A special sort of hand-eye coordination

No milk yet

An interim post, prompted in a rather convoluted way by references 1, 2 and 3. Among which the relevant part of reference 1 might be precised as: what are the reasons for what we do, for what we say? Do we ever really know what these reasons are? Do we care, why do we care about these reasons at all, given how flaky they seem to be on closer inspection? Should we move away from the reasons people give for what they do, and try to uncover the real reasons – whatever this last might turn out to mean? Do these real reasons exist at all in any useful way? Hares which might be said to have been started by Freud something over a hundred years ago with his uncovering of the unconscious drivers for what we do. But problems which have been known about for a long time, with men of the church suggesting five hundred years ago that we would do better to rely on faith, rather than embarking on the treacherous & tricky waters of reason.

Against this backdrop, we think in what follows about carrying tea. It so happens that here at Epsom we take tea in the morning before we get up for the day and, roughly speaking, we take turn and turn about to make it. An activity which has a primary objective and various secondary objectives. The primary objective is to deliver two mugs of tea upstairs. One secondary objective is not to spill any tea on the stair carpet or to splash any tea on the walls, an objective which I fail to meet on a regular basis. Another secondary objective is that the mugs, on delivery, should be as full as possible. I suspect this is a mainly male objective; a challenge which is not to be ducked. With the result that while I aim for about an eighth of an inch below the rims, BH aims for about three eighths. Which provokes regular comments about rationing.

Maybe there is also an element of conspicuous consumption, a flavour of luxury and excess about mugs full to overflowing. It is certainly true that in my beer drinking days, I preferred a simple sleever full to the brim, rather than one of those glasses which had a white loading line painted about half an inch below the rim - a story rather complicated by the continental habit of filling well past the brim, but with foam rather than with beer. Nevertheless, maybe the comments are really about conspicuous consumption, rather than being anything to do with not being able to carry full mugs of tea up the stairs.

And then, for one reason or another – habit, aptitude or whatever – the BH custom is to deliver the two mugs on a tray, the tray going to the first secondary objective, as any spillage is likely to be contained by the tray. She also claims that carrying a tray is easier than carrying two mugs. Which I don’t find to be the case, which may be the reason why my custom is to carry one mug in each hand - bearing in mind what reference 1 has to tell us about the almost universal weakness of reasoning about one’s own activities, about something which it calls myside bias, about the fact that, despite our lack of privileged access to their interiors, we seem to be rather better at reasoning about the activities of others.

Then, the other day, I noticed, while coming upstairs with the morning tea, when it was still dark, but with the hall light on, that my eyes were flicking between the two mugs as I came up the stairs, perhaps every second or so, presumably so as to optimise the muscular activity of each of the two arms, with their slightly different requirements. Certainly the amount of slopping about is not the same in the two mugs, presumably a result of some combination of the weaker management of the left arm than the right and the different shapes of the two mugs. And to optimise the muscular activity of the body more generally. Possibly a demonstration that the brain – including here the eyes – finds it easier to focus on one mug then the other, doing one mug at a time, rather than processing the two mugs in parallel, this despite the huge amount of parallel resource available from the brain. It does not have to single thread, as it appears to be doing here. Furthermore, maybe I can argue that carrying both mugs on a tray means that fine control is not possible; there might be two mugs in two different states of slop & spill, but just the one tray.

In the present case, the two mugs are held a little in front, quite close together, say not more than an inch or so apart. But far enough apart that it suits the brain to flick from one to the other, rather than attending to both at the same time. From where I associated to reference 3, noticed previously, where various telling examples about this sort of thing are to be found.

It is the same two mugs each morning, a his mug and a her mug, one slightly bigger and a slightly different shape than the other, as can be seen in the snap above. I don’t know whether there is any bias as to which mug is in which hand, although I can see advantage from a final delivery point of view in the smaller mug being in the right hand, so there might well be. It is also the case that, being right handed, if I am only carrying one mug, it will almost certainly be in the right hand rather than in the left hand. And, without checking, this would remain true if, say, there was a newspaper to carry as well. The brain would work out, without troubling consciousness, that newspapers do not spill and act accordingly.

I might add that going upstairs with two mugs, with the two hands some way apart, say a foot or so rather than an inch or so, is a great deal more difficult. Presumably partly because the eyes have to waste so much more time moving from one to hand to the other, partly because the two command sequences to the muscles of the two arms are drifting apart and so getting harder to keep going at the same time.

