I’ve been working on a post about human cruelty — based on Molly Crabapple’s 2026 book about the Jewish Bund: Here Where We Live is Our Country — and I’m having trouble fitting it into the Two Trees theme of this website. So, since I haven’t posted for well over two months, I thought I’d revisit the covert-behaviour-as-cognition underpinning for my argument that our human “Tree of Knowledge” is essentially a compromised-at-the-root reconstitution of genetic evolution’s “Tree of Life”. The excerpts here, from Essay Thirty-One in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice, are not found in the selections from that essay presented in Two Buddhas sequence (https://www.extremophilechoice.com/2022/10/01/two-buddhas-short-selections-from-darwin-dogen-etc/) on this website.
It may very well be that in our conscious inner lives the interplay among the senses is what constitutes the sense of touch. Perhaps touch is not just skin contact with things, but the very life of things in the mind? —McLuhan [1]
Speaking from experience, I am convinced that the best carpenters make practical ‘sense’ of the messages coming from their eyes—as they scan a drawing or a built framework for instance—only because they use their bodies to under-stand connectivity itself. And yet my reading on the subject reveals only this: that ever since literary men first began to write down their philosophies, the objects of perception have typically been de-scribed in primarily visual terms. One might be excused for wondering if this is a practised (but not necessarily deliberate) oversight, due to the need of indelible author-ity to verbally and pictorially grasp at the hope of a non-material, and non-mortal, self-possessed mind. Or perhaps it’s just that the semiotician’s background-foreground illusion has not yet been seriously considered at this deepest of all cognitive levels. The illusion in fact must be absolute for sensible human beings who naturally hesitate to take that absurd final step of thinking medium vs message where these are so finally thus.
But in McLuhan’s “culture … long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control”, where an author must spin a partial and relative web of argument which is inevitably a universe easily “reduced to absurdity”, why should the Totality of our lived experience interfere with his/her bold deconstructive mission? Then let’s begin by asking an absurdly simple question: How can vision alone extract ‘meaning’ from an animal’s, or an animated machine’s, ‘environment’?
Persevering in these boldly dualistic terms, how else, from the moment our infant eyes are opened, can knowledge about ‘there’ be registered as meaningful, if not by responses of the body ‘here’? If only by the voluntary or involuntary contraction (or the resistance to contraction) of a single muscle fibre attached to a vertebra, a wrist bone, an eyeball or its lens? We call even those ‘motionless’ shadows that seem to map out our fainter impressions, feelings; so how can the geography of cognitive tensions, or our brain maps of projected in-tension, be other than the body itself? I find it hard to accept that any of my thoughts or imaginings can have meaning before they are registered by some impulse in my brain aiming, if only tentatively, at the fibres that relate my body to its environment. [2] So let’s agree for the moment (allowing for dreams, and for the late Steven Hawking’s profound immobility) that my use of the term, motor program, need not imply actual movement. Indeed, until some threshold of a brain’s efferent population of impulses is crossed, their effect on muscle fibres might not be afferently, let alone act-ually, ‘felt’.
So then: are impulses to be cast as genes, action potentials as genotypes, and overt actions as organisms in our evolutionary analogy here? I must admit it’s difficult to assign a perfect set of neurological correlates to Natural selection’s three-phase dynamic: a genepool design space reiterating from its archive a supply of various fixed mortal organisms to advance the seamlessly evolving Reality of Natural selection (though others have in fact made similar attempts) [3]. Even with its jiggered genepool “design space” third phase, we have natural selection working only on phenotypes, while its behavioural counterpart works on many levels —where both language and habit are “archival”. But is perfection really necessary? Isn’t it the imperfection of analogy that opens our eyes, proving Leonard Cohen’s Anthem lyric, [4] “There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”?
While I acknowledge that this alternative phenomenology, weighted in favour of the deep tactile afferent-efferent sense rather than the visual, may seem to disregard the full richness of mental experience, I ask you to trust, for now, a carpenter-philosopher’s sense of restoring literary balance while he deconstructs himself as a tool-making animal. While my authority to speculate on biological evolution is strictly that of a well-read amateur, my claim to expertise in what I’ve been calling a phylogenic tree of knowledge, stands upon a long and detailed intimacy with tools—the technological means to fulfill culture’s branching.
