Inlightenment: Light & Mental Affect
Dr. James Karl Fischer PhD Wednesday, February 25, 2021
Bodies of Consciousness
This installment of Inlightenment explores links between mental health, considering the sciences of light and life in the context of the Five Domains Model of Animal Welfare. We argue that applied photobiology serves positive animal welfare across each of the domains and in particular, with respect to mental functioning whether this is considered as affect, or intellection.
A host of authors have already written about the connections of positive animal welfare to community resiliency, improved sustainability outcomes, and scientific advancement beneficial for disease mitigation and productivity. Rather than revisit the many reasons why positive mental health in animals is beneficial for humans, I will take that context as a given. Instead, I am going to focus on connecting light to positive animal welfare, specifically with regard to the penultimate mental domain.
Another presumed given that I will cling to, is that light, or rather the narrow range electro-magnetic radiation that instigates particular chemical reactions in the eye while providing a setting and media for physical changes within the whole of an organic body, relates to consciousness insofar as this is organized by perception.
Consciousness is entirely physically based, in line with the 2012 Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, an authoritative document that grounds animal consciousness in biological functioning. Let’s consider two propositions.
1. Natural light diversity is vital to the mental functioning of animal life, and date-driven inquiry into physical relationships enables investigators (of all cultures) to understand positive mental welfare better.
2. Natural light diversity conditions, impacts, and makes possible different states of animal consciousness, entirely grounded within the manifold of the physical world as observable by scientific inquiry.
To enter lazily into philosophical, religious, or fantastically creative artistic imaginations of light, that reject dictates of scientific inquiry and replace the potential of the physical animals in front of us with well, something ideological, would serve to diminish attempts at improving animal welfare. Informed, sensitive, and professional observation are better than posturing, if we truly wish to care for either a non-human, or human, animal.
So, if I recognize as a physicist, for we can all be physicists, that light is to be described as electromagnetic radiation, and nothing else, we can begin to describe consciousness as an effect of perception. Once we are able to make this observation, we are forced to change how we think of the light around and within the animals we care for significantly.
By simplifying light to its knowable physical definition, completely described by Maxwell’s Equations, we are forced to recognize that consciousness, one aspect of mental life, is not unitary, but potential of expressing a near infinite variety of states, replete with differing modes and levels. When we recognize an infinite number of human or non-human animal states of consciousness in this way, the search for mental welfare enters a space that requires the rich exploration of perception, as an animal’s environmental engagement that balances demands and pleasures from without, and within.
Light, in this line of thinking, becomes incredibly important.
The luminous environment cannot be seen, but it can be measured. This sounds strange, and counterintuitive. But no reflection of light on light produces vision. Despite the fact that EM radiation can travel light years from the stars to earth, the void of space looks black. The light traveling from the Sol to Mars is invisible to us, unless we interpose ourselves and take it away. We see, we have vision, because our consciousness-perceptual system (CS-PCPT) is ignited by radiation that it is sensitive to it, in particular ways.
Perception is a complex process, but suffice to say our inner demons do not ‘see’ light, but rather process it. To the consternation of philosophers, theologians, and speculative fiction writers, nothing akin to a soul is needed for us to see. To ascribe to an animal something like a soul, is to do it a great injustice of denigration, denying not simply the specificity of its physical being in light but worse, its ability to achieve enlightenment (whatever that might be) in whatever ways that might happen to occur through the different states of consciousness one particular animal or another is capable of entering.
The latter is not a mystical claim, but a sheer consequence of insisting that mental life, whether human or non-human animal, is physically grounded. Let’s think about the phrase ‘state of consciousness’ a bit.
Our argument for animal welfare, is that consciousness and mental life depend upon perceptual engagement with the complex external world, insofar as the perceptual system is shaped and conditioned by it, along with a human or a non-human animal’s specific biology and individual experiences written into it. Protecting, or providing for, a richer range of natural light, enables an animal to think and act to its fullest capacity.
A Babette’s Feast of the animal mind, if you like.
‘States of consciousness’ is not a term we invented to suit our argument. It generally refers to content specific qualities of awareness, such as that which arises from listening to music, reading a book, meditating, or feeling pain. States of consciousness are closely allied with both positive and negative concepts of mental health, believed to facilitate personal growth while simultaneously freeing the mind from irrational anxiety caused by ‘stress’.
To say that states of consciousness are based in perception may seem antithetical to the many dominant histories of philosophy and meditation, many of which teach socratic mistrust of the senses, and the weakness of flesh in place of a mystical ideation disconnected from it. Oedipal blindness brings enlightenment in many a tradition.
