THE DISABUSED BOOMER

Black Box Voting

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 31 Aug 2016 14:38:00 +0000

It is indeed bizarre, but it seems to me that the beliefs concerning democratic governance with which we boomers grew up have to be radically modified in the face of their widespread subversion.

The information given on this site - http://blackboxvoting.org/ see 'websites' list in sidebar - concerning the GEMS voting machines in use in the USA is simply breathtaking.

These devices employ a 'fractional vote' counting system that allows profiling of communities and individuals, the allocation of favourable or unfavourable quotas to candidates and the setting of the 'value' of the individual vote at any fraction less than one and less than two. The GEMS voting system, which processes 25% of all votes cast in the USA, appears to be one of the worst designed systems possible; that is, if the powers that be really want the democratic process - or at least the 'one-person-one-vote' principle - to be preserved. It's so badly designed that the 'flaws' in it that allow interference cannot be an accident; perhaps that's its whole point. The 'flaws' appear to be design features, since they are written into the source code. These 'flaws' make auditing impossible since the 'settings' that allow fractional voting, profiling and quota allocations can be permanently hidden from detection immediately upon the close of voting and no-one will ever know what the fix was.

I imagine that Bernie Sanders is well aware of this possibility, but the scope for subverting the electoral process cuts two ways in a two-party state. The difficulty is in knowing who is going to apply the fix. It's down to local electoral services to do this and they are under the control of one or other of the parties in different states. I guess Bernie had no clear idea that the DNC was favouring Hillary until the Wikileaks revelations came out and proved this. The fact that even after these revelations Bernie endorsed Hillary, and that no-one in the mainstream media bothered to ask about the voting machines convinces me that the press is largely under the control of the undemocratic forces that influence the choice of both Democratic and Republican pre-selected candidates. The primaries thus risked being a charade, as many said at the time, and America got the Democratic candidate that the hidden powers of the CFR, Bilderberg, Wall Street, global companies, outfits such as the Soros 'Open Society' movement and so on... had already selected.

But as always, the 'best laid plans of mice and men' went somewhat awry with the surprise arrival of Trump, who as a complete outsider, non-politician, was not keyed into these various kingmaking organisations and rode a wave of popular irritation and discontent at the effects of globalisation and the clout of unelected agencies. This support of a popular movement was evident in Bernie Sanders's case, too, but while for him it was insufficient, for Trump it was such a significant groundswell, that it was more than enough to neutralise the subversion in areas where the Republicans had the power to interfere with the GEMS system and both select and elect the Republican candidate favoured by the above and similar organisations. Hillary is in the pocket of the undemocratic globalizing forces; Trump is not. This simple fact is perhaps the main reason why I consider Trump to be a thousand times better for America and the world than Hillary Clinton. There are other reasons, but they are all related to this central issue, because it goes to the heart of the current global corruption of democracy by powerful and illiberal unelected bodies throughout the world.

Trump is clearly a loose canon and as such a risky unknown quantity. I don't like him. But he is far from stupid, as his canny use of the primary elections showed, and has the interests of the American people at heart, as he understands them. He also speaks plainly; and given the subversion of language by the semantic manipulations of the politically correct, who have rendered meaningless words such as 'racism', this is reassuring. Despite the press vapourings, Trump is not a racist. A Trump presidency would signal a breaking of the anti-democratic link between the USA and global financial and industrial complexes.

I think he is aware of the globalists' plans to crash the American economy in the coming and more disastrous phase 2 of the 2008 upset; and he knows that Hillary is in on this, in on the plans for the creation of a 'new economic (perhaps cashless) world order'. He is aware of the plans of the Democratic party to foment racial tensions in the interests of creating problems of social unrest that can then be 'solved' by more measures along the lines of the Patriot Act, conducing to enhanced internal state control. He is aware that the Republican party, that has lost its way completely, is largely on board with these anti-democratic designs. He is aware of the plans enshrined in numerous international trade agreements such as TTIP and NAFTA to empower multinational companies over nation states and of the hand of the Democratic party in these. I've heard him talking of all of these matters in interviews not screened or aired in the mainstream media, whose aim is simply to discredit and demonize him. So his opinions on these issues incline me to support him.

I'm not inclined to heed the opinion of Trump that is promoted by the mainstream media. If you listen to the mainstream media, then electing Hillary in preference to Trump is simply a no-brainer and the alternative unthinkable. But Trump has done no more than commit multiple sins against political correctness and robustly spoken his mind. On the other hand, Hillary Clinton is a known liar of an almost pathological kind. She is a member of a crime syndicate quite as nefarious as the Mafia and far more powerful by virtue of its vast political influence. She is guilty of fraud on a breathtaking scale, notably in using the offices of the state for corrupt purposes; and she and her criminal associates have more than likely been guilty of commissioning the assassination - both figurative and literal - of opponents. She is in very poor health and a presidency held by her would probably pass very rapidly to her VP who is a fully bought-up Washington insider and creature of global finance. A Hillary presidency would mean at least four more years of Obamaism, that is to say four, probably eight, more years of the destabilising domestic and foreign policies - designed to reduce the national elected power of the USA while increasing that of the unelected global interests centered there - that have created the discontent in the USA that led to the Trump phenomenon in the first place.

So while I am not a supporter of Trump, I am even less of a supporter of Hillary.There is no other choice: either Trump or Hillary; and the latter would represent further progress of the globalist agenda. I think that a Trump presidency could at least be as positive as the Reagan presidency and at worst far less damaging than a continuation of Obamaism. This latter doctrine is inspired and fuelled by the political theory of Saul Alinsky as re-interpreted by George Soros. Soros is obsessed - as are Obama and Hillary - with creating an unelected global political authority that abolishes national identities and borders, that mixes peoples throughout the world into a bewildered, directionless herd of enslavable sheep, who can be easily bullied or cajoled into accepting political manipulation and transformation into consumer robots.

I think the globalist agenda is proceeding apace, faster than we realise, and the pushback is even becoming evident in certain parts of the EU, a globalist project if ever there was one. The recent ruling by the European Commission concerning the unpaid the Irish tax of the Apple behemoth is in my opinion a major crack in the globalist agenda at the heart of the EU. Apple knew that the Irish state was not powerful enough to oppose it and behaved as globalist bullies do with sticks and carrots. Margarethe Vestager has understood which way the wind is blowing and realised that only the EU was powerful enough to oppose the globalists; and I think we can expect to see more of this.

Trump is part of the same popular anti-globalist irritation that led to Brexit. The narrative that tries to argue that all of this discontent is driven by small-minded issues such as 'racism' is simply idiotic. I feel this strongly: the anti-democratic agenda is now in plain sight; and the opening of my eyes has dealt a death blow to my lifelong tendency to vote left-wing. This doesn't make me right-wing, since these distinctions are rapidly going out of the window. Soros is overtly and 'proudly' left-wing; and for me, that's enough to make me give up any loyalty to this particular label for ever, since this 'left-wingness' does not mean a genuinely liberal concern with human welfare and social justice, but rather an obsession with ideology and social control. Dreamers such as Jeremy Corbyn in the UK may think that Soros is one of them; but their ideas are fifty years out of date and Soros's globalist conceptions of what is left-wing are a world away from their quaintly antique vision of society and the future. Theirs is a blast from the past: his is the real future, unless he is defeated by the people.

The talk in the USA at the moment, in influential circles, about putting the election in November under the control of Homeland Security gives a strong hint about the manner in which this election may be stolen: a Homeland Security official, fiddling with the GEMS machines at the behest of the White House, for reasons of 'national security' is now a real possibility. The Obama administration and the insiders of the Republican party are so intent on stopping Trump that this Homeland Security wheeze may well be the way the achieve their aim. Severing the close link between the White House and global interests is that unthinkable!

EVIL

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 13 Aug 2013 14:56:00 +0000

A sketch of a Theodicy

The religions and philosophies of the world are stuffed with symbols of transformation, transformation that is not simply change of form but genuine transmutation of the simple into the complex, the less evolved into the more evolved, the lower into the higher, the primitive into the advanced, the base into the noble, the less perfect into the more perfect and so on. Scanning the universe as a whole, insofar as we are able to do this, it seems obvious that some process of refinement, sublimation or at least complexification is going on. The broad lines of development from hydrogen and helium atoms to us are fairly clear. It is obvious that no rational account can be given of the nature of this development, but that should not stop us trying to interpret it, indeed it is pusillanimous not to try.

The whole process seems to be conditioned by an avoidance of the sort of mechanical routine and repetitive stability that human intellect appears to require. The principle seems to be that the initial conditions of the universe and the laws that govern it are set so that the maximum variety is permitted along with the greatest possible unity. Of course, this is an observation that applies only to the bit of the cosmos that we can observe; it may be that quite different rules apply in other regions, but we have no choice but to start with what we know. It seems further that extreme creative fertility is the result of this combination of just these initial conditions with just these overarching laws. This extreme fertility is in many ways the source of what is called ‘evil’ for it is in the conflict between different organisms (we exclude material processes for the purposes of brevity) that the phenomenon arises; and it seems to arise because each organism is programmed to make its living in a particular specialised way and this inevitably brings it into conflict with other, different organisms doing the same thing but in different ways. But it is not only the extreme variety of nature that leads to this conflict, it is also the specialisation, the mechanisation, one could almost say, by means of which each organism hones its range of capabilities to an extreme degree and invests them with absolute, exclusive worth. One can almost see these capabilities, the strategies and skills by means of which an organism makes its way in the world and achieves what it achieves, as ‘values’ – at all events they are values for the organism concerned. It is inevitable, therefore, that nature be a tissue of conflicting values. The values of the crocodile are not those of the wildebeest, the values of the virus are not those of the human being. Conflict is inevitable and so is all the pain and suffering that characterises the biosphere. But it is entirely comprehensible that these features of the natural world should be precisely the features that confer upon it the exuberant creativity that we as human beings so admire and prize in our world.

It is when this creativity works in the human species that we begin to make a distinction between the drive to variety in man and that in other parts of nature. The variety of human cultures, first, and the variety of human life-aims, second, lead to the same kind of conflict within the human species that we note between the other non-human species on this planet. They lead to the same kind of intense specialisation, the same kind of intense rivalry, the same kind of myopic concentration on a range of activities and values to the exclusion of all others; and since all human societies and individuals are going about their business with the same intense zeal, albeit in different directions, it is inevitable that severe conflict should arise, conflict that we dignify with the name of ‘evil’ when we see it leading to the worst kinds of brutality, violence, cruelty and so on. It is just possible that the notion of ‘evil’ here begins to take on some of the sense of the notion of ‘chaos’ in cutting-edge science.

When we contemplate the general brutality and nastiness of much of human life we ask the question ‘how can an all-powerful and all-benevolent God permit this?' It is strange that we do not ask this question with regard to the non-sentient aspects of the universe; we do not even ask it of the sentient but non-human parts of our world. Surely we should be able to see that the conflict and the resulting suffering are integral parts of the nature of the universe as we find it and are indeed vital to its volcanic creativity. It would seem that if you will the end of this kind of exuberance in creation, you have to will the means of great conflict. The so-called problem of evil actually boils down to this conflict and this extreme creativity of the universe we know. If the universe were less creative, it would be probably more mechanical, more rigid, less interesting. It can surely be no accident that we as creatures loathe and detest repetition, routine, leaden sameness and so on. Of course we need these things, for without them, there is no life at all; but when they become the essence of our reality, we revolt or lie down and die. There is no greater burden than the burden of predictable sameness and mechanical routine. This knowledge is deeply engrained in us as creatures. The principle of endless variety and open-ended creativity seems to be woven into the warp and woof of what we are. We simply know that the world cannot be “the Eternal Return of the Same”. The price of all this variety is, of course, a great deal of discomfort, a great deal of what looks like useless pain and suffering. It is easy for creatures for whom comfort is a priority to regard the stable conditions in which their comfort is permitted as the ‘good’ and unstable conditions in which their comfort is attacked as ‘evil’. That this is a very short-sighted view of things naturally does not occur to them, since they invest all their energies in increasing the comfort and decreasing the discomfort. But this is just the particular life-plan that they are saddled with and since they are saddled with a life-plan, they necessarily come into conflict with different life-plans and different modes of existence that militate against their own. But far from adding up to any metaphysical ‘evil’ this is merely an example of the universal conflict that arises because of great variety and creativity. To call it ‘evil’ merely because it interferes with our particular human craving for comfort is simply stupid.
It is stupid because it suggests that human moral judgements are normative for the entire universe.

So what could redeem this universal process of boundless and unrestrained creativity in which each creature is in conflict with each other creature and most care not a fig for the damage they inflict upon their rivals? The answer must lie in the principle of sublimation: out of the universal struggle to favour life-plans and modes of existence (what the evolutionists call ‘the struggle for survival’) arises a drive to higher and higher forms of being within creation. If creation is to be regarded as the concrete image of the ineffable divine, and if creation reveals a striving for this image to be an ever more faithful approximation to likeness, then we can expect what we see: this inexhaustible invention of forms in wild profusion with a mainstream of increasingly complex forms rising to ever more representative likeness of the creator.

It may well be that in this sense, Leibniz was right: we have the best of all possible worlds, because it is the most creative and the most susceptible of coming up with forms that are worthy of representing the creator, rather than most in conformity with our desire for comfort and with the human morality we erect upon that desire. It seems to me that the human race has to commit itself to the notion of its own perpetual transformation. We are turning into something higher and this creative process is inevitably painful, inevitably a disruption for those whose immediate comfort here and now is an absolute priority. But hey, the universe is constituted this way; who are we to take issue with the nature of the cosmos that gave rise to us? Who are we to claim that our particular life-plan with its particular values is normative for the rest of creation? We are merely limited creatures making a living like all the rest. Conflict and pain are part of the deal. What redeems us as human beings is precisely that we can rise above the mere making of a living and see the means of our own transformation into something higher. It is too easy to pooh-pooh the notion of something higher and decry it as comforting delusion; but those who have grasped the essential process of nature, insofar as these are encoded in their own human nature, do not need to prove that of which they are convinced. Part of the essence of what it means to be human is the inchoate conviction, nothing more than a hunch, but decisive nonetheless, that we are turning into something else – something that potentially turns our life-plan into a mode of being that exploits the entire range of reality and not just a little corner of it as at present.

The Problem of Evil

After reading Mackie’s article on the problem of evil (Evil and Omnipotence, first published in Mind - Vol. 64, issue 254, April 1955) it became clear to me that with people who have no imagination and therefore no understanding of the real problems associated with the divinity, there is really no discussion possible. Mackie is one of those persons who believe, sincerely no doubt, that logic-chopping gets rid of problems, or solves them by dissolving them. This credulous faith in language is touching but not very imaginative.

I would like to respond to Mackie by means of a thought-experiment that may look like theological blah-blah but that is in fact just an exercise in imagining alternative possibilities. I don’t expect the Mackie sort of mind to be able to go along with such fantasies, but some of my other readers may. Anyway, let’s see where such a thought-experiment could take us in considering the so-called problem of evil.

Mackie seems to be saying that you can only hold the two theses – ‘God is omnipotent’ and ‘God is good’ – by means of equivocating over one or other or both of the basic notions. It seems not to have occurred to him at all, that the notions of good and evil may have no meaning at all when applied to the divine, in spite of the clear meaning they have for us. It seems not to have occurred to him that concepts such as omnipotence and goodness may simply be irrelevant to God as he is in himself, because there is no point in comparing him with anything, and goodness and powerfulness are scaling – therefore comparative – concepts. To paraphrase one of the old mystics, God cannot be good, for if he were good, he could be better. It is entirely possible, assuming that God exists, that the categories of good and evil are the only categories by means of which we, limited creatures that we are, can make more than mechanical sense of the world, but that to apply them to God is simply as naive an anthropomorphism as supposing that God has human features and a human body. The problem of evil, so-called, in fact implies a tacit comparison of ourselves with God, and him with us, and a moral judgement in favour of ourselves.
The so-called problem of evil derives from the egoist's suspicion - and wish - that he might be God's superior.

Let’s pursue this simple-minded thought-experiment: imagine the state of good and evil before God created the universe. How could God, in himself, have had any use for the notions of good and evil, except as aspects of himself? But if he’s not comparing himself to anyone or anything else, what’s the point of the concepts? What earthly use was there for concepts such as good and evil before the arrival of life on the scene? Even if we imagine trying to apply these concepts in the time of the dinosaurs, it’s still hopeless. How can we apply the concepts to the world before the arrival of sentient life? We can’t. Why then should we suppose that they have any sense at all outside of the sphere of embodied human preoccupation? Good and evil only come into being with human perceptions of the world. Just as much as the steam-engine, they are our invention and no more appropriate than steam-engines as a universal standard.

There is, of course, a simple way to combine God’s goodness with his all-powerfulness in a manner which makes use of the concept ‘good’ such that it appeals to human beings and yet remains entirely compatible with the concept of omnipotence, again used in a way that appeals to humans. Unfortunately, this way of solving the problem requires humility, patience, trust and love, all the Christian virtues, in fact, that are in very short supply in scientific and philosophical circles. They are virtually non-existent in the ego. This way of solving the problem involves saying to ourselves that we do not understand what God is up to with regard to us, but that we trust him to work it all out. The world is after all the sort of place that inspires confidence, ‘evil’ (a wholly human category) notwithstanding. It seems to me that most of the so-called problems associated with the existence of God and with the coherence of all his theistic properties is that the minds that see such problems are stuck in outmoded visions of the world: they are all essentially stuck in the Newtonian world as monolithic state of affairs to be grasped and understood in its entirety by the rational ego. They still have not grown into the universe of uninterrupted, seamless change in which man is merely a transient creature who is becoming something else, just as all other creatures on this planet have so far been transient creatures who were slowly turning (and turned) into something else. To repeat: if metaphysical evil is a useless concept in a world before the arrival of man, why should it suddenly turn useful after his arrival except on account of its usefulness to him? There is no use here in changing the rules and equating evil with any useless pain and suffering, because no-one can judge as to the ultimate usefulness or uselessness of suffering.

But let’s put a bit of flesh on these abstract bones. Suppose that God is in the process of a creative work and that the embodied life of humans is only a relatively early stage in the process, not as early, say, as the absence of life or the presence of only non-sentient life on the planet, but early nonetheless. Since the concepts ‘good’ and ‘evil’ clearly have no meaning at all in a universe of non-sentient beings, the concepts came into existence with sentient life and more specifically, with sentient life endowed with language. Before that time, the problem of evil, so-called, did not exist. So we must ask ourselves, why did the problem come into existence? Clearly it has to have something to do with the emergence of sentient, language-endowed life, human life, in short and the ability of such life to experience pain and suffering. But why should human life have created the problem of evil? If it didn't exist before the arrival of people, what made it exist? Was it suffering plus language or was it just suffering plus sentience, self-consciousness? Was it both of these or was it only one? Was it perhaps just language? This seems unlikely, since one can be humanly but inchoately outraged at useless pain and suffering without necessarily being able to articulate one’s outrage in words. So it must be self-consciousness, then. The possession of language only serves to communicate the concept to other sentient beings. But then again, without language, there seems no possibility of making the essential judgements that equate pain and suffering with metaphysical evil. So perhaps we need both sentience and language.

How can evil have come into the world with the emergence of sentience and language? This seems to me to be the nub of the matter. The solution to the problem will be found, in my opinion, in the extent to which the sentient individual is able to name him- or herself and to name the essential goods of his or her existence. This will determine the extent to which the individual regards him- or herself as a finished being, as a stable state of affairs, rather than as a stage in a process, as a given, rather than as a signpost, as an authority – perhaps as great as that of God himself, so great is the perceived power of language – rather than as a creature in the process of being created and therefore not only unfinished, but also totally dependent. If we are finished creatures, the end-station of a process of creation, then clearly the life we have is far from perfect and if we have been specifically created as these finished creatures, then we must see the creator as incompetent or malicious. If we are unfinished creatures, however, then evil is possibly only the index of our incompleteness. There we are: it seems to me that the existence of evil in the world has to do with the status of man as unfinished creation. Now this is something that the scientific or rationalising philosopher simply cannot or will not understand. Both would find it even more difficult to understand the possibility that creation is always unfinished. But let’s think a bit more and a bit more deeply about the matter.

Is there any more suffering in the world now than in the age of the dinosaurs? Clearly, there are not more natural calamities, there is not more brutality, not more disease, not more bloodshed, not more early death, not more exploitation of the weak by the strong and so on. So how is there evil all of a sudden? The answer must lie in the extent to which human beings believe themselves to be suffering unnecessarily. But what is necessary suffering? Clearly the notion has not much sense. No suffering is necessary in the sense that suffering is analytically connected with some aspect of human life. Suffering is in fact connected with human birth, but is it necessarily so connected? Clearly it is not, since it is not contradictory to say, that a woman had a painless and successful birth. Is suffering necessarily connected with any other result, for example with becoming beautiful? No, again. So what is suffering if not the occasional disagreeable accompaniment or interruption of some of those things in life that we value? Answer: it is the invariable accompaniment to the apparently gratuitous destruction of those things in life that we value. The ultimate evil in life is death, timely or premature, it’s always perceived as evil, as the greatest evil in human existence.
But what if we could perceive death as a benefit? What if we could see it as an inalienable part of the process of creation? If we could do this then we could perhaps begin to perceive suffering as a benefit as well. If we could perceive suffering as a benefit, then we have demoted evil, as understood by humans, to the status of mere apparent evil, and once we have done that it is easy to reconcile evil with the goodness of God – from the human point of view. The whole of creation - and human life is part of that creation - is dependent upon tensions of opposites in every sphere. This tension is no sterile stalemate, in which the opposites cancel each other out; it is a dynamic tension. Small wonder, then that such instability results in the massive sidereal forces that unleash earthquakes, hurricanes, tidal waves, and other natural catastrophes. Small wonder that there are creatures of the evolutionary process – viruses, sharks, wasps – whose adaptations are in conflict with our well-being. These are part of the world we inhabit and they are part of its creative instability. Our interaction with such a world is on the same terms as the interaction with the world of all other living systems: we thrive on its benefits and have to accept all the other conditions that make these possible. It seems impossible, given the dynamic instability of the tensions of nature and given the exuberant creativity of life, that we should not come into conflict with these things. The question is, would the elimination of these things constitute an abolition of what we call metaphysical evil? The alternative to the dynamic instability and the exuberant creativity of the world seems to be a sort of sterile mechanical stability. This strikes me as far more evil than the richness we in fact have. Any other conception of an evil-free world is going to be based upon perceptions and conceptions of human comfort; and the thought of a universe based upon purely human values is simply nightmarish. The only alternative to these views (if we insist upon evaluating morally the entire universe rather than pronouncing it to be value-free) seems to be to see so-called evil as only apparent. Evil is an invention of the human point of view that considers itself to be absolutely normative.

