On Creativity

To me creativity seems to be such a general phenomenon. It seems to be something that permeates all life, all decision making, all language. It is not born in someone, as a friend tried to tell me. I am starting to suspect it is universal and pervasive, as Chomsky argued. I want my life to be creative all the time. I want all of my words and all of my actions to be creative. I want every decision to be creative.

So that is what this is about. I'm going to explore this idea of creativity and talk about how I relate to it in general. First I just want to talk about Chomsky for a second and how he thinks it is universal. Then I'll talk about conversation and the creativity that is involved with that. Then I'll go into my experiences with customer service and the sorts of creativity I see in those situations. Then I want to reflect briefly on my writing and how I associate it with creativity. Then I'll talk about empathy, and the importance of creativity and empathy. Then as a closing note I want to touch on my most serious concern: How society prevents us from being creative by saturating our minds with theory-theory.

Chomsky on Language and Creativity

So a little while I read a transcript of The Chomsky-Foucault Debate. A fascinating event in 1971 when Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky met in the Netherlands to debate the question of whether or not there was such a thing as human nature or not. Interesting debate. Foucault is skeptical of the idea of human nature, and regards it more as a form of knowledge that has been utilized at certain historical moments to regulate and create certain types of power relations. Chomsky, on the other hand, at the time at least, believed that there must be something to human nature. His work on linguistics was his primary point for this claim. He argued that because the human brain possesses a 'universal grammar' that all languages rely on, then there must be a sort of human nature that extends beyond language and into other realms of human life. I wish I were more familiar with this idea of universal grammar, and I imagine/hope I will be in the future, but basically the idea is that humans have a sort underlying set of rules that govern our use of language. Let me quote wikipedia cause they word it better: Universal Grammar asserts that the human brain "contains a limited set of rules for organizing language. In turn, there is an assumption that all languages have a common structural basis." But anyways, let me get back to Chomsky and creativity.

Chomsky believed that because all human brains have this underlying capacity for speech, it must be a part of our nature. It must be human nature to express ourselves with language. Chomsky says that it is amazing that children can hear all these words, never be explicitly taught, and can then learn to use and recombine all these words into entirely novel new phrases. He says that every single day we all use language to produce brand new sentences that we have never heard before. Basically, that the use of language is inherently creative. That human capacity for language implies that all human beings have a proclivity for creativity.

All language as creativity? I suppose hearing Chomsky say this was really interesting to me. It is the basis, roughly, for much of what I am about to say.

Creativity and Conversation

So if language inherently involves creativity, then how do we need to think of conversation? Well, let me just say, personally, that for a long time conversation baffled me. I was always struck with the fear of 'I don't know what to say', or 'I won't know what to say'. I seemed to have this idea that conversation had to be something that was planned, structured, made sense, or had to be thought about. But no, that is not the case it turns out. Conversation has to be spontaneous.

In other words, conversation cannot be planned or anticipated because it has to be creative. This was such a crucial lesson for me to learn. To understand that I don't need to know what I'm going to say when I enter a conversation. That I just need to be relaxed and go with the flow. All reminds me so much of Clausewitz, and becoming comfortable so that your intuition can guide your decision making. Conversation is nothing but lots of tiny intuitive decisions.

So it is always interesting to think about how I still think about impending conversations. I still run miniature simulations in my mind of what we might talk about, what we might do. I still build little scripts to try and help myself work. But the bottom line is that those scripts can never be relied on, they have to be used as fodder for creativity. You have to learn to use things like scripts or principles in creative ways at the actual moment of conversation. Sounds awfully zen, and awfully Clausewitz.

But these scripts that I build, that I bet other people build too, and that society builds for us, I know that they can sometimes get in the way. Thus my paralysis at conversation at earlier points in my life. I wanted to know how it would go. I had all these ideas of how it should go. All these ideas of what I should be talking about. We are just flooded with shoulds. and I think that these get in the way of creativity. Further, I identify this idea of shoulds with mental models and tacit theory. At the end of this I am going to have a section on this, on how we need to overcome mental models and tacit theory in order to be creative. Onward to customer service.

Creativity and Customer Service

I think my experience with customer service jobs has also prompted me to think about creativity. Customer service is just such a unique environment that it requires a certain amount of creativity. Especially when I interview and people ask me about what I do in customer service situations I realize how loose it has to be, how creative it has to be. People ask me, what do you do? And I have to tell them that I don't know exactly what I do. But that I deal with each person as an individual. I have a sort of basic set of strategies I can use, I can ask them if they have seen this product here before, when it was, how long ago it was, what it was like, etc.. But there is never any way to rigidly apply those strategies. You have to run with that person in the moment, you have to read their mood and handle it appropriately. Customer service takes sensitivity and creativity. I think I wrote about this in my blog on customer service. But there is no denying for me that it feels like a very dynamic and creative thing. I won't go on about this for too long. Basically customer service is a specific variety of conversation, and therefore still requires creativity.

Creativity and My Writing

My writing is also something that is very interesting to think about in terms of creativity. For one thing I am not writing fiction or poetry and so it is sometimes hard for me to say precisely how my writing is creative. But I think that my thoughts on my life, on other people's lives, on empathy, on lots of things is indeed creative. I think I have lots of ideas and I've never seen them presented in quite the way that I think of them. I definitely think my writing is creative.

And my friend commented that creativity can be a harsh mistress. And I thin he means how it comes in fits and bursts sometimes. Sometimes I want so badly to write something and it just won't come out. I want to tackle a problem and I just don't know how. Then all of a sudden BOOM I UNDERSTAND. And then I write it in a flash. It is a strange process. My aunt described it as going deeper into a tunnel in which you don't know what lies ahead. David Shields says that essaying is a verb, it is exploring through writing. I feel like I am essaying right now, almost all the time. Sometimes I have a vague sense of where I am going, but the tunnel has a lot of dark corners, if you catch my drift. Whenever I write I think I am exploring myself, exploring my thoughts on the world. I think that I am trying to write creative non-fiction, like Shields. But that is enough. On to empathy.

