Chapter 8     The Metaphorical Structure of our Knowing

The brain is a story-making organ, but the way we use words to divide up our world tends to produce fragments of a story and we need a way to combine these fragments into a satisfying whole. This whole is sometimes called a ‘gestalt’ from the German word gestalten that means to form or shape. Some of the experiments you may have tried in this book, e.g. filling in gaps in visual perception or recognising the giraffe amongst a jumble of black blobs, are sometimes explained in terms of the gestalt theory of perception. Gestalt psychology has waned in popularity, but it is certainly a matter of no small importance that we create coherent wholes out of the history of connections that define the operation of our mind. This big picture is also referred to as our world view and the most important thing about it is that it is a product of our mind and our imagination, not an actual world that we view. At the end of this Chapter I have included a short extract from the Metalogue by Gregory Bateson called ‘What is an Instinct?’ that helps to make it clear that we don’t really discover our world, we invent it.

I mentioned earlier that Mary Clarke described two very different world views in terms of contrasting pictorial images we could form in our mind by using our imagination. The first is what she called the ‘Billiard Ball’ gestalt: an individualistic universe in which isolated objects move independently and may collide with one another according to linear, cause-effect, relationships and sequences of events. It is an atomistic world view and the ‘self’ is discrete and separate from the whole. The other she named the ‘Indra’s Net’ gestalt after a Buddhist story about a God seated on a jeweled net in which each jewel in the net is connected to and hence reflects upon all the others. This is a connected universe and no one entity can exist independently of its connectedness to the whole of reality.

The contrast between standard European or Western language and Australian Aboriginal Yolgnu language as explained by Michael Christie is a perfect example of these two world views. The western culture has developed an atomistic reality in which boundaries and segmentation are basic. Society consists of individuals, language consists of words that mainly stand for things, everything is reducible to smaller parts and it is as if that is the way the world was originally made and is meant to be. To Yolgnu people, whose ancestors created the world by their actions of singing and talking their way across the land, there are no fixed boundaries enclosing any discrete entities; there are only extendable webs of connectedness. To them the English phrase ‘the cat on the mat’ makes no sense because they have no such distinct entities. Surprising as it may seem, a phrase such as ‘familiarity breeds contempt’ or ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ is more meaningful to Yolgnu people because those are ways of talking about experience that apply in many different situations.

In both cases it is the explaining of human experience that has developed the language and, in turn, the language that will continue to shape that experience. As we form meaning in our process of knowing we become able to do what we do. What we do seems right and logical if it is coherent with the world our knowing has created. In order to create this world we have to employ our imagination because it is not all set out in front of us at any point in time. We construct these worlds on the basis of relationships in language that are known as metaphors. The contrasting world views we have just described are two completely different metaphorical structures. The point is we live our lives according to the metaphorical structure of our knowing, i.e. according to the way we see the world.

Putting our world together

Wittgenstein said: “Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.” As we use language, particularly in conversation, we rely heavily on our imagination because many of the things we are talking about are not actually happening at the time. The incredible richness of our experience of language comes from these deeper resources of our human mind. It does not come from the way in which meaning is attached to particular words, although that is quite important too. It has more to do with the way in which our brain is a story-making organ creating a whole world that is coherent and complete for our purposes at that point in time. The mind uses language, not only to divide up our world, but to put it together again in a satisfying and often very beautiful way.

The biology of cognition outlined here informs us that the meaning does not come directly from the words we hear. It comes from a combination of the words we hear and our own story, i.e. what we think the meaning is. So in exploring more about how our minds make meaning we need to look beyond the literal meaning of a word as it appears in the dictionary. This is amusingly illustrated in another of the insights of Charles Dodgson (alias Lewis Carroll) from Through the Looking Glass:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”

Inevitably, some of the words I say will have a slightly different meaning for each of you according to where your mind is coming from at the time. If that trend continued for a while we may cease to be properly connected and our effective relationship could come to an end, but fortunately we can often regain the connection by persevering with an honest conversation.

In creating our own story our mind has one masterful characteristic: the ability to build bridges of meaning. This is the metaphorical nature of our mind, the word metaphor having come into our language from words concerning the transfer of something from one place to another or the carrying of something across a divide. A metaphor is typically thought of as a poetic use of language with an artistic quality – a literary device in which something is described by another word that is quite different in meaning, but yet brings out some nice similarity between the two, e.g. ‘a sea of trouble’ or ‘all the world’s a stage.’ This aesthetic value, which we enjoy, disguises a deeper significance that metaphor has in the development of our language and the way we use our minds. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have shown us very clearly that “the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.” In other words we can think of one thing in terms of another and utilise this meaning bridge to jump our train of thought into another track or to change the direction of flow of what we are thinking and what we are experiencing. Metaphors are essentially paradoxical in that ‘all the world’ is not really ‘a stage’ but it can be thought of as that because of some underlying similarity or pattern they have in common within our meaning structures.