How, then could we come to view death and suffering as only apparent evils? The answer to this must be in being able to see evil and suffering – from the human point of view – as good for us from God’s point of view. We have to try and adopt a God’s-eye point of view and try to see everything sub specie aeternitatis. Imagine that God’s work on this planet has something to do with creating creatures endowed with minds of such vastly greater capacities than ours, that we can not even imagine them, though we might extrapolate from our own infirmities and invent creatures entirely lacking them; immortal creatures, cognitively infallible creatures, physically omnipotent creatures, ecologically integrated creatures, morally perfect creatures (as morally perfect as the dinosaurs, perhaps) creatures worthy to rule the material universe… you get the picture. In this, God would not be producing creatures to rival himself, since he would remain the ground and origin of the universe, and any creature would by definition be subservient to him. But he might perhaps be creating creatures who would be free from most of the problems, discomforts and uncertainties of the human condition. Since this goal is so far above us as to be unimaginable, but since we can at least imagine the possibility, let us ask ourselves what kind of world would the half-formed creatures inhabit who represented fairly lowly stages in this process of development but who have a dimly dawning conception of their distant and wonderful destiny? They might just conceivably look like us; and the suffering of their imperfections might just conceivably resemble our sufferings.

Imagine for a moment that the creator is in the business of creating minds, or souls, if you like, to animate the superior creatures sketched above. Imagine also that these souls are already immortal, but very rudimentary, very primitive, very imperfect, mere soul-seeds, so unsure of their status that they are inclined to deny their own existence. Imagine also, that these souls have a mode of existence which is not physical and which is atemporal. Imagine further, that these souls, like God, undergo development without essential change by association with a physical presence – a ‘creation’ – in time and space. The development is precisely the evolution of the physical system with which they are associated, just as God’s development is associated with a physical universe, although in himself he is infinite potential. The development is self-discovery: becoming aware of what one essentially is without ever arriving at a term. The evolution of life on this planet could be seen in this general scheme of things as the culture-bed for the growth of souls, and the evolution of species as the physical counterpart of that growth. The timeless, placeless, eternal (why not?) souls would grow in consciousness of their own potential and develop by association not with one physical creature, but with many, as the temporal, special characteristics of the particular life with which the soul is briefly associated teaches the soul its lesson in self-awareness. Imagine that our human existence is just one such mode of physical existence with which certain souls are associated. What would be the consequences of supposing that this mode of existence is the only mode of existence that we are ever likely to know? Surely (again, if we are indulging in moral judgement rather than nihilistically pronouncing the whole pageant as meaningless) it would be the judgement that this existence is nasty, painful and tortured, the kind of existence that a malevolent or non-omnipotent God may foist upon the creatures he either delights to torment or else cannot prevent suffering. Alternatively, this existence of ours could be regarded as part of the creative process by means of which we are as souls growing to maturity. Just as children chafe under the lessons that they have to learn in order to live effectively and sometimes consider those that impose such lessons upon them as evil tyrants – or at least enemies, even though they may not be – so we, as imperfect human beings, may perceive the world we live in and the lives we lead as characterised by useless pain and suffering and as therefore either being the work of an evil, omnipotent God, or the work of a good, but limited God, or as not the work of God at all.

What I am saying is this: it is entirely possible that our conception of evil is the result 1) of our lowly stage of development, our ignorance and feebleness 2) the result of our being in the uncomfortable process of being created and therefore unfinished 3) the result of the creative work of a God who has our long-term interests at heart, but whose job is long and far from over. If we see our lives in this sort of light, then the problem of evil vanishes altogether and we can accept joyfully that “whatever is, is right”. The evil that we know, is evil, but it is in these terms a little evil and indispensable to the greater good. After all, in a world where the soul is immortal and has an immortal destiny, nothing much can be radically evil. Of course, if we were being fattened up and equipped with exquisite sensitivity to pain in order to be subjected to some massive jamboree of torment at the end of evolution, then the problem would be solved in another way, but we have no evidence for any sort of evil other than the normal pain and suffering that we know and this might entirely reasonably be associated with our imperfect understanding of the manner in which we are being created. Merely being able to regard this suffering as part of the creative process drains all the evil out of it. If you find yourself getting hot under the collar at the idea that you are being created and that you are subject to a Creator, then I think you'd better consider the size of your ego and ask yourself whether it may not be rather bloated.

Within such a scheme of things, even the complete destruction of all life on this planet is compatible with the goodness and omnipotence of God: the souls simply relocate, taking their store of wisdom with them. It seems to me inevitable that such an eventuality will befall planet earth sooner or later, probably sooner. It seems to me that embodied human life on this planet has probably reached some sort of end-station. I would not be at all surprised if life were snuffed out by something catastrophic, a comet-strike or something. But assuming the existence of God and the existence of his long-term creative plan, such things are simply more opportunities. To regard them as evil would therefore be over-hasty. In this sort of cosmic view of things, the problem of evil as tussled with by philosophers just evaporates. Evil as a metaphysical concept relies wholly on the ego’s conviction that it understands human life in its entirety. To the eye of faith, however, that sees creation in terms of process and transitory imperfection, and that suspects that its vision of a greater destiny has some substance, evil, by contrast, has no substance at all.

THE FUNCTIONALISED PERSON

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 23:06:00 +0000

All living systems show two opposing tendencies: the tendency to creative discovery, and the tendency to conservative rigidity. Every living system exhibits both tendencies but in widely differing proportions. Moreover, the relation between the two tendencies is not symmetrical: it's fair to say that while creativity requires a modicum of conservatism, too much of the latter can and often does stifle the former completely.

There is, clearly, a difference between making a living and having a life.
Human life is, indeed all sentient life is, to a very great extent about making a living. But if that's all it is about, then such a life is seriously impoverished, however successful the living. Making a living implies, as it does in the natural world, specialisation. For better or for worse, one becomes to a great extent what one does. We become some identifiable type of human function in the course of making our living. We are urged, as children to be something. We do this with greater or lesser degrees of coherence. We become doctors, lawyers, factory-workers, toilet-cleaners, musicians, artists, astronauts, beggars, tycoons, thieves and so on. Each of these functions implies a degree of specialisation and normally, the more complete the specialisation, the more successfully the function is performed. But if this success is the reward of specialisation, the price paid is very often the loss of plasticity, the loss of adaptability, the loss of creative formlessness, creative infinity. We all know of people who are so completely formed (or deformed) by their professional activity that they cannot stop performing that particular function. The lawyer adopts litigious attitudes in his relations with his family and friends. The teacher remains a pedagogue, even between the sheets. The doctor cannot stop diagnosing illness and so on. To a greater or lesser extent, we all become a function of our role in life. To a greater or lesser extent, our minds are structured by our function. Our function turns into a mental carapace.

We think of knowledge as liberating, but it can turn into quite the reverse. While learning expands the mind, knowledge can frequently limit it. To a greater or lesser extent, we become a function of our knowledge and see the world through the spectacles that our knowledge imposes upon our minds. This sort of functionalisation happens not only with respect to specialised, professional knowledge, it also happens with respect to beliefs of all kinds as well. The mind operates according to the categories set by the beliefs and functions and may be unable to stand outside of them. Often such functionalisation of the mind – though necessary to making a living – results in rigidity of attitude, all kinds of orthodoxy, dogmatism and occasionally, bigotry. The efficient and successful performance of a function often correlates with the degree to which the mind in question is ‘orthodox’, ‘dogmatic’ or ‘bigoted’. Less than whole-minded commitment diminishes efficiency. The result of all of these limitations on the human mind is a diminution of both the world inhabited and of the self that inhabits such a world. When it goes too far, functionalisation is a matter of living as a part self in a part world, living as a fragment in a collection of fragments. Such functionalisation, when yoked to the paranoid emotions of the ego can become a negative, damaging state in which each specialised individual pursues individual goals to the detriment of others. When belief in the thing-ideology and the fragmentation it engenders intervene to reinforce this negative development, the individual becomes the famous cog in the machine and the result is quite simply catastrophic. Dehumanised units interact mechanically with each other according to the forces generated by the immediate tensions to which they are subject and humanity disappears.

The mind is always in danger of becoming no more than a function of its beliefs and when the ego is in control of those beliefs, its craving for power is such that, to talk mythically for a moment, it ousts God by assuming his role. There are only these two possibilities, given the propensity of the mind to become functionalised by its beliefs: either the ego fuses with the self and the self recognises its dependence upon an overarching meaning to which it is subservient, or the ego sees itself as sole authority, the sole origin of meaning in the universe and abolishes God in order to take his place. By ‘God’ here is meant no more than a meaning to the universe that is not simply that of the ego. God’s place is taken by the ego’s claim to godlike knowledge and what goes with it, god-like control. The scientific ego is the last refuge of anthropomorphic religion; here the ego has fused with the anthropomorphic god. The ego as quasi-divine lawgiver arrogates to itself the omniscience and the omnipotence of the monotheistic deity. Its mechanistic universe is ruled by laws that it has itself created. These laws are forced upon the rest of mankind by so-called ‘proof’, a form of violence that is generated by nothing more authoritative that what appears self-evident to the ego and that thus frequently means no more than ‘true because I say so’. What is self-evident to the ego is what it makes itself, namely its machines, either the literal machines of technology or the intellectual machines of theory. So the whole business of ego-authority goes around in a circle and the authority of ego-based intellection is simply the mechanical propensity of the ego. This is as close as the ego gets to the status of ens causa sui. It is an indication of the vacuous nature of an attitude that declares that parts are more important than wholes: the ego as part imagines that it is entitled to legislate for the whole and for no good reason than that it both desires to do so and lacks the ability to conceive of any power above itself. Since the ego can only work with machines and since the machine is necessarily a demonstration of its own validity, the ego imagines that the mere appeal to machine models will be exclusively authoritative. The functionalisation of the intellect makes every thus functionalised ego infallible in its own eyes. The result is both a cacophony of little tin gods shouting at each other and a leaden knee-jerk consensus that is the essence of orthodoxy. Daily human life is analysed in terms of a range of mechanical problems. These problems are provided with mechanical ‘solutions’ by a variety of tin-pot deities. The result is that daily life becomes, increasingly, a perpetuation of the very problems that the solutions were intended to solve. The reason for this is that the root of the problem lies within the ego and its reductive, mechanical methods: the rationalistic ego is, in the words of Karl Kraus, “the disease of which it thinks itself the cure.”

Just as the ideology of mechanism imposes a mechanical conception of the processes of nature and just as the thing-ideology imposes a fragmentary view of reality, so the functionalisation of the person succeeds in rendering all human beings mechanical and fragmentary as well. It must be said that the success of the ideology is as notable here as it is in the scientific sphere. It must also be said that the catastrophic effects of functionalisation on the human self are as extensive and profound as the effects of mechanical modes of understanding on the environment. The two go together and complement each other perfectly: the practical policies that result from mechanical models cooked up by a myopic, hidebound science are implemented with robotic efficiency and soulless disregard for the fine balances of nature by the truncated ego- and persona-dominated beings to whom they appeal. The greatest danger in the human realm today is the possibility that this combination of mechanistic ideology, mechanised society and mechanised personalities will supplant, by virtue of their very simplistic efficiency, all other ways of viewing our world. If this happened and if centralised political power on this planet were of this cast, it would be time to bid good-bye to all those vague but precious notions, such as ‘environmental ethics’, ‘human rights’, ‘the freedom of the individual’, ‘the sanctity of life’, ‘the mind’, ‘the creative imagination’, ‘the human spirit’ and so on, which make the functionalised ego sneer, but without which we humans would be a lot nastier and certainly less creative than we are. These concepts already have a difficult time of it, but they survive because decent, unprejudiced people know they are valuable, even though there is no room for them in the officially scientific view of things. The day this language goes on the wane and begins to disappear from public discourse in favour of the efficient language of function and technique, that is the day humanity will begin the first stage of its congealment into a stagnating or self-destructive species.

It may well be that the human species will split into two, the one continuing to grow and develop, the other, like the coelacanth settling down to long-term stability. It may be that that process has already begun. Whatever the case, the functionalisation of the human person strangles creativity, reduces the range of the personality to that of a routine-ridden calculator and chokes off that indeterminate, unpredictable, innovatory input into the world that is the essence of our interaction with our environment. How then does the wholly functionalised mind operate? It operates, primarily, by adhering with almost evangelical fervour to the implementation of a certain procedure, a certain method, a certain algorithm: it computes. The specific nature of the functionalisation is given by the role, the persona. The energy for the sometimes almost fanatical zeal for method is provided by that would-be divinity, the ego. The combination of functional efficiency and ego-ambition is one of the most potent in the human world today; and it is this combination that could result in the imposition of the universal totalitarian machine portrayed in literature and film from Plato’s Republic to Skinner’s Walden2, from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to the ghastly visions of the Matrix films and of all those other popular stories of ultimate societal mechanisation. The extent to which such scenarios are viewed positively or negatively depends upon the degree of mechanisation of the personality doing the viewing. The point of view adopted here is the following: far from representing a positive view of the future, such nightmares are wholly negative since they represent attempts to achieve, for whatever agency or ideology it may be, a control over humanity that will lift it out of the creative mainstream of evolution and consign it to the class of no-longer-developing creatures. And that – at least for humanity as we know it – would be a very bad thing indeed.

So how does functionalisation of the person work? It works by developing, to the detriment of the self as a whole, the rational, methodical aspects of the intellect – the left-brain aspects, in the language of brain-mythology – and by linking these so firmly with a certain role within a certain organisation or a certain type of organisation, that the person concerned is entrapped and enslaved - bought, body and soul. It becomes incapable of thinking outside of a certain box or outside of certain boxes. This role is defined as a series of procedures for which the person has responsibility. This sense of responsibility is cemented by many types of reward, financial gain, status, power, influence and the like, that are craved by the self-worshipping ego. The old animal passions that stoke the ego – territoriality, aggressivity towards any competition, self-importance, self-regard, vengefulness, greed, and the like, on the one hand – and the distortions that result from the truncation of the self from its own depths – paranoia and schizoid dissociation of intellect from emotions, on the other – create an extremely efficient, intense but dangerously unstable state of mind that is a diminution of the human. It is a diminution of the human because it constitutes a loss of that distance and ‘beyondness’, a loss of the finite-infinite tension, that always characterises the relation of the self to its own products: the infinite self externalising itself in finite productions. The functionalised personality is pure persona, pure ego and the robotic attitudes that go along with this are deeply pathological, however ‘normal’ they may be considered in our western industrialised societies. The instability of a functionalised personality depends upon the strength of those creative forces of renewal that are part of the birth-right of the self, and on the degree to which the function has conquered or subjugated them or otherwise keeps them in check. In certain functionalised personalities, the function cannot keep the transformatory forces in a state of repression and they break out (often in a ‘mid-life crisis’) either in positive or in negative form, either as creative innovation and departure, or as destructive illness. Both of these latter types of dissolution of the function are relatively rare. The functionalised person usually has too much to lose by allowing cracks in the persona to appear. Those who do allow such slippage either achieve something radically different from their functional prowess or else they suffer some kind of breakdown and consequent demotion or disgrace.

The functionalised person in short is a mechanised mind. Small wonder, then that it tends to develop conceptions of the mind that are mechanical. Its first level of programming is that of the theory of three-dimensional space, one-dimensional time, and reality as a collection of three-dimensional solid, persisting objects. This basic operating system of the mechanised intellect, laid down in early childhood, is then reinforced by the acquisition of language and becomes the basic set of assumptions used to approach the world of experience. The next level of programming comes from education and depends upon the degree to which the personality concerned adopts mechanised attitudes and mechanised thought-patterns from the milieu in which it grows to maturity. Those persons possessing a facility for procedural matters, algorithmic thought-patterns, convergent, rule-governed thinking of all types will tend to flourish in an educational milieu where such things are valued and where proficiency in them is rewarded. Educational success, throughout, will have been measured in terms of the efficiency with which the person convinces the educational authorities of its ability to conform to received standards of excellence. The ‘passing’ of examinations, generally no more than the reproduction of rote-learned factual information or the manipulation of procedural technique, will further reinforce the sense of achievement of the already deeply functionalised intellect. The next layer of programming, however, is probably the most vital, and it is this level that completes the process of functionalisation: it is the level that is laid upon the person by professional activity. The need to achieve economic independence and the ego’s desire for status, drive the already functionalised personality towards social roles that it can fill with the aid of the mental procedures and ideological assumptions thus far internalised. The personality is drawn into a net of forces that provide all manner of feedback loops, which further functionalise the mind: daily routine, reward, fear of demotion, economic necessity, social pressure, reputation, authority, deadlines, competition and so on. The person becomes entirely bound up in the routine of such an existence, entirely dominated mentally by it and entirely devoted to its partial values. The result is often either a hard-nosed and ruthless personality who sees only the achievement of those immediate goals that are imposed by the role played, or else a stressed and harried personality whose perpetually stimulated fight or flight mechanisms operate internally and inappropriately to burn up the body itself.

The thing-ideology and the philosophy of mechanism drive the procedures and values of the major educational institutions. These, in turn, foster the functionalised personality. These personalities achieve eminence both in the educational institutions and in the other organisations to which they apply their abilities. The mechanised, functionalised values and the ambitious, energetic ego are highly prized in industry and commerce because they maximise growth and profit. Governments perceive this maximisation of profit as the highest good of a country and therefore foster all the values, procedures and abilities that conduce to its further maximisation. Educational policy, economic policy and all other sorts of planning then become dominated by the mechanical outlook and the immediate goals of the functionalised ego. The result is a drive towards the mechanisation of society from its roots to its most authoritative institutions, from parenting to governing, from manufacturing to entertaining, every activity is governed by procedure, by method, by algorithm; and the intrinsic, indeterminate creativity of the human mind that is responsible for every positive cultural acquisition is lost.

This tendency of western societies to foster the training of more and more functionalised persons generates a conception of human identity that equates it entirely with the persona, with the social role. The successful person is ‘something’ in society, i.e. a recognisable definable thing. Personalities are regarded as achieving a state in which they are ‘finished’, ‘formed’, ‘rounded off’. The implication seems to be that once a recognisable social role has been achieved and filled efficiently, then the person has, as it were, peaked and can go nowhere else. The person thus functionalised is entirely identified with the brain with which it is associated and this brain is considered as a sort of computing device that has been programmed to operate in a certain way. The functionalised person and the mechanised mind see only mechanism and function; they are self-confirming theories. Inevitably, when the efficiency of this computing device begins to wane, the person is regarded as waning along with it and hence judged to be of little use, little worth and, like a clapped-out machine, suitable for the scrap-heap. The person is regarded as diminishing along with its diminishing efficiency. The value of such a functionalised person is precisely the extent to which it can fulfil its function efficiently. Once this goes, the person has no further value. Thus the old, the sick, the handicapped, the diminished have no value in terms of functionalised personalities. How long such diminished persons will continue to be tolerated in a given society depends upon the extent to which non-functionalised persons and non-functional conceptions of personal value are maintained. It requires very little for a society to be so devoted to mechanical values that it begins a process of reification, objectification or depersonalisation of the persons it regards as somehow inappropriate to its aims. Thus totalitarianisms of all kinds have systematically persecuted those they considered inappropriate in this sense, i.e. not susceptible to being functionalised in the approved manner. Behind all of these totalitarianisms has always stood some rigid, orthodoxy, mechanically applied, some mechanistic, algorithmic conception of human life and of the most efficient manner in which to live it. The mechanistic-deterministic-materialistic ideology that still governs the west and the thing-ideology that now constitutes its only authoritative view of the world, are steadily creating a functionalised population that not only cares nothing for the indeterminate core of the human self, but also fails to understand that it is the origin of all that is positive in human culture: purpose, value, creativity, meaning, and all those forces that foster the constant achievement of complexity in diversity that has characterised the history of human culture. The victory of the functionalised personality would perhaps spell the end of that history; it might spell the ‘end of history’ altogether, in Francis Fukuyama’s phrase.

The antidote to functionalisation is not to be found in its demonisation or in any set of measures designed to achieve its abolition. Functionalisation produces many benefits. It focuses the intellect with the intensity of a laser-beam and this intensity of vision permits an attention to detail and an unsurpassed analytical ability that are both of great value in the solving of all manner of ancient human problems – disease, hunger, ignorance, privation, and suchlike. On the other hand, it is clear that unchecked functionalisation produces its own set of problems – intolerance, insensitivity, short-termism, myopia of all kinds, diminution of the person and so on. The solution therefore would seem to be some means of maintaining the benefits of functionalisation while reducing its deleterious effects. This can only be done, it seems, by fostering two mutually opposing manners of thought. The self has to be seen as potentially governed by contradictory sets of principles. Once again, the solution to a fundamental conflict in human life is not the stressing of one side to the exclusion of the other, but rather the balanced maintenance of both elements of the tension. The procedure-obsessed, methodical, algorithmic aspects of the personality have to be counterbalanced by its informal, indeterminate, unpredictable aspects and the two have to be seen as one.

In circumstances where functionalised thought-patterns rule the roost – as in contemporary western civilisation – individuals will tend to see method as the essence of thought. When you have no creative ideas, you fall back on a method. The logical procedure, the mathematical procedure, the organisational principle, the managerial method, the recipe, the formula, the formalism, the routine – all of these will be seen as ends in themselves and not as provisional thought-patterns, essentially subject to review and modification. In addition formal patterns of thought will be regarded as somehow complete and in themselves completely authoritative. Formal thought will be considered to generate its own internal principles from its own formal structure. The form will be accorded absolute status. No attention will be paid to the status of the self as always above and beyond its own formal thought, as the indeterminate and indefinable origin and creator of all formality and as the authoritative user and manipulator of such formalism rather than merely its slavish operator. It is therefore only in the affirmation of the self’s intrinsic indefinability that such a viewpoint can be achieved. The finite, limited aspects of the mind have to be seen as dependent upon an infinite and unlimited background. The essentially extra-systemic nature of the self has to be affirmed. Once the self is seen as dominated by particular procedures, particular formalisms rather than as being essentially above them, the self is on the road to mechanisation and functionalisation. Where thought is largely driven by repeatable formulae, intelligence has to be seen as the intrinsically indefinable essence of the self and the indeterminate source of the determined structures it creates. Intelligence has to be regarded as the unformalisable origin of all formality. Intelligence is only formalised when it manipulates a formalism. As the origin of all formalisms, it is intrinsically superior to them. This is not mystification, it is simply good mental hygiene. Though they are among our most intimate experiences, we have no clear idea how the innovations of the human intellect take place. We have no formal procedure for the achievement of creative advance. We have no way of formalising the production of new structure by the human mind. Thus we have to accept the gifts of our own creativity on trust. It is in that sense that the essential nature of the self has to be considered to be indefinable and indeterminate. Thus any fostering of the functionalisation of the intellect – and such is vital if the intellect is to achieve and to master any field – has to be offset by an inculcation of the essential inviolability of the self, the essential ‘beyondness’ or infinity of the self, the essential, indefinable value of the self. It is perhaps in the use of the traditional language of ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ that such a view had been and is currently maintained in our society. But such language is on the wane and its vocabulary lacks resonance. We have to find an equally powerful language that renders the same service as the traditional but now discredited concepts. The language of physics is perhaps now in a position to do this for us, particularly where it points up the spurious nature of the distinction between parts and wholes. If there is no ultimate separation between the sub-atomic particle as a local manifestation of energy and the entire energy-field of the entire universe, then a similar lack of separation can be assumed to obtain in respect to the human being. If the universal energy-field is imbued with its own universal meaning and ultimately governed by an indeterminate source of all creativity, then our connectedness to this source must surely be the antidote to the deleterious effects of our own tendency to functionalisation. But we have to choose this connectedness.