Rather than dismiss this mistrust, despite maintaining an insistence on the monads of a physically presented world, we ought to take it seriously. It is the senses after all, mainly the eyes, that are modified in prayer, meditation, and ultimately scientific investigation, that bring about altered states of consciousness. If modification of the senses brings about, or rather allows access, to different states of consciousness important for mental well being, the fantasy of dualism, of mental life separate from the 'real' world yet modified in relation to it, can be thought of a useful tool to understand the relationship of the luminous environment to mental well being across all animal life. Fantasy remains fantasy as the fundamental attribute of thinking, in a rather strange reversal. But it ought be remembered that, the wide range of potential conscious states must, by necessity, depend upon perceptual systems.
To get a sense of the relationships between perception and consciousness, one might take al look at the history of meditation. Meditative postures have been depicted as early as 5000 BCE, and meditation has been a consistent part of Hindu, Taoist, Buddhist, Judeo-Christian, and Islamic practices to this very day. Intended to remove ignorance, improve understanding, or to connect more deeply with a ‘world’ or ‘absolute’, it is not too difficult to see how the ‘sciences’ of mental life relate to it, as the goal of science is after all, understanding of the world around us.
A quick google search divulges at least nine qualitatively different types of meditation.
Mindfulness meditation combines concentration and reflexion on the thoughts that rise within. Spiritual meditation connects one to a cosmological truth, such as a monotheistic G-d or similarly conceived universal, employing psycho-impactful substances such as essential oils (frankincense, LSD, sandalwood) to aid the encounter. Focused meditation explicitly stresses focus on one of the five senses, including the touch of internal breathing or fingered Mala/Rosary Beads, to align consciousness to a more productive efficiency than mindfulness allows. Movement meditation, whether of yoga, tai chi, gardening, or a simple walk in the woods, stresses application with bodily senses in their entirety, to raise states of awareness not possible without intimate and aware connections to the physical world. Mantra meditation typically stresses acoustic formulas and tonality, to push vibrations throughout the body and align conscious awareness holistically. Qi Gong is a good representative of this, though accompanying movements tend to also have a more localized, pragmatic purpose than mere ‘higher’ consciousness alone. Transcendental meditation stresses the the silent repetition of sounds with eyes closed. Progressive relaxation involves the conscious tensing and relaxing of muscles, resulting in a transition to sleep modes of consciousness. Loving-kindness meditation, Maitrī, aims at creating general happiness through repetition of well-wishes, with different traditions either relying upon inner visualization for specific happiness, or without for a more general distribution. This meditation may very well have internal benefits, like the defense of altruism, Visualization meditation replaces the world as appears with images of the desired world within, in the mind’s eye.
States of Consciousness differ from modes of consciousness, or rather global ways of being conscious within such individual states, such as waking, dreaming, or seizures, or ecstasy. A third term, levels of consciousness refers to dysfunction within states and modes, such as clouding, confusion, lethargy, obtundation, stupor, or coma. States of consciousness are different from these two latter categories, as a matter of active perceptual possibilities under different environmental conditions, according to the different senses a being has access to (for humans; taste, touch, hearing, smelling, and sight, singly or in combination).
An experiment any sighted person can try, bears this out. Sensory deprivation tanks offer an extreme example, but it is possible, every day, to contrast a mental state dependent upon scotopic vision with that of photopic vision, simply by allowing ourselves to remain in an unlit (no artificial light) space for twenty-four hours. At night, human eyes become much more sensitive to motion than in the day, and we become aware of the environment through our other senses in a much more intense way. Contrariwise during the day, under full sun, our capacity to recognize and produce images increases, and the input of other senses is lessened. These are not simply fun psychedelic entertainments, but an aspect of varying states of consciousness that connects us to our environments in rich ways as sign of mental health and, when we speak of animals, positive mental affect.
For a moment, imagine every prayerful or meditative artwork you can recall.
Common artistic expressions of the prayerful, include half closed eyes, or the unfocused ecstatic gaze in the ultimate detachment from worldly grief and pain, a presumed erotic communication with a god/des achieved through a kind of ecstasy beyond peace. The modification of sensual function, the modification of perceptual states, the exploration of perceptual states through musculature control, has long been a path to altered states of consciousness, no more mystical than the careful navigation of a forest path under the stars.
