"I think your experience an interesting one and I can see that it has a deep significance for you. However I believe the 'insights' you think you received about the way your body works are highly metaphorical at best and, taken literally, are complete nonsense. I suggest you forget about system dynamics and computer science and dwell on your experience in your own way."[AW: This forthright comment by Crick on The Engineer's Story and my very early (1989) system dynamics analysis of purgation - despite its negativity - was thrilling for me to receive at this early stage of my work. I knew I was on to something great - a first-person, formalized theory of consciousness during an experience of purgation or Dark Night of the Soul - and so continued on. Around 1996 or 1997 it gradually began to occur to me that intentionality during purgation was about a mental image and that a linkage of my first-person analysis with a third-person analysis would solve Chalmers' hard problem and integrate science and religion. In about 1999 I saw that the biological correlates of the particular mental imagery dynamics I was dealing with had been explained by Sherrington in his 1906 book, Integrative Action of the Nervous System, as:
"... the contractions of particular sets of muscles in the heart must entail the suppression of activity of other muscles for coordinated movements of the heart to emerge."In about 1999 I also began to realize that I was making a phenomenological reduction and began to integrate my analytical work with that of Husserl. In October 2000, listening to a lecture by Antonio R Damasio at Harvard, I learned that the particular mental imagery I was dealing with, KnotsInHeart and HeartOpenness, is called somatosensory mental imagery. All this is discussed at my homepage. I would very much like to get Crick's comments on my work, now, after these many years of refinement of the analysis. I am sure his comments would stir me on to further refinement and development of this project.]
"Your Engineer's Story drew me in instantly. It is a power piece of writing. ... I don't doubt that [the technical aspects of your work] can help system analysts to understand religious experience. What the rest of us can gain from it, I'm unsure."
"Thank you very much for the working paper that you sent me. I read the engineer's story with great interest, but must confess I found the technical section very hard going. In that area, you live in another world than I! Still fascinating. Mystics have often tried to describe spiritual experience and no doubt found it a challenge. Other times used different approaches. St Theresa of Avila's handling of the business is a classic example. The desert Fathers did not appeal to me particularly until I read some of Carl Jung. He dealt with familiar territory but did it in a way that is appropriate to us. I mean we are all at home in a psychological world - at least are familiar with the terms - and it is in that context he deals with questions the early hermits also coped with. And so opened them to me. But you are off in another direction in handling religious material. I do not know whether I will find a monk here who is comfortable with it. The basic theme they understand readily enough, I am sure, but your profound analysis of it is something else. God bless you and guide you."
"Thank you for giving me the opportunity to review this very interesting piece of work. It is unique among all of the candidates for publication in the review that I have ever looked at. In many ways I am drawn to this work and would like to recommend that you publish it in the notes and insights section, but alas I can not. At least not in its present form."My first quick impression was that this was a "tongue-in-cheek" exercise, thrown off in a not totally serious manner. Upon any amount of closer reading, it is certainly not that. This is a very serious piece of work about which Mr. Wolpert apparently has deep feelings. Or so it would seem to me.
"So I have tried to approach the model presented in the serious manner in which it is written. My main comments on this as a piece of modeling work is that it is closely "tuned" to reproduce (and perhaps clarify?) a reference mode that has intense personal meaning to the author. But I can not determine from the given material how robust the model structure is when run even an epsilon away from this given reference mode.
"For example, the equation for psychic stress shows a complex formulation as a function of Heart Openness and KnotsInHeart with a number of parameters, all estimated to up to four significant digits. Similarly, the Forgiveness and Catharsis equations appear to be "tuned" to produce the stepped ratcheting down associated with the critical transition shown in Figure 5. Indeed, from my reading, the variables Complexes and KnotsInHeart appear to have identical dynamics. For unknown conceptual reasons, Mr. Wolpert appeared not to want TruenessOfMind to depend on KnotsInHeart and so created the mathematically identical equation for Complexes. In a related vein, PrayerQuality is an additive function with a constant term of .555. This value appears to be somehow calibrated to create a numerical balance in the string of auxiliaries involving PsychicStress through PrayerQuality. Rather than normalizing these seemingly arbitrary variables to some defineable "Normal=1.0" point, these difficult to interpret constants are inserted throughout the model.
