THE CENTAUR and the SELF

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THE CENTAUR and the SELF Graduate Seminar in
Architecture Monday, March 13, 2006
Neil Greenberg Department of Ecology and
Evolutionary Biology University of Tennessee
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• Naturam non vinces nisi parendo
• (You will not master nature unless you obey it)
  
• -- Francis Bacon

• Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature.
• It will never fail you
• --Frank Lloyd Wright

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The Connection between Architecture, Centaur, and
the Self

• ARCHITECTURE is an essential component of
  experience it can emulate the charmed circle of
  the mystery religions
• It celebrates by protecting and preserving
  experiences, installing them in the appropriate
  corner of the self.

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The BIOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE of the SELF

• Knowledge of the SELF is knowledge of constraints
  and possibilities
• self-knowledge DEVELOPS
• the ENVIRONMENT empowers or limits ones
  possibilities
• EVOLUTION has led to adaptive traits that may or
  may not be expressed
• PHYSIOLOGY is the proximate mechanism by which
  the SELF acts, copes with needs, is manifest

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DEEP ETHOLOGY

• DEVELOPMENT
• ECOLOGY
• EVOLUTION
• PHYSIOLOGY

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DEEP ETHOLOGY

• Development
• Progressive change within an individual
• Epigenesis genes affect and are affected by the
  environment

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DEEP ETHOLOGY

• Ecology
• Context geology, climate
• Context conspecifics, predators, prey
• Presents challenges (selection pressures) to
  individuals or groups with which they must cope
  to maximize their fitness

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DEEP ETHOLOGY

• Evolution
• Ultimate Causation (why?)
• Transmission of information between the
  generations
• Progressive change across generations
• Based on competition an organism need not be
  perfect, only better

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DEEP ETHOLOGY

• Physiology
• Maintains organisms internal stability
  (homeostasis)
• Integrates and assimilates new percepts of
  experience based on innate and acquired
  competence
• Models the outside world within us
• Selects the best course of action

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DEEP ETHOLOGY

• The Triune Brain
• Ancient Motivational centers
  (meeting
  needs)
• More recent modulation selective attending and
  acting
• Most recent modulation in the light of foresight
  (organ of civilization)

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Distributed but integrated systems for
motivation, affect, and cognition, mediate
behavioral patterns from reflex to reflection

• Homeostatic functions and archaic reflexes of
  motivation are
• energized by the systems of affect and
• modulated by more recent systems employing
  cognition
• The ensemble represents the self as well as the
  outside world.

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MEETING NEEDS

• Meeting NEEDS is the basic business of life.
  When real (or perceived) needs are not met,
  stress is created.
• Organisms have ancient and powerful mechanisms
  for relieving stress
• Needs exist in a hierarchy of urgencies. When
  the most urgent need is met, all the organisms
  energy is focused on the next need.

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MEETING NEEDS

• Maslows need hierarchy
• Physiology (homeostasis, health)
• Safety (security, order, protection)
• Belonging ( sociability, acceptance, love)
• Esteem (status, prestige, acknowledgment)
• Self-Actualization (individual fulfillment)

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MEETING NEEDS

• ALL our biological adaptations have been
  preserved by natural selection because of their
  ability to help us meet our needs more
  effectively and efficiently.
• THIS includes BEHAVIORAL PATTERNS
• Not the least of which is the creation of
  narratives about causes and consequences.
• Spiritual experiences are unusual states of
  consciousness interpreted to support narratives
  about unseen forces that appear to guide us.

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MEETING NEEDS

• Be all you can be . . .
• (US Army recruiting slogan)
• For most creatures, self-actualization is
  manifest as fitness
• "The aim of life is self-development. To realize
  one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us
  is here for. . . .
• (Oscar Wilde, from The Picture of Dorian Gray)

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G????? sea?t??GNOTHI se AUTON

• To be an effective, competitive organism, we
  would be wise to follow the advice of the Oracle
  at Delphi
• Gnothi se auton
• (Know thyself)
• Is this the primal function
• of art? Of science?

the ancient ruins of the sanctuary of
Apollo at Delphi. is spread out over the southern
slopes of Mount Parnassos, beneath the Phaidriad
rocks.
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Who the Hell Do You Think You Are!?

• Are you nothing more than a squirming mass of
  memories enveloped by an ego boundary?
• At some level, we seem to know that what we call
  matter, is, as the physicist David Bohm once
  observed, is just a ripple on the ocean of
  reality.
• There is an INTUITION of great depth but is
  that just an illusion that keeps us on a
  biologically adaptive path to learn more about
  our SELVES and the WORLD?