In thinking about the different types of meditation, and the presumed ‘feelings’ that arise from them, it is easy to imagine that we have reference points. Watching others meditate is of course very different than meditating ourselves, even when we meditate in a group setting in Church or with a partner. Yet the inference of meditation, the accepting of meditation as having something to do with consciousness, depends on the former. We watch, and we listen; these are an important part of any investigation.
Countless icons of Saints, whether Buddhas or Denominational Equivalents, testify to this.
One might ask what possible importance this has, in relation to the positive mental affect of non-human animal. At stake in animal welfare, in mental animal welfare, is an animal’s potential opportunity to explore the fill capacity of mental states, which involve being able to engage perceptually with the world around it. An animal’s mental affect, bonded to its physically grounded Cs-Pcpt abilities, responds only when it has an environment that it is capable of processing appropriately.
Science has no saints, nor should it. Getting past the prominence of famous ‘scientists’ has always been a challenge for investigators who simply want to do good work, without the craven need for approval. Yet in as difficult a terrain as the mental affect of animal life lays before us, it is good to adopt guides. We can alway go on our own later.
Darwin and Freud, Again
One of the earliest, if not the earliest, efforts to relate mental affect to environmental factors, comes right at the foundation of modern biology. Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (EEMA) recognizes that mental affect, whether of human or non-human animals, presents itself as an object of scientific inquiry no less than other facets of organic life. In providing an answer to the ideational physiognomy of Sir Charles Bell, or perhaps to Lavater (whose essentialist linking of physiognomic features to permanent character and ability might well have kept Darwin from embarking on the H.M.S. Beagle), EEMA begins to tease out, as work of naturalism, relationships of emotional affect within the expressions visible to analysis. Along with Darwin, we watch.
EEMA spells out three guiding principles for a reader to consider the affects imbued within the animal postures to be observed later in the work. First, the initial relation between mental state and action is conditioned by habit, a repetition of actions necessary to satisfy organic appetites and desires. Darwin labels these as serviceable associated habits. Second, useless actions are introduced through a principle of antithesis. States of mind, in Darwin’s readings, have opposites. Antithetical actions are not only useless but involuntary, meaning that actions arise without the driver of habitual expectation, with the intent of repetition. Thirdly, the physical nerves condition expression, and not an ideational external will, nor mechanisms of habitual acquisition alone.
With Darwin, we might infer that mental life proceeds from a physical structure (an organism), shaped by accidents of relieved satisfaction, yet exhibiting purposeless and involuntary inversions. Natural selection, rather than an apocalyptic teleology revealed in a Communion after death, provides a scientific explanation of biologically grounded emotion without the need to posit something like a soul, an intelligence, or other unknowable givens lurking behind the radically knowable animal subject.
For the longest time, and seemingly rising in vogue again, the presupposition of an imaginary eye behind the windowed eyes we can account for, has dominated not simply philosophy seminars, but how architectural lighting has been conceived and installed. The very terms ‘“lux” and “lumens” speak to this, used by industry to make the need for artificial light seem like a moral imperative, coming from theological concepts of a touching God that ignites the soul; light from without manifest within.
One of the many challenges faced by photo-biologists and sensory ecologists alike, is the expunging of ideational, theological concepts that imagine light to provide to this imaginary embedded intelligence, (an homunculus), with a ‘picture’ of the world.
If this picture helped to develop understanding, we could keep it, but it doesn’t. An homunculus gets in the way of appreciating the immense diversity of consciousness based within an astonishing number of diverse perceptual systems. Because it does this, there is no possible way to comprehend the emotional affect possible within the myriad of perceptually bound conscious states, and the modes of these states, that an animal of a complex perpetual systems would be capable of. Ockham’s Razor can be efficient in cutting away fat, but when unskillfully wielded, it violates viable and important differences.
The “picture” of the world that we refer to above, does not simply refer to a ‘complete’ picture or understanding, something religions and philosophy complete with reference to an afterlife or the infinite, but to the very simple concept of a ‘picture’ itself, as a image projected from without and landing within. Neurological structures simply do not replace replace classic homunculi, as eyes embedded within the eyes capable of ‘touching’ the world with optic perspective or haptic grace.
Freud famously abandoned neuroscience, and the concept of a guiding ‘brain’, in the 1895 Project of a Scientific Psychology, while retaining steadfast insistence on the physical and biological basis of mental life. Instead of tracing connections between particular nerves or specific physical structures to actions though, he gave attention to the functioning of mental processes on the surface, the layered algorithms of mental life.
