Risk of Serious Inquiry

1. Know Thyself: The Impasse link 2. Akrasia: Two Steps Backwards link 3. Fechner Makes a Difference link

# Fechner Makes a Difference

Two sides. Fechner was a scientist. He rejected a singularly materialist approach. Nevertheless he embraced a conceptual and experimental rigor that led to the foundation of several domains of science, most notably Psycho-Physics. As Dr. Mises, a pseudonym, he wrote literary pieces, witty essays and parodies. Truth & Beauty.

Fechner wrote Ideas in the _History of Organism Creation and Development_ (1873) the first known paper on what is now trendily called “self-organizing” systems. Fechner outlined five principles for the ways inorganic matter and organic matter co-developed. He traced the various gradations or stages of dynamic stability and instability necessary to produce self-organizing systems. In the history of science there are winners and losers. Until recently Fechner was something of a loser. If he is remembered at all, it is as one of the first experimental psychologists and the founding father of theoretical psychophysics. He devoted his life—a long one (1801–1887)—to making a place within science for his anti-materialistic psychophysical world view—his “Day View.” With it he sought to counter the nihilistic entrenchment of scientific materialism—the “Night View”—into mid-nineteenth century science. To Fechner science was becoming increasingly dry, disconsolate and wrongheaded. The Day View, invested with what Fechner called “liveness,” shares common ground with early and mid-nineteenth century philosophies of Nature, physics, idealism and Romantic aesthetics. The Day View holds that the physical does not cause the mental nor that the mental causes the physical and neither do they cause each other. "Fechner… describes life and consciousness as having an independent, original nature that cannot be further reduced to physical phenomena…. Yet, at the same time, Fechner’s position is materialistic. He sees every change in the physical world as wholly explicable by the laws of nature, and he sees for every mental change some change in the physical world that precedes it. The intriguing thing about Fechner’s philosophy is just how he gets these two seemingly contrary tendencies of non-reducibility and materialism to harmonize." [Heidelberger, Michael. _Nature From Within: Gustav Theodor Fechner And His Psychophysical Worldview_ (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), 73.]

Ernst Heinrich Weber the German anatomist and physiologist (1795–1878) was a direct influence on Fechner both as mentor and colleague. He first introduced the concept of the just noticeable difference (jnd), that is, the smallest difference perceivable between two similar stimuli. A jnd conveys the idea that a self-report of a sensation is a measure of a mental state. Weber determined that there was a threshold of stimulus that must be passed before an increase in the intensity of any stimulus could be detected as the sensation of difference; the amount of increase necessary to create sensation was the just noticeable difference. Interpreting the empirically derived jnd mathematically Fechner gave us his law which states that human perception follows a logarithmic rather than linear response.

The fact that human sensory discrimination is logarithmic is a profound insight.[22] It allows us to discriminate stimuli that range over many orders of magnitude. For example the threshold for human hearing is approximately 0 decibels (a ticking watch 20 feet away in a silent room) while a rock concert may be 120 decibels. This is a range of 1 trillion (10 to the 12th power) in acoustic power—a remarkable range for any sensor. The same logarithmic response holds for other senses. Fechner showed that the logarithmic sensory response could be derived from the mathematical description of the _jnd_.[23]

Fechner had arrived at a way of demonstrating a fundamental philosophical truth called the identity hypothesis, which holds that mind and body are not to be regarded as real but as different sides of one reality. Inseparably united and distinguished only by point of view, sensation appears from an internal subjective viewpoint as the mind and appears from an external objective viewpoint as the body. Fechner’s law was a testable way to make evident that dualism is not real. Gustav Theodor Fechner humbly named this law after Weber. Later theorists gave Fechner his due and renamed it after Fechner. His radical mathematical reformulation of Weber’s law became the first psychophysical law.

When delving into the history of the Fechner-Weber Principle one is struck with the central role of the concept of a threshold. The threshold in the experimental and theoretical science of Psycho-Physics is where matter and mind meet, where a universe of quantity reappears as a universe of quality, consciousness and awareness. In its remarkable history the psychophysical threshold has been defined, denied, redefined. It’s a concept who’s worth is actively debated still today. It began with a simple set of questions, one of which is: How and by what measure does one define the point, line or zone where the physical becomes the psychical, where quantity becomes quality?

The pleasure of learning, which as Aristotle has taught us is the greatest of all pleasures, can be recast in the light of Fechner. Given that for Fechner pleasure arises when we regain balance psychophysically, then regaining balance is one way of describing learning. Our habits, whether life affirming or life denying, can be viewed in the light of a dynamical systems perspective. Habits, thought of as dynamically stable states are relatively imperturbable. Given the right impetus they can be perturbed, made unstable, giving rise to another dynamically stable state that is more inclusive, more rooted in and more attuned to the flow of lived time. While learning with reduced effort is its own reward the full import of Fechner to us is in integrating our mechanisms of judgment with more strata of our lived experience. In a Feldenkrais lesson the different strata of experience are reconfigured and they are _revalued_. Habit’s most intimate dynamical machinations are accessible and amenable to our tinkerings.

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I've read Part 3 more than once. Each time I'm blown away over and over again at the depth of thought and insight. Here, secrets of the universe are discovered through deep reflection on physical and psychic human experience. Know thyself.

Elsewhere I have observed, humans create things in their own likeness. For example, bowls are shaped like two cupped hands; forks shaped like the fingers and wrist of one hand; hydraulics and heavy machinery resemble muscles and bones. With the Internet and computing, we begin to construct things that model our nervous system, and our community & communication.

So this notion of _threshold_, the _just noticeable difference_, sub-liminal... Couldn't help but notice that similarity in Human Performance in Systems