Uncertainty & Spatial Bias

It’s natural to try identifying a particular object as being the cause of something. We want to nail it down and say, “here’s the cause, right here; just fix this and we’re all good,” or, “here’s what makes us conscious… and here’s what set the universe in motion: the mystery is solved once and for all!”

Yet, again and again, all of the causes we identify — causes of failure, causes of wars, causes of great accomplishments, causes of natural and physical facts — keep pointing even further and further back.

At some point making sense of these complex systems gets too difficult. Inevitably in every investigation we stop tracing causal chains back in time and we start looking at general patterns (sometimes imagined ones) and then we give the pattern a name like good, evil, hate, love, greed, resentment, altruism, change, uncertainty, chance, or something else abstract. It’s unavoidable. Sometimes it works pretty well; other times it doesn’t.

Saying that evil “caused” 9/11 and greed “caused” numerous financial breakdowns doesn’t explain anything. They’re simply names we give patterns of social phenomena. When we say “greed caused the financial crisis” we’re simply saying people’s behaviour through the financial crisis is consistent with behaviour we conveniently tend to categorize as “greedy.”

It’s the individual events that are responsible, not the categories we use to make sense of them. Yet we have to act on the ideas we have, so we accept them and get on with it — however imperfect they may be — at least until we can come up with better explanations.

But then we’re still left with questions about the causes of behaviour that’s greedy, altruistic, etc. These ought to be left to specialized researchers to answer scientifically. Unfortunately we can’t afford to wait for their answers. Political and economic questions need to be addressed with the best knowledge we have now. We have to proceed with the imperfect knowledge we have.

And we want to proceed with our imperfect knowledge. Whether one tends to take action or tends to reflect on ideas, we can’t stop ourselves from believing something. There’s never a moment we’re not doing or making things, and we’re constantly experiencing various feeling of attraction and revulsion, desire and disgust. And then there are even more basic processes we take for granted.

Things are always happening. Right now we’re both breathing, our hearts are pumping oxygen from our lungs to our brains, making sure our neurons fire fast enough to translate the light hitting our eyes into images and words, affecting our streams of thought and influencing our ideas.

Even when we die there are processes of decay occurring. Meanwhile the planet moves in orbit while the burning sun evaporates rivers and seas which condenses into clouds that are blown by winds until changing temperatures release rain that falls to fill reservoirs and streams and nourish the plants that generate the oxygen that circulates to our brains so we can think about these things.

Think of a whirlpool that forms over a drain and persists as long as water continues to flow into it. Now think of the same sort of motion occurring in a hurricane seen from Space, or the Great Red Spot seen on Jupiter’s surface.¹ We think and talk about these stable, nonequilibrium ordered systems as if they are permanent, discrete objects — as if they could exist independently — but their existence depends on ongoing occurrences: energy and matter flowing both into and out of them.

Such nonequilibrium ordered systems, called “dissipative structures,” are very common in our world. Ilya Prigogine was awarded the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research on these dynamic systems, and spent much of the rest of his life urging the broader scientific community to appreciate temporal characteristics.²

Temporality is tough to fully appreciate because we usually take time for granted. We evolved to go with the flow while building structures and tools from all the blocks and bits of hard stuff around us. We evolved to perceive and shape the rigid outlines of objects while ignoring the ambiguous flux that’s constantly occurring — not just around us, but in us (and as us) as well.

Most of what we take for granted in our social and economic realities are either dissipative structures or affected (i.e. within) dissipative structures; we can talk about them as if they’re solid things, but their existence depends on continuous occurrence. For example, if every economic indicator hypothetically stayed flat for a year, it would not be because everything stopped, it would be because of constant production, revenues keeping up with expenditures, steady turnover of employment, etc. Likewise, even the proverbial small town where “nothing ever happens” and the population stays the same actually consists of many complementary occurrences — like the rhythms of the seasons or the human body.

Even you and I are nonequilibrium systems, composed of — and suspended by — multiple dissipative structures: the cells in our bodies are nonequilibrium systems exchanging matter and energy with surrounding structures, our thoughts are nonequilibrium systems; so are our communities, our organizations, and our economies. If it wasn’t for events constantly occurring through and around us, we wouldn’t exist at all — and if we could exist (absurdly) without occurrence, it would be at the expense of action, sensation, mind, or any future whatsoever.

These processes are so constant, they’re so established, so regular, we hardly even think of them as happening. We conveniently conceptualize all these living processes as static things. We describe these processes as collections of parts — like parts of a car that can be kept on cognitive shelves in our minds and our books until we need to assemble them, one-by-one, into theories.

Like the poet said,

Our meddling intellect

Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:–

We murder to dissect.³

Then we find ourselves stuck with static models that don’t move and grow the way things do in real life, so we have to ask, “What makes all of these processes go?” — “What is life?” “What is altruism?” “What is time?” — and we roll up our sleeves, carving away, looking for the force or particle that animates the world.

But we’re looking for the wrong things. We shouldn’t be looking for any thing at all. Instead we should recognize that by conceptualizing life as an assemblage of static parts we’ve omitted, or “murdered” and sterilized the simple fact that things always happen, and the notion that things can exist without happening is just a hypothetical construct that is often useful but can’t always be exploited.

To get a better sense this bias and what’s required to counter it, try to imagine the smallest particles of matter. If you’re like me, you probably start by visualizing spatial forms that are absolutely sterilized of temporal qualities, and then you hit the proverbial ON switch to set them in motion. There is no empirical or rational justification for thinking like this, unless we’re thinking about machines and other things we fabricate ourselves. Everything that occurs in nature (including your own mind) has both spatial and temporal characteristics; there’s no way to know which came first.

