a second-order operation. One of my songs at the end of this Chapter is an attempt to simplify this concept and generate meaning about it in a different way.

The first option of simple objectivity effectively does away with the role of the observer. In that option we simply take for granted the abilities of the observer, assuming there is no need to explain them, whereas in the second option the idea of the observer is part of the explanation. Another way of saying this is that, if we cannot account for the role of the observer, we are confined to descriptions of the brain and our behaviour at the first-order level. The advent of second-order cybernetics opened the door to studying observing systems (those doing the observing), not just those being observed. We are using this approach to try to go deeper and see more clearly how the mind operates so that we might use this knowing to help ourselves and benefit our world in some way.

A key difference between these two ways of explaining our experience is that, in the first one, we justify our actions by what we say is the truth whereas in the second we try to act according to the needs of human relationships. We then have the possibility of respecting one another’s different views of the world and trying to use our human interaction to work things out between us instead of relying on the authority of any particular dogma. This could be a much more difficult and arduous path to take at times, but it could also avoid much of the very arbitrary decision making that predisposes to all kinds of conflict from workplace disagreements to global war.

There are very good reasons why people might not want to do that. These are partly useful pragmatic reasons, but more seriously they are to do with the power structures in our society and a widespread belief in the force of reason. If I know what is true about the world and you do not agree with that then I will have to persuade you that I am right and you are wrong. Maturana wrote extensively about the huge amount of human effort we put into “the search for a compelling argument.” We human beings use our minds extensively to exert influence on others – to try to force others to do as we say. I think it’s true that much of our personal distress is due to the fact that other people do not seem to know the world exactly as we do and we believe they should.

This notion of personal reality is not intended to be what philosophers call solipsism. Realism is the philosophical term for the idea that reality exists quite independently of the observer and solipsism is the term for the claim that such a reality does not exist – it is purely created by the observer. We are not saying anything about whether an independent reality exists. We bring forth our own world and we don’t worry too much about whether our world fits with reality or not; we have no need to prove that in order to coexist. If we have to think that our fit with reality is the correct one then the other people must be wrong and we will have to convince them to change their thinking. As long as people argue that it is the other’s distorted view of reality that is the problem it will always be difficult to find solutions other than one side capitulating altogether.

The notion of objectivity is very useful in that it enables us to explain something independently of ourselves. Putting objectivity in parentheses does not mean that we discredit it, but that we choose to leave it aside for the purposes of our present interaction. By foregoing, for the moment at least, the belief that there can only be one world or one reality, we become willing to make an effort to listen for the particular world in which the other person’s experience was lived as valid at the time of its happening. We put the emphasis on our role in relationships rather than our so-called knowledge of the world.

We move between these two ways of operating all the time, because they are both useful to us. In some situations, especially where control and manipulation is required, the simple objectivity works best. In other situations, especially the more delicate business of human relations, we naturally tend to use a multi-world paradigm to converse with others. This movement from one to the other or the length of time we spend in one or the other process is driven by our basic emotional state (love, fear, etc.), which we will be exploring in due course.

What makes a good explanation?

If we accept that the nature of human perception is to bring forth an individual world, then there are as many worlds as there are people. In this case the questions we are asking are not about agreement with reality, but what is the particular world in which the other person’s statement is valid. Any statement or explanation will be accepted if it appears to us to be valid in the particular domain (or world) in which we want to operate. The statement will not necessarily be valid in another domain.

In one way or another, an explanation is always an answer to a question, which may be posed by someone else or by yourself. Its usefulness and acceptability as an explanation therefore depends on whatever criteria the questioner wants to apply to it. If another scientist is explaining to me about a brain hormone or a principle of thermodynamics I will be listening for certain regularities in his or her explanation that satisfy my criteria for doing science together. If I am listening to a sports commentary on the radio I also have expectations that I will hear which player moved where and how it was that points were scored or not scored in that situation and so on. If I am trying to explain to my wife why I am late home for dinner I will draw not so much on science, but on my knowledge of human nature, particularly hers. She may not accept my explanation in which case it is not a satisfactory explanation. There are as many different kinds of explanation as there are different criteria for acceptability of that explanation. In the end it is the acceptability to the listener (who may be oneself) that determines the validity of the explanation.

The business of asking any question is quite different in these two alternative explanatory pathways. In objectivity, we often find a workable solution, but the answers we get must inevitably lead to more questions because it is some ultimate truth or reality that is being sought, whereas in personal reality we can potentially find many different kinds of solutions in our living together. These may bring more contentment to our lives; some relief from the anguish of never knowing the full story. There is a creative element in trying to negotiate original and integrated solutions together, though I am not saying this is necessarily easy to do.

