From my brief dip into Whitehead, what I find concordant is that in my model the observer and the object of attraction are not separate, and the seeming gap between them is what we perceive of as Time and then fill up with concepts to explain interrelatedness. I call this the “mental ether” because just as physicists once needed ether in space in order to explain action over distance, mainstream biology and behaviorism needs thoughts to explain an animal’s action over time. I think Whitehead is saying something akin to this.
In my view consciousness is energy that reflects back on itself so that it reliably repeats and nature is so construed with elements that reflect, absorb, conduct and interrupt the “flow” of consciousness, and this is because consciousness is not a self-contained phenomenon. Consciousness is a network device because it takes a network to turn physical energy into information. I believe that what happens in the mind is that a frame of reference is erected as containment vessel so to speak, so that this reflecting back and forth process can be enabled rather than energy being diffused and dissipated into the surroundings. The more advanced the brain, the more arbitrary the containment device, but that not to say that these frames of reference are completely in error since they are akin to dolphin sending out a sonar ping and then getting back a ping or a pong and thereby constructing an acoustical image of their reality. But it’s easy for the highly intellectual mind to be waylaid and I think this is the problem Whitehead is addressing.
I don’t think it’s coincidental that dogs and humans seem particularly prone to epileptic seizures because the higher the emotional capacity of a species, the more they go by emotional sonar and if there isn’t enough emotional grounding in this ping/pong process of consciousness, they can get stuck in an echoing loop that generates an unbearable amount of electro-chemical energy spikes in the central nervous system and the system crashes. Less emotional capacity and the animal stays reliably grounded into its network niche since it doesn’t have to create frames of reference on the fly and in novel circumstances. For animals of lesser capacity if they experience a rate of change that is too high they just go by instinct and this has its own measure of being adaptive. I think this is also why electroshock therapy remains the only viable course of treatment for the most severe cases of depression (which is over-stimulation rather than under-stimulation of the involuntary nervous system). The shocks wipe out these reverberations so that the system can reboot and establish a ground into the little-brain. {Luca Turin also talks of some morbid scent pathologies being a kind of epileptic seizure.}
These containment vessels while necessary, as I mentioned above are also arbitrary to greater or lesser extents because the human intellect tends to become attached to these frames and we end up projecting the ones that work for us onto animals in order to account for their behavior, and in particular to feel safe about emotionally investing in what dogs do.
My hunch is still strong that Whitehead’s Organic Philosophy will provide the cosmological framework you are seeking for your Emotional Energy Theory.
I am revisiting the following link by David Ray Griffin which I recommend for you as well.
http://www.anthonyflood.com/griffinmatterconsciousness00.htm
I am boning up on your writings and process articles and hope to formulate my thinking so as to maybe put my hunch of the relatedness into words.
The key to my hunch is in both cases feelings are of paramount importance.
A footnote in the Griffin essays I linked above there is mention of Charles Birch, an Australian process biologist who wrote a book on _Feelings_.
I will venture to say that this source will surely help KB with developing and grounding his ideas within an existing scientific/philosophical framework
Here is an interview w/ Birch:
http://www.australianbiography.gov.au/subjects/birch/interview1.html
Kevin
I found this 1993 letter to the editor in the NYT…a most excellent piece!
To the Editor:
As a dog trainer and the author of a book about dog training, I would like to take notable exceptions to Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s review of “The Hidden Life of Dogs,” by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (Aug. 1).
That Ms. Thomas finds dogs to be both emotional and mysterious is indeed refreshing. However, while the book’s greatest strength is her impeccable logic, that also proves to be its downfall, since it leads her into the traditional sand traps concerning canine consciousness. She concludes, like all animal behaviorists before her, that the driving force in a dog’s behavior is “image enhancement,” so that it may enjoy status among peers.
This conclusion misses the best answer to her question “What do dogs want?” In my view, they want to hunt, but, given domestication, their prey drive has been reformatted into many varied and obscure manifestations, hidden from the untrained eye. Consider how flexible this prey instinct now is: herding dogs, predators like their ancestors the wolves, are to be found around the world, tending flocks of sheep, guarding what traditionally has been their prey. After all, what is it that keeps Ms. Thomas’s dog Misha on the move long after he’s attained status and sired his brood? Sociobiology notwithstanding, why is status never enough?
To appreciate what a dog’s life is like, one mustn’t try to think like a dog; in fact, one shouldn’t try to think at all. To attempt to think like a dog is to be decidedly human. Mankind’s ability to reduce nature to concepts, while a useful means of conquering it, is quintessentially a human capacity and therefore in the long run self-defeating to the exercise at hand. Dogs are sensual, emotional, arational, amoral and instinctively driven animals. Their conscious selves will always elude man’s attempts to quantify and categorize through our rational standards of conduct.
Furthermore, it is egocentric of our species to presume that all the forms of intelligence that dogs amply show (such as the ability to navigate, communicate and learn) must adhere to or mimic the human capacity to reason. KEVIN BEHAN
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I recall that the editor of NYT Book Review even illustrated it. Since my new book seems to be on track for this fall, be prepared to buckle up our collective NDT seat belts because I get the feeling it’s going to stir things up and hopefully will be reviewed in places like NYT. I wonder if Masson will recuse himself.
Most of the interview seemed about his background but there were some great passages on the idea of everything being about a process rather than particles in relation to each other through linear linkages. I believe that my study of dogs in terms of energy/immediate moment beings is able to say some definitive things about emotion and feelings in terms of a network consciousness that have not yet been said but as far as I can see are consonant with process thought. What I’m saying that’s new is that in my model of emotion as the operating system of a networked consciousness, everything is part of the network’s evolution, from plate tectonics to geopolitics. Nothing about human activity falls outside the scope of a natural process, even the drilling of oil to run computers or the burning of the rain forest or warfare. So while there is no simple formula, it is remarkably simple to say something definitive about evolution. What’s really going on is physical energy is becoming information, i.e. consciousness. Every living being is “designed” so that everything that happens on planet earth, even the influence of the moon, changes the way we FEEL toward other living beings. It’s not coincidental that the more human technology can threaten the environment, the more we demand the US Navy rush to the North pole to rescue a stranded whale, the more joy we feel by wolves reintroduced to Yellowstone. Even inanimate things become part of our consciousness. Note the urge to talk to someone about experiencing a solar eclipse, an earth tremor, or a remarkably large boulder. “Did you see that full moon yesterday?” That’s why it’s so important to understand the true nature of dogs, this can help us become more conscious, i.e. AWARE of the network into which “our” emotion plugs us and to which our feelings attune us. What we feel IS how nature evolves.