If we allow ourselves to imagine purely spatial objects despite the fact we know that everything has temporal characteristics, what happens if we try the contrasting approach? Try imagining the smallest particles of matter by conceptualizing purely temporal characteristics first, and then give them spatial form… I’m not sure it’s possible to start. I can’t even imagine a “purely temporal characteristic” without first imagining spatial forms.

For heuristic purposes, if we imagine a spectrum between pure space and pure time (while noting how we rely on another spatial image to do so), motion and becoming would be in the middle of that spectrum; they aren’t directly opposed to rest (or fixity) and being. Motion and becoming involve both time and space, while fixity and being are abstractions at the extreme end of pure space. Timelines and ticking clocks would be in the middle of the spectrum too — those have spatial characteristics.

It’s kind of an absurd exercise — but also an enlightening one, which vividly demonstrates that, as Henri Bergson put it, “intellectualized time is space… the elimination of time is the habitual, normal, commonplace act of our understanding.”⁴

Specifically, I call this “spatial bias”: our tendency to frame concepts in spatial terms, thereby diminishing the importance of life’s temporal qualities. Spatial bias is what leads us to make categories and taxonomies — often very useful ones, but sometimes perniciously for their own sake. Spatial bias is what leads us to treat some categories and abstractions as if they are real things that have actual effects in the world, other than conceptual ones.⁵

When we try to understand something affected by complex processes (e.g. consciousness, motivation, creativity, and evolution), there’s a tendency to spend a lot of cognitive energy asking broad questions about Why?, How?, and What is…? Often such questions are unanswerable — at least until better information or more penetrating insight is available. In such cases, let’s just say things happen because time exists so we can focus on moving forward and dealing with real, practical, nitty gritty details.

This is roughly what Bergson suggested a century ago: “time is what is happening, and more than that, it is what causes everything to happen.”⁶ It’s a deliberately open way of accounting for “the very mobility of being”⁷ — or the fact that everything in life (down to the smallest particle) seems constantly motivated to assert itself.

It’s important not to interpret this “vital principle” as a postulation of some kind of cosmic force, substance, or thing; it’s precisely the opposite: it’s a kind of heuristic placeholder we can use to prevent false ideas from settling before better information is available. As Bergson wrote, it “may indeed not explain much, but it is at least a sort of label affixed to our ignorance, so as to remind us of this occasionally.”⁸

It’s through our dispositions represented by spatial bias that both materialism and vitalism have been corrupted into ungrounded abstractions. Materialism often degenerates into a belief that everything must be reduced to static fossils and chalkboard diagrams — as if we could see altruism under a microscope, or cut greed out with a scalpel. Vitalism often degenerates into a belief that there’s some kind of spirit pushing and pulling everything behind the scenes.

Note that the word “bias” doesn’t imply that its effects are necessarily negative. If it wasn’t for our tendency to conceive objects and patterns as permanent — even when we can’t see them (starting with Mommy or Daddy playing peak-a-boo behind a blanket) — then we wouldn’t have geometry, math, or even an alphabet to work with. On a more complex level, without spatial bias we wouldn’t have science, religion, commerce, or legal systems. All of these require a sense that structural and patternistic abstractions are really concrete and permanent.

My point is that we should know the limitations and distortions conditioned by that practice and be open to alternatives when trying to understand new challenges and complex processes (e.g. consciousness, motivation, creativity, perceptions of meaning, love).

This is more important now than ever, as we try to understand a hyper-connected world in which global events play out in real-time. We can’t assume anything is fixed anymore.

Again, as I suggested at the start of this chapter, I trust scientific experts to figure everything out eventually, but in the mean time we have some severe challenges that aren’t going to wait, and a lot of impatient idealists proposing solutions that may cause more problems and delays than they solve — cowering under the spectre of evil and shouting down mere caricatures of greed rather than addressing real, complex behaviours and their root causes.

By balancing spatialized concepts with an equally, deliberately fallacious notion that things are “caused” by the “existence” of time (I’ll call it the “temporalist maxim”), I’m trying to maintain the benefits we get from purely spatial assumptions while accounting for inevitably uncertain and random occurrences. Like Bergson, I use this as “a sort of label affixed to our ignorance.”

Note that science already does this. Think of notions like “uncertainty” and “chance,” without which we wouldn’t have good understandings of quantum physics or evolution. The notion that “things happen because time exists” is essentially a generalization of those notions. It’s useful for balancing our spatial metaphors and descriptions, as well as neutralizing, and postponing the need to identify specific, over-simplistic, erroneously fixed causes.

Above all, the “temporalist maxim” helps keep explanations open to new insights for appreciating the dynamic and complex conditions that constantly reshape our world. We can say the more precisely we’ve described what something is in spatial terms, the less we know about what it’s going to do; likewise, the more tacitly we appreciate what’s happening, the more we should expect we’ll need to articulate in concrete terms.

1Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe (1995): p. 20 – 21.

2E.g. in Prigogine’s widely available End of Certainty (1997).

3William Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned; An Evening Scene, on the Same Subject” (1798).

4See The Creative Mind, tr. Mabelle L. Andison (1946): p. 19.

5This specific fallacy is called reification. Also see Whitehead’s notion of the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” in Science in the Modern World (1925, 1997): p. 51.

6The Creative Mind, tr. Mabelle L Andison (1946): p. 2.

7Creative Evolution, tr. Arthur Mitchell (1911): p. 366.

8Creative Evolution, tr. Arthur Mitchell (1911): p. 48.