I also enlist in this “alternative phenomenology” project my twenty-five-year familiarity with a Zen tradition that teaches us to resolve even our subtle e-motions silently, within a bodymind ‘before words’. For this is how an artful carpenter’s mind works: (From Essay Seven) A carpenter — or any hands-on artisan and creative problem solver for that matter who’s also well-read in evolution and cognition — might say that Gerald Edelman (originator of the Neural Darwinism theory) speaks only for the conceptual point of view when he writes, “we all know that when we first learn a new skill we need consciously to control everything we do, but after some time our performance becomes automatic and soon fades from consciousness”. Thus, with practice, he says, what starts out “slow, laborious, and prone to error” becomes “fast, easy, and accurate” as “conscious control becomes superfluous, and disappears.” [5]
Now suppose, for the sake of argument, we’re learning to shingle a roof. My problem with this truism, as a complete accounting of my own experience, is this: just because I’ve acquired the skill of shingling and I’m no longer breaking down the process into separate actions, this doesn’t mean I’m not conscious of the action. In the past, I have shingled roofs automatically: my mind on more ‘important’ things (like how I’m going to spend my pay). Trust me, the job is done faster, better, safer, and more profitably when I’m fully aware of what I’m doing: when I feel the grit on my fingertips, the sun on my back, and my hammer blows shivering the same clear air as the white-throated sparrow’s all-penetrating song (Old-Man-Peabody-Peabody-Peabody!). At these times it’s true that I can’t conceptualise my actions without losing my focus. But my action is deliberate. Perhaps you too have noticed that most carpenters (I would go so far as to say the most productive ones) have a problem putting their skill into words. They ask you for a “thing-a-ma-gummy” when they don’t have a free hand. And just as intuitively, you “get it”!
I accept that habits are convenient when you want to turn your attention to other things—indeed if you think about tying your shoe lace you might discover you no longer know how! But there are many ways of knowing, and if you let your fingers take charge, without thinking, you can still be fully aware of what you’re ‘doing’. Thought is reluctant to question its sufficiency, and it’s this ‘failure’ to reduce whole body intelligence to head-games that is subsequently construed in the thinking mind of even our otherwise competent carpenter as evidence of work ‘unconsciously’ done.
Personally, I (as a thinking mind) prefer the reflecting pool simile given earlier (https://www.extremophilechoice.com/2022/05/14/two-buddhas-part-5-not-other-than-a-fallen-leaf-or-a-footprint/) over the other more discrete conceptions of consciousness listed there; for if similes, metaphors, and analogies are also incomplete, they are honestly so. Certainly this one must change with the times, for we now know, whereas the ancients did not, that the reflective surface of a pond does not overlie a ‘dead’ balance; what looks like still water is not a static equilibrium, but rather a dynamic harmony of molecules in motion. So we might want to characterise our own experience during especially ‘conscious’ moments in more active terms: “It was like my mind and body were in perfect balance and I was open to any challenge. Every step on the dance floor (stroke of the brush, swing of the hammer, grip on the rock face …) belonged to its own moment in time where the right (as in the eight-fold path meaning of ‘uncalculated’) response just happened.” (To be fair, early Buddhists were talking about stillness of desire, not the natural arising and passing away of thoughts—like molecules beneath non-agitated reflection?)
1. McLuhan, 1964, p. 105.
2. That robots, like children, learn from “the shape of the body and the kinds of things it can do” has been recently demonstrated by Angelo Cangelosi of the University of Plymouth in England and Linda B. Smith, a developmental psychologist at Indiana University Bloomington. Source: Diana Kwon, Scientific American, March 2018 (volume 318, number 3), “Self-Taught Robots” pp. 26-31.
3. See: Fernando, Chrisantha. Aug. 2013. From Blickets to Synapses: Inferring Temporal Causal Networks by Observation. Cognitive Science, Vol. 37, Issue 8, pp. 1426-1470. —“We have reason to believe that language learning is an evolutionary process occurring during development, in which populations of constructions compete for communicative success. We have reason to believe that during human problem solving, multiple solutions are entertained recombined and mutated in the brain. We have reason to believe that evolutionary methods provide a powerful ensemble approach to combine populations of decomposed and segmented predictive models of the world, policies, and value functions. We have reason to believe that causal inference can play an important role in copying patterns of connectivity between one part of the brain and another part, by one part of the brain observing the spikes from another part of the brain, and that the same mechanism can be used to infer causal relations in perceived inputs. In short, multiple constraints at many levels make the idea of evolutionary neurodynamics not as crazy as it would seem from any one perspective.”
4. Simmons, 2012, pp. 390-392 (lyrics from Leonard Cohen song, “Anthem”; selection includes commentary).
5. Edelman, 2000, p. 57.
