Losing Oneself

Category: blog-post

  • same old body

    William James – the nineteenth centure pioneer of Psychology – wrote the following:

    Contrary to the perception of an object, which can be perceived from different perspectives or even cease to be perceived, we experience “the feeling of the same old body always there”

    – William James

    There’s something about the way in which we take our bodies for granted in James’ statement. That we tend to think of our bodies as consistent and constant (rather than fabulous Ships of Theseus).

    Yet, in this work – and in much movement work that focuses on sensitising the body as it feels – there is nothing ‘same old’ about it. The feeling is more like an ongoing refreshing of the body in which what is new or different or fresh or distinct (whether it be temperature, position, friction, weight, tingling, movement) manifests a same new body.

  • shimmer

    I’ve mentioned before in data data data and in low fidelity documentation just how complex the ways in which some of the practical work in the studio might be documented and shared.

    A while back I happened across a simple post-production technique called motion extraction by the YouTuber Posy. It made me think that it might be a way to reach towards just how much movement is going on when it seems like very little is happening.

    My colleague Heinrich Escano is a video artist and was keen to have a go. Here’s a brief sample of Katye Coe practising our version of authentic movement in the studio:

    What I find most interesting is how the body seems to start to shimmer when there is next to no movement happening. I find my attention drawn in very closely to those actions and stillnesses. It’s not precisely what I am imagining but it’s a good first test or prototype.

  • the ordinary self and nonduality

    To the ordinary self, NDA appears as an object of sorts, something one might want to experience or as a capacity one might want to have. To NDA, however, the ordinary self and its constituting processes, to the extent that they can be phenomenally accessed, appear as contents within its space.[1]

    – Josipovic and Miskovi

    In the above quote Josipovic and Miskovic describe a vital aspect of nonduality. That is, the self (or what we think of as a self) is simply yet another thing (or object) in consciousness. Furthermore, there is no “I” aware of itself as an object in consciousness, because where would that “I” exist or be located? Rather there is simply no “I”. This is what is meant by the unification of subject and object.

    The proposition here is that we human beings are already nondual; nonduality is not a ‘state’ to be reached (like we might say ‘flow states’ are). Rather we create and recreate the self as part of the process of grasping or reaching for sense. Sam Harris refers to this as selfing:

    … your mental experience of the world is a process. It is not a static something. So the experience of being a self, an ego, in the middle of all of these changing neurophysiological states, it too must be a process. It’s a verb, it’s not a noun. You are selfing your experience. You are not a self standing in the middle of experience. Self is a kind of action. It’s the act of identifying. It’s the act of grasping.[2]

    – Sam Harris

    [1] Josipovic, Z. and Miskovic, V. (2020) ‘Nondual Awareness and Minimal Phenomenal Experience’. Frontiers in Psychology 11, 2087

    [2] Harris, S. (nodate) Ego and Illusion. [online] available from https://dynamic.wakingup.com/course/CE2E59 [30 January 2024] (from 01:29min).

  • simple gif

    These images are of Katye Coe dancing on 13 March 2024. I looked at the first one (slightly out of shot) and then grabbed the next 50.

  • data data data

    Just as a strange kind of wtf there are approximately 36000 photos from 10 days of studio practice, and a rude quantity of video footage. All photographs were taken as part of timelapses so the framing is effectively arbitrary and designed to cover the space.

    I’ve mostly resisted thinking too much about what I might do with the photos and videos but here are two images from yesterday (13 March 2024) presented as a single image. Katye and I never danced together but it’s very easy to create masks for the photos and then populate a single image with 2 (or 1000s) of figures. Note that I also added a blue filter to the images.

    Here’s the original of just Katye:

    And then here’s an composition with a second image of Katye (this time the mask isn’t so crisp) taken from a different perspective. Curious to note (even with these knocked together images) just how different it is when there are two versions of the same person in the image — that it immediately is recognisably “photoshopped”.

  • next phase

    Yesterday (Wednesday 13 March 2024) Katye Coe and I finished the studio-based phase of the project. If you’ve been looking around this blog you will have noticed that most of the posts are really background information: philosophical and theoretical things that have in some way been important to the research.

    This is what is next:

    • Meritt Millman will take a look at the various questionnaires Katye and I completed during the final 3 days of studio practice. These are questionnaires about mindfulness, flow and interoception.
    • Michaela Gerussi will continue reviewing literature exploring improvisation, awareness and consciousness.
    • Katye and I will work through the transcripts of the conversations before to see what needs further conversation and thinking

    Although I’ll continue to post background information here, very slowly I’ll start posting material that will reflect the conversations and practice. These posts will be (I think) a little bit more like insights.

  • awareness as modulation of organism and environment

    Here’s Jay Garfield (again) writing about the embedded, embodied, enactive and extended 4E) approach to cognition:

    we can think of awareness as a mode of embedding of the organism in its world, instead of as the relation between an interior subject and an exterior object, even if that is how it appears to us in introspection. To think of awareness in this way is to take seriously the idea that we don’t stand against the world as subjects that detect its properties or agents that act on it, but instead are part of the world, and that awareness is more an attunement to our environment than a recording in our minds of what is going on outside.

    – Jay Garfield, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self

    Garfield’s explanation is more complicated when we think about our bodies; that the body easily becomes another object (but this time an interior object) looked at by some other interior subject. This is the linguistic trope (at least in English) that we have a body. But who is the ‘we’ in that phrase that is other to the body?

