Yes, exactly. Those who have been traumatized need the strength that comes from healthy and supportive communities. These communities might need to be comparatively small for a while, and in some situations remain a refuge returned to frequently and regularly for a long time.
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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 6
- Thread starter Soupie
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Yes, exactly. Those who have been traumatized need the strength that comes from healthy and supportive communities. These communities might need to be comparatively small for a while, and in some situations remain a refuge returned to frequently and regularly for a long time.
I wonder about that last sentence. It seems to me that many people (deeply traumatized or not) require extended therapy with a sensitive psychologist they trust. Empathy is as vital to healing as rebuilding memories of past abuse, and often what the patient/client needs is guidance in addressing (addressing directly in the mind) those (often parents) who have damaged him or her in the past. Much of the improvement in understanding the effects of abuse (and there are many kinds of abuse) has been the result of 'family of origin' counselling in dealing with alcoholic and otherwise addicted parents and grandparents. The insights developed from that kind of therapy and intervention with children and adult children of substance addicts have been extended to survivors of other dystunctional parenting (narcissistic parents, for example, and parents who lack the most basic nurturing instincts and should never have become parents).
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
I agree. However, I imagine the logic is that some (effective) therapy is better than no therapy at all.
Yes, they are anti-representional. This article on Enactivism from wikipedia should be clarifying for you not only in terms of enactivism but also in the context of the embodiment, embeddedness, and extendedness of consciousness as clarified by phenomenologists. Here are the first several paragraphs:
"Enactivism argues that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment.[1] It claims that our environment is one which we selectively create through our capacities to interact with the world.[2] "Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations. Natural cognitive systems...participate in the generation of meaning ...engaging in transformational and not merely informational interactions: they enact a world."[3] These authors suggest that the increasing emphasis upon enactive terminology presages a new era in thinking about cognitive science.[3] How the actions involved in enactivism relate to age-old questions about free will remains a topic of active debate.[4]
The term 'enactivism' is close in meaning to 'enaction', defined as "the manner in which a subject of perception creatively matches its actions to the requirements of its situation".[5] The introduction of the term enaction in this context is attributed to Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch,[5][6] who proposed the name to "emphasize the growing conviction that cognition is not the representation of a pre-given world by a pre-given mind but is rather the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs".[7] This was further developed by Thompson and others,[1] to place emphasis upon the idea that experience of the world is a result of mutual interaction between the sensorimotor capacities of the organism and its environment.[6]
The initial emphasis of enactivism upon sensorimotor skills has been criticized as "cognitively marginal",[8] but it has been extended to apply to higher level cognitive activities, such as social interactions.[3] "In the enactive view,... knowledge is constructed: it is constructed by an agent through its sensorimotor interactions with its environment, co-constructed between and within living species through their meaningful interaction with each other. In its most abstract form, knowledge is co-constructed between human individuals in socio-linguistic interactions...Science is a particular form of social knowledge construction...[that] allows us to perceive and predict events beyond our immediate cognitive grasp...and also to construct further, even more powerful scientific knowledge."[9]
Enactivism is closely related to situated cognition and embodied cognition, and is presented as an alternative to cognitivism, computationalism, and Cartesian dualism.
Philosophical aspects
Enactivism is one of a cluster of related theories sometimes known as the 4Es, the others being embodied, embedded and extended aspects of cognition.[10][11] It proposes an alternative to dualism as a philosophy of mind, in that it emphasises the interactions between mind, body and the environment, seeing them all as inseparably intertwined in mental processes.[12] The self arises as part of the process of an embodied entity interacting with the environment in precise ways determined by its physiology. In this sense, individuals can be seen to "grow into" or arise from their interactive role with the world.[13]
"Enaction is the idea that organisms create their own experience through their actions. Organisms are not passive receivers of input from the environment, but are actors in the environment such that what they experience is shaped by how they act."[14]
In The Tree of Knowledge Maturana & Varela proposed the term enactive[15] "to evoke the view of knowledge that what is known is brought forth, in contraposition to the more classical views of either cognitivism[Note 1] or connectionism.[Note 2] They see enactivism as providing a middle ground between the two extremes of representationalism and solipsism. They seek to "confront the problem of understanding how our existence-the praxis of our living- is coupled to a surrounding world which appears filled with regularities that are at every instant the result of our biological and social histories.... to find a via media: to understand the regularity of the world we are experiencing at every moment, but without any point of reference independent of ourselves that would give certainty to our descriptions and cognitive assertions. Indeed the whole mechanism of generating ourselves, as describers and observers tells us that our world, as the world which we bring forth in our coexistence with others, will always have precisely that mixture of regularity and mutability, that combination of solidity and shifting sand, so typical of human experience when we look at it up close."[Tree of Knowledge, p. 241]
Enactivism also addresses the hard problem of consciousness, referred to by Thompson as part of the explanatory gap in explaining how consciousness and subjective experience are related to brain and body.[16] "The problem with the dualistic concepts of consciousness and life in standard formulations of the hard problem is that they exclude each other by construction".[17] Instead, according to Thompson's view of enactivism, the study of consciousness or phenomenology as exemplified by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty is to complement science and its objectification of the world. "The whole universe of science is built upon the world as directly experienced, and if we want to subject science itself to rigorous scrutiny and arrive at a precise assessment of its meaning and scope, we must begin by reawakening the basic experience of the world of which science is the second-order expression" (Merleau-Ponty, The phenomenology of perception as quoted by Thompson, p. 165). In this interpretation, enactivism asserts that science is formed or enacted as part of humankind's interactivity with its world, and by embracing phenomenology "science itself is properly situated in relation to the rest of human life and is thereby secured on a sounder footing."[18][19] . . . . .
