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Afterword: a view from enaction
Language Sciences xxx (2018) 1–6
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Afterword: a view from enaction John Stewart CRED, Technological University of Compiègne, France
a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
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Enaction is the process whereby a living organism brings about its own Umwelt or livedworld of experience. The prototype example is the “the world of the tick” as described by von Uexküll. This is a nice case of simplexity – achieving an impressive result by apparently simple means. Thus, the modest tick, blind and deaf and only capable of crawling slowly, achieves the task of catching a mammal – thousands of times bigger and faster – and getting to suck its blood. The means in question involve chaining three perceptionaction cycles: sensing butyric acid (emitted by the sweat glands of mammals) which causes the tick to drop; crawling on a rough surface until finding a smooth surface (in context, the bare skin of the mammal); and sucking a liquid at 37 C underneath the surface (in context, the blood of the mammal). The notion of simplexity is attractive, especially to those biologists who still retain « a feeling for the organism ». However, the concept of simplexity has its limitations; it does not explain anything, it is essentially an appreciation which comes after the event. Indeed one might even go so far as to say that simplexity is not so much a solution, but rather a problem which itself requires explanation. After commenting on each of the texts in this volume, I found no substantial indications that “simplexity” does actually explain anything. My conclusion is that “simplexity”, far from being an explanation, is rather an alert flag for situations which are certainly interesting, but which are in need of further study and explanation. In this sense, “simplexity” is indeed a useful heuristic – although perhaps not in quite the way that was originally intended. Ó 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Enaction Simplexity Explanation Heuristic
1. Introduction Enaction is the process whereby a living organism brings about its own Umwelt or lived-world of experience. The prototype example is “the world of the tick” as described by von Uexküll (1909). The tick’s world is constituted by just three salient perception-action cycles: on perceiving butyric acid, the tick lets itself fall from the branch of a bush; on perceiving a rough surface, the tick crawls until it finds a smooth surface; if it then finds a liquid at 37 C underneath the smooth surface, the tick sucks to satiety. In context, the only source of butyric acid in the tick’s natural environment is the sweat-gland of a mammal; the rough surface is hair and the smooth surface is bare skin; and the liquid at 37 C is the mammal’s blood. In this way the tick, a tiny animal that is blind, deaf and can only crawl slowly, achieves the truly remarkable feat of catching a mammal that is thousands of times larger and faster; and not only that, but getting to suck its blood. This is a prime example of simplexity in action.
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J. Stewart / Language Sciences xxx (2018) 1–6
To a first approximation, each biological species brings about a single characteristic Umwelt. The exception is the human species: due to the twin innovations of language and the making and using of tools – which enrich each other in the form of techno-logy, i.e. talking about making and using tools – humans enact a great variety of Umwelten. Here, again to a first approximation, we may say that there are as many human lived-worlds as forms of society, both pre-historic and historic. Thus, although it is rooted in biology, enaction also extends to human cognition; so that the theory of Enaction is potentially the basis for a new paradigm in Cognitive Science (Stewart et al., 2010). The notion of simplexity is attractive, especially to those biologists (however few they may be in these days of genes and molecules) who still retain « a feeling for the organism » (Fox-Keller, 1983). However, it is important not to get carried away: in spite of its immediate appeal, the concept of simplexity has its limitations. The main shortcoming is that it does not explain anything; it is essentially an appreciation which comes after the event. Indeed one might even go so far as to say that simplexity is not so much a solution, but rather a problem which itself requires explanation. We can begin to appreciate the limitations of the concept of simplexity if we ask the question: how does a simplex process of enaction, such as that achieved by the tick, come about in the first place? We may be sure of one thing: it did not arise by any deliberate process of seeking a solution to a well-posed problem. The tick did not scratch its head and say to itself: “Here’s what I need to do, it’s to catch a mammal and suck its blood; now how could I best go about it?” And even if the tick had posed the problem in these terms, invoking the principle of simplexity would not have been operationally effective in opening up the way to a solution. Over the course of evolutionary history, things must rather have been the other way round. The mechanisms, the perception-action operations, were in large part there first; it was when, in an unplanned manner, that they came across a suitable problem that they became the simplex “solution” to that problem. My claim, then, is that in the biological realm which is its initial frame of reference, invoking the principle of simplexity is not an operationally effective means of finding a solution to a pre-existing problem. We may now ask: is it any different when it comes to human affairs? The potential advantage here is that in this case, we have better empirical access to the actual processes of discovery. In the realm of biology, the actual processes whereby simplex situations arise are lost in the shrouds of evolutionary time, and they do not leave any fossil traces. My claim, and a possible counter-claim about the effectiveness of invoking simplexity, are thus inevitably questions of theoretical speculation. But if we are addressing contemporary human situations, then we have at least a chance of looking empirically. It is in this spirit that I will now comment on each of the texts in this collection. In the Prologue, Berthoz informs us that the notion of simplexity has been found of interest in a wide variety of areas, including geology, mathematics, design, architecture, engineering, artificial intelligence, biology, philosophy, rhetoric, robotics, linguistics and management science. The list is impressive. Unfortunately, however, Berthoz does not tell us anything about how the concept of simplexity actually works in any of these areas; and so this does not help us to decide whether the concept does or does not have any explanatory power. Worse than that, without being overly paranoid, the inclusion of rhetoric and management “science” in the list may give rise to a sneaking suspicion. To what extent may the appeal to “simplexity” be part of a “cover-up” operation, masking either a deficiency or (as in the case of management science in the relation between Capital and labour) aims that it would be impolitic to make too clearly explicit? On a somewhat subsidiary note, may also remark that Berthoz makes repeated references to “the brain”: “the brain’s role in social interactions.”; “universal properties of the brain.”; “the brain’s remarkable ability to find vicarious processes to implement a function.”; et cetera (my italics). This may seem natural enough, given that Berthoz’s primary area of competence is in neuroscience. However, it is improper to speak of the brain as acting; just as it is not the legs that walk but rather the whole organism, so it is not the brain that actually does anything. This residual neuro-centrism is all the more ironic in that the principle of simplexity often reduces the role of the brain. The tick’s remarkable ability to enact its lived-world does not reside in its brain (it does not even have one worth speaking of). And more generally, simplexity is distributed over the whole situation, not localized in any one part – not even the brain. In their Introduction, Cowley and Garhn-Andersen ask the key question: “Why simplexity and language?” They recall the basic definition of “simplexity”: “the set of solutions that living organisms find that enable them to deal with new information and situations, while taking into account past experiences and future ones. Such solutions are new ways of addressing problems so that actions may be taken more quickly, more elegantly and more efficiently”. The question, then, is whether simplex solutions were “the basis for proposing a new approach to linguistics.” They indicate the need to move away from “segregational views” where language is a synchronic and/or real-time system that is taken to stand apart from history and actual movement. Now the move beyond segregational views towards a distributed perspective (Cowley, 2011) did not require an appeal to simplexity. The question, then, is whether simplexity adds anything new to the broad distributed perspective. It would not be appropriate for an introduction to answer this question, so we will look to the rest of the volume to see if we can find some elements of response. In the next text, Cowley and Markos address the theme of “evolution, lineages and human language”. Challenging the “language metaphor of life”, they note that a linear string of characters represents a drastic reduction of both language and living beings. The fallacy goes back to Schrödinger himself, who wrote: “It is these chromosomes . that contain in some kind of code-script the entire pattern of the individual’s future development and of its functioning in the mature state. . But the term code-script is, of course, too narrow. The chromosome structures are at the same time instrumental in bringing about the development they foreshadow. They are law-code and executive power – or, to use another simile, they are architect’s plan and builder’s craft – in one.” (Schrödinger, 1944, pp. 21–22). This is deeply wrong; to understand why, it is actually useful to turn the metaphor around. Written words, in themselves, don’t do anything at all; they are just marks on a piece of paper, Please cite this article in press as: Stewart, J., Afterword: a view from enaction, Language Sciences (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.langsci.2018.06.004
