Drawing; Chasing Soul, a Tale of Two Realities?
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Isabella Brant by Rubens, c. 1621
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It was in 2022, and a week to a day before Christmas that Talitha had her 97th birthday party. Talitha dressed in her best clothes and jewellery, powdered her face and dabbed herself with Calèche before descending on the stairs-lift to be the proud host at her annual party. We were all there for lunch; her five children with their families and many grand children, as well as many of her friends who had known her for decades. Her annual birthday party marked the beginning of Christmas week, a festival of re-engagement, exchanging presents and catching up. On Christmas and Boxing day we were at it again as Talitha always demanded we visit her for a family Christmas lunch where she had presents for all her grandchildren. That week she drank too much wine, talked too much, got a bit sloshed and slept a lot.
My brother Crispin was the last of the family to leave. He started the long drive back to the French-Swiss Alps where he lives. Her celebrations over, Talitha ascended the stair-lift to read her newspapers for a while before taking a nap. A little later her carer brought her a cup of tea as she always did and nudged her awake. Her heart must have stopped for an instant. Talitha's face appeared serene and still living but inside her face the lights had been quietly switched off, and her soul had silently lurched into the oblivion of stardust. Poor Crispin had not even reached home when he heard the news that his mother had so gently passed away.
A week later we all assembled to celebrate Talitha's supremely long and eventful life. My sister Nikki adorned the church with the same flowers as were used on her wedding day in 1947 and I put on display the wedding dress she wore on that day, and we all remembered her. In her living room Talitha's chair was empty. I remember going up to her bedroom and opening a wardrobe where all her clean clothes were waiting for her, a breeze with the scent of Calèche brushed my face. That day I felt as if Talitha's soul was still with us. Now, two years later, I still sometimes meet my mother in my dreams, and I have a path where her favourite daffodils bloom in the Spring. We all experience these moments when people we loved are gone but still present.
In 1943 Talitha was a young girl, on the threshold of adulthood and as their youngest student ever at Cape Town University she was studying psychology In those days psychologists were banned from using the words like spirit, soul or consciousness. Psychologists of that age had adopted a dogma that soul was an abnormality that had no place in the physical word. Soul, renamed consciousness, is now guardedly accepted as a fact that needs to be incorporated into the physical sciences. Mind sciences have become one of the hottest topics in schools of psychology and philosophy, but the word soul is still largely banned from the scientific lexicon. Personally I see soul as a warmer more accurate word with which to describe my inner thoughts and being, but I guess scientists find it has to many overtones of an after-life, and an element of the physical world that might be disassociated from our earthly bodies. For many the word soul implies a consciousness with a separate identity from the body, and whilst I have no objection to that concept, whenever I use the word soul in this article I am NOT acknowledging a disconnection between body and soul.
I am complemented if someone tells me a drawing I have made appears to have caught the soul of the subject. Artists embrace the concept of soul, and a whole genre of music even calls itself Soul. When I was young and starting out as an artist I found looking at portraits boring, but even in those days there were always a few images that mesmerised me. In those days I was living in London and many times I would go to National Galley (London) where I would often spend a long time looking at their collection of Rembrandt oil paintings.
Hendrikje Stoffels by Rembrandt
I have always thought Rubens drawing of Isabella Brant (head of this post) to be the gold standard of portraiture. When we look at Isabella she looks so real that we feel we must know
this person, but of course we do not. Isabella lived over 400 years
ago, yet the image has preserved the sensations we have looking at a real soul. Of
course we are all aware that the image is made up of inanimate pixels, and contains no soul.
A drawing like this skilfully booby-traps our perception into believing
we are looking at a living being.
As an older artist portraiture has become almost an obsession for me. Everyday I spend several hours drawing moving faces from the television screen,
and in the summer I go down to the beach and draw the families eating
ices creams at Saundersfoot. In my mind I often return to the Isabella Brant drawing to guide my own more limited ambitions to learn how to better set my booby traps. I still have a long way to go before I reach the nuanced expression Rubens catches so effortlessly.
Technically portraits are marks on flat paper that we use to booby-trap our audiences into seeing as three D structures that are likenesses of people we know and in the best we even see soulfulness. What is it that we are really "seeing"? My best answer is that we are seeing a representation of the perception of the maker of the drawing. Looked at from this point of view the drawings you make will never exceed your ability to perceive, using this insight it would be a truism to say improving your drawing is more about improving how well you see the world than how well you hold a pencil. Learning to draw is all about learning to see, and we will learn to draw faster if we understand how the mechanics of perception work.
Drawings are made in two contrasting realities
Technical drawings are made in the language and reality of measurements, the same language as science. Science has a unified immutable view of the world.
Artistic drawings There are attributes of perception with which we are born; are you colour blind? Then there are contributors to our perceptions; memories from experiences collected during our lives and finally there is what information is flowing into us in the moments the drawing is being executed. This collection of realities is called our umwelt. Umwelt is a complex cacophony of subjective influences all happening together in a sort of fuzzy unity from which our brains construct the view of the world we call perception. Our consciousness is made from our perception and experiences.
Umweltan realities are never really unified or immutable, they are made of distorted relationships and qualities on which the mind at any one moment in time is focusing its attention. What we see when we focus our attention is a moment, a "now" of a vivid conscious experience. The experiences are moulded by values and affects which grew out of evolutionary forces. As we dig deeper we will find that the "nows" of conscious thoughts are created by a mixture of intrinsic and conscious intelligences that have only a fuzzy unity, and the thoughts of our umwelts have a protean mutability that are shaped from the organism physical and mental finesses of that particular moment.
Have I lost you? What I am drawing your attention to is that artistic reality has a weird dynamic that co-evolved with the physical evolution and experiences of our bodies. Don't worry if you feel confused, we will unpick what I mean in stages with some visual examples. The first stage of understanding is to understand that the mind has two realities which are in direct opposition to one another:
The objective reality model (science): works on a principle that there is a single unified immutable answer to everything that exists in the universe. Everything that exists is in the universe is measurable and in a fixed relationship against everything else.
