Category: On Vision

On Vision and Being Human #16: Trance as the Link between Symbol and Vision

26/5/2016

Nine months is a long time for a blog to have a hiatus, and much longer than I anticipated! I can only apologise again. This was mainly due to working on a volunteer mural project entitled 'PAINTUP WITH KAMAMMA' in a township in the Western Cape of South Africa. Interested readers can find out about the project HERE. I have also been writing a treatise - entitled LIMINAL CONTACT - challenging the so-called 'death' of painting from cognitive and anthropological perspectives. This will be out later in the year.

In the meantime, it seems appropriate to re-start this blog venture by continuing the serialisation of my first book 'ON VISION AND BEING HUMAN', where we left off all those months ago. The path we began has taken some twists and turns, so let's recap: we started with some of the 'problems' of visionary experience in the context of 21st century knowledge, including the ambiguity and 'otherness' of vision, before taking in some neuropsychological views of altered states of consciousness, quantum considerations which liberate the notion that the kind of hidden reality humans expect is not likely to be possible, and even speculations on the nature and properties of consciousness.

We came to a tentative conclusion that visions are centred upon the human rather than a reflection of some ultimate reality, but no less important to human perception, wellness and identity for being so. Our road then took a sharp turn towards the Darwinist, and the notion of symbolic cognition as a central, defining feature of our species. We explored a theory of how this, along with ritual and language, could have evolved together through menstrually-driven social realities liberating humanity's first 'gods' and sacred images, and hinted that dance display, trance, symbol and vision may be deeply intertwined in our species' perception and history. In this chapter, we go deeper into that network of experiential ideas...

Thus we can see from the preceding few pages [which is to say, the preceding chapters in posts made some nine months ago - see chapter 15 for a quick summary] how symbolic culture and language do not spring from a single aspect of the human being, but from a whole range of phenomena that are emergent in character and delocalised across the whole human system. Some of these phenomena include increased intelligence, a change in the colour of the eyes, female concealment of ovulation and amplified menstruation, greater control over vocalisations, a tendency towards coalitionary behaviours to suppress philandering and those who would cheat the emerging system, and the use of pigments to signal those collective attitudes.

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On Vision & Being Human 15: Meditations on the First Deity

1/9/2015

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If the previous chapters in this essay have sought to be fairly scientific in their approach to visionary experience and symbolic cognition, with this chapter upon a Palaeolithic social reality we reach a threshold where we begin to treat our themes in more speculative and imaginative ways. In this meditation, the epiphany of a female proto-deity coalesces out of our previous discussions, and perhaps the first link between the 'otherness' of vision (one of our initial questions) and the evolution of symbolic cognition is made. Of course, throughout this and future speculations, we seek to remain honest about the fact that they are speculations and not truth, but in doing so we may find - at length! - that we arrive at a fascinating new image of the human being...

I am also delighted to announce that the delightfully illustrated book of this essay is now available on pre-order, via this link: 'ON VISION AND BEGIN HUMAN: Exploring the Menstrual, Neurological and Symbolic Origins of Religious Experience'. Release date for the book is November 1st 2015.

Our journey so far has been a strange and twisting road, involving the raising and subsequent shattering of a Classical Image of a World-Beyond-Worlds, the realisation that our perception of 'hidden realities' and visionary textures is primarily founded upon the structures of our neurology, and we have discovered that the apparently cold, directionless and blind processes of Darwinism do not lead us into a kind of existential desolation, but towards a human image endowed with strange beauty and blessed with a lively sense of the sacred, albeit one radically modified from the traditional definitions of that word. In so doing we have now have the capacity to do something which perhaps few other humans have been able to do since the end of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the majority of human populations: gaze into the eyes of the first human proto-deity and see in her primordial yet counter-intuitive visage apparitions of the whole complex of associations under discussion.

...it probably didn't happen exactly like this,
but let's just say, for a moment, that it did...

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On Vision & Being Human 14: Becoming Human

21/8/2015

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If the model outlined in the previous chapter seems somewhat speculative, this chapter presents an array of illustrative evidence, and demonstrates the genuine multi-disciplinarity of the evolutionary ideas discussed. Chris Knight and Camilla Power separately present a great deal more evidence than I offer here, but what is perhaps demonstrated in this chapter is an invitation into an expanded image of the human being, in that we begin to see more clearly that our apparently separate categories of human behaviour – visionary experience, religion, language, menstruation, sexual behaviours, symbolic culture – participate in a much more interconnected reality than we are perhaps accustomed to considering. This holistic experience of our humanity will be developed further in later chapters…

This evolutionary picture, pioneered by Chris Knight and expanded with Camilla Power and several others, of cognitively-transforming humans gaining collective and symbolic identity is a subtle and reasoned narrative that emerges from strictly Darwinian sexual selective pressures, but which nonetheless maintains a lively sense of the sacred throughout. In case the semi-mythical nature of the model should cause one to think it fantasy, however, it should be noted that this 'Female Cosmetic Coalitions' hypothesis, bears significant predictive power upon the fields of archaeology as pertaining to the Middle Stone Age in Africa and possibly Europe, as well as upon the ethnography of modern hunter-gatherer populations the world over.

