First steps


This strange COVID-19 era has opened up many possibilities for attending talks all over the country - even the world!

I attended this fascinating talk last week:

Towards a Holistic Humanities: Senses and Sensibilities of De-Westernisation

The speakers were lecturers in film: William Brown and Mila Zuo.  It was arranged by the University of Stirling and available to members of the Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities.

Dr. Zuo's work looked extremely interesting on senses and the body - and how Western thinking prioritises sight over the other senses.  

Brown's talk resonated with my current reading.  He referred to contemporary neuroscience and physics to suggest that our Western tendency to separate 'subjects' from 'objects' is flawed. He suggested that the experience of personhood is entangled with other persons (shown in the firing of "mirror neurons" in the brain).  In fact, our perceptions of 'things in the world' are more deeply intertwined with those things than we tend to think.

Barad's (2007) book "Meeting the Universe Halfway" describes the frictions between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in experimental physics.  Barad's thinking develops the idea that our interactions with the world are entangled with it; even the social standing of a person can have impacts on the outcome of physics experiments.

Barad describes the Stern-Gerlach experiment (pp.164-165) where Stern's breath, carrying sulphur from a cheap cigar oxidises the silver on a screen, revealing the impacts of a beam of silver and creating a visible image.  Without the breath, no image was present.  What are the limits of a scientific apparatus?  The cigar was the decisive factor, and its presence depended on Stern being male and having a relatively low income (hence a lot of sulphur in the cigar).

It becomes impossible to separate the observer from the observed.  Both 'arise together', as Buddhist texts would have it. 

***

This  Zen chant "Affirming Faith in Mind" came to me as the talk ended:

"For things are things because of mind, as mind is mind because of things." 

(Rochester Zen Center Chant Book)






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