The Umweltan subjective reality (soul): works on the opposite principle that nothing is fixed, because everything is in a dynamic relationship with everything else. What is correct now will be incorrect in 2 seconds time. Unity itself is a mutable illusion. The umwelt is set up to never be universal, everything in it is multiversal
The Umweltan "Shape-Shifting" and "In-the-Now" modes of thinking versus Reasoning
The dichotomy we experience between technical and artistic drawing is nothing new. It is the same division we see in our educational institutions which are divided into two faculties, the Sciences and the Arts.
We can see the same dichotomy in the differing ways we classify the world. If I were to go to a remote island and discover a new kind of cat, science would gain a new species. They would look at the morphology of the cat and work out who amongst existing cats are the closest cousins, and from this find the fixed position of the new species on their taxonomic tree. The new species would then have been catalogued as a fixed immutable place in the physical world of science and the universe. If I were to ask a bunch of scientists what my cat was they would all give the same fixed answer; Felidae julianus.
Contrast the science method of classification with what happens when you walk down the street and ask people randomly "what is a cat?" If you met a scientist they would reply "all cats are mammals and members of the Phyla Felidae" but most likely you would meet a non-scientist living in an umweltan mode of thinking. They would give you random often conflicting answers such as
"Cats are fluffy animals with tails they wag when they feel angry, they have whiskers too" .
If you were then to show the girl a picture of a Manx cat without a tail and ask
"like this?"
she would say: "yes, you got it, that is a cat."
"But it has no tail!"
"Yes, she would reply, some cats have no tails."
then you show a picture of a Rex cat which are bald,
"yes that is a cat too" she would reply
"But it is not fluffy?"
"Some cats are not fluffy" she would reply
She would be unflustered by the divergence from her description of what a cat was 10 seconds ago, and the contradictory information she is confirming 10 seconds later. She is thinking in the reality of a mutable umweltan multi-universe, not the immutable science universe.
When we are thinking in the umweltan mode the reality we are looking at happens "in the now". "The now" is that fragment of consciousness on which attention is being focused at that moment, and everything inside the now is being distorted by the acts of attention and focus. Every time we asked a question the girl re-focuses her attention on the way she saw cats; tailed and untailed, and her umwelt mutated to inhabit a new umweltan niche that has been created to fit the new context of the environment in which the cat was to be seen. Maybe her attention is taken by some markings on its paws, then her umwelt sees the cat differently and more specifically with special references to the paws. Notice how the mechanics of this approach are very similar to the mechanics of evolution, where a species mutates its shape as the environment around it changes. If the sea becomes less salty the species mutates its morphology to live in less salty water. Umweltan perception is a restless shape-changer that is always looking for its niche of the moment in which to do its perceiving.
I have given an example of how objects are shape-changed by perception. Shape-changing applies itself to all modes of perception, including qualities like colour-changing in-the-now redness of strawberries or the taste-changing in the-the-now bitterness of lemons. I personally find wine tastes better out of thin antique glass at a dinner table than from a plastic mug in a car. Wine tastes different according to context in which the wine is imbibed. It is a crucial to understanding the frames of minds in which artistic drawings (as opposed to technical drawings which use measurement and reason) are executed and seen, so before moving forward I will give you some more examples of perceptual mutability for things other than objects, in this first case the quality of redness. Using the illustration below we can see the two realities (objective verses umweltan) working in opposition with each other.
A quick glance at the image to the left we immediately understand there is a single shade of red on tiles that are receding away from the viewer. Scrutinise the image closely and we notice the tone of the redness becomes darkened as the tiles get further away. We see the red as both a constant colour and a range of darkening reds. This phenomenon is called "colour constancy"
Your computer is a man-made machine that has been set up on the universal reality principle that technology uses. This means computer is without a consciousness and does not have subjective experiences with mutable multiversal umweltan features. Man made machines are all designed without souls! The designers wrote the programs that compute the colours that are projected on the screen, so there is no mystery about how they are generated. Each red tile has its own colour which is an immutable fact, and each immutable fact in the machine is given an immutable number, in our case above #4000 # da001 # b9000....... To give you an impression of a soulful experience the computer crunches billions of digits a second, and speeds millions of times faster than a human brain can process. Computers give an impression of having human-like intelligence, but this is an illusion. Computers are number crunchers run on algorithms.
Later we will look at how human brains are physically set up to run on different multiversal shape-shifting principles.
The birth of Religions and Science
Umweltan perception has a sister feature unknown in man-made machines, it called belief.
Popular books on neuroscience often tell us that the brain is a prediction machine, but I think this is wrong. Brains are belief machines. Beliefs evolved to be used in a multiversal shape-shifting version of reality, but human beings use belief differently from my cat. This is because in our species we have a excessively large pre-frontal cortexes where we have an extended ability to use working memories and reason together, with language. The combination combination thee three things have us objective thinking which provided humans with abilities to outwit Nature and other species. Reasoning is universal, not multiversal, but beliefs are multiversal. The way around this was to make beleifs dogmatic and bigoted, which is how religions came into being. At first sight it seems a bad move to become bigoted, but there were advantages to bigottry, th advantae ia that societies use bigottry to unite and work together in larger groups that can create societies and wage war more effectively against competitors.
Seelieving
our species created a new reality in which beleifs became dogmatic and fixed, this is how we came about adopting religions. Science, technology, and religions all abandoned teh multi-versal method of think for a use fixed belief philosophy are third mode of reality.
Dualism
As a very young child in the 1950s I was sent to a convent school where the nuns wore habits. The nuns taught us to pray before and after lessons and told us that we each had a soul. In serious voices they instructed us about "mortal sin" which could never be forgiven even by God, and how after we died our souls would ascend to heaven where we would be judged by God for our goodness, but however hard we tried to be good all of us would spend at least some time in a fearful place of repentance called purgatory. These sorts of religions, where people believe the body and soul have separate identities are called dualist.
I was very fortunate in my education as some years later I went to a Quaker boarding school which whilst still being nominally Christian had a much more reflective approach. Here we were taught to sit silently in "meeting rooms" for an hour and only talk when our spirit moved us to contribute to the service. The conversations were rarely about after-lives and almost always about putting ones thoughts into social context. The school naturally had a science department where religion was not even a thing.
