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“For
the real world has inexhaustible splendour, the real life is full of
meaning and abundance, where we grasp it, it is full of miracles and
glory.” "I
am myself plus my circumstances" Jose Ortega y
Gasset Knowledge
should be useful and provisional. I
think comparing the doctor-patient relationship with the teacher-student
relationship can be useful, and it might suggest ways that both of them
could be made more productive, with implications for the nature of learning
and knowing. 40
or 50 years ago, advocates of student-centered education were encouraged
by the popularity of psychologist Carl Rogers' client centered therapy.
Rogers was interested in what made some therapists successful, and he
found that their personality and attitude, not their theories or techniques,
accounted for their success. Successful therapists had three essential
traits. They offered their clients acceptance or “unconditional positive
regard” and empathic understanding, and they themselves were congruent,
not presenting a facade of authority or esoteric knowledge. According
to Rogers, “accurate diagnosis” and “specific treatment” didn't
have anything to do with helping the client. Some
therapists thought Rogers' approach was impractical, others were sure
it was foolish. Medically oriented psychiatrists saw Roger's prestige
among psychologists as evidence that psychology wasn't suited for dealing
with the “mentally ill,” who needed authoritative diagnosis and
treatment--such as drugs, convulsive shock, or surgery. Scientifically,
however, Rogers' ideas were supported by evidence, and medical psychiatry
had no evidence to support many of its diagnostic concepts or their
therapeutic usefulness. Most
university professors felt that Rogers' ideas were irrelevant to their
educational work, and some clearly saw their own function as being a
sort of Malthusian selection of the fittest, and deliberately designed
their classes as barriers that only a few could surmount. When
I taught English composition, instructors were told that they must grade
according to a standard scoring system for errors of grammar, punctuation,
spelling, and diction. Our success was seen in terms of the number of
freshmen who had dropped out by the end of the year, as evidence that
the department had “high standards.” Knowing that system, most students
chose to write in the style of the first grade “See Spot run” readers,
hoping that they could handle the mechanics of writing if they reduced
the complexity and content of their essays. It didn't work, and they
didn't improve during the weeks when their mistakes were being brought
painfully to their attention. Since I hated reading their meaningless
efforts, I told them that I was going to grade them on content, rather
than punctuation and spelling, and that they should try to write about
something that was important to them. Only their success in communicating
something would be graded. Their papers became more readable, and the
interesting thing was that the mechanical things improved immediately.
(The intention to communicate something is the real source of structure
in language.) I had another teacher score some of their compositions,
and he confirmed that they had improved according to the department's
system. The attempt to steer a person can make it hard for them to move,
because it inactivates their own guidance system. A
physics professor would notice that writing classes have a lot in common
with psychotherapy, and would dismiss the possibility that such an approach
could be used in serious education. Professors
of medicine see themselves as models of the authority that their students
will need to apply in dealing with patients, and the physicians trained
in the authoritarian style are likely to see their patients as recipients
of their medical knowledge, rather than as occasions for listening and
learning something new. Students
entering these disciplines must expect to be disciplined. This means
that they learn not to ask silly questions about the fundamental assumptions
of their profession. Their common sense of meaning, their original guidance
system, must be inactivated to keep them from asking questions such
as “is that a disease or a theory?” Some patients find that their
physician has little patience for their questions, but most patients
don't want to ask questions, because they have been taught to respect
the authorities. Our
nervous systems are made up of physiology and culture. That
can be a philosophical problem, because our experience is governed by
our composition. In people like Heraclitus, physiology was in the foreground,
and in people like Plato, culture was in the foreground. (Heraclitus
understood that things are always becoming, Plato believed that change
wasn't real.) To change someone's mind, it's necessary to change the
way they experience themselves and the world, and that requires changing
their substance. In
the 1950s a group called “Synectics” was formed to study the creative
process. They found that having an expert in the group could be useful,
but it could also often stifle the group's ability to find a good solution
to a problem. W.J.J. Gordon described their method as "trusting
things that are alien, and alienating things that are trusted."