Once someone recommended that I read a book entitled “Zen and the Psychology of Transformation,” written by Hubert Benoit. Mr. Benoit was a psychiatrist (or psychologist, not certain) – he wrote the book when he was bedridden for years with illness. It was translated from French, and it is not an easy read (although Kevin I don’t imagine you would have any trouble with it, because reading your works brought that book back to me, and I picked it up again – I never made it through the first time around). Interesting that this book was republished by a Vermont publisher 🙂
Here is a passage that I turned to that really illustrates (to me at least) how there is some basic natural truth that Kevin and others have managed to perceive and have articulated in similar ways (Mr. Benoit speaks from the point of view of humans):
“Emotion represents a short-circuit of man’s vital energy flowing between his instinctive, negative, centre and his intellectual, positive, centre. This short-circuit consists in a disintegration of the energy at a point which one regards as a third centre and which one calls the emotional centre). (After satori this point is no longer a centre similar to the others, situated on the same plane, but the apex of the triangle of his ternary synthesis.) The short-circuit that produces emotion occurs when the intellectual terminal is not insulated. To what does this lack of insulation of the intellectual terminal correspond? To the passivity of the mind in the face of the ultimate problem of man’s state as this problem is manifested in the present moment.”
cannot wait for the new book!!!!!
i just ordered “Natural Dog Training: The Canine Arts Kennel Program – Teach Your Dog By Using His Natural Instincts”
is it any good ? Kevin ? i hope you say yes since you wrote it. not like these wolf researchers who have emphatically distanced themselves from their old theories , but guess what they do not stop the sale of the old books…i understand sometimes an author cannot stop a book,,even if they want to
Yes, I stand by every word. Some of the training has evolved as the theory has evolved to its logical extensions because I’ve found some missing steps, but the philosophy and method remain consistent.
Thanks to Burl for letting us know about Kevin’s take on The Secret Life of Dogs. Since I used the book as an example of how removed science is from seeing dogs as they are, I was able to plug Kevin’s thoughts into a link to the book’s title! Very cool.
Here’s the article, for those interested. It’s a slightly different take than Kevin has written about here. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/my-puppy-my-self/201001/why-do-dogs-mark-their-territory
LCK
I am too tired to proof this, so be nice…
Kevin,
Your comment above places you squarely in the realm of process thought. I will say much the same for Lee Charles Kelly below.
Heather,
That does sound a lot like some of Kevin’s writings. Using metaphors and analogies in a theory can distract the student/reader from taking the whole thing in. I keep losing Kevin when he makes analogies of quantum physics and dog emotion, or of energy flow/conservation and battery polarities and behavior.
Process is already a pretty well developed cosmological ‘network’ that explains the highly interrelated ‘experiencing subjective entities,’ ‘actual events,’ or ‘occasions of experience’ that are the real stuff of the natural cosmos. We are each just such experiencing events and are only differing from our experiencing dogs in degree, not kind. We both experience our physical world through our bodies in identical fashion, most is felt in a non-conscious mode, and some of what we feel and perceive rises to consciousness. Humans are capable of more conscious experiencing by taking in and contrasting a host of abstract mental feelings (potentials of what could or could not be) that the dog brain has no need to do.
Process sees subjects’ experiences as the sole activity in the universe, and explains how these occasions of experience come into being in the present immediate moment by first feeling the past events which now form their (our) objective, physical environment, and then act with varying grades of mentality (anywhere from electrons to cells to conscious creature minds) to synthesize these feelings, add a bit of novelty, and thus experience a new present event. For creatures, this subjective occasion of experience, this event of our personal immediate moment, is a physical-mental experience, that has occurred but is now over, and it passes into the objective past to be the data that will be felt by future succeeding occasions of experience coming into existence, and on and on. I will feel what you did, what I dis, what Fido did, and maybe even what is happening around the world.
In his blog series ‘How Man Creates Dog in His Own image,’ Lee Charles Kelly is describing the interplay between subjective experiences in present events becoming objects of the past and then becoming the content of future experiences…
“Here’s how I think this happens: Dogs read us and react, read us and react, read us and react, over and over. And we project our own emotions and thought processes onto their reactions, based in large part on our personal beliefs and identities. As a result, our reactions, in the moment, reinforce whatever small behavioral changes the dog exhibits in response to us in an almost continuous loop. This happens repeatedly, countless numbers of times every day, even when we’re not thinking about it. And as a result, the dog begins to reflect back to us many of the same things we’re unconsciously projecting onto them.”
I will use more of LCK’s work to explain how feelings work from a process standpoint. In the third of his blog series ‘How Man Creates Dog in His Own image,’ LCK said
“… my feelings about the nature of emotion. The first is about memory, which is that there is virtually no difference between physical and emotional memory. This is something I learned while studying at the NATAS acting workshop in New York. … you can struggle and strain all you like to recall the giddy, almost tipsy delight you felt the first time a girl (or boy) you liked told you they liked you back, for example, or the despair you felt later when she (or he) told you things were over, but try as you might to recall the exact emotions, they won’t come. But if you simply recall some of the sensory details surrounding those events — the color of her eyes, the texture of the walls, something as inconsequential as the angle of light shining off her hair — then the emotions come flooding back to carry you away once more.
This is what is called ‘prehension’ in process thought. In this case, we have a physical prehension – a taking-in of the physical feeling of a past event, or occasion of experience. Such prehensions are the way the world interrelates – all of the world! And each physical prehension has two parts: 1) its physical (objective) datum (the past romantic boy-girl encounter), and 2) its subjective form, or what the event felt like. The subjective form of a physical prehension is emotion.
Memories are physical prehensions. If such prehensions do not rise to conscious awareness in your current experience, they would cause your sudden but inexplicable sense of joy or sadness – your mood.
In _Process and Reality_, Whitehead says “
conceptual prehensions are visions of [appetites for] some possibility as to how some actuality might be more definite.