Most children today are educated in schools without dogmatic religious affiliations and we are taught one view of reality, that view is the science view of reality. In many ways the science version of reality has displaced religions. Religions are not like umwelts or like science because religions attempt to create a unified reality, perception is about mutability and changing relationships. Religions are mongrels between the two realities. If you had been born 800 years ago in Europe you would have lived in a pre-science society where knowledge was overseen by the teaching of the Church. Immutable beliefs included a belief that the earth was the centre of the universe and the world was created in seven days. With the coming of the scientific method the immutable beliefs of the teachings of the Church were challenged and demonstrated to be wrong. Through their reason and telescopes Copernicus and Galileo showed that the earth is a planet that orbits the sun. Today when we send our space ships to the moon we see no evidence of a God that created the universe. The immutable beliefs of religion have been usurped by the immutable facts of science. The coming of science has changed our view of our bodies too.
Today we can see through our microscopes and our scanners how our mood swings and spiritual well being are directly linked to the biochemistry of our brains and goings on in the physical world of our bodies. We take drugs to relieved our pain and change our moods. After a bleed on the brain we become speechless, damage in the occipital lobes will cause us to become blind, a knock on the head that separates the forebrain from the midbrain will cause us to lose all empathy, a lesion to the hippocampus will cause us to lose our abilities to remember what happened five minutes ago. As science uncovered more connections between our mental experiences and the physical make-up of our bodies it became ever harder for scientists to believe that body and soul have separate identities. Today almost all neuroscientists call themselves "materialists".
Philosophers and scientists always run away from subjectivism
When Scientists, philosophers and Neuroscientists declare themselves as being materialists, they are saying all their all their analysis will be conducted using the reality of reason. They are indirectly saying objective reasoning of science and physics which is somehow superior way to view the umweltan perception of the world. Consciousness leaves no physical evidence of its existence, therefore it cannot be classified and included in the world of science? indeed for most of teh 20th century this was indeed the reaction of science to consciousness
Today's Philosophers talk a lot about Consciousness, but are careful never use the word 'soul' because for them that word is too closely associated with beliefs in an afterlife and has too much religious baggage. But dropping being a duellist is not as easy as becoming an atheist, dropping "God" and switching words. Declaring yourself a materialist does not work when science and physics have no place for "consciousness" alongside other features of the material world like matter, space, time, gravity and magnetism. |Without a theory to unify Physics and Consciousness we remain in a place on the edge of a duellist's frame of mind.
Sciences first reaction to having no place to accommodate consciousness's in their Newtonian world of physic was to deny our thoughts interacted with the functioning of the body. They evaded facing their own dualism to burying their heads in the sand, and saying consciousness as no interaction between consciousnesses and the physical world so there was no reason to mention it in science and psychology academies. The subject shunted consciousness into a lay-by and that they called an "epiphenomenon"; consciousness existed as an unexplainable metaphysical cloud that sort of rose like a scent from inside complex animals for no good reason. Well, in a way that was more dualist than believing in a God to organised things, because it implies people have two separate existences that do not even talk with each other. In the absence of any admission that consciousness had been selected for by evolutionary forces psychologists in those times became obsessive followers of the work of Pavlov with his hungry dogs and bells, and insisted on describing all human behaviour in terms of bodily (physical) reactions to stimuli (physical). They called their movement "behaviourism". Behaviourism became a dogma. My view is that whilst there is evidence that free will, and control of the thoughts over our bodies are very complex subject, there is no way I can believe the minds of complex animals like ourselves did not evolve consciousness for a real world reason. In the last half century psychology have moved away from behaviourism.
Behaviourism is perfectly respectable well established science supported by proofs, and they are not wrong. Single celled organisms, plants, fungi and even multicellular animals like sponges have no minds. The organisation in sponges is completely decentralised, and their intelligences is entirely intrinsic. Organisms without neurones have no brains and without minds their intelligences will be entirely intrinsic. Intrinsic intelligences include sophisticated social co-operative behaviours that are social, altruistic and even moral, so from the outside they can look as if they are being guided by minds with consciousnesses.
The building blocks of multicellular organisms are cells, and cells themselves hold intrinsic intelligences that are astounding in their complexity and variety of responses. Slime mould cells co-operate to solve mazes. Cells co-operate together in extremely sophisticated ways, and our bodies can be viewed as societies of cells. An organ in our bodies, be a pancreas, a heart or a kidney is a
Our own bodies are mostly run on intrinsic intelligences that are happening at all sorts of levels. There are social interactions between the cells that make up an organ, let us say within a pancreas, heart or kidney, that work autonomously outside the perimeter of the brains' control. Most famously there is the enteric system which brings together maintenance of our digestive system. The controls are so extensive that people have come to call the nerves inside the digestive system as being a second brain.
"Consciousness studies" have become very popular subject in our academies that has become wedded to a particular framing of an idea they call "the Hard Problem of Consciousness". The hard problem of consciousness was put forward in 1995 by a colourful Australian philosopher who dresses like a beatnik, his name is David Chalmers.
To paraphrase Chalmers' Hard Question; Philosophers of the mind are now asking "how do physical processes produce the rich conscious experiences of seeing colours, tasting lemons and having feelings?" Very soon after this question was asked an influential philosopher called Daniel Dennett stepped in questioning whether phenomenal experiences (qualia) are real or illusory. He argued that if conscious experiences are an illusion the hard question goes away. For the last three decades the philosophers have been divided into two factions with neither side able to land a solid blow against the other. Out of the stalemate a movement called the panpsychism has been allowed to flourish. Panpsychists, largely led by a British philosopher called Philip Goff, propose that consciousness is a attribute of all matter, a bit like mass or gravity. They think even stones contain the secret sauce of consciousness, and that secret sauce has been concentrated and magnified by evolution into a powerful entity in the minds of animals like ourselves. (reading list below). I agree with neuroscientists who say that Phil Goff must be wrong because consciousness depends on ownership of a mind. Stones have no minds and therefore no consciousness.
Philosophers are doing what philosophers do best: playing with words and writing books. Their hard question evades a more pressing and interesting question: we have minds, bodies and consciousness. If consciousnesses were selected for by nature they (I like to use the plural) must have a worth in the physical world of evolutionary forces. To evolve and be selected for they have to bestow a benefit to the animal, and be a working part of the mind that interacts with the body. How consciousnesses interacts with are bodies are the practical "hard" questions we should be asking first.