They used metaphorical thinking to help them to see the complexity and
potentiality of a situation, and to go beyond the existing understanding. Professors
and physicians too often present themselves as having “definitive
knowledge” about a subject. For people who already have “definitive
knowledge” about something, anomalous facts (if they are perceived
at all) will simply remain anomalous and will be quickly forgotten.
The things they produce will be extensions of what already exists. For
others, things that aren't easily explained have special interest, and
cause them to ask new questions. New perspectives can lead to new possibilities
and new realities. Once
during a lecture, Alfred Korzybski offered his students some cookies,
which they seemed to enjoy, then he showed them a label on the bag,
“dog cookies,” and some of them felt sick. "I have just demonstrated
that people don't just eat food, but also words, and that the taste
of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter." Hypnotists
have often demonstrated that words can have physiological effects. Many
of our institutions use language as a system for preserving culture,
that is, for preventing change. Korzybski wanted to correct the cultural
habit of making abstractions seem like objects or “elements,” by
making people aware of the degree of abstraction in their words. This
can be useful, but his book has been used to promote an extreme linguistic
relativism in the theory of knowledge and science, placing “meaning”
entirely within the nervous system. This
approach evades the fact that patterns exist objectively, and that they
can be perceived as they unfold through time. Although Korzybski thought
he was teaching people to overcome the limitations of thinking in the
style of Aristotle or Plato, he was supporting an attitude that would
make it impossible to perceive in the style of Heraclitus. If
Heraclitus said it's impossible to step in the same river twice, his
comment was directed to those who ignore the rich complexity of experience
because of stereotyped “elemental” thinking. He was pointing to
the abundance of the world, but elemental-concept thinkers have felt
that he simply negated their objective meanings. To
perceive another person accurately requires the ability to perceive
the person as a pattern unfolding coherently through time, as a potential
realizing itself. Carl Rogers' insight was that one's awareness of being
perceived in this way encourages the unfolding of potentials. The
refusal of institutions or individuals to perceive others in this way
is an imposition of their way of understanding, and is itself a form
of oppression. People who think in terms of “professional training”
often describe learning in terms of “conditioned reflexes,” producing
a desired response to each stimulus. The
terms “conditioned reflex” and “conditioning” were introduced
into psychology by the behaviorist J. B. Watson, who mistranslated and
misrepresented Pavlov's ideas, and who insisted that the ideas of consciousness,
volition, and self should be eliminated from the science of psychology. The
orienting reflex, the alertness provoked by something new, was described
by Sechenov in 1863, and explored by Pavlov (who also called it the
“what is that? reflex” and the “exploration reflex”)
who considered it to be our most basic and most powerful reflex. The
fact that novelty powerfully arouses our exploratory systems means that
we have a mental image of our familiar environment, and that a change
in that environment requires us to investigate the properties of the
new thing, to see whether it can be explained by the things we already
know, or whether it requires us to change our basic ideas about our
place in our surroundings. For Pavlov, the study of psychology or physiology
without consciousness was simply crazy. Pavlov
said that he studied nutrition to understand consciousness and the nervous
system, because eating is our closest interaction with the world. Our
brain is part of our digestive system. But eating has become highly
institutionalized and influenced by our cultural beliefs. If people
begin to think about the meanings of eating, they are beginning a process
of cultural and philosophical criticism. Helping
people with physical problems (such as obesity, headaches or joint or
nerve pain, or named diseases) and helping people who want to understand
something about the world beyond themselves, are structurally similar,
but in the issues of health the questions and the potential answers
are more clearly present and immediate. The
Synectics group began with the study of artistic creation, but they
found that it was easier to evaluate their progress when they concentrated
on technical invention. They found, as Pavlov had, that consciousness
