Comments on: Against the Flow

By: Walter

Walter — Sun, 01 Feb 2004 01:31:19 +0000

Yes, you’re right about that. My mistake. I blame the prickishness involved in this discussion as the reason for my not catching that before I posted.

By: MR

MR — Sat, 31 Jan 2004 22:41:01 +0000

Walter said: “Even WITH a conflation, you are still required to consider flow as a non-vacuous concept. That sort of skepticism is a skepticism of accuracy, not existence.”
No. “Flow” could be a conflation of, for example, “concentration” and “conditioned reflexes within the play of a game.” As there was no such thing as caloric or phlogiston, so too there might be no such thing as “flow.”
And again, because it is such an ill-defined term, there is no saying whether it describes recurrent features of the mind, or is a fantasy term such as “aura.” Pending a clear definition of “flow” and verifiable claims about it, there’s no point in discussing it. And I think that was essentially Brandon’s original point.

By: Walter

Walter — Sat, 31 Jan 2004 18:35:36 +0000

I suppose another way of putting that first paragraph is, “Treat me merely as a means, and I’ll bring you to an end, motherf*cker.”
(That’s a joke, not a threat.)

By: Walter

Walter — Sat, 31 Jan 2004 18:24:32 +0000

Many philosophers are pricks, to be sure, and the sort of activity which their prickishness leads them to can often be helpful, such as pointing out ambiguities. But being a prick isn’t at all required to engage in those activities. Your expressing a lack of confidence in my ability to understand the transitive/intransitive distinction ultimately has *nothing* to do with your conducting an inquiry, aside from riling me up and causing us to engage in this discussion about prickitude, your rationale be damned.
Many philosophers advocate giving a generous interpretation. Rather than simply rejecting what they notice to be an inadequate explanation, they set themselves towards trying to see what the person was nevertheless getting at, attempt to clarify the explanation themselves as best they can, and then decide whether there are grounds for rejection or not. There is, at the very least, some productivity involved here aside from simply noticing an inadequacy. You might give this some thought.

By: Brandon

Brandon — Sat, 31 Jan 2004 17:33:25 +0000

Walter: I am honestly interested in exploring the definitions and assumptions in the currently popular discourse surrounding games. If I practice overinterpretation, it is only in order to pin down the motives behind what people say. And I think you’ll agree that prickishness is a quality shared by many philosophers and critics, to a level that I only hope to aspire to.
Take a few breaths. See you next week.

By: Walter

Walter — Sat, 31 Jan 2004 17:16:48 +0000

I’ve not read Csikszentmihalyi, and I would agree that his explanation of the components of flow is definitely unsatisfactory, as is his conflation of enjoyment and flow.
I disagree that flow is intransitive, and quite frankly, you can stop with being the prick–the post above this one was entirely predicated upon an asinine overinterpretation, as are your responses to my comments on GTxA.
Apparently this disagreement can only be resolved if someone puts forward a satisfactory definition of flow, whether I or someone else develops it or finds one and refers you to it. This is fine. I’ll work on it.