The functionalised human being is the fragmented human being, the part human being, the human being who is, by virtue of the loss of wholeness, cut off from the world as a whole, from the self as a whole and from humanity as a whole. Such a fragmented human being is responsible for all the ills of the human world today. Such human beings are doubly dangerous in that not only are they alienated and intrinsically distorted, they are also in ignorance or even in denial of the fact. This combination of mental distortion and refusal to understand the distortion is at the root of the cultural malaise of the west and at the origin of its disastrous collective behaviour.

VIEWING THE WORLD AS A WHOLE AND MAKING SENSE OF ONE’S LIFE AS A WHOLE

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 17:36:00 +0000

One of the most dangerous features of our culture is our loss of a sense of connection with totality, our almost autistic obsession with yet more detail. We are unhoused and alienated in the very universe that gave rise to us. Increasingly, we think and behave as if we had only ourselves to thank for our existence. The problem lies with the nature of our understanding that views reality through the narrow slit of empiricism. We possess a bewildering array of facts about the cosmos, but the more we know, the less of a connection we have with it. Blaise Pascal was right to be spooked by the cold vastness of space. The more science tells us us about the universe, the more futile it appears. What’s more, we believe that this purely factual, thing-obsessed conception of the universe delivered to us by scientific geeks is a healthy state of affairs as opposed to that of the religious or mystical consciousness that sees itself as fundamentally keyed into an intelligent universal process.

The self has to operate in the context of a superordinate whole. This superordinate whole can be many different structures at different times. It can be a family, a church, a football crowd, a company, a government, a school, a factory, a committee and so on. But fundamentally, the self has to feel itself at home in the universe. It has to recognise itself as a stakeholder in the universe, rather than just an accidental cog in some small, arbitrary machine in some obscure corner of the world. People can and do find significance in their membership of all kinds of organisations, from a group of regular drinking-pals to the Catholic Church; but fundamentally, when the self takes into consideration every aspect of its existence, its arrival on the scene as a result of long and ancient natural processes (natural selection, heredity etc.), its birth, its short span of conscious life and its inevitable death, it cannot prevent itself wondering about its place in the whole pageant of events that we call the universe. It is in the nature of consciousness so to think. This locating of the self coherently within the universal process is identical with the impetus to do philosophy, as already noted, and is central to what we mean by the phrase ‘the meaning of life’. The self has to feel itself at home in the universe rather than merely desperately building a little home for itself in a particular social group, a particular town, a particular country, a particular social role and so on.

Of course, the vast majority of humans are too preoccupied with the daily business of making a living ever to give a thought to their place in any grand scheme of things. Indeed, the culture of celebrity, through which our civilisation expresses its principal values of egoism and possession, is designed to keep people in a state of suspension of self in which the meaning of their existence is provided vicariously by those they admire, while they themselves serve the economy as various types of wage-slave. The culture of celebrity convinces people that the sense of life is essentially to be seen in terms of fulfilling an enviable social role supremely well. Since most people are unable to achieve this they have to contemplate it in others, the rich, the famous, the powerful; and the media reinforce this practice by their constant harping on the doings of these people to the exclusion of almost any other issue. Newspapers, television-screens and radio-broadcasts are dominated by the antics of famous actors, politicians, musicians, sportspeople, crooks, writers, captains of industry, the rich and indeed any other kind of individual who appears to have a claim to eminence of any sort. The non-eminent thus have no significance for the media and only get into the newspapers if they distinguish themselves or are distinguished by some event or act that propels them to celebrity-status, however briefly. The significance of so-called ‘reality TV’ is ostensibly to repair the gap between celebrity and non-celebrity. That it fails is only in part due to the personal mediocrity of those who go in for this sort of self-exhibition. It fails more seriously because the distinction between celebrity and non-celebrity is a symptom of a wider failing in our society: namely, our inability to discover the essential dynamics of the self. We lack the means to understand ourselves and appear to believe that narcissistic egoism is the summum of human existence.

Eminence of any sort is a function of the supposedly enviable social role of the person concerned, for the meaning of existence in the modern west is seen only in these terms. Once one has identified a range of human types as abstractions, which is what the thing-ideology does for the human species, once one has fragmented the human species into identifiable types, then the sole meaning of human existence becomes the filling of a representative role, defined in terms of a particular function. Then, since the filling of an identifiable social role is the only meaning to life, the prevailing belief is that the more enviable the role (in terms of popular notions of 'success'), the more meaningful the life. Any notion that the self could have a unique importance, a unique destiny, quite separate from its social function, its ego, its persona, its external relations with other persons and the like, is completely lost.

Now the contention here is this: that the sense of human life has to do precisely with not identifying the self with the socially dependent ego or persona, but rather with the self’s own place in the universe as a whole. The persona, i.e. the social function, is only a means to a particular practical end in a particular specific context and no more, though it is usually a means of bolstering the self-regard of the ego. It does have its purpose, but this purpose is a temporary part of the developmental process, like all stages of education. Neither ego nor persona have any intrinsic relevance to the self as such; they are the causa efficiens in the self's growth, but their relevance is to the social structure in which they are rooted. The intrinsic and unique self, on the other hand, is completely dispensable to this social structure, since only the function – the social contribution, if you like – is of any value. The philosophies of Utilitarianism and Marxism realise this and exploit it to the full – which is why they are universally regarded as inhuman. Now the self is precisely not identical with the ego, persona or societal function and incapable of identifying itself in any way but temporarily with these. The self requires a destiny and an identity that go beyond social ambition and the social structure altogether. The persona and the ego inhibit the development of the self precisely to the degree that they begin to dominate the personality. The essence of the personality, however, and the focus of any meaning to life is the self.

The self requires nothing less than the ability to see itself as creatively part of the universal creative process of nature. Nothing less will do. Less than this is not satisfying to the self, despite its awareness of its own lack of importance; and it is for this reason that throughout the ages, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, from the I Ching to the modern horoscope, people have persistently sought to account for their lives, as a whole, in religious terms or quasi-religious terms, terms that located all the separate contexts of their daily life within the total context of the world as such. These terms functioned by invoking those agencies that were thought to be responsible for maintaining the entire order of nature, whether they were conceived as recognisably divine or not. It is for this reason that morals and values have persistently been considered to be dependent upon the divine, or at least on some universal co-ordinating agency, rather than on any immediate social context that a person may be committed to and that thus may have a claim to be valued. Only the myopia of the thing-ideology has blinded us to the sense and value of these traditional attitudes. It goes without saying, that so-called ‘divine command ethics’ is merely a mythological distortion of the essential insight that true morality is a matter of the individual’s place in the cosmos.

The model of the universe with which we operate nowadays sees it as a complete process in which many types of apparently independent systems cooperate to produce a world containing all the staggering variety that we are able to witness. It is, however, the notion of process rather than object that is important, since coherent processes amount to something, go somewhere, achieve something and contribute meaningfully to a superordinate process. We see the fifteen-billion-year history of our universe as an integrated process, but we are incapable of working out whether it is a coherent, co-ordinated process, that is to say whether it amounts to anything, or not. Indeed, we deny actively that this knowledge could in any way be possible, because the cognitive criteria of our science do not allow it. We think that it is impossible because for us, reality is no more than a bunch of inanimate objects. Meanings, purposes, values - these are unreal. We deal with this ignorance imposed upon us by the thing-ideology by convincing ourselves that in all this process, in which nothing seems ultimately to endure, there are nevertheless stable entities that do not simply pop into existence and go out of existence or transform themselves into quite different things. Our ability to identify at least some stability in the universal flux reassures us in some small way. These stable entities are the ultimate ‘things’, the building-blocks of the universe and the rules or laws that govern their motion. So we elaborate a view of the universe as a collection of identifiable three-dimensional objects, all of which are made out of some ultimate three-dimensional objects that hang around for much longer than any others. We cling to these ‘ultimate’ things with a kind of desperation. Thus we come to regard these fundamental building blocks as ultimate reality in all the change and as a consequence we come to regard ourselves as no more than collections of these fundamental building-blocks. The process that is our self loses all significance because it is not seen to endure. It has no stability. It has no substance. It appears and then, after shifting inconstantly, disappears almost immediately and nothing seems to impart to it the enduring identity of the tangible thing.

Small wonder, then, that we are unable to see ourselves as parts of the universal process. But the really depressing feature of our supposed understanding of the cosmos is that despite our instinctive awareness that something staggeringly meaningful is going on and that the universe looks as if it is a gigantic put up job, we are unable to allow ourselves any suggestion that the whole system might be intelligently coordinated. And so we are left with an improbable tale of countless improbable accidents piled upon countless improbable accidents which just happen to get things exactly right. This so-called 'Anthropic Principle' is the most mysterious feature of our current scientific understanding of the world and all attempts to deal with it scientifically lead only to yet more improbability.

The Big Bang (which just happened to get the initial conditions for our cosmos spot-on) produced the first generation of particles. The second generation suns just happened to have the capacity to produce the particles that make up our world. (It was the emergence of carbon at that stage that convinced the atheist Fred Hoyle of the intelligence of the universe.) The processes by which our planet came into existence just happened to be a consequence of the external dynamics of these particles. The organisation of matter into living systems then just happened to be another consequence of the same dynamics (though it is not, because the information of the genome has no chemical explanation). The emergence of consciousness – again, something that just happened – we see as a product of still the same dynamics. Our lives, our societies, our entire human world just happens then to be a product of the same dynamics. The staggering series of accidents that we believe produced us and our specifically human world have nothing at all to do with the nature of that human world, with what is of value in it and with what makes it precious to us. The universal process seems to our science completely different from ourselves and to have no possible relevance to the self. The self relates to other selves; and the universal process that produced selves – so runs the thing-ideology – has no resemblance to the self and its concerns at all. It is not surprising then that we view the whole universal process of the universe as completely irrelevant to us, as completely foreign to us - just another bunch of things to be used. No wonder that we see the corollary to this as true, as well, namely that our lives, our preoccupations, our values have no relevance to the universe as such. No wonder, either, that we are fragmented and alienated and that we retreat into the ego, from where we see the significance of our lives as lying in what we do every day or in what we aspire to do every day and as having no significance outside of these activities.

We never pause to ask ourselves, however, whether these beliefs held by modern man are not deeply misguided, deeply harmful and deeply wrong. The simple truth is that they are; but the conspiracy of the modern democratic, industrialised society, sedulously fostered by politicians, pundits, journalists, academics and educators, is to suppress every possible belief that militates against the thing-ideology and that militates against the conviction of governments and industries that only an existence devoted to the production of yet more things has any sense. Modern democracies and modern industries are obsessed by the production and consumption of things and yet more things. That is the only activity that has any measurable value and meaning within the view of the universe imposed by the thing-ideology. In a world in which things are, at least initially, randomly thrown together by the forces of nature and by chance, the essence of the human meaning seems inevitably to be the control of the universal collection of things and the consequent production of different things by means of our conscious intention; otherwise consciousness is completely meaningless and quite superfluous. Our identity and our view of ourselves is now bound up with the ever more frenzied production and consumption of things. We are things. Our main purpose is the frantic production of yet more and yet newer things; and all the organisations that constitute human society have the sole purpose of generating still more things. We have to generate more things than our competitor. We have to possess more things than our neighbour. We are drowning in an ocean of things and as we produce them in ever greater quantities, we cut ourselves loose from the sustaining universe and pollute both it and ourselves with the by-products of our hard work, our ‘industry’ our ‘growth’, our thing-production.

The power of this social aspect of the thing-ideology is so great that one begins to wonder whether there is not some greater significance to it that we overlook completely, some ‘cunning of reason’, to use a Hegelian phrase. Perhaps, if we think holistically and teleologically for a moment, the universal process of evolution may require this distortion for the achievement of some creative leap forward, just as the profusion of the Cambrian explosion of species was required for the later production of robust and complex survivors. That may be the case, but one still has a duty to combat the injurious effects of this fragmentation and the concomitant reification of the self because those who suffer from and are damaged by it – and they are a significant number, if not the majority – do not necessarily have to submit to it. They certainly do not have to believe the ideology that supports it. The world as a whole, the planet, the ecosystem would obviously be far better off if human beings adopted a more integrated and harmonious relation to the natural systems that spawned them and upon which they depend. We see ourselves as foreign to nature, as apart from nature, as superior to nature in intellect even, but as inferior to nature in our transience, as locally dominating and exploiting nature, but as being finally defeated by her (short of making ourselves immortal!); but this is only because we see nature as fundamentally nothing more than a collection of insensible things, whereas we are things endowed with consciousness, which is intrinsically more valuable than things. This jumble of half-baked beliefs about ourselves and our world divorces and estranges us from the world to such an extent that we are incapable of understanding it despite all our science. That is the principal reason why, as it were, we pelt our mother with filth.

The confusion in our own view of ourselves – things, yet not things – shuts us out of the cosmos. If we could see ourselves and our consciousness as intimately woven into the universal process, such that every aspect of our being, mental and physical, is rooted in an aspect of that universal process and every event of our lives is both influenced by and has an influence upon that universal process, we would be a little more careful and a little more concerned to know more about the nature of our connections with that universal process. This cannot be achieved by considering ourselves as just one more thing – however mysterious, paradoxical or anomalous – amid a universal collection of things. We have to be able to understand the manner in which we are integrated into the whole and the manner in which the processes of our individual life chime harmoniously with the whole. We have to understand how what we consider to be merely a collection of alien things is in actual fact the dynamic, intelligent milieu in which we have come to be and which is not in any sense alien to us but intrinsically related to us. It generated us and it has a place for us. We have to be able to see what we call ‘matter’ as of the same kind of subtle, ambiguous stuff as ourselves, not as some inert, brute ore from which chance and necessity have absurdly extracted us. We have to be able to see mind as a universal property of the universe as a whole, from its tiniest filaments to its entire, coordinated flow.

We now believe in the ‘emergent properties’ of wholes; and that is the only handle we can get on minds. But maybe we are seeing them in the wrong light: in a causal light. We are so wedded to the notion of antecedent cause, that we think that the so-called emergent properties of a collection of parts are caused by the aggregated properties of those parts. Of course if the parts are not present, then the whole effect will not be present, right? Well who knows? It may be that the levels of complexity achieved by material systems merely permits the expression of antecedent properties, particularly with respect to mental properties. If reality is inherently intelligent, then maybe any system resulting from evolution is merely the expression of a particular aspect of that intelligence. This is the way we view the cultural formalisms that express our own increasingly complex thoughts: we can conceive of relativity, quantum physics, multi-dimensional space, black holes and all the rest because we have the language to express these notions. The language does not cause the notions, the notions do not emerge from the language – at least scientists would not thank us for saying so. The content of these thoughts existed before we evolved the language to discuss them. If we admit that possibility then it is not difficult to admit the possibility that the states of mind which ‘emerge’ in the human exist prior to the evolution of humans and come to expression because the human body and its brain have come to exist. Since emergent properties characterise the evolution of matter in our universe, it is possible to see emergence at all levels as the evolution of form adequate to the expression of pre-existent content. Perhaps there are higher mental states beyond ours that require large numbers of humans for their expression and maybe that is why the human race as a whole has emergent properties such as large-scale cultural and societal phenomena. If we extrapolate this logic to the universe as a whole, then it may be that a network of life-bearing planets is connected by an emergent property that binds together a galaxy and so on up the scale. We do not have to view this sort of phenomenon as causal, such that, for example, a deity is generated post facto as an emergent property of the universe - though this has been speculated. There is nothing shocking in the thought that the material universe is the medium of divine self-expression. This sort of speculation is inherently no more ridiculous than the speculations concerning the emergent properties of termite-hills, crowds, economies or the process of the evolution of species. It is speculation, but something like it is needed to break the choking stranglehold of the thing-ideology. Something like this is needed if we are to make real and satisfying sense of our lives in the universe we observe.

In order to obtain a better understanding of why this is of vital importance, we will have to look a little more closely at the functionalisation of the intellect and of the person.

WHAT IS GOOD FOR HUMANS?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 20:45:00 +0000

Most ethical theories stop at one or other of the restricted dimensions that make up the whole context of human life. They stop at the individual, as in egoism, or at the societal, as in Utilitarianism or they restrict themselves to the cosmic as in religious or divine command ethics. Why thinkers on matters ethical feel obliged to choose one of these or why all of them should not be taken into consideration at once is something of a conundrum. But then, perhaps it’s not as surprising as all that, since humans have consistently shown themselves prone to take a restricted view of themselves and of their world. But our imagination will not allow us to stop short and be satisfied with some restricted view. The basic issue is that of doing the best with the mind: this ultimately involves establishing a creative tension between the three principal dimensions of human consciousness, the individual, the societal and the cosmic. It is impossible to draw boundaries between these three, but increasingly one or other of them is neglected, as is the manner in which they interact. It is clear that the question ‘what is good for humans?’ can not be answered by any individual or societal recipe for happiness alone, though in contemporary society that is in effect what is happening. The cosmic dimension is more and more regarded as irrelevant. But we neglect it at our peril. We locate ourselves in the cosmos and our happiness is bound up with what we take to be its character. Locate us in a cosmos that intelligently brought us forth and that has a place for us and we are at ease. Locate us in a cosmos in which we are anomalous and alienated beings for whom there is no place apart from that which we carve out for ourselves and we become brutalised and brutal.

It is notoriously difficult to state what is the good for human beings. It is difficult to define this good. The problem here lies with our desire for definitions or rather with the kinds of ‘thing-like’ definitions we desire. This being the case, it is probably easier to say first what is bad for humans. We won’t bother with metaphysical notions such as ‘evil’, for there is little need for these outside of a religious context. It is much more convincing to point out in what way the thing-ideology imposes certain defective beliefs that are bad for us; for make no mistake about it: the thing ideology is bad for us. Once we have done that, we can show why we no longer need to put up with these defective beliefs. If what is bad for us is the consequence of a defective set of beliefs and a defective set of assumptions, then arguing or imagining ourselves out of those assumptions may well open the way for counteracting their effects upon our minds. Once we have outlined what is bad for us, logically the absence or maybe the opposite of these things could be good for us.

So what are the bad effects of the thing-dogma?

One of the chief sources of damaging disruption to natural systems is the injection into the system of defective, inappropriate or irrelevant information. For example, viruses constitute defective information as far as our bodies are concerned and their disruption of the body is obvious to all. Cancers arise from a kind of defective information. Similarly, many of the problems and discontents of western culture arise from defective information, defective beliefs. Richard Dawkins was right in this to the extent that his ‘memes’ can be extremely resilient and extremely deleterious. He was wrong in thinking that he could isolate a certain category of memes – the religious ones – and show that these are uniquely damaging. It is not the holding of this or that particular belief in human culture, that makes it damaging, it is the use made of it. It is the case that the scientific dogma according to which Dawkins operates is a damaging meme precisely because of its monopolistic domination of areas of life over which it has no right to pronounce. Thus the bad effects of the dogma are those that suggest that human life is meaningless and worthless, that despite the deepest convictions of the human race, its most universal conceptions of the value and purpose of human life are utterly misguided and untrue.

Of course it is bad for humans to suffer poverty, disease, oppression and so on; and there are enough people around the world suffering from these. But to a great extent, these problems are exacerbated by the moral bankruptcy of the developed west. The concern here is with this latter and not necessarily with societies at other stages of development. A basic assumption is that getting the self right in the west will do much to produce improvements to the global situation. So the goal here is to address the spiritual and moral malaise of the west and not so much the consequences of this malaise in the rest of the world. It is to attempt to change the view that human beings have of themselves as things. To see a human being as a thing is to deprive him or her of all value and meaning; and it is precisely these two features of human life that we wish to bring back into the foreground of discourse. In the west a set of damaging assumptions concerning human life that grow directly out of the thing-ideology impacts directly on our psychological health. These assumptions and the beliefs constructed on them have inflicted on us the intellectual and moral malaise from which we suffer. This has in turn afflicted us with a whole range of disorders that are the direct result of what are not only defective and oppressive beliefs, but also now redundant beliefs.

Some of the assumptions and beliefs that are bad for us are listed here. The list is not exhaustive.

It is bad for humans:

- to be told that whatever they may think they are merely things;

- to be told that however they may feel they have no freedom;

- to be bossed around by dogmatists or subjected to this sort of totalitarianism;

- to be made to believe that they are machines and as such, robotically determined;

- to be told that their mind is an illusion or a delusion;

- to believe that any notion of a soul or spirit is even more of an illusion;

- to believe that only external relations are possible with others or with the world;

- to believe that they have only physical, external ‘material’ relations with any reality;

- to be told that as isolated objects they are fundamentally alone and cut-off;

- to be made to believe that their lives have no intrinsic structure or value;

- to be told that only things have value for them;

- to be made to believe that their lives have no purpose;

- to believe that the universe around them is a senseless machine;

- to believe that the universe is an uncoordinated jumble of things;

- to believe that nature is governed only by chance or necessity;

- to believe that human intelligence is a freak of nature and without context;

- to believe that they have no stake in the order of nature;

- to be hectored into believing that their intelligence excludes them from nature;

- to be alienated and terrorised by any or all of the above.

It requires no great insight or subtlety to see that morality in modern western societies is deeply problematic. Philosophy, particularly of the Anglo-Saxon variety has pronounced ethics impossible because values are not things and moral ‘oughts’ cannot be found in nature as one finds rocks, trees, clouds, turtles, galaxies, viruses and other things. Since in our culture the only authoritative sorts of sentences are those that describe things and since in the examination of things, nothing like a value can be detected, sentences that describe the way things ‘should’ be are pronounced to be meaningless expressions of knee-jerk likes or dislikes, mere noises like ‘yuk’ or ‘yum yum’. It has never occurred to the luminaries who thought up this piece of philosophical nonsense that the problem lies with matters of methodology, with midworld, that is to say with a particular use of language and not with the absence of value from the world as such. The empiricist dogma pontificates grandly that only sentences describing things are meaningful and therefore talk of values is gibberish. But value is intrinsic to the world and to all its systems. It’s just that the concepts that designate such value have to be holistic concepts and not reductive ones. Language is particularly well adapted to talking about objects; but this is the weakness of language and it should not blind us to the primacy of values.

