Surfism: a model of Perception

Surfism is a philosophy that likens the mind to surfing, in the sense that the imagination rides the mind like a surfer riding a wave. The interaction between the surfboard and the wave represents the roles played by spatial and temporal relations in how we perceive reality. Surfing is an ideal analogy for the psyche, because a variety of interconnected elements can be represented, with scenarios representing their influences within the system.

The rational framework for Surfism is based on the notion of embodied cognition (EC), which characterises the mind as physically grounded in its situated presence. The EC paradigm encourages a flexible attitude to the study of consciousness, drawing on fields of research as diverse as phenomenology, neuro-physiology, evolutionary biology, anthropology, developmental and cognitive psychology, computer science, linguistics, literature, meditation, art and sport. Admittedly, interdisciplinary research is a risky enterprise, given that researchers attempt to base arguments on concepts they may not fully understand. The risk is often ignored by New Age philosophies, which draw analogies with scientific concepts to give their ideas credibility. The 2004 film What the Bleep Do We Know!? is riddled with counter-factual arguments that are viewed by academia as pseudoscience. According to a letter published in Physics Today:

"the movie illustrates the uncertainty principle with a bouncing basketball being in several places at once. There's nothing wrong with that. It's recognized as pedagogical exaggeration. But the movie gradually moves to quantum 'insights' that lead a woman to toss away her antidepressant medication, to the quantum channeling of Ramtha, the 35,000-year-old Atlantis god, and on to even greater nonsense." (Kuttner & Rosenblum, 2006, p.15).

The film presents a message that is potentially misleading, because laypeople would not know where the science ends and the speculation begins. However, the problem is not limited to pop culture. Sometimes, academics use terminology that carries inferences from everyday concepts, like for example "altruism" in biology. This no doubt appeals to a broader audience of readers. But, some question this application of the term, suggesting that it is not consistent with the core meaning of altruism.

"Ordinarily we think of altruistic actions as disinterested, done with the interests of the recipient, rather than our own interests, in mind. But kin selection theory explains altruistic behaviour as a clever strategy devised by selfish genes as a way of increasing their representation in the gene-pool, at the expense of other genes. Surely this means that the behaviours in question are only 'apparently' altruistic, for they are ultimately the result of genic self-interest?" (Okasha, 2008. [WEB]).

Acting in the group's best interests in order to benefit in the future is delayed self-interest, the antithesis of genuine altruism. Not only does this undermine the original meaning of the concept, it infers that there is an evolutionary link between the two phenomena. Clearly, metaphors serve a useful pedagogical function, but they are also fundamental to intellectual enquiry. The Nineteenth Century German Chemist, August Kekulé, who contributed some major discoveries to the field of organic chemistry, gives a tantalising account of the thought processes that led to him discovering the chain structure of many organic molecules and the ring-structure of the benzene molecule. The story is often discussed in the context of consciousness studies, because it highlights the mysterious ability of the mind to make sense. Here is the story in his own words:

"During my stay in London I resided in Clapham Road....I frequently, however, spent my evenings with my friend Hugo Mueller....We talked of many things but most often of our beloved chemistry. One fine summer evening I was returning by the last bus, riding outside as usual, through the deserted streets of the city....I fell into a reverie, and lo, the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. Whenever, hitherto, these diminutive beings had appeared to me, they had always been in motion. Now, however, I saw how, frequently, two smaller atoms united to form a pair: how a larger one embraced the two smaller ones; how still larger ones kept hold of three or even four of the smaller: whilst the whole kept whirling in a giddy dance. I saw how the larger ones formed a chain, dragging the smaller ones after them but only at the ends of the chains....The cry of the conductor: "Clapham Road," awakened me from my dreaming; but I spent a part of the night in putting on paper at least sketches of these dream forms. This was the origin of the "Structural Theory".

"Something similar happened with the benzene theory.... I was sitting writing at my textbook but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere. I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again, the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. This time, the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye...could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation: long lows, sometimes more closely fitted together all twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time, I spent the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis.

"Let us learn to dream, gentlemen, then perhaps we shall find the truth." (Martin, 1997, p.165).

