Journal of IiME Volume 2 Issue 2 www.investinme.org P Plluuss ççaa cchhaannggee,, pplluuss cc’’eess tt llaa mmêêmmee cchhoossee ( (ccoonn tt ii nnuueedd )) causation is not usually included in descriptions of the etiology of ME/CFS since it is too “anecdotal”. Cognitive fatigue is often not picked up or is under-estimated during psychological testing because an ethical tester is supposed to throw away data obtained while the client is fatigued. This rule results in interpreting dynamical findings as inconsistencies. So here is the dilemma. A “fatigue”, which by definition is dynamic- it comes and goes- is not accounted for in an objective thought system which requires objects, which by definition are stable and unchanging, and thus ignored. In such a system entities are not objects if they are changing, and thus to be discarded. If observed in a dynamical system which is set up to observe this coming and going, the fatigue would be very real and consistent. But to see this requires a prognostic dynamical approach. In such an approach the relevant causal events are not only in the body, they are in the world, (embedded, embodied dynamics), and they may shift with changing circumstances (causal spread- 17). While such an interaction could of course be studied in the standardized environment of scientific experiments, it can also be identified and confirmed in the on-line, ‘wild’, unique, anecdotal, situation described. 2/ Observations of “kinds” of fatigue to identify sites where causal patterns change. Research into the development of mind in children has revealed that children are born “essentialists”. What does that mean? Gelman (11) has given reasons for why children are essentialists, in their ongoing attempts to understand the underlying causal structuring of the world and of their own bodies. It works by learning to identify “kinds” of thing that do this or that so that they can learn to predict their own and others’ Invest in ME (Charity Nr. 1114035) behavior. 1/ they act as if they are aware from earliest infancy that there is an appearance/reality distinction, such as we have mentioned before. They learn what experts would call “induction from property clusters” or what additional properties to expect from a given cluster, especially homeostatic clusters that work to stabilize the organism and maintain its invariance through environmental change . They learn causal determinism, with its search for hidden, nonobvious, as-yet-unknown “natural” properties that can explain cause through inherent properties or essences. They also learn to track identity over time, thus becoming dynamicists and followers of both Heraclitus and Parmenides. They learn deference to trusted experts (starting with their parents) to fill out what they do not know, (and as a corollary, to avoid the opinions of those they have learned not to trust- my addition). In exploring the feeling they later learn to call “fatigue” they learn how it is causally connected with activity (they feel fatigued after activity and restored, more energetic, after rest), and learn to expect this dynamical relation and how the feeling differs from sleepiness and weakness. They learn that there are other kinds of fatigue- that of a different flavour (malaise) that they feel with a viral infection, or the fatigue they feel if they have not had enough sleep or if they have been on a long airplane ride, again with different characteristics or ‘flavours’ which can give causal clues when felt with discrimination. This implicit knowledge about the causal relations surrounding fatigue is embedded in our experience of the varying contexts of daily life, which is a changing flow, not a static state. It is our concepts which have been abstracted from this dynamical state that are constant. In the resting state the body is felt (consciously or not) by the generalized sensation of proprioception, or self-perception, as the presence of an nonmoving body. When (continued on page 27) Page 26/74
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