Immobilized patients, lying upon the couch, were asked and invited, to speak. Freud, and critical analysts such as Karl Abraham and Melanie Klein, built analysis upon observations, of the specific complex Viennese musculature of mouth, larynx, and lungs, using the ear, pad, and paper, rather than eye, as measuring devices. Ignited by a particular conversation, evincing of an emotional human consciousness resting in perception, a Cs-Pcpt. System, Viennese mental life emerged no different than the Hadron Collider might study a new particle flying off a crash within its tunnel.
Of course, what emerged was a complex and contentious (especially and laudablywithin psychoanalytic circles) mapping of unconscious and autonomic vectors both within and prioritized over consciousness, observed through the physicality of a speech which became the vehicle of human consciousness in its phenomenal expression. Yet these physically expressed minds, expressed by the musculature of speech on the couch, also presented eminently physical qualities laboriously built into an ever-evolving but cohesive reading. When Freud organizes the CS-Pcpt. System into overlapping oral, anal, genital and phallic phases, he is indeed building a physical model of consciousness relating organic elements at hand, from historical and contemporaneous sources written into its functioning.
This approach produces a stark alternative to fantastical readings of an inner homunculus, and as Freud skillfully argues, a science of mental life. By this time, the biological sciences arisen about Darwin’s founding work, put natural selection beyond reasonable doubt at the heart of organic development, reproduction, and the expressions of emotional affect. Freud’s work is not so concerned to have to stress this, but instead proceeds with physicality, and so environmental contextualization, as a reasonable given. In so doing though, Freud re-imagines the very concept of a projective ‘screen’; one that requires no additional intelligence to watch.
When first reading the passages on screen memories, at first, it is difficult not to imagine an image in accord with a theological ideology of ‘lux’ and ‘lumen’. Visualization, and the imaging we create in the dreams that satisfy mental desire, inserts itself and prevents us (it did me, years ago) from listening to what Freud tries to impress upon his readers. The (limited) image is that of a movie projector casting an image onto a screen. An intelligence wishes to convey something, and projects this conveyance upon our souls. Our souls respond, reflecting this illumination with an inner light of its own; gift given, gift returned. Yet the meanings of ‘screen memory' in psychoanalytic work is very different, coming closer to the physical condition of complex bodies composed of open intertwined systems without need of a ‘picture’ as such.
For Freud, the term "screen memory" refers to any memory that hides another from conscious perception; that inhibits the ability to express it despite it remaining in the system (it can come out eventually, as a successful technique of analysis). Three distinct sub-types of screen memories might block, possess or stand in for other potential recollections, but the point to make (rather than try to own Freud), is not simply that Darwin’s principle of antithesis has a very unique correlate in ‘Unconscious’ resistances, of substitutes arising and symbolic opposites forming pairs, the illuminated and the illuminating, dark and light, but that these perceptual screen memories form a fluid, deceptive, and dynamic consciousness beginning at the surface, and remaining in a ‘real’ sense, fearful of it.
While it might be fun to imagine the self-deceptive (un) conscious states of animals in our care, and at what point we are in theirs, the point to make here is that physical mental functioning begins and ends at the surface, no matter how entangled the eddies of the mind might be, and that this surface arose in the subtle illuminations of our environment.
Variable environments produce variable mental states of consciousness, through the variable perceptual mechanisms observable through proper tools and subject to intellectual conception. Science and data-driven metrics are needed to explore this realm, but at the end of the day, the simple notion that light governs diverse consciousness, holds simply true.
Light, States of Consciousness, and the Pursuit of Positivity
'Natural light comes first’ gives us a mantra to guide our medication.
Non-human and human animals are to a certain degree detached from our environments, as much as we are generated by them. No teleology, no purpose, for the purposes of science. That means that there will always be a certain flexibility in what we animals might tolerate, yet only to a certain degree. If we take natural selection seriously, and we must, not only do we accept the freedom and presence of death within a purposeless physical world, but we recognize that as our environment changes, our fitness to it changes as well. Degraded conditions, results in degraded possibilities for survival and the vitality necessary to thrive. As Freud accepted Darwin’s physicality of mental life as a given, so too did Darwin accept Malthus’s inevitability of suffering in a closed living system. Joy comes, to non-human and human animal alike, when a richness of possibilities arises before us. It is all, a questioning of conscious perception.
What is natural light?