Another way of putting this is that it changes the basic question we are asking about everything. Instead of the question that philosophers would call an ontological one (what is that?) we are asking a different question that is an epistemological one: how do I know what that is? That is the approach I am taking in this book. I’m not trying to tell you what anything is; instead I’m talking about how we could know what anything is. The book is about the process of knowing and not knowing. This changes the nature of questions and answers. Instead of someone saying that is the correct answer because it is the truth, i.e. it is validated by some external given reality, I would prefer to say it is a good answer because it satisfies something in my relationship with you at this point in time. Validation is in terms of the success of human relationships rather than according to which person’s use of knowledge is more powerful at that time. If my answer is not satisfying to you then it is not an answer; you will have to ask someone else.

Earlier you had the opportunity to experience some visual illusions. You know that the process of perception cannot distinguish what is real while doing the perceiving; it requires a subsequent act of perception using another point of reference, e.g. when you thought the train was moving or you mistake the person coming towards you for a friend and call out her name only to find a moment later it was not her. What we later call a mistake was perfectly valid at the time of committing it. Mistakes are not in themselves; they do not occur in the present, but are a later reflection. This makes a difference to how we answer the question: what is it to know?

Maturana’s basic idea is that we can only bring forth our realities by what we do, so strictly speaking, we can make no definitive statement about a reality that exists independently of our doing. What is external to us cannot reliably tell us what we need to know about it. This leads again to the realisation that we need to know ourselves to know about anything external to us and we do this through our successive interactions with it. To be a knowing unit we first have to know ourselves and then we proceed to know about anything else because who we are will largely determine what we will come to know about everything else.

Self-consciousness and personal responsibility

In both philosophy and science there is a huge effort devoted to trying to explain self-consciousness. This may be because many people regard self-consciousness as what distinguishes us from other animals. I don’t think this is necessarily the case, but of course I don’t really know whether other animals are self-conscious or not. In explaining how the observer arises as part of the biological process of cognition Maturana is in effect explaining where self-consciousness comes from – not what it is, but how it arises.

This could not be achieved using simple objectivity or the first explanatory pathway (option [1]). In that case the observer, language and perception cannot be explained scientifically because it is assumed that the observer can make reference to something that is entirely independent of himself or herself, i.e. something that is outside the scope of the scientific explanation. To put it another way, in option [1] the experiential (biological) indistinguishability between perception and illusion is not recognised whereas in option [2] it is the starting point.

To Maturana as a biologist, the observer is primary, not the object; or, you could say, observing arises as a consequence of the way we perceive and explain. He puts it that the physical domain of existence is secondary to the living process of the human observer, to us anyway, even though in the explanation of observing the human observer arises from the physical domain of existence. He said: “understanding the ontological primacy of observing is basic for understanding the phenomenon of cognition. Human existence is a cognitive existence and takes place through languaging.” The way Maturana used the term, languaging, is something I will explain more fully in the next Chapter.

We human beings arise as self-conscious entities in our language. The self arises in language when we bring forth the observer as an entity, distinct from other entities, in the explanation of his or her operation. In Maturana’s words again: “self, self-consciousness and reality exist in language as explanations of the happening of living of the observer. Indeed, the observer as a human being in language is primary with respect to self and self-consciousness; these arise as he or she operates in language explaining his or her experiences.”

Therefore what we call reality is an explanatory proposition arising from the way of living of the observer. An external reality may not be created by our doing, but its existence is known to us only through what we do. The important implication of this is that nothing we do as human beings is trivial. Everything we do becomes part of the world that we live as we bring it forth as social entities in language. This carries with it an enormous sense of human responsibility. We basically know that we ‘make our own bed and will have to lie in it,’ but we often try to forget that.

Pontius Pilate

There is a peculiar human coyness here in that we say we want to explain and acknowledge self-consciousness and yet we habitually shy away from taking full responsibility for the worlds we bring forth. We scientists have a particular way of doing this. We insist on citing another person’s work rather than imply that we had this thought ourselves because precedence is taken very seriously. An example would be that what I am saying here is only what Maturana has said - so don’t blame me if it isn’t correct! In writing scientific papers I am not supposed to use the first person for fear of subjectivity creeping in so I would have to say ‘the animal eluded the experimenter’ rather than ‘I couldn’t catch it’, which could be a more useful account of what happened.

Heinz von Foerster has wryly observed, "Objectivity is a subject's delusion that observing can be done without him. Invoking objectivity is abrogating responsibility; hence its popularity!" What von Foerster called the ‘Pontius Pilate Syndrome’ - otherwise known as ‘they made me do it’ - is quite a common occurrence. Pilate washed his hands of a very crucial decision in the history of Christianity by asking a crowd of people to settle the matter for him. Nowadays people often wash their hands of any responsibility because the system in which they work apparently compels them to make certain decisions even if they do not agree with them. We have grown quite accustomed to doing what some authority requires us to do even when we think it is probably wrong.