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On Vision & Being Human - The Book

19/8/2015

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I am delighted to announce the forthcoming publication of my book, entitled 'On Vision and Being Human: Exploring the Menstrual, Neurological and Symbolic Origins of Religious Experience'. This beautifully-presented 340-page book represents the completed form of the 'On Vision & Being Human' essay whose first draft chapters are being serialised here on Archaic Visions.

As will perhaps be familiar to regular readers of this blog, the book explores the problems presented by visionary experience in the modern world, and suggests our propensity for symbolic cognition as a way to come to a new understanding of the human being in the twenty-first century as living in two different worlds, one of scientific evidence and one of imaginative colour.

The book is adorned with 30 beautiful monochrome visionary illustrations, and is supplemented with interesting endnotes and detailed references and annotations. It is being published by my own personal publishing imprint, Xibalba Books. Of course, the first draft will continue to be serialised here, but the final form of the completed essay along with all the extras is in the book!

The publication date is November 1st 2015 but preorders will be available from September 1st from this page - www.biroz.net/xibalbabooks/book-on-vision.htm. 'On Vision and Being Human' will also be available from Lulu, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other notable outlets from Autumn 2015.

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On Vision & Being Human 13: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture

2/8/2015

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It might seem, at first glance at least, that in tracing a path back to the evolutionary origins of our species, cognitively-modern Homo sapiens sapiens, some 180,000 years ago in the African Middle Stone Age, we have wandered far from our original theme of visionary experience. But as we have seen, visionary experience is just one element which partakes in the wider phenomenon of human symbolic cognition, and when we begin to look into how that could have evolved, we begin to sense the outlines of how the 'Otherness' of vision, and its perceptual ambiguities, could have arisen. With patience, over the next few chapters, we will see how this lengthy Darwinist (and, in time, ethnographic) excursion will throw a completely new light upon our visionary subject, beginning here with a subtle, complex and strange but powerfully predictive hypothesis from evolutionary psychology - the Female Cosmetic Coalitions model...

One of the perennial themes that emerges from even a casual glance of the australopithecine and hominid fossil record is a marked increase in brain size from a decidedly chimplike 350-500 cubic centimetres in Australopithecus afarensis (whose remnants include the famous 'Lucy' fossil) to around 1200-1600 cubic centimetres in anatomically-modern humans. This process, known as encephalization, was not however a steady, continuous one: rather there were two periods over which hominid brains appear to have taken major leaps in volume, the first being some two to one-and-a-half million years ago with the emergence of Homo ergaster, and the second between five and two hundred thousand years ago with the evolution of archaic Homo sapiens from ancestral populations of Homo heidelbergensis in Eastern and Southern Africa. It is the second of these periods which interests us here.

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On Vision & Being Human 12: On Symbolism & Symbolic Cognition

18/7/2015

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After another blog hiatus - things have been busy here - we continue with the serialisation of my essay (and soon to be 340-page book!) 'On Vision and Being Human', in which we examine a central organising principle of human cognition that leads to the expectation of hidden worlds. To a certain extent, this chapter takes a strongly social view of religious forms, but as we proceed, deeper and more enriched purviews will be taken. Future posts on Archaic Visions will consist exclusively of extracts from this essay for the next few months - due to project work, the 'stand-alone' essay part of this blog will resume in the autumn - and exciting news on the publication of the book version of 'On Vision and Being Human' will follow later this summer!

It is at this point, as we draw near to a threshold over which, once passed we will come to a revolutionary new understanding of ourselves as humans, that we should take a moment to review precisely what we mean by symbolism and how it is proposed that symbolic cognition takes place in human culture. We have so far been working with three functional definitions of symbolism, whose inspiration springs from three very different fields of study.

Campbell's mythic definition of a symbol as being that which is “transparent to transcendence” established as basic formulation that a fundamental property of a symbol is extension of reference, that is to say, it moves beyond the directly perceptible or immediately verifiable into an unseen realm of meaning. McBrearty & Brooks mirrored this with a more functional definition as the cognitive ability to substitute people, objects and ideas with arbitrary referents, whose meanings are made real through cultural practice.

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On Vision & Being Human 11: Signs, Symbols, Language & Vision

20/5/2015

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We now turn to the issue of language as one of the most distinctive human behaviours, and one which we might think of as completely natural, arising quite easily from our increased intelligence. However, it is to be noted that among primates, as intelligence increases so do Machiavellian strategies in which only expensive and expressive signals are trusted. By contrast, language production is cheap and easy, and thus the question of how language could have evolved becomes a genuinely challenging one. A wide range of magical theories are often invoked to explain our faculty for speech, but more subtlety is needed to understand how unprecedented levels of inter-individual trust could have come about to permit such an inexpensive communication system to prevail.

This chapter mainly outlines 'the problem of language' and only offers some solutions, more of which will come later. It should be noted that those who are particularly attached to some of Chomsky's ideas, or McKenna's 'mushrooms of language' hypothesis may not entirely enjoy what follows!