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they just sit there. Of course, when they are read and interpreted by human beings, the written words can profoundly influence the actions of the humans – Goody (1977) has noted that the invention of writing corresponds to the “entry into history” for human societies. Similarly, biological genes don’t actually do anything at all – they just sit there, and indeed there are few biological macromolecules that are as chemically inert as DNA. Of course, like written words, genes can profoundly influence evolutionary history; since they can be copied and transmitted from generation to generation, they arguably make natural selection and progressive evolution possible. Returning to the theme of simplexity, we have here an instructive example of “simplexity gone wrong”: it is a mistake to reduce either language or living beings to a linear string of characters. At the same, there is a phenomenon that calls for further examination: how is that this simplistic reduction seems possible, why is it so appealing, and what is it hiding? Cowley and Markos then discuss the phenomenon of “homeosis”, an ontogenetic aberration where body parts appear in improper positions. For example, the anthers of flowers may emerge in place of petals; or in fruit-flies, the thorax may double up to produce an insect with four pairs of wings. A homeotic phenotype can be triggered by a genetic mutation, for example the “bithorax” gene in Drosophila. Berthoz (2012) cites this himself as an example of simplexity. However in order not to be led astray, it is important to note that exactly the same homeotic forms can also be triggered by environmental disturbances – for example exposure to ether vapor, a temperature shock, or even a pin-prick at a certain point in development. Such mutant forms, identified initially as the result of an alteration in a gene but which can also be produced by an appropriate change in the environment, are called “phenocopies”. Far from being exceptions, phenocopies are the rule: already in the 1940s, the geneticist Goldschmidt (1940) was able to obtain phenocopies of all the known genetic mutants of Drosophila. The lesson from this is that the exact nature of the triggering stimulus, be it environmental or genetic, is of relatively little importance. What does matter, is the structural dynamics of the developmental system, because it is this which explains how the developing embryo can be switched between the normal and the homeotic mode. The upshot of all this, is that what we really need to understand, is the temporal dynamics of the system as a whole. On a distributed perspective – whether applied to life, language or cognition – ‘multi-scalar temporality’ is intrinsic to the workings of the systems. In particular, there is a resonance between the timescale of ontogenesis (weeks, months, years.) and the timescale of phylogenesis (thousands and millions of years). A popular version is theory of “recapitulation”, according to which ontogeny is an accelerated version of phylogeny: the developing embryo goes through all the stages of its evolutionary ancestry. An example is that vertebrate embryos often go through a “fish-like” or “tadpole” stage reminiscent of their piscine or amphibian ancestors. In fact, if evolution occurred by adding on further stages to ontogeny, recapitulation would be a general rule. However, evolution sometimes occurs by “neoteny”, i.e. discarding all the later stages of development, going back to an earlier stage and starting over; this is indeed what happened when humans diverged from monkeys. So to repeat the main point, in all these phenomena the essential feature that needs to be explained, is the dynamics of the system as a whole. Berthoz explicitly considers that “homeosis” involves simplex tricks, notably involving the homeobox genes. Cowley and Markos claim that to reduce languaging to a verbal aspect is like treating a living system as a genotype; they say “like genes, words are virtual”. As a biologist I am tempted to turn this around, and say that “like words, genes are virtual”. In either case, we see what is becoming a pattern: simplexity is not an explanation or a solution, it is part of a problem. Vincenzo Raimondi addresses the bio-logic of “languaging”. He makes the important point that languaging behavior is embedded, and exists as such, only in a framework of inter-individual coordination. This means that while correlations between the neurobiological domain and the organismic domain can always be established, we cannot provide any constitutive explanation of the specific phenomena that take place in the existential domain of the organism as a whole (i.e. social interaction) by looking at the neurobiological domain. To sum up by a phrase, “the mind is not in the brain”; to the extent that humans are profoundly social beings, for whom languaging is a constitutive activity, the mind is not even in single bodies. Turning from these critical comments to more positive aspects, Maturana defines “languaging” as recursive co-ordination, i.e. co-ordination of co-ordination. This is maybe worth spelling out. Animal communication is first-order co-ordination: the conditions which trigger the emission of a signal, and the responses of conspecifics to perception of that signal, lead to a coordination of actions. The pheromone trails of the “social insects” are a prototype example of this. Note that in such cases there are no specific intentions to communicate. In human languaging, when we talk to each other, there is or can be a very definite intention to communicate; indeed the whole point of the exercise is to try and understand what the other person is trying to say. This is why phrases such as “do you mean that .?” (followed by an attempted paraphrase) are so common. In other words, we seek to achieve a “co-ordination of co-ordination”; but it is to be noted that (a) there is no guarantee of succeeding, (b) it cannot be forced, and (c) politeness requires that we talk as if we understand, but lucidity obliges us to recognize that usually we end up surfing on a mis-understanding which in the best of cases may not be completely crass. Finally, we may ask: where does simplexity come into this? Raimondi does not have anything very specific to say on this; but I would like to make a suggestion. When, in the course of everyday conversation or indeed when reading a text, we have the impression that we understand, things seem simple and the words seem to have a reasonably clear “literal” meaning. But actually, this is problematic. On the conventional view of language, “metaphors” are a somewhat dubious, improper mode of functioning: one takes as unproblematic a “literal” meaning, and “metaphor” is then seen as an (over)imaginative extension by mental association. However, as Lakoff and Johnson (1980) have seen quite clearly, a “metaphorical” mode of functioning is actually the basic norm. It is the so-called “literal” meaning that is the special case that calls for additional explanation; a “referential impression” arises when a metaphor is used in a particular sort of well-limited context, in a stereotyped way, so that the “meaning” of the word is impoverished to the point of being “standard”. This may be pragmatically convenient, and there is nothing morally wrong with it; but it is actually rather a sad state of affairs (we are stuck in a rut), well evoked by the Please cite this article in press as: Stewart, J., Afterword: a view from enaction, Language Sciences (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.langsci.2018.06.004
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phrase “dead metaphor”. My suggestion here is that a “literal meaning” is an example of simplexity: a situation that appears simple is actually more complicated, so that there is more than meets the eye and further examination would be in order. Lassiter proposes to mobilize the concept of “powers” to clarify the role of simplexity in languaging. He offers as a prototypical example: “I have the power to drink coffee and coffee has the power to be drunk by me.” The difficulty here is to perceive what distinguishes this “powers view” from mere truisms. “Don’t forget the eggs, especially when you’re making an omelet”. Sound advice, assuredly; but is it really getting us anywhere? One of my favorites is: “Someone who is out walking his dog, is on the end of a leash” (Serge Gainsbourg) – at least here we have a reversal of the usual way of looking at things that has some comic value. This might be an opportunity to rehabilitate the much-maligned “dormitive principle”: after all, what’s wrong with saying that the reason opium makes you sleep, is that it contains a dormitive principle?! A mite more seriously, these are worrisome bedfellows for simplexity, already under suspicion of masquerading as an explanation when it is nothing of the kind. Elsewhere, Lassiter cites Berthoz: “Meaning can’t be superimposed on life; it is life”; and comments: “The claim that ‘meaning is life’ is philosophically bold. Meaningfulness is a property that’s typically associated with human beings, not