Pronouncing ethical statements to be meaningless because they are not reducible to properties of things is about as intelligent as someone’s pronouncing a move in chess illegitimate because, firstly he doesn’t admit to the existence of chess, but only to that of tiddly-winks, and, secondly because the move does not conform to the rules of tiddly-winks. There is a gaping hole in the intellectual fabric of the west and that is its inability to talk the language of wholes. The question, ‘what is the good for humans?’ is therefore a very western question, because it implies some identifiable thing called ‘good’ that can be isolated, as an electric charge or a pungent odour can be isolated along with all other partial things and defined. Thus the good for humans has variously been called ‘happiness’, ‘pleasure’, ‘power’, ‘wealth’ or some such ultimate irreducible thing that can be obtained, like any other commodity, by some mechanical procedure or other. According then to the logic of the thing-ideology, this ‘good’ is deemed to be obtainable for all humans by the application of a set of rules, just as a chair can be obtained from a tree by following a distinct procedure or set of prescriptions.

True to the reductionist methods that dominate intellectual life in the west, we can conceive of the good only in terms of identifiable goods, even to the point of taking that word quite literally: the good is goods. We should have the courage to turn this cast of mind around and invert the reductive spirit in ethics. We only pursue our manic focus on parts because of our prior understanding of wholes. Indeed, the concentration on parts is actually in the service of the understanding of wholes, though we tend to forget this. We understand instinctively that health and happiness are good for man, but we mislead ourselves in identifying those states altogether with what we imagine are particular attainable examples of them. Just as health is not the optimum condition of any one organ, but the complete and harmonious functioning of the entire body and mind, so happiness is not the acquisition of any one aspect of the whole range of potentially agreeable things. We want to know when we ask what is good for man, not what might give him pleasure or satisfaction, what might gratify or entertain him, what might enhance his self-love or increase his feelings of self-worth. We want to know what happiness as a whole, on the analogy with physical health, may entail for the human being as such. We shall therefore ignore the individual goods and try to understand the holistic conception in virtue of which every individual good, from the acquisition of an object to the experience of oceanic ecstasy is understood to be of value.

Western ethics, apart from suffering from the handicap of having been pronounced ‘nonsensical’ by western philosophy, suffers also from the Greek and Judaeo-Christian input that the Middle Ages bequeathed to us. In Ancient Greece, the fundamental ethical question was thought to be ‘what is the best kind of life for a human?’ or ‘how does the individual human flourish?’ The answer to this question was thought to be found in the acquisition of a particular kind of technical know-how; for Plato it was knowledge of the Forms, for Aristotle it was the development of adaptive patterns of behaviour called ‘virtues’ or ‘excellences’. For the Jew and the Christian, however, the fundamental ethical question was rather ‘what does God command me to do?’ And these ‘commands’ were understood to be codifiable rules laying down the best kind of life. These two conceptions of the good life are vastly different, but they had one thing in common: both the Greeks and the Judeao-Christians busily went about trying to establish a method for obtaining the right kind of knowledge in question. As always when humans apply their reason to such matters, however, this led to reductive definitions and punitive prescriptions.

So while the Greeks taught that a certain kind of learning resulted necessarily in the individuals' becoming ‘good’ in the sense of ‘successful’, or ‘well turned-out’, and in their ‘living and faring well’, the Jews and then the Christians, following the monotheistic notion of a divine set of rules for everything in the universe, set themselves the task of clarifying these rules, imposing them on everyone and enforcing them. (And Islam, as a latecomer, is still trying to do this.) Now while the Christians retained the Greek conception of the good life for human beings, considering it simply as complete conformity to the will of God as interpreted by the authority of the Church, in post-Enlightenment Europe God dropped out of the picture and the ego took his place. The good life for a human being became a life of desire-satisfaction and the rules turned into a procedure for ensuring that the desire-satisfaction of every individual member of a given group did not damage the mode of desire-satisfaction of the majority.

This grotesquely impoverished notion of ethics combined the worst of both the Greek and the Christian views on matters ethical. It designated the individual as a unit of pleasure-seeking and announced that, since no one unit has a greater right to pleasure than any other unit, the pleasure-seeking of each unit had to be controlled in such a fashion as to ensure that the greatest amount of pleasure was obtainable by the greatest number. There was of course no compellingly authoritative reason for this at all. It was simply a hang-over from the old Greek and Christian ideas that the good was to be obtained by some sort of procedure and constituted some sort of knowledge; and this knowledge was assumed, particularly by Bentham and his Utilitarians, to be available by scientific means. It was to be acquired by means of the so-called ‘felicific calculus’. Since the search for factual knowledge was deemed to be the amassing of the finest-grain unit facts and combining these facts according to some rules, the same was thought to go for ethics. The ‘facts’ were those that the ego deemed to be the facts of human nature, namely that each human being, as a kind of atomic unit of humanity, was motivated by an entirely selfish desires for kinds of pleasure. Bentham believed that all the individual satisfactions could each be given a score and that on the basis of some ill-defined arithmetic these scores could reveal some optimum state of society, just as the properties of atoms combined them together to form a world. This caricatural conception of human life remains the dominant ethical theory in the west today – albeit without the wacky mathematics – and is an indication of the extent to which, in desperation, westerners are liable to believe the veriest nonsense merely because they have no other means of intellectual control of reality than the thing-ideology.

What, then could the alternative be? What alternative view could we develop of the good for human beings if we ditch the thing-ideology and learn to speak the language of wholes? The reductive language of fragments that is imposed upon human beings by the thing-ideology suggests to each individual that he or she is completely cut-off and alone as an object among objects and has only external relations with other individuals or atomic units and all the other ‘ills’ resulting from the thing-ideology listed above. The result of belief in this fragmentary view of life is that each individual feels obliged to exploit every situation as an opportunity for personal gratification, since there is no other value. This personal gratification has no other substance than the obtaining of certain types of commodities. The ethical ideal of the average western individual is thus officially viewed as the acquisition and consumption of a certain sum of these commodities. Of course, an extra ethical dimension is bolted on to this in a completely irrational manner, which states quite flatly that one person’s acquisition and consumption of commodities must not damage another person’s chances of obtaining and consuming commodities. There is no particularly moral justification for this from the basic ideology, which is purely egoistic, but it is bolted on nevertheless, because even the thing-ideology has to recognise that ethics has a group dimension that it would be absurdly inefficient to ignore.

One other reason for the utilitarian inhibition of egoism is also, of course, the mechanistic need for predictable organisations: society in utilitarian ethics is viewed as a well-oiled machine – since everything else in nature is an efficient machine – and it would seem that pure egoism as a social principle could not work very well. It becomes evident from an understanding of this fragmentary approach to reality, that not only can it not really deal intelligently with the dynamics involved in the relation of individual to group, it cannot understand human life in any way at all, because human life is only comprehensible as a series of integrated systems that go from particles to cells, from cells to organs, from organs to the body, from the body to social groups, from social groups to cultural groups, from social and cultural groups to the world, from the world to the totality of nature and the cosmos; and without some way of integrating all of these systems, it is impossible to grasp what is good for the individual human being and for the human group. It is as arbitrary to cut off the ethical questioning at the societal or cultural level of systems as it is to declare that it belongs to the individual alone. Every human being is aware that questions concerning the good for humans go from the individual through the societal to the cosmic without any obvious boundaries and they do so because it is in the nature of human self-consciousness to situate itself in these contexts and to understand them holistically.

Some sort of realisation is dawning that a holistic language and a conception of complex feedback loops is needed with respect to recommendations concerning human behaviour, for example in the ecological movement, but it needs to be much more consciously and much more systematically developed in conscious opposition to the fragmenting effects of the thing-ideology. The ethical phenomenology of the human race has to be considered as an emergent property of the most complex thing in the whole known universe, namely the human being, not just singly, but as a whole species. And let us remember here that these properties are called ‘emergent’ by us only because our habit of looking at every whole in terms of what we identify as its simplest parts makes wholes challengingly mysterious. Each sub whole of relevance to the human being, from sub-atomic particle to planet, has to be regarded as essentially and fundamentally connected both to the immediate subordinate whole and to the immediate superordinate whole and, thereby, to the totality both at the micro and at the macro scale. There is a flow of information from all levels of the system to all other levels. The flow of information is from what we call ‘the simple’ to what we call ‘the complex’ and from the complex to the simple. In reality, there is no such thing as the clear distinction between ‘the simple’ and ‘the complex’, for the simple can behave in complex ways and the complex in simple ways. There are no ‘fundamental building blocks’ to nature, no ultimately ‘simple’ bits, the properties of which, along with the rules of their combination, govern all phenomena. Wholes at all levels have irreducible emergent properties that cannot be understood reductively. Parts are only apparently parts; they are in fact either sub-wholes or superordinate wholes depending on the point from which one views them; and this relation of parts to whole is an essential property of the entirety of the biosphere, and, we must assume, of the universe as a whole.

The life of the individual human being is set in a nested series of systems, each of which has to be considered as a whole that is not reducible to its parts. Moreover, each whole has either to be viewed as a sub-whole within a superordinate whole, rather than merely as a part of that whole, or else as a superordinate whole the parts of which are its sub-wholes. As for the wholes relevant to ethics, there is the body, to begin with, then the family, then the various larger social groupings, after which comes the ecosystem of the planet and thereafter the universe as a totality. The idea that the individual human could somehow seek integration into the universe as a whole is not as barmy as it sounds when one realises that according to the de Broglie interpretation of the individual particle, each particle reflects the whole universe in the information encoded in the wave-potential that accompanies it. Imagine, in order to put a bit of reality on this abstract notion, what is indeed the case: the light from every visible source in the universe, the light that encodes the information concerning every object in the visible universe, is present at every point within the universe, for every part of the visible universe can be observed from every other part. Thus every ‘part’ of the universe that we experience is present in every other ‘part’. The information governing the entire universe is present everywhere in the universe, holographically present, if you like. A human being can not be fully human without feeling ‘at one’ with each of the systems of which it is a sub-whole. The good for a human being is therefore a living sense of belonging to each of the systems in turn in which its life is set, from body to universe. The link between each of these systems is information-processing or intelligence, the intelligence specific to the level in question. The old notion of man as the microcosm mirroring the macrocosm returns in new guise if one considers the notion of ‘self-similarity’ in chaos-theory. It is one of our deepest instinctive conceptions of ourselves that suggests to us that the relation between our creative minds and our earth-bound bodies might be a dim reflection of the relation between the physical cosmos and the universal intelligence that animates it.

The intelligence of the individual is not just brain-function, it is rather an aggregate function of the indeterminate information that accompanies every particle of the individual’s body, a function of the complex information-bearing field that fundamentally is each apparent part and that is connected to the indeterminate intelligence of each superordinate system above it. The information-bearing field that is each apparent part unfolds itself to us in ways that are peculiar to our particular ability to experience. We experience a world of separate things – that is our brain-imposed handicap. But our experience can be trained to broaden itself and become an experience that the self has of fields, of the universal field. We can experience the universe as universal light, universal energy, universal intelligence, and its various phenomena, ourselves included, as bound forms of these. This is a kind of myth, and will be rejected with cries of “juvenile idealism” or something similar. But the mechanistic dogma is a myth, too, and a destructive one. The holistic myth proposed here is the sort of myth that is needed to counteract the corrosive and fatal effects of the mechanistic-deterministic thing-ideology.

It is a consciousness of the integrated totality of the universe, in which the individual has a stake and a role, that has the potentiality to combine all the disparate elements in ethical theories as diverse as Utilitarianism, Natural Law ethics, Kantianism, Virtue-Ethics, Divine Command Ethics, Situation Ethics, Egoism, Prescriptivism, Anarchism and so on. It can combine deontological and consequentialist notions. It can combine prescriptive and descriptive ethics and abolish the spurious distinction between cognitivism and non-cognitivism. It can do these things by the simple expedient of not restricting knowledge to knowledge of parts. The forces that forge the many moral codes that exist and that have existed in human groups have the purpose not only of connecting the individual to a system, but also of revealing and imparting to individual life a structure, a purpose, a sense, a 'meaning' if you like, that is inherent to it and not simply imposed for the convenience of this or that power-hungry authority. Whatever the Existentialists may have said about the lack of a human essence, there has to be an essence of the human in order for life to function, though this essence clearly is not identifiable with any one aspect of human existence. It is precisely the doctrine of meaningless that has given rise to the existential notion of absurdity and to the view that fundamentally ‘anything goes’ except where the majority has decided – on the basis of its superior power – that in the interests of its comfort, certain things will be forbidden. The good for humans is therefore substantially the opposite of everything proposed by the thing-ideology and is found in a rediscovery of the ancient values of spiritual connection with universal meaning. That it is physics that can begin to make these things comprehensible demonstrates that we are not dealing here with mere mystification, but rather with intellectually serious matters of vital importance that we have no reason any more to obfuscate with any half-baked ‘scientific’ dogma.

When one has got rid of the pusillanimous notion that the only good for humans is vegetable health it is fairly easy to see that what is good for humans is the same as what makes their existence meaningful: it is being dynamically and permanently aware that the self-conscious mind is integrated into the cosmos and thus actively involved in its ceaseless creativity. There is no more consummately meaningful, no better life than to be in creative partnership with the creativity of the cosmos. To create, to be creative, for us humans is to be created, even if we know it or not. The cosmos is infinitely varied and infinitely complex because it is a process of constant creation. We have a stake in this perpetual creativity whether we understand this or not. Clearly, it is better to understand our status as created creators than not.

DON'T GET STUCK IN YOUR BRAIN

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 17:56:00 +0000

The belief that we as individuals are each a brain, a chunk of matter, a complex 3D object and nothing more is an article of faith in our materialistic culture, dominated as it is by our physicalist science. It is confidently declared by pundits and popularisers that 'of course' the mind equals the brain. But does it? It’s more likely that this belief is no more than a methodological prejudice, a comforting ploy of the ego to affirm its own mastery of the situation. We all believe that our minds are distinct from our brains, so we might as well give the thought its head and see where it takes us.

It may seem counter-intuitive to consider the mind as ontologically distinct from the brain – as a different sort of existent, but it is just as counter-intuitive to try to consider the mind and its events as mere movements of particles. The 'brain-mind identity' theory is a recent belief deriving from our obsession with things and a little reflection shows that no-one actually holds it very seriously – except, that is, when people are getting on their theoretical hobbyhorse. We all think as dualists, but that may be because our brains and our language can only deal with objects. It is unlikely that our brains can handle the whole range of reality; but in addition to handling objects, our minds can also conceive minds and it is futile to dismiss this ability as misguided fantasy. On the one hand, our entire culture rests on the primacy of the object; but on the other it also rests on the primacy of the individual and on the dignity of the self as a mental entity, whatever that might mean. The confusion is obvious and deeply-rooted, impacting on our legal and moral discussion no less than on our science and our religion. So it's probably time dissenting voices were heard again, since taking the self seriously, though still unfashionable in academic circles, is a perfectly legitimate approach to the mind and its development. Thy physicalist talks only of objects and claims to believe that only objects exist; those who talk of minds know with more immediacy than they know anything else that minds exist - it's just that they have constantly to remind themselves when talking of minds that, despite the way it sounds, they are not talking of objects.

The mind is part of our experience, so treating it as if it were a mind, rather than an object, is good empiricism. Calling mental experience 'delusory' is actually bad empiricism. Of course this raises ontological problems, but they are not solved by pronouncing the mind to be 'mere matter'. It raises epistemological problems, too, because as soon as we stop regarding the mind as an object, it becomes correspondingly more difficult to be 'objective' about the mind. But prejudging the nature of reality and declaring minds to be impossible because they are not objects is simply daft. It’s time we grew out of this childish simplification. Giving the self its own ontological status, therefore, is just good mental housekeeping. Taking the difference between the self and the brain as fundamental (as Popper and Eccles did in their book The Self and its Brain) involves pursuing the ontological distinction wherever it might lead; and one direction in which it leads is that which takes us towards considering the self and its properties introspectively. This might be decried as subjectivism; but it is possible to remain objective and strictly empirical about subjective experience. It just requires a bit of caution and a lot of culture.

The brain is like any other organ of the body, a chunk of stuff that can be treated as a mechanism. As it ages, its mechanical properties inevitably begin to decline. It becomes sclerous and calcified. It creaks and groans in protest at the years of routine tasks it has been required to perform. Its circuits, once so plastic and impatient to learn, become, with advancing age, rigid in their resistance to the new and in their tendency to repeat and repeat the actions they performed in the past – particularly if these actions produced pleasurable or empowering feelings. Then the whole thing starts to wear out and shut down. The brain begins seriously to fail and its control over the body becomes less and less efficient. But even in these circumstances those circuits that have been of significance in the life of the empirical individual, whose brain it is, may intensify their autonomy and generate obsessions and manias in the mind of the individual concerned. Old people can become ‘set in their ways’ and also prone to develop ever more eccentric, incomprehensibly egoistic or outwardly weird behaviour, as the diminishing brain circuits that are left to them occupy more and more of their mental economy and dominate more and more their behaviour. The spectacle of a demented old person half naked and shouting in public about a confused mania with some incomprehensible link to past experience is not calculated to inspire optimism about the process of ageing. But we do not necessarily have to age in order to become obsessive in all sorts of unedifying ways: if we fail to develop as selves – that is to say grow ‘spiritually’, for want of a better word – , brain-circuits that have provided us with pleasure or satisfaction in the past, however trivial, will come increasingly to dominate our waking life and may lead to the kind of obsessive nastiness that is observable most clearly – by virtue of the exaggeration – in the psychopaths and deviants that plague our society with their insanitary idées fixes.

But is this dismal tale altogether a negative one? My deepest belief is that it is not. The reason for this is that the negative developments in the brain may be accompanied and outweighed by entirely positive developments within a self that is increasingly independent of the brain. The brain is the seat of the ego, the organ of survival, of accomplishment in the world, of reproductive success of increasing power and of all the other areas of interest to the growing and maturing human individual. The main function of our brain is to guarantee the survival of our individual body long enough to enable us to reproduce our kind. The focus of the conscious brain’s activity is the egoistic programme and egoism is its natural mode of functioning. But all of this is destined to be slowed by decline and finally to fizzle out altogether. So it is what remains after the brain has been programmed for success and then worn itself out in the pursuit and possible achievement of this success that really matters to the individual. And it’s the real individual we’re talking about here, not some social role or persona.

There is good evidence to suggest that spiritual growth throughout a life seems to protect the person in some measure from the effects of brain-wear. In ageing, the individual, if he or she continues to grow as a self, naturally detaches him- or herself progressively from the egoistic accomplishments of life, from its dominant preoccupations and turns inward towards the self. It is at that point – precisely when the brain is beginning to decline – that the ego can be relegated to the back seat and the self is able to assert itself, as long as the retrieval mechanisms are not irrevocably damaged. At this point, the self can use the vast store of knowledge and experience stocked within the brain as so many reasons to abandon the life of the organ of success in preference to cultivating the life of the individual self. It is at this stage of life that altruism – that mysterious phenomenon of human community – is understood for what it is: the dawning awareness of the self that it is a vaster mental terrain that that of the ego. Sometimes this happens earlier in life as a result of a crisis – a near-death experience or something similar – but it happens most naturally as a result of ageing.

The positive side of ageing is generally invisible to those who see only its wear and tear. As brain-dominated egos (or as ego-dominated brains) we’re so obsessed by judging others according to their value to us, that we often forget that they have a value to themselves and that this may increase as their value to others decreases. This value of the self to itself is utterly different from the value of the ego to itself and wholly independent of the value of an individual’s brain power to others. The essence of self-awareness can be seen as the growing consciousness of the self as part of the universal intelligence of the cosmos. Given that the development of the self seems to separate itself from and even to go against the functions of the brain, there is no reason to suppose that the self may not continue to develop beyond the point at which degeneration of the brain has seriously interrupted the individual's ability to communicate with the outside world. The moral and spiritual accumulation of the self requires, as Kant pointed out, that the self in question have no term set to this development.

Many aspects of the empirical personality, many of its accomplishments and habits, many of its most treasured intellectual and emotional possessions, including language itself, have to be abandoned in the process of ageing; but in abandoning these, the self discovers what is intrinsic and essential to it. Old age is the stage of life in which contemplation may take over from action and goal-directed thought; indeed, if it doesn't there's something wrong. This is the stage at which the self discovers that though its brain is determined, time-bound, space-bound, hidebound and destined for inevitable decline, the self is not necessarily any of these. It is the stage at which mind-thinking begins to diverge from brain thinking - though in certain creative individuals, this divergence may have happened much earlier. The self realises as it detaches itself from the brain with its egoistic routines and habits that it is possibly undetermined, spaceless, timeless and polyvalent. The sense of liberation is immense. Old age is often a period of cheerful gallows humour, as the ego declines towards its inevitable demise. The self begins to develop a hunch, if it continues to grow, that it is not only keyed into the universal intelligence of the cosmos, as pure, unexpressed potential, but that its continuing stake in the cosmos is assured. Of course, pursuing the logic of such a process, the individual becomes aware that the brain not only will die, but actually has to die in order for the self to be released; but the wise of every age have known that death, far from being the end, is a kind of return to the point of departure that makes possible the liberation of the essential self. Cavafy’s fine poem Ithaca is a description of this separation process. In this liberation the brain is merely a facilitating mechanism that has served its purpose and, having done so, become irrelevant. We are unable to speculate intelligently about the manner of the self’s persistence, but the accumulations during the period of physical life assure us of its reality and give us some inking of its onward course. The consignment of the ego and its ambitions to oblivion seems to be an important precondition of this unfolding of the self.

