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Lots of thoughts running through my head from our session last night. Not exactly sure yet where/how they will settle into a pattern. Interesting indeed to tell a story, hear/see/feel how it does/doesn't resonate with others, learn from that. Thanks all for contributions, in lots of different ways. Looking forward to seeing what thoughts arose in other peoples' minds (brains?). Hope it at least stirred some things up, as it did for me.

Mulling in particular the idea that everything we see (hear, taste, feel) is inherently "subjective," ie dependent on the idiosyncracies of our own distinctive nervous systems and their particular forms of construction. And that science (among other things) is an effort to achieve some degree of "objectivity," in the sense of finding/creating commonalities across our distinctivenesses (see The objectivity/subjectivity spectrum: having one's cake and eating it too?). Its an intriguing notion that "reality" is not the starting point for science. That it begins instead with the variety of different subjective/personal understandings and that it is from the interaction of those that "reality" is brought into existence, that "objectivity" and "reality" are actually stories that derive from social interactions, from the effort to find commonality.

Maybe "mental health" is in some ways the same thing? Not something that is a given that we try to achieve, but rather something that is brought into existence and continually revised by our efforts to find commonality in diversity, not only between people but within ourselves? Maybe we are less similar to each other than we sometimes think, and less coherent internally than we might like to believe? And perhaps those things, rather than being failings, are actually what drives the ongoing process of "getting it less wrong" (as a basic incoherence or randomness drives both evolution and the evolution of the universe?).

What all this would seem to imply (if one took the story seriously) is that neither we (nor biological evolution nor the universe) has a fixed goal any more than we (or they) have a coherent starting point. We (and they) have randomness (meaninglessness) as a driving force that causes new things to be created. And from those new things, and our observations of them, we create meanings as well as understandings, objectives, and goals. And we continually test and revise not only our understandings but also our objectives and goals both by new observations and by comparing them with those of other people. And so we evolve/change, based not on any absolute standards but rather on "getting it less wrong" by whatever local standards we have so far developed. The "law," as Oliver Wendell Holmes argued, is not how we are supposed to behave but rather a summary of what we have so far discovered are ways to behave that work.

Maybe all that provides an explanation for our difficulties in defining "mental health"? Its a work in progress, and necessarily starts from a fundamental subjectivity, one that it can't escape without losing its distinctive reason for being (unlike classical physics). And maybe that makes our course not only a theoretical exploration of "mental health" but a practical one as well? In wrestling with the meaning of "mental health" we're not only creating new meaning for it but also doing so in a way that provides us all concrete experiences with a particular way to get it less wrong, one that involves finding/creating coherences within and among ourselves.

Is the brain really big enough to do all of those things? To accept both left and right (objective and subjective, mind and body, the personal and the social, health and illness) rather than choosing between them? And to do so in a way that is productive rather than mushy? To start from meaningless and create meaning? And then challenge the meaning to create new meaning? And to find meaning in that process itself, both individually and collectively? We'll see ...