with living organisms in general. I can appreciate a meaningful poem or painting, but I’d bet good money that ants in my yard can’t. So what sense can we make of Berthoz’s claim?” He frames an answer in terms of Gibson’s notion of affordances and von Uexküll’s notion of Umwelten. He then claims that “adopting a powers-metaphysics to conceptualize languaging . begins to unpack the conceptual connection between simplexity and meaning. . (They) are connected by way of manifestation partners for powers: powers are governed by simplex principles and powers require a meaningful world for their activation. Just as powers are inert without manifestation partners, simplexity is empty without meaning.” The work to be done here is to unpack what there is here that goes beyond the status of mere truisms. As Popper reminds us, if a proposition is not refutable, it is not properly scientific. Gahrn-Andersen raises the issue of heteronomy. His argument is formulated in terms of a critique of what he calls “strong autonomy”. He notes that “we are heteronomous in that we continuously learn new things, solve problems and adjust to social norms and the values of others.” And of course any natural language is not created from scratch by the user, a new-born human infant always finds a language “already there”. These points are so obvious that if “strong autonomy” really does deny them, one may wonder whether there are any serious proponents of “strong autonomy”; the worry is that Gahrn-Andersen may be attacking a straw man. It may therefore be useful to recall the essential tenets of “autonomy”. The main point is that a cognitive agent can only perceive the world in its own terms, on the basis of its own “cognitive repertoire”. This was the point made by Kant in his criticism of Hume’s empiricism: even if there are empirical regularities in the flow of perceptions, they will only be noticed if they fall within conceptual categories that the agent already possesses: this is why he insisted that the conceptual categories are necessarily “a priori”. Gahrn-Andersen notes with approval that “within a social system a given action can be meaningful to agents only if it is performed in accordance with the rules and norms that govern the system”. There is a certain irony in the fact that Gahrn-Andersen cites this as evidence for “heteronomy”, whereas this point is precisely in accordance with the spirit of autonomy. In fact the difficulty here (and it is a genuine one) goes back a long way, in the form of the learner’s paradox. The paradox is that in order to learn about something, you must first know that thing. As Socrates puts it: “A man cannot search either for what he knows or for what he does not know. He cannot search for what he knows – since he knows it, there is no need to search – nor for what he does not know, for he does not know what to look for.” The only way out, as far as I can see, is to admit that in spite of first appearances, “autonomy” and “heteronomy” are not mutually exclusive. If this amounts to a refutation of “strong autonomy”, it is equally a refutation of “strong heteronomy”. Rather than mounting a unilateral attack on autonomy, it may be more appropriate to follow Thibault, and to consider that there is a dialectic between autonomy and heteronomy. Gahrn-Andersen also has some interesting things to say about the phenomenology that is involved. Following Heidegger, he notes that our experience of things-in-use is different from when we just observe objects. In particular, he cites habits as an example of simplexity: “they allow us to engage more swiftly and effectively with the environment. [.] As we skillfully engage with a thing, we experientially transcend it. To paraphrase Heidegger: when using a hammer to put a nail in a wall, we focus on its purpose (its relation to the nail and the wall), and not on the hammer by itself. Reflective thinking disrupts the experiential flow enabled by habits. Thinking too hard about your game, in cricketers’ lore, is usually not a good way to go, a sign that something has gone wrong”. This is fine, as far as it goes; but I would add that when something has gone wrong, then one does need to think about it. We may take this as a paradigm for simplexity: when it is in place, and everything is going well, we can forget about it; but when we want to understand the genesis of a simplex situation, as we are forced to do if something is not working smoothly, then we have to unpack everything and start over again. The article by Thibault raises the key theme of the “Self” – not a thing or a state, but a time-extended process which gives rise to a person who experiences an ‘inner life’. Philosophically, the existential theme of “the soul” has been recognized as being of primordial importance, ever since Aristotle (quoted by Thibault). But scientifically, there is a decided reluctance to engage with this theme, for the following reason. Science is generally supposed to aim at objectivity; and the straightforward way to ensure objectivity is to remove all elements of subjectivity. And of course, nothing is more “subjective” than conscious experience of the self. But since Thibault has had the merit, and the courage, to raise the theme anyway, I would like to take advantage of the opportunity to mention two related themes that do not usually have a very good press in scientific circles. The first of these themes is the issue of consciousness; and more specifically, an audacious theory concerning the origin of our modern form of consciousness due to Jaynes (1976). According to Jaynes, our present state of human consciousness – that we may identify as reflexive consciousness, being conscious of being conscious – has not always existed. More specifically, Jaynes claims that it did not exist at the time of the great civilizations of Antiquity – Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Assyrians, the Please cite this article in press as: Stewart, J., Afterword: a view from enaction, Language Sciences (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.langsci.2018.06.004
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Incas in America, and so on; the period in question runs roughly from 9000 BC to 1000 BC. Jaynes defines “civilisation” as “the art of living in towns of such size that everyone does not know everyone else”. His basic hypothesis is that this form of social organization was made possible by what he calls the “Bicameral Mind”1. By this he means that the core of this social organization was provided by “prophet-kings” who quite literally heard “voices” in their heads, telling them what they – and hence the population in general – should do. In contemporary terms, we would call such persons “schizophrenics” (who do indeed have “auditory hallucinations”); nowadays we put them away in mental asylums. At the time, however, such persons were at the very pinnacle of the social structure: the voices they heard were taken, by all concerned, to be the “voices of the Gods”. With this background in place, the key moment in the story as Jaynes tells it comes with the breakdown of this mental form and associated social organization. He goes into plausible detail as to the causes of this “breakdown”; the gist of it being that when such states expanded and came into contact with each other, the “Gods” on both sides were not too happy about it. The slightest incidence became the pretext for declaring war; and since the mutual acts of aggression could only irritate the Gods further, this escalated into total war – and hence mutual destruction. Jaynes’ truly astounding idea is that our modern form of consciousness was born, painfully, in these dire circumstances; in the aftermath of the great collapse, the survivors – bereft of the Gods who had hitherto told them what to do but who had now self-destructed – had no choice but to work out how to make the best of a very bad job; they had to fend for themselves and to think for themselves. In short, for the very first time, humans had to think. Animals are conscious – they have feelings, and they are aware of what is happening. The distinctive characteristic of the specifically human form of consciousness that we are dealing with here is that it is reflexive: it involves being conscious of being conscious. One of the most impressive features of Jaynes’ story is that he is able to cite compelling documentary evidence for this momentous mind-shift; indeed two largely independent sources. His first source is the Bible; not the distinction between the Old Testament and the New Testament, but the difference in tone within the Old Testament between the earlier books (those of the Prophets) and the later books such as Ecclesiastes. The Prophets rant and rave; thus Amos: “Therefore this is what the Lord, the LORD God Almighty, says: ‘There will be wailing in all the streets and cries of anguish in every public square. The farmers will be summoned to weep and the mourners to wail’.” Ecclesiastes, by contrast, is like an old friend having a fireside chat and musing philosophically: “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.” Jaynes’ second source is the difference in tone within the writings of Homer, between the Iliad and the Odyssey. I will illustrate this mutation in Greek mentality with some quotations from Jaynes (1976). “The Trojan war was directed by hallucinations. And the soldiers who were so directed were not at all like us. They were noble automatons who knew not what they did... We cannot approach these heroes by inventing mind-spaces behind their fierce eyes as we do with each other.” (p. 75). “The evidence... can be found in the Iliad itself. At the very beginning, Agamemnon, king of men but slave of gods, is told by his voices to take the fair-cheeked Briseis away from Achilles, who had captured her. As he does so, the response of Achilles begins in his etor, or