Whilst Chalmers, Dennett and Goff have been arguing about the hard question the neuroscience community has gone on investigating and adding to our knowledge on how the relationships between mind and body work. Using their new knowledge as a backdrop new books have been appearing that have attempted to put the emergence of consciousness in the minds of highly intelligent animals in the context of evolution. These books sometimes start with a few sentences about putting the hard question of consciousness in the practical context of what we know, and how it might have evolved, followed by a few sentences suggesting understanding the mechanics of thought makes the hard question evaporate. Personally having read many such books I have never seen the hard question evaporate, but their approach, especially when we consider the evolution of consciousness, does bring sharper focus on to Nature's purposes when adding consciousness into the design of her creations. As the cloudiness has evaporated the interaction between body and soul has become a little more visible.
Reading List of books about Consciousness:
The theory of Two Flawed Realities
Two realities
We are all seduced into believing reality is aligned with truth telling. Sometimes truth is believing what our eyes tell us or other times it is following the science? Realities are constructions of the mind and they are always attempts to impose sense on a universe built out of chaos. There are as many ways to construct them as there are minds to think them. The Case Against Reality by David Hoffman (2020 Penguin) is a must read if you want to go deeper.
For my purposes, which is to demonstrate how drawings work, I will be dividing realities in a traditional way, using two commonly used methods to construct the world:
The first way to construct reality: The reality of logic, science and technology is one method. It is a unified reality of measurements, physics, chemistry and immutable facts.
The second way to construct reality: is through the lens of subjective thought. Sunjective reality is a product of perception, a
manifestation of our "umwelts". Subjective reality is ,perceptual thoughts and mutable beliefs. It is a method of seeing the world that is more
used in the arts.
Let us assume there is one universe, but
the two methodologies to make sense of the universe reach different conclusions about truth and their
conclusions are often 100% in opposition with each other, however their
strengths are complimentary with each other. I will give you an example of the way the two realities work:
A cat looked at using reason: The
Science view is a unified reality of the world built on a scaffold of
measurements, immutable facts, axioms and the theories of Newtonian
physics. The technological genius of our societies are dependent on the
factual knowledge of science, and if a fact is discovered to be wrong
our unified conception of reality has to be amended to include the new
information, otherwise our bridges will fall down and we would not be
able to send people safely into space. Everything in technology relies
on the successful application of a unified theory of immutable facts.
The fact that our technology works confirms to us that science view of
reality is close to being correct.
On the rare occasions science facts are proved wrong and the science has to be rewritten. More
often structures are left untouched and the new information is bolted
on. For instance imagine you discover a new species of cat on a remote
pacific island. This would not change sciences theories on cats, but a
new species would be added to the phylogenetic tree.
The success of technology is dependent on the findings of science, logic and objective reasoning. Reasoning at this level is a method of thinking unique to the human species. It is made possible by the excessively large frontal brain lobes humans have where the final stages of these sorts of thought processes are completed. Reasoning has enabled our species to outwit and dominate all other animals species with which we share our planet. We are so in awe of the advantages reasoning has given us that we have lost all scepticism towards this method of analysis which is very slow to do and has many flaws. In times of crisis we down play subjective perception and say things like "use your head", "follow the science" and "don't be so emotional". There is a unspoken consensus amongst us that it is our rationality and reasoning powers, not our humanity, that makes our species superior to other animals. I do not agree.
A cat looked at through your umwelt
Just to lay my cards on the table early I will summarise my opinion here. Human superiority is in our humanity, and our ability to magnify our consciousnesses to levels of enrichment other animals cannot reach. This ability is partly because we have enhanced rationality, because our frontal lobes enable us with many new instruments of thinking that contribute to how well subjective reality works. Working memories, autobiographical memories, religions, language, the arts and beliefs that contribute to us climbing the stairs to higher consciousness levels. Our frontal lobes also allow us to extend our minds All these things magnified self awareness, shared cultural achievements, self discipline and empathy. I hope as the story I am about to tell unfolds you will understand my view better.
Flaws in science reality
As I have already mentioned we are taught in our schools to revere science's version of reality. As discussed consciousness simply cannot be accounted for by science. This alone should be a red flag that the fundamentals of science are in need of amendments. Sadly consciousness is not a lone red flag as there are other red flags that warn us of abnormalities in sciences version of reality.
Science is a distorted view of reality, but the distortions do not affect how well our technology works on our planet, so these flaws are sent to the back of minds. The flaws are measurable. Time is not linear, it exists across a warped universe, and an atomic clock launched and sent around the earth will register time at a different speed to one left on the Earth's surface. Science's matrix of facts get more bizarre as we drill down into particle physics or expand into astronomy, and theorists in these areas of study begin to abandon the hard language of measurements for subjective language of qualities like "charm" and "strangeness". Quantum physics is weird too. A theory called "entanglement" postulates communication between electrons across the universe that happens at speeds faster than the speed of light. These deviances demonstrate that the hard question of consciousness is not a lone anomaly that cannot be filled with a Newtonian explanation, it is instead just one more example that teaches us to recognise that science is flawed. Even so we can all recognise that science is a dependable tool of thinking that affords us to make excellent technology that helps our species dominate the other species on Earth. In his book (recommended above) David Hoffman summarises another hard questions "space an time are doomed".
Science
is one of many virtual tools that contributes something important to
our enriched consciousness. Science is no more than one of many
versions of reality that we use to flourish and keep us safe in the
daily routines of our lives.
2,300 years ago Plato likened our perceptions and conceptions to a flickering shadow cast on a wall by an unseen reality. Science tries to be objective, but it can never be the-be-all-and-end-all of reality, because it can never be more than an interface that hides an unseen reality behind a veil of virtual icons.
In 1969 I
was a first year student at Bangor university. I used to collect money
for a third world charity. The work involved knocking on doors of
students in the halls of residences and asking the owners to sign up to
donate. I remember meeting this couple, a young man and his very pretty
girlfriend, who were very committed Christians. I was perplexed by
their faith which was so out of place in the zeitgeist of that age of
flower power and hippies. We talked a while and the young man passed me
a bible opened at King John 1. The gospel of St John starts with the following words: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him;". I was unimpressed but the conversation has stuck with me.