Conceptual prehensions are what account for mentality in experience they also have a datum and subjective form. Their datum are abstract actualities like pure love, red, triangular, right/wrong, justice, equality, number, etc…. Their subjective form is the nature of desire they envoke. Process theists hold that God is where conceptual realities are housed, while process non-theists would categorize concepts as potentials (degrees of definiteness) for physical existents.
For the physical prehension of the boy-girl event of the past to rise to consciousness in your immediate moment of experience, it would need to be accompanied by a ‘conceptual prehension’ of let’s say ‘pleasure’. You synthesize the physical and conceptual prehensions and sometimes may then go on to engage further mentality and form a propositions like: ‘the experience was pleasurable’, or ‘the experience was not pleasurable.’ Such propositions create a mental contrast between what is but might not be, and such propositions have an intellectual feeling.
Like a prehended feeling, an intellectual feeling has two components: a datum that is the contrast in question, and a subjective form that is CONSCIOUSNESS. Consciousness is what a affirmation/negation propositional contrast feels like.
Dogs entertain such contrasts when they decide whether to ‘stay’ instead of chasing a cat – some real intense consciousness there…Not calculus, but consciousness nonetheless.
Most of what we and dogs do is physical non-sensory, unconscious prehension. Mainly, we are all feeling our bodies in their enviornment.
Also, in process thought, sense perception gives rise to conscious awareness in a fashion like I just described.
–I keep losing Kevin when he makes analogies of quantum physics and dog emotion, or of energy flow/conservation and battery polarities and behavior.–
At first I thought of them as analogies and/or metaphors, also, although I don’t think that’s actually the case (maybe there are some labels for things that would otherwise be impossible to describe, but my understanding is that the labels represent what is actually happening from an energy flow standpoint).
Right, I’m meaning it literally. Just as two neurons exchange energy, the exact same process is happening between two dogs, or dog and person, any two animals. There’s an action potential that builds up and is then discharged, the subsequent movement of energy then becoming manifest in more and more complex manner of interacting just as the firing of neurons can articulate the body into more and more complex ways of moving, the net effect being to recharge the system. You can begin to see in these complex arrangements actual states of electricity and magnetism. You can actually see your dog working as a magnet. Look him in the eye and walk toward him, you can see the electrostatic bubble pushing in on him as you approach, maybe he becomes magnetized and “flips polarity” and seems “happy.” You can see the dog becoming more animated, just as if you as magnet are inducing more emotional energy in him, just as if you and the dog are creating an electromagnetic dynamo, a motor. He starts to run around to find an outlet for this energy. And then we get bogged down in thoughts and start talking, trying to communicate mentally, intellectually. We are trying to explain to the dog how our world of Time works. The dog may learn he can’t trust this human magnet, he always has to keep the electrostatic bubble up.
The human intellect gets waylaid by its reflexive intellectual formatting and reads thoughts into all of this and so what I’m saying at first seems difficult to grasp.
One helpful exercise is to learn how to talk about one’s emotion and feelings strictly in terms of energy/immediate-moment rather than being inextricably invested with thoughts, and a good way to do this is to define what one is feeling when driving a car and then all of a sudden a trooper appears in the rear view mirror. What do you feel? The first step in this is to learn how to excise thoughts from the experience and focus fully on emotion and feeling. Where in your body do you experience the pull forward before the trooper arrived? What else were you feeling as the car moved along and where? Where in your body do you feel the collapse? What has collapsed, what specifically were you feeling before the collapse and where was this centered in your body? What rushes up right after the collapse? Where in your body did that come from and what sensations are affiliated with the rising and falling of that which rushed up? Can you remember how these sensations are affiliated with the distance/bubble that you feel encapsulated in while driving, the faster the car, the more intense the sensations and the bigger the bubble surrounding the car?
After you master this simple exercise, you will notice that the same dynamic is responsible for how you perceive and respond to music, or when you watch a basketball game or tennis match, ride a swing, and is even what is guiding one’s relationship with another living being. What you are learning is how your animal/emotional mind works, its network brain being your heart, the same faculty of intelligence that is guiding all animal behavior.
The other day my family and I were walking with Happy in a new place, and we came to a wooden footbridge that was built over a dam – there was a waterfall created by the dam that was making a lot of noise and vibrating the bridge. My husband and kids had stopped to look at ducks so Happy and I reached the bridge a bit ahead of them. He wouldn’t step on it. When my husband and kids caught up, they didn’t notice the reason we were stopped and simply walked over the bridge – Happy bolted onto the bridge and forged ahead of them without hesitation. Going back the other way Happy was the first one on the bridge. That was really interesting – I was wondering how to explain that in terms of the NDT energy model? I am quite sure that if I had a very long line and had walked over the bridge myself, trying to coax him over, Happy would not have followed me! It was the kids that triggered him to go.
sometimes when bad things happen like a speeding fine, i am totally cool, and other times very angry. it is not always the same. at all. it can be opposite.
My little dog also does not step over a bridge without special reassurance, i.e. other people/dogs walking over it and getting to the other side without it collapsing…it might be a survival behaviour with many generations of doggie ancestors trying not to fall down.. also, when the walking surface changes, dogs can get weary. i.e. from dirt to wooden bridge planks etc. even a branch in the trail or a tree across the trail is not usually a very welcome sight for the dog. threatening…
Yes that’s a very interesting window into how a dog’s mind works. The abrupt change in footing disturbs the dog’s very framework of reality, i.e. its feeling of resonance with its surroundings becomes ungrounded, literally by overwhelming the balance circuitry. It then attributes this disconnect to physical memories in the emotional battery data base attached to incidents of disconnect, and so as you note it’s easier for him to follow kids across because there’s little to no history of resistance between dog and kids. In other words, in the dog’s mind, it attributes the disturbance of the bridge to the most intense variable (i.e. predatory aspect) in its memory bank, invariably the owner. The dog also manifests a strong fighting drive because having overcome the resistance of the bridge, on the way back he is now stimulated by that vibration rather than inhibited. On your next return to bridge you may still notice a degree of hesitation, although possibly not if his drive is strong enough, because strictly speaking he was active rather than reactive toward bridge only on the way back and approaching bridge from opposite direction, i.e. after having passed the midpoint of the walk. The way out is loading, the way back is unloading. But in any eventuality, bridges will soon not represent any sense of discontinuity in his perception of reality.