"In a related vein, the ModelOfMind structure contains some additional dynamics that become apparent from the reading of the equations, but not really discussed in the text except for one sentence that refers to Miller's work. This was confusing to me at first until I unraveled the relationship between the STELLA flow diagram and the equations in the Appendix.
"I did not go over the entire structure with a fine-tooth comb, but I can believe that you can see the main thrust of my comments. Most of us do not pass through the Model of the Dark Night of the Soul on an average 960 minutes (indeed most humans may never make such a journey) and yet we may begin every day of our lives with the same initial conditions in our psychic states that Mr. Wolpert assumes. More usually we exist in a state of relatively high psychic stress as shown in Figure 2. What drives the mathematics in Mr. Wolpert's model from Figure 2 to Figure 4 is to a large degree driven, in my opinion, by a series of finely tuned parameters such as those discussed above. Hence moving toward mystic union reduces to finely tuning a number of conceptually abstract parameters. I doubt that this is what Mr. Wolpert really intends us to take away from his modeling work.
"This raises the important question of exactly what are we (am I as a reviewer) supposed to take away from this paper. I do not believe that details of parameter values such as those suggested above are the point of the paper. Rather, Mr. Wolpert is suggesting that subjectively important inner psychic states can be usefully conceptualized, structured, yes and even simulated using a feedback framework. This result I believe firmly and intuitively. ...
"... I have never seen anyone in our literature articulate the fact that system structure can be so useful in clarifying these inner states of mind, although I believe that many persons in the field prabably do use their training in System Dynamics for just that purpose. (Parenthetically, I believe that Ralph Levine, I believe at the University of Michigan, has actually taken to modeling psychological dynamics using system dynamics. As a psychologist, much of his work has turned to psychometrics and more precise formulation of measureable constructs.)
"Mr. Wolpert is the first among us to "come out of the closet" on this point and I feel that his insights on this matter could spark an interesting discussion.
"However, this note seems to be claiming more - namely that Mr. Wolpert's model of inner psychic states could have some value as a more objective statement of deeper psychic structures that may generalize beyond a set of intense personal experiences. I doubt that he or any of us have done the work to create such general theories of psychic dynamics, certainly at the level of intense mysticism portrayed in Mr. Wolpert's paper.
"Hence, in redrafting this note, I would very much like to see a clarification of the claim of what has been accomplished with this work. What purposes have been met? I suspect that readers who spend time with this paper will have sharp reactions. It would be best to consider asking someone (perhaps Ralph Levine whom I mentioned above) to draft a few words to frame this piece if you do decide to go with it.
"But certainly, I do not believe that it can be published in its present form."
"You have a new science which lays out the form or structure of a mystical experience, but not its content."I have thought about Prof. Dr. Cramer's brilliant comment over the years. It seems to me that it is time for me to forgive the German people.
"Judging from what I know about Union Mystica, his experience seems entirely authentic. I cannot judge his expertise in System Dynamics, about which I know nothing, or even if we want to bring the two together in what is bound to be at least at the outset an uneasy marriage. But in an age where we are faced with and often overwhelmed by technologically informed paradigms, I think we certainly ought to give him a hearing."
In two of Lane's papers,
Here are two comments of mine on Lane's categorization of my analysis as solipsism:
"This well-written, but incomplete, paper shows how system dynamics succeeds because it structures consciousness during an experience as a multiloop nonlinear feedback system, which is the same structure as the nervous system underlying consciousness. The paper is both entertaining and daring in delving into the author's internal belief system. Although its model structure is not that sophisticated, the paper made me think of Jack Homer's (1985) brave worker-burnout model. The paper might be of high interest to a significant fraction of the conference population. But it is incomplete and seems to have been published on a website. A parallel session in a large room should do fine."I would like to see more model details available. You are clearly modeling a very personal experience involving many soft variables. The development of the model structure and the quantification of obscure and soft varables offers potential value to others. I personally would like more focus on those details. While I believe the paper is competant and has value, I fear the topic of phenomenology and extreme personal nature of the model may impair acceptance and discussion across a broader spectrum of the SD community."
Arlen Wolpert
awolpert@world.std.com
April 28,2008
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
http://world.std.com/~awolpert/gtr11.html