For those human beings who find it impossible to transcend the ego and who remain exclusively attached to the activities of their adult life, to the memories of pleasures going back to their childhood, to the feelings of accomplishment, power, reproductive success and so on, nothing remains to them in ageing but the re-excitation of those brain circuits that provided them with the experiences of such things. If such individuals never acquired the spiritual distance, the mental disengagement from the physical, the discovery of the no-thingness of the essential self, that is at the heart of all authentic aesthetic, spiritual and religious or mystical experience, then their fate is sealed and they are destined to decline as selves along with their declining brain. On the other hand, the development of a spiritual dimension to the self seems to guarantee that separation from the brain takes place (the earlier spiritual development began, the easier and more effective this separation will be) and the self acquires the ability to contemplate the decline of its body with equanimity as the awareness takes hold that it is only after the death of the body that the full scope of its potential can be realised. The ego can only mourn, as its infrastructure, the brain, begins to decline and as its highest values – those of fostering its own advantage – look increasingly vain. What more pathetic spectacle than that of the wealthy tycoon desperately trying to extend his empire and increase his wealth as death beckons? For the self that has abandoned egoism, however, the sense of accumulation, of expansion from the centre, that characterises a life devoted to the cultivation of spiritual values, has at its core the conviction that such an accumulation not only will not, but cannot be truncated. The death of the brain along with the death of all that the brain does best is then understood as an essential element in the process. It is as the brain and the ego fall away that the oceanic consciousness of the self is free to expand.

The brain is responsible not only for our obsessive, automatic behaviour, but also for our ritualised actions, our habitual actions, our skilled actions, in short, for all of our typically egoistic human behaviour and for most of what people conventionally consider to be the essence of their personality. In fact, none of that is intrinsic to the essence of the self but getting rid of all this stuff is obviously challenging, since it feels a bit like the threat of extinction and is therefore anxiety-inducing. Nevertheless, the practice of death (Plato’s melete tou thanatou) involves nothing less than this, and getting used to the process is probably indispensable to a decent old age. Those who fail to develop a spiritual non-egoistic life risk fizzling out along with their brain. Spiritual consciousness is post-intellectual, post-linguistic, post-human. But it is the culminating stage of a coherent process of human development that is similarly described in numerous old traditions. It is on the whole vouchsafed to the old, firstly because in the young it would be a handicap – principally to earning a living, though ascetic passions may arise spontaneously at any age – and secondly, because a great deal of experience, skill and time are required to acquire distance from, and growth out of, the brain.

The human self requires a brain and a programmed brain in order to develop a full self-consciousness. The development of a fully functioning ego is vital to the process of transcending that ego. The self emerges not only out of the experience of an individual lifetime, but also out of the entire evolutionary history of the species that lies stored up in the brain. In common with all natural transformations, the husks of former stages of existence, though they were necessary at the time, fall away and become redundant. So it is with the brain. Far from being the essence of our self, it is simply the essence of our humanity and the support structure of our ego; and as such it has to wither away as the self moves beyond mere human life and transcends the human condition. Getting stuck in the brain and failing to move beyond the ego, for whatever reason, failing to develop a spiritual self can thus be regarded as the greatest of disasters for the individual, since with the death of the brain, the individual who has not developed as a self may turn out to be truly dead. The possession of an under- or undeveloped self is almost always advertised by a stridently vociferating ego. But the ego is literally going nowhere. The ego lives and dies with the brain and the energy field that defines the physical boundaries of the brain and thus of the brain-dominated personality will be absorbed into the entire energy field of the cosmos anyway, just as an eddy in a fast-flowing river gradually fills and disappears. The panic-stricken resistance of the ego is powerless to stop this. The self, on the other hand, feels no resistance at all to the prospect of reabsorption, indeed, it desires nothing else.

So for those who may feel stuck in their brain and fed up with their ego, several stiff drinks, or a dose of some mind-expanding substance may loosen the bonds and give the self a bit of elbow-room; but these effects are of limited value. There's no substitute for the development of the creative persistence of that unfathomable but entirely non-egoistic frame of mind that is frequently referred to – however inadequately – in phrases such as 'a sense of awe', 'aesthetic contemplation', 'mystical awareness', the 'oceanic experience' and so on. Such phrases may strike the empiricist in us as outlandish, pompous or simply absurd, but they nevertheless point to an archetypal experience of the emerging self that we do well not to ignore. The entire cultural history of our species, with its florescence of religion, art and science, is a record of the struggle of the post-human self to liberate itself from the limitations of the evolved human brain. Culture itself is an indication that the evolution of our species has left the realm of the purely physical and moved into the realm of the immaterial. Every tendency of our species is towards the loosening of the dark embrace of matter. To have some inkling of the manner in which the brain has exhausted its usefulness to us is to experience the completest liberation of the self that is possible this side of death.

COMMON SENSE

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 12:10:00 +0000

Common sense is popularly considered as the infallible guide to life, the universe and everything; but this is emphatically not so. The human animal is a creature that is in a type of conflict with itself that leads it to believe many contradictory things. This conflict is sometimes referred to as a moral conflict – ‘the things I want to do I don’t do, and the things I don’t want to do I do’ – and accounted for in terms of friction between social pressures and individual freedom. It is clear that what is of benefit to the individual is not necessarily of benefit to the collective. But it seems odd to suppose that the human animal would invent and go on inventing something – culture, society – that is in conflict with and even militates against its essential nature, unless there is an impulse to do so that determines behaviour in ways that are not strictly ‘selfish’ for want of a better word. But then, the conflict is not only moral, it is also intellectual. Guilt – and some would call it ‘existential guilt’ – is a feature of our species, but so is the intellectual need of members of successive generations to call into question what the previous generation believed. So rather than trying to find cultural factors or genetic factors supposedly responsible for this conflict, it is much more reasonable to speculate that the dissonances we experience as a species are rather down to a much more primordial tension that is inherent in our own nature. I am going to stick my neck out and call this:

the conflict between the brain and the mind.

It is not very fashionable to postulate a distinction between brain and mind, no more fashionable, indeed, than the distinction between body and soul. The ‘brain-mind problem’, so-called, is solved by those seeking scientific respectability by the simple expedient of denying the existence of the mind, or calling it a mere ‘epiphenomenon’ of the brain – something like the hum of an electric motor. I have no need of scientific respectability and care not a fig for fashion, so I’m going to argue for what strikes me as the clearest explanation for the essential conflict at the heart of human mental activity and declare that it’s down to the (creative) tension between the brain, and the mind that uses it. We could call this the conflict between the self and its brain. The materialistic objections to taking the mind seriously have evaporated as physics has developed: we simply do not understand what we mean by ‘matter’ any more. There are clearly levels of reality beyond the material and there is no point in asserting that mind cannot be considered a reality in its own right and studied phenomenologically. This is the line to be taken here. We shall assume not only that mind is distinct from brain but that mind is the more basic phenomenon and that mind makes use of brain for its expression. The mind, on this view, is a more capacious concept than that of the brain and the phenomenology of the mind is correspondingly more complex than that of the brain. For physicalism, brain event a and the ‘corresponding’ mind event a’ are one and the same. But there is no particularly good reason for this apart from a correlation that we do not understand. Brain event a may give rise to mind event a’; but equally, mind event a may give rise to brain event a’. Brain event a may exist without any mind event at all; but equally mind event a might exist without any brain event at all. Mind events might thus be prior to and more complex than brain events. If this view has any merit at, it becomes possible to see how the brain might be a source of limitation on the mind and how the mind might be a possible means of transcendence of the brain. The brain may merely focus the mind; and the mind may well expand the brain.

The brain, we are told, is an engine tinkered together by the long peregrinations of our evolutionary past including those of the evolutionary past of all of our non-human forebears. This brain, in common with every other organ of every other creature, has been sculpted by all the dramas, tragedies, adventures, catastrophes and accomplishments of our long evolutionary history; and, in common with brains of other creatures, it is an impressively effective but sometimes unruly agent. But if we were no more than the sum total of the operations of our brain thus evolved, we would be creatures without conflict, like our non-human cousins, whose brains allow them to live in the same manner generation after generation without inner discord. Far from being impelled to live life in a certain way and no other, we (modern) humans find it impossible to live like our parents. We announce to ourselves that there is no essentially human life at all and that we are whatever we decide to make ourselves into. We imagine we are completely free to do this, even though, at the same time, we may hold the doctrine of total behavioural determinism by the brain.

Even a rudimentary knowledge of the history of our species should suggest to us, without invoking an immaterial self, that our mental evolution seems to require at the very least some ability of the brain as a system to modify itself, to stand outside of itself, as it were, and to criticise its own functioning. It is as if the software running on the computer, so to speak, were built so as to be able to re-write itself on a regular basis. We seem as a species always to be rubbing up against what our brains impel us to do and finding stratagems that we think might be in some way better – or at least different. That doesn’t much look like mechanistic determinism and perhaps the ballooning of self-conscious awareness in our species is the irruption into what appears to us as material nature of the universal non-material levels of reality. If we take the existence of the human mind seriously – rather than trying to explain it away – then there is no reason at all why mind should not be considered to be a universal feature of realty. The emergence of this reality into the natural world in the form of self-consciousness can no longer be assumed to be an impossibility, as it was on the basis of now discredited conceptions of the material constitution of the world. We don’t necessarily have to go into the realms of Hegelian speculation concerning the absolute spirit and its emergence into consciousness in the human being; but we can postulate that universal intelligence achieves consciousness in the human individual thanks to the complexity of the brain, and that this brain, far from being a perfectly adequate instrument for the expression of this universal intelligence acts as a restriction against which such intelligence constantly struggles. This restriction is, it seems, vital to our creativity and our ingenuity. It is in that sense that we suggest here that human beings might be in conflict with themselves and that this conflict emerges most visibly in that battle between our soaring imagination and our common sense.

This contradiction at the heart of our being should make us reflect that while we might be determined by our brains, there is clearly something else going on both in our individual consciousness and in the human species as a whole. The conflict of which we speak is of the very essence of what we are and is closely related to our restless drive towards accomplishment. It is responsible for the fact that we have moved in a very short time – speaking in evolutionary terms – from being no more than savannah-dwelling bipedal ape-like creatures to being, in our own eyes, masters of the universe. Our volcanic creativity, our use of language and mathematics, our technological inventiveness, our political evolution, our poetry and religion – all of these features of our history are connected to the central conflict of our being. So what is the nature of this conflict? The suggestion here is that it is down to a tussle within the human species between the swelling cerebral mass, as a survival-machine produced by evolution, on the one hand, and the emergence into human consciousness, on the other, of a level of reality that can only be described as ‘intelligent mind’ and that may for all we know be as essential a feature of the universe as matter. It may well be that the brains of mammals had to reach a certain level of complexity before this became possible, but whatever the case, there is a chasm between the human species and all other species that is to some extent explained by the nature of the brain, but that is best explained by the operation of the mind. We do not need to assume a dualistic structure to reality, with inexplicable interactions between two apparently irreconcilable realities, since current theories of physics do not exclude the operation of the mental in the non-material world of the sub-atomic in ways that cannot be explained by a purblind insistence upon the primacy of the three-dimensional object.

If this thesis is true, then we have to assume that brain-thinking and mind-thinking can be prised apart. Intuitively, this seems possible. But the difference between brain thinking and mind thinking is perhaps most clearly evident in the phenomenon of ‘common sense’. Human common sense is demonstrably a brain function: it is the way we are impelled to think before we start to reflect on our thinking, before we are even conscious of thinking. Common sense is what appears to humans to be obvious, self-evident or completely reasonable. For example, there are many perceptual conclusions that we draw about the world that are ‘obvious’ to us. It is ‘obvious’ to the common sense view that the universe is composed of three-dimensional objects. It is ‘obvious’ that the world is flat. It is ‘obvious’ that the sun goes around – or at least over – the stationary world from the east towards the west. It is ‘obvious’ that space has three dimensions and time is infinitely linear. It is ‘obvious’ that the moon is the same size as the sun, and so on. Additionally, there are many other common sense conclusions that we draw that have a moral character and are more subtle. It is ‘obvious’ that I owe a greater duty of care and have a greater moral responsibility towards my relatives than to non-relatives. It is ‘obvious’ that strangers are to be treated with suspicion. It is obvious that potential sexual partners are in themselves attractive. It is ‘obvious’ that aggression from you is to be met with aggression from me. It is ‘obvious’ that I should strive to maximise my sphere of influence, my power, my possessions. And so on. These ‘obvious’ matters are of relevance at the forefront of consciousness, but there are a host of other less conscious to unconscious determinants – some of which emerge when we discover perceptual illusions, for example – that nudge us towards conclusions that we find self-evidently correct and that we refer to as ‘common sense’. It is only when we begin to think about our thinking that these determinants become clear to us, we become aware of the brain’s influence upon us, and we become able to modify our behaviour or our knowledge in the light of our own freedom to criticise our common sense. The growth of culture can almost be seen as our transcendence of the brain as we become ever more skilled in criticising its operation and our consequent liberation from our common sense.

Common sense is clearly very fallible and may be dangerous once we adopt lifestyles more complex than those of hunter-gatherers. What was obvious to our ancestors served them well; but as we move away from the earth-bound, low velocity lives they led, we think about our thinking in a way that demonstrates our ability to think beyond the strictures of our brains. What is obvious now is that human civilization has taken the species beyond the sort of response to our environment that we observe in non-human animals, that all of these matters that are ‘obvious’ to our common sense view of the world are in fact far from obvious at all and are in other frames of reference mistaken. Modern physics has substantially destroyed our common sense perceptions of the world around us and centuries of moral and political evolution of our societies have extensively modified our common sense moral perceptions, too, since many of them were unjustifiably discriminatory. So although we still ‘know’ certain things of a perceptual and moral character – and know them with greater certainty the less aware we are – we may now have to accept on the basis of rational argument that we don’t know them at all, that they arose out of mere brain ‘prejudice’ and that we are indeed mistaken.

The world is not flat. Space is not three-dimensional. The world is not composed of three-dimensional objects, my family is not inherently more deserving than strangers, aggression is not obviously best met by aggression or vengeance, sexual attraction is a trick of the brain and it is not self-evidently true that I should always seek to maximise my own advantage. These things are ‘false’; and the fact that generations of human beings have thought otherwise does not change that.

So what is going on? What is going on is that our brains deliver to us a perceptual interpretation of the world along with certain patterns of thought and patterns of behaviour, on the one hand, that were useful to our survival as animals among animals, and our minds, with increasing awareness, find these perceptions and patterns of thought to be inadequate, on the other. This conflict is of our very essence and the view taken here is that it indicates the split in our being between mind-thinking, on the one hand, that is free to criticise and modify its mode of expression, and brain-thinking, on the other that is not. Brain-thinking is the hard wired bit of our mental economy. Brain-thinking will always impel us to pursue those types of behaviour that the brain has evolved to equip us for. We will behave like the elk with its enormous antlers and continue to use our adaptations in ways that lead to the development of even more effective versions of these assets. But like the elk, we will discover that these adaptations can be a handicap. Then, in contrast to the elk, our imagination will reveal to us where our advantage has turned into a hinderance and allow us to resist the promptings of our brain and its common sense. Our imagination will suggest to us ways in which we may liberate ourselves from the determinations of our brain. It is this creative transcendence of our innate thinking, we suggest, that is the indication of an intelligence at work in us that is not explained by the functioning of our brain alone.

Now while this intelligence may not have an evolved physical organ of expression in each individual human being, it does have an organ of expression in the totality of cultural institutions of the human species. It is this cultural organ – what Popper calls ‘World 3’ and what we have called ‘midworld’ – that permits the expression of universal intelligence through the human species as a whole and through the individual where this individual is, in turn, cultivated.

Clearly, our common sense reactions to the world are those reactions that evolution has programmed into our brains as a result of our struggle for survival. So our common sense is down to the unreconstructed activity of our brains that operates unopposed in the absence of education and continues with considerable power even where education has brought it to consciousness. It seems clear that brain-thinking does not require consciousness at all. In common sense it is, as it were, as though we were following the ordinary gradient of brain-activity. In common sense we experience the mechanisms of our brains acting according to their own structure. In our common sense conclusions, insofar as these enter our critical awareness, we ‘catch our brains at it’ and are able with increasing mental distance to criticise these conclusions. We ‘catch our brains at it’ in all sorts of situations where we may think that we are acting on reflection but where in fact our brains are thinking and acting autonomously. This is certainly the case in the affective aspects of our lives, in our sexual activity, in our motivation to find food, in our need to maximise the sphere of our power and influence and so on. But it is also the case in our perceptual interpretation of our immediate environment, in our locomotion, our judgement of space and time, our conclusions as to the suitability of a certain type of movement within a certain terrain and so on.

But the most treacherous operations of our brains in the exercise of common sense are found in our chains of reasoning based upon common sense premises and then extrapolated to frame a general principle. For example, we may reason that since our immediate environment seems full of three-dimensional objects and nothing else is detectable by means of our senses, then there is nothing else in the universe. We may reason that since we can get to the top of a tree by means of a ladder, the use of a much longer ladder will get us to the moon. We may argue that since the world is clearly composed of three-dimensional objects, thought just has to be a three-dimensional object. We extrapolate all the time on the basis of common-sense premises and then discover subsequently that such extrapolations are illegitimate. Only after much trial and error do we finally reassess and possibly abandon our common sense conclusions. It is for this reason that the confident empiricist should temper confidence and hasty judgement with caution and perhaps a little imagination. Empiricism is common sense elevated to the level of the absolute and even common sense should tell the empiricist that thinking like a human being is not necessarily any more absolutely valid than thinking like a tadpole. (The comparison comes from Socrates.)

It is clear that as a species we have always been engaged upon a long process of modifying or abandoning patterns of thought that were given to us a priori, as it were, by the structure of our brains. We have as a species gone beyond the dictates of our brains in all manner of ways, both perceptual and moral. But we have also gone beyond our brains in our tendency to call into question and abandon our own extrapolations from common sense. What, for example, could be less commonsensical than the discoveries of quantum theory? Or how could an evolutionarily determined brain come up with the ideas of the Big Bang, black holes or other exotic states of matter far beyond the scope of any creature’s experience? So the question is: how does this process of ‘going beyond the brain’ come about? How do we ‘catch our brains at it’, catch ourselves thinking according to wobbly brain-supported assumptions, spot the fallacy and correct it? Animals cannot go beyond their brains. They are stuck with their brains and compelled to follow what they dictate. The elk has to carry on with its competitive behaviour that led to the disproportionate growth of its antlers and thus perhaps damage its future prospects, particularly if it gets stuck in a thicket while fleeing from wolves. The poor elk is stuck with that fate. We are apparently the only species that habitually criticises its own evolutionarily determined patterns of thought and modifies them where they appear to come into conflict with an expanded conception of reality. How do we do this?

The answer that occurs most insistently is that the human self-conscious mind is somehow ‘outside’ of or ‘beyond’ the brain and able to modify its activity from this outside vantage-point. Of course such a conclusion will draw howls of rage and ferocious opposition from all sorts of quarters, not least from the materialists and behaviourists. But the simple riposte to their arguments will often be that their ferocious opposition is more often than not based upon common sense and that they are not therefore going to win the argument by simply asserting what the brain compels them to assert. The empiricist dogma, that only what is experienced by the senses is known, is patently false. There is no longer any point or any justification in the assertion that what cannot be experienced by the bodily senses has no reality. Since that is so, we are entirely justified in following our own intuitions about our minds where rationally they take us. The empiricists will assure us that thoughts of God or transcendent minds are merely the brain-determined craving that our species has for coherent stories about and coherent meanings to our environment. But the view here is that empiricism is brain-determined common sense and probably misguided. Stories of gods and universal meanings arise because of our access to universal intelligence and not from the structures that our brains have evolved in the course of their evolution.

The empiricists can not have it all their own way: if thoughts of God are just aberrations of the brain, then so are thoughts of universal scientific explanation. For us it is a blind alley to explain any aspect of the extraordinary effects of human creativity by pointing to this or that bit of the brain. Our creativity and the imaginative flights of fancy that are at the heart of our cultural accomplishments, are more intelligently seen as the emergence into human consciousness – admittedly still in primitive and often distorted form – of the universal intelligence that generates the cosmos. Moreover, this notion of universal intelligence gives us a sheet anchor to our minds when the business of criticising our brains and our common sense calls into question our cherished assumptions. The empiricists, who must equally criticise common-sense assumptions, have no compass thereafter to guide them on what has to be a trackless mental sea. That is why the empiricists are sometimes so ferocious and why they insist on the exclusive and absolute value of empiricism. The alternative seems to them to be pure irrationality. We at least are able see rationality as universally valid because it is rooted in universal intelligence.

Our creativity arises in our minds and not in our brains. We know all sorts of things that run counter to common sense and that nevertheless turn out to be truer than the conclusions of common sense. To take a simple example: whereas Euclidean geometry was regarded for many centuries as corresponding to the essential nature of reality, non-Euclidean geometries dreamt up out of sheer mathematical exuberance by Gauss, Riemann, Lobachevski and others turned out to correspond much more precisely to our expanding conception of reality and facilitated the development of Einstein’s theories of Special and General Relativity as a result. Euclidean geometry is based on the ‘obvious’ properties of three-dimensional space, delivered to us to by our brains. And yet we have the ability to think up, in purely abstract ways, exotic properties of a world we have not experienced but suspect may just be possible. That such properties later turn out to be applicable to new features of the material world unsuspected by our common sense is nothing short of miraculous. The fundamental issue here is that of human creativity. We get beyond our brains by means of our creative thinking and we do it with such consistent success that to claim this merely as one part of the brain talking to another simply fails to convince. The prophets of naturalism, materialism and determinism will all claim that creativity is simply brain activity turbocharged by feedback loops created by language or by cultural pressure. Where it is not so determined, they believe, creativity is largely accidental. But both language and culture are themselves the results of human creativity over generations and therefore cannot be called upon to explain creativity. As for the ‘accident’ theory, in which creativity arises out of random brain-activity, this is a declaration of ignorance and mere desperation – the scientific equivalent of the unconvincing ‘god-of-the-gaps’.

Determinism, brain-determinism simply does not work as an account for human creativity. The easiest and clearest way to account for the manner in which humanity has consistently and massively altered the functioning of its own thought, transcended its common sense, is to suppose that the mind is a broader, larger and more complex phenomenon than the brain and that it is the action of the mind upon the brain that drives it to transcend its own limitations while continuing, in many respects, to be tied to them. There is clearly a two-way process going on: the brain becomes ever more practised in its functioning as a result of experience; but this conceivably allows the mind enhanced scope. The mind can be presumed to be far more complex than the brain, just as all possible, but as yet unknown, mathematics is more complex than existing mathematics. Such complexity could not of course be squared with the notion of mind as an ‘emergent’ property of the brain, for emergence, though permitting interactionism, leaves the mind less, and not more, complex than the brain it uses and from which it supposedly emerges. The only reasonably respectable conception of mental reality that could allow the mind to be more complex than the brain is that of panpsychism, according to which mind is a property of the universe at large and as such predates the emergence of any brain, human or otherwise. And indeed a conception of the universe that includes intelligent mind as one of its fundamental properties is not inherently difficult to accept any more. It is only difficult to accept is if one is ideologically committed to one or other – or all – of the various eliminative theories that since the eighteenth century have striven to exclude mind from the universe, first in the form of a deity and then in any form at all, including that of a human mind.

