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‘Philosophical experiences’ in education

I am interested in bringing philosophy into teaching, and believe it plays an important role in all educational activities. There is a field called “philosophy of education,” but this is primarily interested in generating philosophical questions about education. In philosophy of education classes, students philosophise about educational issues. This tends to place emphasis on the role philosophy can play in conceiving (and practicing) pedagogy.

But outside of philosophy of education, students can profit from philosophising topics of any course. Philosophical issues are implicit, explicit or nascent in particular topics within a subject, but are also present in the relationship between subjects, and in the relationship between what is taught and how it is taught (ie curriculum and pedagogy). To bring philosophising into education in this way connects with certain philosophical premises about the purposes and nature of education. For example, philosophising tends to leave students with more questions than answers, and against a view which sees education as the commitment to replace ‘ignorance’ with ‘knowledge.’ Because my main interests are ecological education and biology education, I am always finding philosophical questions to bring out in these areas. While I think there is a place for ‘understanding’ ecological and biological phenomena, I think the artistry of education involves navigating an ongoing situation which involves making and breaking questions and answers. When to linger on one or the other, or to rupture them, is the process I aspire to improve in my pedagogy.

I think academic philosophy is becoming increasingly unphilosophical, so my bringing philosophy into education is not an attempt to get people acting like professional philosophers. My main concern with professional philosophy is that the ‘philosophical experience’ is very often absent or buried, because of the tendency to focus on quality and validity of method, which for philosophers is mainly the development of arguments. The focus on developing better arguments may have its own pedagogical value, but on its own I consider this to be the field of logic, not philosophy. I suggest that bad philosophical positions can be investigated and defended with highly rigorous arguments, while important philosophical positions can be developed through poor ones. While an important philosophical position argued well is perhaps the best outcome, given the choice between the two options in the previous sentence, I would often opt for the good philosophical idea over the good argument. The fact that Plato continues to be read, even though first year undergraduates can rather easily punch holes in his arguments, suggests that this intuition is still held by others, and that despite appearances the philosophical spirit has not yet been destroyed by logicians. His ideas are defended with new arguments, or tweaked and then supported, suggesting method is subservient to vision. Why else do some ideas get resuscitated perpetually, while others are left to fall away?

A master logician might see errors in arguments so quickly that they prevent themselves from ‘experiencing’ the idea being argued for. Also note that a computer could in principle identify errors and develop logical arguments extremely effectively, but is unlikely to be considered a philosophical machine. Perhaps pedagogically, an argument sometimes only needs to be as good as is necessary for a student to take the idea seriously, and imagine what the world is like through that lens. Perhaps it only needs to be good enough for a student to care enough to enter into that world, explore it, and spontaneously develop their own reasons, consequences and connections, –but also feelings– within it. To ‘experience’ the world philosophically.

I used the word ‘philosophical experience’ and ‘philosophical question,’ and claim that these are importance, not only for retaining the philosophical spirit, but also pedagogically. What what is a philosophical question, and what is it like to experience such questions?

A philosophical experience can be characterised in several ways. Here are two preliminary intuitions:

1) A philosophical experience occurs when something one unreflectively assumes, and which forms the basis of daily life, is suddenly the focus of consciousness and our assumed attitude cast in doubt. Such an experience renders to that thing a sense that it is both better known and less well known than it was previously. It appears as ‘better known’ in the sense that our previously unreflected-upon engagement with that idea now appears somewhat dreamlike and superficial. But for this same reason the thing also appears less well known, and mysterious. Such experience is similar to how a word appears odd when we dissociate it from its use by saying it many times. As such, a philosophical experience needs no argument at all. It can even be experienced without words, as gestalt switch, an insight, a possibility, a doubt or a contradiction.

2) Often a kind of jamais-vue, philosophical experience is inherently an emotional experience. It can be exciting, terrifying, lonely, eery, beautiful, confusing, loving, or a combination of all. There is something uncanny and disruptive about philosophical experiences. They are discoordinating and disorienting because such experiences open and then sustain questions which shake basic foundational assumptions we rely on in our lives, and put at risk any sense of firm footing in the world. A philosophical experience feels like an adventure. It can feel dangerous, and people may not be equally open to it, or need different kinds of scaffolding or preparation for it.

One reason philosophical experience / questions is backgrounded in courses (including philosophy courses) is because it seems more difficult to standardise a way of evaluating its quality. I believe I can sense when someone is experiencing a philosophical problem, but it is harder to pinpoint on rubric sheets just what a marker would be looking for compared with, say, the validity of the argument. This leads to another version of Biesta’s (2009) observation that in assessment, we tend to value what we can measure rather than measuring what we value. (We could call this ‘the assessment fallacy’, recognising its resonance with Dewey’s ‘philosophical fallacy’). Another reason it is backgrounded is because students and teachers may have unquestioned assumptions about the purpose of education at odds with cultivating philosophical experiences.

Of course, the development of arguments and the development of ideas cannot be as easily parsed as is suggested here. The act of working out an argument is sometimes a clarification of its consequences, scope, conditions, and connections with other ideas, and so developing arguments can itself be the act of dwelling in a philosophical experience. But even here, I am not so sure the quality of the argument always matters. Sometimes, the arguments provide qualitative depth and texture to the philosophical idea. Other times, I feel it is the time spent reading or thinking up the arguments that sustains the philosophical experience, and that the minimal condition is that such arguments are simply ‘believable enough’ to hold this imaginative space. In any case, argument is subservient to the ideas it develops.

The assumption that it would be otherwise is grounded in the premise that our beliefs are founded and develop primarily through reason, evidence and justification. But we often have a feeling that something is plausible or true, and then work out why we think this is the case. If the philosophical experience is important in education, then the cultivation of plausible possibilities becomes paramount. In addition to reasoning, this requires an engagement with the full dimension of what underlies a person’s openness to novel ideas. This means philosophising education has psychological dimensions too, a rhetorical aspect including context setting, mood, responsiveness, narrative, silence, and much else besides.

For a continuation, click here.

“Vital norms” in biology education

Living organisms sustain, and are sustained by “vital norms” (Canguilhem, 1966). A norm is vital if it is necessary for life. For example, the human body maintains a norm of 37C temperature and specific levels of minerals, despite fluctuations in the external environment. From the point of view of physics or chemistry, vital norms are abnormal. 37C is a far-from-equilibrium state, and so it is only because life can tap into, store and distribute energy, that it is able channel material flows towards norm maintenance.

There are several feedback loops sustaining any norm. First, there is the fact that maintaining a norm keeps the organism alive, which in turn maintains the norm. On a smaller scale, every norm is itself maintained by feedback loops between contrasting tendencies. 37C is achieved through a feedback loop between processes that heat the body, and those that cool it. All norms are dynamic fluctuations around some ideal, optimised point or range. There are also the feedback loops between different norm sustaining feedback loops. Life sustains norms at varying scales, from those norms sustained through gene regulation in a cell to global nutrient cycles, with many interconnecting levels in between. Because organisms sustain such vital norms, life is intrinsically normative.

What maintains a vital norm is valuable, what does not may be destructive. Unlike the world of phyiscochemistry, life exists in a world where healing, pathology, strength, weakness, safety and danger all exist. From the point fo view of physics and chemistry, these words make no sense. They are surely just vague global descriptions of processes that can ultimately be understood by mechanical underlying components. Not so, says biology, and feedback loops are the way out. Pathology is an ontological state on equal footing with chemical reactions or quarks because it is a description of the dynamics of feedback loops. The scale of the atom or molecule brackets space and time too narrowly to perceive these feedback loops, let alone explain them. When an organism’s vital norms are at risk, the feedback loops themselves are threatened. If the norms cannot be sustained, neither can the organism they sustain. And vice versa. Physics and chemistry are only necessary and sufficient explanations for a lifeless world, and will lead to one unless biology restores itself.