So metaphors are not merely literary devices used to embellish our language; they actually define our reality, shape our thoughts, our plans and our expectations and form the basis for our actions. Everyday opinions and decisions emanate from this patterned story that we live. This affects our wellbeing at all levels, e.g. health workers have been able to use this metaphorical conceptualizing in the healing process. Lakoff explained that “a large proportion of our most commonplace thoughts make use of an extensive, but unconscious, system of metaphorical concepts, that is, concepts from a typically concrete realm of thought that are used to comprehend another, completely different domain.”

Our human mind works across a spectrum from knowing to not knowing and metaphorical imagination is the way we connect up fairly concrete and familiar patterns with the more elusive concepts that are too rich and nebulous to grasp easily. As Vladimir Dimitrov said, “logic is the torch of rationality, but it is metaphor that illuminates the edges of the unknown” with its inherent paradox and flexibility in much the same way that fuzzy logic works in modern technology. Fuzzy logic tolerates the conceptual twilight with which we have to deal all the time as we thread our knowing story through a jungle of unknowing. The phrase ‘a can of worms’ or ‘Pandora’s box’ evokes more meaning than a fairly detailed description of one’s complicated and difficult circumstances. Often metaphors come from archetypal stories passed down over time, e.g. the sword of Damocles was suspended by a single hair over a courtier’s head as he feasted and now it expresses any real life situation that is impregnated with danger.

We can often see in the derivation of words from much earlier times how the metaphorical structure has been continued and modified along the way. An example given by Mary Clarke is the English word ‘window’ deriving from the Old Norse word, vindauga, or eye of the wind, which was the name for the hole in the roof that let the smoke out, the smoke being, in a metaphorical sense, visible wind. Window now stands not only for openings in walls, but also for windows of opportunity or frames in which you work with your computer.

The metaphorical nature of the Yolgnu language is more transparent and reveals much common ground with ours when seen in this light. Mountains and rivers, for example, can have heads and arms and feet, like our body. Constellations of stars in the sky are called Baiame or The Saucepan or Orion’s Belt. Ritual dance, like corroboree or our theatre and ballet, creates rich metaphors of the more subtle aspects of human experience that cannot be spoken about directly with the same force or clarity.

It is hardly surprising that our body, which operates with our mind at all times, would provide such a great source of metaphorical structure. We talk about the heart of the matter, losing heart and also broken hearts. A table has a leg and a foot and we talk about attitudes such as standing on your own feet or standing firm, being tight-lipped or holding your head high, not to mention keeping your chin up and your feet on the ground. Also significant in our everyday lives is the idea of being in touch and having a voice rather than having no say or no standing in the world.

From his experience as a ‘bush theologian’ working with Aboriginal people, Eugene Stockton drew attention to the way in which the logic of imagery is by analogy or association. One of his examples was projecting from one form of the story to another as from myth to experience; the myth being fictional yet deeply true to experience. In his book The Aboriginal Gift he characterised the Western world view as a hierarchy depicted by a triangle compared to the Aboriginal world view as a family depicted by a circle of people around a camp fire. The imagery of concentric circles is important in Aboriginal art and has many different layers of meaning.

Metaphors regarding communication

Useful examples from Lakoff and Johnson of metaphors that directly apply to our communication are the different ways we might think of having an argument with someone. A common metaphorical structure in our society is that of a fight or a war. Thus you can attack every weak point of your adversary or shoot down and demolish his argument particularly if your words pack a punch and are right on target. You could also think of the argument as a building that was not properly constructed or supported and might be a bit shaky or easily torn down. It could also be framed as a journey that wanders roundabout or covers very little ground or it could be a vessel that has lots of holes in it and does not hold water. Even more complex concepts such as causation have a simpler metaphorical basis in that it is seen basically as direct manipulation as of an object by a hand. We will examine this important concept in more detail shortly.

How often do we think of our mind as a machine? We have to get the wheels turning to grind out a solution and we can be a little rusty or even run out of steam. We get annoyed if our cogs do not seem to engage as quickly or as neatly as we would like or we are not on the right wavelength or if there just seems to be no gas in the tank for travelling further today. The advent of new scientific methodology speeded up research into the mind and body during the last century, but it also sponsored a more mechanical imagery and dimmed our view of the organic wholeness of the human being and this has changed our manner of relating to one another. In particular, the information revolution was spawned by electronic communication technology and, as I was saying much earlier in the book, cognition came to be seen purely in terms of information processing mechanisms. Pick up any popular book about the brain today and you are sure to find plenty of computer metaphors such as firmware, parallel processing, error messages, etc. The way we choose to view our mind has many implications for the way we will use it in our human interaction.