Creativity and Empathy

I am saving this one for second to last because I think it is so important. I think that empathy is the best way to really understand people. But I don't think it is easy. I don't think that it can happen as automatically as I would like. Mirror neurons exist, so I know that it does happen automatically with certain things, on those basic levels of facial expressions and emotions. But when it comes to more complex situations, when it comes to odd social situations, I think it requires a bit of creativity. I think that this applies both to empathizing with other people and empathizing with ourselves.

Here I want to talk about empathy with other people and the creativity it requires. I think it is very easy to run the standard scripts that let us blame people. I think it is easy to say that criminals are irrational fools, that people who are bad drivers are idiots who weren't paying attention, that people who disagree with us are ignorant, so on. I think that this is just far too lazy and inadequate. People don't just do things because they are idiots. People often have very difficult circumstances that compel them to do things. Life is hard, and we can't just act like people have every choose all the time. People struggle. Decisions are made with incomplete information and with very limited experience.

Perhaps those people driving poorly are having a heart attack, or a plain old really bad day. Maybe those criminals were born into a world that you haven't even taken the time to imagine. Maybe they have been told that crime and drugs was the way to go, maybe they have only seen people who have taken those paths. Maybe we need to take the time to creatively imagine what would compel someone to act that way. Maybe we shouldn't just write them off because we are lazy.

We need to start associating empathy with creativity.

This is something I've written a lot about. My essay of 6/13/10 and also my post of 7/11/10 I talked about creative empathy, and in particular my idea of 'forgiving everyone for everything'. At least conceptually, we should try and find a way that we can come to peace with other people's behavior. Yeah, sure it is upsetting. People do such terrible things. Do we just want to write them off as stupid? Or do we want to take the time to try, really try and imagine a situation that could be compelling that behavior. Choice is overrated. We need to grapple with determinism, at least on the level of empathy. Try to feel for these people that have done these things you don't like. Really try to imagine their situations. It is so hard to really do. But try to empathize with everyone. Don't just explain their behavior away with stupidity or ignorance. Try to feel for a life that is so radically different that it compels someone to do it.

How creative is your empathy? How far are you willing to take it? How far can your mind go outside of itself? How potent is your imagination? What kinds of things can you forgive? What kinds of things can you understand? What kind of pain are you incapable of empathizing with?

I have really been on this message for a few years now. That empathy requires creativity, and that we need to try and forgive everyone for everything. One major reason is that I want to forgive myself.

I have done things that I regret. Said mean things or done hurtful things. And yeah, I can write it off on stupidity, or something like that. But I think that is inadequate. I want to understand myself and why I did what I did. Let me give a mundane example. I was out with a friend, we were talking about how we slept in. He said that it would be easy for him at 6pm to say "Oh man why did I sleep in I should have gotten up and done other stuff." But the bottom line is that during that moment in bed he was tired, he didn't have anything to do, and he needed the sleep. Basically, it is easy to project views from the present moment onto your past self. It is so easy to think, OH WHY DIDN'T I JUST DO THAT! Well the bottom line is that you were in a totally different frame of mind. And I think time is better spent trying to understand that frame of mind that you had at the time. It is better to empathize with past actions than to judge them. Because if you take the time, if you exert the creative energy, turns out your past actions may be more intelligible than you think. Even if they were mistakes, even if they were painful, try to understand.

Interestingly, I think all of this is about historical thinking. It is about not letting present views interfere with your ability to understand past thought and action. I think that empathy is historical thinking. Collingwood said all knowledge of mind is historical. We need to learn to think historically so we can be more empathic people. We need to learn to think creatively about empathy. We need to learn to inhibit our perspective so we can more readily take on the perspectives of others. We need to forgive ourselves. We need to forgive others. We need to learn to be creative with our sense of empathy so that we can do this.

Lastly, I want to briefly explore some ways that I think we are discouraged from empathizing.

Tacit Theory and Mental Models as Impediments to Creativity

I think the main thing getting in the way of empathy is the plethora of 'shoulds' that we encounter in society. On television, in advertising, in books, in movies, in our daily lives, we are so often told how things should be. We see so many representations of social life that it is so easy to internalize those messages. I used to find myself paralyzed by the idea that my interactions wouldn't fit in with the norm, the shoulds, the scripts. These scripts are such bs though. Life never goes like movies, never goes like tv shows or books. Life is so much more dynamic than that. But to me it seems like these cultural representations that they come to substitute for our actual experience.

Oscar Wilde said that art doesn't imitate life, but that life imitates art. I think he meant that representation tends to structure our lives. Once we see something represented in a certain way it becomes difficult to shake it, it becomes a part of the way we think about life. I think in our culture we are saturated with representations of how life 'should' or can be. I think it can be hard to escape these representations and that people just sort of run these scripts, they run these theories, they run these models. Their minds revolve around these already worn paths, these already worn neural circuits. We need new scripts. We need new models.

Basically, I identify all this with some technical terms from philosophy of mind and the neurosciences. Philosophy of mind has a school called theory-theory, where philosophers believe that we understand people by using unconscious mental theories, we infer from these tacit theories. I believe that this does happen, but I believe our society has created rigid theories about bodies and races and interactions. I think people rely on these tacit theories too much and that we lose our creativity. We no longer have creative conversations because we just run the scripts. Well, there are tons of creative conversations going on out there, don't get me wrong. I just think we run the risk of being overrun by these tacit theories that we get from society. Another term is mental models. Neuroscientists believe that the brain models the world and uses these models to predict things and people. Same thing, we have models that are too rigid and we have to overcome them to be creative. We need to shake this idea that the world is the way we are told. The media has given us a distorted model, and distorted theories.

Anyways, I just think that creativity can be hard because we are saturated with representations of 'shoulds'. We don't explore new ways of thinking because we are so overrun with other ways of thinking. These scripts cant work in the real world.

The world of human affairs has to be handled by creative decision making. We need to be creative with language, creative with our conversations, with our jobs, with our writing, and most importantly with empathy. We need to look out for oversimplified representations of social interactions that encourage us to think reductively and uncreatively about life and people.

Perhaps this post is ranty. But I think creativity is all pervasive, and I think we need to recognize how our creativity is being stifled by social representations, and we need to take control and be more creative, all the time.

I also think that identity and creativity should have a close relationship. But I didn't think of that until later and don't want to add to this.