It is harder still when there is little if any light. Harder still, but the story here seems to be that provided one takes it slowly, there is enough other input to manage. One’s hands, for example, know which way up the mugs are. I think they also know something about the tea moving around in the mugs. Perhaps also the ears pick up something of the tea moving around, although I have not been aware of any such thing.

All this activity is managed unconsciously. One needs to pay attention, one needs to keep one’s eyes on the mugs, whether there is any light or not, for it to work, but one is not aware of what the brain is doing, except in very general terms. Rather as one needs to pay attention while writing with a pen, without being aware of what the brain is doing about it, except perhaps when one is learning or when one gets into trouble. One is not much aware of the muscular responses to the various contingencies arising. One would be hard put to find reasons for anything, again except in very general terms.

But one can practise, with performance at this sort of task usually responding well to practise.

In passing, I might say that things seem to be a bit different when playing the piano, where the two hands are also moving, certainly to a considerable extent, independently. Concert pianists often spend a lot of time gazing blankly over their piano or peering at their music, time when they are playing, time when they are certainly not watching one or other or both hands. Much the same is true of typists and their typewriters. The computational constraints involved here must be rather different. While the players of violins and violas play with the hands apart, but with the fingering hand in the same line of sight as the bit of the bow – that is to say the business end of the bow hand, an extension of the bow hand, as it were – in contact with the strings. Cellos are rather bigger and rather different. All very complicated.

And then there are causes and effects with our mugs. In principle, there seems no reason why one could not follow the tangled web of sensory input out into the equally tangled web of muscular output – part of this last being the muscles controlling the orientation of the head and eyes, this system involving feed-back as well as feed-forward. One can explain the muscular output in terms of the sensory input – although this is not the same as providing nice and tidy macro reasons for macro outcomes.

In the present case a macro outcome would be delivering the tea without any spillage on the way. For which the macro cause might be something like keeping one’s eyes on the tea, on the ball, as it were. Or remembering to put one’s slippers on before embarking on this early morning journey.

Perhaps this is where higher level processing comes into play, perhaps where consciousness has a part to play, apart from that of spectator. Higher level processing which is told or which notices that wearing slippers delivers a better outcome, on average, than not wearing slippers. One might devise experiments which would test whether the knowledge that slippers helped needed to become conscious in order to be used. Or whether, as a matter of habit, one always put one’s slippers on at such a time, but, if asked, giving some complicated and probably spurious reason. Perhaps one always put slippers on when first getting out of bed; that was just the way it was. A reason which might be true, might be correct as far as it went, but which did not include the additional benefit of absence of spillage of tea.

Digging deeper, perhaps during a spell of illness I had cold feet and took to wearing slippers in the morning and the habit stuck. But like many people, I do not care to admit to illness or that illness has anything to do with anything, so, if asked, subconsciously or otherwise, more or less invent some quite different reason for wearing them.

Perhaps the classification invented by Aristotle and widely used since – material causes, formal causes, efficient causes and final causes – would help here? A classification which I got from Rolfe’s ‘Hadrian VII’, but which can be more easily found at reference 4. Or reference 5 if you want something more substantial.

But I leave such experiments and speculations to others. I shall return to reference 1 and its reasons for doing things, its reasons for our reasoning. Reasons which turn out to be all about the need of a dominant hunter gatherer to be able to convince others about the best place to get a mammoth and the superiority of interactive, collective reasoning over introspective, solitary reasoning. The madness of the crowd or the wisdom of the crowd? For which see the earlier thoughts, from a rather different perspective, set down at reference 6.

PS: regarding pint glasses, I had thought that my glass of preference was called a ‘sleever’, but Bing and Wikipedia put me right, explaining that what I was really thinking of was a ‘nonik’, invented in the US in 1913. And despite having drunk what must be thousands of pints of bitter over the years, I don’t think I ever came across the word. From where I associate to a story I heard somewhere about a beer drinker computing that he had drunk just about enough pints of bitter over his drinking life to fill the front room of his suburban semi. Not to be confused with the pints of plain drunk on the other island.

References

Reference 1: The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding – Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber – 2017.

Reference 2: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-dictionary-of-rational.html.

Reference 3: The Mind Is Flat: The Illusion of Mental Depth and the Improvised Mind - Nick Chater – 2018.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_causes.

Reference 5: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-causality/.

Reference 6: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/11/a-last-outing.html.