Krippendorf pointed out six different metaphors that relate to our attempts to communicate with one another. The first is to think of it as a container, which is sometimes called ‘the bucket theory of meaning.’ This puts the emphasis on content, the words being distinct entities that must be transported correctly and unloaded without damage. Sometimes a message or parts of it can get lost. The second is the conduit metaphor in which information may encounter bottlenecks or not go through proper channels. There is even the possibility of an overload or misdirected flow. Then there is the control metaphor in which the message takes hold of its recipient in a compelling way because it is so persuasive it cannot be resisted. The transmission metaphor comes from signal encoding where it is crucial to decipher correctly. The pervasive war metaphor has already been described above with respect to an argument, where the communication has to have a winner and a loser. Finally, there is the dance metaphor that we alluded to earlier in this course, which is a delightfully cooperative and communal activity that entails continuity and repetitiveness.

The important point to notice, as Krippendorf said, is that these metaphors have ‘entailments’ that organise their users’ perceptions and thereby help to create the experience of living. The metaphor I have suggested as the basis for this course about mind-body science is to see the mind as that which connects us to one another and to our world; mind as the great connector. I hope you may have glimpsed from your experience so far that using this metaphor has changed the landscape that we are looking at and altered what we will see about the working of the mind and it will largely determine what we will come to understand about the subject. That is how powerful the choice of metaphor can be.

The most basic metaphors of science and experience

We rarely notice any of the ways we are shaping our view of the world by metaphorical structures in our language, but there are some basic patterns that we take so much for granted that it is hard to accept that they are not aspects of reality itself. These are the concepts of space and time and the related concept of causation. We use a variety of metaphors to do with spatial orientation – up, down, in, out, rising and falling, etc. For example, happy is up and sad is down; you can be in high spirits until your spirits sink. More is up and less is down; the numbers may reach a low level. Things come into view or go out of sight; you go in a race or go out of it; or you fall in love. We speak about water turning into ice or an idea coming out of a discussion. The concept of time is also used metaphorically. Time is money and can be wasted or saved; we never seem to have enough of it. What does this kind of language have to do with the physical science on which it seems to be constructed?

Bruce Gregory’s delightful book about ‘physics as language’ affirmed that, for all practical purposes, the world is what we say it is or, as we have said in this book, we invent our own particular reality as we bring it forth using our mind. Another book in a similar vein is Physics as Metaphor by Roger Jones. This need not contradict the idea that what science seeks to understand is not necessarily something we created. That is why we say our mind is bringing forth our world rather than creating it. However, we tend to think of science, metaphorically, as drawing back the veil that hides the secrets of the universe whereas the history of science is the evolution of a particular language with which we attempt to explain and understand our experience. Sir Arthur Eddington put it beautifully when he wrote: “the footprints we have discovered on the shores of the unknown are our own.”

The most common everyday metaphors we use are built upon foundational concepts that are the deepest expressions of our consciousness, such cardinal metaphors as space and time. Immanuel Kant considered space, time and causality to be conceptual and intuitive categories arising from the interplay between our mind and the world itself without which we would never be able to construct our personal story because our experience would be too chaotic and tangled. Philosophy has produced many variations on this theme, but the role played by these metaphorical foundations in the operation of our minds has never been completely denied.

It seems unthinkable that we could live without there being space to keep things apart from one another and time to prevent everything from happening at once. The psychology of our experience of time and space is interesting, however, because we can feel separate from someone who is standing beside us and close to someone who is a long distance away and our sense of the passing of time is notoriously elastic. An hour can seem to go like a few minutes or it can drag interminably. There is also a sense in which the past can intrude forcibly upon the present and, for some people apparently, the future can be seen before it has happened. Physicists tell us that matter is simply a more concentrated energy field composed of vibrating particles, but it feels solid enough when you kick it. The scientific concept of space and time, once thought to be straight line parameters, changed dramatically when Einstein showed that the universe could not operate as it does unless space-time is curved. Again this has no practical meaning for most of us, but it illustrates the elastic nature of our metaphorical constructions. Einstein apparently believed from his experience that “the human mind has first to construct forms independently before it can find them in things.”