Society's Implicit War: Foucault's "Discipline & Punish" and Military History - Chapter V

Part III - The Pragmatics: Being A Guerilla of Power/Knowledge

So this is a very strange point to be at in this series of essays. In 114 pages I have established a few things (i.e. rough summary of chapters): 1. That social order rests on violence, or at least its implicit threat. 2. That in the modern age this implicit war is waged primarily through elaborate forms of knowledge and representation. 3. That these forms of knowledge penetrate people's minds by controlling the way that individuals are able to simulate other people's thoughts. 4. That this can be described as a transition from low-level to high-level simulational mindreading in which people are encouraged to think more abstractly about other people, and that we may even be bypassing simulations in favor of pure theory-theory mindreading. My discussion of these things is far more nuanced than this, but that is the rough flow up to this point.

Having established this war of simulational mindreading, I now want to explore some practical ways that we may be able to exert some control over our minds. I have this divided into two chapters. Chapter five is called "Politics as the Continuation of War by Other Means and the 'Politics of Ourselves'". The purpose of this chapter is to establish generally how it is that all of this business about war has to do with me and the way I live my life. In chapter 5 I simply want to establish that all of this should be thought of as very personal. I suppose this sounds a bit like the feminist idea that 'the personal is political'. Chapter 6, called 'Intellectual Insurrection: Waging Mental War', will then propose much more practical and specific ways that we can hope to do battle within our own minds. So chapter 6 is much more about how to actually bring about these personal changes through this historical and philosophical work that Foucault describes.

Here is a table of contents for chapter 5.

5. Politics as the Continuation of War by Other Means and the 'Politics of Ourselves'

a. Disciplinary Society's Power/Knowledge and our Identity

b. Power/Knowledge as Creating Our Mental Models and Tacit Theories

c. Ethics and War: Practices of the Self as a Personal War

Politics as the Continuation of War by Other Means and the 'Politics of Ourselves'

In this section I am going to try and make all of this a bit more personal. In particular, I want to explore three things. First, I want to explain how disciplinary society's forms of knowledge/power serve as the basis for our identity, and thus govern our basic conceptions of ourselves. Second, I want to explore how it is that these socially constituted identities probably take the form of mental models or tacit theories of reality, thus specifying this as the level at which our identity really functions. Third, I want to explain how all of this comes back to the level of 'practices of the self'. This third part of chapter 5 is particularly important because it brings Foucault's ethical work into the picture. In a volume called 'The Politics of Truth', Foucault introduces the idea of 'The Politics of Ourselves'. This is an idea that he implicitly explores in Volume II of the History of Sexuality, The Use of Pleasure. His main concern in TUOP is to explore how individuals use forms of power/knowledge to constitute themselves as ethical subjects. He wants to understand how it is that society forces us to relate to ourselves. By bringing Foucault's ethical period into the picture I can establish a clear connection between the idea of a social war (i.e. politics as the continuation of war by other means), and the politics of ourselves (i.e. a war that we wage with our own thoughts and behavior). That is the point of part III, of these last two chapters: To make it so that we can conceptualize ourselves as waging a personal war against society's forms of power/knowledge. Foucault actually describes this in terms of an insurrection, in terms of guerilla warfare. So that is what I want to do. I want to explain how we can wage a guerilla war of power/knowledge in our own minds and relationships. Here I go.

a. Disciplinary Society's Power/Knowledge and our Identity

So here first I want to make this personal by explaining how our identities are actually constituted by the forms of power/knowledge that we encounter in our society. Our identities are so closely related to social knowledge due to the density and richness of social knowledge. Our society has defined so much about people, already articulated so much about people, that our lives and identities naturally revolve around these terms. It doesn't even matter if these terms are historically contingent or completely inadequate, it still serves as the knowledge that we have to ground ourselves in something like identity. As Foucault says, in disciplinary society "all offences must be defined; they must be classified and collected into species from which none of them can escape. A code is therefore necessary and this code must be sufficiently precise for each type of offence to be clearly present in it" (98). While here Foucault is speaking of the codification of penal practices, this applies to all other facets of life, and he explores this in all of his other books. Our society has codified so much knowledge that we cannot escape it. These codes, these articulated bodies of knowledge, these serve as the basis for our sense of self and thus our identity. So we have to admit that our identities are a direct result of social, historical, and institutional processes. Again, Foucault believes identity comes from"the constitution of the individual as a describable, analysable object, not in order to reduce him to 'specific' features, as did the naturalists in relation to living beings, but in order to maintain him in his individual features, in his particular evolution, in his own aptitudes or abilities, under the gaze of permanent corpus of knowledge; and secondly, the constitution of a comparative system that made possible the measurement of overall phenomena, the description of groups, the characterization of collective facts, the calculation of the gaps between individuals, their distribution in a given 'population'" (190). Our elaborate, modern forms of identity are not possible until a large body of articulated knowledge has been produced.

It is this rise in terms for describing people that leads to our modern forms of identity. Just think of all the complex ways that we can now identify ourselves. We can be gay, straight, queer, bi, metrosexual, gender-queer. Think of all the subsets within these categories, butch lesbians, lipstick lesbians, bull dykes. People really identify as these things, and I doubt it is in their essential nature to be these things. In any case, I think it has much more to do with the rise of elaborate forms of knowledge that allow people to be described in this way at all. It is a chicken/egg question of sorts, and I am inclined to say that these identities were first articulated, and then they were constituted by individuals who began to identify this way. Lip stick lesbianism did not just exist in the shadows waiting to be discovered. It did not exist until it was articulated. This Foucault quotation demonstrates this point nicely. These forms of knowledge "seem to extend to the general forms defined by law to the infinitesimal level of individual lives; or they appear as methods of training that enable individuals to become integrated into these general demands. They seem to constitute the same type of law on a different scale, thereby making it more meticulous and more indulgent" (222). We are not the words that we have come to label ourselves with. The labels that we place on ourselves, and thus our sense of self, our identity, is the result of historical processes. We cannot ascribe to an identity without ascribing to some of society's forms of power/knowledge. Perhaps that is fine, perhaps we find these socially produced terms adequate, but they are still a result of the social construction of knowledge.