continues at Enactivism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
Yes, that's what I get out of them as well, but it seems that many embodied theorists mean much, much more than that.
The following paper offers an overview of how embodied theorists have approached the HP. The full article is in the JCS, but I seem to have found a draft of the paper.
Embodiment, Consciousness, and Neurophenomenology: Embodied Cognitive Science Puts the (First) Person in Its Place
Abstract: This paper asks about the ways in which embodiment-oriented cognitive science contributes to our understanding of phenomenal consciousness. It is first argued that central work in the field of embodied cognitive science does not solve the hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers, 1996) head on. It is then argued that an embodied turn toward neurophenomenology makes no distinctive headway on the puzzle of consciousness; for neurophenomenology either concedes dualism in the face of the hard problem or represents only a slight methodological variation on extant cognitive-scientific approaches to the easy problems of consciousness. The paper closes with the positive suggestion that embodied cognitive science supports a different approach to phenomenal consciousness, according to which the mind is massively representational (and cognitive processing teems with body-related representations), cognitive science has no use for the personal-level posits that tend to drive philosophical theorizing about consciousness and mind, and the hard problem is illusory.
This was a helpful paper for me. I have always felt that what embodied theorists claim and what they actually explain do not add up. For cognitive science to proceed, the only tenable stance is to claim that the HP is illusory, and that therefore phenomenal consciousness is illusory as well. While I am very open to the idea that the nature of consciousness may not be what it intuitively seems to be, I'm not sure what it means to conceive of consciousness as an "illusion."
And I agree with the author that neurophen does not "solve" the HP: at the most it posits duality, and while that may be the correct approach, it is not a "scientific" solution to the HP, it's an affirmation of the HP. If one argues that neurophen does not suggest dualism, then neurophen is not ultimately different from standard cognitive science.
The HP shows us that there is something wrong with one (or both) of the following views:
(1) All of reality is objective and physical.
(2) Phenomenal consciousness is not objective and physical.
So because standard 'cognitive science' [still a work in progress] cannot/will not address phenomenal consciousness it is in your view in a legitimate position to claim that phenomenal consciousness is "illusory"? It should be added that a number of leading cognitive neuroscientists have already moved in the directions of phenomenology and phenomenological analysis of consciousness, a boat I think you will not want to miss.
I think the meaning of that conception is plain: those who claim that consciousness is an illusion either do not recognize their own phenomenal experience and the ways in which it is expressed in consciousness or they pretend not to.
You've read (or claim to have read and understood) Thompson's Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, but it appears that in order to follow that work you would have needed to first read Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, which is the well-spring of Mind in Life and of neurophenomenology and which I have also recommended numerous times in this thread. I wouldn't claim, either, that neurophenomenology "solves the HP," but it makes significant progress in understanding the HP for traditional cognitive neuroscientists who read the necessary works by Varela, Thompson, Rosch, Gallagher, Zahavi, and others cited here in the past.
Here are two other recent books that are already recognized to be significant contributions to the understanding of prereflective and reflective consciousness and affectivity necessary for a more adequate recognition of what consciousness and experience are:
The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind by Giovanna Colombetti.
Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind: Beyond Art Theory and the Cartesian Mind-Body Dichotomy (Contributions To Phenomenology) by Alfonsina Scarinzi
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Just a note to add, Soupie, that you seem to be unwilling to let go of dualist thinking. The overcoming of dualist thinking has been the prime motivation (and success) of phenomenology since it's inception in the late 19th century. Then as now it stands against the reductiveness of materialist/physicalist/objectivist premises (indeed presuppositions) about the nature of reality which radically limit understanding of consciousness and mind.
Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
my latest paper (for The Monist submission):
http://mind-phronesis.co.uk/Info-essay-10-02-16.pdf
feedback welcome
http://mind-phronesis.co.uk/Info-essay-10-02-16.pdf
feedback welcome
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Don't think we got to these original questions of yours?
1. but what do you do with people whose story has been inverted over time and come to subjectively assess themselves and their reality from a highly unique & self-destructive position such as the anorectic
2. how do you approach storytelling as a means of healing when the belief in the inverted and damaging narrative is the one that they identify with, logic be damned?
Burnt State
Paranormal Adept
No but then you don't always get clear answers from the philosophers up on the hill do you?. So I researched the NICE protocols for Borderline Personality Disorders and combined with what I learned about how memories and emotions are made I think I have found a good direction to go in with my students in jeopardy. Unfortunately without the willingness to commit to a therapist and engage in positive human relationships for a good 5-7 years I fear self-destruction is inevitable. Once the synapses have written into the system an inverted version of reality you really are just talking to someone whose reality is dissassociative, rarely clear, and so riddled with a desire for self-harm that I know all I can do is set the stage for future growth in the next four months and after that it's do, or quite literally, die. Once you start on down Sylvia Plath's road with your racking up of suicide attempts it seems there is little to be done despite persistence and consistence from the adult world. Psychic damage done early on to youth is very hard to rewrite in the brain space. There is no willingness to improve and mindfulness therapy makes them feel too unstable as a calm life is a foreign thing to someone always looking for accidents to get themselves into.
I know something about BPD because a friend of mine has a child diagnosed with it, a child now age 25 and functioning well after about four years of expert therapy. Psychiatrists won't diagnose BPD until a child reaches at least 21 years of age since other conditions to which the young are vulnerable often look like, but are not in fact, BPD. Depression in youth is always serious in my opinion and the best thing you can do with high-school-age students in whom you recognize signs of depression and hopelessness is what you're doing one-on-one now, and also motivating their parents to seek counseling for their children. If you or the school's counselor would call such parents in and provide them with relevant written material concerning the signs you see, it might go a long way to getting the kids into therapy.
Re the kids you're dealing with who you suspect might have serious problems such as BPD, you might reach them with a showing of the film "Girl, Interrupted," which can motivate very troubled kids, boys as well as girls, to seek some counseling earlier rather than later. For mothers of girls, you can't beat the book Raising Ophelia, which older teens can read themselves for insight into themselves, their peers, and the risks they face these days. "Boys Don't Cry" is an excellent (but heart-scalding) film for young people to see if they are short on empathy and sensitivity to others. You may know about these and other sources that can produce insight for teenagers about the seriousness and pitfalls of the world they're trying to grow up in, and the importance of protecting themselves, caring for themselves and others, through their turbulant years.
You must be trying to get through to some very troubled kids in order to write this:
"Once the synapses have written into the system an inverted version of reality you really are just talking to someone whose reality is dissassociative, rarely clear, and so riddled with a desire for self-harm that I know all I can do is set the stage for future growth in the next four months and after that it's do, or quite literally, die."
That's a really bleak view, Burnt. Even a difficult condition like BPD is not necessarily fatal, though it can certainly limit an individual's capacity for emotional fulfillment if no skilled help is available or affordable. We are not robots acting out synaptic compulsions but living beings that, like all animals, intrinsically desire well being and remain at least partially open to receiving friendship, comfort, support, and validation from others.
Burnt State
Paranormal Adept
I'm not bleak. i'm realistic. Mom is already damaged and dad does not exist - he is the violator. she has gone through three therapists already and is working on the fourth. she likes to have accidents. she already drank bleach once. she has every single BPD piece from the self harm to the anorexia, from the personal punishment and control issues to aberrant sexual behaviour. she's beyond our local counsellors and has three staff members that support her daily and work on providing daily hope and optimism in a supportive, consistent and non-judgmental manner. she needs five years of committed and caring therapy right now to rewrite her script and she needs resilient and committed caring relationships in her life. she doesn't want those - she likes to hurt herself and punish herself. it's not an easy case. I find it painful to watch because she has wiped out every relationship and potential for change in her life. she is not in control and responding to impulses that she herself does not fully comprehend but they feel right. it's about as surreal a thing in a young person as I've ever seen outside of the spontaneously violent boy I taught at the start of my career. he's dead now.
