The Space of Affordances in Unelaborated Umwelt

The mind is in the heart is in the unity of body and environment.

The Space of Affordances in Unelaborated Umwelt

The mind is in the heart is in the unity of body and environment.

One of my core principles is cultivating the capability for action in contact with the totality; action that is in responsive interplay with all that appears as sensation. This is founded on surrendering into a physical motor loop with the environment. Cognition and care both become present as interactions between an organism and the environment, rather than dynamics of an organism operating on an environment.

Contact occurs through affordances (a perceived capability for action). Greater contact occurs through seeing more affordances, a view of the environment as rich with interaction potential.

Metaphorically, “the heart” is the felt-sense of care. When care extends broadly into the organism and environment, then the heart is in the totality: “the heart is all-pervasive”. Cognition is seeing what is relevant for action, and what is a possible action is an interactive discovery of organism and environment: “the mind is in the interaction of organism and environment. Care is the core prerequisite for relevance: “the mind is in the heart”.

Cultivating living as the heart

“See” here refers to whole-body-knowing.

“Umwelt” will be explained in detail below. A temporary definition: “sensation at the level of detail right at the threshold where it becomes infused with meaning.”

First, a summary, then, an elaboration.

1. See the Umwelt without affordances: let go of limitations on interactive expressions of care that arise from habitually narrowed patterns of seeing affordances.

2. Allow spontaneous discovery of affordances: increase the scope of care and richness of interactive cognition through inhabiting a broad scope of affordances.

3. Enter the possibility space of affordances: Develop fluid capacity to both inhabit affordances and release patterns of inhabiting affordances, so that experience blossoms with interaction potentials.

4. Allow the heart to move freely in the possibility space of affordances: Surrendering into physical motor interactivity as the expression of care, freely moving in the recognition of the vast space of affordances.

An elaboration:

See the Umwelt without affordances

The Umwelt is the organism-specific sensation of the environment (both internal and external). For example, humans have sensory channels that include a particular range of the light spectrum (vision), wave patterns in the air (hearing), and particular possibilities of sensation of the internal environment, such as joint-position proprioception and chemoreceptors for carbon dioxide level in the blood. A tick has an umwelt focusing on carbon dioxide in the external environment and warmth. Some animals see parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that we don’t. It is likely that there are organisms with highly developed magnetic field sensation.

The Umwelt is the context in which we see affordances. At a sensory level, for example, we always see a field of color. When that field of color resolves into objects, it has been resolved into affordances: each appearing object is a possibility of interaction. At a sensory level, we always hear a field of sound. When we hear a familiar language, that field of sound may resolve into words that have meaning for us. When we hear a language spoken that we don’t know, and the environment creates a lack of clarity, as in a busy crowd on a street, the field of sound may remain undifferentiated, without clarity as to whether we are hearing human language or ambient noise.

In order to open up the space of affordances, we can discover resting in the texture of the unelaborated umwelt, without resolving it into shapes and meanings.

Sitting at rest, we can let go of manipulating experience by excluding, emphasizing, or de-emphasizing sensation in order to create meaning. Why sit at rest? Motor action, physicality, is how an affordance is engaged; it is the embrace and inhabiting of an affordance. Here, we are letting go of seeing affordances in our environment.

This is the process of discovering, in each circumstance of practice, what is being excluded from sensation, and allowing it to be part of the totality of experience that we are aware of. Is the sensation of pressure on the foot included? Is the ambient hum of the room included? Is taste on the tongue in the absence of eating included?

The sensation that we are aware of is formed into shapes by emphasis and de-emphasis. A “cup” in our visual field, when manipulation of experience is relaxed, becomes a field of light and color.

This is our unelaborated Umwelt. It is not “reality as it really is”, it is an experience highly constructed by our biological mechanisms. But, having relaxed meaning-making, a space of specific potential (“I can grasp the handle of the cup”) becomes without potential for action (“field of color experience, field of sound experience, synesthesia of these”).

Allowing spontaneous discovery of affordances

When we are good-enough at relaxing into the experience of unelaborated Umwelt, we can turn to exploration of affordances. There are always far more affordances available than we might imagine. In some sense, affordances are a form of pareidolia, the seeing of forms in textures which were not intended to convey those forms. The most basic example is seeing shapes in clouds. In a cloud, you can see many shapes. If we become fixated on seeing a bunny in the cloud, then we may have difficulty in seeing a fire engine. If we only try to mentally enumerate a list of possible shapes, we forgo the opportunity to spontaneously see something that we did not previously imagine. Here, in this practice, we allow ourselves to fully inhabit the shapes that spontaneously form in experience.

When there is a basic capability to rest in the ever-changing texture of our Umwelt, shapes will pop into existence continuously. Each shape is an affordance, a perception that could lead to action. Here, in a set-aside practice situation, we are exploring the innumerable different affordances that might appear in an environment, and so the constraint of “no action” allows the possible affordances to rise and dissipate.

A related practice is exploring affordance seed-essences: how the construction of the felt-sense of bodily attitudes biases what affordances arise. For example, the bodily felt-sense of “peacefulness” versus the bodily felt-sense of “making things happen” may spawn the appearance of quite different affordances. Images (whether visual, kinesthetic, auditory, or complex images of mixed sensory channels) can provide subtle shades of affordance generation.

Enter the possibility space of affordances

With the capability to fluidly move between perception and relaxation of perception comes the possibility of seeing multiple affordances simultaneously, without forcing them to form a coherence. Moving between dwelling in the unelaborated Umwelt without affordances and allowing spontaneous discovery of affordances reveals a non-prescriptive possibility space of affordances. Every moment and here-and-now becomes known as a rich space of potential affordances. The alternation creates a sparkle, like rotating a gem in light, as affordances appear and disappear, only to be replaced by different affordances.

Allow the heart to move freely in the possibility space of affordances

Now that we are present to the possibility space of affordances, we can surf the ever-changing potentials of effective physical interaction. Preliminary set-aside practices of enactment of possibilities in a physicalized, theatrical manner can cultivate the capability to physically engage in a particular affordance while maintaining contact with the possibility space of affordances. Set-aside practices of responsive and interactive unprescribed embodied relationality can also be particularly useful in exploring what it means to fully embody perceived affordances.

For example, there can be a friction between seeing that you could invite someone into your circle of conversation and actually inviting them into your conversation; when the possibility is seen with clarity, then the friction is purely a matter of physical inertia that is overcome when the energy of the heart (organism-and-environment infused with care) flows into the whole body.

Ultimately, though, we move from set-aside practices to engagement in a fresh dynamic physical interplay, as an organism in contact with the environment.

The Illusion of Relatedness

The infinitely small view that is being popped here is the illusion of relatedness: that there is a self that relates to the world as fully separable entities. There is only a play of relationship in the unity of organism and environment.

This play is a manifestation of care, a heart that is found to be all-pervasive in all that is sensed. From a bodily recognition of body-and-environment as totality, the heart can move freely and wisely into action amidst the possibility space of affordances, cognition distributed in the dynamic relationship of body-and-environment.

The mind is in the heart is in the unity of body and environment.