In short, our identities are inseparable from the implicit war that is being waged by society's forms of power/knowledge. Our identity is thus a battle ground. We have to care about the way we think of ourselves. Is identity always good? Does it restrict us? If you feel choked by your identity, constrained by labels, then battle them, reject them, call them our for being historically and socially constructed terms. Do not regard identity as final, regard it as a point of contest. Regard it as a battleground.

Now I just want to bring a bit more technical terminology into this discussion of identity and power/knowledge.

b. Power/Knowledge as Creating Our Mental Models and Tacit Theories

Yesterday (8/17), I published a blog post on mental models and tacit theories. I believe that these two concepts, which come from cognitive neuroscience and philosophy of mind respectively, can help me get beyond the language of a priori thought. I believe that these two terms can help me explain how it is that socially constructed forms of power/knowledge would effect our minds at an unconscious level.

The basic idea with both mental models and tacit theories is that there is an unconscious structure to our thoughts. We are only able to think certain things, and certain forms of thought simply are not allowed because our brain has a certain model or tacit theory of the world. We have underlying sets of assumptions that shape our thoughts and actions. Take for example the idea of the physical world. We cannot reasonably jumping off of a 50 story building and living. We can fantasize about it, but we could never believe that we would simply land on the ground. Our brain has a certain model of how our bodies engage with the physical world. We have an unconscious knowledge that gravity exists and that our bodies would die falling from that height.

Apart from those models of the physical world, our brain also has intuitive models of the social world. We have a basic set of assumptions about the social world. We assume that everyone is either a man or a woman, that people are either children, teenagers, young adults, adults, or elderly people. Our mind intuitively classifies people in this way. We even intuitively classify ourselves in this way. Among our peers we see people who might be hipsters, wanksters, gangsters, goth kids, and so on. We have all these basic models of genders, ages, and personality types.

So above when I talked about how power/knowledge forms our identities, and now that I am saying that power/knowledge creates our mental models, the conclusion is that our identities are constituted by these mental models. That is all I want to say here. That the real thing going on is that our unconscious models of the world are what is being changed by power/knowledge. We are being changed so that we unconsciously perceive the world in certain terms.

Power/knowledge, therefore, constitutes our own identities and our perceptions of others by modifying our unconscious models and tacit theories of reality. As I said, I just believe that the language of tacit theories, and especially the language of mental modeling, is very useful here, and helps me specify more clearly the level at which we have to try and change ourselves. We have to try and change our unconscious models of reality.

c. Practices of the Self and Foucault's Ethical War

Now I want to try and explain how Foucault's notion of practices of the self plays into all of this. I find this idea very compelling. Foucault was not speaking in these terms while he was writing Discipline & Punish. He only started thinking in these terms very late in his life, during the 80s. In The Use of Pleasure he explicitly focused on how it is that power/knowledge enables individuals to work on themselves. He essentially said that he focused too much on dominance and disciplinary power. It isn't so much about how social institutions dominate people, society does not force identity on people. More so, it provides people with ways of working on themselves. The transformation brought about by disciplinary institutions have to be enacted on a subjective level. It is up to individuals to transform themselves. There can be no disciplinary power without a practice of the self. People cannot be forced into being certain ways by power/knowledge unless there is an ethical component, unless people transform themselves. So in D&P Foucault says: "The wages of penal labour do not reward production; they function as a motive and measure of individual transformation" (243), he is describing this way that power/knowledge transforms people. But he pulled back and claimed that practices of the self were more important. What is really important is how people relate to themselves, how they transform themselves.

This relationship to the self is what Foucault means when he talks about ethics. It is this addition of ethics that is so important in Foucault's work, and allows the pragmatics of his project to be specified that much more clearly. No longer are his histories simply about exposing the limitations of our thought. With the addition of ethics his histories can become a way for us to transform ourselves, to find new ways of relating to ourselves, and therefore find new ways of relating to others (power) and new ways of relating to things (knowledge). The level of ethics, therefore, is the level at which we must wage our own implicit war. We can only become a guerilla of power/knowledge by attempting ethical transformation within society's systems of power/knowledge/ethics. We no longer have to be passive subjects that are produced by power/knowledge, we can become active agents that are able to transform ourselves and thus overcome society's forms of power/knowledge that are forming our identities and our sense of others and the world.

In short,

once Foucault specified ethics as the point of transformation,

we can begin to wage an intellectual insurrection against the power/knowledge of the institutions, only with the addition of the /ethics can we become a guerilla of power/knowledge.

In the last chapter I'll specify how Foucault's work is meant to enable us to become guerillas of power/knowledge.

Mindfulness as a Mental Model of the World: Getting Beyond the Language of 'A Priori' Thought

For a while, since about June 13th when I published my essay "The Everyday A Priori Imagination", I have been hung up on this notion of a priori thought. This is Collingwood's term and I think that it makes sense. Generally it just means that our thought often presents itself to us as necessary, that it logically unfolds from itself, that it is produced by deeper structures in the mind than we are aware. Our thought often unfolds a priori. But as soon as I wrote that essay I told a friend that I needed a way to escape this language of a priori thought. It is inadequate. It doesn't explain it in simple enough terms. The phrase a priori is a bit too philosophical, a bit too dense, a bit too esoteric. I think I even had a dream where my sister poked fun at the inaccessibility of a phrase like a priori imagination. I need to get beyond this language of a priori thought.

Recently I have been reading about two concepts that have been of major use to me. They have helped me explore ways of describing thought that get at this same issue of the unconscious structure of our thought, but they are much more accessible I think. These two ideas are 1. the idea of mental models created by the brain, and 2. the idea of tacit psychological theory. Both of these concepts are meant to explain how our minds are able to act intuitively in a complex world. The idea of mental models I encountered originally with Guy Claxton, and I just finished a book by Chris Frith that helped me understand this stuff more. The idea of tacit theory I actually wrote an essay about on August first. This idea comes from a philosophy of mind known as theory-theory. These philosophers generally believe that people understand each others minds primarily by making unconscious theoretical inferences about one another.

Both of these things help me understand what it means to have a priori thought. It means that our mind had unconscious models or theories that structure our intuitive thought. A model is essentially a theory of sorts. Scientists build theoretical models of things and try to predict, and Frith and others think our brain does the same thing. So mental modeling and tacit theory are very similar things, and they are essentially the same thing as the a priori imagination.