Science
was designed by the ordered minds of the elite thinkers and
philosophers in civil societies, and for philosophers
and scientists and technologists "the word" is the beginning. Without
words there is very little opportunity to expand logic. My cat,
Cha-cha, will never be a philosopher, scientist or inventor because
he has no language. Even though Cha-cha has no words, he does have
perception that enable him to hunt, find food, fight other cats, poo and
play. He has a reality that gives him unspoken values and guides him
to look after himself. He did not have to go to school to learn how to
survive and live a worthwhile life. I am not suggesting the Bible needs rewriting, but perhaps a better beginning would be "In the beginning was perception, and out of perception came consciousness, for perception made intelligence. All things were made by perception and intelligence".
The Spectrum between Reason and Umwelten perception
Scientists and philosophers of the mind have this game of asking "what is it like to be......a bat? ...a cat?". We cannot know what another creature's subjective experiences feel like. An extension to this question maybe "What is it like to live in a wordless word and have very little ability to reason". This sometimes happens to people who have had strokes, and it is close to the world in which my cat Cha-cha lives. Cha-cha has a much less developed pre-frontal cortex (PFC) than we humans have, and since reasoning needs a PFC Cha-cha's lives in a reality that is an exclusion zone for Newtonian physics, religion, recognising himself in a mirror, after dinner conversation and poetry, but from the outside it still seems to be a rich rewarding experiential world which includes having feelings, pleasures, fears and emotions. Cha-cha has limited understanding of time too. He knows he gets fed in the late afternoon and looks forward to it, but I get no sense that he knows an autobiography of his life. He lives in a subjective reality that was forged by natural selection and evolutionary forces. It seems to be a rich rewarding life lived in the now.
We humans of course experience both realities; subjective and objective. A lot of subjective living happens in our sub-conscious, and another large part happens in a partition of our selves which we call consciousness or soul. Instead of using the word subjective I will use umwelten (a word I will explain in the next section) because I think it introduces a useful tool to looking at this side of our personalities.
Drawings are on a spectrum between the two realities; Objective reasoning with language and science against subjective umwelten experiences. At one end of the spectrum are technical drawings deliberately drained of emotional input and confined inside the factual perimeters of measurements.
At the other end of the spectrum is the distorted world of umwelten focus where weird things happen but still make sense. A favourite example of mine is the caricaturists image of the Duke of Wellington "the head of the army" who in his day was jokingly called "the Nose". Cartoonists exploit this end of the spectrum, where reality resembles a ramshackle jumbling together of emotional triggers, a magnified collection of selected ideas focused on and mutated that feed our umwelten perception of what a thing is. It is also of the now, and unstable, since in the next moment I might jettison all those troupes and construct a new image of a military man on a horse leading his army at Waterloo with compassion and forethought.
The Umwelt
Umwelt is a word you are likely to meet more often, particularly after the publication of Ed Yong's recent book "An immense world". I recommenced Ed Yong's book becaue it is very well researched and a great read, but as I will explain I find his view of Umwelt is too limited in its scope. This is especially so when we come to looking at how our umwelts are modified by the extra special consciousness skills of the human mind. Drawing come into this gambit of thinking.
Umwelt was a word coined by a German called Jakob von Uexkul in 1909. It is a representation of the parameters/limitations of a creature's sensory world. For instance a dog is colour blind because it does not have the physical structures in it's eyes to differentiate red from blue. So a dog's umwelt does not include seeing redness. Most humans see redness, so for these people their umwelt includes seeing colours. A dog has a bifocal nose that can detect smells directionally, so when the dog and his master go for a walk together they experience the world differently; the dog is living a smell-a-rama and the human is living a colourama. Scientists can compare the physical characteristics of a snake's suit of sensory receptors, against a bat's, against a cat's against a human's to make lists of umwelts for every species. Ed Yong explains these differences very well in his entertaining and thorough book.
The disappointment I have with Yong's book is that I see umwelt as being sculpted by both nature and nurture. |To get what I mean imagine someone brought up in Japan in 1500 who would have used the one word "aoi" for blue and green, and considered them a single colour. Then the Europeans arrived with their more granulated language vocabulary that separated blue from green. The Japanese mind of today experience blue a green separately, and consequently have a more granulated umwelt than their 16th century counterparts. There is a benefit from separating the colours since it gives the user a more acute awareness that enhances their conscious experiences. The acquisition of new experiences in this way is called gaining an "affordance". If a child is taught the piano they will granulate music more than a child with no musical education, and that will give the child a broader range musical perceptions and experiences, and in that child music might even be processed in different sections of the brain the become enlarged. The umwelts we get from Nature are extended by nurture, especially in humans. In my personal case the act of learning to draw changed and developed my visual perceptual abilities and brain. You will have different skills from mine and as a consequence you will have an umwelt and brain that is shaped towards your personal lifestyles and values.
Humans have exceptional language and cultural abilities, many of which are given to us by our extra-large PFC, and as species we are able to extend our umwelts more than other animals. Looked at from this perspective adding reasoning to our umwelts provided our species with an opportunity to extend the scope of our minds outside ourselves. Together
these give us mind-extending tools like pens and paper, pencil and
drawing pads, and even computers that allow us to outsource work the
brain does. Returning to learning music, a musician not only has a physically enlarged musical brain that granulates sound more effectively, but they also have the ability to extend their thinking with pen and paper.
Reason gave us humans methods of "extended" thinking unknown in other animals, and from this was born more complex cultural dialogues and a meta-consciousness that can recognise ourselves in the mirror.
My
earlier notion that drawing is on a spectrum between objective thinking
and umwelten subjective experience is too simplistic, it is a lot more complex and harder to
grasp, but it does not invalidate the idea. It gets worse! Umwelts are
influenced in the moment by our health and state of mind. For instance
an unfit tired person looking at a hill will see the slope as being
steeper than a well trained athlete. This has been demonstrated by
experiments where subjects were asked to estimate gradients. An athlete
who is exhausted will start to see the hill as being steeper than he
saw it at the beginning of the day. This has parallels to the case of
thinking of the Duke of Wellington as a head stuck on a boot in one
moment and as an inspiring leader of men in another.
Below is a diagram that gives an idea of the shape changing properties of an umwelt. Umwelts are not
stable, they are constantly re-organising as your environment changes, you mind wanders or your
sense of well being varies.