    In this project, in the movement practice conceived as non dual awareness there is no ‘we’ or ‘I’ as subject. Rather, perhaps we can re-think the nature of the environment as described by Garfield. That is, the environment does not start at the boundary of the skin and that the separation between human as (dancing) organism and the environment is more or less arbitrary. Certainly, the extended part of 4E cognition aligns with such a conceptualisation.

    Perhaps though I’ve missed a vital part of Garfield’s thinking here; that “awareness is more an attunement to our environment”. But attunement by what or who? In the English language (and certainly in the romantic langauges) it’s nigh impossible to avoid subject-object splits.

  • consciousness

    I’ve been mentioning consciousness quite a lot on this blog. But what is it?

    Annaka Harris is a editor and consultant for science writers and the author of a lucid introduction to the nature of consciousness research called Conscious: a brief guide to the fundamental mystery of the mind (2019). She writes:

    And even though, as mentioned earlier, Thomas Nagel’s definition of the word “consciousness” (i.e., being like something) is the most accurate way to talk about subjective experience, there are a variety of ways people use the word (the capacity for self-reflection, wakefulness, alertness, etc.), which causes additional confusion.

    – Annaka Harris

    Nagel’s definition is from a 1974 article called What Is It Like to Be a Bat? and his perspective on consciousness as subjective experience is now known simply as the “what it’s like” thought experiment. It boils down to this:

    An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something that it is like for the organism.

    – Thomas Nagel

    Anil Seth describes the importance of this idea as follows:

    Without consciousness, it may hardly matter whether you live for another five years or another five hundred. In all that time there would be nothing it would be like to be you.

    – Anil Seth

    Yet, how consciousness relates to awareness, perception, attention, sensation and feeling (and how to disambiguate these different terms which are often used interchangeably in dance research) is for another time.

  • nonduality

    Nonduality “encompasses a unified experience in which the boundaries between self and environment dissolve”.[1] It is when subject and object are unified.

    It is also known as consciousness-as-such [2] and in Asian contemplative traditions it is variously known as pure consciousness, pure awareness, nondual awareness (NDA), rigpa, timeless or choiceless awareness, being-awareness-bliss, the Self, the fourth, Atman-Brahman, Buddha-nature, clear light, Shiva-Shakti, etc .[3]

    Aside from the idea that non dual awareness can co-occur with any content Josipovic and Miskovic write:

    we advance the perspective that consciousness-as-such is first and foremost a type of awareness, that is non-conceptual, non-propositional, and nondual, in other words, non-representational. This awareness is a unique kind, and cannot be reduced to a level of arousal and phenomenal content, or to their mental representations and representational models.[3]

    Nonduality’s relationship to flow states is not at all clear to me. There are certainly degrees of overlap but at this stage my hunch is that they are different in kind, or perhaps that experiences of flow are a subset of nonduality, or provide insight into this open awareness that is equivalent to consciousness.

    References

    [1] Lynch, J.M. and Troy, A.S. (2021) ‘The Role of Nonduality in the Relationship Between Flow States and Well-Being’. Mindfulness 12 (7), 1639–1652

    [2] Metzinger, T. (2019). Minimal phenomenal experience: the ARAS-model theory: steps toward a minimal model of conscious experience as such. MindRxiv, https://www.philosophie.fb05.uni-mainz.de/files/2019/04/MPE_discussion_paper_March_2019.pdf

    [3] Josipovic, Z. and Miskovic, V. (2020) ‘Nondual Awareness and Minimal Phenomenal Experience’. Frontiers in Psychology 11, 2087

  • the paradox of choice

    In the middle of a guided Waking Up meditation I hear the following words:

    Observe that you don’t actually choose the next thing you notice; whatever it is. Everything is simply appearing, including acts of attention. You don’t know what you will pay attention to next. See if you can drop back into that position of merely witnessing whatever happens.

    – Sam Harris, https://dynamic.wakingup.com/daily/DA9545D

    This is a difficult idea to assimilate: even the act of attending to the body is simply appearing in consciousness, and we do not know what we will pay attention to next. Consciousness is merely happening.

    But perhaps the condition of unusually high degrees of movement provided by the context of dancing mean that sensations in the body are simply more likely to appear in consciousness. If this is the case, then is there an agent here? And if so, who is that agent?

    This is a paradox of choice. We think we are directing our attention and it feels like we are directing our attention, but attention is merely yet another appearance in consciousness. If this is the case, then why do we move or dance in the ways we do? Habit? Training? Some kind of predictive processing in which we our orient towards movement and body-based priors feed consciousness and vice versa?

    Here’s the full transcript of the meditation:

    Let your body resolve itself into a cloud of sensation. Pay close enough attention so as to relinquish the form of your body. The shape of your hands, and back and head. Just let each new sensation appear in consciousness.

    And among this many sensations are those of the breath.

    And now notice whatever sounds you hear. And let your mind expand so it’s just the space in which sounds and sensations are appearing.

    And the moment you notice you are lost in thought, watch the thought itself unwind. And just come back to noticing sensations and sounds.

    Observe that you don’t actually choose the next thing you notice; whatever it is. Everything is simply appearing, including acts of attention. You don’t know what you will pay attention to next. See if you can drop back into that position of merely witnessing whatever happens.

    Again the moment you notice a thought is present witness it clearly. Where does it go? And then briefly look for the thinker. Look for the seat of attention. Look for what’s looking. And then leave your mind at rest.

    In the last minute of the session, become clearly aware of the sensations in your body. Return to the undifferentiated cloud of temperature, and pressure, tingling. Whatever is there.

    – Sam Harris, https://dynamic.wakingup.com/daily/DA9545D