The most difficult thing, however, and the issue I really want to handle here, is the notion of mindfulness. How are we to be mindful, how are we to pay attention, if our thought is dominated by models. Another friend of mine challenged me to think that we need to transcend models rather than build them. We need to get beyond this ridiculous and inadequate network of concepts that govern our daily thinking about the world. Mindfulness, he proposed, is the way to transcend models. But is it possible that mindfulness, too, is a model of the world? A model, however, in which we have an understanding of the inadequacy of concepts and thus don't rely on them and can pay attention in different ways. Could we create a model of the world that was aware of the historical construction of our concepts, of the inadequate nature of our concepts. Could mindfulness be a flexible and open mental model of reality? In short, I think that these notions of mental modeling and tacit theorizing are compatible with a mindfulness. It just means that mindfulness has to be a sort of mental model in itself. I'll try to explore these ideas more in depth now. Starting with the notion of a priori thought, then moving to tacit theory and mental models.

A Priori Thought as Tacit Theorizing and Mental Modeling

So I guess I have decided that I want this essay to be more reflective than anything else. I don't feel like going into heavy citations or really working hard. My daily life is too occupied by job hunting for me to really make this super heavy. I basically feel like I'm trying to articulate things for myself that I already am now comfortable with in my mind.

In this section I just want to rehash the idea of a priori thought and explain how it can be a form of tacit theorizing or a mental model of sorts.

Collingwood uses the term the a 'priori imagination'. He is trying to explain how historians, and people in general, are able to quickly and intuitively explain other people's behaviors. He compares it to Kant's discussion of the perceptual imagination (though I haven't read much Kant). But the idea is that we don't need to see the bottom of a table to know that it is there, and our mind always know that it is there. I don't need to see the part of the wall that is being blocked by my computer screen, I just know that it is there. My a priori imagination fills in these gaps in evidence and lets me simply know that what I cannot see is indeed there.

Collingwood's work on a priori thought got me thinking hard about how the mind does this. How does the mind create a totalized view of the world even though we are lacking so much evidence? How do I attribute complex mental states to people even though I have so little information about them? How do our minds naturally try to predict other people's behavior without having real confirmable evidence of their actions?

In short, the problem that I was grappling with while writing about a priori thought was that we have a complete and total view of the world (whether it is minds, objects, or anything else), even though we are lacking so much evidence. It is this tendency to explain and predict other people's behavior that I was trying to explore. The mind must be filling in these gaps somehow, it must be facilitating our perception so that we can create a complete picture from limited evidence. So the notion of the a priori imagination was my first foray into trying to understand this unconscious structure of thought, especially thought about other minds.

But since then my reading has led me to think that these ideas of tacit theory and mental modeling would be better ways to describe this unconscious structuring of thought. Both of them are more contemporary as well. These ideas are more grounded in contemporary literature.

So tacit theory, this is basically an idea that comes from philosophy of mind. There is a school in philosophy of mind called 'theory-theory'. The main claim being that people attribute mental states to other people by using naive/tacit psychological theories. Meaning that we have some sort of unconscious store of information about how people think, how they act, how they move, etc., and that we use this unconscious theory to understand other people. This is an interesting way of conceptualizing the unconscious structures of thought. It communicates the same idea: that we have an unconscious store of information that structures our thoughts and allows us to infer totalized perceptions despite the inadequate evidence of the world. But the notion of tacit theory is also obviously inadequate in some ways. For one thing, a theory is an articulated body of propositions, it is discursive. A theory has to be language based. The unconscious structure of our thoughts, however, is clearly not articulable. Our mind uses it ineffably, without reference to words. It structures our thoughts in a way that does not require articulation. Alvin Goldman makes this observation and I can't disagree with him. The notion of tacit theory is lacking a bit of something because of this disparity between the articulable nature of theory, and the ineffable nature of our unconscious perceptions.

This is where I think the notion of mental modeling may be a bit more adequate than the idea of tacit theory. For one thing, there is a fair amount of similarity between the notion of a theory and that of a model. Scientists create theoretical models, there is something similar between these ideas. But the idea of a model differs from a theory in that a model does not need to be linguistic, it doesn't need to use words. A computer program could model a storm without actually using any types of words about that storm. But it accomplishes the same task, it still creates a representation that is supposed to aid in explanation and prediction.

Chris Frith writes quite a lot about how our brains model the outside world in order to function better. He believes that our brains model the outside world, our own bodies, and other minds in order to 'get ahead' as he says. It helps if we can predict ourselves and others, and the brain seems to do this. He believes that understanding in a conversation is all about making it so that two people have the same model of thought in their minds.

So I find this idea of mental models to be the most adequate way of getting beyond the language of a priori thought. It helps me understand that there is an unconscious structure to our thoughts, that our brain runs on models of the outside world and uses those to make inferences and predictions about things and people. It makes sense, the brain couldn't engage with the world unless it was actively building our perception of the world, as it does with modeling. But what if these models get in the way of accurate perception?

Mindfulness and Transcending Models of Reality?

I once expressed this idea of mental modeling to my friend and he had a real challenging question for me. He said to me that what if we get hung up on these models? What if they prevent us from perceiving reality accurately? I started reflecting and I realized this was a very good point. I started thinking about Foucault's work in relation to mental models of people. I started thinking: What if our society is saturated with ideas about how people and things supposedly are that we are held back from really paying attention? What if we are so hung up on the notions of gay and straight, black and white, right and wrong, that we can't even observe reality as it really is? In short, how are we to be mindful if we are relying on mental models? How are we to really pay attention to our experience when all of our perception is supposedly functioning on preformed models of reality?

My friend wanted to get beyond these models entirely, find a way of viewing the world that didn't rely on these inadequate preformed concepts. I'll actually quote this e-mail where he said this to me: "So to summarize, it's the cure that interests me. Would not the antidote to the social imaginary constructed by the state (to all forms of coercive power) be a form of perception or awareness that's able to see things as they really are, without all the rickety scaffolding of concepts and schemes? It would be rooted in the present moment and would be neither a prisoner of discursive thought nor afraid to engage it. If I'm not mistaken, this is what Buddhism generally refers to a 'mindfulness.'" Quite insightful. I found this very compelling at the time, and it frankly pushed me away from the notion of mental modeling for a little because I didn't know how to explain mindfulness in relation to it. I have a hunch that we will always slip into unreflective, inattentive ways of thinking and perceiving, so we have to ultimately try to modify our models of the world, and make sure that we can rely on our models.