A universe in which intelligent mind is a fundamental property may well strike us humans as against common sense and thus as inconceivable, but it is not more against common sense than quantum theory and its inconceivability is a result of the limitations of common sense anyway – limits that we transcend with great regularity. So inconceivability and common sense are no objections to a theory of universal intelligent mind. Moreover, it is not as inconceivable as all that, since we know from our most intimate experience, and against common sense, what is implied by the word ‘mind’ and we have direct experience of the interaction between mind and the material systems that make up our bodies. Extrapolating from our own mental experience to the universe at large is now more justified than extrapolations to the universe at large of human common-sense intuitions concerning matter. We do not need, moreover, some unsatisfactory dualistic theory to make the idea of universal mind comprehensible to ourselves. The world of physical matter is quite complex enough to include in it mind-like levels of reality. The old idea that matter had to mean three-dimensional objects has gone forever. Matter is now understood much more in terms of energy fields than in terms of three-dimensional objects. There is, therefore, no reason at all, why intelligent mind should not be an energic feature of the entire universe just as intelligent mind is a feature of the human being. The world of three-dimensional objects arises out of a level of reality in which there are no three-dimensional objects and that level could conceivably be not one, but a multiplicity of levels, - let’s say a hierarchy of ever more subtle fields – on one or more of which mind could operate.

So the distinction between brain-thinking and mind-thinking is by no means a wild or fantastical idea. The brain is only a three-dimensional object in terms of our common sense and in terms of the capacities of the sensory-cognitive apparatus bequeathed to us by evolution, and we are learning to be ever more critical of all of this. It is not reasonable to claim, as dyed-in-the-wool materialists do, that thoughts are objects. It is, however, perfectly reasonable to believe that thoughts are what we think they are – i.e. thoughts – and to suppose that the history of human culture has been a progressive liberation of the mind and of human consciousness from the limitations of the brain. If we had been stuck with our brain and nothing more, we would arguably be still living in the manner of our hominid ancestors. The explosive development of human culture and human consciousness is well accounted for in the speculative theory that the increasingly complex brain produced by evolution permitted the emergence into human consciousness of the universal mental levels of reality. If what we understand as the ‘matter’ of the universe is more a creation of our sensory-cognitive apparatus than objective reality, and if this material character of the macroscopic world arises out of a distinctly non-material substrate, then our brains, too, can be understood as arising out of a non-material substrate, an energy field or something analogous. Such conceptions are entirely within the bounds of modern physical possibility. Mental activity will thus always correlate to observable brain activity, since the two – the mental dimension and the physical – are aspects of a single reality that in turn is part of the intelligent, mentally active universe. But correlation is not the same as causation; and it is no more reasonable to say that the empirically observable electro-chemical activity of the brain causes the thoughts than it is to say that the thoughts cause the electro-chemical activity.

Common sense has to be taken with a large pinch of salt. The brain imposes all manner of mental habits upon us that we do well not to trust, when it is a question of understanding reality. Reality has to be our guide, not fashionable theory. And whatever else we may know or not know, we know that our minds are real. Much of scientific advance has involved overturning common sense notions and there is no reason to suppose that this will not continue as science becomes deeper and investigates ever deeper levels and wider vistas of phenomena. Science is still too closely linked to common sense. The philosophy of naturalism and its related ideologies of determinism and materialism arose from a too uncritical reliance on common sense and therefore on the natural gradient of the brain. Science, when it comes of age, will take us ever further from our brains and ever deeper into the mental reality that we are only just beginning to appreciate. But we may have to take mental reality more seriously first. Technology is taking us ever further from the limitations of our bodies and there is no reason to suppose that science will not do the same for that bit of our bodies we call the brain.

Materialism is dead. Determinism is dead. And there is now no longer any reason to cling to the ideology of naturalism. The mind is the most difficult entity for science in its present form to understand, precisely because science is still too dependent on common sense. The self-conscious mind is even more difficult to understand. Science will have to grow up and evolve new methods for dealing with the immaterial. But this is not something to fear; nor is it something radically alien, since art has been dealing with it for centuries. On the contrary, a liberated science holds out the possibility of vastly enhanced understanding and vastly expanded vistas of reality. If such intellectual developments eventually rehabilitate the idea of a deity, then so be it. The idea of a God is only to be feared if it is shackled to the common sense of the human brain and all the primitive obsessions that arose from it, its tribalism, its territoriality, its xenophobia, its naïve three-dimensionalism and all the rest. The modern atheists rely entirely on their common sense to deliver their truth. The truth is that the brain has never delivered any more than a convenient, survival-related truth. The search for truth is an activity of the mind and that mind, once honestly considered, leads inevitably to the thought of a universal intelligence.

It is completely obvious that we are limited beings with a limited conception of reality who are still struggling with the straightjacket of the brain upon our thought. The question is whether we are definitively imprisoned within those limits or whether there is a way for us to transcend them. I have tried to argue that though our brains are determined, evolutionarily circumscribed structures, our minds give us access to levels of reality that are not merely material, and therefore we may legitimately hypothesise that we do have mental access to levels of reality from which our brains exclude us. Thus the interaction between mind and brain on the historical level has led to an expansion of our capacities in all areas, because we rightly suspect that more is going on in the universe than our brains give us cause to believe. Below the sub-atomic level of reality, we have no indication from our brains of anything at all: reality shades off into a mysterious fog or foam of energy. There is no reason, however, why the hierarchical levels of reality to which we do have access – macroscopic objects, microscopic objects, atoms, sub-atomic particles etc. – should not be supported by any number of additional structured levels beyond the sub-atomic, as David Bohm suspected.

The structure beyond the levels of the sub-atomic would provide ample accommodation for the presence and operation of any number of entities that are unknown to us from our sensory experience of the world but that might be grasped to some extent by us on the basis of our own experience of the mental. We perceive the world in a particular way; and empiricists will assert boldly and with breezy optimism that there is nothing else to reality other than what we experience in that way. That they are mistaken in this is clear not only from non-scientific culture but also from the progress made by particle physics. They can also clearly be seen to be mistaken from the simple observation that they have no account to give and therefore no understanding to offer of the phenomenon of mind unless they reduce it to a thing. Their account of mind is an eliminative one: they can only deal with mind by denying its existence because there is no sensory access to it. They can only study mind by murdering it first. Less ideological thinkers, however, see clearly that as limited beings, limited by the capacities of our brains, we are right to suspect that more is going on in the world than we can understand by empirical means.

The hunch that members of the human species have always had that something is going on in reality beyond what we perceive, is a legitimate ground for speculation concerning structures in reality that are not given to the experience vouchsafed to us by our brains. The easiest conclusion to draw is that our mental access to levels of reality beyond the physical is an avenue of communication between those levels and ourselves. It may well be after all that we have a connection with what has traditionally be called ‘the divine’ through our mental experience. After all, we can postulate that our bodies are in causal contact with all the other matter in the universe, so why should we not suppose that our minds are similarly in contact with a universal mental reality? It is for this reason that one does well to take the deliverances of the brain cum grano salis and to allow the hunches of the mind concerning the complexity of reality to provide a very much expanded conception of the world than that of the merely empirical.

Common sense is thinking according to the limitations of the brain. Poets, prophets, philosophers and imaginative scientists have always suspected that there is more to the world than meets the eye – and brain – and indeed followed strong hunches as to what that ‘more’ might be. There is no reason why we should bow to the bullying dogmatism of the empiricists when the world patently is so much more wonderful than they allow and becomes yet more so with every new discovery that expands our consciousness. Expansion of consciousness and spirituality are related concepts. If spirituality means anything at all, then it involves some aspect of humanity that is not tied to the empirically observable brain. The brain dies and decomposes - that is the universal lot of evolved creatures. That much we do know. If any spirituality that may be achieved simply died with the brain, it would be a waste of time to pursue and accumulate it. All the religious traditions of the world suggest that spiritual growth involves progressive departure from those patterns of behaviour that seem to be programmed into the brain of the species. Spirituality is a matter of increased individuation – or perhaps it should be ‘dividuation’ – and a diminution of those features of the personality that are merely human. It is a departure from the attitude to the world governed by common sense. We are no longer justified in dismissing the fact that humanity has always suspected the mind and body to be separable with the former providing the locus and focus of onward growth. There is no reason to assume, except on merely common sense grounds, that the death of the body annihilates the gains made by the mind. Such a possibility is entirely compatible with our present understanding of the world and of the information that structures it.

MINDS AND THINGS

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 16:21:00 +0000

We inhabit a culture in which things are of consummate value and in which the mind as an entity is not taken seriously. This is an anomalous situation since we do in fact take minds seriously in our relations to other human beings, in our legal system, in our art, religion, ethical reflection and indeed in every context in which consideration of the person without any attempt at reduction is vital. But then as soon as any theoretical discussion of mental events arises, we fall back with tedious knee-jerk predictability on scientific mantras to the effect that mind is ‘of course’ nothing but brain. There is a deep-seated fear in our culture of appearing to take the mind seriously as mind, but the simple and obvious reason for this is that we are unable to talk of anything but objects. We are hidebound by this convention even though we know in our deepest being that there is more to us than mere tangible things. So the intention here, and in subsequent posts, will be to follow the consequences of taking the existence of the mind seriously. Taking the mind seriously involves having the courage of our convictions and allowing what strikes us as completely obvious (until we begin to theorise) to impose certain types of conclusion. The essence of these conclusions is to allow, without prejudging the issue on theoretical grounds, that the mental is a form of existence in its own right and can be treated as a real aspect of the world. Once this is allowed, a host of consequences begin to flow – most of which will be unacceptable to the physicalist and materialist assumptions of the neuro-scientific and biological establishment –, the most fundamental of which is the postulation of a real distinction between those aspects of our being that are brain-determined, and those aspects of our being that are not.

The trouble with all talk of minds, selves, souls, persons, psyches, and so on, is that although the existence of such is obvious to us from our own intimate experience, we are not equipped by our brain even to think of such putative entities, let alone talk of them. Evolution gave us a brain honed for our survival in a world of hard knocks and has thereby equipped us to think of things with great precision and clarity. We do this wonderfully well. Our discrimination between things and between parts of things is magnificent, but the downside of this is that we can think with any precision only of things. Having adapted us to perceive and handle things mentally, evolution also gave us the massive handicap of preventing us from mentally manipulating anything else with the same degree of lucidity. The result of this is that we have powerful hunches concerning entities in the universe that simply cannot be things and yet we tend to reify them nevertheless because that is how our mental apparatus works best. And yet we are clearly able to get beyond our own obsession with the 3D object. Our minds have persistently grappled with the non-physical and physicists have recently come up with the startling thesis that things might not exist in the way we believe, that the fundamental levels of reality cannot be thought of as material. So while we are apparently handicapped by our innate empiricism, we also, surprisingly, have the means to overcome this handicap, at least to some extent. The belief here is that it is the possession of a mind, distinct from its brain, that not only allows us to perform such feats but that drives us towards them. While the brain convinces us that the world has to be thought of as a collection of objects, the mind tells us a different tale.

The postulation of two separate substances – mind and matter – is as misguided as the reduction of the one to the other. It is futile to commit ourselves to some metaphysics of mind or matter because such a policy entails prejudging what can and cannot be the case, and this practice has notoriously failed in the history of thought. We have to work with experience and it is unnecessary to pontificate on what can or cannot come into its purview. As ‘thinking things’ to use Descartes’s phrase, rather than as bodies, we immediately suspect that we are not ourselves things, or at least that we are rather special things lacking the most obvious properties of the things of our sensory experience: three dimensional geometry, solidity, space occupancy and so on. The result of this most crucial aspect of our experience is that though our sensory experience provides us only with notions of yet more 3D things, our experience of the self (Hume was simply wrong in believing that we do not have any) provides us with at least one example of an entity in the world which is not a 3D thing. We try to get around this problem in ways that are illustrative of our evolutionarily determined handicap: we reify the self. We either imagine that the self is a special kind of thing (a ‘substance’, a ‘subtle body’ a ‘soul’, ‘ a mind’ etc.) which we imagine we understand on analogy with the 3D thing of our sensory experience; but the difficulties are insurmountable and we get into insoluble muddles because of category errors. Small wonder then that the materialists and physicalists, who rely absolutely on our brain-determined tendency to think only of 3D things and regard it as completely authoritative, continue with Hume and the Behaviourists to deny the existence of a self completely.

But once one has realised that belief in 3D objects is something that is forced upon us by our brains, something that we have to entertain because of our sensory-cognitive apparatus, it is surely legitimate to reflect that our primary experience of the self may well be a reason for learning to believe that not only may 3D things be possibly the illusory, but that our minds conceivably reveal a feature or property of reality that our object-obsessed thinking cannot deal with: its mental or non material nature. We may legitimately begin to reflect that our mental experience gives us access to levels of reality that our brain-imposed thinking about things cannot cope with. We may then proceed to reflect that contrary to the deliverances of our sensory-cognitive apparatus, things do not exist at all, but that reality is perhaps intrinsically mental. If things have no real existence beyond our belief in them, if things are constructions of our minds, then minds are possibly primary and the one we possess may be our particular access to levels of reality that transcend our ability to think or talk about. On the other hand, we may not have to go this far, for this is an extreme view. There may well be a rational middle ground between the old alternatives of materialism and idealism.

Given the state of modern physics and its non-material conception of the fundamental levels of the material world of our sensory experience, I can see nothing wrong in:

a) believing in mind as a reality on the basis of our raw and fundamental experience of it;

b) rejecting materialism and physicalism as creations of our particular cognitive handicap; and

c) assuming that as the basis of our very existence, mind is a fundamental aspect of reality.

Pontificating on what can and cannot exist in the universe is a risky and unwise business. The universe is not as small as we are and not as limited as our sensory-cognitive apparatus would lead us to suppose; and our minds are prima facie evidence that reality is more complex than our brains allow us to imagine. To dismiss thinking of the mindlike properties of the universe as a ‘category error’ or ‘epiphenomenon’ or to dismiss it by some such effort to discredit the notion merely demonstrates the power of our tendency to think in terms of 3D things alone. It is mistaking a handicap for an absolutely valid and exhaustive set of assumptions. It is as unjustified as declaring that non-visible electromagnetic radiation does not exist because we cannot see it. We need to liberate our thought and concede that we have in the experience of our own minds reason enough to conclude that our thinking in terms of 3D things is now leading us astray and should be held more lightly, if not abandoned. The development of a little discipline in conceiving non-material reality would be of great benefit. This is indeed done with reasonable rigour by studying in an unprejudiced way the wealth of stored insight found in religious and poetic language across the world and throughout the ages. The problem is that official science does not take such studies seriously because their conclusions cannot be reduced to things and their uses.

We think of things, we love things, we delight in making more things, in amassing things but fundamentally we know that we ourselves are emphatically not things. We, as selves, are fundamentally different from things. So much is clear to us in the differing values we place on items of our experience. The entity of highest value is unquestionably the self. Though as bodies we are things, we know as a feature of our most fundamental experience that the self cannot be a thing or a collection of things. This dichotomy at the heart of our being is the origin of all thought of a religious or poetic nature. It was this that led Kant to propose thinking of the world in terms of phenomena – or things accessible to our senses – and noumena, or entities not accessible to our sense (called by him - with a reificatory impulse that is quite characteristic of us - ‘things in themselves’). We cannot escape from the immaterial mind and maybe the immediate reality of the immaterial in our conscious awareness is our entrance into levels of reality that are above and beyond or behind the material presented to us by our brains. Maybe it is not just our possession of minds that gives us our obsession with the spiritual, the psychic and so on, but also our position at the edge of dimensions of reality that have always been there but that now we can begin to conceive.

In the book The Self and its Brain (Routledge London 2000) by the philosopher Karl Popper and the neuro-scientist John Eccles, Popper takes the mind seriously in that it has causal effects upon the world of matter that cannot be reduced to purely material causes. He accounts for the mind as an ‘emergent’ phenomenon, a reality that has ‘emerged’ from the process of evolution as a reality in its own right and that has in its turn given rise to the additional ‘emergent phenomenon’ of what he calls ‘World 3’ – that is to say culture and language. But he refuses to concede that mind might be a constant and universal feature of the universe. It is difficult to see why he is opposed to such a notion – called by him ‘panpsychism’ – for emergent entities with their own ontological status are no easier to understand than universal mind. His refutation of panpsychism in his section of the book (cf pp 67-71) is weak and half-hearted; and his own notion of an emergent phenomenon is no easier to understand than that of a universal mind. One must assume that his hostility to the notion of a universal mental reality – with which his fellow author Eccles has no problem at all – arises from his inability to shake off entirely the effects of his early devotion to Logical Positivism. At all events this book allows one to begin thinking in terms of a non-material mind; and once this is allowed (why should it not be?) it becomes clear that it is impossible to understand the human without postulating an immaterial self – with its own class of mental events – on the one hand, allied to a physical brain, which provides us with its particular class of mental experiences, on the other. Put crudely, brain-thinking is distinct from mind-thinking, the self is distinct from and to a real extent independent of its brain, and understanding this is vital if we are to grasp the essential features of our nature.

IMAGINATION - AGAIN

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 13:51:00 +0000

Knowledge or expertise should not be taken too seriously, because there is nothing definitive about these. It is only when they are laid aside in play that the truth-generating core of the mind asserts itself. That truth-generating action of the mind does not yield definitive knowledge either because local cultural factors intervene; but the authenticity of the experience behind the creative act is in itself a kind of truth.

Play is essential to the operation of intelligence. Unfortunately the various cognates of the Latin verb ludere (illusion, delusion, collusion) show that we consider playing with ideas to be connected with falsehood. This may at times be so, but some playing is clearly generative of what we call truth. Playing generates truth when the result of the play is a creative synthesis that is of cognitive value and that constitutes a genuine contribution to understanding. Children are the specialists in true play and an ability to re-discover this ability in the mind of the adult is always fruitful.

Imagination is frequently considered to be a rather childish aspect of the mind. But once again, this is a theory of the left-brain, a theory of the control-freakish ego. Of course, children do have a rich imaginative life, but then so may adults if they do not stifle it. The difference with adult imagination is threefold: 1) it has far more intellectual material in which to express itself; 2) it is far more likely to be swamped by this material; and 3) it is liable to take fright at the strangeness of the new. Adult and child have opposite strengths and weaknesses. The child’s relative freedom from intellectual baggage is its great strength, but it is also its relative weakness, since it lacks the formal skills to give a convincing account of what is happening in its mind. The adult may have these formal skills, but is often so intent on manipulating them that the deliverances of the imagination are suppressed. Thus the imagination in human beings suffers from real problems that stem from either formal weakness or formal strength. The genius, the innovator, the creative individual manages to retain an imaginative richness while mastering and further developing high formal skill. There is, indeed no other way for the skills of humanity to be extended and deepened except by their creative extension and expansion through the imagination.

The superficial conception of the imagination is that of a sort of inner picturing faculty; and indeed, this is one of its most powerful modes of operation. But it can equally operate with feeling-toned ‘hunches’ concerning the nature of reality and concerning the inadequacy of prevailing beliefs. It is indeed always a rather emotional business and it might be salutary to attribute a cognitive role to certain feelings in this respect. The feelings of the unprejudiced, curious imaginative mind, whatever its expertise, are those of intense interest, excited anticipation, joy, aesthetic pleasure and the ecstatic ‘eureka’-reaction; they are quite distinct from the feelings of the scheming ego which are those of self-regard, self-promotion, fear of defeat and desire to dominate.

Descartes’ (rather dismissive) understanding of the imagination was entirely that of an inner vision, an inner ‘viewing’ of possibility and as such it has in his writing obvious weaknesses, as for example in the inability of the imagination to ‘picture’ a geometrical figure with more than a fairly small number of sides, whereas the intellect can conceive the most complex polygons, for example, according to definition with great clarity. It may be, however, that it is precisely the imprecision of the imagination that is its greatest strength as far as its role as originator of new structure is concerned. The imagination is unconcerned by internal contradiction: it can combine contradictory features without being restricted by the existing formal constraints of a formal system. But these contradictions are frequently resolved by the imagination itself through the recasting of the formal system so as to incorporate the former ‘contradictions’ as aspects of a higher unity.

As instances of the power of the creative imagination, examples such as Einstein’s adolescent fantasies concerning the behaviour of a light wave as observed by someone travelling on a light-wave, that became the precursor to the considerations leading to relativity-theory, or Kekulé’s dream of the snake biting its own tail as an image of the benzol-ring, are often quoted in books on creativity. They are quoted as examples of visual imagery that led in the minds of great innovators to major scientific discovery. But the limiting of the imagination to this kind of visual imagery is a grave mistake. The imagination can, indeed, allow ‘visions’ of all kinds, visions that have no visual content in them at all. For example, the imagination of Mozart was extraordinarily powerful, but operated with sound. The whole of a symphony could be present in the mind of the composer at once as a single field of complex vibrations, and at that point it would be simply a matter of writing it down in the musical notation of the time. The mathematical imagination of a Poincaré or a Ramanujan, the famous Indian mathematician of raw genius, seemed to work in substantially the same fashion, though with entirely different material. Poincaré felt the emergence of a new mathematical insight simply as a kind of pressure associated with a hazy visual image. This pressure was accompanied by an inner certainty that a problem that he had been working on for some time had been solved in his mind and that it was now simply a matter of writing it down in an acceptable formalism. Ramanujan discovered mathematics of a very advanced nature without having had the benefit of advanced mathematical training. He seemed able to invent his own formalism to express his astonishing gifts and to repair the lack of formal education. He talked of his mathematical inventiveness as a kind of ‘seeing’, but insisted that it was a seeing of a very special kind and only vaguely analogous to visualisation.

Much more than the ability to engage in a sort of inner visualisation, the human imagination seems to involve the ability to relax the control exercised by knowledge, training, conditioning and the like and to give in to a kind of playful dissolution of orthodoxy that is then followed by a reconfiguration of the elements of that orthodoxy in a new and more illuminating form. The fact that this breaking and re-casting of the old is in the highest degree an involuntary process makes it intrinsically worrying for the ego. The ego does not like to be the recipient of gifts it cannot control. Yet the imagination depends precisely upon the relaxation of control, on the abandonment – even if only provisionally – of control and on the yielding to a sort of mental fluidity. Control may be exercised at a later stage on the productions of the imagination, but the control is not the imagination, it is merely the tidying-up operation after the main creative work has been done. The ability to accept without prejudice, to receive without pre-conception is absolutely vital to the functioning of the imagination. Without this humility, this modesty, there simply is no imagination. A rigidly orthodox and doctrinaire ego will never submit to the presentations of the imagination and will never admit that the imagination can provide it with insight for which it can not claim sole and complete credit.