my student is open to dialogue but our simple short term goals of working to stay stable when not at school and being successful academically (she is very high functioning and easily one of the best young writers I have ever had the pleasure to teach) but she can't stop exploding at home or engaging in self-harm. the anorexia is maddening. I just champion her work and keep an open ear and try to work on her two goals through Dialectical Behaviour Theory which is the underpinning of all my leadership classes and the standard of care for BPD. I hope she keeps contact with the staff she will leave behind at the end of this semester as I think these are the best relationships she has ever had in her life and I know transitions are especially difficult for this cohort.
i'm not giving up on this one but i'm realistic. i sincerely wish it wasn't this way. not that I show it but I find her case to be heartbreaking truly. it's beyond my capacity and time constraints. But you know when you are talking to delusional people and how they change their mind every other second... it's not their momentary lucid capacity for positive human contact that tells you the story it's their ability to explode all types of goodness in their life because they are driven to do this. It is a synaptic reality because that's how she formed her vision of the world through her early trauma. I've been to these places before and I've been there with loved ones. This is about a life journey. It's the only way it comes right.
This child's situation is very bad, very difficult. And I commend you for trying to help her. Do you know if her mother is verbally, emotionally, or physically abusive? If so, and maybe even if not, I recommend that you and the school's counselors report the girl's situation to Family Services in your city or county. They will send a psychiatric social worker or two around to the home to meet with the girl and her mother. If they determine that the girl and her mother should be separated for a while, there might be an option for temporary foster care. If they see her as seriously unstable and a danger to herself, they will be able to set her up with a Family Services psychologist. This could be a turning point for her. And the social workers will follow up with her regularly. They themselves are skilled professionals, highly empathetic people, and often able to provide strong emotional support and continued advocacy for young people with these kinds of problems.
Is she going on to a community college or university? I hope so, even if only part-time (and that might be better). A change of scene, even if not in another city, would be good for her. She'll develop a new peer group, start over again in a new school situation. She needs to step out of the box she's in, form new relationships, on her own and also with the social workers and her psychologist, in order to gain some fresh grounding in the world. There might also be therapists associated with Family Services who provide group therapy in which girls in similar situations can befriend one another and learn to understand themselves and others better. She might find a few best friends that way that will last a lifetime.
I think this girl is the victim of both of her parents' dysfunctions. Neither has been able to provide her with the constancy of love every child needs to grow up whole. Change is what she needs.
Is she going on to a community college or university? I hope so, even if only part-time (and that might be better). A change of scene, even if not in another city, would be good for her. She'll develop a new peer group, start over again in a new school situation. She needs to step out of the box she's in, form new relationships, on her own and also with the social workers and her psychologist, in order to gain some fresh grounding in the world. There might also be therapists associated with Family Services who provide group therapy in which girls in similar situations can befriend one another and learn to understand themselves and others better. She might find a few best friends that way that will last a lifetime.
I think this girl is the victim of both of her parents' dysfunctions. Neither has been able to provide her with the constancy of love every child needs to grow up whole. Change is what she needs.
One further thought: you and the others involved with this girl at school need to work as a team, talking it over and hopefully agreeing to take the step of calling Family Services. And as a group you should probably call the mother in for a meeting in which you discuss your concerns and advise her that you feel it necessary to take that step before you take it. I hesitate to give this kind of advice, and it might not be the best course to take, but I think that in fairness the mother ought to be given some notice and an opportunity to make a solid commitment to her daughter and to making things work at home -- and perhaps to being the one to call Family Services in order to obtain the support her daughter needs. If she could be persuaded to do that it would be the best thing that could happen all around. She might even suggest that she be the one to make the call. It takes a village.
And of course the mother needs to be assured that this is the teachers' and counsellors' decision to speak with her, and that her daughter knows nothing about it. Y'all need to convey your collective concerns about this girl, and not to risk setting the mother against the daughter any more than she seems likely to be at this point. Their relationship needs to be protected because that one lasts a lifetime.
Backtracking at this point: rather than present the mother with an announcement that you are ready to call Family Services, start by expressing your group's concerns about the girl's state of mind and suggest that services are available to help from FS. Would she consider requesting those services on behalf of her daughter's health and well being? She might not even realize such help is available. If she's instead intractable, you can always follow through yourselves.
Backtracking at this point: rather than present the mother with an announcement that you are ready to call Family Services, start by expressing your group's concerns about the girl's state of mind and suggest that services are available to help from FS. Would she consider requesting those services on behalf of her daughter's health and well being? She might not even realize such help is available. If she's instead intractable, you can always follow through yourselves.