This story is relevant for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it encourages us to be open to new ideas, even if they seem only loosely related to the research. The idea that surfing is analogous to the psyche would fall into that category. Secondly, Kekulé recalls that a "snake-like motion" was instrumental in the processing of the mental images. This corroborates the idea that a rhythmic motion like surfing is somehow implicated in thought processes. Thirdly, the idea that dreaming could actually lead to great discoveries validates the use of introspection to interpret temporality.

According to John McTaggart (1908), there are two modes of time reference: an A-series and a B-series. The difference between the A-series and the B-series hinges on the orientation of the subject relative to the object. It is our detached perspective that portrays time as a continual stream of events, labeled the A-series. Events are objectified, in the sense that they stand in relation to time, as if the event is in the foreground and time is in the background. In the B-series, events are subjectified, in the sense that they stand in relation to each other, with temporality viewed only in terms of events that are before and after each other.

Surfism adopts the B-series, because the subjectification of temporality suspends the separation of subject and object responsible for categorising the world in terms of concepts. The separation of subject and object evolved because recognising danger was key to our survival. A clear sense of your own physical presence is vital when faced by danger (Montell, 2002, p.8). The ability to act decisively in a stressful situation set the stage for more advanced cognitive development. Conceptualisation enables people to collaborate in problem solving activities (Breunig, 2009, p.5). But, the natural world does not reveal itself through conceptual means. On the contrary, it is concealed by concepts, as Heidegger (1925) explains:

"When tradition thus becomes master, it does so in such a way that what it 'transmits' is made so inaccessible, proximally and for the most part, that it rather becomes concealed. Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it over to self-evidence; it blocks our access to those primordial 'sources' from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part quite genuinely drawn. Indeed it makes us forget that they have had such an origin, and makes us suppose that the necessity of going back to these sources is something which we need not even understand." (Heidegger, 1962, p.43).

Heidegger views philosophy as a means of destroying ordinary everyday meanings of words like time, history, being, theory, death, mind, body, matter, logic, etc. By orienting ourselves to an objective reality, the truth is presented as a neutral fact belonging to what Heidegger calls the they-self. It suits our everyday circumstances to subscribe to the they-self, but it is an inauthentic existence, plagued by angst. Unlike fear, angst is not oriented to an object, but rather to an uncanny sense of one's own detached perspective. Heidegger defines this problem in terms of our attitude to death. In ordinary everyday discussions, the they-self views death as a mundane fact, which inadvertently hides its actual relevance to one's own presence. Angst challenges us to recognise life's finitude; a call of conscience from the self wanting to be itself. In a moment of vision, the self is revealed from a new perspective, which simultaneously exposes the they-self as responsible for concealing the self from the self.

Conceptualisation enables us to deal with reality in objective terms. However, our experience of the world remains transient, because, in essence, we are transient, which is terrifying if thought of objectively. But, we only fear transience when we look at it objectively. In essence, the problem is not the transience, but the perspective that renders it objectively. Although fear of transience seems to equate with fear of death, the threat is not gauged by the danger itself, but rather by our inability to determine the nature of the danger and how best to respond (Montell, 2002, p.12). Although the threat posed by our own transience is an illusion, the more we try to interpret it the more our inability to gauge the threat increases our fear of it. The fear is real. But, it is also pointless, because transience is not an object that can be interpreted separate from ourselves.

The most basic assumption we have about objective reality is our own spatially derived presence, whereby our surroundings provide the context for our own presence. Neurologists point to the posterior superior parietal lobe-the portion of the brain Newberg and D'Aquili (2001) have dubbed the orientation association area, or OAA:

"The primary job of the OAA is to orient the individual in physical space-it keeps track of which end is up, helps us judge angles and distances, and allows us to negotiate safely the dangerous physical landscape around us. To perform this crucial function, it must first generate a clear, consistent cognition of the physical limits of the self. In simpler terms, it must draw a sharp distinction between the individual and everything else, to sort out the you from the infinite not-you that makes up the rest of the universe." (p.4).

They suggest that reduced neural activity in the OAA during transcendence indicates a deficit condition resulting from a lack of information processing:

"Would the orientation area interpret its failure to find the borderline between the self and the outside world to mean that such a distinction doesn't exist? In that case, the brain would have no choice but to perceive that the self is endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything the mind senses. And this perception would feel utterly and unquestionably real." (p.4)

However, by assuming that the spatial limits of the self are the absolute limits of the self, they overlook the key attribute of transcendence, which is the heightened sense of immediacy. They fail to acknowledge that the brain has to first generate a perspective from which to interpret the spatial boundary of the self.

