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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Vol 40! On Minds and Mindsets...
Good Morning fellow emergent systems!
It has been a busy week on our end. We’re scheduled to deliver a series of workshops and lectures over the next couple of weeks. So we are heads down, hard at work preparing. (Actually, we had to pause finishing the newsletter this morning to join a conference in Bangkok to host a session on Creativity, Technology and the Arts— where we were discussing Acheulean Hand Axes and Virtual Reality amongst other things— which is why morning has become afternoon…).
In the midst of all the other parts of life we have our daily practice of writing short informative posts for LinkedIn. We like to get up early to watch the rise of the summer sun, slowly make some coffee, feed the cat, walk the dog, hear the birds and write. It is a good personal exercise and a wonderful collective practice. LinkedIn can be far more than an advertising platform.
This week we wrote a post on Mindsets that really sparked a great conversation — there are, as of this morning, over 370 comments. “Comments” does not really describe how rich the discussion is – we encourage you to take a look. We have tried to engage everyone. It is really wonderful to be developing a rich collective dialog on this topic — thank you!
Given the great and passionate interest in critically engaging with the vexed terrain of everything to do with mindsets, we felt it only appropriate to go further, devoting this week's newsletter to critically exploring this terrain.
To kick things off with the right energy, we curated a mindset playlist to accompany your reading of this week's newsletter (album art credit to Casey Frasca).
Give it a listen, dance a bit and shake things around! Feel your being propelling you! Dance a little with your environment, shake those chairs, spin the tables and wrestle with the rugs!
The current interest in mindsets is part of a long tradition in the west to give primacy to the immaterial over the material and mind over body. We can trace part of this back to the Greeks and then a number of key developments in the west.
In this tradition there is a strong conceptual habit to understand the mental as the source of our actions (this is perfectly illustrated by the story of creation in the Bible).
Internal mental beliefs are directly seen as the source of our behaviors. Carol Dweck the psychologist and author of Mindsets: The New Psychology of Success, continues this approach and states this explicitly:
“A belief … leads to a host of thoughts and actions”
And: “The view you adopt for yourself… can determine whether you become the person you want to be and whether you accomplish the things you value”
Now Dweck is not the first person to develop such an approach — the change your mind and everything follows approach is a long standing and highly problematic cultural trope.
But with Dweck’s book and her claim to have developed a “psychology of success” a whole mindset industry has sprung up. This industry with its promises of success via a mental fix is part of the larger set of trends around all things mental — the mindfulness complex. Roger Purser writes an interesting book on this: McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality.
We now live in an absurd business universe littered with dualistic mindset choices (and everything in between) being offered by various consultants as a solution to everything from creativity to social change.
Now we are not that interested in directly critiquing Dweck and her research or whether the mindset industry has taken this far beyond its useful and effective context (education). There is a lot of very interesting research and criticism from these perspectives (from small sample sizes to unrepeatable experiments and more). This Scientific American article is a fair starting point for those interested in this aspect of the debate.
We are also not the first to critique mindsets, David Snowden has been insightfully critiquing this approach for quite some time (here is a recent piece of his on the topic).
Our critical skepticism of mindfulness is really threefold and quite simple:
Given this, our critique of mindfulness is larger than this recent trend inspired by Dweck’s work. We can see similar claims in Systems Thinkers such as Donella Meadows who says “Paradigms — the mind-set out of which the system arises” and who goes on to explain how she understands mindsets with a longer quote from Emerson:
“Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of some man’s mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers… It follows, of course, that the least enlargement of ideas… would cause the most striking changes in external things.”
“Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of some man’s mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers… It follows, of course, that the least enlargement of ideas… would cause the most striking changes in external things.”
And a number of the people who responded critically to our LinkedIn post also came from this perspective: the mental — whether it be conceptualized as beliefs or mindsets shape and drive everything.
The claim is the same: the mind is the source from which our approach, understanding and agency in the world arise.
When we unpack this claim further we can see that what is assumed by this position on mind and beliefs is that it is internal to an individual — it is something that properly resides in the head/brain.
This internal vs external logic is clear in the Emerson quote, in Dweck’s work, and all the copious brain images associated with the manichean presentation of mindset choices (see image above). It goes further than this — we can see this conceptual logic across our culture from the movie The Matrix, to how we discuss AI, to those who propose that at some moment in the near future we will cross a “singularity” and we can upload our minds to computers.
The key questions for us are:
But before getting into this, it is important to ask why does this matter? Is this just enjoyable but irrelevant armchair philosophizing?
It matters because how we understand the mind shapes how we understand action and where we put our attention. As we hope to demonstrate, this conceptual logic has profoundly deformed how we engage with reality, and pushed us away from actual relevant tools and practices. (As an example, on Monday we wrote a post on LinkedIn about how this has radically skewed our approaches to creativity).