The Theseus house that chance built (and the weird fabric of subjective reality)
"I will only believe it when I see it with my own eyes" is a common exclamation that demonstrates how closely we identify reality with what our senses are telling us. Believing what our eyes tells us is a much older version of reality than "following the science". Rationality is ordered thinking done with words, mathematics, axioms and logic which is at most a few thousand years old. On the other hand subjective perception has a history that goes back to the very foundations of life itself and is the reality that my cat Cha-cha lives in. It is even the one we humans use most of the time in our daily lives.
The nuns who taught me in the convent wanted me to have immutable beliefs in one God, but this goes against how nature intended. Beliefs, like umwelts, as I will demonstrate later, are supposed to be mutable. In this sense religions are an aberration of perception, but an aberration that has been useful in cementing the fabric of human societies and civilisations together. Shared immutable beliefs are a bit like science, a glory of human perception not shared with our other brethren in the animal kingdom. Yuval Harari in his two books Sapiens and Homo Deus postulated that the human propensity for shared immutable beliefs (a love for bigotry?) allowed human tribes to work with other tribes and conduct more effective warfare in huge numbers, and it was perhaps the critical factor that helped our species wipe out the stronger more well adapted European Neanderthals. Human societies are bound together with immutable beliefs such as where countries have borders, consensual agreements on laws, the intrinsic value of money and religions. These things are all expressions of our human propensity to value immutable beliefs as a virtue. Religion which again is built on a scaffold of immutable facts was the precursor to the development of science.
As I stated earlier nature intended beliefs to be mutable and retested. Cha-cha does not do religion, but he believes. He believes "this creature will sting me and it will hurt", and that "the window is a barrier", but his beliefs, whilst seemingly constant and unchangeable throughout his whole life, are always mutable because he will always have a desire to go through the window which is in the way. Evolution is about adaptation, and changing with the environment as it changes around you. Imagine you are the first fish that crawls out of the water and scrabbles across the rocks. You use your fins to push your self across to the next pond, and in that moment instead of perceiving your fins as fins, you for the first time realise they are no longer fins but legs. A million generations later you are a lizard with legs and no fins, another few million generations later you are a dolphin with fins but no legs. Mutability is baked into the umwelt.
The mutability of belief is always in play, even from hour to hour. We may be walking through the grass passing a piece of old rope, but as we get nearer our heart misses a beat because we suddenly change our belief and see it as a snake. Perception without mutability is bigotry, and will get you killed. Mutability is in our umwelts and in the now.
Notice the word is "Believing" what one sees. To move forward in science you have to prove and accept new immutable facts, for perception to move forward you are required to change your beliefs. What I believe today will be different from what I believe tomorrow. The differences between mutable reality and immutable reality are at the heart of the difference between objective thinking and subjective thinking, and acknowledging the difference will be very important later when we come to discussing how drawings work.
The birth of life was the most improbable big bang event in the history of the Earth. On the internet I found a
nice analogy of how improbable the birth of life was; imagine that it
was raining lego bricks and out of the chance falling of the lego bricks
a perfect house was built? Whilst this analogy gives and good picture of the unlikelihood of the birth of life, it has a big weakness. What was born was not an immutable object. The thing that was born was life. Life, in all it forms, is mutable through and through. Life is a shape changing event that is only sustainable through guzzling constant supplies of energy. Life happens on a time line, like a fire burning wood it is never static and dies when the wood is all burnt up. Whilst the fire is raging the fire is changing the world, and the world is changing around it. Every moment in the life of the fire is unique. Life is the same. Our bodies are in a constant dance with out environments, until the energy runs out and our hearts stop. Then we disintegrate back into stardust.
Strictly speaking stones are mutable shape changers too because the weather erode them over time, but in terms of human times scale they are immutable and the shape changing is of a different sort; erosion. Living cells do not erode because they repair any breakages in their structures, their mutability is of a different sort, their mutabilities are like Theseus' Boat .
The
Greeks had a thought experiment called the Theseus Boat Paradox. The
story goes that Theseus, the king of Thebes who slayed the Minator, had a
boat that was hundreds of years old. Over the years it was repaired
again and again, until every bit of itself had at some point been
replaced during repairs. It was a different boat, but it was always Theseus Boat. Cells take in nutrients and throw out waste, so they are like Theseus
boat. A cell is an event, and if you freeze a moment it is a unique moment in the life history of the cell unlike any other moment in its life.
Theseus'
boat might have had two red sails when it was launched but only one
white sail now, but it never stopped being Theseus' boat! Looked at objectively the later Theseus' boat is a different one to the one that first set sail, but as a subjective perceptual mutable belief it is the same boat that was built hundred's of years earlier. We can say the same about your fingers. Objectively the tiny fingers you were born with are different from the big ones you have as an adult, and we can say the same about your soul which is composed of disparate ever-changing elements of your perception. Perception views objects as mutable and even as with Theseus' boat as they change in perceptual reality they always retain one unity.
So when the lego rain fell from heaven it did not produce a house in the sense of making an object like a stone, it was more of a Theseus' house. An object that collected nutrients from the outside world, excreted waste, repaired itself and guzzled energy to sustain its structure. Theseus'
boat was maintained by a crew of sailors who sailed her from port to
port, and at each port she was met be a group of workmen who brought on
provisions, mended and changed damaged planks and mended her sails. In this sense our analogy between Theseus house and boat does not hold, since the boat was maintained by an outside intelligence. In contrast the Theseus house not only constantly mutates and rebuilds, but it also had its own internal intelligence with a concept of "self". My contention is that in order for this to happen Nature had to invent a "reality" that could perceive a ever-changing mutating self as a stable object like a stone. A stable sense of self inhabiting an unstable mutating object! How did Nature do that?
By lucky chance Jakob von Uexkull, who coined the word Umwelt, likened an animal's body to a house with a number of windows "Each house (an individual or species) has a number of windows" he wrote "which opened onto a garden: a light window, a sound window, an olfactory window and a great number of tactile windows. Depending on the manner in which the house was built, the garden changes as it is seen from the house." This is a lovely explanation of how our vision of the reality is restricted by the choices the umwelts evolution bestows on us. A Theseus dog has wide open olfactory windows that flood the spirit of the dog with a panorama of smell experiences, whilst we have excellent colour vision and acute sight. The experiences we have as individuals are so overwhelming that the dog believes most of reality is made of smells, and as humans half of our brain processing power is given over to sight so we think reality is a colourama. Just as a colour blind person cannot imagine redness a human cannot imagine what living in a smell-a-rama is like.