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Know Thyself who are you?

• you are a theory.
• The most coherent assemblage of percepts
  consistent within a given context/environment
• THEORIA involves the charmed circle within which
  one is SAFE and SAFE to experiment with
  possibilities to be CREATIVE to be
  SELF-ACTUALIZING

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DUALING HEMISPHERES?
LEFT HEMISPHERE Coherence creates a stable and
internally consistent belief system (Ramachandran
1998) Probabilistic reasoning (Osherson et al
1998) Abstract object recognition (Marsolek 1999)
RIGHT HEMISPHERE Correspondence tests reality
and if damaged, confabulation runs
rampant (Ramachandran 1998) Deductive
reasoning (Osherson et al 1998) Specific object
recognition (Marsolek 1999)
Kant "The senses cannot think, the
understanding cannot see.
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Paths Through the Brain

• SENSATION to PERCEPTION
• INTEGRATION and ASSIMILATION of percepts
• ACTING (including extracorporealization
  making the implicit explicit, as in (e.g.) ART
• PATHS COMPETE

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• "The senses cannot think.
• The understanding cannot see."
• Immanual Kant
• Critique of Pure Reason

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Impulse control is what the higher cognitive
functions are all about
"The sleep of reason produces monsters"
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Reconciling Conflictsthe Dionysian and the
Appolonian

• Chiron

Orpheus
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Chiron

• Chiron, "the most righteous of the Centaurs"
  (Iliad, XI, 83z), was the teacher of Achilles and
  Aesculapius, whom he instructed in the arts of
  music, hunting, and war, as well as medicine and
  surgery.

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HOW WELL DO WE KNOW THE WORLD?
PERCEPTION Is the world within our heads a
good representation of the world as it is? Not
likely
Not likely INDIVIDUAL developmental and
evolutionary background is variable SOCIAL
communications requires us to find a (relatively
limited) common ground
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The Vital Illusions that help us cope
DEVELOPMENTAL ETHOLOGY we may not be competent
to perceive things we have not experienced during
critical stages in development EVOLUTIONARY
ETHOLOGY our sensory apparatus has evolved to
make available information about the world that
is necessary to surviving and thriving in the
environment in which we evolved. We are not
burdened with information that is irrelevant to
our supreme needs
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We see the world not as it is, But as we are .
. .
(Talmud)
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We see the world not as it is, But as we are .
. .
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We see the world not as it is, But as we are .
. .
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We see the world not as it is, But as we are .
. .
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We see the world not as it is, But as we are .
. .
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• "Our life is an appenticeship to the truth that
  around every circle another can be drawn that
  there is no end in nature, but every end is a
  beginning, and under every deep a lower deep
  opens"
• --Ralph Waldo Emerson

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The Natural History of the Self"

• But alongside our insignificance, we have the
  sentiment that we are largethat we contain
  multitudes, as the poet Walt Whitman so famously
  said.
• Part of the resolution of this seeming paradox is
  that humans are part of one another. To be a
  part of the main, as the poet John Donne put it,
  is among the hallmarks of the mystical
  experience.

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The Natural History of the Self"

• DEEP ETHOLOGY the convergence of complementary
  perspectives Development, Ecology, Evolution,
  and Physiology
• The evolutionary significance of KNOWING ONES
  SELF
• The LIMITS of KNOWLEDGE (the world is more
  continuous than our fragmentary knowledge of it)
• The SELF as concerned with CAUSES and
  CONSEQUENCES (history and future)
• TRUTH the convergence of correspondence and
  coherence (expressions of the way the brain is
  organized)

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The mind consists of countless layers of
overlapping, interconnected nets, each sharing
millions of knots called neurons, and deployed to
catch and control whatever experiences will
advance our fitness -- our relative success in
the meeting of needs to survive and thrive. No
single net can catch much of anything of great
use, each catches fragments at best. Art
Organism
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The scientist in the crib

• we were all scientists in the crib developing
  and testing hypotheses about the nature of our
  environments and how best to control them, how
  best to relate to one another.
• Like scientists, rejecting hypotheses that are
  false
• It is a necessary stage of our cognitive
  development. It is the phenomenon of mind that
  ultimately makes learning possible . . . and it
  is the beating heart of the scientific method.

