Blog Posts

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

20/5/2015

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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Enacted Epiphanies and the Birth of the Humanist in Minoan Art

2/5/2015

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For several years, one of my avenues of research has revolved around the Minoan civilisation of Bronze Age Crete, which has so far culminated in a treatise on the Minoan Epiphany as a visionary ritual. These researches are greatly enriched by visits I and my partner take to the archaeological sites and museums of Crete, and it was on such a journey in late 2013 when I had a flash of insight into how the perennial humanist concerns of Greek art may have had their formative moments. This essay, which is generally longer and more image-heavy than my usual Archaic Visions fare, is what followed. I have a vague plan to publish my Minoan Epiphany research in late 2016: this article is likely to form the introduction to that text.

One of the major themes in the history of Aegean art, from its emergence out of the Greek Dark Ages at the end of the ninth century B.C. to its fullest flowerings in the Classical and Hellenistic periods, is appropriately summarised by Boardman, in the introduction of his comprehensive study on the subject, as:

“…its rapid but deliberate development from strict geometry admitting hardly any figure decoration, to full realism of anatomy and expression…”

and its emergence into an authentic expression of what Perry has termed:

“…the humanist spirit that characterized all aspects of Greek culture. They made the human form the focal point of attention and exalted the nobility, dignity, self-assurance and beauty of the human being.”

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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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The 'Bird Man' of Lascaux

20/3/2015

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The notion that the cave paintings of Southern France and Northern Spain during the Upper Palaeolithic were painted by shamans is so ubiquitous in the visionary community as well as other circles as to effectively have become a kind of dogma. In archaeology, however, in recent years, this idea has come to be challenged in favour of a more nuanced view, and many of the images previously thought as shamanic now partake in a wider understanding of what little we can know of the Palaeolithic cultural context, the function of the art itself and of human creative and ritual behaviours. In my many years of studies in Palaeolithic artforms, there seems to me now only a handful of images with unambiguously shamanic elements. One such painting might be the famous Bird Man of Lascaux, but as we shall see, despite the shamanic nature of this image, it is not exclusively so, and partakes of wider cultural forms as much as any other image...

In many ways, the often cited category of the ‘Palaeolithic cave painting’ is a clumsy term, not least because the phrase actually represents several widely divergent traditions visible in three discrete time periods (the early-to-mid Aurignacian, the Gravettian-Solutrean and the Magdalenian) stretching across nearly thirty thousand years of the European Upper Palaeolithic. As such, it is hardly likely that the same ritual functions and cultural imports of the paintings would have persisted unchanged for such a long time period – indeed important clues of these changes can be gleaned from the architectural spaces of the caves themselves and the siting of the art within them, as well as from the interactions between the cave sites, particularly in the latter two periods.

There are also huge changes within the art itself, and the famous images of animals of the Eurasian Steppe represent only one strand of a rich set of traditions whose varieties and subtleties are easily missed from within a casual purview. In the earliest periods, dots and tectiforms of unknown meaning seem to predominate, but by the late Aurignacian (30-28kYa B.P.) the familiar images of bison, cave lions, deer and others take centre stage, with human-animal hybrids making occasional appearances. In the Magdalenian, abstract claviforms accompany animal images but the usage of the cave itself seems to be transformed into public and private spheres in a manner not seen previously.

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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.

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On Vision & Being Human - A Quick Note

6/2/2015

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A quick note about my essay 'On Vision and Being Human', discussing the lack of bibliographies in each post, the upcoming book of the essay and a couple of other points...

At this point in the serialization of my essay ‘On Vision and Being Human’ I’d just like to say a few brief things. First I’d like to apologize for the lack of bibliography for each individual chapter. In the short stand-alone essays on various subjects, I’m always careful to make sure there’s a full bibliography so people can check the original sources for what I’m saying about, for example, the Mayan concept of itz as cosmic sap. With ‘On Vision and Being Human’ however, I’ve written the whole thing – 25 chapters in total – all together and as such, the bibliography runs to some 20-odd pages. The task of dividing this up into individual chapter reference lists would be too long, and so I spare myself this task. The full Bibliography will be published as part of the book I am planning for this essay.

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Vinajel - A Tzotzil Word and Maya Conceptions of the Sky

30/1/2015

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Across the various Mayan languages, whether ancient, colonial or modern, there exists a nexus of words and wordplays centred on the sounds chan, kan, k'an and ka'an which reveal interesting dimensions to Mayan conceptions of the sky. This wordplay symmetry is broken however in Tzotzil, a language of the highlands of Chiapas, where the word for sky is vinajel, but it nonetheless demonstrates something fascinating about the Mayan cosmovision.

It has long been known that in the Classic Maya language of the inscriptions, the word for 'sky', chan, is often expressed or replaced with glyphs for 'four' or 'snake'. This wordplay, which has persisted in many modern Mayan languages across the centuries, happens to illuminate several previously-impenetrable Mayan images with meaning. Thus, for example the Classic Maya image of the World Tree as being bedecked with foliage with its cross like central bar represented as a double-headed serpent makes more sense when one considers that the Classic Maya translation of 'world tree' was wakah chan.

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On Vision & Being Human 7 - On the Noumenon

14/1/2015

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One of the favoured philosophical concepts among visionaries and seekers of the past century or so has been Kant's idea of the noumenon, which implicitly or explicitly rests in the worldviews of a variety of thinkers on the subjects of spirituality, mythology and visionary art and experience. I think particularly of Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade in this regard. In this chapter, however, we find that a quantum mechanical view renders the noumenon as meaningless, suggesting it reflects a fundamental human instinct or expectation, rather than an insight into the true nature of reality.

What are we to do with this quantum worldview which strikes at the heart of the human experience of a cosmos driven by forms, essences and a perceived objectivity and eternity, rendering them meaningless and indeterminate? We can perhaps agree on an 'objective' reality on the human scale, with human perception and instruments of enquiry offering windows into that external realm, but a key issue is what our conceptions of that realm should be founded upon. Scientists often concur that we can be sure of an 'objective' external reality (and to my mind, these two attributes are not the same) because of the consistency this reality offers to experimental observation.

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On Vision and Being Human 6: Quantum Considerations

3/1/2015

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It might seem a little strange for a blog about prehistoric artforms and cultural realities to engage in a discussion about quantum mechanics, but as outlined in the Introduction, a sojourn around some relevant scientific theories will eventually - at length! - bring us to a radically new image of the visionary human being. This overview of quantum mechanics is the first step in this journey, which will take in pertinent aspects of human neurology, Darwinism, linguistics and signal theory, and while patience is required to move through each aspect, the destination will be - I hope! - one of profound quality and insight for the 21st century.

I should also remark that I don't consider quantum mechanics to be a difficult discipline as such - strange for sure and profoundly absurd from a human perspective, but not difficult - though I am aware that some will find it challenging or disconcerting to engage with. Another point to note is that those expecting to see a validation of 'quantum mysticism' ideas of 'universal consciousness' will be here sorely disappointed!

Most modern students of a scientific field will be familiar in some way with the quantum phenomenon of wave-particle duality in which elementary particles such as electrons and photons exhibit properties that are particle-like in some situations and wave-like in others, and this example of complementarity is a fundamental property of the universe. Let us look at this duality in some detail, and the manner of its discovery, so that we can understand its import.