Our notion of causality today is built around the concepts of space and time, but this was not always the case. It serves to give some idea of how thinking changes over the centuries according to the progress of our metaphorical story making. There is ample evidence that people hundreds of years ago felt much less severely separated from their animals and plants and natural world than we do. They saw something of themselves in their fellow creatures and in the stars, the sun and the moon; they believed their lives were connected to everything else they observed. They had no need to distinguish between an objective assessment of planetary orbits and their subjective experience of the celestial cycles in their mind and body. In some cases they were able to respond to natural events more meaningfully than we can because of this awareness of being connected. We have developed through science cleverer ways of interacting with our environment that enable us to respond more efficiently today, but at the same time we have lost much of our connection to nature.

Carl Jung gave us a term to describe the coincidence of two events that have no apparent causal connection between them, but which have a common symbolic or metaphorical content. He called it synchronicity. Astrology is a classic example of a supposed relationship between what we experience in our lives and what we see in the phases of the moon and movement of planets and their relative positions at the time of our birth. Today we would call it an acausal correspondence; some of us believe in it, many of us do not. Science has always been primarily concerned with causal connections that are directly linked, but in an extraordinary transformation, somewhat akin to cutting its own throat, science produced the new theory of quantum mechanics in which probability rules and meaning and information do not need to travel across time and space, they are shared and omnipresent. I mentioned earlier that quantum theory has spawned many new metaphorical descriptions of brains, minds and bodies and ‘great fields’ that encompass everything. The evolution of our knowing will continue as new metaphors are created.

The concepts of space and time lead to the idea of movement or animation, the opposite of being still, and to thoughts about what makes this happen - what is the motivating principle behind everything that moves, if there is one. Newton’s three laws of motion sound simple enough, but they are a bit trickier than they look because you have to understand the concept of inertia: that uniform motion continues indefinitely unless something interferes with it. In fact Newton had to invent a new mathematics called calculus to work them out! The concepts of force and energy are incredibly pervasive in the way we use our minds, sometimes acting as a bridge between rationality and emotion enabling us to think of an impetus to act or an impulse. Then there is the indispensable concept of fields about which Einstein remarked that it required a courageous scientific imagination to realise that it was something existing between the bodies rather than the bodies themselves that was responsible for the activity being observed. James Clerk Maxwell is sometimes regarded as the greatest of all physicists for his invention of the electromagnetic field; although his work was based on the observations of a relative layman, Michael Faraday..

Fields as invisible regions of influence are the basis of Rupert Sheldrake’s radical explanations about living systems that he called a “new science of life.” His idea is that every cell and organism such as a human being creates an invisible morphogenetic field that shapes its existence and defines its connection with the world. The metaphor I am using of mind as connection could be expressed in terms of field theory or quantum mechanics or simply in terms of the proactive nature of our perception as in this book. It is not necessary to give it any more concrete existence in order to use it to guide our exploration of the basic principles of mind-body science. This is the beauty of metaphorical structures: they can take different forms for different people, but they still act as bridges of meaning so that we can share a meaningful experience with one another. The fundamental importance of time and space will be visited again as we proceed further because, after all, they represent the physical aspects of the separateness that we are trying to bridge with our great connector mind.

A small experiment you may like to indulge in here is to think of an apt metaphor to describe your experience of reading this book. The easiest way I know to play with metaphorical constructions in your mind is to draw a picture. I would be very interested to know what your picture of your experience of this book so far would look like.

Wholeness and the implicate order

One of the most important new metaphors created in the latter part of the last century, during which huge advances in our thinking about the mind were occurring, came from the celebrated physicist, David Bohm. As a research scientist during the subsequent unfolding of both relativity theory and quantum mechanics, he was in a position to think about what features these two revolutionary ways of thinking about reality had in common. To many people these two approaches seemed irreconcilable, but what Bohm said they had in common was that they both invoked the idea of an ‘undivided wholeness in flowing movement.’ He was also extremely aware of and articulate about the fragmentation of the world as it manifested in every aspect of thinking and doing. He saw this as a root cause of most of our problems and, partly through discussion with Krishnamurti, he argued passionately the case for seeing things holistically. He proposed the powerful new metaphor of two orders of reality: an implicate order in which the unbroken wholeness enfolded within itself all the manifest details that we recognise in the explicate order. Thus fragmentation and unity could coexist in what seems like a perfectly natural way.