By: Brandon

Brandon — Sat, 31 Jan 2004 17:01:28 +0000

Walter: “[T]hen I can only further assume that perhaps [Brandon has] simply never had a comparable experience.”
Let’s see: As our studies have suggested, the phenomenology of enjoyment has eight major components. When people reflect on how it feels when their experience is most positive, they mention at least one, and often all, of the following. First, the experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing. Second, we must be able to concentrate on what we are doing. Third and fourth, the concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken has clear goals and provides immediate feedback. Fifth, one acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life. Sixth, enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions. Seventh, concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over. Finally, the sense of the duration of time is altered; hours pass by in minutes, and minutes can stretch out to seem like hours. The combination of all these elements causes a sense of deep enjoyment that is so rewarding people feel that expending a great deal of energy is worthwhile simply to be able to feel it.
We shall take a closer look at each of these elements so that we may better understand what makes enjoyable activities so gratifying. With this knowledge, it is possible to achieve control of consciousness and turn even the most humdrum moments of everyday lives into events that help the self grow. [emphasis mine]
In this passage, Csikszentmihalyi first purports to be describing the everyday concept of enjoyment. By the end of the paragraph he is using the term flow experience as a synonym. Obviously there should be something interesting about flow itself to distinguish it from enjoyment, something that is missing from or hidden in his description above. Csikszentmihalyi hints that flow is a kind of internal pleasure that can be experienced regardless of the external environment. (After Descombes, I would say that while enjoyment is transitive — enjoyment is enjoyment of something — flow is intransitive: flow is not flow of anything at all. But I’m afraid only Mr. Rooney will understand what I mean.)
So, have I experienced “flow”? I have experienced enjoyment, even by Csikszentmihalyi’s terms. I have played computer games which led to concentration and a goal-directedness. I have turned off a game to discover that it is 4 am, truly a transformation of time. But is this flow, or just enjoyment? Given the external quality of the activity, the soothing glow of the CRT, the brooding soundscape of StarCraft, I’d have to say this was plain enjoyment.
Similarly, reading a book while riding a bus hints at some of the components of enjoyment. It requires concentration, skills, and clear goals. It is incompatible, however, with the transformation of time, because if I lose all awareness of time I will probably miss my stop. And again, this is enjoyment mediated by an external object.

By: Walter

Walter — Sat, 31 Jan 2004 15:35:49 +0000

Even WITH a conflation, you are still required to consider flow as a non-vacuous concept. That sort of skepticism is a skepticism of accuracy, not existence.
Secondly, ‘flow’ as a *term* is a recent invention, but the phenomena (or range of phenomena) it purports to describe (or describes incidentally) is hardly recent at all.

By: MR

MR — Sat, 31 Jan 2004 14:50:55 +0000

I doubt that the “usual explanation” of flow is adequate, any more than the usual explanation of the supposedly familiar concept of love is adequate to prevent frequent romantic confusion. Brandon raises cogent objections to the adequacy of “flow”: e.g., it may be a conflation of fundamentally different categories, such as certain mental states with certain types of activity. An eliminativist account might find that “flow” is actually two very different types of brain activity that people describe, with nudging and leading interpretation, as “roughly” the same. Etc. The problem is, as I’ve said, that our language for describing feelings is extremely vague.
As for an explanation of the widespread belief in a supposedly vacuous concept, that is easy for the skeptic to provide: whereas love and other folk psychological terms at least have the virtue of being embedded in speech about feelings since time immemorial, “flow” is an invention of recent date, and belief in its existence is causally traceable back to “researchers” like Csikszentmihalyi. In fact, the burden of proof here lies again on the defenders of flow, to explain why such a purportedly common experience has only lately emerged as an item of discourse. (An analogous problem forces Heidegger to invent his notion of a self-occulting structure of temporality and, later, an even more baroque history of the forgetting of being.)

By: Walter

Walter — Sat, 31 Jan 2004 05:03:01 +0000

Agree entirely. However, I do think that the usual explanation of flow is more or less adequate for many people’s apprehending it, this being so because these people have all experienced a phenomenon which, even if not entirely discrete, distinguishes itself from phenomena that terms besides ‘flow’ and “being in the zone” are taken to refer to.
I can only assume that the literature Brandon surveyed provided him with numerous examples of what could have potentially been an experience of flow, but if none of these examples jumped out to him as being distinguished in some way from all other personal phenomena that he feels is non-vacuous as a concept, then I can only further assume that perhaps he’s simply never had a comparable experience. Which strikes me as unlikely, but certainly still possible.
And even while I agree that people who claim flow is non-vacuous should be held to clarifying what they’re talking about, they cannot be held to this arbitrarily, such that no matter how clear they get in their description, the other always replies, “I don’t see it.” The skeptic must similarly be held to explaining what could be the reasons for widespread belief in a supposedly vacuous concept.