In Harmonium

Posted By Marc on May 18, 2009

Over the past several months, I have been doing a lot of thinking about how people think.  This has led me down some rather odd trails, but I thought I would toss out a few ideas and see what people think.

Let me start by saying that I am really interested in the question of how people, as humans, form what, for want of a better term, I’ll call perceptual fields.  By this, I mean a combination of interpretive schema operating at the (mostly) sub-conscious (but cultural) level together with associated “settings” for sensory input.

While the idea of cultural schema is pretty well known, the idea of settings for sensory levels isn’t.  However, if you want an example, try lying down on your bed and concentrating on one toe.  Do this for 10 minutes or so and then try to stand up.  My guess, is that you will take a fall before your brain readjusts the sensory settings to reduce input from the toe.

What this is getting at is a fairly well known phenomenon – cultural schema can condition or “set” neural perceptions and, in some cases, vice versa.  I can say that it is a fairly well known phenomenon not because of any particular survey of academic literature, but because the pop culture name for one of the states I’m referring to is “in the zone” or “in the grove” (think sports).

But what does this have to do with “thinking”?

Thought is a rather strange thing / area of research.  We actually have no generally accepted, cross-disciplinary definition of “thought”, putting up, instead, with a mish-mash of differing conceptual definitions. Indeed, each discipline has a tendency to construct different and sometimes conflicting, conceptual maps while, at the same time, not reading in other disciplines.

So,…. “perceptual fields”.  The basic concept that I use for them stems from the work of Alfred Krozybski – in particular, his concept of a “semantic reaction” the [culturally and individually] programmed responses, both affective and intellectual, towards a symbol. This “programming” must be viewed as active and ongoing, rather than “static”; in other words, it changes over time and experience.  Some times, these changes are predictable, at least at the population level.  Consider, by way of example, changes in “meaning” based around age and life course.  Other times, the changes are purely random and unpredictably; the result of happenstance.

Now, for Korzybski and later symbolic anthropologists such as Victor Turner, symbols do not exist in a vacuum.  Rather, they exist in an interlinked and constantly shifting network of networks based on associations between them.  These “associations” also shift over time, again sometimes in predictable ways and sometimes in totally unpredictable ways.  Not only do the associations shift over time, they also can shift over “context”, which gives rise to part of the reason why symbols are polysemic.  Furthermore, there is often a significant difference between the associations (and “meanings”) of symbols held by individuals and those held by their “culture” (i.e. between the individual and population levels).

The reason I raise this issue of individual vs. population level association is key to a lot of my arguments.  The population level symbolic network constructs the means of communications – the media, the genres, etc. – between members of a population, but the messages are constructed and decoded by individuals.  This is a simple little piece out of communications theory that has, or should have,  a strong impact on the entire discussion of thought.  In particular, it goes back to a very basic philosophical question: is a “thought” a “thought” if it cannot be communicated?

This may sound like a silly question but, I believe, it is a crucial one for almost all areas of human endeavour.  Let me take an example area which I have been working on for a while: Security Force Assistance (SFA).  The recent publication of FM 3-07-1 Security Force Assistance by TRADOC (announcement here, PDF here) spends a fair bit of time discussing the absolute necessity of communications between the advisor and the people they are working with.  In what I consider to be one of the most insightful passages, the manual notes that

2-1. Conducting successful security force assistance (SFA) requires a specific mindset. This mindset focuses on working by, with, and through foreign security forces (FSF) to support the host nation’s internal defense and development (which includes local security requirements) or regional organization’s charter.

While I could easily expend a lot of time on pulling this apart, I won’t.  I will merely note that the passage quoted above implies that successful SFA requires a mindset that is radically different from that of conventional US forces in that it is focused on the host nation and not on the US.  Furthermore, and this comes out much more fully later in the manual, advisors must understand at a gut level (verstehen or empathic understanding) the culture of the nation they are working in and tailor their advising to that culture (well, at least in theory!).

Now, this is all about cross-cultural communications which, when you come right down to it, is about taking presentations of thoughts from one symbolic network and “translating” them into another symbolic network.  Or, to put it another way, it is about taking a “thought” from one universe of discourse and translating it into another universe of discourse.

Anyone who has ever tried to translate from one language to another will realize that there are difficulties with that; trying to translate from one perceptual field to another is even more difficult.  It is not, however, impossible, at least as long as the individual(s) involved start with some idea of what their basic commonalities are.