Now I think that I can make these ideas compatible. I think I can make it so that mindfulness is compatible with the fact that our mind models reality in order to predict it.

Mindfulness as a Mental Model of the World

I think that I can reconcile mindfulness and mental modeling by claiming that mindfulness must itself be facilitated by a mental model of the world. If we were to spend enough time reflecting on our preformed concepts, on the inadequate concepts that pervade our daily perception, we might be able to reduce how much they structure our thought. By working intellectually would could attack our mental models that we have required through our pre-reflective years. Because obviously by the time we become conscious and thoughtful we have already internalized quite a number of inadequate models of the world: we may believe that gender is a rigid binary, that the races are inherently different, that class reflects something about people's intelligence, so on. Our world is just saturated with these inadequate models.

So the first step to mindfulness would be this exposure of our already internalized models. This is what Foucault can help us with quite clearly. I even wrote about this on 6/13. I wrote that Foucault was exposing the contents of our a priori imagination, but I would now say that Foucault is exposing our internalized models of reality. He is showing us that our conception of the world is not perfect, but is rather shaped by historical circumstances that have provided us with specific models of reality. This would be the first step to escaping the models that we are originally stuck with when we enter the world.

Once we have attacked those original models, are we left with no models at all? Are we left with a blank sort of mindfulness? Can we now completely transcend mental models and experience the world as it is? Unlikely

Here I am saying, rather, that this sort of Foucauldian mindfulness is in itself another mental model of the world. It is still permeating our unconscious mind and informing our pre-reflective perceptions. It is simply now our mental model of the world is no longer rigid, but is attentive to the inadequacy of the commonly circulated social conceptions. Just because we have managed to delegitimated the everyday social perceptions does not mean that we are able to transcend mental modeling of reality. It just means that our mental model of the world is now expanded enough, porous enough, loose enough, that we can pay attention to the world without relying on those everyday concepts.

Mindfulness must be a mental model in its own right. It is simply a mental model that rejects standard social conceptions and instead is open to less articulable and more creative approaches to the social world. But it is still a model, it can't not be a model. The brain has to model. It is hard for me to argue with Frith, obviously (I'm not a neuroscientist).

Our mind still has to have models, and I see no reason why mindfulness couldn't be a form of mental modeling. And as I've said, it is simply a model that is more open, more flexible, and more aware of the social construction of our forms of thought.

My aunt talked to me about 'choosing between fictions' in the social world. Unfortunately, society provides us with fictions without telling us they are fictions. These are the mental models that Foucault attacks. But I believe that mindfulness, too, must be a fiction. Albeit a less rigid, a barer, a less articulable, and more attentive fiction. It is still a fiction, still a mental model.

Conclusions

This is a great thing to have written. It helps me so much. It helps me get beyond the language of a priori thought, and it helps me reconcile mindfulness with the brains need to model reality. More importantly, I think this will be of huge help to me in writing the last two essays in my 'Society's Implicit War' series. Which I still plan on finishing. I just don't have the time right now. I think this will be a huge step. A huge help in talking about how Foucault intends us to apply his work to our own lives and minds. It will be a huge help in explaining how Foucault's work is meant to enable a sort of mindfulness. Over and out, son.

Mental Simulation and Tacit Psychological Theory: Understanding Intuitive Mindreading and Identifying Its Unconscious Structures

In my post on the a priori imagination, of 6/13, I really grappled with simulation theory of mind, and how it interacts with other forms of thought. In particular, I think I did a good job of addressing the role that tacit mental theory may play in processes of simulational mindreading (or any mindreading process). In this essay I want to give a closer look at this notion of tacit theory as it relates to mindreading and the education of mindreading abilities. Not an extended look, more so just a nuanced look. First I want to talk about my first inklings of this idea of tacit theory, which I was calling innate, or intuitive theory (I love blending memoir/reflection into this blog so that is section 1). Then I'll talk about how Alvin Goldman was the first author to confirm for me that tacit theory may indeed be a real thing, but in any case that other people are talking as if it is a real thing. Then I'll discuss how Goldman believes tacit theory plays into mindreading, i.e. he believes it either initiates or aids in processes of simulation. Then I'm going to explore the possibility that tacit theory may simply be able to bypass simulation, therefore meaning that, at certain moments, theory-theory mindreading may actually exist. Lastly I'll discuss how tacit theory may be the level at which mindreading can be educated, or, at the very least, how it may play a role in the cultivation of mindreading abilities.

Should be an interesting post for me to write. Should be fruitful in some ways. At the very least I am starting to think I should get into the literature on theory-theory more.

Clausewitz and My Musings on Intuitive Theory
So when I learned about Carl von Clausewitz's work I was compelled to conceptualize the idea of an intuitive or innate mental theory. I later learned about the notion of tacit theory, and my speculations were thus confirmed. But the notion of a tacit theory was essentially a logical conclusion of the things that I had learned about Clausewitz, and what I suspected about the how of empathy.

Anyways, Clausewitz was the first time that I learned about simulational thinking. Clausewitz believed that historical case study should be used to reenact (ie simulate) the thoughts that people had in the past. In particular, Clausewitz believed that reenacting the thoughts of successful commanders-in-chief could be a way to educate the mind to handle the difficulties of high-command. Most importantly, Clausewitz believed that theory was an essential element in the successful reenactment of past decision making experiences. In other words, in order to properly simulate a person's thoughts you need a body of theory that can help you fill in gaps in evidence. Evidence of thought processes, and especially past thought processes, is never complete, and surmise is always necessary.

For Clausewitz, therefore, a set of propositions (ie normative theory) is essential to successful simulational mindreading. Again, I learned about Clausewitz before I learned about simulation theory of mind, mirror neurons, or theory-theory, so it was new to me. So Clausewitz was my first exposure to a simulation theory of mind, and he stressed that theory must be used in order to achieve a successful mindreading.