and meaning could best be studied in concrete situations. The process
of goal-seeking was to be studied in action. I
see the therapeutic or educational or productive situation as a goal-directed
biological and social interaction, and the goal can be either the creation
of something new and better, or simply the preservation and application
of something already existing. Until
just about a generation ago, “teleology” (especially in biological
explanation) was considered to be metaphysical and inappropriate for
science. Norbert Wiener, who coined the word “cybernetics” (from
Greek for “proficient pilot” or “good steersman”) helped to
change attitudes toward the word when he used the phrase “teleological
mechanism” to describe cybernetic control systems. A
goal-directed system is one that senses its actions and makes adaptations
so that its actions can be refined to achieve a purpose. Between 1932
and 1935, a student and colleague of Pavlov's, P.K. Anokhin, developed
this idea of self-regulating systems, and originated the concept of
feedback, in describing the ways organisms guide themselves and their
adaptations. Building on Pavlov's work, and investigating the origins
of innate reflexes, he found principles that would explain the origin
of organs and their functions, and that would also apply to the interactions
between individuals. The functional system on any level, in embryology,
psychology, or society, is a sequence of interactions with a useful
result. Movement towards a goal is adaptive, and the system is shaped
by the adaptations it makes in moving toward the goal. Resources are
mobilized to meet needs, changing the system as it moves towards its
goal. Since
there is always novelty in the real world as contexts change, the exploratory
function is causing us to continually revise our understanding. Every
question forms a functional system, and our brain adapts as we find
answers. This
kind of systems theory and self-regulation theory developed along with
the field theories in embryology, psychology, chemistry, and some branches
of physics. Pattern and analogy were central to their approach. The
functional systems are processes that occupy time and space. The
“field” idea in biology (wholes shaping themselves) can be understood
by considering its opposite, the belief that cells are guided by their
genes (producing a mosaic of parts). That idea, in its extreme form,
claimed that cells contained an internal map and an internal clock telling
them when and where to move and how to change their form and function
as they matured and aged. In reality, cells communicate with surrounding
cells and with the material between cells. The existence of long-range
ordering processes between atoms, molecules, and cells threatened some
of the central dogmas of the sciences. Although
Norbert Wiener popularized some aspects of the “teleological” approach
to regulatory systems in the 1950s, and saw analogies between the teleological
machines and the way the brain functions in Parkinson's disease, by
1950 the digital approach to information processing, storage, and transmission
was displacing analog devices in computation and engineering, and was
compatible with theories of intelligence, such as neo-Kantianism, that
believed that human intelligence can be defined precisely, in terms
of discrete rules and operations. Field thinking in embryology,
cancer theory, psychology, and other sciences effectively disappeared--or
“was disappeared,” for ideological reasons. Wiener's
goal-directed machines, like Anokhin's functional systems, worked in
space and time, and the idea of steering or guidance assumes a context
of time and space in which the adjustments or adaptations are made.
Analog computers and control systems in various ways involved formal
parallels with reality. The components of the system, like reality,
occupied space and time. Digital
computers, with their different history and functions, for example their
use for creating or breaking military codes, didn't intrinsically model
reality in any way. Information had to be encoded and processed by systems
of definitions. A sequence of binary digits has meaning only in terms
of someone's arbitrary definitions. Parallel
with the development of electronic digital computing machines, binary
digital theories of brain function were being developed, by people who
subscribed to views of knowledge very different from those of Anokhin
and Wiener. (Anokhin argued against the idea that nerves use a simple
binary code.) These computer models of intelligence justify educational
practices based on authoritative knowledge and conditioned (arbitrary)
reflexes. Neo-Kantianism has been the dominant academic philosophy in
the U.S., turning philosophy into epistemology to exclude ontology.