The study of cognition has evolved over the last 75 years from an information processing model of brain based activity that rested upon computer processing analogies: information about the outside world came in via the senses and was processed internally via a symbol/information processing logic that generated internal representations of an external world. This 1950’s model is what we now call Cognitivism.
By the early 1980’s Cognitivism gave way to Connectionism which focused on perceptual pattern recognition. This neural network based approach is widespread and has had a big impact on current AI systems. Ultimately Connectionism and Cognitivism are not profoundly different and their differences are about whether what the brain deals with are best understood as symbolic or sub-symbolic representations.
Cognitivism and Connectionism are classical approaches that locate thinking wholly with the brain and posit a clear distinction between brain and world that is mediated by internal representations. These approaches could be termed “brain-on-a-stick” or “brain in a vat” models.
Connectionism was itself challenged by the end of the twentieth century by Dynamic Embodied approaches that began to emerge in the 1990s (but have a far longer history: Henri Bergson, William James, Husserl, the Gibsons in the western tradition, and far longer in India and elsewhere— Nagarjuna, and Dogen to name only two of many).
The Embodied approach stressed dynamic systems and embodiment. Cognition as a dynamic system is temporal, distributed and emergent — with repeated sensorimotor patterns giving rise to cognitive processes. Cognition as an embodied phenomenon shift attention to focus on meaningful embodied, situated activities (situate know-how and sense-making) giving rise to thinking.
The dynamic and embodied approach to cognition was and is revolutionary — perhaps even Copernican in how it shifts our understanding of the mind. From the Embodied perspective mind and body could no longer be seen as separate and distinct. Further, some researchers within this approach looked at how tools, activity and the environment could be considered a necessary part of cognition. Shaun Galleger’s How the Body Shapes the Mind, Erin Manning Thought in the Act, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone The Primacy of Movement, Lambros Malafouris How Things Shape the Mind offer good introductions to this emerging approach.
This extended embodied approach to cognition has itself evolved into the Enactive Approach.
To enact is to carry something out — things come about through action. It is a co-creative approach: we come about through more-than-human action.
This approach develops a new understanding of who we are, & how we are in the world as active co-creating beings. Evan Thompson’s Mind in Life is perhaps the best introduction to this approach.
NOTE: for a good brief overview of the field and the state of various contemporary debates this article After the Philosophy of Mind: Replacing Scholasticism with Science is a good starting point.
The emerging consensus within the Enactive approach is what is often called “4EA”.
The mind is not some mental “thing” that is locked inside the skull/brain — rather it is fully Embodied, Embedded, Extended, Enactive and Affective process (thus 4EA). We go into this in detail on our website — which is worth a pause from reading the newsletter.
This has led Evan Thompson (one of the key researchers developing this approach) to say that “looking for the mind in the brain is like looking for flight inside the wing of a bird. Flight is not in the wing — it is not “in” anything; it is a relational property of the system — a system composed of bodily qualities and environmental qualities. Mind is likewise not “in” anything — it is an emergent process that arises from a relation dominant system.
This is a critical aspect of the debate that is worth lingering upon. It could be argued that yes all of these aspects matter (body, tools, environments, etc…) but only because they support the brain activity of thinking. But this is not what the Enactive perspective is saying. They, following from a dynamic adaptive systems approach are making a very different and much stronger claim:
“When the constituents of a system are highly coherent, integrated, and correlated such that their properties are nonlinear functions of one another, the system cannot be treated as just a collection of uncoupled parts. Thus, the activity of strongly non-linearly coupled brain, body, and environment cannot be ultimately explained by decomposing them into subsystems, or system and background. They are one extended system.” (Chemero & Silberstein).
“When the constituents of a system are highly coherent, integrated, and correlated such that their properties are nonlinear functions of one another, the system cannot be treated as just a collection of uncoupled parts. Thus, the activity of strongly non-linearly coupled brain, body, and environment cannot be ultimately explained by decomposing them into subsystems, or system and background. They are one extended system.” (Chemero & Silberstein).
This is what Thompson means when he is saying that the mind is not in anything. The activity of thinking and the mind are emergent processes of the extended system — and cannot be found in any one aspect of the system (the brain) supported by other aspects (body and environment).
This dynamic system approach changes everything for us: “in the complex systems of coordination dynamics, there are no purely context-independent parts from which to derive a context-independent coordinated whole, even though we often try and occasionally succeed to analyze them as such” (Kelso and Engstrom).
What emerges from the relational whole both changes the parts (system causation) and is irreducible to any part (note: in the link we provide a good introduction to emergence).
While the science has evolved rapidly, the concepts of the historical approach to mind as an internal brain based property and the related logic that causality flows from mind to world linger in many fields.
This is very clear in the contemporary discourse of mindsets and the importance of changing our mindsets. They are, we would argue, artifacts of a historical and scientifically false model of cognition.