So, once I learned about Clausewitz, I was trying to apply these notions of reenactment to everyday perception and mindreading. In particular, I was curious about if empathy was a process of reenactment or simulation. The mirror neuron system confirms that this is the case, but I was unaware of this at the time. Anyways, in my post of 4/30 I wrote about my concept of instantaneous emotional reenactment. This was a sloppy phrase that I threw together in order to understand how empathy could happen instantly, naturally, and could be a form of simulation. Ie, when I empathize with someone I feel what they feel for myself, but it happens lightning fast. How does that happen?

Since Clausewitz spawned this notion of instantaneous emotional reenactment, and Clausewitz's central concern is the role of theory in mental reenactment, I immediately had questions about what kind of theory could be allowing me to engage in these everyday reenactments. If my mind naturally reenacts/simulates other people's thoughts, then how does my mind do it without reference to a theory? How can my mind just do it? Does it possess something like a innate or intuitive theory?

In concluding this section, once Clausewitz claimed that mental simulation must be aided by a body of theory, and once I connected this notion of reenactment to my everyday perception, I was immediately compelled to ask what kind of theory my mind was using to engage in this everyday intuitive reenactments. In short, Clausewitz forced me to think of my everyday thoughts in terms of reenactment/simulation, and his emphasis on theory forced me to conceptualize a sloppy and inarticulate idea of an innate or intuitive theory.

Later, I learned about Alvin Goldman's work, and the existence of the theory-theory of mind. These philosophers very often refer to tacit or naive psychological theory. So my speculations about an innate or intuitive theory were essentially confirmed by the contemporary literature on philosophy of mind. This is where I want to go next. I'll discuss Goldman's assessment of the notion of tacit theory in general. First as it relates to theory-theory, and second how it relates to simulation theory. From their I'll discuss where my thoughts on tacit theory and simulation are these days, in that tacit theory can either structure or initiate a simulation process (this is awfully Goldman, but I forget what he says exactly). Then I'll discuss the possibility of mindreading that is accomplished solely by tacit theory. And finally, I'll talk about my ideas on how to modify tacit theory so as to educate our unconscious mindreading abilities.

Goldman on the Role of Tacit Theory in Theory-Theory
So Alvin Goldman's book Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading is undoubtedly one of the most important books I have read in the last six months. Goldman is arguing that people understand other people's mental states (i.e. mindread) by internally simulating other people's thoughts in their own mind. In other words, we understand other people by simulating their thoughts for ourselves, it is like an extended and more complex form of empathy. More importantly, Goldman believes that simulation theory can answer all the central questions of philosophy of mind, and can accommodate the arguments of theory-theorists and modularity theorists (theory-theory and modularity theory being the other two major schools of thought in philosophy of mind). So now I basically want to give a run down of theory-theory, and then I want to explain how the claims of theory-theory can be incorporated into a comprehensive simulation theory of mind. Ultimately, Goldman argues for a simulation-theory hybrid. So the notion of tacit theory is actually essential to Goldman's argument.

So, what precisely is theory-theory? Well, theory-theorists generally claim that mindreading is accomplished by the use of naive/tacit psychological theories. So that whenever an individual needs to determine the mental state of another, they can draw on these tacit psychological theories to ascribe mental states to others. This set of tacit psychological theories allows us to draw inferences about how others behave. In essence, theory-theorists maintain that every person is naturally a sort of 'folk psychologist'. They believe that we simply acquire these tacit theories over the course of our lives, and that we unconsciously rely on them to ascribe mental states to others. I am a skeptical that something like a folk psychological theory could account for all mindreading processes that people engage in.

In any case, whether or not it can account for all of mindreading, the notion of tacit theory is still worthwhile. It is useful when trying to talk about how it is that people make unconscious inferences about other people, or why we assume certain things about other people or other situations. Our experiences almost certainly provide us with a naive understanding of how the world functions and how other people think, and I think that the term tacit theory is useful when trying to talk about these unconscious, yet seemingly structured, thought processes. Whether the term 'theory' is really appropriate or not is something I will reserve for a later date. That isn't my purpose here, and frankly I don't have the intellectual chops to get beyond the language of theory-theory right now.

But in any case, I can say right now that the term 'theory' is inadequate because what we are trying to conceptualize is not discursive, it is not language, it doesn't consist of a set of propositions, and is therefore not a theory as we know it. It is rather an unconscious understanding that guides our thoughts and actions. The term theory is useful because our unconscious understandings seem to comprise certain things, and seem to consist of definite preferences, tendencies, and inclinations. I suppose, then, that the term theory is simply meant to describe the structured nature of unconscious thought. It seems to happen consistent to certain rules, as a theory does, or as theory specifies. So the word theory in tacit 'theory' is just meant to describe the unconscious structure that underlies our intuitive mindreading.

Now that I have sloppily handled Goldman's description of theory-theory in general, I would like to discuss how theory-theory may play a role in simulational mindreading. In particular, I will discuss how tacit theory may 1. provide a structure of framework for simulation, and 2. initiate simulation processes.

Tacit Theory as Structuring or Initiating Simulation
Now, as I said above, I can think of two ways that tacit theory would enter the process of simulational mindreading. I believe that Goldman also frames the relationship between tacit theory and simulation in a similar light, but I need to reread it to be sure. So anyways, I'll handle this without much explicit reference to Goldman. First I'm going to talk about how tacit theory may provide a structure by which simulations would happen. Second I'm going to talk about how tacit theory may be involved in initiating simulation processes. The former point I am more comfortable with, so I regard it as more important. The latter is something I know Goldman talks about, but that I don't have a grasp on at this point.

So, how would tacit theory provide a structure for simulations? Well, I think that tacit theory would let us delimit the possible factors involved in a simulation. In order to properly simulate another person's thoughts we would need to decide what criteria would be relevant in that particular simulation. Simulating the thoughts of a child, for example, would require us to take only a limited number of things into consideration. We would have to shrink our world view to properly simulate their thoughts. If these simulations happen on an unconscious level, however, we would need to be able to intuitively delimit our views. I bet that tacit theory is the way that we would be able to automatically and intuitively consider only a few things in a given simulation. Our experience with children (and remember experience is what builds tacit theory) tells us that children only care about certain things. So simulation would thus structure the boundaries of any given simulation.