It should follow that a basic understanding of different kinds of feedback loops (ex positive, negative, and interlocking combinations of both), and how they manifest vis a vis norm sustaining relations, ought to be foundational for biology education. Instead, many school systems hardly emphasise the pervasiveness of feedback in bio-logic. For example, in the Scottish biology curriculum, it pops up as simply one among many dislocated factoids about this or that phenomenon, such as in glucose regulation or predator-prey cycles. This is not because it is too complicated; many national curricula do demand understanding (or at least the performance of understanding) of many much more intricate biological processes. It seems instead a vestige a 20th century vision of life premised on its ultimately reducibility to chemistry. We are in the midst of a transition towards a 21st view that acknowledges and seeks to understand what and how life accomplishes what it does, on its own terms. While there is basic lethargy underlying resistance to any change, many industries still profit from the 20th century vision. This means the transition to an empirically more satisfying and unifying understanding of the living world is further gummed up. The reduction of life to chemistry ‘works’ for certain purposes, even if it piles on downstream side effects.

The view that life sustains itself through feedback loops that can be healthy or not also implies a different kind of empiricism, which suggests a different approach to teaching biology. Because such feedback loops are often meso-scale (meaning neither too small nor too big for the eye to see), we can perceive the quality of such relationships directly through the senses. There is an ‘aesthetic quality’ to understanding life’s maintenance of norms. For example, we can tell if a plant or animal is sick because we can sense disruption in its internal relations. The role of the senses in perceiving, evaluating and diagnosing quality of biological relationship could be given some prominence amongst the ‘skills’ development science curricula insist upon. This does not mean there is no place for instrumentation or computation in perceiving the health of living systems. It is instead to suggest that our sensory engagement in the world is not detached from the reality of things in the way we suppose when pondering whether a chair ‘really is’ just jostling molecules, or colour ‘really’ just specific frequencies of wavelength. The scale in which many norms are established and sustained is often the same scale we perceive the universe. And this is not surprising, given we evolved our senses in order to sustain the norms of our own physiology and that of the community of others we depend upon. Another angle into making science curricula have more contact with the ‘real world.

Perceiving, understanding, and responding to vital norms should itself be a vital norm which human societies orient around. An education system that does not work towards these ends is itself engaged in pathological feedback loops, while not even providing students with the eye to see the destruction it is complicit in.

ChatGPT and dogs

I am watching a dog chasing a ball. I see so clearly that matter is not insensate. It is able to yearn, to pursue with frenzy what it craves. Perhaps all matter yearns to become what it can next become, and the evolution of the world is brought about by its ongoing desire. When we say particles are attracted to or repelled by one another, perhaps we should take these terms seriously. Perhaps matter channels itself into different capacities and intensities to desire. How else to make sense of the clear fact that once there was a zygote, before that carbon and hydrogen, and now a frantic chase?

People are eagerly discussing whether ChatGPT is intelligent, and if not, they are making predictions on when it might be. ChatGPT’s performance is not arising out of the attractions and repulsions of its matter, but by a structure imposed on it. By contrast, whatever problem solving abilities dogs have, they are in service of what dogs desire. In life, intelligence is how organisms find ways of satisfying what they yearn. It is completely interconnected with and dependent upon an emotive tug. Without this tug, there is no incentive. The animal sits listless, –almost like a computer. Granted, if all matter yearns, then the electrons and silicone and what not inside a computer will be compelled towards certain ends. But these ends are being funnelled by the organisation of the hardware and the constraints of the software. Perhaps the electrons desire to move down the wires. But the disconnect between the apparent function of the computer at the level we interface with it, and its material process is most evident when the computer breaks down owing to a ‘malfunction’ of some inner component. It no longer does the apparently intelligent things we want it to, but it may in fact be an instance where matter is achieving change through its own quietly persisting willing and achieving. One might suggest that it is no different from a cell ‘breaking down’ and becoming cancerous, but the analogy is flawed. The activity of cells produces the multicellular organisms that they in turn depend upon. A cell malfunctions when it no longer reliably brings forth what it has co-created. The material in a computer is not disrupting its own creation when it burns out a circuit.

In the tradition of enactivism, biologists sometimes suggest that cognition and living are the same process (ex Maturana and Varela). Cognition makes the self, and self-making is cognitive. The intuition when seeing the powerful impulsive obsession of a dog and contrasting it with the passivity of ChatGPT opens for me thoughts that such self-making (or ‘autopoiesis’) is driven by desire. Schopenhauer spoke of a ‘will’ in nature, and Bergson of a desire or volition that creatively compels evolutionary process. And yet, the idea seems odd to modern ears (even New Materialists feel a need to de-phenomenologise desire), as science has decided (without evidence one way or another — what evidence could settle the question?), that matter cannot yearn unless it happens to be a human, or perhaps a mammal. But how molecules, operating according to physicochemical ‘laws’ evolve the ability to thirst for anything, is quite impenetrable. Wherever we look in physiology, we see mechanisms of causal interaction between parts. We even see the mechanisms underlying such thirst. But this does not explain its urgency, intensity, feeling and power.

I should also say we don’t even know where to begin in thinking about how to create a computer programme that desire. In science fiction depictions, it often just kind of happens. The problem may be that unles matter itself is organising into hardware and software, we will be stuck simulating desire through imposing constraints and rules. And so, the desire in ChatGPT remains extrinsic, in the minds of the people creating it.

One might suppose all matter is affective. While we say that particles yearn or have desire, this is not meant to suggest it is at all like the spatiotemporally complex and textured kinds of affects that multicellular organisms can have. The difference between the kind of desire a particle has compared to a human may be as wide as the structural and organisational difference between them. It is simply to suggest that, just as a human and a particle are both material, albeit vastly contrasting in scale and complexity, so too are they both feeling, and with just as much difference.

It is not scientific to assume that matter is feeling or unfeeling because we have no empirical evidence either way. And yet, this is nevertheless a topic that matters for science education. Why? Because we do have theories and hypotheses about the evolution and development of feeling (since Darwin many biologists have written about it), and also because it is striking that all our scientific progress remains inconclusive on this point. It tells us something about science, and about nature, when empirical investigation cannot make concrete progress in certain realms of inquiry. The question unfathomable marks science opens up are just as important ‘products’ as the predictive theories it generates. Particles may well be completely insensate, but then it is a powerful mystery how it is possible that they organised themselves into feeling.

But the most important reason it matters, I think, is twofold. On the one hand, the misidentification of AI with intelligence is rooted in a sharp dualism between cognition and a feeling body, and each time we succumb to this separation in thinking about entities in the world, we further detach our thinking minds from our own feeling bodies. We risk becoming more like a computer at a time when we need to pay attention to what our own hearts yearn for, and reorienting thinking in such service. On the other hand, such misidentification also continues to drive a wedge between humans (and computers) and the rest of the biological world. The latter may not have the computation complexity of a computer or a person, but calling AI intelligent and not a tree or bird does much damage to our relationship with other species.