One's perspective emerges from optic flow; those movements in the scenery that are attributed to one's own movement. In essence, the mind uses these movements for the sake of determining one's moving perspective. Since the correlation between these movements and one's own motion is immediate, the relationship between them contributes to one's sense of immediacy. However, while our perspective resides in the present moment, the interpretation of space suppresses our experience of the present moment by harnessing our perspective to navigate space. The mechanism that renders the world as spatial does so at the expense of our own immediacy.

We use a variety of cues to perceive depth; motion is only one of many. One of the most powerful cues to depth, especially at short distances, is binocular disparity, the difference in the images received by each eye. Additionally, we make use of accommodation, the thickening and thinning of the lens of the eye to better focus on near and far objects respectively. Additionally, we use a number of pictorial cues to depth, such as the fact that nearer objects occlude further objects (occlusion), nearer objects are larger than further objects (relative size) and are further from the horizon (relative position).

Although motion is not the only means by which depth is interpreted, it distinguishes itself from all other depth cues by virtue of its temporality. Depth variations revealed by motion are determined across time. The mind determines the shape of an object, or an empty space, based on how its appearance changes over time. These changes in appearance only make sense to the extent that they are relative to the observer's perspective. So, the process of determining depth through motion effectively harnesses the observer's perspective, with the result that our sense of immediacy is dulled.

Space seems like a solid foundation for presence, however, it is not as fundamental as it seems. As far as perception is concerned, it is a façade that masks the fluidity of one's perspective. Paradoxically, this fluidity is more resilient than space, because it is the foundation for spatial perception. Through meditation it is possible to retract one's awareness from the world, and in so doing dissolve the division between one's perspective and the object of one's attention, such that one's very perspective becomes the object. Then, one does not see the surroundings so much as the movements in the surroundings that indicate one's own motion. Subject and object merge and the here-and-now becomes palpable.

The "sharp distinction between the individual and everything else" only applies to our spatial presence. Our immediacy extends beyond this boundary. The so-called inner and outer worlds are intertwined within our consciousness. One's perspective emerges from the changing appearance of one's surroundings and the so-called "outer" reality only gains its spatial character from the projection of one's own presence. What emerges from this discussion, however, is a distinction between spatial and temporal relations, where space is in fact 'imagined' and the nature of transcendence extends beyond our physical boundary.

While it is perfectly sensible to treat the world as objectively present, the spatial paradigm is by definition divisive. By contrast, the temporal paradigm is inclusive. However, the nature of this connection is not to be understood in spatial terms. It sounds absurd to say that: "the self is endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything the mind senses" without first dissolving the spatial paradigm. It infers that the mind is misinterpreting its relationship to the world. On the contrary, during transcendence, the mind perceives the foundation of its own presence. The extraordinary connection felt during meditation doesn't just feel real it is real. But it is a connection to the present moment, rather than the physical world as such.

Optic flow determines the point-of-view from which we perceive space. Or conversely, the perception of space depends on a point-of-view, which in turn depends on optic flow. Although a moving point-of-view can be described as a line, this is only how it looks within the spatial paradigm, which cannot depict movement other than in spatial terms. Besides, optic flow presents a veritable sea of moving points, which collectively determine the moving point-of-view. Not that they are seen as points or lines, however. Instead, the mind attends to the different rates at which the different parts of the scenery slide past each other.

Spatial perception takes shape within the fluid movement of one's own visual perspective. Just as a wave changes shape as it enters shallow water, vision converges with the visible to render spatial relations. The confluence of movements coalesce to give us the impression of form in our surroundings. Like a wave, spatial perception propagates through reciprocal causality. Motion determines the observer's perspective, which detects the spatial relations that situate the observer. There are thus two directions of causation: a feed-forward from motion to space and a feed-back from space to motion. The observer's perspective rides the interface between space and motion.