Thank you, Kevin! It is good to have an understanding of what is happening as we come across things in the environment that create a lot of resistance. Also extremely interesting that the way out on a walk is “loading,” while the way back from a walk is “unloading,” which is exactly how it looks and feels – we are invariably totally smooth and relaxed on the way “back”.
Kevin– you’ve referenced fighting drive several times. Do you consider this a separate “drive” from prey drive, or are they one-in-the-same (but perhaps “fighting” drive is simply a different expression of that singular drive)?
I’ve never liked the “many drives” theory as I’ve seen people reference things like “toy drive”, “bark drive”, and “play drive” which sounds a bit silly to me.
Kevin
I am puzzled why you prefer the science of physics for so much of your modeling and explaining of our fellow canine creatures’ ways. I suppose you could move a bit closer for a scientific study of a living creature using chemistry, but, of course, biology would serve as an even closer scientific vantage point.
Really, the language of evolutionary biology and psychology seem a better launching point for canine models, and this is also true when discussing conscious creatures’ occasions of experience within a process metaphysics.
You note with your use of a car driving experience as a means of practicing self-awareness. Process thought strongly holds that we can study our natural human bodily experiences to confidently make reliable parallels with how our dogs experience feelings, sense perception, and simple reasoning in like fashion.
Our dogs, like us, are organic – we have high grade mental experiences far more complex than the inorganic experiences of electrons, water molecules, or simple organic experiences of trees. That said, I think we have more in common with trees than cell phone batteries.
Kevin;
I find your post explaining what’s happening to dog on the bridge to be very timely for me. There is a playground in the park where Jinxsie and I train that has a swinging bridge on it. I’ve been training her to walk over the bridge with food, or occasionally will just walk her over it. After we do this her drive is definitely up and pushes harder or plays tug with abandon.
The beauty of physics is that it allows us to excise thoughts from the workings of a complex system. Whereas as the name itself implies, evolutionary psychology, is an oxymoron in that it presupposes that the purpose of evolution is survival and that it runs according to a psychology, its reasoning being the need for genes to replicate. I believe nature and consciousness works according to a physics and thoughts emerge from this, even genes conform to this physics and so our first task is to get the thoughts out of the way to see past the mirror that our thoughts by their very construct create. (Interestingly, early physicists were called natural philosophers.) My study of dogs has shown me that the purpose of evolution is to turn energy into information, this is the nature of consciousness and so the ground floor is to see and understand animals as “charged particles of consciousness” organizing around the most basic laws of nature, rather than as self-contained entities of intelligence that work according to a psychology.
A short while ago on this site I was introduced to Control Theory and I find it an elegant complement to Process Thought such as I may understand either of these. It seems to me that Control Theory is talking about the auto-tuning/feedback dynamic that orchestrates all interactions, while Process Thought seems to be talking about the interconnectedness of all things via consciousness. Meanwhile I’m talking about a network consciousness that regulates all interactions via an auto-tuning/feedback dynamic (emotion evolving into feelings) so that all things are connected in order to add energy to the always expanding network.
The main point with my car example is to teach a method of becoming aware of ones “self” (the emotional center-of-gravity) and then learn to see a dog in what it’s doing, likewise arrive at an understanding of its “self” through the very same dynamic. This is the network consciousness working through our emotion and then our feelings to define our grasp of reality in service to its need for information, i.e. new energy. No matter what we think, no matter how much we use thoughts to detach ourselves from community or from reality, to deny emotion and pervert feelings, no matter how hateful any thought might be, it will always serve to increase the force of attraction that is contained within the network, and sooner or later (and nature has all the time in the world) this will turn into a more highly organized expression of a networked intelligence.
This is what we need to see in problem behavior. The denial of emotion by the owner increases the force of attraction in the dog toward the source of denial in the owner. We kill millions of dogs each year because they are bringing this disconnect in consciousness to the attention of their owners.
Right, there is only one drive, the drive to make contact. When it meets resistance, it refracts into a range of personality types and “skill sets” so that in the collective, the group organizes to deal with complex objects of resistance in a varied and yet coordinated manner. My use of Fight Drive is to denote that individual which finds itself at the Direct/Active polarity, either by circumstance or by temperamental default, (this is an important distinction because when a “soft” dog has a bone in it’s mouth, it is at D/A polarity–12 Noon if you will — no matter its temperamental inclination and so now can intimidate a “tough” dog because relative to that bone as midpoint, this other stronger dog nevertheless finds itself at Indirect/Reactive polarity — 6:00 so to speak — and so its energy is drained to the soft individual at the D/A polarity). The difference between a hard and soft dog is that when the former meets resistance, it will externalize energy, whereas the latter will internalize it. It is related to prey drive this way, if a dog can feel the preyful aspect in the object of attraction, then no matter what the object of attraction does, it will add energy to the feeling of the strong dog. The predatory aspect of the stimulus will actually be a further “tuning” stimulant for the strong dog. Whereas the softer dog will find itself focusing on the predatory aspect to the exclusion of the preyful aspect and will find itself internalizing and becoming more inhibited. Because the harder dog can feel the preyful aspect despite the intensity of the situation, emotion can continue to elaborate into more complex feelings, and so paradoxically as it might first appear, such a dog can actually be more social in more difficult situations. For the dog with strong fight drive, its sense of reality is defined by a feeling for the object of attraction, and so it displays a more sexual/aggressive mannerism. For the dog that is softer, its sense of reality is defined by feeling that it is the object-of-attention and so it displays a more sensitive/defensive mannerism.
That’s an excellent example of how changing the dog’s sense of balance changes the dog’s frame of reference and by dissipating an old frame of mind that has resistance in it, this “old energy” gets converted to a feeling of flow, i.e. new energy and so your dog is now channeling physical memory into you via the pushing/biting exercises which is why it’s more intense. Keep on Pushing!