A Spinozan take on the academic’s desire for “impact”

Sometimes academics want ‘impact.” We want to ‘make a difference’ in the world, now and after we die. According to Terror Management Theory scholars, desire to make lasting change may be rooted in a fear of death. A kind of surrogate immortality. But the aim to see one’s impact externalised for posthumous significance stems from a thwarted understanding of nature. Everything we do is both the product of infinite events in space and extending back infinitely in time, while also having infinite and eternal ramifications. The entire history of the universe in its every detail was necessary to bring forth the uniqueness of each particular thing existing now, and each thing contributes essentially to its endless extended ripples and permutations. Perceiving the scope of one’s power in changing the world gets corrupted when detached from awareness that this very power is itself nature’s power, present and effective regardless and independently of whatever evaluations humans place on who or what has ‘impact’. One’s existence necessarily is equally infinitely significant and insignificant. Rather than feeding into the seeking of personal immortality, this realisation destroys the foundation of the ego, and offers in its place a deeper matrix within which to conceive oneself and others. In other words, every one of us cannot help but have an eternal impact.

All things are immortal, forever a part of what the world is, has been, and will become, and the thread-lines between these. And yet, all things in existence change, echoing, reflecting, refracting, varying… And so, “she lives on in our hearts” is her soul fractalising out in a hundred different forms, that themselves change even as our memories of her recur. By great great grandchildren, her effects are now in rhythm and melody instead of voice and image, and gone is a conscious association with her being. She has also merged with the rhythm and melody of countless others. Merged not in the sense of dissolution, but as contributing through interplay, dialogically, in ways now implicit. She lives on not only in the mind or behaviour of other humans, but in all things. The reason why no two things in the universe are identical, and the reason why there is necessarily ‘experimental error’ in scientific experiments (however precise), is because each thing is stitched into space and time in its own particular place. The conditions are different, which means the weight of the entire universe –past and present– offers to each being something absolutely unique, while in turn each gives back its uniqueness, reshaping nature through its arising. She has forever influenced ever forest she’s walked through or stream she’s waded in. We forever change everything we interact with, and to varying extents, we interact with everything. This sounds like a ‘spiritual’ pronouncement, and perhaps it is. But it is implied but the insights humans have gleaned from centuries of empirical investigation into how things hang together, from evolutionary process to ecological relation, and beyond.

Spinoza tells us an increase in our power to act is experienced as joy. But he also says everything is interconnected and he denies free will. This seems like a contradiction, but only from the point of view that conceives ‘power to act’ egoistically. This is the same partial lens that seeks personal immortality. The power to act individually is ultimately increased by recognising that one’s individuality is the process and product of nature. It frees us from judgment of self and other entrapments that limit exploration of what we are as existences arising uniquely in the world.

One acts– as a unique but interconnected activity of nature itself. The more one is able to act -be an activist (as Naess calls it in “Spinoza and the Deep Ecology Movement” (3250)), the more one experiences joy. It is joyful to act according to our own interests and abilities. It enlivens and energises to act in the way nature has uniquely gathered in us, and which it has given for us to contribute back into it. This means acting towards those things which attract us to action, because what we can care about or have compassion for is also unique to us. Active care is a form of what Spinoza calls amor intellectualis (loving understanding); it is love towards another particular being that is itself a unique expression of infinite nature, and the love is developed through more deeply caring for this being and in so doing, understanding it ever more deeply.

Because our actions have infinite consequences, we cannot predict them. This does not mean that strategising for ‘impact’ is altogether pointless. But it comes with big warnings. First, we may be misled about what we think is worth prioritising. Second, strategising can lead us to close off to the impact we actually have. When discussing means and ends, Gandhi says ‘the means are everything.” What happens when we focus on ends in academic impact? Chasing publication citations can lead to fear of getting scooped, a hermit-like avoidance of exploring ideas with colleagues, an advertising attitude towards our work, or a jealousy of the fecundity of others. Even if these approaches make sense for maximising citation impact (and they may well not), it is not necessarily the case that an academic has their influence measured well through such metrics. The means aren’t only everything, they are also everywhere — scattering effects outward with our every gesture, pause, or movement. We do not know how we influence the world, but the clues and feedback needed to responsively attend are often in concrete encounter. If we choose some arbitrary and abstract spatiotemporal level as the domain for intended impact, we background what we currently interact with. Our students, family, colleagues, as well as our own values or nascent vulnerable ideas ignored by impatient ends-based thinking. Why do we hold onto certain stories of how we causally affect the world, and what are the effects of those stories? What keeps us caring about such things even if we know they are illusions? We should be vigilant about such questions if we choose to orient our power around particular aims we think worth achieving.

If the individual is expressing, and an expression of, the whole of nature, we can develop understanding love / loving understanding towards nature through focusing on individuals, and our quality of relationship with them. The actual things we meet in our moment to moment lives are the primary points of contact of our infinite power. We meet the world and respond best to its rich and dynamic textures just where we are. It is a mistake to instrumentalise or bypass those we encounter for imagined effects “down the road,” because how we affect the world now now affects the quality of subsequent reverberations. We only treat “down the road” as generalities, calculations, or statistical games which silence the infinity within us and others, which only appears in our commitment to the particulars.

How can I be an activist in loving attention to this person, this idea, this work? How can I help understand and support the infinite uniqueness coming forth in those I encounter, nascent with power and vulnerability, recognising also that my own uniqueness is also dependent on their flourishing? How and when do I teach in this way? I propose several interconnect approaches. The first is developing a metacognitive practice of realising when one has shifted into treating present particulars as means to an end, and remembering how flows of actual effects are backgrounded by such thinking. This might involve forming a community with others who can remind us, with the practice becoming a cultural norm. The second involves practices of attending to the uniqueness and becoming of the particulars we encounter. This does not mean ignoring how they are similar to others, because seeing similarity also foregrounds difference (affifi 2019). This may range from relatively passive appreciation of another, to actively engaging it. Third, we need to critically uncover how the perceived topology of our impact in the world has been contorted by systemic values and beliefs that do not serve humans or the earth. Because these values and beliefs have found their way into the 21st Century’s academic’s identity, we need to consciously create alternative spaces where we normalise pluralistic and process-focused approaches to conceiving our role and effect in the world.

Spinoza teaches that we share kinship with all. Even those we merely tolerate and even hate are all born of the same nature that births us too, and the same billions of years of interactions are working themselves out to produce all of us. We share this moment of space and time together, astonishingly so, in the midst of the countless dark miles in every direction. We sit around a campfire together, so to speak, and are each the kinds of beings that can appreciate its warmth and comfort. Our shared kinship softens rivalry. And yet, we each also manifest our shared heritage differently, because we are both manifesting nature’s process from slightly different positions in its manifold.

Ecological and existential barriers to interdisciplinary

This blog post takes an ecological approach towards understanding interdisciplinarity, opening questions about the purpose and consequences of different ways of keeping disciplines separated, intermingling, or fused. By extension, I explore how an ecological approach might inform the kind of interdisciplinary thinking we might need to conceive, evaluate and respond to the inter/disciplinary challenges currently faced. Here, I am particularly concerned with the existential sides of engaging in interdisciplinarity and how these ‘ecologise’ with different facets of human and biotic worlds.

Interdisciplinarity is often promoted for the benefits new knowledges play in addressing social, economic or ecological problems. One concern is that siloed knowledge leads to actions and attitudes based on partial premises, and dialogue between silos can achieve a more holistic picture of phenomena. Undoubtedly the interdisciplinary conversation between, say, coral reef biologists and atmospheric scientists helps understand the causes of, and steps forward in addressing, mass bleaching of these wondrous systems. But does it follow that interdisciplinarity is always good ‘ecologically’? 

Through dynamic interactions between relata, ecologies maintain certain variables while changing others. They develop ‘dynamic equilibria’ (Kauffman 1993), patterns of stability across space and time, which become enabling conditions for the organisation and emergence of complexity. For example, while a species of bee and flower may in principle evolve in diverse ways, in practice they mutually specify the range and rates of change of the other (Maturana and Varela 1992) -at least until dependence relationships break down. 

