Qualities of Life
This unfinished writing is about the elusive Qualities of Life - Exploring the biological, psychological and philosophical roots of human passion, understanding and satisfaction. It is fuelled by the pioneering work of Maturana, Varela and others whose science of wholeness (based on autopoiesis) reveals many processes of everyday living that we have not been able to talk about coherently before.

Some of it appeared in "Towards a Biological Explanation of Human Understanding" in the Journal Cybernetics and Human Knowing, Vol 2, No 3, pp 3-15 . A longer version of that paper is "The Dance of Understanding" which is in the book Seized by Agreement, Swamped by Understanding. Some other aspects are covered in "Songlines in the City - Hearing the Spirit Dimension" and in various other unpublished articles.

By the way, Emily is older now - as you can see - and she's still beautiful!

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A few background notes to this writing are given below:

Dissatisfaction and yearning

 Human dissatisfaction seems to be widespread, but the reasons for it are not so clear. Despairing cries take many forms. One can see anguish written on some faces and others looking peaceful despite appalling deprivation. Life often seems to be synonymous with stress and uncertainty while peace and tranquillity are more closely associated with death. What we call "work" is a large part of our lives, but there is increasing talk about declining personal satisfaction in the workplace.

One place we search for satisfaction is in our conversation. An issue/problem/topic/concern arises out of conversation when there is a feeling of dissatisfaction about it. When it has apparently been satisfied, it disappears from conversation.

What is our conversation about? We are self-referring beings and, though our conversation often seems to be about some external reality, on closer examination, it is about our own experience which we are attempting to explain. In that sense conversation is about itself.

What is the nature of a satisfying relationship? What would have to happen for us to say that we were satisfied - or that we understood? Could we ever be completely satisfied? And should we? These are questions which we will consider here.

While poets and artists have captured the deep yearnings of human experience, the biological, medical and social sciences have not had the tools to explore these very well. But science is changing with the steady acceptance of constructivism in psychology, second-order cybernetics (the science of observing systems) and autopoiesis as the basis of cognition.

I think these changes address dissatisfaction and yearning directly. The dominant mode of thinking about reality with its absolute requirement for external validation is a primary source of dissatisfaction and "the quest for a compelling argument" and it actually confounds our sense of human understanding. Thinking based on autopoiesis or constructivism points to an entirely different quality of relationship.

The biology of gene pools has diverted attention away from the integrity of the individual, but the biological explanation of autonomy / interdependence helps to redress this imbalance.

Information technology has distracted us from sensory awareness, perception and reflection and the importance of "making the connection." I think that fears of "information overload" will be allayed as our experience on the internet provides the opportunity to see that connection, not information, is what matters.

The focus on human intention and causality is an intellectual hubris that has clouded our spirituality (not the other way around). Recognition of the basic biological need for "co-drifting" and love (a domain of behaviours in which others arise as legitimate others in co-existence with oneself) offers great hope.

The personal nature of this work

This is a story of my search for satisfaction. It is a personal odyssey, but I have not travelled alone. I have the feeling that your path and mine must surely have crossed, somewhere, and I trust that we may walk together now for a while.

Having written as a scientist, in the third person, for much of my life and experienced the impotence of being only objective, I now delight in an idea that Carl Rogers was supposed to have expressed: "I speak most generally, when I am speaking personally."

This story is entirely about my own experience. It being an attempt to explain my experience, I will draw parallels with what I perceive to be the experience of others or what others have said about their own experience. But I do not regard it as a body of theory. It has no validity outside the explanation of my experience. It is possible, however, that my explanation might appeal to you in reflecting on your own experience. I hope that may be the case. If it is, we still cannot claim a universal validity for these thoughts, but we can claim something far more important than that for we will know that we have shared some understanding.

This writing is equally about my dissatisfaction. A brief look at some low points in my journey and their parallels in society serves as an introduction to the theme. That is the starting point. As in all stories, things happened along the way which seem important to me as I reflect on my particular history. My attitude is spiritual, but I am not an evangelist. I do not have the authority to speak for others. It is the road less travelled I have chosen. And, as the poet said: that did make all the difference.