what I suggest is a cramp in his guts, where he is in conflict or put into two parts (mermerizo) whether to obey his thumos, the immediate internal sensations of anger, and kill the pre-emptory king or not. It is only after this vacillating interval of increasing belly sensations and surges of blood, as Achilles is drawing his might sword, that the stress has become sufficient to hallucinate the dreadfully gleaming goddess Athene who then takes over control of the action and tells Achilles what to do.” (pp. 258–59). “After the Iliad, the Odyssey. And anyone reading these poems consecutively sees what a gigantic vault in mentality it is! ... In a word, Odysseus of the many devices is the hero of the new mentality of how to get along in a ruined and god-weakened world... The Odyssey announces this in its very fifth word, polutropon ¼ much turning. It is a journey of deviousness. It is the very discovery of guile, its invention and celebration. It sings of indirections and disguises and subterfuges, transformations and recognitions, drugs and forgetfulness, of people in other people’s places, of stories within stories, and men within men. . The contrast with the Iliad is astonishing. Both in word and deed and character, the Odyssey describes a new and different world inhabited by new and different beings. The bicameral gods of the Iliad, in crossing over to the Odyssey, have become defensive and feeble. They disguise themselves more and indulge in magic wands. The bicameral mind by its very definition directs much less of the action. The gods have less to do, and like receding ghosts talk more to each other – and that so tediously! The initiatives move from them, even against them, toward the work of more human characters, though overseen by a Zeus who in losing his absolute power has acquired a Lear-like interest in justice. Seers and omens, these hallmarks of the breakdown of bicamerality, are more common. Semi-gods, de-humanizing witches, one-eyed giants, and sirens. are evidence of a profound alteration in mentality. And the huge Odysseyan themes of homeless wanderings, of kidnappings and enslavements, of things hidden, things regained, are surely echoes of the social breakdown following the Dorian invasions when subjective consciousness in Greece first took its mark.” (pp. 272–73). Jaynes concludes: “This . chapter can be briefly summarized in a metaphor. At the beginning, we noted that archaeologists, by brushing the dust of the ages from around the broken shards of pottery from the period of the Dorian invasions, have been able to reveal continuities and changes from site to site, and so to prove that a complex series of migrations was occurring. In a sense, we have been doing the same thing with language throughout this chapter. We have taken broken-off bits of vocabulary, those that came to refer to some kind of mental function, and by their contexts from text to text, attempted
1 Jaynes cites substantial neuro-physiological evidence concerning the reality of such mind/brain states; the strange term “Bicameral” is a technical reference to the neuro-anatomy underlying this psychology.
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to demonstrate that a huge complex series of changes in mentality was going on during these obscure periods that followed the Dorian invasions in Greece. . Let no one think that these are just word changes. Word changes are concept changes and concept changes are behavioral changes. The entire history of religions and of politics and even of science stands shrill witness to that. Without words like soul, liberty, or truth, the pageant of this human conditions would have been filled with different roles, different climaxes. And so with the words we have designated as preconscious hypostases, which by the generating process of metaphor through these few centuries unite into the operator of consciousness.” (pp. 291–92). This is consistent with the distributed view of life, cognition and language precisely because it appeals not to a system of preformed ‘representations’ (or genes), but to the workings of multiscalar temporality. Jaynes provides us with the means to unpack what seems to have happened on the time-scale of a few thousand years. The second theme I wish to introduce is that of Enaction; and what is unusual here is that this theme not only begins by emphasizing meaning (as does simplexity) but that it also engages the subjectivity of research scientists themselves. Enaction is the process whereby a living organism brings about its own lived-world; and the point is that this applies to each and every one of us, every minute of every day. What is at stake is quite simply our very existence, the essential quality of our most intimate experience – and our own personal responsibility for what we make of ourselves. It is somewhat commonplace to say, in polite academic language, that Enaction raises the question of the relation between “first-person” and “third-person” perspectives. This statement is of course itself in third-person mode. What I want to express here, in a way that will be shocking and outrageous if I succeed, is that the perspective of Enaction concerns each of us personally, it reminds us that every one of us plays for his/her life, every day. Vörös and Bitbol (2017) explain that the original intention behind the notion of “enaction,” as originally expounded by Varela and his colleagues, was to help the researchers in the field avoid falling prey to the various dichotomies (mind/body, self/world, self/other) that bedevil modern philosophy and science, and to promote an ongoing and irreducible circulation between the flux of lived experience (being) and the search of reason for conceptual invariants (knowing). This fits in with Thibault’s concern for recursive self-individuation, and indeed extends it to the realisation of values. I have already mentioned that this active concern with our own subjectivity is unusual, and somewhat uncomfortable, for practicing scientists. It is widely held – implicitly more often than not, but that only strengthens the norm – that Science is and should be “value-free”. Having overcome one taboo in this sense, it is perhaps not surprising that Thibault also overcomes another one: he ends on an overtly political stance. He argues in favor of dialogical modes of languaging that cut across and integrate the presumed distinction between the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ aspects of human mental life; and makes no bones about saying that this view is at odds with how, in postmodern neoliberal capitalism, human relations and activity are often identified with instrumental rationality based on the exchange value of the market. All this reminds me of the post-68 period, when we aimed at developing and integrating the personal and the political. 50 years on, after an eclipse during the Thatcher–Reagan years, may the wheel be turning again? Finally, however, there is a question which requires clarification; it concerns the status of simplexity. Thibault seems to have decided that “simplexity” is the repository of all virtues; and since he also has a positive attitude towards Selving, this had lead him (by association?) to consider that Selves are simplex. I must confess that I do not follow the argument (to the extent that there is one); but the conclusion seems to me to be dead wrong. On the basis of my own personal experience, particularly in psychoanalysis, I would rather consider that a Self is indefinitely fascinating, open and . complex. There is room for an honest disagreement here, of course, and maybe some mutual explanations. Nevertheless, this only goes to confirm my impression that “simplexity” is not as straightforward and above-board as it seems and indeed purports to be. 2. Conclusion We have now come to end of our perusal of the texts in this Special Issue. Each of these texts is interesting in its own way, and I have added my comments on the questions that are raised. However, the common thread running through what would otherwise be a somewhat heterogeneous collection is the theme of simplexity. In my introduction, I raised the question as to whether this notion of simplexity has any explanatory value; in my reading of the texts, I found no substantial indications that “simplexity” does actually explain anything. My conclusion is that “simplexity”, far from being an explanation, is rather a warning flag for situations which are certainly interesting, but which are in need of further study and explanation. In this sense, “simplexity” is indeed a useful heuristic – although perhaps not in quite the way that was originally intended. References Berthoz, A., 2012. On Simplexity: Simplifying Principles for a Complex World. Yale University Press, New Haven. Cowley, S.J., 2011. Distributed Language. Benjamins, Amsterdam. Fox-Keller, E., 1983. A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock. Freeman, New York. Goldschmidt, R., 1940. The Material Basis of Evolution. Yale University Press, New Haven CT. Goody, J.R., 1977. The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Jaynes, J., 1976. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Houghton Mifflin, Boston. Lakoff, G., Johnson, M., 1980. Metaphors We Live by. Chicago University Press, Chicago. Schrödinger, E., 1944. What Is Life? Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Stewart, J., Gapenne, O., Di Paolo, E. (Eds.), 2010. Enaction : Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science. MIT Press, Boston. von Uexküll, J., 1909. Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere. Berlin: J. Springer. Translated as von Uexküll J. (1992). A stroll through the worlds of animals and men: A picture book of invisible worlds Semiotica 89 (4), 319–391. Vörös, S., Bitbol, M., 2017. Enacting enaction: a dialectic between knowing and being. Constr. Found. 13, 31–40.