Disciplines and interdisciplines are also involved in a range of ecological dynamics. They are not only patterns of knowing, they are also patterns interacting with the world. These interactions can become very complex, affecting, among many other things, the ‘psychology’ of the knower. Our epistemological and existential needs also regulate rates of being and becoming in the relationships they constitute. These may be dangerous (dysecological), healthful, or either or both, at different temporal and spatial scales.

An ecological approach to knowing suggests sometimes even false premises will be ‘used’ for the stabilities they produce. Plastic in the ocean becomes a niche for new ecosystems, a faulty theory may still be the basis for a prosperous academic career. In the ecological and existential dimensions of interdisciplinarity, errors can become true through the relations they come to sustain. But such scaling out eventually leads to laissez-faire relativism. We need to make a cut. Ought we see how different ecologies emerge on different scales, within and without, before we do so?  How do we learn to give up some cherished ecologies when we come to see others as more important? How can education approach these problems?

Some scholars have suggested there is a magical moment two disciplines cross boundaries and meet one another (Angerer). ‘Magic’ suggests positive qualities seen characteristic of an interdisciplinary experience: a sense of suspense, of surprise, of enchantment, perhaps a feeling the synthesis appearing before consciousness is the result of some subterranean sleight-of-hand work in our personal or social physiologies. I have felt something ‘magical’ in the arising of new ideas and insights when seemingly separated rivers come to ramble together. But I also sometimes feel resistance, and I remember that magic has long been associated with the dark arts, a space where people fear to tread.

A discipline is a habitual way of attending the world, where people, boundaries, concepts, logics, practices, and materials, ecologise into a self-reinforcing groove. Much has settled into the unconscious, because we stop thinking about what we know well or do often. But a vibrant edge of novelty remains,  like a magic froth on the invisible wave that carries us. As researchers, we may relish this edge; it gives opportunity to experience freshness, but within the safe contexts of a sensible matrix. We get our little adventures but we still get our home.

Interdisciplinarity demands a different psychology. What does it feel like to have the foundations of one’s home pulled away? Even the silent work sustaining our magic froth seems now at risk. Along with it, the decades of work invested into that way of worldmaking, the professional identities constellated around it, even the way it has simply given to the world a structure, a logos, a nest: there may even be inklings of a spiritual abyss gloaming in the distance. (Moreover, other people and perhaps species too have come to rely on the regularities arising from my habit, however ill conceived it may be). Add the pragmatic fact we have trained to see and act towards phenomena in a certain way, magnified our focus of a sliver of the world while backgrounding the unknown unknowns needed to sustain that gaze. Is it any wonder attempts at interdisciplinarity often have lackluster outcomes? 

Some educational questions arise from thinking about this existential ecology:

Maybe all new thought is magical. It involves the birth of the new from the old, and with it our participation in the creation of the world. The more difficult and unexpected the birth, the more astonishing it may be, -and so how do we respond to the dynamics of stability and change in interdisciplinary education? Perhaps the psychology guarding the well-disciplined mind against radical novelty produces and protects something sacred in its arising, and it would be somehow desecrating or improprietous to force such confluences. 

Nevertheless, it would be absurd to try to protect the ‘magic’ of an unexpectedly rare offspring when the cost of keeping disciplines separated is a thousand clumsy cuts into the also magical world outside of us. The ecologies of the mind retained at the expense of the ecologies around it. Cancer too is an ecology. Sustainability cannot concern solely with inner ecologies or outer ones, but with the interconnected dynamics between them. After all, hidden connections between things in the world are occluded by the disciplines, and the magic we experience in the novelty of knowing mirrors the magic felt at the revelation of the world. What kind of discipline or interdiscipline can perceive these dynamics and respond to them?

If current disciplinary structures need to be taken down urgently, what kind of disciplinarity follows, given ecologies necessarily sustain patterns and enabling conditions? What is an ecological approach to ecology? If there is no solution we must agree on, how to educate for pluralism in light of our existential needs? 

Caffeine, consciousness and curriculum

This morning, I’m perusing articles on the origin of humanity’s favourite stimulant, sitting— obviously —with a coffee in hand. 

Dozens of plant species, across unrelated families, produce caffeine. This indicates it has evolved separately, many times. That seems surprising, but according to Huang et al. (2016), it really isn’t. Plants synthesize caffeine in different ways, but each start with a 100-million-year lineage of enzymes conserved for crucial but unrelated biochemical purposes. Co-opting these enzymes to synthesize caffeine is, therefore, always an ongoing possibility. If all caffeine-producing species went extinct, we can imagine caffeine would likely again evolve. 

I find that strangely consoling, perhaps due in equal measure to my joint addictions to both caffeine and to evolution. But what makes caffeine so valuable that it has repeatedly emerged? After all, producing it, like any metabolite, has costs. What kind of selection pressures would pull its synthesis, again and again, from mere possibility into actuality? Independent evolution suggests caffeine synthesis may have different roles in different contexts. There are two favoured theories associating caffeine with a plant’s defense system. One is that caffeine’s antifeeding and pesticidal properties protects it against herbivory. The other is that the release of caffeine into the soil inhibits germination of nearby seeds, reducing competition from neighbours. From my own experience with caffeine, I know its pleasant lift can quickly go awry, so it’s no shock that it would be detrimental to other creatures. I also know the slide from elation to irritation is dose dependent. Could a small hit have positive effects for any other animals? Perhaps even for those very insects— and competing plants —it seeks to debilitate?

Some ingenious experiments on bees shed light on this question. In a story all too convenient for punsters across the world, it turns out caffeine gives bees ‘a buzz.’ Bees on caffeine become more energetic and are more likely to remember the location of caffeinated nectar in complex environments (Wright et al. 2013). This is totally remarkable. According to Evogeneao’s Tree of Life Explorer, humans and bees’ closest ancestors are simple blob-like entities that lived about 630 million years ago. Could it be that virtually all of the species between us and bees, and even that blob, can get high on this stuff? Or is the response to caffeine similar to caffeine itself— evolvable should a species be lucky enough to land in situations where its own endogenous possibility for botanical exhilaration strums into existence? 

As I look further, it seems a whole range of insects and molluscs fall for effects Homo sapiens know only too well: they get hyperactive on caffeine, but succumb to tremors and lose their appetite and their focus on larger doses (ex. Nathanson 1984). Mustard’s (2013) review of studies administering caffeine to insects, molluscs and mammals concluded its effect on behaviour is conserved across animal species. Meanwhile, at least one study sees this pattern repeat in another kingdom entirely. A small dose of caffeine stimulates the growth of sunflower plants, but inhibits it at larger concentrations (Kursheed et al. 2009). Indeed, cases of immunity to caffeine seem the rare consequence of deft symbiotic mergings— such as those of the Coffee Borer (Hypothenemus hampei), who conspire with gut microbes like Pseudomonas fulva (Ceja-Navarro et al. 2015). In this case, the bacteria consume the caffeine and allow the Coffee Borer to live its life burrowing into a bean containing, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (2015), a lethal dose equivalent to 500 shots of espresso. The Coffee Borer seems to be missing out. But do these other organisms really get high? 

Biologist Jakob von Uexküll is well-known for launching a research programme aimed at gleaning insights into other species’ lived experiences (ex. Uexküll 2010). According to him, by carefully observing an organism’s behaviour, we can see what ‘shows up’ in its environment as relevant and what is ignored, and use these to make inferences into how the world appears to that being. His intention was to create a science interrogating the subjective experience of the biotic world. He was well aware humans would never really know what it is like to be a bee. After all, we cannot really know what it is like even to be our own spouse or child. But we can get ever closer, especially if we try. For example, many people are familiar with studies revealing that bees see a different spectrum of light, and hence floral patterns invisible to our eyes. This is an example of an insight falling within an Uexküllian focus. 