I am finding that if I use my ability to recognize my own energy – as in simply being aware of the fact that I have this stored energy that comes “in” via my senses or my thoughts or both, and let myself experience it (at least while I am with my dog, as a starting point, instead of ignoring it like I usually do :)), things just roll along smoothly. It is those times when I am (for lack of a better phrase) “living in a fantasy world” that I start to have what I would think of as dog problems. Paradoxically, however, every dog problem has actually been the result of my failure to acknowledge my own energy (stress energy I had stored that I was unaware of that came from my belief in my illogical thoughts, I think that’s as good a way as any to describe it). I think that being aware of that energy is what Cesar Millan refers to as the “calm assertive” state. The more energy you are able to “absorb,” the more you are going to attract and facilitate its constructive use. In that sense you are truly a “natural (every interconnected thing in nature) leader,” but it has nothing to do with power or pack position. To me, the thing that makes dogs so amazing is that they are able to provide pure opportunities for expanding the ability to increase humans’ awareness in the moment – the same thing can be said of any interaction with anything (per Kevin’s interconnected network), but unlike most everything else (rocks, trees, people), they provide an undistorted reflection. Babies are also good in this regard, but as they grow they become very human-like, which poses a more complex challenge to the novice practitioner of awareness.
Very well said, thank you.
I just wanted to add that I am hopeful that I am adequately able to keep learning and practicing absorbing/attracting my own dog’s energy in a way that will allow him to live a full and good life. I have newfound (and I have a Newfoundland, haha) respect for how much concentrated effort over literally many decades would be required to get to the point to have the ability to help dogs in general and to teach others in that regard. I am thankful that Kevin and others have put their energies to the task! Dogs are certainly worthy of it.
I am sure everyone has been watching the news from Haiti. I noticed many search and rescue dogs were going to be of service. THeir handlers must also be worried for their dogs as well as the victims.
Actually, there’s a better answer to your question as to why physics is so important. We don’t know what we’re feeling, our feelings are based on a primordial energy, emotion, that takes in the whole of consciousness. That’s a hard thing to wrap our limited minds around. Our feelings plug us into this network and organize every aspect of our life and over a multi-generational course of events and so how can one see that a feeling here leads to an inexorable consequence much later? So the question becomes what does a feeling feel like? Take two magnets and try to hold them North to North, that’s what avoidance feels like. See the hairs stand on end when a charged comb is held above, that’s what “makes my skin crawl” feels like. Jump off a rock into a clear cool pool on a hot day with a thrill racing through the heart with the force of acceleration, that’s what falling in love feels like. Sit in a car that’s sliding backwards on ice about to go out of control, that de-acceleration is what a sickening sense of dread feels like. Remember what is what like to be a kid and roll over and over going down a snowy slide-hill, that’s what flipping polarity feels like. Stand next to a charismatic movie star of enormous appeal, that’s what magnetic attraction feels like. All these forces of nature are the basis of how we feel and are what we have in common with all other beings of consciousness.
Then study the dog in terms of feelings, no thoughts, and see how these play themselves out right before our eyes showing us how feelings really work. What we thought was friendliness, was a coping response to avoidance, what we thought was defiance, was a state of confusion because a feeling couldn’t emerge through the static electricity, what we thought was aggression was due to a sickening loss of emotional traction, that when a dog just is around us without feeling the need to react in any way, that’s what magnetic attunement feels like and then when we talk to the dog, we destroy it.
We can then study our own emotional experiences through this clear vision. Am I really mad at that person because of this or due to that, or am I attracted to them but am afraid of something about them at the same time? What is the attraction? What is the fear? This helps us know what we are feeling.
It’s really hard to do this parsing apart with people since it triggers the deepest, darkest, dankest stuff in the emotional battery. But it’s exponentially easier to do it with the dog. So first, find the physical expression of the physics in the dog’s behavior, and then study how this courses its way over time into other expressions that at first don’t seem related, but clearly are once one understands the physics as the connecting thread to everything the dog does.
For me the major complicating factor is being aware of my own physical manifestation of my feelings and absorbing/experiencing it prior to attempting to discern the physical expression of the feeling in the dog. Often it is as simple as my own unawareness triggering the dog’s behavior, in which case once I come back to the moment things flow again. But sometimes there is that *plus* some other thing(s) going on, and I find that if I had taken the time to look inward before forging ahead and analyzing the dog, I might have been of more help to the dog by being able to see more clearly what the dog’s behavior is indicating about the physics. Most of the time it is days later that I have any insight to even the most basic situation. So it is discouraging sometimes and I feel my resistance to doing that work. Then I see that it is not good for my dog when I get lazy that way.
What Kevin says about the drive, is interesting to me because of what I experience with my dogs in harness.
when there is a dog (or even a snow mobile) ahead of them, they run 3 – 4 times faster, and one could think they will launch themselves onto the dog when they reach it but … when they have reached the dog, the aggression is gone and they will pass the other dog and then… slow down..
this is why it is very disadvantageous to draw first starter in a sled dog race. no one to chase !!!!!! i am racing this weekend so please you all keep your fingers crossed that I will not draw number 1
What is Homeokinetics?
Homeokinetics is the study of complex systems, systems such as universes, galaxies, social systems, or various planetary subsystems. The entire universe thus consists of atomistic-like units – “atomisms” – bound in interactive ensembles to form systems, level by level in a nested hierarchy of systems. A system is a group of relatively common ‘atomisms’ organized into a high ordered ‘atomism’ bounded from above and below in the space and time domain. A person is a system, bounded in time and space from above and below. Skin is the border, separating the inside from the outside. The person’s life is bounded in time from birth to death. When the person gets into a car, the person and the car become another system. The car joins other cars and forms another system called traffic. The flow of cars in a traffic system is much like the flowing of blood cells through our veins. Cars lose their autonomy in traffic and become part of a greater whole, just as blood cells do in our blood.
Within the system, atomisms, as actors, are moving. Whatever the level, whether the actors are people, cars, cells, or planets, they move. Early beliefs held that the movement of the actors was generated by a ‘spirit’, or ‘anima’. Actually, the creation of the action by the actor is done by the internal forces acting on or within the actor. There are ultimately very few forces or agents causing this. In fact, there are only four known forces: gravitational, electrical, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear forces. People walk due to small electrical signals from the brain telling their leg muscles to contract. This throws them off balance and gravity takes over pulling them forward. An automobile has an internal combustion engine, which is driven by an electric spark that creates an explosion in the cylinder. That chemistry in the engine itself also has an electrical foundation. The resulting movement of the piston in the cylinder is translated into rotary movement of the wheels, driving the car forward. Inside the human body, heart muscles contract as a result of an electrical signal from the autonomic nervous system. Movement of blood is created by the pumping action of the heart.