"Operationism" and logical positivism share with neo-Kantianism
its elimination of ontology (concern with being itself). In
the 1960s, Ludwig von Bertalanffy developed a theory of systems, defining
a system as an “arrayed multitude of inter-linked elements.” Although
it was intended as a description of biological systems, it reduced the
teleological factors, needs and goals, to a kind of mechanical inner
program, such as “regulatory genes.” “Following old modes of thought,
some called this orderliness of life 'purposiveness' and sought for
the 'purpose' of an organ or function. However, in the concept of a
'purpose' a desiring or intending of the goal always appeared to be
involved--the type of idea to which the natural scientist is justly
unsympathetic” (von Bertalanffy). His
system theory was highly compatible with programmed digital computers,
that could define the interactions of “elements,” but unlike Anokhin's
definition of functional systems, it lacked a pattern-forming mechanism.
In Anokhin's view, the system is formed by seeking its goal, and perceiving
its progress toward the goal. Carl
Rogers' approach to person-centered processes recognized that the interacting
therapist and client or teacher and student were a formative system,
rather than just an occasion for one to inform the other. In
the Synectics group, they learned to identify the types of deeply involved
interaction that would lead to the best inventions. As in Anokhin's
functional systems, resources are mobilized or generated as they are
needed. Like Anokhin, they showed that the process of creating something
new can be understood and controlled. Every
meaningful interaction involves formative systems. Stimulation
of sensory nerves can cause cells to move into the stimulated area,
causing the organ to grow. Environmental enrichment causes brains to
become larger, and to metabolize at a higher rate. All of these processes,
from the level of energy production to the birth of new cells and the
creation of new patterns in the brain, are called up in the formation
of a functional system. The
studies of organismic coherence by Mae-Wan Ho and Fritz Popp appear
to support the idea that even the alignment of molecules in cells is
responsive to the state of the entire organism. The
reason this seems implausible to most biologists is that cells are commonly
still seen as analogous to little test-tubes in which chemical processes
occur as the result of random collisions between molecules floating
in water. But Sidney Bernhard's study of glycolysis showed that
the reactive sugar molecules are passed individually from one enzyme
to the next, in an orderly manner. In
this system, the flow of energy, a series of oxidations and reductions
changing glucose into other substances, effectively “pulls” the
molecules through the system, contributing to order on a molecular level.
Function creates structure, which supports function. Self-regulating
systems are self-ordering systems. When a person is allowed to function
freely as a goal-directed, questioning system, the formation of patterns
in the brain will be spontaneous and appropriate, and orderly. Knowing
is the ability to hold patterns in awareness. Knowledge, rather than
being stored like money in the bank, is something that is regenerated,
or generated, as we need it. When
our own steering system is commandeered by the authorities, our patterns
of knowledge will be compartmented, and arranged in a fixed pattern.
This kind of knowledge either deteriorates, or it seeks more of its
own kind. While
self-regulation and the generation of knowledge are pleasurable, having
knowledge imposed isn't. Korzybski
was right in warning about the dangers of letting names become “elements.”
This perception led Paolo Freire to emphasize the educational importance
of critically giving things their appropriate names, rather than just
“banking” the names given by an authority. “To exist, humanly,
is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its
turn reappears to the namers as a problem and requires of them a new
naming. Human beings are not built in silence, but in word, in work,
in action-reflection.” “. . . to speak a true word is to transform
the world.” “'Problem-posing' education, responding to the essence
of consciousness--intentionality- Having
the power to assign names is a source of power and wealth. The pharmaceutical
industry has been accused of inventing new diseases to sell new drugs
for treating them. Old definitions of cancer are hard to change, when
the medical profession has invested so much in treatments--radiation
and cytotoxic chemotherapy--which conflict with newer biological understanding
of cancer. The
person who is learning is critically interacting with both nature and
culture, with practical issues and theories. Applying
this to practical problems of health and nutrition, a first step is
to begin to think about which things are theories or deductions from
theories, which are habits, and which things are felt needs or appetites,
and to get in the habit of watching processes or things--such as “signs”
and “symptoms”--develop through time. With
practice, people can begin to see themselves as functional systems in
their main activities, such as eating, and to watch how their needs
influence their actions, and what effects different ways of eating have
on their other functions, such as sleeping and working. Do appetites
govern the timing of meals and the choice of foods? How does the time
of day or time of month affect appetites? People often watch for effects
of foods, but usually only for a few minutes or hours after eating.