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Afterword: a view from enaction John Stewart CRED, Technological University of Compiègne, France
a r t i c l e i n f o
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Enaction is the process whereby a living organism brings about its own Umwelt or livedworld of experience. The prototype example is the “the world of the tick” as described by von Uexküll. This is a nice case of simplexity – achieving an impressive result by apparently simple means. Thus, the modest tick, blind and deaf and only capable of crawling slowly, achieves the task of catching a mammal – thousands of times bigger and faster – and getting to suck its blood. The means in question involve chaining three perceptionaction cycles: sensing butyric acid (emitted by the sweat glands of mammals) which causes the tick to drop; crawling on a rough surface until finding a smooth surface (in context, the bare skin of the mammal); and sucking a liquid at 37 C underneath the surface (in context, the blood of the mammal). The notion of simplexity is attractive, especially to those biologists who still retain « a feeling for the organism ». However, the concept of simplexity has its limitations; it does not explain anything, it is essentially an appreciation which comes after the event. Indeed one might even go so far as to say that simplexity is not so much a solution, but rather a problem which itself requires explanation. After commenting on each of the texts in this volume, I found no substantial indications that “simplexity” does actually explain anything. My conclusion is that “simplexity”, far from being an explanation, is rather an alert flag for situations which are certainly interesting, but which are in need of further study and explanation. In this sense, “simplexity” is indeed a useful heuristic – although perhaps not in quite the way that was originally intended. Ó 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Enaction Simplexity Explanation Heuristic
1. Introduction Enaction is the process whereby a living organism brings about its own Umwelt or lived-world of experience. The prototype example is “the world of the tick” as described by von Uexküll (1909). The tick’s world is constituted by just three salient perception-action cycles: on perceiving butyric acid, the tick lets itself fall from the branch of a bush; on perceiving a rough surface, the tick crawls until it finds a smooth surface; if it then finds a liquid at 37 C underneath the smooth surface, the tick sucks to satiety. In context, the only source of butyric acid in the tick’s natural environment is the sweat-gland of a mammal; the rough surface is hair and the smooth surface is bare skin; and the liquid at 37 C is the mammal’s blood. In this way the tick, a tiny animal that is blind, deaf and can only crawl slowly, achieves the truly remarkable feat of catching a mammal that is thousands of times larger and faster; and not only that, but getting to suck its blood. This is a prime example of simplexity in action.
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To a first approximation, each biological species brings about a single characteristic Umwelt. The exception is the human species: due to the twin innovations of language and the making and using of tools – which enrich each other in the form of techno-logy, i.e. talking about making and using tools – humans enact a great variety of Umwelten. Here, again to a first approximation, we may say that there are as many human lived-worlds as forms of society, both pre-historic and historic. Thus, although it is rooted in biology, enaction also extends to human cognition; so that the theory of Enaction is potentially the basis for a new paradigm in Cognitive Science (Stewart et al., 2010). The notion of simplexity is attractive, especially to those biologists (however few they may be in these days of genes and molecules) who still retain « a feeling for the organism » (Fox-Keller, 1983). However, it is important not to get carried away: in spite of its immediate appeal, the concept of simplexity has its limitations. The main shortcoming is that it does not explain anything; it is essentially an appreciation which comes after the event. Indeed one might even go so far as to say that simplexity is not so much a solution, but rather a problem which itself requires explanation. We can begin to appreciate the limitations of the concept of simplexity if we ask the question: how does a simplex process of enaction, such as that achieved by the tick, come about in the first place? We may be sure of one thing: it did not arise by any deliberate process of seeking a solution to a well-posed problem. The tick did not scratch its head and say to itself: “Here’s what I need to do, it’s to catch a mammal and suck its blood; now how could I best go about it?” And even if the tick had posed the problem in these terms, invoking the principle of simplexity would not have been operationally effective in opening up the way to a solution. Over the course of evolutionary history, things must rather have been the other way round. The mechanisms, the perception-action operations, were in large part there first; it was when, in an unplanned manner, that they came across a suitable problem that they became the simplex “solution” to that problem. My claim, then, is that in the biological realm which is its initial frame of reference, invoking the principle of simplexity is not an operationally effective means of finding a solution to a pre-existing problem. We may now ask: is it any different when it comes to human affairs? The potential advantage here is that in this case, we have better empirical access to the actual processes of discovery. In the realm of biology, the actual processes whereby simplex situations arise are lost in the shrouds of evolutionary time, and they do not leave any fossil traces. My claim, and a possible counter-claim about the effectiveness of invoking simplexity, are thus inevitably questions of theoretical speculation. But if we are addressing contemporary human situations, then we have at least a chance of looking empirically. It is in this spirit that I will now comment on each of the texts in this collection. In the Prologue, Berthoz informs us that the notion of simplexity has been found of interest in a wide variety of areas, including geology, mathematics, design, architecture, engineering, artificial intelligence, biology, philosophy, rhetoric, robotics, linguistics and management science. The list is impressive. Unfortunately, however, Berthoz does not tell us anything about how the concept of simplexity actually works in any of these areas; and so this does not help us to decide whether the concept does or does not have any explanatory power. Worse than that, without being overly paranoid, the inclusion of rhetoric and management “science” in the list may give rise to a sneaking suspicion. To what extent may the appeal to “simplexity” be part of a “cover-up” operation, masking either a deficiency or (as in the case of management science in the relation between Capital and labour) aims that it would be impolitic to make too clearly explicit? On a somewhat subsidiary note, may also remark that Berthoz makes repeated references to “the brain”: “the brain’s role in social interactions.”; “universal properties of the brain.”; “the brain’s remarkable ability to find vicarious processes to implement a function.”; et cetera (my italics). This may seem natural enough, given that Berthoz’s primary area of competence is in neuroscience. However, it is improper to speak of the brain as acting; just as it is not the legs that walk but rather the whole organism, so it is not the brain that actually does anything. This residual neuro-centrism is all the more ironic in that the principle of simplexity often reduces the role of the brain. The tick’s remarkable ability to enact its lived-world does not reside in its brain (it does not even have one worth speaking of). And more generally, simplexity is distributed over the whole situation, not localized in any one part – not even the brain. In their Introduction, Cowley and Garhn-Andersen ask the key question: “Why simplexity and language?” They recall the basic definition of “simplexity”: “the set of solutions that living organisms find that enable them to deal with new information and situations, while taking into account past experiences and future ones. Such solutions are new ways of addressing problems so that actions may be taken more quickly, more elegantly and more efficiently”. The question, then, is whether simplex solutions were “the basis for proposing a new approach to linguistics.” They indicate the need to move away from “segregational views” where language is a synchronic and/or real-time system that is taken to stand apart from history and actual movement. Now the move beyond segregational views towards a distributed perspective (Cowley, 2011) did not require an appeal to simplexity. The question, then, is whether simplexity adds anything new to the broad distributed perspective. It would not be appropriate for an introduction to answer this question, so we will look to the rest of the volume to see if we can find some elements of response. In the next text, Cowley and Markos address the theme of “evolution, lineages and human language”. Challenging the “language metaphor of life”, they note that a linear string of characters represents a drastic reduction of both language and living beings. The fallacy goes back to Schrödinger himself, who wrote: “It is these chromosomes . that contain in some kind of code-script the entire pattern of the individual’s future development and of its functioning in the mature state. . But the term code-script is, of course, too narrow. The chromosome structures are at the same time instrumental in bringing about the development they foreshadow. They are law-code and executive power – or, to use another simile, they are architect’s plan and builder’s craft – in one.” (Schrödinger, 1944, pp. 21–22). This is deeply wrong; to understand why, it is actually useful to turn the metaphor around. Written words, in themselves, don’t do anything at all; they are just marks on a piece of paper, Please cite this article in press as: Stewart, J., Afterword: a view from enaction, Language Sciences (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.langsci.2018.06.004