We are accustomed to thinking of language as the representationally human trait, a behaviour whose origin is the focus of probably the largest number of magical theories. While the form and structure of human language is most certainly unique among the animals, there are observations emerging that some primates, as well as elephants and dolphins, may possibly utilise systems of linguistic communication of one form or another, and this alone can lay to rest some of the crazier theses, since if the magic (whatever form it is supposed to take) was acting upon humans, it must also have been acting upon these other mammalian species too, a situation which looks more unlikely the more species we discover may be using verbal signals.

A simpler and more elegant explanation is that these behaviours have evolved, and in this light we gain our first insight, that in the world of signal communications, all possible systems of language are not the same, for there are signs and there are symbols.

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On Vision & Being Human 10 - On Darwinism

18/4/2015

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Having now examined the manifest properties and problems of visionary experience in the 21st century, we now proceed to the second major section of this essay: a lengthy excursion into the Darwinist origins of some of our fundamental human traits. Only with this expanded purview can we come to a new understanding of why visionary and religious experiences are so important, and so fundamental, to human cultures everywhere, and we may also at length discover why such visions are always experienced in terms of ‘Other’. If we are to move away from both literalist and dismissive views of these phenomena, to one in which the expectation of hidden realities and sacred beings emerges naturally from the ancestral conditions of the human being, we are required to look at ourselves in a completely different way. Darwinism represents such a new way, linking such apparently disparate and independent behaviours and experiences as vision, religion, language and ritual into a wider human whole.

The evolutionary theory which has come to be known as Darwinism is in many ways an elegantly simple thesis of profound transformative power. Dennett considered evolution to represent a kind of universal acid, an imaginary substance which dissolved anything it came into contact with and so could not be contained. In the same way, he said that Darwinism:

“...eats through every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionised worldview, with most of the old landmarks still visible, but transformed in fundamental ways.”

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On Vision & Being Human 9 - Speculations on Consciousness as an Emergent Order

2/4/2015

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Here we arrive at a great mystery, the nature of consciousness, a question mark which looms so large in human understanding that it may as well be white noise, and like any constantly-shifting mercurial image, what we see when we gaze into this white noise is often a reflection of what we already believe rather than any ‘true nature’. My own speculations on consciousness here should therefore be taken as just that – speculations – but they raise some important themes, most notably that of emergence, and again the idea that what we perceive, even about ourselves, may be more about useful evolved illusions than reality.

This is the last chapter in the 'introductory phase' of the essay, before a lengthy excursion into Darwinism and symbolic cognition is embarked upon. It should be noted that at several points here, reference is made to a newer draft of chapter 7 than that posted on this blog, in which objective reality is modelled as an emergent, ‘computational’ feature arising from quantum interactions. Douglas Hofstadter’s concept of the Strange Loop is also here obliquely referenced, and will be a future line of enquiry for development of some of these ideas.

While symbolic cognition is a crucial part of our perceptual architecture and of key relevance to visionary experience, we cannot begin to consider it before we come to some understanding of what we mean by consciousness. The nature of consciousness represents a major problem for modern thought: despite the vast number of definitions of the phenomenon – ranging from a sentience or alertness of mind, to a sense of self as separated from the world, and even as an immanent presence centred upon the brain – it remains confined to a paradoxical situation in which everyone experiences it but its true fundamental properties appear liquid and difficult to pin down. A relevant factor here is whether it is even relevant to consider consciousness as a 'thing' – as has been thought for many centuries – or as a 'process', or indeed as neither.

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On Vision & Being Human 8 - The Neurological Foundation of Visionary Experience

6/3/2015

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After another brief hiatus, one of the main themes of our journey is arrived at for the first time, that of the capacity of human neurology to generate specific visionary experiences which many of us will recognise. This chapter presents the first evidential arguments towards the idea that the primacy of visionary experience is founded upon the human being, and not the external world. It should be recalled that we should maintain a genuinely humanist viewpoint here: just because these experiences spring from neurology and not deity (or 'reality') should not debase the intrinsic value of the experience. This notion will be greatly justified at length in the later chapters of this thesis, but it nonetheless fundamentally challenges 'traditional' interpretations, and our ultimate goal is to come to a new image of the human which transcends many of our contemporary antagonisms... But I am getting far, far ahead of myself - read on!!

In consideration of the foregoing, visionary experience which purports in all cases to provide a sensory window into a hidden reality presents a significant problem for the modern human, and the majority choices available thus far have been to either reject quantum theory (or fuse it pseudo-scientifically into the Classical Image somehow) or to reject visionary or religious experience as delusional and contrary to what our experimental observations tell us about the universe. Religiously-inspired positions that visions represent some kind of message from a deity, or that they are verifiable reports of a mystical ultimate reality, are as unsatisfactory and unrepresentative of a complete picture of human experience as atheistic ideologies, not least in the notion that an affirmation of quantum theory does not necessarily lead to a rejection of the value of visionary experience.

Rather it unhinges those experiences from a foundation upon literal interpretations of the Classical Image, and centres both the Image and the experiences themselves not on the external cosmos but upon the human being, our neurological structures, our social realities, our propensity for ‘seeing into what is not, towards a perceived deeper truth’. Here we find clarity, and a third path opening before us.