Some foods can produce symptoms days after they were eaten, and the
activation of the digestive system by a recent meal can cause a reaction
to something eaten previously. Our
traditional cultures, and advertising and schools give us definitions
and expectations relating to foods and symptoms and physiology, and
they teach us to think of our bodies in terms of an “immune system,”
“endocrine system,” “digestive system,” “nervous system,”
and “circulatory system,” which are mainly anatomical concepts that
are more useful to the drug companies than to the consumer of culture.
Both conventional and alternative approaches to medicine and health
are likely to let those arbitrary ideas of systems cause them to overlook
real, but unnamed, processes. When
the organism is seen as a mosaic of parts, rather than as a system of
developing fields, medical treatments for one part, such as the “circulatory
system,” are likely to cause problems in other “systems,” because
the “parts” being treated don't exist as such in the real organism,
with the result that the treatments are seldom biologically reasonable. Besides
learning to perceive one's own physiology and becoming aware of the
processes of perceiving and knowing so that they can be improved, it's
important to seek information to expand the interpretive framework,
and to look for new contexts and implications. Reading
with a critical imagination is as important for science as it is for
literature or advertising. Good literature often opens expansive new
ways of seeing the world, and good science writing can do that too,
but too often scientific publications have ulterior motives, and should
be read the way advertising propaganda is read. Some
publications now require authors to state their conflicts of interest
(such as receiving money from a drug company while testing a drug),
but editors and publishers, who choose which studies will be published,
seldom reveal their conflicts of interest. As Marcia Angell showed,
editorial choices can turn statistical randomness into statistical significance.
Private ownership of science journals permits control of their content. Besides
being aware of the conflicts of interest and the frequent insignificance
of “statistical significance,” it's possible to recognize some features
of the style of argument which is often used in science propaganda.
A deductive style, rather than a descriptive and inductive style is
extremely common in technical writing, and it should always lead the
reader to question the principle from which deductions are made. “Membranes
are made from Essential Fatty Acids, therefore those fatty acids are
nutritionally essential.” But cells can multiply in a culture medium
that provides no fats. In biology, the most popular “principles”
are simply dogmatic beliefs about genes and membranes. In
physics, where testable inferences can be drawn from arbitrary assumptions
or doctrines, predictions that may be made based on different assumptions
are often ignored for ideological reasons. This ideological quality
of physics can permeate the other sciences when they use reductionist
explanations. Korzybski
felt he was helping humanity to escape “word magic” and to advance
to a mathematical view of the world. But the same processes that caused
people to “confuse words with things” can cause people to confuse
mathematical descriptions with reality. “Chaos
theory,” which was a faddish excitement about the ability to generate
unpredictable output from a simple rule (which could be endlessly repeated
by a computer), has been suggested to explain many things in biology,
including heart rate variability. It doesn't. Instead, it has probably
had a slightly harmful effect, by distracting attention from real biological
pattern- forming processes. Real
substance can sometimes be modeled by descriptions of randomness, but
substances at all levels have intrinsic pattern-forming tendencies,
and context-dependent histories. Water, for example, has structure and
structural memory that can affect even simple chemical reactions, and
even gases have internal complexities that are often ignored. Real observations
shouldn't be displaced by theories. The ideal and identical atoms of
the reductionists are a crude fantasy, invented, more or less consciously,
to serve their ideological purposes. One purpose has been to justify
their abstract models of reality. A particularly noxious way of modeling
reality has been based on the assumption of randomness, justifying a
statistical view of all things. The
neo-Kantian philosophy that has dominated US universities for more than
a century argues that our senses (even when extended instrumentally)
are limited, so our knowledge must be limited--we can only speak of
theories or interpretations, not of being. The world we see is, according
to them, only an artifact of our senses. A popular example is that the
flower a bee sees is different from the flower a human sees, because
the bee's eye is sensitive to ultraviolet light. (The triviality of
the example is shown by the fact that when a person's lens is removed
because of a cataract, ultraviolet light becomes visible, because it
is no longer blocked by the tissue that is many times thicker than a
bee's lens.) There is a straw-man quality to their arguments against
philosophical realism and empirical science:
No one claims that our senses deliver complete knowledge all at once.
