Bill B

I wish Peter Sterling was with us, because what you’re talking about Gay concerns the baseline and the predictions. The whole allostatic process is modified, which means that as patients move forward in the world, they’re seeing their world in a different way. So that means the narrative is not just a nice fiction. If Peter’s correct, the narrative literally changes the physiological processing going on. Peter’s allostatic process fits with a constructive model, whereas a homeostatic model would be much more fitting with an objectivist issue. From a homeostatic perspective, we have some baseline that we can measure, and it stays there. However, the allostatic model brings us back to Bill Galander’s dynamic constructivism. The allostatic model that Peter talks about assumes that things are constantly shifting at the physiological level.

Jack introduced the work of Wendell Barry. Do you want to talk a bit about Barry?

Jack

Wendell Barry is one of my favorite poets, philosophers, and essayists. I read a book by him called Life is a Miracle. And I read it before I’d read E.O. Wilson’s Consilience. I fell in love with Barry’s premise: Understand the world as a mystery, and science is one language to describe this mystery. However, there are other appropriate languages, including art and religion. They all are languages that describe this world.  Life is a Miracle is a direct response to E.O. Wilson, who is a noted biologist. He wrote Consilience towards the end of his career. In this book, he was essentially saying that all parts of the world, science, knowledge, social science, and humanities can be understood through one unified framework. And the scientific method is the best approach to understanding that world. Wilson offers us a reductionist materialistic approach.

I think sometimes we get stuck in this sort of E.O. Wilson’s Consilience. We want everything to be boiled down, using one language, so that everything can be understood. When in reality, multiple languages describe the world we live in. And I think narrative plays a central role in this description. There are scientific narratives, art narratives, and religious narratives. And each one is probably incomplete but complements the others.

So those narratives can really help us understand all the aspects. It’s like being multilingual. My wife’s Chinese. So I’ve learned a lot of Chinese. There’s a whole bunch of words that you can’t translate. They’re not translatable. And I didn’t ever get that. I was like, well, of course, a cow is a cow is a cow is a cow. But there are ideas that can’t be conveyed by a single word when working with two different languages. It may take 10 words to describe it in English, whereas it’s one word in Chinese. The constructs are just a little bit different. And I love the aspect of narrative that provides different ways of understanding the world. Different versions of the world are brought to us through different types of narratives.

Bill B

By the way, Jack, there are some languages where there’s no such thing as a cow. There’s “cow-ing.”   What you have is a process-based language: something is becoming like a cow. It is a matter of change and growth.