About feelings and explanations

The way I talk about experience is this. I think that feelings are the primary reality. What we are all trying to do, all the time, is manage our feelings. We do this to a large extent by interacting with and trying to influence the feelings of others, who are also trying to manage their feelings. All that I can really be aware of as I reflect about myself within my world - that is what I like to call my feelings. In the scheme of biology we are rational/emotive animals, but our distinguishing characteristic is the way we use our rationality to justify (and often deny) our emotioning. I want to look not just to our reasoning power, but to the way our reason is braided with our emotion.

Charles Birch began his recent book (called Feelings) with these words: "Feelings are what matter most in life. Yet we are only now beginning to understand what feelings are and what produces them." He talks about thoughts as intellectual feelings; about zest and indifference, vitality versus depression; sources of feelings other than sensory information; the way our feelings affect our health and the feelings of animals.

We explain our experience with our experience. What we experience is our feelings, but we don't know what makes them come and go - what mechanism is operating that produces certain feelings. We have a passion for explaining what is going on under the shell of our experience. Why? To be able to control it.

We are manipulators at heart having learnt through science to work out mechanisms of deterministic systems and thus control them (so we will feel better). The way in which scientific explanations are used to manipulate and control in the pursuit of pleasure is also there amongst the roots of our dissatisfaction.

It contributes to the general lack of enthusiasm for explanations of our circular, self-organising, autopoietic qualities and reluctance to accept that we can't really control very successfully, but we can flow with life remarkably well (because we are made that way).

We are talking about quality in a way that relates to what Robert Pirsig has written in his two beautiful books - Lila and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It isn't how effective we are, how productive we are, how efficient we are, how successful we are, how rich we are, how important we are, how emotional we are, or how happy we are - although all of these may be involved.

Making the connection

This is at the heart of my story - though it may be very sketchy here.

David Bohm talks about the unbroken whole enfolding the parts of the whole so that ultimately everything is connected. Maturana talks about the self-referring process of structural coupling. We seem to know who we are through our connections with the world. But what is the nature of these connections?

In one sense they are historical. We live as on a wave front and move coherently as a result of our history - points connecting through the origin. We tend to be surprised to see coherence without any local causal relationship. Synchronicity does not require being in touch - just being part of the same history. Everything happens in the present. We write our history backwards to connect up with present experience. We are all surfers on a giant wave.

In another sense it is the congruence between our structure and that of our world which seems to be important. To be connected is to be part of the same whole in one's experience. Certain properties of what we call objects become as one with certain properties of what we call our thought.

As a cognitive model this is known as representationism, which draws attention away from the historical aspect - that we see similar things because we have similar histories of structural coupling. It also draws attention away from the proactive nature of perception whereby our sense organs are not passive, but actively determine what is being sensed. Our ear determines what it hears and our eye determines what it sees; the sound waves and light rays are a medium of connection, rather than an input.

I think that we often short-circuit ourselves through fear and indifference. Confidence is acting always to increase the number of options available - maintaining a wide range of connections. This comes from the second-order cybernetics of von Foerster and provides a way of looking at trends in human social behaviour.

Bateson once called stress "a lack of entropy. . ." and I study it in terms of lack of flexibility in making the connection. Being well connected, having a good grip on life and being on the same wavelength are popular metaphors. Metaphor begins to take us into the world of qualitative, rather than quantitative understanding.

Bohm warned about the insidious danger of relying upon thought as the pre-eminent system because thought is the fragmenting (and polluting) system with the systemic fault that it doesn't see that it is the problem - it only claims to be the solution.

Moving beyond thought is interesting and challenging. We can't describe what is beyond thought, but it is a big statement to say that we can, as living beings, operate in that (spiritual) domain. "We shall have to use logic to try to corner perspectives that laugh at our attempt," said Huston Smith. It certainly helps when I laugh at myself, here. At this point I usually turn to writing songs!

To me the essence of spirituality is that we are a part of something bigger, not complete in ourselves, yet the paradox is that we make our own world as we go and it seems to help to have complete confidence in this process - to trust that the larger whole requires us as much as we require it.

There is a yearning for completeness, but, once we speak (or act), the epistemological knife appears. Moving from the one to the many by making distinctions is essential for our conversation, but brings incompleteness and frustration once again.

As languaging beings we seem to use the conversational relationship - connections with others - to try to satisfy that insatiable yearning for completeness. And, in the end, it works!