Every individual owns an umwelt that is sculpted not only by the physical attributes, are they colour blind, but also by their nurture: Are you Japanese in the 16 century and unaware of the differences between blue and green? Do you play a musical instrument? Do you speak German and English? Were your parents kind or cruel? As we go through life we accumulate experiences, and develop an umwelt unique to ourselves. We all have a unique perspective on reality which has been integrated by nuture into our umwelts.
Portrait artists are dancing between these two realities. On the one hand are producing a physical object, but the languages the drawings are written and read in are perceptual. Portrait drawings are like the girl in the street describing a cat, the options of how to respond are in the moment and mutable. Portraits are created in Theseus' unity in the moment, in contrast to an architectural drawings which are more like science as they are pinned to immutable facts, like measurements and scale. I am stating the obvious, but it is an obvious that people misunderstand when they first take up drawing. Go to an art class and the teacher will sit the model motionless so you can copy what is in front of you. The teacher might then come and sit next to you and show you how to measure comparative sizes with their pencils on outstretched arms, and meticulously copy patches of shade with photographic accuracy. When they do this they asking their students to abandon the mutable reactive reality that comes to a girl in the street when she is asked to describe a cat, and giving you instead an immutable crutch that will strip your drawings of soul.
Everything coming through the window is Categorised and Mutated
Intrinsic Social Behaviour
Umwelts and variable windows
Returning to the rain of Lego. It was more than a house that was built. It was a Theseus shape-changing house that guzzled energy, could
repair and reproduce itself and had the wits to do intrinsicly intelligent things in order to survive. In my revised analogy the wits are perception, however it must be remembered that having perception plus intelligence does not infer that the first life forms had consciousness. In the beginning life forms had no brains, so early life forms were without thoughts and were run without consciousness. Today we have a huge diversity of life and most still do not have minds. Archaea, bacteria, moulds, algae and even most multicellular organisms like sponges and plants have no centralised minds, which rules out much option for consciousness. All these life forms are still run on "intrinsic
intelligences" without consciousnesses.
Mindless organisms have a wide range of perceptual suites of sensors attached to intrinsic intelligences that cause them to behave like they have souls. They have an intrinsic sense of their own identity and the boundaries between themselves and the outside world. They have an intrinsic sense of their internal order and well-being, which we call "interoception". They have an intrinsic sense of what is happening in the outside world which we call "exteroception". They go about their lives gaining nutrients, energy, evading dangers and looking after themselves as if they are under the control of a mind. Many have a sense of other life forms in their ecosystems with which they can interact intelligently, running away from predators and working with friends. Mindless life have primitive "social interaction". Even trees communicate and act in coordination with other trees and moulds in the earth, including trees of other species. No-one can know what it is like to be a plant, but it seems very likely that whilst they have intelligences in terms of conscious experience it is not much advanced on being a soulless iPhone.
WE have no knowledge of what the first shape canging Lego shouse looked like, teh best we can do is reverse enegineer The very first forms of life happened very soon after the birth of the earth. Using teh genetic clock we can estimate that all life forms are descended for a cell called a oki, a lfie form that has about 40 c
A single cell's existence is simple and limited. About 2 billion years ago cells started to band together, sometimes with genetically identical clones, and sometimes through close interaction with outsiders. Cells in a multicellular organisms mutate to their new niches and give up their independence to stick together tenaciously; they take on specialized functions, and they curtail their own reproduction for the greater good, growing only as much as they need to fulfil their functions.
Patterns
Perception co-evolved with the evolution of the body, and it reflects the forces out of which it was forged. Mutability combined with a flexible view of unity is a fundamental way that subjective thinking differes from the objective analysis that science does.
When the life stops guzzling energy it disintegrates, this makes life dependent on its food supplies never running out, which makes evolution very focused on the strategic use of energy supplies. A big principle inherent in life is energy conservation and efficiency. Perception reflects these goals in many ways. The Human brains is about 2% of our weight but they consume 20% of the energy budget. It is a little misleading when scientists talk of human having big brains since most of the components of our brains are roughly in line with what we would expect for a mammal of our side. But one component si stupendously large, this is the neocortex.
Cells have suites of sensors on their surfaces measuring the environments that are looking out for nutrients to
take from the environment. Inside their walls they have a self regulated internal milieu. To regulate the well-being of the cell they must have had a
intrinsic perception of what the cell/boat is, which parts of internal
milieu needed to be preserved and nurtured, where the boundaries are
between the cell and the outside world. They have to intrinsically know which parts of themselves are used-up and
need to be spat out back into the environment as waste. The cells idea of unity is mutable. Theseus' boat, while maintaining a stable identity, sees its identity as mutable. The way perception evolved it became adept at
dealing with structures that mimic Theseus boat.
Man made AI products are going down a similar line of developments. Your iPhones know to turn themselves off to save running the battery, and can reply to your questions, but they run on intrinsic intelligence not consciousness down when they are not being used. The combinations of perceptions and consciousness are a relatively recent development of evolution only found in higher order multicellular creatures with substantial brains and minds. Even creatures with minds, like ourselves, with consciousness most of our daily lives are run on mindless forms of intrinsic intelligence. For instance your heart rate is run on autonomous intelligences that are outside the control of your consciousness, but your body has an intrinsic intelligence that perceives when your blood oxygen levels are low and your heart beats need to be speeded up. Some actions are in-between mindless and mindful, for instance you can hold your breath, but mostly your breathing rate is thoughtless. Your sight, which you may feel is totally under the control of your consciousness, includes a feature called blindsight which seems to be dumb and without consciousness.
Notice I wrote "suits of perceptions". This is another important divergence
between objective reality and subjective thoughts. In the subjective
world unity is always very problematic, mutable and porous. The
plurality and disunity of our thought landscapes will be central theme I will be returning to again and again as we unpack the subjective mind and how drawings
work.
Some scientists speculate the birth of life
happened in primordial soups with amino acids, others that
meteorites rich in organic chemicals rained down on the earth surface.