The imagination in western culture tends to be treated patronisingly and its activity officially restricted to the ‘arts’ – that is to say to areas of intellectual life that are intrinsically frivolous and of far lesser value than the authoritatively ‘rigorous’ offerings of science. But this general scheme of things is a deceitful – or self-deluding – invention of the scientific ego and of its favourite ideology. Imagination in all its forms is essential to the process of research in every field, not only in those fields that seem to deal with visual imagery. Every scientific discipline has been revolutionised by the imaginative overview of inventive genius. The work of the imagination in the dissolving and re-casting of scientific theory is not universally admitted. It is just that the intrinsically ‘scientific’ work is the careful job of testing theory experimentally and expressing the experimental confirmations of theory in precise formal language. Imaginative creativity operates, however, at all levels and in all aspects of the scientific process. Even the designers of experiment require imaginative solutions to experimental problems that cannot be arrived at by the application of old methods. Given this, it is all the more remarkable that the myth of the scientific researcher as a careful collector of evidence and a careful practitioner of logical method was so sedulously fostered by the scientific community for so long. One can only suppose that the desire of the ego to distance itself from the preoccupation with revelation at the heart of European Christianity was so great that it had to take over even that prerogative of the divinity and become its cause.

Yet revelation is not a bad term to sum up the innovatory products of the human imagination and their effects upon the history of human culture. Early societies, lacking the machinery of logic and systematised induction, were reliant on imaginative syntheses of the mythological type. No-one should be under any illusion about the role of these imaginative syntheses in ancient societies: those who used them were as conscious of the difference between mythologem and reality as any modern person. The language of myth was a formal language in which the vocables were not those of physical objects, but which nevertheless functioned in direct analogy to the cognitive worth of the modern scientific theory. The difference of course was that the mythological synthesis contained ethical as well as purely ‘physical’ explanation, thus the logic was different. Indeed, the distinction between the ethical and the factual was not made: ‘is’ and ‘ought’ were fused by the poetic imagery. However, one point of extreme importance that one has to retain in this context is that the same process of refinement and criticism went on with regard to the mythological world-systems as goes on in present day science. Indeed, the scientific arose directly out of the mythological, as can be seen in the thought of the first of the eminent pre-Socratics, the philosopher Thales. What disappears in the scientific refinement of mythological ideas is precisely the visual symbolism; yet it is this visual element that permits the development of a more abstract language. There is no absolute distinction to be made in fact between mythological and scientific views of the universe, though their language is different.

The modern scientific stance is derived very substantially from the religious notion of the monotheistic, lawgiving deity of the Jews. The entire notion of 'laws of nature' implies a lawgiver and that lawgiver was historically understood as the monotheistic God. The modern enthusiasm for abolishing the deity has more to do with academic self-love and with the ambitions of the ego than it does with any serious discredit to the religious idea. So religious and scientific thought can be seen as separate aspects of a single human experience, in which insights about the nature of the world are first expressed in visual or emotional images that contain in undifferentiated combination elements that the scientific mind will later find to be inappropriate – ethical, emotional elements that militate against the strictly ‘objective’ or ‘reificatory’ intent of scientific portrayal. These visual elements are winnowed out of our scientific vision of reality, but some of them nevertheless get through and continue to inform, however unconsciously, the scientific mind. It is these images that generate the new insights that re-cast science and that burst autonomously upon the innovator. In religion as in science, this irruption of novelty into the formal language of orthodoxy has a revelatory character that simply cannot be reduced to any known mechanism.

One may not want to use the mythological language of ‘revelation’, but if you think about it, this is no more mythological than the language of ‘laws’ of nature. The problem of the lawgiver is one that will not go away in modern physics. Similarly the problem of the agency that does the revealing of ever more depths to reality is one that will not go away in intellectual life. If it were left to the brain, we would be stuck in more or less routine behaviour like that of the non-human animals. The fact is, we are more than our brains: we use them; they are not us. We can see ourselves as having access in our creative intelligence to the indeterminate core of reality – that is to say, to the indeterminate core of mind, self, language and world. Objectivity, according to the dogma of naturalism, was supposed to be the practice of letting the world speak for itself; whereas it was no more than the ego’s talking the language of things and pretending that it was the world that spoke. In the creative, intelligent imagination, we come up against the indeterminate core of the world, we become hyperworld and we generate midworld – both archetypal human experiences. It is in this experience, where creating and being created become one, that the imagination reveals its greatest power and we, as beings, maximise out potential. Our imagination connects us with the active information that structures every aspect of the universal energy field, from sub-atomic particle to human brain. In this respect, the world has always ‘spoken’ for itself, though it may use our language to do so. In using our language as in using our brain, the world transforms both. It may be that we owe the evolution of our brain itself to the increasing intimacy of this talk, to the growing consciousness of this hyperworld connection. After all, you need a pretty powerful machine to bring the fundamental process of reality symbolically into consciousness. The onward course of this evolution is unlimited in our imagination and we should not allow the rational ego to suggest otherwise.

INTELLIGENCE

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 16:50:00 +0000

For Bohm, the entire information-content of the universe is encoded in universal light, which is the background reality of everything that we experience. He sees all physical phenomena as forms of light that are to a greater or lesser degree ‘bound’ and as emerging, or ‘unfolding’ from the background of unbound light. This unbound light is the implicate order from which the explicate order of the objects of our sensory experience unfolds. Small wonder, then, that he sees the connection between intelligence and light as very profound and very close, as close, indeed as the connection between mind and matter. Just as the electron – a form of bound light – is accompanied by a field that holographically contains active information concerning all surrounding particles, so the brain is the explicate order (the 3D object) that emerges from the implicate order of the mind: the two, brain and mind, are not separate substances, but the mind is at a higher level than its physical counterpart in being implicate rather than explicate. It is for that reason that the distinction between subject and object exists and the subject can experience its brain as object

The brain considered as a mechanism works quasi-mechanically. Its business is to ensure our survival and it can try and foist all kinds of theories upon us in response to sensory experience. In the ego it has a real sucker for a clever, tied-up theory. Sensory-deprivation experiments have shown, however, that in certain circumstances where the input from the environment is reduced to virtually zero, the brain even begins to work on its own internal states and sets to work generating distorted, hallucinatory experiences in order then to impose upon them a story. The consciousness of the subjects thus manipulated is, however, in principle able to spot the subterfuge and uncover the fiction. The mind is able to catch the brain at work. This demonstrates, if any demonstration were needed, that the mind is not only distinct from the brain, but also able to stand apart from what the brain delivers to it and adopt a critical stance towards its offerings: it can in principle – though it does not always use its ability – assess, accept or reject what the brain presents to it. The conscious mind is not a slave to its brain and does not ‘arise’ from the brain, since consciousness is one and, in common with intelligence, universal.

If rational thought is pure brain-operation and strictly determined, intelligence, by contrast is at the interface between the determinate and the indeterminate in reality; it operates at the frontier between the chaotic and the ordered in nature. Though it inevitably makes use of existing, determined formalisms, intelligence must be considered as essentially indeterminate, as non-formal, extra-formal mentation. Intelligence obviously makes use of the mechanism of both left and right brain, but is beyond both. But this is no plaidoyer in favour of facile dualism. This distinction between determined, substantially mechanical brain, on the one hand – though even this is a convenient abstraction, since the complex processes of the brain, too, are chaotic – and undetermined, unpredictably creative intelligence, on the other is no throwback to the theories of Descartes, for whom all rational thought originated in the undetermined, immaterial mind and imagination in the determined, material body. The point of view presented here is not in any sense an attempt to do the sort of dualistic ontology that engaged Descartes. Indeed it is in many senses the opposite of his view.

Thought, sequential, logical, ‘rational’ thought is well explained by the operation of the mechanism of the brain, while intelligently creative imagination, as the generator of novelty originates in levels or dimensions of reality that have to be thought of by us as beyond the material. In talking of levels of reality beyond the material, we mean, of course, beyond the limited conception that we have of the material as a collection of three-dimensional objects. We do not mean some immaterial, supposedly ‘spiritual’ domain where ghosts, spirits, gods and demons live an allegedly spiritual life. Such a domain may exist; but it is not our concern.

Intelligence is the inner nature of the self-conscious mind. It is for that reason that it cannot be equated with any of the formal operations that are supposed to define what we mean by ‘rationality’ or ‘reason’. Intelligence is the ‘no-thing-ness’ at the heart of the self. It is a purely natural agency, undistorted by any cultural conditioning or formal training. It is not the brain, it is not language which programmes the brain, for these are both used by intelligence for its expression. Intelligence is above all an ‘edge-of-chaos’ phenomenon, which in its perpetual fluidity provides the locus not only for the creative re-arrangement of mental contents, but also for the creative expansion of existing formal systems. Intelligence is the agency that stands outside of all formal systems and provides the extra-systemic input required to understand the system from a standpoint above and beyond the system. When the system is re-cast and expanded, its power increases, but intelligence is then, once again, or rather, still, outside of that new system. The formal system is only mechanical insofar as its use is governed by algorithms based upon procedures that are derivable from within the system. The non-mechanical nature of intelligence is observable precisely in its ability to understand principles that are of relevance to the system but that are not derivable as theorems of the system according to axioms of the system.

Those who would entirely mechanise the intellect and try to establish the invariant features of every aspect of the mind’s functioning, miss the point of this view of the mind entirely. They are obsessed by the ego’s addiction to the thing-ideology and can think of the mind only in terms of those object-like repetitive entities that one can isolate, name and predict. Thus, for example, the mechanisers of the intellect (e.g. Margaret Boden in her The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, Routledge 2004) try to establish empirically – that is to say by inductive generalisation – the repetitive features of the creative mind. They talk in terms of ‘mechanisms’ of recombination, re-arrangement, re-configuration, and so on, as if the innovations of the human intelligence were always and only a kind of shuffling of a pack of cards and a random establishment of a new order. Clearly, inductive generalisations will always lead to this kind of mechanical theory, as the left-brain strives to force the new to take on the characteristics of the old with its little rationalising tales. Equally clearly, chaotic nature – here, in the specific form of the human intelligence – will out of its own perpetual freshness continue to generate real novelty, real indeterminate structure, real complex new order.

One must not suppose that the indeterminacy of intelligence, its ‘no-thing-ness’ makes it into a kind of ‘god-of-the-gaps’-style explanatory principle, where our ignorance is used as a cloak for smuggling in metaphysical agencies into the determined order of nature. It is quite simply empirical fact that the inner processes of nature are indeterminate, in the sense of being uncertain according to our mechanical, objectifying mode of apprehension. It is empirical fact that the determinate order arises from the indeterminate. It is quite simply empirical fact that the apparently predictable order of nature rests upon and emerges from an unpredictable substrate, the essential processes of which we can not, in principle grasp according to our mechanising thought. This is not, therefore a question of gaps in our knowledge that are shortly to be filled. This is an ‘in principle’ ignorance that is in the nature of things, and in the nature of that specific thing that is the human sensory-cognitive apparatus.

The brain, as macroscopic structure, tracks macroscopic structures in the range of its experience; but both it and they rest on a microscopic substrate in which such structure is undetectable. It is futile, given this basic fact of our constitution, to prattle in absolute terms about determinism in either brain or world. Empirical investigations rely on experience alone and we may not prejudge our experiences and pronounce certain of them permissible and others as impermissible. We simply have experiences and we have to accept them all, whether we like it or not. And one of the essential experiences of the human mind is of its indeterminate, creative activity. The ability of the human mind to generate novelty is often pronounced by the ego to be the result of a ‘search’ for new structures – as though these just lay around like objects waiting to be found. This is not really how the most creative minds of history have seen things, however. The creativity of human intelligence is not rational and much less the result of active intention on the part of an individual mind than of the reception, in a mind impatient with the inadequacies of existing ‘knowledge’, of re-constructive insight that then finds expression in formal terms. The ability of human intelligence to jump out of the box and, from that position outside, to espy possibilities for the structures inside, that would not have been detectable from inside, is an intrinsic feature of its functioning throughout history.

Take the non-Euclidian geometries of Gauss, Riemann, Lobachewski and the rest. These accomplishments were obtained by an intelligent leap of the imagination which had suggested that suppressing one of Euclid’s axioms – the least well-founded – would permit geometries of enormously greater power and subtlety. The resulting geometries discovered potential properties of space that Einstein, for example, was then able to exploit in his theories of special and general relativity. Euclidean geometry arose from following the natural inclination of the brain, but thinking inside of the 3D Euclidean box – thinking that had been regarded as without alternative for thousands of years – would never have permitted such major advances in mathematics. Moreover, these advances were not obtained simply by thrashing and crashing around randomly inside the box until some new angle was generated by accident. These developments were generated by the creative intelligence of great mathematicians, whose genius consisted in being able to view the system of orthodox geometry from a extra-systemic standpoint and from there espy its shortcomings and envisage its absorption within a higher and more complex unity, in which the previous system would appear as a limiting case of the new, greatly expanded formalism.

So here we have the essential difference between intelligence and thought. Thought is repetitive, backward-looking, rule-governed, algorithmic, mechanical and seeks only the invariant and the predictable in experience. Intelligence by contrast is innovatory, extra-systemic, non-algorithmic, non-mechanical and, since it is guided by aesthetic feeling, delights in the receptive generation of novelty, the creation of the future. The ego will always want to reduce intelligence to thought, for that is its essential nature. Intelligence, however, will always resist such despotic ambitions and blithely slip through the net of reductive ‘explanations’ cast over it by thought. Human culture will thus continue to be fuelled by a productive tension, a creative conflict between thought and intelligence. Intelligence will work critically and in dissatisfied impatience with the formal limitations of orthodoxy until a new synthesis of disparate elements is obtained. Scientific theories are always victims of the dissatisfaction of the generations following those who establish them. These successive generations find the old theories unconvincing and inadequate. They no longer satisfy. This is a question of feeling, as matters of intelligence always are. Only thought, mechanical thought, is supposedly unemotional, emotion-free; and in the computer it is truly this (though in the ego’s thought, the absence of emotion is a subterfuge). Intelligence, on the basis of its feeling-toned hunches, its curiosity and its heuristic passion for the new theory, develops new syntheses, new visions and to a certain extent ‘proves’ them. Thought will then, as a consequence have new formalisms, new algorithms, new determinate structures to operate on and from which to extract the many mechanical, predictable implications.

Rational thought is the functioning of a brain richly programmed by the creations of intelligence; intelligence itself, however, is at the growing tip of the evolving universe.

The eternal battle between old methods and new insights constitutes one of the principal motors of cultural advance. We cannot do without the rationalising ego that desires final, definitive, certain, absolute cognitive states; but equally we cannot do without the creative intelligence that constantly soars beyond the rule-governed midworld into hyperworld. There really is no point in adopting any other stance to this process than that of grateful, reverential trust. The new order does not arise by some plodding application of an algorithm. It arises, as all new order arises, spontaneously and without the control of the ego. Any desire or attempt finally to subject the indeterminate intelligence to mechanical control reveals the totalitarian ambitions of the ego and these ambitions are invariably destined to failure. This failure is nicely illustrated in the old Russian tale of the Golden Fish.

An old fisherman lived by the sea and made a poor living from his fishing. His house was dilapidated, his water-butt leaked and his wife scolded him for their modest standard of living. One day out on the waves, however, the old fisherman caught a golden fish in his net and was astonished to hear the fish address him in human speech. “Release me back into the sea,” said the fish, “and I will grant you a wish.” The fisherman thought for a while and then said, “Give me a new water-butt.” “Your wish is granted,” said the fish, “now release me.” The fish spoke with such genuine emotion and authority, that the simple, good-hearted fisherman believed it without reservation. And indeed, on returning home, the fisherman was surprised and delighted, as was his wife, to discover that a brand new water-butt now stood in place of the old leaking one. The fisherman told his wife about the encounter and about the granted wish. From this point on, the wife who was an ill-tempered, grasping control-freak, gave the old fisherman no peace until he set off again in his boat to find the fish and have more wishes granted. To cut a long story short, the fisherman went out on numerous occasions and had numerous wishes granted. Their riches and possessions increased beyond their dreams and soon they were of legendary wealth. This continued until the day when the wife, impatient with the unpredictable aspect of their good fortune and desiring to control the source of these benefits, demanded that the fish be kept in captivity in order that its wish-granting capacity should be controlled by her. The fisherman, anxious to please his shrewish wife, complied and brought the fish home, despite the latter’s piteous cries. As soon, however, as the fish was in the bowl, not only did it turn into an ordinary, banal little creature of no distinction, but also, the couple, whose riches had raised them to the pinnacle of the social hierarchy, lost everything in a flash and their lives reverted to what they had been before the golden fish had been caught: the house was wretched again, the water-butt leaked and they had hardly enough to eat.

The moral of the story is clear: the deliverances of the human intelligence are gifts, are grace: any attempt by the ego to control intelligence mechanically will result in the loss of its creativity.

Human beings are not masters of the universe; they are not even masters in their own house. The ego wants to control everything in its world, wants to throne as God over the world. Fortunately this is impossible, for such a world would be a nightmare of predictable, totalitarian mechanism. Fortunately, intelligence understands its position as the recipient of wonders that it cannot control. The collaboration of the fisherman and his wife worked well enough until she made her bid for power. As long as the ego is kept in check, as long as its collaboration with the intelligent self remains just that – a collaboration – human culture will continue to grow in wisdom and develop its degrees of freedom. If, however, the ego ever gains complete control and eradicates the creative intelligence, evolution will pass us by leaving us to wither or stagnate like the coelacanth, the horseshoe crab and many other so-called ‘living fossils’.

RATIONAL THOUGHT

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 16:36:00 +0000

Humans are very proud of their rationality and think that it is the one feature that distinguishes them from non-human animals. In this they are probably deluding themselves. Rationality is a combination of voluntary and involuntary mental processes; and these processes are far from being unique to our species.

It is almost impossible for the conscious mind to work out when it is actively directing or intending its thoughts – making them, as it were – and when these thoughts are merely happening to it, i.e. when it is simply a passive recipient of mental events. The problem of making any absolute distinction between so-called willed mental events and involuntary ones seems insuperable. Of course, the whole subject has become vexed by the wild declarations of some in the scientific community to the effect that every mental event is determined, so the ‘free’ will is merely an illusion. Just as it is impossible to draw the line between subject and object, between percept and percipient, so it is impossible to delineate a firm frontier between ego-driven, sequential, methodical thinking on the one hand and complexes of mental contents that simply arise in the conscious mind under their own steam, on the other. The ego, of course has many theories about this distinction and many of these theories consist in the ego’s trying to arrogate to itself the entire process of thought, while denigrating, demoting or rationalising the processes that are clearly not under its control. The result is that the paradigm of pure rational thought is the logical form of the deductive syllogism, where a conclusion is extracted mechanically, that is to say analytically, from premises. Nevertheless a consideration of the difference between deduction and induction – the two operations that underlie most of our supposedly rational thought – is instructive.

Inductive thought is as paradigmatic of human thinking as deduction; but induction, as Hume knew, is not rational. It is a matter of submitting to patterns that appear given in experience and then acting as if those patterns were predictable regularities (whether they are or are not). It is thus largely a matter of jumping to under-determined conclusions about future events on the basis of past regularity. The point about these unsafe conclusions, however, is that they cannot be considered voluntary. Non-human animals also use them and often to their own detriment, when the regularity in question turns out not to be very reliable. To illustrate this, Bertrand Russell told the story of the farmyard chicken which rushed across to the farmhouse at the noise of the shaken grain tin, because this sound had always signified a meal in the past. On the last time it heard this sound, however, the chicken itself was the meal and was hurrying to have its neck wrung. As human beings, we greatly reinforce our inductive generalisations by means of the analytic power of deduction. We jump to conclusions of the ‘all swans are white’ variety and then use such premises in deductions such as this: ‘all swans are white, this swan-like creature is black, therefore it is not a swan’. The mistake is obviously down to the unreliability of our experience allied to an over reliance on deductions based on faulty premises, and the frontier between voluntary and involuntary mental events is further obscured by the reflection that logic is weaker than the desire to believe.

The unsafe character of inductive generalisations is disguised by our faith in deduction. For example, strings of propositions such as ‘all mammals are warm-blooded, this is a mammal, therefore it is warm-blooded’ cannot be gainsaid by anyone for fear of accusations of illogicality and irrationality. To deny the conclusion is to contradict oneself. The power of such trains of logical inference is their tautologous nature: they say the same thing twice, though the repetition is not necessarily immediately evident. The conclusion is deemed to be in some sense ‘contained’ in the premises, though quite what that word ‘contained’ means is not clear. The nearest we can get to it is in the notion of ‘repetition’: the conclusion in some sense repeats the information in the premise or premises. Nevertheless, in chains of reasoning of this type, the important thing is that the ego feels in absolute control and can reassure itself of this fact at any one stage of the process by means of the rule of non-contradiction. The power of such deductive trains of thought is the belief that they instantiate some almost geometrical ‘template’ for all similar arguments. The logic works like the cranking of a handle on a machine, stamping out identical artefacts. The same thing goes for mathematical reasoning, where the ego follows a procedure, an algorithm, in order to arrive at a result, let’s say, the solution of an equation. The same kind of reasoning characterises most practical, calculative thought as well. One measures a desired end against the available means of achieving it and a calculation is made of the least costly of these methods. Long chains of deductive reasoning of the hypothetical type – ‘if X then Y; X, therefore: Y’ or if X then Y; not-Y, therefore: not-X’ – are run through, sometimes with surprising rapidity and almost unconsciously, but the ego always claims credit for them because it feels it can at any one point re-construct them in linguistic form and demonstrate their formal and ultimately deductive validity. Thus the ego jumps to the conclusion that since its preferred paradigm of rational thought is the logical, rule-driven type just indicated, then all thought without exception has to be of this type and what is not of this type is unworthy of the description ‘rational’.

The example of the dodgy relationship between involuntary inductions and voluntary deductions, however, should give us pause for reflection because of the unsafe character of inductions. We should reflect upon this: the rules of logic – identity, non-contradiction, excluded middle etc. – are derived from our experience of solid objects. That is what makes them self-evident and ‘irrefutable’. Tangible things cannot be themselves and not themselves at the same time and in the same place, for example. The rules of logic are however, by this very token, infected with the sort of involuntary and unsafe assumptions that made us pronounce space to be infinitely three-dimensional, time infinitely linear and the world to be composed of three-dimensional objects – all assumptions demolished by physics.