When the actors move, they interact with other actors. Like actors performing on a stage, people conversing in a car, blood cells coursing through veins, planets orbiting around a sun, interactions occur. Two people see each other in bar, walk over to each other, talk, and then perhaps dance together. Two cars avoid a collision by veering away from each other. Two blood cells bump into each other as they travel through a small capillary. The actors are engaging in a game. This game, within any system, may be called ‘Banging into Each Other by Pairs’. The agents (forces) guarantee that the actors will bang into each other. A few major things are conserved during this game. The sum of the paired mass (or matter) is conserved, the sum of energy is conserved, the sum of momentum (or movement) is conserved, and the sum of the electric charge is conserved. Flip a coin, for example. You and the coin exchange. The coin goes upward due to the momentum imparted to the coin by your thumb. Gravity pulls the coin back down in an exchange with the Earth. When a ball is thrown against a wall, momentum drives it towards the wall, which imparts motion to it in the opposite direction. Neither momentum nor matter is lost.
To describe the behavior of a system, then, one looks at how the flow of matter, energy, momentum, and electric charge spread out in this game that the actors within the system are playing. The purpose of the action is to tell the story of the collective. For a group of molecules in a balloon, the story of the collective may be to ‘form a gas’. As a result of playing the game, by the sharing of motion through their conservations, they all achieve the same temperature, or essentially the same energy. Now, if you want to face them, you will have to face them as a collective. You are no longer dealing with single atomisms. How can one know that? Somebody can aim that balloon at someone else and blow them away. That simple interactive motion creates the collective’s characteristics. At a collective level, the story of the collective force is the social pressure. One can tell a human army, a gang, or a group to ‘go kill’ or ‘go build a nation’ and the bunch will walk out together and act no longer as individuals, but as a collective.
A complex system is one where there is a tremendous amount of internal exchange by the actors. The physics of complex systems is played out on the basis of trying to understand what these complex internal agents are doing. Ordinary physics is a flatland physics, a physics at some particular level. Examples include nuclear and atomic physics, biophysics, social physics, and stellar physics. Homeokinetic physics combines flatland physics with the study of the up down processes that binds the levels. Tools, such as mechanics, quantum field theory, and the laws of thermodynamics, provide key relationships for the binding of the levels, how they connect, and how the energy flows up and down. And whether the atomisms are atoms, molecules, cells, people, stars, galaxies, or universes, the same tools can be used to understand them. Homeokinetics treats all complex systems on an equal footing, animate and inanimate, providing them with a common viewpoint. The complexity in studying how they work is reduced by the emergence of common languages in all complex systems.
From the Center for Evolutionary Physics’ Homeokinetics website:
http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/ecopsyc/homeokinetics/
LCK
–A person is a system, bounded in time and space from above and below. Skin is the border, separating the inside from the outside. The person’s life is bounded in time from birth to death.–
This (either part – the skin as the border or the bounding of life in time) I don’t find to be true in the absolute sense. Kevin gave an example somewhere on this site about his dogs not manifesting signs of stress (not the term he used but I am paraphrasing) upon the loss of another dog in the family, because to his dog, the other dog was not gone. The energy changing form from being the living dog to the dog who was not living did not, in the absolute sense of existence within the network of which everything in the universe is a part, result in the loss of of the dog. The form of course changed, but that is a relative matter and not important to the networked intelligence. I imagine that if Kevin did not himself believe it and live the the knowledge, the dog would have behaved in a different manner.
I think you’re probably right, Heather.
I don’t necessarily agree with all of the tenets put forth by evolutionary physicists. For instance, they still believe in chance and randomness (which may be true on one level, and which from a reading of Heisenberg probably makes sense). However, I’m with Einstein “God doesn’t play dice with the universe,” and Spinosa, “Nothing in nature is random.”
However, the fact that this kind of scientific inquiry has suddenly popped in the past few years is pretty exciting.
LCK
I am learning about these different inquiries here, in the context of dog training, it is very interesting and unexpected. I am not sure what an evolutionary physicist is – different from a regular physicist?
Just more evolved.
I should have been clearer about the material I posted: it was taken directly from the Center for Evolutionary Physics website. From what I can gather it’s an outgrowth of emergence theory.
LCK
KB and LCK
Some good comments from you both, and the homeokenetics sounds a bit resonsnt with process.
I just read all the replies to LCKs Psyc Today blog series on behaviorism where KB and LCK went back and forth with confusedscientist here http://ow.ly/VLIi
I think you two are headed for many more such exchanges as Kevin’s NDT gains wider notice.
I hope you both understand that I feel that KBs ‘practice’ with dog behavior is profound and attracts me as being on target. I sense a major problem when KB moves from what he has experienced/learned in his practice – which he admits to be quite different from abstract ideas and quite ineffible (like trying to describe a smell) – to putting it into a theoretical model complete with verbal description.
Close definition of ALL terms is first necessary. What is emotion, feeling, consciousness, energy, emotional energy, etc. Whitehead was big in seeing to it that any set of elements must only contain things with a common nature (I think this is mereotopology). For instance, in physics (mechanics), each element in an equation (much like a model or a set) had to have the same dimensional units – for instance a set containing a rotating torque, a force moving along its line of action, and heat is logically consistent as all three are examples of energy and have units reducible to ft-lbs.
In discussing KBs theory, I thought about Whitehead’s prehension as receiving feelings and wondered (then googled) about radio waves, and whether they transmit energy – it seems they do, as do other electromagnetic waves like light, radiation, microwaves, etc. It may be possible to say that feelings are like, and have the same ‘dimensional units’ as EM waves, and so they are carriers of a form of energy.
OK, next, what is the difference between a feeling and an emotion? I submit it is much akin to that between color and ‘particular colors.’ As I recently explained using a quote from LCK, a physical feeling has a datum (what it is) and a subjective form (HOW it is), and I stated that emotion is the subjective form of a feeling. I believe KB is confused when saying things like “emotion evolves into feeling.”
