Individuation Project

Here's the bibliography for the individuation project spawned by my preliminary reading of The Fold.  It includes the philosophy of technology detour that happened between the first and second Simondon books.

Gilbert Simondon -- On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects,

W. Brian Arthur -- The Nature of Technology

Langdon Winner -- Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a Theme in Political Thought

Lewis Mumford -- The Myth of the Machine, Volume 1, 2

Joanne Macy -- Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory

Gilbert Simondon -- Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information

Jakob von Uexküll -- A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with A Theory of Meaning

Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Elanor Rosch -- The Embodied Mind

Raymond Ruyer -- Neofinalism

Erwin Schrodinger -- What is Life?

Bernard Cache -- Earth Moves

Richard Halpern -- Leibnizing

Gilles Deleuze -- The Fold

Healing Back Pain

My rolfer suggested I read Dr. Sarno's simple and slim volume about the psychological roots of back pain.  Sarno spent many years treating patients with recurring back and neck pain and came to the conclusion that in many cases the pain is actually psychosomatic.  He describes a medical condition which he calls, somewhat unmemorably in my opinion, tension myositis syndrome.  The idea is very simple.  When we have some chronic emotional disturbance (Sarno points particularly to represessed anger) our nervous system can protect us from this threat by using a physical pain to distract us from seeing the emotional suffering.  It's a trick as old as the Freudian unconscious (which itself goes all the way back to the minute perceptions of Leibniz).

After all, in our culture we have trained ourselves to believe that all physical things have a physical cause and that any pain we feel must signal some sort of 'real' physical tissue damage.  That is, we literally can't imagine that a pain could be caused by the mind, because there is no possible mysterious woo-woo new-age mind-body connection.  We take this naive materialist position as an article of faith these days, and indeed, that is what it literally amounts to -- scientism.  When looked at with even a modicum less religious fervor, however, we can immediately see that this sermon can only convince the already indoctrinated choir.  After all, if there's no mind-body connection, there's no pain and hence nothing to explain.  That'll be $4.5 trillion please.  The very possibility that we should look into the mind to find the cause of a pain in the body is excluded in advance, which of course makes this a perfectly airtight mechanism for repressing the consciousness of an emotional state.  It becomes literally unthinkable that the physical pain could be caused by an emotional disturbance.  

By contrast, Dr. Sarno successfully treated back pain simply by talking to patients about their emotions.  The only prescription is mental awareness.  In fact, in order to maximize the potency of this medicine, Dr. Sarno suggests completely ignoring the physical pain, literally pretending that it doesn't 'really' hurt at all, and that it therefore requires no special physical attention or treatment of any kind.  Forget all the scary X-rays and MRI images and other medical rites and rituals.  Once we convince ourselves that the problem is simply repressed emotional tension, the pain which served to hide this tension from us can no longer serve that purpose, and so evaporates.  He says this has worked for many people.  And, at least so far, it has worked for me as well.  

Attentive readers may notice that there is a funny irony to this mind-only diagnosis and treatment.  It requires a similar yet opposite faith that the physical cannot possibly be the cause of the pain.  From the perspective of the efficacy of the treatment, this makes perfect sense.  But from an intellectual perspective, it encloses us in another self-justifying loop of faith.  For now we have convinced ourselves that pain can have nothing to do with the physical body, which is of course only slightly less ridiculous a hypothesis than we began with, since it leads us directly to the idea that there is 'really' no body at all.  The resulting logic isn't quite as self-refuting as naive materialism, but it still leaves us with a very deep mystery.  Why is the idea of a pain in "the body" so convincing that it literally becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if there is no such thing as "the body"?