@Burnt State, I meant to ask you earlier about the theorists you follow concerning "how memories and emotions are made." Who are those theorists and would you link online presentations (if they are available online) of their theories? I find Jaak Panksepp's research, especially in his development of the field of Affective Neuroscience, to be persuasive concerning emotions -- that emotions are not 'made' but triggered by experiences and events occurring in the course of events experienced in an animal's or human's lifetime. So emotions appear to be 'given' in life, an affordance of nature. Panksepp identifies seven core emotions shared by animals and humans alike that show up early in evolution (before the gradual development of cognitive capabilities evolving in the forebrain and neocortex) and that continue to affect the way in which members of our species experience and react to elements of the environments in which we find ourselves existing.
It seems obvious that influential and significant memories accumulated by animals and humans are both affected and effected by these core emotions, that emotion influences cognition -- i.e., what we are able to construe or understand about our lived relationship to the environments (natural, social, cultural) in which we are situated and to the other beings existing alongside us in these environments. Depth psychology (in several schools) has been in agreement that memories are laid down in both the subconscious and conscious levels of a creature's mentality and that the boundary between these levels of 'consciousness' is permeable. So the question of what a being 'thinks' is entangled with -- and deeply influenced by -- what that subject feels and has felt in its temporally unfolding existence in the world. It seems clear that negative early experiences of an animal or a human lay down emotional memories that persist [probably primarily subconsciously] and that limit or qualify the possibilities of that being's further openness to the enjoyment and satisfaction of a variety of experiences available in life to creatures undamaged by early emotional trauma.
I think that the intractability of the student you've discussed above, who seems unable to benefit from the cognitive-behavioral approaches taken by her school counselors and by you and other concerned teachers, can be understood in the approach to mental and emotional health taken by Panksepp. And you are right, I think, in seeing her need for extended skillful therapy in breaking through the confused and self-destructive ideation that dominates her consciousness at this point in her life and will continue to do so without expert help. The therapy she needs must go deeper than a 'logical' approach to her problems, for her problems can't be reached by 'reason' alone. They are severe problems of an emotional nature created in her childhood and youth by the abusiveness of her father and perhaps the inadequacy of her mother to support and nurture her through those traumas.
The standard approach of cognitive neuroscience over the last few decades cannot come close to touching the deep emotional conflicts that limit this student's ability to begin to thrive in the environment in which she is situated (not just the home environment but the entire cultural environment of our time). That standard approach (now evolving as a result of Panksepp's contributions) was built on the presuppositions of the still-dominant scientific paradigm -- that the world itself and everything that happens in lived experience in the world must be explainable in materialist/physicalist/objectivist terms. Those presuppositions about the nature of reality {what-is} have produced the protracted resistance of modern 'science' to the investigation of the complexity of consciousness itself, now being overcome at least in the interdisciplinary field of consciousness studies. Consciousness in its affectivity and openness to the world is the originary site of all ideas and 'theories' drafted by humans in our species' historical attempts to comprehend and define what is real.
@Burnt State, I'm still wondering about what your current conceptions are concerning "how memories and emotions are made" and the sources from which you derive them. You're not usually shy, but perhaps you're busy at present. I hope you will come back to this question because it is highly pertinent to this thread. Thanks.
Burnt State
Paranormal Adept
super busy at school right now - big events, not much time to think. I wanted to reply properly to you but I believe that this descended from the NOVA episode recently broadcast and discussed on the Strieber thread called Memory Hackers where they identified how memory gets made in the brain through physical growth of synaptic connections and that all memories and experiences are coordinated events that aligns experience with a variety of sensory and emotional response experiences. In this way you can see how the therapies in that episode that worked to cure people of spiders and created emotional blocks normally associated with the spider stimulus then translated into treating people with PTSD. The therapy suggests that emotional alignments are made with individuals early on in life so in thinking about the BPD person whose sexual abuse gave rise to their own self loathing and current experiences of self harm and self abuse is actually written in the synapses. DBT treatment therapies then, like any good mindfulness practice that is lived for years works because it creates new synaptic growths and works to create literal acceptance of events without have their emotional attachements without the drug therapy that blocked the emotions - I would think that this must take a lot longer to do for patients, hence the multi year therapy regimens and frequent lapsing that people like anorectics, alcoholics, self-harm addicts etc. go through. Combining the therapy with an emotional blocker literally rewires the brain that much faster. It was a good episode and worth watching for the future of trauma treatment.
- Status