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• Achille e il centauro Chirone (Achilles and
  Chirone the centaur - 1746) -- Pompeo Girolamo
  Batoni (Lucca 1708 - Rome 1787)

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Reason and Passioncognition and affect
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Reason and Passioncognition and affect

• Apollo and the Centaurs
• West pediment, central group of Apollo and
  Centaurs

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The Natural History of the Self"

• But mystical experiences are transformative!
• Sorry, Im not myself. I just had a mystical
  experience
• MYSTICAL EXPERIENCES are not only Ineffable, but
  Noetic, Transient, and Passive
• they may be facilitated by preliminary voluntary
  operations, like meditation, but once it begins
  it seems out of ones control as if he or she
  were grasped and held by a superior power
• William James 1918

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There are moments, and it is only a matter of
five or six seconds, when you feel the presence
of the eternal harmony ... a terrible thing is
the frightful clearness with which it manifests
itself, and the rapture with which it fills
you. Dostoyevski
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WHAT are our NEEDS?
Why do we need to know our selves?

• Health? Safety? Belonging? Prestige?
  Self-Actualization? (Maslow)
• For many of us, once other needs are met (or
  rendered irrelevant), to become one with the
  truth you seek is a key need. Attaining truth
  can be a peak experience, and one that can, in
  part, be facilitated or enhanced by an
  understanding of the proximate (physiological)
  and ultimate (evolutionary) aspects of its
  natural history.

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Reason and Passioncognition and affect

• Apollo and Marsyas

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Apollos temple at Delphi, built in 373 B.C. with
tall Doric columns made up of thick cylindrical
stones stacked on top of one another. In its
adyton, the gods oracle spoke through the
Pythian priestess
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THE MIND of the CENTAUR (The Beast in the Brain)
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Laterality and Gradientsside-to-side,
front-to-back

• Left and right hemispheres

• Prefrontal cortex to posterior cerebrum

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What are my LIMITS?

• KNOWING who you are is an artifact of cerebral
  mechanisms for helping you maximizing your
  fitness!
• Being ALL YOU CAN BE
• Emotions and cognition, ART and SCIENCE,
  intuition and rationality, senses and reason, are
  ways our minds tell us who we are and exercise
  and extend our boundaries and potential

Vitruvian Man by Leonardo reflects
his conviction that all things can be measured
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The Natural History of the Self

• The LIMITS of KNOWLEDGE
• the world is known only in fragments . . .
  a sense of continuity depends upon neural
  mechanisms.
• We have an instinctive conviction in an
  intellectually accessible mechanistic order in
  nature. (AN Whitehead 1967)

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but how do we get to who we are?

• Congenital endowment
• Development
• Progressive change within an individual
  (experience, neuroplasticity)
• Epigenesis genes affect and are affected by the
  environment

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The scientist in the crib

• we were all scientists in the crib developing
  and testing hypotheses about the nature of our
  environments and how best to control them, how
  best to relate to one another.
• Like scientists, rejecting hypotheses that are
  false
• It is a necessary stage of our cognitive
  development. It is the phenomenon of mind that
  ultimately makes learning possible . . . and it
  is the beating heart of the scientific method.

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SELF CONSCIOUSNESS

• "Before the connection of thought and brain can
  be explained, it must be stated in elementary
  form and there are great difficulties about
  stating it. . . . Many would find relief at this
  point in celebrating the mystery of the
  unknowable and the "awe" which we should feel. .
  . .
• It may be constitutional infirmity, but I can
  take no comfort in such devices for making a
  luxury of intellectual defeat. . . . Better live
  on the ragged edge, better gnaw the file
  forever!"
• (William James 1950177-199)

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CAN the SELF be DESCRIBED?

• there are multiple attributes of SELF including
  competing attributes any one of which can
  dominate.
• These ordinarily converge in varying proportion
  on what we recognize as who we are.
• As in other aspects of behavior, each of these
  has a distinctive development, context,
  evolutionary history and mechanism of expression.

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SO WHAT IS THE SELF

• A graded integration of nested cognitive
  abilities that yield a more-or-less unified sense
  of who we are.
• In James view, the self consists of
• The material Self
• The social Self
• The spiritual Self

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SO WHAT IS THE SELF

• internal self call it centripetal, in which
  ones deepest core values are borne, nurtured,
  reside, and provide an overarching personality
• external self call it centrifugal, in which
  the boundaries of ones competencies are defined
  and extend out to influence those around us.
  This is extrasomatory self, those external
  expressions of inner meaning that are initially
  manifest as we test, explore, and exercise our
  competencies
• . . . as in reafference (feedback that
  fine-tunes our intended actions)
• . . . supremely manifest as art.

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