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they just sit there. Of course, when they are read and interpreted by human beings, the written words can profoundly influence the actions of the humans – Goody (1977) has noted that the invention of writing corresponds to the “entry into history” for human societies. Similarly, biological genes don’t actually do anything at all – they just sit there, and indeed there are few biological macromolecules that are as chemically inert as DNA. Of course, like written words, genes can profoundly influence evolutionary history; since they can be copied and transmitted from generation to generation, they arguably make natural selection and progressive evolution possible. Returning to the theme of simplexity, we have here an instructive example of “simplexity gone wrong”: it is a mistake to reduce either language or living beings to a linear string of characters. At the same, there is a phenomenon that calls for further examination: how is that this simplistic reduction seems possible, why is it so appealing, and what is it hiding? Cowley and Markos then discuss the phenomenon of “homeosis”, an ontogenetic aberration where body parts appear in improper positions. For example, the anthers of flowers may emerge in place of petals; or in fruit-flies, the thorax may double up to produce an insect with four pairs of wings. A homeotic phenotype can be triggered by a genetic mutation, for example the “bithorax” gene in Drosophila. Berthoz (2012) cites this himself as an example of simplexity. However in order not to be led astray, it is important to note that exactly the same homeotic forms can also be triggered by environmental disturbances – for example exposure to ether vapor, a temperature shock, or even a pin-prick at a certain point in development. Such mutant forms, identified initially as the result of an alteration in a gene but which can also be produced by an appropriate change in the environment, are called “phenocopies”. Far from being exceptions, phenocopies are the rule: already in the 1940s, the geneticist Goldschmidt (1940) was able to obtain phenocopies of all the known genetic mutants of Drosophila. The lesson from this is that the exact nature of the triggering stimulus, be it environmental or genetic, is of relatively little importance. What does matter, is the structural dynamics of the developmental system, because it is this which explains how the developing embryo can be switched between the normal and the homeotic mode. The upshot of all this, is that what we really need to understand, is the temporal dynamics of the system as a whole. On a distributed perspective – whether applied to life, language or cognition – ‘multi-scalar temporality’ is intrinsic to the workings of the systems. In particular, there is a resonance between the timescale of ontogenesis (weeks, months, years.) and the timescale of phylogenesis (thousands and millions of years). A popular version is theory of “recapitulation”, according to which ontogeny is an accelerated version of phylogeny: the developing embryo goes through all the stages of its evolutionary ancestry. An example is that vertebrate embryos often go through a “fish-like” or “tadpole” stage reminiscent of their piscine or amphibian ancestors. In fact, if evolution occurred by adding on further stages to ontogeny, recapitulation would be a general rule. However, evolution sometimes occurs by “neoteny”, i.e. discarding all the later stages of development, going back to an earlier stage and starting over; this is indeed what happened when humans diverged from monkeys. So to repeat the main point, in all these phenomena the essential feature that needs to be explained, is the dynamics of the system as a whole. Berthoz explicitly considers that “homeosis” involves simplex tricks, notably involving the homeobox genes. Cowley and Markos claim that to reduce languaging to a verbal aspect is like treating a living system as a genotype; they say “like genes, words are virtual”. As a biologist I am tempted to turn this around, and say that “like words, genes are virtual”. In either case, we see what is becoming a pattern: simplexity is not an explanation or a solution, it is part of a problem. Vincenzo Raimondi addresses the bio-logic of “languaging”. He makes the important point that languaging behavior is embedded, and exists as such, only in a framework of inter-individual coordination. This means that while correlations between the neurobiological domain and the organismic domain can always be established, we cannot provide any constitutive explanation of the specific phenomena that take place in the existential domain of the organism as a whole (i.e. social interaction) by looking at the neurobiological domain. To sum up by a phrase, “the mind is not in the brain”; to the extent that humans are profoundly social beings, for whom languaging is a constitutive activity, the mind is not even in single bodies. Turning from these critical comments to more positive aspects, Maturana defines “languaging” as recursive co-ordination, i.e. co-ordination of co-ordination. This is maybe worth spelling out. Animal communication is first-order co-ordination: the conditions which trigger the emission of a signal, and the responses of conspecifics to perception of that signal, lead to a coordination of actions. The pheromone trails of the “social insects” are a prototype example of this. Note that in such cases there are no specific intentions to communicate. In human languaging, when we talk to each other, there is or can be a very definite intention to communicate; indeed the whole point of the exercise is to try and understand what the other person is trying to say. This is why phrases such as “do you mean that .?” (followed by an attempted paraphrase) are so common. In other words, we seek to achieve a “co-ordination of co-ordination”; but it is to be noted that (a) there is no guarantee of succeeding, (b) it cannot be forced, and (c) politeness requires that we talk as if we understand, but lucidity obliges us to recognize that usually we end up surfing on a mis-understanding which in the best of cases may not be completely crass. Finally, we may ask: where does simplexity come into this? Raimondi does not have anything very specific to say on this; but I would like to make a suggestion. When, in the course of everyday conversation or indeed when reading a text, we have the impression that we understand, things seem simple and the words seem to have a reasonably clear “literal” meaning. But actually, this is problematic. On the conventional view of language, “metaphors” are a somewhat dubious, improper mode of functioning: one takes as unproblematic a “literal” meaning, and “metaphor” is then seen as an (over)imaginative extension by mental association. However, as Lakoff and Johnson (1980) have seen quite clearly, a “metaphorical” mode of functioning is actually the basic norm. It is the so-called “literal” meaning that is the special case that calls for additional explanation; a “referential impression” arises when a metaphor is used in a particular sort of well-limited context, in a stereotyped way, so that the “meaning” of the word is impoverished to the point of being “standard”. This may be pragmatically convenient, and there is nothing morally wrong with it; but it is actually rather a sad state of affairs (we are stuck in a rut), well evoked by the Please cite this article in press as: Stewart, J., Afterword: a view from enaction, Language Sciences (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.langsci.2018.06.004
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phrase “dead metaphor”. My suggestion here is that a “literal meaning” is an example of simplexity: a situation that appears simple is actually more complicated, so that there is more than meets the eye and further examination would be in order. Lassiter proposes to mobilize the concept of “powers” to clarify the role of simplexity in languaging. He offers as a prototypical example: “I have the power to drink coffee and coffee has the power to be drunk by me.” The difficulty here is to perceive what distinguishes this “powers view” from mere truisms. “Don’t forget the eggs, especially when you’re making an omelet”. Sound advice, assuredly; but is it really getting us anywhere? One of my favorites is: “Someone who is out walking his dog, is on the end of a leash” (Serge Gainsbourg) – at least here we have a reversal of the usual way of looking at things that has some comic value. This might be an opportunity to rehabilitate the much-maligned “dormitive principle”: after all, what’s wrong with saying that the reason opium makes you sleep, is that it contains a dormitive principle?! A mite more seriously, these are worrisome bedfellows for simplexity, already under suspicion of masquerading as an explanation when it is nothing of the kind. Elsewhere, Lassiter cites Berthoz: “Meaning can’t be superimposed on life; it is life”; and comments: “The claim that ‘meaning is life’ is philosophically bold. Meaningfulness is a property that’s typically associated with human beings, not with living organisms in general. I can appreciate a meaningful poem or painting, but I’d bet good money that ants in my yard can’t. So what sense can we make of Berthoz’s claim?” He