While its basic function is to situate the agent in space, the observer's perspective vacillates between the spatial and temporal paradigms. Too much of the spatial paradigm causes the individual to see himself as an object. Too much of the temporal paradigm makes him oblivious to his circumstances. The individual needs to balance the two paradigms, to be able to act decisively in circumstances that continually change, because the ability to anticipate change underpins the ability to read a situation.

In the same way that spatial relations feed back to situate one's perspective in space, hypostasis feeds back to support higher level concepts, as Peirce (1906) describes:

"That wonderful operation of hypostatic abstraction by which we seem to create entia rationis that are, nevertheless, sometimes real, furnishes us the means of turning predicates from being signs that we think or think through, into being subjects thought of. We thus think of the thought-sign itself, making it the object of another thought-sign. Thereupon, we can repeat the operation of hypostatic abstraction, and from these second intentions derive third intentions." (para.549).

This process repeats itself constantly, though only insofar as it serves to confirm where one is going, whether that be spatially or semantically.

Peirce regards semiosis as the product of a triadic relation, comprising a sign, an object and an interpretant, such that a sign stands for an object to an interpretant. Surfing can likewise be described in terms of a triadic relation, in this case, between the wave, the surfboard and surfing. Like a sign, the wave exists in relation to itself. The surfboard is like an object in the sense that it is defined on the basis of a relation beyond itself. Surfing can be likened to an interpretant, because it is defined on the basis of its relation to the other two components.

According to Kant, information is organised by three types of synthesis: the apprehension of raw perceptual input, the recognition of concepts and the reproduction of each in imagination. These reflect three fundamental faculties of the mind; Sensibility, Understanding and Imagination. Imagination is the least stable of the three, as it allows the mind to alternate between understanding and sensibility. (Brook, 2009). This pattern reappears in Freud's model of the psyche, comprising three functionally interrelated parts, one of which negotiates between the other two. According to Freud:

"The ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world ... Moreover, the ego seeks to bring the influence of the external world to bear upon the id and its tendencies, and endeavours to substitute the reality principle for the pleasure principle, which reigns unrestrictedly in the id.... The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions ... in its relation to the id it is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own strength, while the ego uses borrowed forces." (Freud, 1962, pp.363-4).

This analogy is similar in structure to surfing, where the rider has to control a superior force; in this case the wave. But, in the surfing analogy, there is no reference to a rider, because the presence of a surfer within the model would amount to placing a mind within a mind, which is not only distracting, but leads to an infinite regress of minds within minds.

To analyse how the surfboard responds to the surfer's movements, the designer reduces the surfer's influence to a set of rotational axes. Focusing on the surfboard, he ignores the shape and motion of the wave, which is subsequently reduced to a flat plane. At this level of abstraction, the surfer's influence can be represented diagrammatically, enabling the designer to more easily visualise the different phases of a manoeuvre, as well as the transitions between them.

We can visualise rotational axes in terms of lines of latitude and longitude circling the globe:

1. The first rotational axis traces a circle on the horizontal plane, which can be thought of as the Equator. So long as the surfboard rotates on this plane, its interaction with the wave has no affect. So, this is a monadic relation, defined solely by the wave in its relation to itself.

2. The second rotational axis traces a circle on any vertical plane; which can be visualised as the lines of longitude circling the globe from north to south. Rotating on any of these axes causes the surfboard to penetrate the wave, which represents a dyadic relation between the surfboard and the wave.

3. The third rotational axis traces a circle on a vertical plane set at right angles to each of the other two. This second vertical plane of rotation simultaneously introduces the variable of direction, in the sense of the surfboard traversing the surface of the wave. When all three rotational axes combine, monadic and dyadic relations become absorbed into triadic relations.

Waves carry energy like memories: the kinetic energy is stored in a chain of orbits, which taper into the depths. The orbiting particles are the wave's memory of the wind rippling the ocean surface. The more wind, the larger the wave, the deeper they reach. When the deepest orbits are compressed against the seabed, the whole chain is squeezed upward, causing each orbit to become elliptical. As wave height increases, the particles break free of their closed orbits and become displaced, either forward or backward of their previous position. The wave thus "breaks" inside, as well as on the surface. So, these breakages are like memories being released in response to a stimulus. The fact that waves are fantastically varied in their shape and motion reflects the limitless 'horizon' of possibilities of each of the qualities listed under "temporality" in table 1.