Bohm was not the first, of course, to plead the importance of wholeness or unity, but it is interesting to ask: what is so special about wholeness? A new book by Malcolm Hollick called The Science of Oneness is typical of this genre in that it gives no concise statement of what oneness is or why it is so needed, yet it seems to be self-evident that without it we human beings would be lost. In this book I have spoken about and we have experienced the way our mind seems to create coherent wholes out of any bits and pieces it encounters. It is clearly something in our nature and it can be argued that it is most evident in nature itself. Goethe, both as poet and as scientist, was a pioneer of the appreciation of the ‘wholeness of nature’ and the book of that name by Henri Bortoft that I mentioned earlier is worth visiting again before we finish. Brian Goodwin’s books are equally passionate about the fact that when we see meaning, coherence and wholeness in nature we can find it more easily in ourselves.

Wholeness is not the same as totality. When scientists learned how to make laser light in the 1970’s there was a sudden leap in our understanding of wholeness through the practical refinement of the hologram that had been invented a while before. A hologram is a photographic plate made with laser light, which is referred to as coherent, instead of natural light, which is said to be dispersed. When you shine laser light on this plate again it shows up as a three dimensional optical image that is a complete reconstruction of the original object. The amazing thing is that when you light up just a small part of that plate it also contains the complete image only at a lower resolution. The whole is contained in each of the parts, which is the essence of the concept of wholeness as it was developed by Goethe. This tallies with modern physics in which the properties of a single particle are said to be determined by all the other particles together.

Another example of wholeness is what is known as the hermeneutic circle, which is the way that meaning arises in our mind as we are reading the words in a book. If the book is well written the meaning seems to progressively unfold as if the essence of the whole story is somehow immanent in each line or paragraph. If you want to know beforehand what a book is about you could read a summary on the dust jacket, but that is often an overview and may be too superficial a framework to capture the essence. If you want to understand the book better after becoming familiar with it you will not get that knowing by standing back for a broader view; you will find it by looking more closely at certain parts which convey the wholeness of its meaning. Similarly, instead of trying to understand the universe by extrapolating from the local environment, we might try to understand the local environment as being the result of the rest of the universe.

Therefore the whole cannot be reduced to parts because it is not an integration of the parts (i.e. it is not secondary). It was always there, as were the parts. This is what Bortoft calls the authentic whole. The authentic whole is basically invisible to science because the scientific method is like the judge who compels the witness to answer the questions he himself has formulated and so it is generally not open to seeing a bigger picture that it did not ask for or expect. So the fragmentary data generated by science often seem to lack practical meaning. Meaning clearly has something to do with the wholeness and it could be said that meaning is in some way hologrammatic.

The biological equivalent of this is that in a living system, structural changes work to preserve, not the totality of the organism, but its autopoietic wholeness. Our mind, which is the essential characteristic of a living system, seeks out in every fragment it encounters a coherent wholeness that it seems to need to keep us operating reasonably smoothly through our lives. The metaphor which best describes how this can happen is Bohm’s picture of the complicated world entirely enfolded within an implicate order. It is the gestalt mentioned at the beginning of this chapter that seems to have a primary place in this view of reality. We will return to the mystery of wholeness in due course.

In the next Chapter we will look at the metaphorical structure of this book; I will unveil the framework of my story about the human mind.

 

WHAT IS AN INSTINCT?  A Metalogue by Gregory Bateson, 1969.

(from Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1971)

 

Daughter: Daddy, what is an instinct?

Father: An instinct, my dear, is an explanatory principle.

D: But what does it explain?

F: Anything – almost anything at all. Anything you want it to explain.

D: Don’t be silly. It doesn’t explain gravity.

F: No. But that is because nobody wants ‘instinct’ to explain gravity. If they did, it would explain it. We could simply say that the moon has an instinct whose strength varies inversely as the square of the distance . . .

D: But that’s nonsense, Daddy.

F: Yes, surely. But it was you who mentioned ‘instinct,’ not I.

D: All right – but then what does explain gravity?

F: Nothing, my dear, because gravity is an explanatory principle.

D: Oh.

 

D: Do you mean that you cannot use one explanatory principle to explain another? Never?

F: Hmmm . . . hardly ever. That is what Newton meant when he said, “hypotheses non fingo.”

D: And what does that mean? Please.

F: Well, you know what ‘hypotheses’ are. Any statement linking together two descriptive statements is an hypothesis. If you say there was a full moon on February 1^st and another on March 1^st; and then you link those two observations together in any way, the statement which links them is an hypothesis.

D: Yes – and I know what non means. But what’s fingo.

F: Well – fingo is a late Latin word for ‘make.’ It forms a verbal noun fictio from which we get the word ‘fiction.’

D: Daddy, do you mean that Sir Isaac Newton thought that all hypotheses were made up like stories?

F: Yes – precisely that.

D: But didn’t he discover gravity? With the apple?

F: No, dear. He invented it.

D: Oh.

 

D: Daddy, who invented instinct?

CONTINUES