Does caffeine tell us anything about the lived experience of other creatures? As far as I know, Uexküll never asked this question. Some would deny it, arguing that another species gets hyperactive and jittery when on caffeine does not indicate they consciously experience it. It merely shows that caffeine produces stereotypical physiological reactions. If a conscious organism ingests caffeine, then it obviously would experience those physiological reactions. However, the majority of the biotic world is not conscious. The reactions just happen with their consequent ecological effects. Such a perspective forms the basis of a dominant assumption in biology research and it suffuses biology education too: if a biological system can be understood mechanistically, there is no need to appeal to consciousness. It is at best pointless; at worst, it is dangerous and anthropomorphic. 

But, of course, those very same chemical changes occur in human physiology too, and the behaviour of a human on caffeine can also be understood mechanistically without appealing to human consciousness. And yet, human consciousness clearly exists. A double standard seems baked into biology. I am keen to find a way out of this. Perhaps if we figure out what role consciousness plays for humans, we can infer whether it is also active in other species. This turns out to be a difficult job, and one I am hoping another cup from my French press will help facilitate.  

I’ll continue on my loosely Uexküllian trajectory. As humans go about their lives, they are generally trying to do things. To accomplish those things, some things matter and others do not. Our bodies filter out what does not likely matter, presenting only what is deemed relevant. These relevant features can then be seen in relation to one another. For instance, I am aware of a small subset of things right now: that the coffee is starting to scatter my focus, and that this conflicts with my writing deadline. Because I am conscious of these two things, I am able to realize that I should slow down my drinking. Consciousness is like a map of important features in ongoing play, a global representation of relevant internal states vis a vis relevant external features. Given the complexity and contingency of dynamic environments, it is likely all organisms would be faced with a similar situation: a lot more things are going on than a creature can attend to, and there is a need to respond only to what is relevant, instead of getting buried in details. Consciousness is that porous map.

I do not see other species waffling about, as we might expect if a global map did not exist to simplify the relationship between the organism and its world. Instead, I see other species’ focus directed by what is relevant to them. If caffeine interrupts or enhances that focus, it makes sense that this would show up too, as it would be relevant for the creature that its capacities had changed. Different decisions might be needed.

The consciousness of other animals is increasingly acknowledged by scientists (see for example the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness [Low et al. 2012]), and is even posited by plant scientists (ex. Trewavas 2015), but Uexküll’s vision remains totally eclipsed in biology education. The assumption that life is nothing but mechanism pervades even apparently ‘progressive’ school provision, such as Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence’s steadfastly mechanistic biology learning outcomes. What is the reason for this, and what effect does it have on the way children see the world? Who benefits and who loses when education is the buzzkill at the party? Some historians claim caffeine accelerated the Enlightenment (Pollan 2020). Could investigating its role in the biosphere enlighten schools too?

References 

Ceja-Navarro, J.; Vega, F.; Karaoz, U. et al. (2015) ‘Gut microbiota mediate caffeine detoxification in the primary insect pest of coffee,’ in Nature Communications 6, 7618 Evogeneao https://www.evogeneao.com/en/explore/tree-of-life-explorer#bees-and-humans 

Huang, R. ; O’Donnell, A. ; Barboline, J. & Barkman, T. (2016) ‘Convergent evolution of caffeine in plants by co-option of exapted ancestral enzymes,’ in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113(38), pp. 10613-10618 

Khursheed, T.; Ansari,M. & Shahab, D. (2009) ‘Studies on the effect of caffeine on growth and yield parameters in Helianthus annuus L. variety Modern T,’ in Biology and Medicine 1 (2), pp. 56-60 

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (2015) ‘Gut microbes enable coffee pest to withstand extremely toxic concentrations of caffeine,’ July 14, 2015. Retrieved on November 21, 2020 from https://phys.org/news/2015-07-gut-microbes-enable-coffee-pest.html 

Low, P. et al. (2012) ‘The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness’. Publicly proclaimed in Cambridge, UK, on July 7, 2012, at the Francis Crick Memorial Conference on Consciousness in Human and non-Human Animals. 

Mustard, J. (2014) ‘The buzz on caffeine in invertebrates: effects on behavior and molecular mechanisms,’ in Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences 71(8), pp. 1375-82. 

Nathanson, J. A. (1984) ‘Caffeine and related methylxanthines: possible naturally occurring pesticides’, in Science. 226(4671), 184–7 

Pollan, M. (2020) Caffeine: How coffee and tea created the modern world. Audible Original. 

Trewavas, A. (2015) Plant behaviour and intelligence. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. 

von Uexküll, J. (2010) A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With A Theory of Meaning. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Exploring time with Nya Falang

My first encounter with this startling plant was during my years in rural Laos. Wong’s youngest, Kongngeun, was halfway up a ladder poised against a mango tree. With machete in hand, her tiny bare feet toddled on its rickety bamboo rungs. I lifted her down and put away the ladder. Scarcely understanding the consequences of what was to transpire, she bumbled towards me, her bright eyes sparkling and her great blade swinging. To this day I wonder what she was feeling. Her two-year old face seemed full of innocence, without a speck of anger. And yet, the machete arced fatefully towards my protesting hand. 

Moments stretched out—in vain —as its metal edge approached and then lodged itself into the top of my thumb. Her face melted into fear. Wasting no time to scold, Wong sprinted to a nearby pineapple field and emerged seconds later with a clump of bright green leaves. I recognised the plant immediately as Nya Falang; that sticky, pungent plant I had spent months weeding in a nearby Mulberry orchard. He chewed it into paste and slathered it onto my gushing wound. The bleeding stopped immediately. Thumb bandaged, I later reflected on what had happened. 

Speeding up platelet aggregation (the mechanism I supposed in play), slows down bleeding. Two opposing rates of change held together a single process. In scientific articles, I later learned Chromolaena odorata accomplished this hemostatic feat by changing the rate of activity of some genes in my thumb’s fibroblasts (Pandith et al, 2013). Different temporal shifts coordinated across different biological scales. The protagonists in this timeshifting wizardry are stigmasterol, scutellarein tetramethyl ether, flavonoids, and chromomoric acid, which seem to serve antiherbivory and antibacterial roles in the plant’s defense (Vijayaraghavan et al, 2017). Incidentally, these chemicals are likely toxic to the plant itself, and so are normally stowed away in the plant cells’ vacuoles. Wong’s teeth had to cut the cells open so the plant could heal my own cut open cells. 

C. odorata’s regional names hint at its sharp and then hemorrhagic arrival into various people’s natural history. Known as ‘French Weed’ (ຫຍ້າຝະຣັ່ງ, Nya Falang) in Laos, but as ‘Herbe de Laos’ in France, C. odorata is actually native to Central America, the Caribbean, and the Northern part of South America. Since the mid 20th century, it has spread rapidly, with now pan-continental distribution in tropical and subtropical climates (though apparently with minimal presence in Australia). When I google ‘world’s worst tropical weeds,’ C. odorata comes up ahead of other notorious troublemakers of the global South, including Imperata cylindrica, Cyperus rotundus, Commelina benghalensis, and Eichhornia crassipes. Its prolific habits damage cropland, lay waste to pasture, and ruin plantation productivity. The same chemicals that saved me a long and bumpy journey to a local health centre and perhaps a serious infection, undoubtedly contribute to its ecological success and its reputation as a scourge. 