Lets take the example of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Each of these social categories are so firmly ingrained in our minds that we automatically assume that certain people from these groups think in certain ways and not others. So when we see someone from a specific category our mind is already set with a certain universe of thought in which the simulation can take place. Tacit theory would set the space, set the possible simulations, that could apply to someone of one of these perceived groups. When we see a person who is female, but they are dressed in a way that purposefully defies gender norms, we would automatically have a base set of assumptions about how they thought about themselves, others, and the world. That set of assumptions is a tacit theory that gives a structure to our possible simulations. This applies with race, class, and sexuality, like I said.

I think this makes sense, but I don't think I am articulating it as clearly as I would like to. It is a challenge for me right now to explain how tacit theory structures simulation. But I think it is the case. We have naive/tacit understandings of all kinds of groups of people, and then we would apply those tacit generalizations to help us delimit the number of circumstances that we would have to consider in any given simulation. Booya, this definitely makes sense. I'll have to do some ruminating on the language though.

Now, how would tacit theory also initiate simulational mindreading? Well, I suppose the answer is somewhat similar to what I proposed for how it structures: tacit theory would allow us to unconsciously understand in which instances we need to initiate a given simulation process. Frankly, I don't really want to write this section on the initiation. But I know Goldman claims that this is one of the functions of tacit theory. I will revisit his work at sometime. So, whatever. For now I am essentially just restating what I said above. That tacit theory may be involved in initiating simulation processes by letting us understand when and what type of simulation is required.

Next I want to explore the possibility that tacit theory may override simulation, and would thus become a form of mindreading in its own right.

Tacit Theory Without Simulation: Pure Theory-Theory Mindreading?
So, theory-theorists claim that tact psychological theories may actually constitute its own form of mindreading. I still believe that simulation is the most fundamental, the most basic form of mindreading that humans possess. But what if there were instances in which no simulation were to take place, and theory would be the only means of mindreading?

Well, in my post of 6/13 I actually made what I thought was an interesting argument about the role of the imagination and simulation in our depersonalized culture. I claimed that our culture was depersonalized by technology and an over-abundance of knowledge, and that this led us to make egocentric and simplified simulations of other people. In particular, I used the examples of meeting new people, driving, and online so cial network, a brief quotation from that essay: 'To demonstrate the depersonalized nature of our experiences I used the example of fresh social interaction (with its over reliance on preformed concepts about people), the example of driving (with its tendency to attribute complex mental states with extremely limited evidence), and the example of facebook and text messaging (with their reliance on self-presentation and text based understanding)'. So, in short, our culture forces us to take certain perspectives on other people. In particular, I think that we have very complex and overbearing tacit theories that give us rigid ways of thinking of other people.

In that post I was thinking mainly in terms of how imagination and simulation were effected by the depersonalized nature of our culture and what that means for our tacit theories. Right now, however, I am inclined to think that our exposure to depersonalization, and the resulting tacit theories, may cause us to completely bypass simulational processes. I don't know if this is really the case, but it seems like it might be. When we make a snap judgment about a person while driving, or based on their race or gender, or on their class, does that really require a simulation? Or could tacit theory simply override a simulation process and provide us with a conclusion about the mental state of another person.

It certainly seems like this might be the case. It seems like tacit theory may indeed allow us to bypass simulation entirely. I think this is bad. I think simulation inclines us towards empathy, towards creative compassion. Simulation is how we should think of other minds. But I fear that our depersonalized cultural situation forces us to rely heavily on tacit theories, and thus makes us less empathic.

So in the last section I simply want to state some of my ideas on how we may battle this cultural tendency. How we may take control of our tacit mental theories and start to manipulate the way our minds engage in mindreading, and most importantly, how tacit theory effects how we simulate other minds.

Identifying, Refining, and Constructing Tacit Theories: Educating Unconscious Mindreading
So in this section I want to lay out some very tentative practical suggestions about how tacit theory's role in educating our unconscious mindreading processes. My goal, in this post, and in the bulk of my writing is pedagogical. I want to know how we can teach people to be more sensitive, more empathic, how to mindread better. I want to know how we can teach people to simulate other people's thoughts more sensitively.

At this time I am exploring how tacit theory needs to be dealt with in order to achieve a pedagogy of simulation. Right now I have three things in mind, identifying the nature of our tacit theories, refining our already acquired tacit theories that we have identified, and constructing new tacit theories that we may not have access to at this moment.

So, why do tacit theories need to be 'identified'? Well, seeing as how tacit theories are acquired over the course of our lives by experience, we initially have very little control over them. They simply work their way into our unconscious without our consent or control. The first step, therefore, would be to identify the tacit theories that we have been unconsciously endowed with. I am inclined to use the phrase 'personal archeology' to describe this process. I am invoking Foucault's use of the term archeology, which he uses to communicate the process of explicating the historical construction of society's most deeply held values. Personal archeology is a similar thing: it is identifying the personal history that has given us the set of tacit theories that we have. Plus, I want to pick up in Foucault's foot steps.

Once we have roughly identified our tacit theories we need to begin refining them. We need to whittle them down, figure out what parts of them we do and don't like, and start trying to refine them. We need to start thinking about why we do what we do unconsciously with the hopes of changing what we do. We need to pay attention to our behavior so we can refine the tacit theories that govern it.

Lastly, we need to creatively try to come up with new types of tacit theories. We need to start exploring new ways of thinking with the hopes of turning those ways of thinking into tacit theory. This is the real business here, is changing the unconscious. Modifying the way we think on an unconscious level. This must be creative. And once we come up with something new we have to really reflect on it to ensure that it can make it to that deep deep level of tacit theory.

Concluding
Well, I think this has been a pretty interesting post. I am happy to have handled the issue of tacit theory as its own beast. I have lots more thinking to do about it, but it is a good step, this essay. I think it all echos Foucault in interesting ways. And I also think that it echos with neuroplasticity in ways that I am choosing not to articulate now. I think this is a potent line of thought that will take me places in the future. So much for this for now. Good attempt. Good exploration.

Original notes of 6/20 -
I now have a much clearer understanding of the relationship between simulation and tacit theory. Simulation is the process by which understanding of other mind's is achieved. Tacit theory is the level at which our simulative processes are 1. enacted, and 2. structured. Tacit theory, therefore, is the level we have to aim for if we want to modify our unconscious simulations.