Tag: mechanism

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Disconnection, Collapse, Complex Systems, and Working Now in the Liminal Spaces

Over the span of my life so far, I’ve been noticing some disturbing trends, which may very well be contributing to our current situation on the brink of disaster, if not extinction. Some of these trends probably have been in existence for hundreds, if not, thousands of years, while others are more recent. And, some seem to be more characteristic of one country (or a few countries) or region.

  • An increase in aggression becoming our default response to uncertain situations or more intense situations..
  • An increase in our emotions driving our decision-making in almost all contexts…. From fear to desire, from joy to repulsion….
  • Tending towards a complete loss of empathy (not to mention compassion) towards fellow human being
  • Tending towards a complete loss of empathy and disconnect from other living beings, from pets to wildlife and our critically important invertebrate cousins.
  • The development of a total disregard for the environments and ecosystems in which we live and upon which we depend
  • An increase in mind-less buy-in to the myths of capitalism
  • An increase in the mind-less buy-in to religious dogma and a loss of the connection to the core meanings of different religions
  • An increase in intolerance, if not hate, of those who are “different”
  • An increase in racism
  • An increase in addiction to our devices (phones, TV’s, cars, etc.), to our foods, to careers, to substances of all kinds, and to our own neuroses and habitual patterns of thinking and behaving
  • An increase in the loss of integrity – decreases in trustworthiness, dependability, reliability, responsibility, honesty, forthrightness, and so forth.

These tendencies are just a few of the more “ig-notable” ones. I’m sure we can add many more to the list. At the same time, all of these tendencies intertwine with one another. There really are no distinct borders between one and another.

I am sure there are multiple factors that have contributed to the increases in these tendencies. Technology has certainly played a big role in disconnecting people in various ways. The concerted effort of the “institution of education” to dumb down the population has had major effects on these tendencies. Political and corporate brainwashing has been a major factor. “Religious leaders” – who do not have deep and extensive training in their spiritual disciplines and in their religious teachings and who edit what teachings they know to conform to their own egotism and biases – have contributed to many of these tendencies.

The corporate world and its greed and disregard for social and environmental responsibility has had huge effects.

And, again, there are many other contexts that have had and continue to have effects on how we relate to the world.

Our complete buy-in to Objectivist, Positivist, Reductionist, Mechanistic thinking (from Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton, and others) has been a core contributor to our disconnects to one another, to other life forms, to society, and to the ecosystems and environment upon which we depend.

At the same time, human beings have so much potential. We can love. We can care for others. We can create amazing powerful, thought-provoking, and/or beautiful music, dance, works of art, novels, stories, film, and poetry. We can develop incredible technologies and structures. We can explore and develop incredible scientific understandings of our world.

Yet, we have brought ourselves to the brink of destruction. Ecosystems are collapsing, Rates of extinction are skyrocketing. Resources are being depleted. And, climate patterns are changing so radically and so quickly that the weather-related disasters that were once rare and becoming common events, which in turn is creating havoc in some parts of the world. And, what is happening in a few areas now will become commonplace everywhere else in the world over the next decade or so.

Our global situation is absolutely beyond grim. However, governments and other institutions will not be “the answer” to the “wicked” problems we’re facing. But, they can make a difference in providing a more workable context for change. And, that change has to come from between the institutions (in the liminal spaces)…. In other words, change needs to arise from as many people as possible working together to address the very complex, transcontextual, and very slippery interacting systems and the pathologies that are plaguing these systems.

And, we need to start NOW!

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How We Think About Animal Behavior — Moving Beyond Behaviorism, Mechanism, Positivism, and Other Problematic Biases

This post has been stimulated by a posting in the “Animal Cognition” group in Facebook that shows a video of a crow trying to break up a rather intense fight between two cats. The crow repeatedly caws loudly at the two cats, then pecks at the base of the tails of the cats (it’s difficult to distinguish whether the crow is pecking at the same cat or at both cats, since the two cats look very similar).

Courageous Crow Tries to Break Up Cat Fight

I’ve been watching my Doberman do the same sort of thing for almost 8 years. If two dogs get into a fight in the dog park, she’ll run up and bark at the two dogs. If that doesn’t do anything, she’ll try to figure out who the aggressor is and pull its tail and run away. She’ll also do the same thing with people who are vehemently arguing (e.g., my wife and I or two people in the dog park), except there are no tails to pull.

In the past, we were stuck in a behaviorist paradigm, where the ideas of animal emotion, animal cognition, and animal consciousness or sentience were dismissed. But, we’re moving beyond such behaviorist views. However, there are still lingering remnants of this paradigm and its companion paradigms of positivism and mechanism and how they affect the way we perceive and think about animal behavior. We may need to consider that behavior, cognition, emotion, learning, etc. manifest:

  • as falling along a continuum of complicatedness (I want to avoid using “complexity,” since I don’t want to confuse this aspect with complex systems, even though behavior, cognition, emotion, etc. do play roles in thinking and learning as complex systems);
  • as adaptive characteristics for the contexts in which an organism lives; and
  • as fundamental characteristics of life.

We seem to get stuck in comparing thinking, acting, learning, etc. to the way we think, act, learn, etc., rather than looking at such things from the contextual perspective of the particular organism. For my Dobie (Dobermans are very sensitive and do not like yelling or fighting), she takes on a role of peace-keeper, which also extends to protecting the perimeter of the house, by alerting us to the presence of people. However, she is extremely observant, so if a person “passes” her visual and other sensory assessments, they can come into the house without further ado. We’ve never had to deal with this, but if a dangerous person tried to enter, I suspect she’d go through several levels of warning before she would neutralize the threat. She did try to warn me about a new vet I took her to. The minute the vet walked into the exam room, she started snarling. I had never seen her do this around any other person, even local gang-bangers who approached admiring my dog and asking how mean she was. But, as I found out, the vet was a money-grubber and psychopath. I should have trusted my dog’s judgment and left immediately.

However, the point is, that every living organism, thinks, learns, reacts emotionally (the biochemical substances associated with emotions are found throughout the spectrum of living things), and interacts with other living things cooperatively and competitively (both can happen with the same organism, but the type of interaction depends on the specific contextual circumstances of the moment).

So, the crow in this video, which like dogs, has developed in ways to or adapted to live in conjunction with humans and their pets. Both crows and dogs are quite intelligent. And, it very well may be that the crow is the neighborhood peace-keeper. This is not to say that all crows act this way. However, this particular crow may have had sets of experiences and particular inclinations that have led to his or her taking on this role. My dog has assumed this role. Not all dogs do, but I have observed other dogs act as peace-keepers, as well.

Intelligence, emotions, and sentience seem to be characteristics of life. From bacteria to humans, organisms think, learn, and act in ways that are appropriate to their experiences in the contexts in which they live. We can’t directly compare and assess intelligence, etc. in terms of our own intelligence and emotions. We can only compare how different organisms’ intelligence and emotions are suited for their own contexts. From this perspective, bacteria may be the ultimate in appropriate emotions and intelligence. They not only survive through multiple assaults from the environment and from humans, but they help other organisms survive (from individual survival to the survival of all life) and have created and regulated the Earth’s atmosphere and biogeochemical cycles that have provided the contexts of survival for all organisms. We, on the other hand, seem to be hell-bent on destroying ourselves and other species. That is not very intelligent in any context.