It is above all, something to be observed measured. There is only one scientific theory of light, that of electromagnetism. Electromagnetism has been completely described by Maxwell’s Equations, in such a way that a conceptual upheaval in this arena is beyond unlikely, unless the physical functioning of the universe changes. Interrelated fields, limited in intensity to discrete multiples of photons, present themselves through interaction with materials, described by the ‘Lorentz Force’ (accomplished through ‘measuring devices’), in such a way as to self-propagate even in the vacuous void of space.
Over the years, simplified conceptual tools to measure light have persisted alongside of electromagnetism, to meet practical engineering, economic, and theological or social ideological demands. These include geometric optics, which we are taught in elementary school, and physical optics, which generally arrives in a curriculum during high school and gets elaborated in undergraduate studies. The first ignores field and wave related phenomena, while the second builds an approximation from geometric optics to account for wave related features, such as diffraction, by isolating the transmission of an EM field upon an incident surface and ignoring other aspects that the electromagnetic field presents.
The point to be made, rather than exploring the meaning of each descriptive equation or simplification in detail, is to stress that such tools offer concessions to external interests that might not serve the mental well being of animals well, in terms of accounting for physically grounded relationships.
Natural EM fields, the luminous environment, varies regularly over time. This includes familiar cycling of the days, months, and stellar positioning, but it also refers to terrestrial sources and modifications such as weather, lightning, clouds, fires, etc…. Natural EM fields have intensity, shape, and vary across a host of qualities such as frequency composition and polarization. Such fields are the context within which all materials, organic or inorganic, appear. Yet this physical context, as abstract as it might seem, is as much of an external proposition, beyond the boundaries of skin, as it is an internal one. We may be, as Star Trek so eloquently put it, essentially bags of water, but we are also, as Nicola Tesla and Fritz Popp realized, beings of light.
All living organisms process light, not simply through visual senses but also within their very cells. Fritz Popp, with all the tenacity of a Marvel Comics enthusiast looking for easter eggs in the latest MCU trailer, argued most convincingly that intra-organismal photon emissions were not without consequence. Functioning as open systems, and so intimately related to their environments, organic animal bodies manage [superficial] chemical reactions under specific EM field conditions having specific structural arrangements.
Photobiology therefore is not limited simply to consideration of an animal’s sensual organs such as eyes, although we might locate consciousness in CS-PCPT systems. When we think of the importance of photobiology, whether processes occurring in a cell or across more complex arrangements, such as the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis, the Hypothalamic–pituitary–gonadal (HPG) axis, skin-based photo-biological processes, or non-ocular receptors, we are immediately in a realm relating internal factors with external ones. Irregular changes to external field patterns, has the potential to impact everything that makes an animal an animal, human or non-human.
The EM fields about an animal are in a very real sense contiguous with it. To say so is slightly different than to say that an animal is a product of natural selection, but it agrees with it. EM fields connect an animal to surrounding environments in ways that go far beyond reproduction. An open system is after all connected, and though it may process elements, ‘it’ is far less of an element than a complex process itself. Attempts to enable positive mental affect in an animal, require sensitivity to the light that infuses it, across the entire range of conditions that contributed to its production.
With these thoughts, our own desire to encourage positive mental states of welfare for the animals in our care, through a more sensitive and deeper understanding and observation of light, has an additional benefit beyond its primary goal. It is a question of more deeply understanding what an individual animal is, in its own right, through an understanding of its relationships and capacities.
Neither animals nor their environments are static. Animals move, and they age. Behaviors change as an animal ages, along with accumulated experience and altered perceptual capacities. Such alterations alter potential states of consciousness as well, in relation to what had been possible before, rather than a static, absolute condition. Where animals go, and how they occupy space, changes. Both the where, and the how, relate to light, and the many possibilities of affect it affords.
To end this installment simply, we can reiterate the two propositions:
1. Natural light diversity is vital to the mental functioning of animal life, and date-driven inquiry into physical relationships enables investigators (of all cultures) to understand positive mental welfare better.
2. Natural light diversity conditions, impacts, and makes possible different states of animal consciousness, entirely grounded within the manifold of the physical world as observable by scientific inquiry.
Establishing program to understand and track the ambient and incident light of an animal in human care, offers a means to assess the possibilities of positive mental affect, and so to improve decision-making behind that care, whether we are speaking of a zoo, aquarium, or other wildlife care facilities. Recognizing the CS-PCPT systems of animals as a function of natural light, simply enables us to care for life better.
In the next installment of INLIGHTENMENT, we will shift to thinking about light and behavior, following upon these lines.