frames an answer in terms of Gibson’s notion of affordances and von Uexküll’s notion of Umwelten. He then claims that “adopting a powers-metaphysics to conceptualize languaging . begins to unpack the conceptual connection between simplexity and meaning. . (They) are connected by way of manifestation partners for powers: powers are governed by simplex principles and powers require a meaningful world for their activation. Just as powers are inert without manifestation partners, simplexity is empty without meaning.” The work to be done here is to unpack what there is here that goes beyond the status of mere truisms. As Popper reminds us, if a proposition is not refutable, it is not properly scientific. Gahrn-Andersen raises the issue of heteronomy. His argument is formulated in terms of a critique of what he calls “strong autonomy”. He notes that “we are heteronomous in that we continuously learn new things, solve problems and adjust to social norms and the values of others.” And of course any natural language is not created from scratch by the user, a new-born human infant always finds a language “already there”. These points are so obvious that if “strong autonomy” really does deny them, one may wonder whether there are any serious proponents of “strong autonomy”; the worry is that Gahrn-Andersen may be attacking a straw man. It may therefore be useful to recall the essential tenets of “autonomy”. The main point is that a cognitive agent can only perceive the world in its own terms, on the basis of its own “cognitive repertoire”. This was the point made by Kant in his criticism of Hume’s empiricism: even if there are empirical regularities in the flow of perceptions, they will only be noticed if they fall within conceptual categories that the agent already possesses: this is why he insisted that the conceptual categories are necessarily “a priori”. Gahrn-Andersen notes with approval that “within a social system a given action can be meaningful to agents only if it is performed in accordance with the rules and norms that govern the system”. There is a certain irony in the fact that Gahrn-Andersen cites this as evidence for “heteronomy”, whereas this point is precisely in accordance with the spirit of autonomy. In fact the difficulty here (and it is a genuine one) goes back a long way, in the form of the learner’s paradox. The paradox is that in order to learn about something, you must first know that thing. As Socrates puts it: “A man cannot search either for what he knows or for what he does not know. He cannot search for what he knows – since he knows it, there is no need to search – nor for what he does not know, for he does not know what to look for.” The only way out, as far as I can see, is to admit that in spite of first appearances, “autonomy” and “heteronomy” are not mutually exclusive. If this amounts to a refutation of “strong autonomy”, it is equally a refutation of “strong heteronomy”. Rather than mounting a unilateral attack on autonomy, it may be more appropriate to follow Thibault, and to consider that there is a dialectic between autonomy and heteronomy. Gahrn-Andersen also has some interesting things to say about the phenomenology that is involved. Following Heidegger, he notes that our experience of things-in-use is different from when we just observe objects. In particular, he cites habits as an example of simplexity: “they allow us to engage more swiftly and effectively with the environment. [.] As we skillfully engage with a thing, we experientially transcend it. To paraphrase Heidegger: when using a hammer to put a nail in a wall, we focus on its purpose (its relation to the nail and the wall), and not on the hammer by itself. Reflective thinking disrupts the experiential flow enabled by habits. Thinking too hard about your game, in cricketers’ lore, is usually not a good way to go, a sign that something has gone wrong”. This is fine, as far as it goes; but I would add that when something has gone wrong, then one does need to think about it. We may take this as a paradigm for simplexity: when it is in place, and everything is going well, we can forget about it; but when we want to understand the genesis of a simplex situation, as we are forced to do if something is not working smoothly, then we have to unpack everything and start over again. The article by Thibault raises the key theme of the “Self” – not a thing or a state, but a time-extended process which gives rise to a person who experiences an ‘inner life’. Philosophically, the existential theme of “the soul” has been recognized as being of primordial importance, ever since Aristotle (quoted by Thibault). But scientifically, there is a decided reluctance to engage with this theme, for the following reason. Science is generally supposed to aim at objectivity; and the straightforward way to ensure objectivity is to remove all elements of subjectivity. And of course, nothing is more “subjective” than conscious experience of the self. But since Thibault has had the merit, and the courage, to raise the theme anyway, I would like to take advantage of the opportunity to mention two related themes that do not usually have a very good press in scientific circles. The first of these themes is the issue of consciousness; and more specifically, an audacious theory concerning the origin of our modern form of consciousness due to Jaynes (1976). According to Jaynes, our present state of human consciousness – that we may identify as reflexive consciousness, being conscious of being conscious – has not always existed. More specifically, Jaynes claims that it did not exist at the time of the great civilizations of Antiquity – Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Assyrians, the Please cite this article in press as: Stewart, J., Afterword: a view from enaction, Language Sciences (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.langsci.2018.06.004
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Incas in America, and so on; the period in question runs roughly from 9000 BC to 1000 BC. Jaynes defines “civilisation” as “the art of living in towns of such size that everyone does not know everyone else”. His basic hypothesis is that this form of social organization was made possible by what he calls the “Bicameral Mind”1. By this he means that the core of this social organization was provided by “prophet-kings” who quite literally heard “voices” in their heads, telling them what they – and hence the population in general – should do. In contemporary terms, we would call such persons “schizophrenics” (who do indeed have “auditory hallucinations”); nowadays we put them away in mental asylums. At the time, however, such persons were at the very pinnacle of the social structure: the voices they heard were taken, by all concerned, to be the “voices of the Gods”. With this background in place, the key moment in the story as Jaynes tells it comes with the breakdown of this mental form and associated social organization. He goes into plausible detail as to the causes of this “breakdown”; the gist of it being that when such states expanded and came into contact with each other, the “Gods” on both sides were not too happy about it. The slightest incidence became the pretext for declaring war; and since the mutual acts of aggression could only irritate the Gods further, this escalated into total war – and hence mutual destruction. Jaynes’ truly astounding idea is that our modern form of consciousness was born, painfully, in these dire circumstances; in the aftermath of the great collapse, the survivors – bereft of the Gods who had hitherto told them what to do but who had now self-destructed – had no choice but to work out how to make the best of a very bad job; they had to fend for themselves and to think for themselves. In short, for the very first time, humans had to think. Animals are conscious – they have feelings, and they are aware of what is happening. The distinctive characteristic of the specifically human form of consciousness that we are dealing with here is that it is reflexive: it involves being conscious of being conscious. One of the most impressive features of Jaynes’ story is that he is able to cite compelling documentary evidence for this momentous mind-shift; indeed two largely independent sources. His first source is the Bible; not the distinction between the Old Testament and the New Testament, but the difference in tone within the Old Testament between the earlier books (those of the Prophets) and the later books such as Ecclesiastes. The Prophets rant and rave; thus Amos: “Therefore this is what the Lord, the LORD God Almighty, says: ‘There will be wailing in all the streets and cries of anguish in every public square. The farmers will be summoned to weep and the mourners to wail’.” Ecclesiastes, by contrast, is like an old friend having a fireside chat and musing philosophically: “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.” Jaynes’ second source is the difference in tone within the writings of Homer, between the Iliad and the Odyssey. I will illustrate this mutation in Greek mentality with some quotations from Jaynes (1976). “The Trojan war was directed by hallucinations. And the soldiers who were so directed were not at all like us. They were noble automatons who knew not what they did... We cannot approach these heroes by inventing mind-spaces behind their fierce eyes as we do with each other.” (p. 75). “The evidence... can be found in the Iliad itself. At the very beginning, Agamemnon, king of men but slave of gods, is told by his voices to take the fair-cheeked Briseis away from Achilles, who had captured her. As he does so, the response of Achilles begins in his etor, or what I suggest is a cramp in his guts, where he is in conflict or put into two parts (mermerizo) whether to obey his thumos, the immediate internal sensations of anger, and kill