Also, the quote below is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion about William James (philosopher/psychologist who had a major influence on Whitehead’s Organic Philosophy, especially w/r experience, feeling, and consciousness)
“William James, in the article ‘What is an Emotion?’ (Mind, 9, 1884: 188-205), argued that emotional experience is largely due to the experience of bodily changes. The Danish psychologist Carl Lange also proposed a similar theory at around the same time, so this position is known as the James-Lange theory. This theory and its derivatives state that a changed situation leads to a changed bodily state. As James says ‘the perception of bodily changes as they occur IS the emotion.’ James further claims that ‘we feel sad because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and neither we cry, strike, nor tremble because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be.’
This theory is supported by experiments in which by manipulating the bodily state, a desired emotion is induced.[4] Such experiments also have therapeutic implications (e.g. in laughter therapy, dance therapy). The James-Lange theory is often misunderstood because it seems counter-intuitive. Most people believe that emotions give rise to emotion-specific actions: i.e. “I’m crying because I’m sad,” or “I ran away because I was scared.” The James-Lange theory, conversely, asserts that first we react to a situation (running away and crying happen before the emotion), and then we interpret our actions into an emotional response. In this way, emotions serve to explain and organize our own actions to us.”
Also, I think KB is vastly misunderstanding my writings and links to process thought. I mentioned, again w/r LCKs writing, how Whitehead saw consciousness to be the subjective form of a particular type of feeling (propositional), in the same way that emotion is the subjective form of physical feelings – so you can see a correlation and analogy of these two very often mischaracterized things.
KB, I never said process sees reality as an interconnected network of consciousness. I said conscious awareness occurs very rarely in reality – in entities that have a central nervous system and only when they are having sense perceptions (taste, sight…) or enjoying propositional feelings of affirmation/negation create a contrasts.
I said Reality is interconnected by _feelings_. This should be of profound interest for NDT.
Correction
Last sentence of second to last para should end as “or enjoying propositional feelings of affirmation/negation which create contrasts.”
As James says ‘the perception of bodily changes as they occur IS the emotion.’ James further claims that ‘we feel sad because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble…and dogs feel great emotion when they PUSH!
Does evolutionary physics have something to do with creationism or otherwise rejecting what is called Darwinism? I don’t want to step into the middle of that discussion!
If you mean my view of evolution, I believe in evolution but I don’t believe it happens by random mutation and I don’t believe genes are the central player. So I’m not talking about creationism or Intelligent Design. The best way to sum it up is that the “design is in the intelligence.” In other words, the semi-conductive nature of emotion, the principle of its conductivity, is what designs all expressions of intelligence, just as the principle of electrical conductivity dictates the intelligent design of the computer and the internet, the wishes of any inventor irregardless. This doesn’t resolve the question of what causes evolution, but it does put it in a new perspective and I believe it grants the individual the means of assessing it more for themselves rather than having to rely on experts. For example, the American Constitution is written rather simply and straightforwardly and so any citizen can read it and have a highly informed opinion as to what it says without having to attend law school. Whereas contracts and legislation are crafted with such arcane and obtuse language that it can’t be understood without technical training. In my view, the modern view of random mutations leading to natural selection is intellectual creationism, abrakadabra let there be thinking, the equal/opposite to Biblical Creationism.
Interesting that the discussion has hit on the subject of evolution. I just read an article about epigenetics, for which I’ll provide the link.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1951968,00.html
In the article, there is mention of the fact that evolution may not happen over long periods of time as proposed by Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Instead, it may be possible that evolution happens very quickly, in one generation in fact.
Here is a quote from the article:
“Geneticists are quietly acknowledging that we may have too easily dismissed an early naturalist who anticipated modern epigenetics — and whom Darwinists have long disparaged. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) argued that evolution could occur within a generation or two. He posited that animals acquired certain traits during their lifetimes because of their environment and choices. The most famous Lamarckian example: giraffes acquired their long necks because their recent ancestors had stretched to reach high, nutrient-rich leaves.
In contrast, Darwin argued that evolution works not through the fire of effort but through cold, impartial selection. By Darwinist thinking, giraffes got their long necks over millennia because genes for long necks had, very slowly, gained advantage. Darwin, who was 84 years younger than Lamarck, was the better scientist, and he won the day. Lamarckian evolution came to be seen as a scientific blunder. Yet epigenetics is now forcing scientists to re-evaluate Lamarck’s ideas.”
Based on Lamarck’s ideas about giraffes, one could postulate that it wasn’t the attaining of the nutrient rich leaves that created the longer necks, but the desire for the leaves. And if this is the case, then we could go even further and say that this desire, this feeling is what created the evolutionary spark. In which case, one could surmise that this evolutionary shift was a conscious evolution, created by choice rather than impartial, natural selection.
This would fall right into line with Kevin’s theory that evolution is driven by the “semi conductive nature of emotion”, rather than the commonly held beliefs of natural selection, creationism, or intelligent design.
Anyway, just my thoughts. Check out the article as it brings light to the basic principles and ideas of epigenetics and the profound nature of what this science could mean.
Right, in the eightties geneticists were looking for this gene for that, and that gene for this, I remember well the hunt for the dog’s aggressive gene. Now geneticists have discovered that there are far fewer genes than they supposed, and that it’s the timing of when certain genes turn on or off that determines so many specific adaptations and basic body types and so on, and that this timing is based on some kind of feedback loop with the environment, so now they’re looking for the master timing genes. But step by step epigenetics is moving the organizing principle farther and farther “above the genes” and while there may be timing genes, I don’t believe this will prove to be the critical modifying factor either. My interpretation of animal consciousness as a networked intelligence led me to believe that Lamarck was right in that evolution happens in real time, rather than being time contextual (random mutation in past meets random environmental shift in future) it’s just that he didn’t have the right mechanism. Emotion and the principle of conductivity organizes individual’s around potential energy, and they model their behavior (create a wave function) before they commit resources just as do human engineers. So short necked giraffes project e-cog into tops of trees and then at some point when critical mass is reached, physiology and genes shift in conformance with this desire and there is sudden evolutionary leap. Furthermore, the projection of emotion to top of trees isn’t happening solely in terms of giraffe, the other animals in the network projecting down to roots of trees induces giraffe to manifest complementary desire, and then there are the plants themselves that attract the projection of emotion in their evolutionary schema, these are all part of the network’s expansion that the long necked giraffe ends up serving as the connecting filament — not for the reason of survival or reproduction — but to keep all elements of the network in phase with its “self.” A big part of this communication process between the environment and the individual will I believe prove to be viruses, bacteria and RNA. I think this is where epigenetics is going to lead us.