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We can understand a “mindset” within these models as acting like a pair of internal glasses that shape how we perceive and engage with all external reality (see above drawing).
We need to move on from this model of minds, mindsets, and beliefs.
The Embodied Cognition researcher Anthony Chemero, based upon work coming out of his lab and the field in general puts it quite strongly:
“I reject the idea of neural correlates of consciousness. There are no correlates of consciousness because consciousness, like thinking more generally, happens in brain-body-environment systems... Claiming that consciousness doesn’t happen in brains alone might strike many people reading this as crazy… In today’s brain-centric intellectual climate, the claim is undeniably counterintuitive… The advantage of rejecting the idea of neural correlates of consciousness is that... it makes it possible to claim, to adapt a phrase from Ryle, that consciousness is neither nothing but brain activity, nor is it something else in addition to brain activity…. [we] argue that consciousness is best understood as the activity of nonlinearly coupled brain-body-environment systems.”
Is this just a philosophical debate that has little bearing in the real world?
After all, one could argue, as many do:
Whatever we call it, mindsets or conceptual schema or anything else — beliefs are real, and we, whoever that “we” actually is, have beliefs and they do shape how we act. So why spend all this time debating things — let's get on with changing how we think at a deep level because that really matters!
There are a number of serious flaws with this argument:
Summing up this critical approach, Micheal Anderson puts it this way:
“We are [embodied] social environment-altering tool users. Tools give us new abilities, leading us to perceive new affordances, which can generate new environmental (and social) structures, which can, in turn, lead to the development of new skills and new tools, that through a process… of scaffolding greatly increases the reach and variety of our cognitive and behavioral capacities” (After Phrenology).
Speaking practically — we need to focus on the whole assemblage and how it works as a totality.
There is a second serious problem with the mindset approach to change: in isolating an individual's mindset as a distinct object and then making the claim that if you change your fundamental mindset you will succeed is an ideological fiction disguised as psychological fact that distracts all of us from the structural changes that need to be made.
Let’s be very clear about this — no matter your “mindset” — growth or fixed or anything else — statistically on average in America today you are more likely to die poorer than your parents. Only 4% of people born into the lowest 20% percent (household income) will move into the top 20%. America and the UK have the lowest social mobility of all the industrialized countries. Wealth, and the radically unequal accumulation of wealth, as Thomas Piketty in Capital in the 21st Century has shown is a structural feature of capitalism — and success has far more to do with where and to whom you were born within this structural logic than anything to do with your mindset (real or not).
Telling anyone that their “success” rests to any significant degree upon their mindset is first adding insult to injury, and more importantly, secondly it is deceiving people into thinking that their lack of success is to some significant degree their fault (or their mindset’s fault), and in doing so distracting them from their actual agency in changing the system.
Our economic system is structurally designed to concentrate success on the very few at the expense of the many and the environment. Changes to this will not happen primarily via developing an inner psychological growth mindset (nor is it a precursor to outer structural change), change will happen by working in an experimental distributed manner across various scales and modalities of the assemblage to make real structural changes.
If we really care about the success of the many — economic, ecologically or otherwise — we should primarily focus on the structural logics that would afford better outcomes. Telling people today in America that their success rests to a significant degree upon how they think is not just absurd, it is profoundly disingenuous and debilitating.
Now, putting all of America and radical inequality aside (if we can), the same logic is true for those working in an organization to facilitate change or creativity — and going further — it is equally true for those facing any other challenge. The general approach is going to be similar:
Will concepts — thoughts matter? Of course, but how they matter and what we do with them is what is at stake. What Micheal Anderson says bears repeating as we conclude:
“We are [embodied] social environment-altering tool users. Tools give us new abilities, leading us to perceive new affordances, which can generate new environmental (and social) structures, which can, in turn, lead to the development of new skills and new tools, that through a process… of scaffolding greatly increases the reach and variety of our cognitive and behavioral capacities” (After Phrenology).
“We are [embodied] social environment-altering tool users. Tools give us new abilities, leading us to perceive new affordances, which can generate new environmental (and social) structures, which can, in turn, lead to the development of new skills and new tools, that through a process… of scaffolding greatly increases the reach and variety of our cognitive and behavioral capacities” (After Phrenology).
While this certainly does not sound so glamorous as the discovery of a “Mindset for Success” and the promise of a psychologically silver bullet — it actually offers us powerful, pragmatic, and creative practices for change making.
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If our work or this newsletter resonates then you'll likely find our book of value: Innovating Emergent Futures - The Innovation Design Approach to Change and Worldmaking. Many of the concepts in this newsletter emanate from the book - which is a deep dive into the what and how of creativity and innovation.
Here is what our dear fellow conspirator Diane Ragsdale of Minneapolis College of Art and Design had to say about it:
Till Volume 41,
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
We’re How You Innovate
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