the pre-emptory king or not. It is only after this vacillating interval of increasing belly sensations and surges of blood, as Achilles is drawing his might sword, that the stress has become sufficient to hallucinate the dreadfully gleaming goddess Athene who then takes over control of the action and tells Achilles what to do.” (pp. 258–59). “After the Iliad, the Odyssey. And anyone reading these poems consecutively sees what a gigantic vault in mentality it is! ... In a word, Odysseus of the many devices is the hero of the new mentality of how to get along in a ruined and god-weakened world... The Odyssey announces this in its very fifth word, polutropon ¼ much turning. It is a journey of deviousness. It is the very discovery of guile, its invention and celebration. It sings of indirections and disguises and subterfuges, transformations and recognitions, drugs and forgetfulness, of people in other people’s places, of stories within stories, and men within men. . The contrast with the Iliad is astonishing. Both in word and deed and character, the Odyssey describes a new and different world inhabited by new and different beings. The bicameral gods of the Iliad, in crossing over to the Odyssey, have become defensive and feeble. They disguise themselves more and indulge in magic wands. The bicameral mind by its very definition directs much less of the action. The gods have less to do, and like receding ghosts talk more to each other – and that so tediously! The initiatives move from them, even against them, toward the work of more human characters, though overseen by a Zeus who in losing his absolute power has acquired a Lear-like interest in justice. Seers and omens, these hallmarks of the breakdown of bicamerality, are more common. Semi-gods, de-humanizing witches, one-eyed giants, and sirens. are evidence of a profound alteration in mentality. And the huge Odysseyan themes of homeless wanderings, of kidnappings and enslavements, of things hidden, things regained, are surely echoes of the social breakdown following the Dorian invasions when subjective consciousness in Greece first took its mark.” (pp. 272–73). Jaynes concludes: “This . chapter can be briefly summarized in a metaphor. At the beginning, we noted that archaeologists, by brushing the dust of the ages from around the broken shards of pottery from the period of the Dorian invasions, have been able to reveal continuities and changes from site to site, and so to prove that a complex series of migrations was occurring. In a sense, we have been doing the same thing with language throughout this chapter. We have taken broken-off bits of vocabulary, those that came to refer to some kind of mental function, and by their contexts from text to text, attempted
1 Jaynes cites substantial neuro-physiological evidence concerning the reality of such mind/brain states; the strange term “Bicameral” is a technical reference to the neuro-anatomy underlying this psychology.
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to demonstrate that a huge complex series of changes in mentality was going on during these obscure periods that followed the Dorian invasions in Greece. . Let no one think that these are just word changes. Word changes are concept changes and concept changes are behavioral changes. The entire history of religions and of politics and even of science stands shrill witness to that. Without words like soul, liberty, or truth, the pageant of this human conditions would have been filled with different roles, different climaxes. And so with the words we have designated as preconscious hypostases, which by the generating process of metaphor through these few centuries unite into the operator of consciousness.” (pp. 291–92). This is consistent with the distributed view of life, cognition and language precisely because it appeals not to a system of preformed ‘representations’ (or genes), but to the workings of multiscalar temporality. Jaynes provides us with the means to unpack what seems to have happened on the time-scale of a few thousand years. The second theme I wish to introduce is that of Enaction; and what is unusual here is that this theme not only begins by emphasizing meaning (as does simplexity) but that it also engages the subjectivity of research scientists themselves. Enaction is the process whereby a living organism brings about its own lived-world; and the point is that this applies to each and every one of us, every minute of every day. What is at stake is quite simply our very existence, the essential quality of our most intimate experience – and our own personal responsibility for what we make of ourselves. It is somewhat commonplace to say, in polite academic language, that Enaction raises the question of the relation between “first-person” and “third-person” perspectives. This statement is of course itself in third-person mode. What I want to express here, in a way that will be shocking and outrageous if I succeed, is that the perspective of Enaction concerns each of us personally, it reminds us that every one of us plays for his/her life, every day. Vörös and Bitbol (2017) explain that the original intention behind the notion of “enaction,” as originally expounded by Varela and his colleagues, was to help the researchers in the field avoid falling prey to the various dichotomies (mind/body, self/world, self/other) that bedevil modern philosophy and science, and to promote an ongoing and irreducible circulation between the flux of lived experience (being) and the search of reason for conceptual invariants (knowing). This fits in with Thibault’s concern for recursive self-individuation, and indeed extends it to the realisation of values. I have already mentioned that this active concern with our own subjectivity is unusual, and somewhat uncomfortable, for practicing scientists. It is widely held – implicitly more often than not, but that only strengthens the norm – that Science is and should be “value-free”. Having overcome one taboo in this sense, it is perhaps not surprising that Thibault also overcomes another one: he ends on an overtly political stance. He argues in favor of dialogical modes of languaging that cut across and integrate the presumed distinction between the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ aspects of human mental life; and makes no bones about saying that this view is at odds with how, in postmodern neoliberal capitalism, human relations and activity are often identified with instrumental rationality based on the exchange value of the market. All this reminds me of the post-68 period, when we aimed at developing and integrating the personal and the political. 50 years on, after an eclipse during the Thatcher–Reagan years, may the wheel be turning again? Finally, however, there is a question which requires clarification; it concerns the status of simplexity. Thibault seems to have decided that “simplexity” is the repository of all virtues; and since he also has a positive attitude towards Selving, this had lead him (by association?) to consider that Selves are simplex. I must confess that I do not follow the argument (to the extent that there is one); but the conclusion seems to me to be dead wrong. On the basis of my own personal experience, particularly in psychoanalysis, I would rather consider that a Self is indefinitely fascinating, open and . complex. There is room for an honest disagreement here, of course, and maybe some mutual explanations. Nevertheless, this only goes to confirm my impression that “simplexity” is not as straightforward and above-board as it seems and indeed purports to be. 2. Conclusion We have now come to end of our perusal of the texts in this Special Issue. Each of these texts is interesting in its own way, and I have added my comments on the questions that are raised. However, the common thread running through what would otherwise be a somewhat heterogeneous collection is the theme of simplexity. In my introduction, I raised the question as to whether this notion of simplexity has any explanatory value; in my reading of the texts, I found no substantial indications that “simplexity” does actually explain anything. My conclusion is that “simplexity”, far from being an explanation, is rather a warning flag for situations which are certainly interesting, but which are in need of further study and explanation. In this sense, “simplexity” is indeed a useful heuristic – although perhaps not in quite the way that was originally intended. References Berthoz, A., 2012. On Simplexity: Simplifying Principles for a Complex World. Yale University Press, New Haven. Cowley, S.J., 2011. Distributed Language. Benjamins, Amsterdam. Fox-Keller, E., 1983. A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock. Freeman, New York. Goldschmidt, R., 1940. The Material Basis of Evolution. Yale University Press, New Haven CT. Goody, J.R., 1977. The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Jaynes, J., 1976. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Houghton Mifflin, Boston. Lakoff, G., Johnson, M., 1980. Metaphors We Live by. Chicago University Press, Chicago. Schrödinger, E., 1944. What Is Life? Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Stewart, J., Gapenne, O., Di Paolo, E. (Eds.), 2010. Enaction : Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science. MIT Press, Boston. von Uexküll, J., 1909. Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere. Berlin: J. Springer. Translated as von Uexküll J. (1992). A stroll through the worlds of animals and men: A picture book of invisible worlds Semiotica 89 (4), 319–391. Vörös, S., Bitbol, M., 2017. Enacting enaction: a dialectic between knowing and being. Constr. Found. 13, 31–40.
Please cite this article in press as: Stewart, J., Afterword: a view from enaction, Language Sciences (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.langsci.2018.06.004