If the first lego house was witless it would never have lasted more than
a fraction of a second, but the house that chance built had wits that it has been able to go on evolving
and developing. Our bodies are made up of mindless cells with intrinsic sensors and intelligences (plural).
.
The
self aware conscious perceptions out of which our souls are made are an
addition on top of intrinsic intelligences, they are the icing on the
perception cake found only in higher animals, especially mammals and
birds. Humans have extra thick layer of icing because we have an
enriched consciousness that gives us reasoning and our humanities like
seeing souls, the arts, hared community beliefs and values, and cultural
hand downs.
Perception in always invoking unity in the sense of Theseus boat, not the sense of science. Science unity is immutable, life' sense of unity if a Theseus boat sense of its own unity and identity. Cells are mindless, but there perceptions are working on modes of thinking that are conceptually different and weirder than science uses. I will demonstrate later how this rule is carried over into drawing.
Cells also needed a wide range of wits;
Exteroception: Wits that told them about the outside world that told them about the world outside. Was the world too hot, too acidic, too dry?
Interoception: Wits that told them about their internal milieu
Again in mindless cells these divisions are all maintained by intrinsic intelligences, but they are part of the Theseus boat sense of self. Unity for a cell is a collection of items that have a common interest, but are again in a dance of association. These divisions in perception are hard baked into how our perceptive apparatus evolved and are reflected in how our souls have been set up. I am mentioning them here because they demonstrate how we talk of having one soul, when in fact the fabric of soul and subjective thoughts are multifaceted.
Returning to the lego houses. We speculated how the natural selection evolved houses with different structures and wits for different niches; hot vents and cold water seas. Another thing they did was combine into strings, like streets
A cell living within the framework of a multicellular world would need communicate to work together. The social lives of cells are again intrinsic, but they are surprisingly complex relationships with checks and balances that often almost replicate moral behaviours we associate with having a soul.
Returning to our first lego house could reproduce itself and was mutable It gave birth to more lego houses, and they mutated according to the use cases where they lived. Sometimes natural selection selected for structures and wits that were good at harvesting energy in the thermal vents of deep oceans, other times the cells resided in cold northern seas. Who knows? But the different houses had different strategies to survive, and as the houses evolved so did their wits too. Perception had to be mutable like the structure of the houses were. We find ourselves at a model for the inception of the mind-body paradigm. The physical reality of the lego house and the peceptual-self-identity reality of the lego house were from the very beginning one thing.
We have a word for the collection of wits a lego house has; "Umwelt". The lego house that lived near a hot vent on the ocean floor had different sensory structures and wits to the ones that lived in cold ocean currents. They had different umwelts. The cold ocean version had structures that were good at living in the cold, and wits that sought out cold water environments. The hot water version had plastics that were heat resistant and a different set of wits with a different set of sensors for finding their niche. Every life form has its own umwelt which has been selected for living in its niche. A city of houses has more diversity and complexity than a stand alone house, and a country contains many cities. Multicellular organisms have organs like hearts (cities) and the organs live in complex relationships with each other with collective needs (foreign policies). So the umwelts of higher animals are more layered and complex than the umwelts of a humble bacteria. As multicellular animals became more complex so did their umwelts, and they needed brains (governments). Few people understand that umwelts are layered, mutable and very reactive to events, this is because they have to be constantly evolving and they have to be reactive to events in the outside world. So your umwelt has permanent features like colour sight as well as reactive features like feelings of well-being that are different in the morning from your umwelt in the evening. This is only a very basic introduction to give you some sense of the meaning of what an umwelt is. Again we are discovering aspects of reality that have big implications for understanding how drawings work.
Human umwelts are the most complex of all because besides including colour sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing our enriched consciousness skills give us a wider array of perceptual tools that include language, reasoning and we are able to develop with perceptual concepts, even identifying with other consciousnesses sensing souls can be thought of as belonging to an umwelt. Umwelts are very dynamic, changing according to the well-being of the owner, and will change between the morning and the evening. I am parking this subject here but be advised that drawing is about understanding how umwelts work, and that we will be returning to the subject in detail..
Intrinsic Morality
Brains versus Man Made Machines
All man made machines, AI intelligence and computer programs work in the Objective reality mode. We simply do not have the science to include consciousness in the design of our hardware, so computers true are monist in design and nature.
The wetware of the brain works on neurone carrying electrical pulses, and the synapses are either triggered or not triggered which gives an impression that they are binary like computer hardware, but the similarities really end there
The Mind-Body Paradox
From the inception of life evolution has been advancing along two fronts concurrently, evolving physical structure hand in hand with the wits of having virtual perceptual reality. The combination of the two realities are baked into life forms, but the way our minds grasp the physical and the perceptual world are worlds apart (pun intended). Plato was right we do not see reality veridically, all we are seeing is the shadows and light dancing on cave walls and this does not tell us a lot about what we would see if we looked out from the cave entrance. Our wits were crafted and selected for by evolution to keep our physical beings safe and nurtured, not to give us answers to our metaphysical questions. Even our best scientific minds cannot untangle the paradox nature has thrown at us. Our conscious minds are simply unable to envisage how it all fits together. But it is a so-what paradox, because we do deal with crossing the division every day, such as when we use inspiration and gut reactions to guide us which new scientific theories to try and carry forwards and look for philosophical answers to problems. The division is in our minds, not in reality proper.
The two methodologies for seeing reality often come to conclusions that seem the same, but they never are, and we will be coming to this when we came to examining how drawings work. For the moment I want you to see the division between the two methodologies, because after you begin to see these it becomes easier to deal with them. Here is a simplified analysis of the differences.
Objective reality:
Objects described and ordered in terms of measurements and numbers
A single unified listing that collates and relates all facts together in a single flat matrix
Immutable Facts
Dispassionate
Subjective reality
Mutable beliefs that are in a constant state of challenge and re-clarification
Layered recursive structures amalgamated into useful units by chunking
Pattern mapping and relationships
Qualities not measurements
An ability to create fake porous unities that are mutable units and discardable
Focus distortions and umwelts
Affordances
Emotions and feelings
The Mind-Body Paradox
I do understand that my introduction to drawing has taken us to a place that might feel very heavy. I hope you will hold with me because once you see the concept that there we live two realities understanding and getting pleasure from the act of drawing suddenly becomes a lot more fun.