What the realists claim is that interacting with the world is an endless
source of valid knowledge. When
reading science articles, or listening to lectures, and even while privately
thinking about experiences, it can be useful to watch for the improper
use of assumptions. Our understanding has been shaped by the assumptions
of our culture, and these assumptions present an attitude toward the
nature of the world, in some cases even about the ontology that our
philosophers have said is beyond our reach. “Evolution is shaped by
random mutations,” “nuclear decay is random,” “the universe
is expanding,” “entropy only increases,” “DNA controls inheritance,”
“membrane pumps keep cells alive,” and all of the negative assumptions
that have for so long denied the systematic generation of order. Every
communicative interaction is an opportunity for the discovery of new
meanings and potentials. =========== Aristotelian
motto: If the knower and the known form a functional system they are
substantially the same. =========== REFERENCES P.K.
Anokhin: 1975, The essays on physiology of functional systems.
1978, Philosophical aspects of the theory of functional systems.
1998, Cybernetics of functional systems: Selected works, Moscow,
Medicine, 400 p., (in Russian). Pedagogy
of the Oppressed, by Paulo Freire. New York: Continuum Books, 1993. Synectics,
W.J.J. Gordon, Harper & Row, 1961. Crystals,
Fabrics, and Fields : Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental
Biology, Donna Jeanne Haraway, 1976. We
Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social
Change, Myles Horton, Paolo Freire, 1990. Science
and Sanity, Alfred Korzybski, 1933. Alfred
Korzybski, "The Role of Language in the Perceptual Processes,"
in Perception: An Approach to Personality, edited by Robert R.
Blake and Glenn V. Ramsey. 1951, The Ronald Press Company, New York. Marshall
McLuhan: “...the devil is in the media,” quoted by Derrick
DeKerkhove, Director of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology
at the University of Toronto. Biochemistry
and Morphogenesis, by Joseph Needham. Cambridge University Press,
1942. Cybernetics--or
Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine,
Norbert Wiener 1948 The
Human Use of Human Beings, The Riverside Press (Houghton Mifflin
Co.), 1950.
“...the rules of the war game never catch up with the facts of the
real situation.” “The future offers very little hope for those who
expect that our new mechanical slaves will offer us a world in which
we may rest from thinking. Help us they may, but at the cost of supreme
demands upon our honesty and our intelligence.”
Norbert Weiner, God and Golem, Inc., 1964. Digital
thinking sees the organism as a mosaic of parts, making rigid and specific
naming essential; analog thinking sees the organism as fields in development,
making flexibility in naming essential. PS:
When defense lawyers collaborate (collude) with prosecutors, it's considered
a crime. What if physicians, instead of covering up for each other,
used the adversary system that is supposed to produce the best knowledge
in law and science, to evaluate their patient's diagnoses and treatments? J
Intern Med. 1999 Jan;245(1):57-61. Decreased heart rate variability
in patients with type 1 diabetes mellitus is related to arterial wall
stiffness. Jensen-Urstad K, Reichard P, Jensen-Urstad M. Eur
J Appl Physiol. 2010 Apr 23. Heart period sensitivity to forced oscillations
in ventilatory pressure. Quint SR, Vaughn BV.
Not
for republication without written permission.