Positive, Causative, Wizard of Oz-itive Thinking
Elsewhere I’ve written about the mistake of applying cause-and-effect thinking to complex systems in general — and to the body in particular. It’s a pernicious trap of thinking, one that can lead to a lot of needless suffering and confusion.
Unfortunately it’s also the default mode of Western epistemology (in case you aren’t familiar, epistemology is that branch of philosophy and science concerned with what counts as knowledge and how we know what we know).
Our bias is towards this positive, causative, Wizard of Oz-itive thinking. Now, I’m not a philosopher, but let’s see if we can break that down a bit…
Positivism in this case isn’t a matter of feeling happy or having a rosy outlook on the future. It has to do with the idea that the only valid explanations of things are scientific in nature, particularly those derived from the natural scientific approach. It emphasizes positive phenomena, those things that are present and directly observable (in contrast with negative phenomena, those things that aren’t directly observable and may in fact be absent). Positivism quite enjoys the world of things and tends to consider any phenomena that aren’t things as more or less invalid. Therefore it conceptualizes experience in terms of things whenever possible, looking at the constituent elements of any given subject of study as the most important element.
However, this denies the internal experience you may have of the world. We cannot directly observe your internal experience, but are we to assume it is invalid? If so, that sets us on a slippery slope.
Causative thinking also derives from the natural sciences focus, which looks for explanations of phenomena. In the causative, natural sciences model we say that A caused B. It implies a direct, linear relationship between observed phenomena. If I hit a billiard ball and it makes contact with another billiard ball, then the first billiard ball caused the movement of the second. And obviously my movement caused the movement of the first billiard ball. We can see that this sort of explanation works for simple mechanical systems, but it isn’t so simple when applied to complex systems — especially living ones.
Can we say for example that you bumping into me on the street caused me to erupt into a fit of rage? Perhaps. But at best that would be a contribution, not a cause.
Wizard of Oz-itive thinking is a catchall term for our tendency to look for some agent responsible for the situations we find ourselves in — some powerful, singular, localizable entity pulling the strings. This of course is the person responsible for the way things are.
We can see the folly of this line of thought quite easily.
And we can also see how these three lenses dovetail and support each other. If we view the world as primarily made up of little building blocks in various configurations all bumping into each other, then it’s understandable why we might accept these as mental models.
And yet these things lead to all sorts of problems when dealing with living systems. Let’s apply it to the body and see where we get.
The positivist lens leads us to consider the body merely as structure, with its functions as by-products or epiphenomena. We begin to think in terms of muscles that are tight and need to be stretched. We think in terms of “calories in and calories out” as an adequate model of weight management. We examine our nutritional requirements and come to the conclusion that we can replace food with supplements with no consequences.
The causative lens leads us to consider the body as a purely mechanical system, making a machine out of each of us. We begin micromanaging our lives, creating a lot of complication. After all, if each effect you’re trying to create has a unique and isolated cause, then you need to account for every particular cause. So we journal, and meditate, and stretch, and drink our green juices, and use our infrared saunas, and practice gratitude, and go through affirmations, and, and, and…Causative thinking compounds in complication quite easily.
And Wizard of Oz-tive thinking leads us to outsource responsibility in myriad ways. Perhaps it’s a matter or bad genes, or trauma, or the alignment of the planets, or the government, or the weather, or, or, or…whatever the case is, the source of our ailments is out of our reach and out of our sphere of influence.
Positive, causative, Wizard of Oz-itive thinking doesn’t set us up for a good time.
Frankly it doesn’t seem to match with reality much at all.
What seems a bit closer to the nature of the world we live in is that it is primarily informational, recursive, and decentralized.
Let’s see if we can break that down as well.
The informational view of the world biases the relationships between things over the things themselves. It considers that the most useful way to examine a subject isn’t figuring out what it is but what it does — as well as how and in what contexts it does what it does.
The most basic “building block” of the informational view is news of difference. Any system that can behave does so in response to news of difference. We can see that this view of the world gets us into the realm of communication and behavior, allowing us to make more sense out of living organisms. After all you do not relate to me based on what I’m made of but based on what I do relative to the world around me.
The recursive view considers that there are essentially no straight lines in nature — and very few linear relationships. Instead we can say that the living world is characterized by feedback loops. Just as A may influence B, B may influence A in response. A simple example can illustrate.
When studying ecology, students are introduced to two graphs that indicate population levels of foxes and rabbits. It becomes apparent that there is some relationship between the two. As the number of foxes increase, they eat more rabbits, bringing the population of rabbits down. However, when the population of rabbits falls too low, the foxes starve, and their population dwindles. As their population dwindles, the rabbits are able to reproduce and survive more effectively, and the cycle continues. We can see that the state of the rabbit population at Time 1 has an indirect influence on its state at Time 2 and Time 3. This is the nature of recursive systems.
And in contrast to Wizard of Oz-itive thinking, it’s perhaps better to consider the way things are as decentralized and overdetermined. It’s very rare that we’re going to find one, single thing dictating our experience of the world. Rather our lives are organized by a multiplicity of interactions, each of which shares the responsibility for the way things seem to be.
While this can lead us to imagine that our lives are random and out of control (thanks to not being able to point to any one thing that is responsible), it also demonstrates that small changes anywhere in the system can lead to outsized results later in time. We needn’t go madly searching for THE THING that will have everything fall into place. We can poke at and nudge any number of little things and observe what emerges from those little changes.
Rather than spending our time looking at the building blocks, the discrete causes, and the singular sources of all our woes we’d do well to examine the relationships, the feedback loops, and the many myriad interactions that organize our lives. One leads us on a sure path to atomizing and reifying our experience. The other opens us up to the beauty with which the world — and our bodies — are laden.
Originally published on The Ecosomatics Institute blog