The simplest and most basic commonalities are certain biologically based actions: eating and drinking come to mind (as do a few others that I won’t mention here ).  Almost anyone can figure out how to “communicate” that they would like something to eat or drink via very basic sign language.  Even my cat can do this (although my wife’s dog does have some problems…).

So what, I can hear people thinking.  Well, what this means is that there is usually, at the base of any necessary communication, something in the “material realm” that can be used to establish a set of signs and signifiers that can cross both cultures and perceptual fields.  Or, in other words, there should always be a “ground of being” for every perceptual field that is common to all humans (or, at least, to the vast majority of humans assuming “normal” genetic makeup).

What does this have to do with something like Security Force Advising?  Well, what is the “ground of being” (“basic need” in Malinowski’s terminology) of SFA?  Put simply, it is the construction and maintenance of a) a predictable security environment which b) contains a “culturally acceptable” level (and form) of violence.  At a more basic level, it all about a rather basic set of archetypes which are grounded in our evolutionary past: the defensor hominem, the Warrior, etc.

Let me start with the defensor hominem archetype, since it is the most directly applicable to SFA.  Roughly translated, it means “The Defender of Mankind”, and its primary connotations are in placing oneself between “danger” and “your people”.  When looked at in terms of species evolution, it is a pretty critical role – hey, someone has to stand between the children and the lions on the savannah!  It also tends to be pretty tightly tied in with males and/or non-child bearing females, which also makes a lot of sense when you think about it in terms of reproductive viability at a group level.

Normally, at least if I followed the standard sociobiology line, this would be the start of a “learned discussion” on altruism and reciprocal altruism.  Well, that’s been done elsewhere and, quite frankly, it doesn’t interest me that much except as a problem in communications (sorry, Jerry!).  As a problem in communications, however, it does create some very interesting points.

First, one extrapolation of it is that people will defend their “home turf” (and “family) first; a situation that has distinct implications for most conventional military as well as SFA operations.  In order to get people to move away from protecting their home turf and family, how do you do it?  Well, one option is to get people to perceive the larger group as “family”; we tend to think about this in terms of “nationalism” in the West, but there are certainly other groups than the nation state that use such a strategy (various religious organizations come to mind).  A second way is to cut all ties between the individual and their family either via an indoctrination process (numerous cults), by removing them from their families (e.g. the Janisarries), or by the simple expedient of eliminating their families (e.g. the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda).

The focus in SFA on which strategy to follow, at least according to FM 3-07-1, is quite clear (2-1):

Soldiers conducting SFA must also understand that legitimacy is vital. The relevant population must perceive FSF as legitimate for long-term success.

What is potentially problematic about this focus is the assumption of “nationalism”, in the sense of an extension of the family to the nation, in many of the states wherein SFA is and/or will be conducted.  (This, however, is the topic of another post sometime in the future.)

Let me return, for the moment, to the problem of communications.  In order to build a “translation”, one has to concentrate on what is – what can be pointed to and what is common between the people involved – rather than what one person (or group) thinks should be or is “self evident”.  This was one of the major points I was trying to make in Chapter 4 of the Mosul Case Study (see here).

All of this, in my usual, round about way, takes me back to that philosophical question of is a “thought” a “thought” if it cannot be communicated?  One of the primary reasons why some “thoughts” cannot be communicated is that they cannot be comprehended by the receiver.  In many cases, this appears as a rejection out of hand for being “illogical” which, in reality, means that they do not meet wiuth expected and accepted patterns of explanation in the receivers perceptual field.  In other cases, they are literally incomprehensible – “insane” as it were (“psychotic” if one wishes to be technical) – because there is no perceived commonality in their grounds of being.

In both of these cases, however, please note that the boundary conditions that categorize a communicated thought as either “illogical” or “insane” (i.e. as ≠ a “true thought”) are culturally defined.  And, lest I be accused of some Us = True, Them = False sillyness, cultural definitions of “true thought” operate at both ends, sender and receiver.  The only possible way to side step these automatic reactions is to establish that commonality in grounds of being, creating the perception that something that may be reacted to, in and of itself as “illogical” and/or “insane” may be possible.

Category: Anthropology, Communications Theory, Ethics
Tags: Communications, Ontology, Security Force Advising