Emerson’s (1880) notion that ‘a weed is a plant whose virtues have never been discovered’ will seem naive and dangerous to most farmers. I have seen enough family crops cramped and cluttered into oblivion to sympathise with those who despise C. odorata. Nevertheless, I have benefited from the virtues of this pungent coagulator. Not only did it heal my hand, it thrust into consciousness the surprise of discovering hidden powers in commonplace things. The humdrum prevalence and perhaps even the menace of highly successful plants sets them up to shatter our preconceptions all the more forcefully. We should be grateful for these ruptures and, indeed, seek them out. 

I do not mean to suggest there is no place for controlling this or any other weed. Agriculture, in any foreseeable future, depends on it. But I wonder if it is possible to appreciate even the vigorous plants we commit to weaken or kill, that their life be taken through acts that pierce hatred with gratitude, to speckle their tedious annihilation with flecks of wonder. 

References 

Emerson, R.W. (1880) Fortune of the Republic, in Prose Works. Boston, MA: Houghton, Osgood & Co. 

Pandith, H.; Zhang, X.; Liggett, J.; Min, K-W, Gritsanapan, W. & Baek, S.J. (2013) ‘Hemostatic and Wound Healing Properties of Chromolaena odorata Leaf Extract’, ISRN Dermatology Article ID168269, pp. 1-8. 

Vijayaraghavan, K.; Rajkumar, J.; Bukhari, S.N.D.; Al-Sayed, B. & Seyed, M.A. (2017). ‘Chromolaena odorata: A neglected weed with a wide spectrum of pharmacological activities’, in Molecular Medicine Reports, vol.15:3, pp. 1007-1016.

Vegetal bebop

In normal times, the genes peppered across a plant’s DNA function more or less according to the common metaphors of popular science. Here, they look very much like ‘instructions’ used to build the plant’s body and direct its behaviour. But when a plant encounters an unexpected circumstance, things get wild. The instruction metaphor breaks down, and a new insight into the interconnected nature of genes, organism and environment is revealed.

I will zoom in on one wild phenomenon here, to make the point. Forty years ago, cracks in the genes-are-instructions metaphor had already appeared with the discovery of ‘alternative splicing’ (Berget et al, 1977). Alternative splicing occurs when a gene gets transcribed differently than ‘usual’. One way to think about what this means is to imagine a gene to be a paragraph of text. Under normal circumstances, the gene is expressed by pulling specific words and sentences from the paragraph and putting them together to be read. But in certain conditions, some of those words or sentences might be omitted, or others put in. In language, this amounts to a change in meaning. In genetics, this means changed physiology and behaviour.

Gene transcripts are shuttled away to get translated into long stringy molecules called proteins. Different parts of proteins push and pull at each other, and the strings often fold into complex but very specific shapes that then specify how the protein interacts. A dizzying array of different protein shapes enable and participate in an equally dizzying array of functions. If alternatively spliced transcripts are translated, these proteins —known as protein isoforms— have a different shape than their regular counterparts, and so can interact differently.

Some protein isoforms seem like well-established alternatives that can be pumped into action in the face of common disturbances, such as drought. But not all alternative proteins are evolutionarily conserved ‘Plan Bs’ waiting idly in the toolkit (Mastrangelo et al. 2012). For better or worse, it appears the number and nature of protein isoforms is not prescribed. A door is opened for the creative role that chaos plays in plant life. Some isoforms turn out to be nonfunctional. They are quickly degraded and their building blocks re-used. Others wreak havoc in the form of deformity and disease. Still others end up assisting the plant in new ways.

It turns out that alternative splicing in plant genes is especially prolific when a plant is encountering a novel stress. Why would a plant bother creating all these variants, with nonfunctional or unpredictable effects, at a time that requires urgent coordinated response? The answer turns out to be exquisitely Darwinian: in precarious times, it may be advantageous to produce a lot of new possible solutions to a danger. To do so, it adopts a randomization strategy. In risky times, it pays to take risks. Doing so, the plant increases the odds of an adaptive response. By generating variations of its gene products, the plant is increasing its repertoire, brainstorming without a brain.

This is roughly the same thing that happens in species at the population level in the process known as ‘natural selection’ (Darwin 1859): diversity in a population of organisms increases the likelihood that when given an environmental disturbance, at least some organisms of that species will survive long enough to pass on their genes. At the organism level, alternative splicing increases the chance that some behavioural response to a stress will be beneficial for the plant’s survival.

So, plant genes are more likely to produce predictable proteins when living conditions are stable, but the plant quickly generates creative chaos out of its genes when it needs to. With this insight, what happens to the ‘instruction’ metaphor? It seems to me this: the plant regulates and deregulates its genes, streamlining their effects in some contexts, relaxing those constraints in others. When genes behave in a streamlined way, it looks like they are deterministically instructing the plant cells. But alternative splicing during stressful conditions shows that if such determinism sometimes exists, it is only because the plant is determining it. The instructor is the organism, shifting how it uses its cellular resources in response to its shifting environment. In some situations it relies on routine, in others on creativity.

Alternative splicing is common in all eukaryotes, not just plants. But because plants cannot escape threats by running, slithering or flying away, the capacity to generate novel possible solutions seems especially crucial to the way they make a living. Readers of this journal will know that the ‘secondary metabolism’ of a plant is the set of processes whereby plants generate those complex chemical orchestras that so define their unique contributions to ecology as much as to economy. Consider the deluge of alkaloids, polyphenols, and terpenes that plants bring into the world: it is these chemicals that are used to ward off pests and attract allies, but that are also concentrated into tinctures and suffuse our aromatherapies. Notably, the secondary metabolism of plants seems highly susceptible to alternative splicing. For instance, 75% of Solanum lycopersicum (tomato) genes associated with producing secondary metabolites undergo alternative splicing (Clark et al. 2019).

In humans, there are more genes getting alternatively spliced —and spliced in more different ways— in the brain than anywhere else in the body (Yeo et al 2004). Just as animals employ alternative splicing to increase the problem- solving versatility of their neurons, plants use it to improvise volatile variations on their favoured fragrant themes.

Welcome to jazz ecology.

(originally published in Herbology News)

Christmas tree philosophy

Holiday season behind us, I walk down the street. Christmas trees are strewn across the pavements for collection. Well, that is the way we talk about it, at least. Their root systems lobbed off doesn’t seem to bother holiday merrymakers, perhaps because that part of the tree is invisible anyway. But roots are complex structures comprising a significant quantity of a tree’s mass and volume. And so, it must be asked: in what sense do we really decorate ‘trees’? Soaked in water, the tree continues to perform in minimal ways we think make it a tree; it sits there, stays green for a while, and emits fragrance from its resins. But like believing a corpse is merely sleeping because his nails and hair are still growing, are we oblivious to a macabre spectacle? What is lost when roots are cut off? 

In his last decades, Charles Darwin was increasingly devoted to studying plants. He wrote a number of illuminating but less well-known books on flowers, plant evolution and behaviour. Co-written with his son, On the power of movement in plants (1880) was his penultimate study. Its last few pages propose an arresting hypothesis that laid largely buried for over a hundred years. After conducting several experiments— pressing or burning root tip apices and examining subsequent changes to plant growth —they noticed an interesting phenomenon. If burnt on one side of a root tip, the plant’s aerial parts would grow the other way, even though this response would not occur were it burnt anywhere else (including further up the root). Injured plants seem to respond as a whole to local impacts on individual root tips. The root tips, they surmised, therefore play a special role in picking up relevant information and centralising a coordinated whole-organism response to it. The Darwins concluded root apices functioned analogously to a simple brain. 