There’s a theory called “symbiogenesis” being reinvigorated by Dr. Margulis who states that random mutations are always debilitating. Symbiogenesis is the “merging of two separate organisms to form a single new organism.” Dr. Margulis points out that there is no instance of a new species by way of random mutation, and yet there is an example of a new species coming into being by way of a tidal pool organism ingesting a photosynthetic bacteria and thereby becoming a new photosynthetic species itself. If you read “Darwin’s Finches” while they demonstrate the beaks getting bigger and smaller, thicker or thinner in perfect conformance with Darwinian reasoning, nevertheless they aren’t talking about new species of Finches, just the original template conforming to the “prey” that’s available. I’m excited about symbiogenesis because it intimates that the prey/predator template is indeed the basis of genetic modeling for change and changing the organisms that become emotionally entangled in this duality.
So I believe that Lamarck was right that evolution happens in real time, but that he didn’t have the right mechanism, it is that the network must maintain a universal formula of energy and that since emotion is what connects all organisms intelligently so as to exploit potential energy and adapt to change, the physical makeup of an animal is predicated on its emotional makeup, and so its genes can shift when it “feels” the shift in the network.
In this book chapter on process thought, physics, and biology by Cobb and Griffin
http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=2066&C=1857
I found what should be, for KB and other NDT followers, a lure for feeling’ as Whitehead often said:
“an analogy between the transference of energy from particular occasion to particular occasion in physical nature and the transference of affective tone, with its emotional energy, from one occasion to another in any human [or high grade creature] personality. The object-to-subject structure of human experience is reproduced in physical nature by this vector relation of particular to particular” (AI 242). This transference of affective tone, or subjective form, is “the most primitive form of the feeling of causal efficacy. In physics it is the transmission of a form of energy” (479f.).
If you could give a quick translation that would be helpful, thanks.
I am working my way through the material. I so far have gotten to Burl’s post re: trouble with definitions and units of measure. And then explains that
–emotional experience is largely due to the experience of bodily changes–
I am able to demonstrate just by observing myself that emotion can be produced via inputs from my mind. Bodily changes are produced by the emotion. In the case of the energy of that emotion manifesting as tension in my body that I ignore and do not experience, it is literally a static charge building up in my emotional battery (I had a similar issue with term definitions, but I’m liking them more now because they are in fact descriptive of the physical phenomena). My way of dumping that charge — the particular wall socket I plug myself into so to speak — is very personal to me — it is my “flaw” I think Kevin would describe it in terms of dogs — the coping mechanism that I developed and honed for my whole life but that I’m largely unaware of. EG, I am quite argumentative and irritable as a main strategy – I pick fights. I have no idea why, and honestly I don’t care to go back and psychoanalyze my life in great detail, and the beauty of it is that I don’t have to, because every time I do the work of being present in my bodily experience of the moment, it’s ALL right there and can be released. Plugging into the socket is not the release. Pretty funny, I realize for the first time now, because isn’t that just what my dog did with his overloaded emotional battery?
In terms of a dog, it’s the same thing happening with the emotional battery – they are going to encounter things that build up the static charge, it’s the nature of any sentient being to meet resistance, and I imagine especially with dogs living in a human world it causes some issues. They are not going to get bogged down and confused by thoughts (they are not going to know the wonder of not being bogged down and confused, either, but that’s why it’s pretty cool to be human), so when they plug into their particular wall socket of choice it’s going to be fairly clear what is happening to a trained observer.
So ideally there is no plugging into the wall socket – there is no avoiding the emotion, but there is the ability to recognize and experience the bodily sensation in the moment and thus “flip polarities” (this may be a lack of my understanding or a definitional point, but I would just think of it as insulating the wire so that the charge could continuously flow from positive to negative within the motor circuit without loss, vs. causing a short-circuit or excessive loss.)
So another thought I had but still haven’t gotten thru more than the first part of Burl’s post…
The emotional battery is a container – over time we (people, dogs, I guess any being) with practice releasing the stored energy in an efficient (ie, doing work in the system vs. overheating) manner, increase the capacity of the container to hold energy and put it to efficient work. The container is probably a coneptually a sphere (everything in circles?) given that the sphere is the container that will hold the most…or at least it is becoming more sphere-like, ever-expanding like a balloon with infinite elasticity…the universe is expanding in that matter, no? No way does every being reach this full potential, but that doesn’t stop the energy from moving that way no matter what the individual forms are doing.
KB,
It was mostly the quote that I thought of keen interest…I don’t think Whitehead could follow that chapter – normally Cobb and especially Griffin can nicely explain process, as in some of my other linked stuff.
Heather,
There was a dairy cattle milking operation that was performing badly, so the owner reasoned that a smart scientist – he chose a theoretical physicist – could come in to study the production operation and make an assessment. After 2 months, the scientist gathered all the dairy employees into a conference room and, drawing a circle on the blackboard said, “First, let’s consider a homogeneous sphirical cow.”
Some additional thoughts I had, just to put them out there to organize my own thinking. I have reached the limit of my understanding of some topics (eg, I don’t know much about evolution but I’ll read up).
KB said –So I believe that Lamarck was right that evolution happens in real time, but that he didn’t have the right mechanism, it is that the network must maintain a universal formula of energy and that since emotion is what connects all organisms intelligently so as to exploit potential energy and adapt to change, the physical makeup of an animal is predicated on its emotional makeup, and so its genes can shift when it “feels” the shift in the network.–
My observation isn’t so much about the mechanism of evolution, but what has to be true is that everything in the universe is “recreated” continuously, not even by a unit of time, but I guess what KB refers to as “real time,” ie, unceasing recreation. Nothing is in a state of suspension, it is constant change at the most basic particle level. So in that sense, evolution must happen in real time.
I had been confused by the terms “emotion” and “feeling”, because in everyday usage they are synonymous, but if what is meant by “emotion evolving into feeling” is what I would think of as emotion being resolving into physical experience/”recreation in the moment,” then that would resolve the confusion for me regarding the term “feeling.”