In one sense this seems like an abrogation of our personal responsibility. On the other hand, what if Pilate was correct and that really was the best way to handle the situation he faced? The resulting crucifixion of Christ turned out to be one of the most notable events in human history judging by the significance that is attached to it in the Christian and some other religions. In trying to take responsibility for our own actions at all times we come face to face with the vast uncertainty of our knowing. The likelihood that blind spots affect every aspect of our knowing cannot be ignored in any practical study of the human mind. Our mind has to work at the interface between the known and the unknown at all times and, as I said before, it is a truly remarkable feature of the human mind that it thrives on this challenge. I hope you have glimpsed a little of the elegance of Maturana’s scientific explanations about the mind, even in the greatly simplified version I have been providing here, but the main issue as I see it still is how little we know

The fun of explaining

One of the worst side effects of too much explaining, as you probably realise by now, is taking ourselves too seriously. Fortunately, most of the great explainers have been aware of this and have given us a wealth of entertaining literature so we can enjoy the sheer fun of explaining. One of the best examples is the set of Just So stories by Rudyard Kipling, which are delightfully fantastic accounts of how various natural phenomena were supposed to have come about – how the camel got its hump; how the leopard got its spots, etc. Although written as if for children, these have been very widely translated, read and enjoyed by millions of people and are regarded as notable literary achievements, suggesting that they help us to see ourselves more clearly by not taking ourselves too seriously. Kipling’s Jungle Books and many other tales featuring feral human children raised by animals, e.g. Romulus and Remus who founded Rome, Tarzan, Mowgli, etc., are further examples of the delight we take in speculating rather wildly about our humanness and the human mind.

Every cultural group of humans that we know of has produced creation myths in the form of elaborate stories about the origin and the creation of the world in which they live. The Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime stories and their Chinese, Mayan, African, Norse, Japanese, Inuit, Maori, Egyptian and Native American equivalents are just a few examples. A modern scientific example is The Universe is a Green Dragon by cosmologist Brian Swimme, which is not only fun to read, but contains, as they all do, much wisdom regarding the human mind. Most of the written work of humankind is fiction. Much of it - romance, adventure, crime, etc. - is closely based on human experience. The huge genres of science fiction and fantasy give vent to the incredible human imagination, which at times has been remarkably prescient regarding future scientific developments, e.g. the work of H.G Wells.

I spoke earlier about explanations and how their validity depends on what you want to hear or what fits with your own story. Explanations, no matter how wonderful, are stories about our experience. Scientific explanations have certain regularities about them that provide a satisfying way of working together for many of us at this period in our history. We honour and respect these regularities, of course, but deep down we know that we are only enjoying taking our pacifier (or dummy) in the form of the explanations that our human mind seems to need.

In the next Chapter we will begin with a change of direction because there is more to life than explaining. We will consider the relationship between knowing, as we have explored it so far, and doing. Obviously we use our mind to guide, motivate and monitor every single thing we do even though some of this may be subconscious. We need to work out how we can apply what we know - and cope with what we don’t know - in our everyday tasks of making decisions and taking action.

One of the practical experiments I recommend is to sing songs together and one of the theme songs for this course is The Song of Autonomous Unities which I created as a bit of fun to help us understand this Maturana biology. We have talked a little about tones and the images that form in our minds from sounds we hear – how the stories in our brains have movement to them which we experience in listening to music and singing a song – especially when we join in the singing. It is not a trivial experience; it involves our mind and body in a rather special way. A recording of the melodies and the musical notation are available on my website (http://www.pnc.com.au/~lfell/).

We will be talking shortly about how we use language to express the meaning that we form and to form the meaning that we express. The Second Order Song is about the way we use words to create a stable reality - inventing objects and ideas, but not always realising that we invented them!

THE SONG OF AUTONOMOUS UNITIES

I am an autonomous unity

My structure is very profound

While everything else is a line to me

To me I am perfectly round

My history mystery I will unveil

Believing I know as I do

This world I bring forth is my own - and I love

Your autopoietical you       

Not hypothetical, just parenthetical,

Autopoietical you

THE SECOND-ORDER SONG

If I'm doing something to it, it's an object

To objectify existence is a must

By discovering the objects all around me

I know my world is something I can trust

Trust! Trust?

But what if it is doing something to me?

Have I become a victim of its way?

Could it be I've given it my power?

How come I don't seem to have a say?

Chorus

Second order, second order,

Second order singing is a song, song, song,

Second order, second order,

Second order singing is a song.

What is this that I am doing to it?

Giving it its objectivity

As if it was completely independent

Of little, old, good-for-nothing me

I do believe that I was its inventor

Perhaps I only have myself to blame

What I do and what it does are not different

The action and the object are the same

Chorus