Is it absurd to use neural analogies to understand plants? Some assert it is plainly so (e.g., Alpi et al., 2007). But many metaphors used to describe neurons and their synapses were themselves borrowed from botany. Consider ‘arborisation’, ‘dendrite branching’ (double whammy there), and neural ‘pruning’: if plants prove an effective source to describe aspects of neurons, why deem it anthropomorphic (or animal-centric) to go the other way and investigate how neural thinking might better help us understand plants? 

The Darwins’ intriguing idea remained uprooted until the rise of contemporary plant behaviour and signalling research (Baluska et al, 2009). According to these authors, plants are analogous to animals with their heads buried in the soil. Superficially, this seems to make sense— at least according to our mental image of the typical animal and the typical plant —roots, like mouths and nostrils, are where plants take in nutrients and gases from the air, while leaves and flowers are excretory and sexual organs respectively. However, the more important question is not to what extent the upside-down analogy is roughly true, but how much the root system really does coordinate responses to information a plant receives. 

One way to approach this question is anatomical. Is the root system organised (or not) ‘like’ a brain? The point is not to find specific similarities. For instance, a chemical that serves as a neurotransmitter in an animal might be doing things broadly served by a different chemical in a plant. On the other hand, that neurotransmitter might exist in plants but be involved in totally unrelated activities. The anatomical approach seeks correlations in structure and function between brains and roots. 

This approach immediately leads to a problem. Root system architecture tends to be vertical. Roots break into smaller roots, and so on, without evident channels between them— in obvious contrast to the messy, circular and interconnected nature of neurons in a brain. Lateral connections between parts of the brain are reinforced or atrophy— facilitated, reinforced or softened through use and disuse. It seems intuitive that lateral connections between roots would be a minimum structural requirement for an organ whose function is to coordinate information, because otherwise it would seem hampered by the siloing constraints of its shape. Can something like this be found between a plant’s roots? Perhaps we ought to look at root hairs (and their associated mycelia) as such flexible lateral structures. Like neurons, root hairs are usually long single-celled structures. Their copious 

growth means they certainly come into contact with other hairs of their own, or other roots. Root hairs grow and atrophy relatively quickly and easily. Looking at the growth of root hairs might be analogous to dendrite branching, while volatile organic compounds released in the soil regions between root hairs might be roughly synaptic. One concerns transmission along linear tissue, the other across spaces between such tissue. Sadly, research into communicative activity in root hairs is virtually non-existent. 

Nevertheless, there is no point in looking for anatomical structures that might be organised like neural networks if no behaviour warrants the search for these structures in the first place. For this reason, a second area of research has to do with plant behaviour. It is certainly the case that coordinated plant responses are well-detailed and commonplace. A lot of plant coordination is owed to the release of hormones, such as jasmonate and auxin. This is not the kind of integrated activity we would be looking for in an organism with something brain-like about it. Instead, we would be looking for a globally coherent activity that involved differentiated responses amongst its parts. For instance, we might look for electric signals transmitted between cells, leading to local but coordinated responses. Electric signalling has been known in plants since even before Darwin’s experiments. Like Darwin’s root apices, its significance was also downplayed until evidence could no longer be ignored (Davies 2006). Action potential, for example, is now recognised as pervasive in plants. More detailed studies into signal transduction in roots, cambium, and other tissue that extends throughout the plant body is needed. 

A second issue is that coordinated plant responses do not appear to be as coordinated as, say, those in vertebrates. In investigating plant responses to stimuli, what level of centralising is needed to deem it ‘brain-like control’? Plants may be more decentralised than vertebrates, responding to their worlds more like a confederacy than a dictatorship (Firn, 2004). Response may be either at the cellular level, the tissue level or something more global— depending on the situation. An organism is likely to centralise its response to the extent it needs to, and plants may not need to— or at least not need to as much. But we should be wary of drawing dichotomies across kingdoms. Animal behaviour is not equally centralised across its phylla, either. By any anthropocentric measure, octopuses are highly intelligent— but they have more neurons in their arms than in their heads. On the other hand, citing Shomrat and Levin (2013), mycologist Merlin Sheldrake (2020) points out that flatworms are able to regrow brains once their heads have been cut off, and retain memories of their prior experiences. 

When very young, some conifer cuttings can grow new roots, but not once the tree is big enough to wrap with tinsel and adorn with red balls. It would seem only small and simple bodies can get by without brains— or roots —long enough to sprout fresh ones. With or without an artificial supply of nutrients, such trees slowly die. Whatever it is, something more fundamental than a flatworm’s brain was taken from these firs and pines, their colours dull and bodies brittle, awaiting pick-up above pools of dry dead needles. 

References 

Alpi, A. et al. (2007) ‘Plant neurobiology: No brain, no gain?’ TRENDS in Plant Science 12 (4): 135-136 

Baluska, F.; Mancuso, S.; Volkmann, D. & Barlow, P. W. (2009) ‘The “root-brain” hypothesis of Charles and Francis Darwin: Revival after more than 125 years.’ Plant Signaling & Behavior, 4(12): 1121–1127 

Darwin, C and Darwin, F. (1880) On the power of movement in plants. John Murray: Edinburgh 

Davies, E. (2006) ‘Electrical Signals in Plants: Facts and Hypotheses,’ in Volkov A.G. (ed.) Plant Electrophysiology. Springer: Berlin, Heidelberg. 

Firn, R. (2004) ‘Plant intelligence: an alternative point of view,’ in Annals of Botany, 93(4): 345–351 

Sheldrake, M. (2020) Entangled Life. The Bodley Head: London 

Shomrat, T. & Levin, M. (2013) ‘An automated training paradigm reveals long-term memory in planarians and its persistence through head regeneration,’ in The Journal of Experimental Biology, 216(20): 3799 LP – 3810 

Trewawas, A. (2015) Plant behaviour and intelligence. Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK

A job offer: A lesson in empathy and pedagogy

I was recently offered an Assistant Professor job in a (mostly) online sustainability-focused doctoral programme in the US state university system. The position had much going for it. Most important to me was that my would-be colleagues were passionate, caring, thoughtful, and open-minded, and that I would have a lot of opportunities to develop my subject of interest. At the time, I was on a precarious one-year teaching contract in a programme at University of Edinburgh where I felt a bit out of place, often giving courses to teach well outside my area of knowledge or concern, and to deliver these courses in ways that did not make sense to me. I also felt constricted in what was possible. The programme at the American university was emergent and developmental, which really suits my preference for fluid co-evolution between teaching, curriculum, and students. By contrast, a favourite moaning point amongst colleagues in Edinburgh is that this university is highly bureaucratic and managerial. Forget allowing space for ambiguity and emergence! Even proposing course changes is such an elaborate affair that few bother to do it. Hence a culture of firing through unchanged powerpoint slides in courses year to year.

I was heading to class one morning after too many nights in sleepless indecision. It would be the first class I would teach since the job offer. The class was on quantitative research methods, a topic I know little about practically or theoretically. I was nervous about how it would go. The day before, I was busying myself trying to understand the meaning of ANOVA tests and the relationship between p values and standard deviation. I felt dislocated, and felt as sorry for my soon-to-be-students as I did for myself. I found myself veering heavily towards accepting the job offer. My interests and enthusiasm are not being made use of here, I concluded, to the detriment of my students, my programme, and my own life as a teacher.

