The Philosophy of Deafness

My personal philosophy of deafness is based on "Philosophical Taoism" which is known by most people as Buddhism for short, even although Taoism precedes Buddhism (which it combined with to form the basis of Zen). Philosophical Taoism is not to be confused with "Religious Taoism" which is categorically different. In particular within Taoism, I found the writings of Chuang Tzu very helpful for trying to understand PUHL (Profound Unilateral Hearing Loss). The most effective translator of the writings of these early Chinese philosophers was Dr Alan Watts (1915-1973) and I have placed links to some of his material on this website in the Animation section. Although he passed away in the early seventies he left behind a huge catalogue of talks and videos from his many seminars. Unfortunately, he is less well known in the UK than in the United Sates despite the fact he was born in London before emigrating to the US in his twenties and becoming an American citizen. He was an early populariser of Zen in the United States and was associated with the Scottish psychoanalyst Ronald D Laing and known as a leader of the American counter culture movement of the sixties. I shall expand on philosophy elsewhere to flesh things out, but for now I want to keep this website tightly focused on the subject matter of random deafness, so I only offer readers this brief explanation of the nature of the formal "philosophy of deafness" which I pursued because I think that having an appropriate personal philosophy is an essential part of coming to terms with the condition not only for the deaf person but also for friends and family and I offer mine without claiming it to be the only personal philosophy available but simply that it worked for me. So I will go straight from here to list some of the common things that annoy us folks with PUHL mainly because it is brief and gets quickly to the point in much the same way as I tried to do with the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ's) section of this website.

Annoyances

I accept that the following scenarios will probably also annoy people with normal hearing but the difference is that these situations cab render me effectively completely deaf and can be totally overpowering/disorienting in their effect.

• Supermarket Muzac and (other such like)
• Being suddently interrupted whilst lost in a book studying only for the flight or flee instinct to be suppressed due to the functional shortcomings of my hearing loss and I tend to study wearing headphones and listen to talking books where possible to avoid suh situations
• The sound of people fumbling and angling for their keys
• The sound of people impatiently drumming their fingers
• Being in wide open spaces - like when doing gardening, for example.
• Walking in strong winds where I cannot hear anything
• Being aware of people walking behind me and I cannot use localisation to know how for or near they are to me for the sake of perhaps moving out of their way if they want to get past me without my accidentlally bumping into them
• Noise recruitment scenarios with multiple volume levels present and not knowing which one to adjust to
• Being outnumbered at meetings and therefore inevitably inviting the misunderstanding of somebody or another
• Being paired with other deaf people as I find this very counter productive however well intentioned it might be.

PUHL is Not the Same as Age Related Deafness

P(Profound Unilateral Hearing Loss) is really not atall like living with an age related hearing loss. As our friends get older and we see their hearing is getting slightly dulled we may caution them to "be careful", or, "watch out", or to, "keep their wits about them". But equally I know that if an older person inadvertantly stepped on to the road, they might very well turn away from any potential danger if needs be by dint of retaining the essential functions of hearing, even if slightly dimished and not optimally acute or sharp. But that is not the case for me because I would not know where the danger originated from and, consequently, not know what direction to take to avoid the source of the danger. So the difference between age related hearing loss and PUHL (Profound Unilateral Hearing Loss) centres around "danger and how to avoid or escape from it". Another example of the difference between age related hearing loss and PUHL is that it would be futile with PUHL to turn up the TV volume control or ask somebody to speak louder because PUHL (Profound Unilateral Hearing Loss) is a form of deafness rather than a hearing degradation and using subtitles on TV is preferred. Decibel loss is a crucial factor with age related loss and is, to some extent, the measure of the condition. For Profound Unilateral Hearing Loss, decibel loss is irrelevant and the appropriate measure is "loss of function", most notably localisation, discrimination and differentiation. ^*Time is a very important distinguishing factor between the profoundly deaf person and the person deafened through PUHL because the profoundly deaf person is deaf for all or the greater part of the time whereas the person deafened by Profound Unilateral Hearing Loss has a more momentary experience of deafness: in other words, there is an alternation between "hearing" and "not hearing". So, for these reasons, Random Effective Deafness (RED) is very much like living within both worlds - the world of hearing people and the world of profoundly deaf people.

"It is the custom to put speaking and listening in opposition: one man speaks, the other listens. Speaking is of itself a listening. Speaking is listening to the language we speak. Thus, it is a listening not while but before we are speaking. We do not merely speak the language &em; we speak by way of it. We can do so solely because we always have already listened to the language. What do we hear? We hear language speaking " (Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, Harper and Row, 1971, p. 123)".

Please let me restate that I define deafness as "the inability to meaningfully process sound". It is similar to a classical "computer crash" which happens when the processor erroneously attempts to store two pieces of data in the same location in memory. The action of the microprocessor as a serially processing device is very much like the listening actions of a single ear. The lack of a simutaneous processing capability from having just the one ear working instead of two results in our brains repeatedly calling on a function (now absent) that normally overcame such situations. In other words, two ears are capable of parallel processing, whereas the brains of those of us with PUHL are only capable of serially processing our auditory data thereby occasioning frequent "crashes", or, "rapidly alternating episodes of hearing and deafness" (please see the video simulation on the front page of this website). In terms of the loss of a localisation function, whatever data is "sender" and whatever data is "receiver" is established in serial data processing networks through a protocol known as handshaking. Analogous to that, one ear cannot be both hands in the shake. The notion that my brain detects delays in sounds sent and received by my one solitary ear from either side of my head is nonsense. For that to be true, sounds would need to be tagged as coming from either the left or the right of the head, acting as "hands" in the pair that when shook, established synchronised communication. My general interest in the area caused me to setup a sister website to this one some time ago at http://www.gspencer-brown.co.nr/ where I provide information on the origins of the early theory of fuzzy logic and A.I. I only have a layman's knowledge, but the site attracts a steady flow of AI (artificial intelligence) students from all over the world and I recommend a visit because it ties in closely with the work of another of my heroes, the late philosopher Dr Alan Watts (1915-1973) whom I also setup a dedicated website for at http://www.alanwatts.co.nr/. I also recommend "Steps To an Ecology of Mind" by Gregory Bateson for his thoughts on "redundancy" and patterning for effective communication http://oikos.org/homeen.htm.

Medical professionals ought not to feel offended when I say they have no direct experience of deafness like that of the sufferer because one cannot turn off the ears in the way we can turn off sight by closing our eyes. And, indeed, why should they know what it is to be deaf? I remember a hilarious TV comdey sketch where paediatricians were attending a job interview trying to impress the boss by dressing up in baby clothes and diapers! Do we really want a geriatric specialist to directly "know" what it is to be geriatric or a psychiatrist to be insane? I see medical professionals very much like historians in that they can empathise to a very high degree with a time they have no direct personal experience of actually living in but, nevertheless, they try to transport themselves back in their mind's eye to gain an approximation of the lived reality. So, naturally, historians highly value primary source accounts for offering insights into the period under study to maximise that empathising/imagining process. So, by analogy, I hope this website might be regarded as a primary source account of PUHL (Profound Unilateral Hearing Loss) that enables hearing people to constructively imagine something they can never fully appreciate unaided.

* Asymmetry of temporal processing in listeners with normal hearing and unilaterally deaf subjects. click here to contact me by email