Everything changed within 5 minutes of entering class. I felt a swell of energy rising from within as I submerged in the whirlpool of teacher-student interactions. A cluster of new faces, new people behind them with their unique hidden depths, new relationships between us, and so much growth awaiting! As I started explaining something about statistical significance, I felt a heaviness in my body when a young male student to my left starting slouching absentmindedly in his chair. When asking questions to check the class’ understanding of the concept, I welled with excitement when another student attempted an answer with bright, sparkling eyes. I realised at that moment I would rather be teaching a subject I knew nothing about (and, frankly, had some concerns about) face to face than my favourite subject online. I thrive in this dynamic space, where the currents of feeling circulate. Here is an ecology of emotions, spreading, evolving, co-evolving, eliciting my thoughtful attention and responsive experimentation. It is as alive and real as it is dynamic and complex. It is a space that terrifies me and thrills me, and is one I cannot live without. How might I engage that young man? How will I enthuse others?

I turned down the job. This led to an attempt to articulate semi-conscious aspects of my pedagogy, aspects that are coming into clearer apprehension through this whole experience. It is now becoming clearer to me how much I depend on (and enjoy) empathy as a way of knowing and interacting with students. The term “empathy” is used and thought about in many different ways. Perhaps I should attempt a sketch of what it might mean to me.

I am influenced by those working on the phenomenological descriptions of empathy that acknowledge the primacy of intersubjectivity (e.g. Zahavi; Thompson). When one is empathetic, one is feeling the emotion that is being felt by another. This feeling is not a projection or a theory. We do not form a hypothesis of what the other person is feeling based on an interpretation of their body language and disposition and then feel the consequences of that hypothesis (this is the “theory-theory”). Nor do we simulate the experience after having received our sense impressions of the other. Instead, I assert that the experience of empathy is co-emergent with the perception. It is simultaneous because the perceiving the other’s boredom or sadness or joy is our experience of these similar states emerging within us. I see boredom wash over the student’s body as I feel heaviness wash through my own body. The meaning of the outer experience and the inner experience are given significance by one another. We may be variously conscious of these affective flows, and sometimes not aware of them at all (as when your tired yawn makes me tired and yawn). But they are there. Our bodies gear into a sociality that is fundamental to perception itself, conditioning and enabling the possibilities for thought and action, lending situations a shared tone, a shared ground, a context.

In other words, empathy is part of how we know and interact with people. It is only when we are incapable of empathy that we need to piece together the various bits of information about another person to cobble an hypothesis of what they are experiencing. Void of context, the mind is left to its own scattered devices, analysing a situation with no horizon to give bearings or direction. This happens, and is experienced as a lack of connection, but when it is commonplace it becomes pathological. Thankfully, most of us can get better at empathy through learning. Even if it is such a fundamental pre-cognitive and embodied condition for experience, the capacity of empathy remains open to the world. It provides a context, but is not an impermeable framework. As Evan Thompson puts it, human empathy is open to “pathways to non-egocentric or self-transcendent modes of intersubjectivity” (2001, p. 1). And so we can learn new emotions as we experience new perceptions; the world outside us and the world inside get richer and more nuanced in tandem. The development of our self and our capacity to be affected by those around us are aligned not opposed. This is crucial for pedagogy but also in understanding and participating in the world more generally.

Once I feel empathy, I am now in some sense on a similar path as the other person. I don’t feel “exactly” the same thing that my bored student feels, but this may not matter because they do not feel the same thing from one moment to the next either. The important thing is that an affective feedback loop is occurring, where my empathy is continually calibrating and re-calibrating as I continue to perceive my student. We share a path, perhaps at first a vague synchronisation, but one which is a condition for our respective experiences to hone in on one another with more particularity. With boredom as a shared context, a shift in their chair is felt as an alert break from disengagement and I feel myself suddenly attending to the student’s next move. On the other hand, a continued slouch is also new information because of context; it is felt as a more prolonged boredom. With the passage of time, our immediate perceptions are always put into context. Empathy is the condition for shared experience but is also conditioned by such experiences. The shared path dilates or constricts. Sometimes it brings others into it. Sometimes it dissolves in an instant of total incomprehension.

The meaning of particular statements that students make or do not make is always couched in contexts. The more perceptive I am to these contexts, the more empathic I am to them. The more I feel, the more I see.

Without context, particular statements can be interpreted in many different ways. Our focus shifts from the relationship between the statements and the context to the multitude of semantic possibilities that reside within the utterance. This can mislead us into thinking that it is the nature of language to be infinitely ambiguous and open to interpretation. But textual meanings and their ambiguities result from dissociating statement from context. We hone into nothing but sterilised font, and the contexts at play are only between previous and present words. People who read too many books might be susceptible to forgetting that the meaning of words emerges within and contributes to a more-than-worded world. Those analytic philosophers obsessed with the meaning of words divorced from situation come to mind.

In the case of my job offer, I realised the subtle and dynamic dimensions of the body would disappear: the reams and realms of empathic feedback that accompany the shared words of the classroom. Not only could I not engage in the kind of pedagogy that makes most sense to me as an educator, I would be constantly fighting the quiet but pervasive meta-lesson that we must succumb to, instead of mend, the problem of abstraction. I do not want to contribute to reductionistic assumption that events can be abstracted from their contexts, even if (especially if) I teach that such abstraction is dangerous, leading to instrumental thinking, stereotyping, automaticity, a lack of receptivity, a lack of growth, the logic of standardised solutions, and much of what is contributing to personal, social, ecological destruction widely. (Quite the claim). In other words, I don’t want enact the assumption that form and content do not have to be congruent in pedagogy, itself a miseducative lesson in context.

I do not mean to suggest that there is no place for abstraction. But abstraction is only half of thinking. On its own it can lead to models, theories and hypotheses. It can also lead to concepts and ideas available for analogical transfer into new situations, such as when I parcel out a ‘story’ of my experience and tell it to others with the hope that it resonates for them (it sometimes does!). But the more we apply abstractions, the more we think they work, and the less we are open to remembering that they were in fact abstractions. We must pair our skills in abstraction with skills in contextualising. When and how do the abstractions breakdown? What situations do we invite such that other people and the world might nudge these mental constructions into better coherence, or discount them entirely? For me, it is in face to face situations that my abstractions (such as my cognised hypotheses about what the other person is thinking or feeling) are recontextualised by the ongoing flow of the interaction. Through computer screens, this would forever be an upward swim. Perhaps it would be full of insights about the nature of these problems, maybe even a catalytic opportunity to reconstruct “distance learning.” But this work for another.

The rejoining of abstraction and contextualisation is an important pedagogical project. But it is more than that. The same problems that lurk in our fractured classroom pervade our fractured world, so the rejoinder is an epistemological and ontological project as well.

It is epistemological because it concerns the process and nature of knowing, suggesting that any knowing is incomplete unless it goes back and forth between these two registers. Its ontological significance lies in the fact that this is a necessary way to engage the world. If we pay attention to any phenomenon closely enough, we find it asks us to avoid the extremes of surgical reduction and wooly holism.

Things have parts and these parts interact to form wholes. That is why breaking things down into components and analysing their properties and interactions leads to knowledge. But the wholes also have a sort of “downward causation” because they set the contexts for local interactions in the form of organised relations, boundaries, and relative interconnections and disconnections. There are a lot of wholes and parts in such circular causal organisation in between the smallest and largest phenomena. It is within this meso-world that we live and is here where our actions are meaningful or meaningless, wise or misguided. Empathy is a perceptual response to an ontological whole, the global feeling of another being that pervades and unifies a person’s various behaviours. This whole is not simply created by a set of separate local interactions, as though the eyes, nose, back’s behaviours were all causally effective on their own and the whole body merely an epiphenomenon. No. The whole body sets the conditions for the local parts. People are wholes. And empathy teaches us teaches us there are also wholes in social co-ordination, dynamically whirling between people who co-emerge together like starlings in murmuration or the infectious bellowing of howler monkeys.