Rational thought, so the official story told by the ego runs, is method-driven all the way down. There is only method, and all method is under the direct control of the ego. Thus the history of human culture is, for the ego, largely a process of separating mental processes that are not rational thought, according to its criteria, from those that are. Human culture is therefore represented by the ego as an inexorable march to ultimate and final victory of the algorithmic type of thinking over which the ego has complete control. All other kinds of mental activity are dismissed by the rational ego as ‘irrational’, ‘subjective’, ‘immature’ and so on. (An egregious example of this sort of ‘rationalism’ is John McCrone’s, The Myth of Irrationality, Macmillan 1993.) All of the above words involve reliance on the power of a kind of insult and not on a genuinely critical assessment. But there are many types of thinking. In the quasi-mythological language of current brain-science we could say that the ego, tied as it is to the left-brain language-engine, always and only comes up with the same thing: names of ‘things’ and procedures for grouping them together, and yet more names and yet more procedures for grouping them together. The right-brain, however, is largely inarticulate and, since it allegedly works on images and feelings, is easily shouted down by the vociferous left-brain, particularly when the ego’s lust for power kicks in with force. Thus, like an old oriental despot, the ego claims more and more absolute control for itself over the ultimately indefinable mental realm that is the fundamental experience of the self. But we do not have to go along with this – rather dated – mythology to be aware that there is something wrong with the ego’s over-optimistic rationalism.

The ego has a vested interest in maintaining that there is no other authority, no other controlling agency than itself and its logical methods. The suggestion that there could be other agencies in the mind that are not under the ego’s control is impatiently, intolerantly and even angrily rejected by the ego as ‘infantile’ or ‘irrational’ nonsense. The ego loves to equate maturity and all the other intellectual virtues with its methods and only with its methods. It loves to suppress any view of the mind that seems to indicate that it is not sole master in the mental household. When it comes up with theories of the unconscious creativity of the mind, it does as Freud did: it reduces them to a mechanism in order then to be able to dominate, ‘cure’ or otherwise eliminate them. Alternatively, it puts the unconscious creativity of the mind – which, after all, it would be folly to deny – down to the complexity of the brain and to the brain’s tendency to indulge in random ‘chatter’ between its various modules, random chatter that is so complex that it just throws up novelty and innovation as a matter of course, like the random clatter of the imagined millions of monkeys, bashing randomly away at typewriters for millions of years, that would ‘inevitably’ throw up the collected works of Shakespeare. This touching faith in the almost miraculous power of accident is one of the hallmarks of the ego’s invincible self-belief and is detectable in a surprising number of high-profile scientific theories from the cosmological to the biological and psychological. It has re-emerged in recent years as the ‘complexity’ aspect of so-called ‘chaos-theory’ and here the rational ego claims to have grasped the chaos by means of fractal geometry whereas all it has achieved is an illuminating analogy and anyway, its application to processes in the brain is obscure to say the least.

The common factor in all of these denigrations by the ego of non-rational thought is simple fear of irrationality. The ego is afraid of what it does not control and insists on controlling it or exorcising it as a kind of evil spirit by various apotropaic uses of language: ridicule, insult, belittlement, calumny, and so on. The characterisation of non-rational thought as ‘accidental’ is the most scientific of these exorcisms, but its purpose is similar to the others: whistling to keep the ego's spirits up.

One is surprised that this kind of conception of the mental economy – the belief that what is not the result of the ego’s volition is mere random activity – could ever have gained acceptance by intelligent people. But then one realises that it is in fact an ideology. In the language of the mythology mentioned above, it is an ideology of the left-brain that wishes to pretend that it is the focus of all power and authority. All ideologies turn into rigid and punitive orthodoxy at some point in their development and the ideology asserting that real rational thought is entirely under the control of the ego is no exception. We can however adopt a quite different view of the mental economy, without denying anything that ego-driven rationalistic theories say about the mind, but rather by classifying all those activities called ‘rational’ together and pointing out that they invariably depend on those aspects of the mind that the ego can only dismiss as ‘irrational’. We may to this end distinguish thought from intelligence, and understand intelligence as a fundamental property of the self that, though highly productive, is not ultimately governed by the rules and algorithms that are considered by the ego to be of its essence, and not under the ultimate control of the ego.

Intelligence is the more capacious concept; and rational thought is simply one of many expressions of intelligence. In the human sphere, intelligence may well be expressed using the methods of ego-driven, routine thought, but it is also the origin of creative, innovatory insight. The former may for the most part be under the control of the ego; but the latter definitely is not. We ought to relax the monopolistic stranglehold that the ego has on intellectual life in the west and reflect for a moment on the degree to which human culture is driven forward not by the ego – which uses methods that may or may not be appropriate and tends rather to make a hash of things – but by the self’s passive reception of mental contents that it cannot command, nor direct by any method whatsoever.

The simple fact is this: the methods of the ego can only repeat past thought-patterns according to a distinct recipe. That is the essence of purely rational thought: the re-activation of, and extrapolation from, past experience couched in terms that ‘repeat’ a self-evident template. Ego-driven thought is fundamentally repetitive, because new elements of experience are jammed into old configurations. That is central to the ego’s method. The ego wants always to contain the new in old configurations, calling certain old configurations in which it believes very strongly ‘necessary truths’, ‘invariant features of experience’, ‘regularities’, ‘the laws of nature’ or suchlike. Rational thought can only repeat past patterns and try to tell new stories in old ways. Intelligence – the partially voluntary functioning of the self – does not, however, operate like that at all.

The self’s intelligence is much more aware of its collaborative, subservient nature: it is as much structured by reception as it is by production. The intelligence of the self receives insight as a gift and in combining this insight with rational extrapolations, creates genuinely new methods of containing new ideas. This principle should therefore be writ large in all educational institutions: there is no rule for generating new ideas but neither are they accidental. Really new ideas simply have to be accepted as grace. Along with the new ideas come new insights into the formalisms needed to express them. Often the new insight comes with its new mode of expression. Existing modes of expression are blown wide open and re-formed on a higher level of formal complexity, a higher level of formal power. To want to claim these creative deliveries of the mind for rational, algorithmic thought is to misunderstand totally the entire process according to which human culture has grown steadily richer and more complex. It is creative innovation that drives culture, not rational thought.

The fundamentally repetitive character of rational thought can be seen in every situation where a body of ‘truth’ is being worked upon, processed in order to make it yield up its implications. Much of routine science is the repetition of old thought-patterns and their imposition upon new experiences. It seems that the rational ego can simply not get out of this bind. This is all the more surprising, given the fact that the great innovatory scientists, though using the deductive methods that are vital to rigour, are always conscious of the non-rational, non-methodical aspects of the insight that brings or brought them to their innovatory ideas. The vast mass of scientists seem to be very good at thought, that is to say good at the rule-driven manipulation of old insight; they are sometimes not so good, however, at the generation of radically new insight; indeed some are so bad at it, that they deny its existence and even forbid any appeal to it altogether. Orthodoxy in science, it is well-known, can stifle innovation, cover up results that militate against a standard theory and even so influence the process of observation that scientists mis-observe and mis-interpret observations in favour of the prevailing orthodoxy. The persecution of the unorthodox scientist, the enmity towards him or her and the orchestrated efforts to discredit both the person and the work are all aspects of the same process of mere rational thought. It is almost miraculous, given this, that science produces the wonderful creative advances that actually characterise its history – a history that is most often driven forward by the flexible creative plasticity of the innovating genius.

One can almost draw an analogy between the durability of scientific orthodoxy and the conservatism of species. The genome is like a persistent theory of the way things are to be done. This theory is incarnated in the animal concerned; and this theory will continue as a rigid orthodoxy until evolution, by whatever means it uses, accidental or not, alters the genome and the behaviour patterns of the creature. Some creatures – for example, the coelacanth – show astonishing conservatism. The creature was thought to be extinct until one was caught by a fisherman in a deep lake in Africa. Now it is called ‘a living fossil’. But this sort of conservatism is equally applicable to various beliefs, scientific or not. Old religious and magical practices persist; old theories of the universe persist. People go on believing and defending views of the world that have become difficult or impossible to defend. Even Richard Dawkins, who invented the word ‘meme’ to refer to persistent inheritable ideas, seems not to realise that in his popular writings he too is defending an outmoded and now indefensible view of the world. But that is what happens when the ego takes control of the intellect; and there are few better examples of an ego-controlled intellect than that of Dawkins. It almost seems that natural systems from bacteria to the human mind have two opposite tendencies built into them – the conservative tendency, self-protective and self-perpetuating, on the one hand, and the adventurous, risk-taking tendency that appears not to be afraid of simply giving in to the new and accepting it as a challenge from reality as such. The risk-takers have a kind of faith in their own experience of creativity, the conservatives, with their jealous regard for procedure, do not.

The methods of thought pronounced to be authoritative by the ego are not the only forms of repetition that it develops. The thing-ideology is also a kind of repetition. The naming of a thing is the first stage in the effort to control it. Then by defining and circumscribing it by means of more names, such that any further instances of that ‘thing’ will have all and only the properties given in the definition, the feeling of repetition is guaranteed. The combination of objectification, reification, and the ‘rules’ of reasoning are the principal means by which the thing-obsessed ego strives to wrap up the process of thought for all time and reduce it to a mechanism. The ego can simply not admit that the best products of the mind and the world it experiences are not under its control. It combats such an idea with the ferocity of a creature under attack. This kind of panic-stricken, sometimes paranoid urge to dominate is almost what the ego means by ‘thought’ or ‘rationality’ and constitutes the principal means by which all ‘irrationality’, ‘subjectivity’, ‘mysticism’ and suchlike heinous intellectual crimes are to be eradicated.

Rational thought, with its desire for repetition, control, objectification and so on, is the mechanical aspect of the mind and this mechanical aspect may well be entirely driven by purely mechanical processes in the brain. It is this mechanical kind of thought that pronounces that certain rules of logic are ‘rules of thought’, as if the rules of the mind were laid down in the nature of the universe. These so-called rules of thought are deemed to govern all legitimate mental operations; and hence by definition those mental operations that are not so governed are somehow illegitimate. The ego simply cannot admit that the rules of thought are invented by the self’s need for expression and therefore do not rule the intelligence of the self which invents them: the self, using equipment bestowed by evolution and following a similar biological compulsion to that which drives induction, made them up for its convenience and therefore it rules them rather than being ruled by them. The manner in which the intelligent self rules its own rules, so to speak, is by creating them in the first place in order to externalise its insight. It is strange that the ego wants to ground the rules of thought outside of itself, pretending, like many despots to be no more than the servant of something higher: the logic of reality itself. The intelligent self is above all rules, beyond all rules that it sets itself; and it sets itself rules because without them it can say nothing coherent. But in the saying, in the rule-generation, the means of speaking of ever more complex matters is vouchsafed to the self by a process that is not under its control, but which it enjoys or suffers, depending on your point of view.

This process can only be characterised as ‘creative’ and it is not, repeat not, the prerogative of the rational ego and its repetitive thought. The methods of the ego are pure midworld – that is to say they are linguistic phenomena. They consist in the drawing out of implications from existing formalism, existing theory, existing ‘knowledge’. They are the manipulation of the mechanical aspects of these formalisms. In these methods, midworld, mere language, has taken over hindworld, i.e. the self’s raw experience of reality, and has set itself up as the essential truth about foreworld – the realm of perceived objects. In so doing it has excluded altogether hyperworld – i.e. untamed reality as such. But this exclusion is in fact impossible. There is inevitably a hyperworld component in foreworld, hindworld and in midworld, since we, our world and our language are integral parts of a process that we use but do not grasp. Foreworld, hindworld and midworld each have an indeterminate component. That is the zone into which the intelligent self has as a birthright unimpeded access and from which the ego excludes itself by its dogmatism. It is the indeterminate hyperworld element in all three worlds that is the source of all novelty and therefore of the future. Hyperworld, which is essentially what Bohm means by his term the ‘holomovement’ is the locus, the essential ‘milieu’ of intelligence. It is here that new structure that is manipulated formally by thought emerges into what we call ‘reality’. It is here that the miraculous incarnation of intelligence first takes place. Rational thought that then follows is mere rationalisation of the products of intelligence.

We shall take a look at intelligence in a separate post where our fundamental premise will be that intelligence is not a product of evolution, but rather a fundamental and universal property of the essential processes of reality as such.

PERCEPTION - AGAIN

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 10:52:00 +0000

We have already looked at the process of perception in an earlier post (see: February 2009), and there is no plan to repeat here what was said there. The focus of interest here is slightly different. It concerns the allegedly absolute distinction between subject and object. We want here to see how far distinctions can be made between these three apparently different systems: 1) the sense-organs that receive types of data from ‘the outside world’; 2) the brain that processes all the neural reactions to this data; and 3) the self, to which this combined process appears as ‘experience’. It may be that one can pull this process apart and show, by analysing the particular role of sense-organs and brain, and without recourse to psychotropic drugs, that the self is not slavishly tied, in some supposedly ‘causal’ fashion to experience passively the only world that is, only and always in one particular way, perhaps the only way possible. The self can be separated from one particular mode of experiencing, just as it can be separated from its language use, or its use of logic and mathematics, and indeed from any more or less mechanical structure by means of which it interacts with the world. The self can creatively adopt a new mode of perception. The self can create a different mode of perception for itself and at the same time come to an understanding of the habitual, mechanical and inadequate features of its usual mode. This is where imagination becomes consciously rather than unconsciously part of perception. The essential point in this process is the recognition that the self is not some sort of victim, eternally condemned to suffer the buffeting by the ‘objective’ world because that is ‘the way the world is’. On the contrary, since there is indeed no sharp distinction between self and object (the spatial boundary of the body does not supply this), the process of perception is far more of a participatory collaboration than most humans imagine. A vital question then is, can the self really liberate itself from being tied to one particular, culturally and historically determined mode of perception and achieve another or others? The answer seems to be in the affirmative.

The usual mode of perception is understood by most human beings who have grown up in western culture more or less as follows: a perceiving self, located vaguely somewhere inside the chunk of neural matter inside the skull, and conceived as being a kind of inner projection-theatre, passively receives signals from the world outside of the skull, the non-self, in terms of pulses of neural-activity that encode the impacts received from the objects of that world, impacts that include light, sound-waves, material particles or straightforward physical contact. Somehow, it is thought, these pulses of neural activity give the subject a faithful picture of what is actually there in the world of the non-subject. The reasons for this optimism are not very clear, but they seem to have to do with the apparent absence of any evidence to the contrary, even though evidence to the contrary is there in abundance, particularly in contemporary physics. But the dominant feature of this general view of perception is that this whole process is simply the direct action of the world upon our bodies and that the perception of the world outside is simply a passive reception of what is actually there and thus delivered directly to us. From this arises the belief called naïve realism that perception is direct, unmediated or immediate access to what is actually there. It is the belief that what is actually there simply imposes itself directly upon us as the brute fact of the world apart from ourselves. It is as if we believed that the world imprints itself upon us much as the pattern of a rubber boot-sole imprints itself upon a patch of mud. To change the image, it is as if we believed that our sense-organs are simply holes in our head and that the world simply gushes into the mind as the breeze blows through the open window. Perception, according to this view is simply unfiltered reception of the only world that is, and in the only mode of existence that it can have.

Human language is in greater part – though not entirely – structured by this belief. The belief is woven into the warp and woof of the grammar and into the vocabulary that we string together into sentences by means of our syntactic rules. It is to this extent a self-confirming hypothesis of such power that it is no longer regarded by us as an hypothesis, but rather as simply and absolutely the way the world is, the way the world ‘has to be’.

If one pulls apart the process of excitation of sense-organs, its processing by the brain and the subjective experience of the self, then one can reassess any one of those stages and ask oneself whether one is really sure what is going on at each stage and whether one is at all sure about the way in which these three stages interact with each other and influence each other. If one does this, one can rapidly get away from the commonsense notion that the process of perception is ‘obviously’ a simple delivery to the observing consciousness of only and exactly what is actually there. If one stops prejudging the matter, stops assuming that the world apart from our experience is exactly as that experience suggests it is, then one is at liberty to re-interpret the input from the non-self into the self at any one stage in the process outlined above. One is at liberty to reassess the relationship between subject and object. One is freed to consider so-called ‘common sense’ as a kind of prejudice that distorts the process of perception and therefore of cognition. If one chooses to assume that the world, as such, is the unknown, is hyperworld, then one cannot think in terms of the senses’ having total access to that world. What, after all, entitles us to believe that our senses receive all the possible data from the world? Answer: nothing. We can no more claim that our senses deliver all the available information from the world than we can claim that the rudimentary sensing capacity of the nematode worm does. Imagine for a moment that you are such a worm and reflect upon how impoverished your experience of the world must be compared with that of a human. Then reflect that humans might, if compared to hypothetical beings endowed with richer sensing capacity, be no less limited than nematode worms. Regarding our sense-organs as limited, as giving us only a fraction of the available information, is the first stage in critically evaluating them. But we have then to do the same thing with the brain that processes this limited information.

The process by means of which the brain becomes ‘programmed’ by behaviour to experience the world in a particular way begins in early childhood from the moment the senses begin to be stimulated. The young infant, assumed to be possessing fully functional sense-organs, does not experience a world of ‘objects’ right away. The young child cannot focus on individual aspects of the ‘buzzing, blooming confusion’ of the sensory input. Their vision does not focus on individual visual experiences. The eyes are not co-ordinated with the feelings of the hands, nor with the auditory experiences, nor with the gustatory and olfactory input. More importantly, perhaps, the brain of the infant does not initially impose the hypothesis of the ‘outside world’ upon its sensory experience. The young infant makes no distinction between inside and outside, between subject and object, but simply receives raw, uninterpreted experience. Thus notions of time, space and causality are not at all formed and the young child will give evidence of expectations that seem to indicate a kind of magical understanding of the way in which the disparate elements of experience hang together, magical in the sense that the child often seems to believe that the realm of experiences is somehow under the control of its will.

Gradually, however, as the child is stimulated to connect visual and other sensory experience and connect different kinds of experience with a single source, the concept of an enduring object begins to form. As the child’s improving locomotion, and perhaps repeated pleasures and pains, allow it to discover repeatable routes through various sources of repeatable experiences, memory begins to establish the concept of space through the hypothesis of the disposition of objects in space. The understanding of what ‘causes’ these repeatable experiences, however, can often remain hazy for quite some while. A child may, for example be shown an item and then witness its disappearance. But far from looking for, and waiting for the re-appearance of this item in the region in which it disappeared, which would suggest an understanding of the causality of the experience, the child tends to turn its attention to the direction from which the object first appeared, suggesting that it equates the emergence of the object with the act of perception. It seems to see the perceptions as causing the object’s appearance, rather than understanding the object as causing the perception. Nevertheless, the repeated discovery of invariant elements that memory retains from the child’s exploration of the origin of its experiences gradually builds up a theory of the world in which a belief in three-dimensional objects, their disposition and movement in space, their enduring presence when not being perceived, and so on, is central. This belief is delivered by the brain to the self as being the best interpretation of the nature of the stimulation received by the senses. That the brain does indeed ‘deliver’ hypotheses like this is attested to by the fact that the brain can be induced by various distortions of the sensory processes to abandon the commonsense theory and begin to generate all sorts of additional hypotheses. We can ‘feel’ this hypothesis-generation happening in very simple situations. We have all had the experience of sitting in a stationary vehicle, a train or a bus or a car, and then suddenly experiencing all the sensations of the vehicle’s beginning to move, as, looking through the window, we ‘see’ our vehicle, ‘passing’ another. It frequently comes as a shock then to notice from other cues that our vehicle is still stationary and that it is a neighbouring vehicle or some other mobile object that is moving. This comes as a shock because the brain will have delivered to us all the kinaesthetic as well as sensory experiences of movement. This particular theory turns out to be wrong, but it demonstrates just to what extent perception is a theory. The brain often interprets various kinds of movement on the part of the environment – spinning of a roundabout, pitching of a ship etc. – as evidence that the body has been poisoned and is for that reason disoriented. The result is an impulse to vomit – the brain’s way of getting rid of the hypothetical poison. This shows just to what extent the ‘theories’ imposed by the brain manipulate us independently of our will or intention.

Now the thesis here is just this: the brain that has evolved in our skulls and that has allowed us to survive and to flourish as a species, imposes upon the self the interpretation of sensory information that suggests that the world outside is a collection of three-dimensional objects enduring through one-dimensional time, that the objects are separate from each other and interact with each other by external impact alone. This hypothesis then becomes a self-confirming, self-validating theory as repeated experiences of the same type reinforce the general ideas about space-occupancy, solidity, movement, stability and so on. These general ideas thus reinforced then become firmly engrained habits of memory that turn into second nature and govern the process of perception and experience entirely, such that they are not considered to be hypotheses at all, but ‘the way the world is’. Their origin in a certain interpretation of experience is forgotten, their dependence upon habit is overlooked, they become ‘abstract’, ‘a priori’, ‘necessary’ and so on. Their status as a hypothesis is entirely missed and they become a theory adopted by the brain and forced upon the self that ceases to be questioned, that indeed may not be questioned. The complex of concepts becomes not a theory at all, but ‘obvious’ unquestionable reality pure and simple, pure common sense, to question which is tantamount to madness.

We have rehearsed aspects of this general scheme of things several times before, but the point here is just this: the self does not have to take uncritically the deliverances of its brain concerning the nature of the outside world as such. Indeed, taking these deliverances uncritically led to the shortcomings of scientific theories of the world that had to be abandoned as facts emerged that clearly did not fit them. The Newtonian universe was remarkably successful for a remarkably long time as was for all that time regarded as not simply an hypothesis but as a perfect reproduction of the way the world is in itself. Nevertheless, it was in the end overturned by the insight that its commonsense conceptions of reality (infinite three-dimensional space, infinite linear time etc.) were misguided because they generalised insights that were only applicable in a limited context. Once we went beyond the simple use of the unaided sense-organs and began to use prosthetic devices of vastly greater sensitivity than our eyes, ears, hands etc., then we began to realise that the structure of the world is far subtler than we, with our simple commonsense inductions had ever suspected. We began to understand that the equipment that evolution had given us was not infallible, not the only possible means by which we could approach reality. We began to understand that the view of the universe bestowed upon us by our sense-organs and the particular manner in which they become programmed was no more than a set of deeply-engrained habits, a kind of mental routine which, in the interests of economy, it was better not to question. This potential liberation of the mind has been bestowed upon us by discoveries in physics. It means that the mind can use its hypotheses heuristically, without regarding them as absolute. It means that we can continue our precise investigations and at the same time, without obscurantism, preserve a conviction of the infinite fathomlessness of the world.

The progress of physics from the time of Einstein onwards has been a gradual demolition of the commonsense view of the way in which the self receives information about the nature of the world. It is therefore now simply part of straightforward intellectual honesty to try and keep up with these developments and to try and see how the sensory-cognitive apparatus that evolution has given to us can be found to be strictly limited in its abilities, imperfectly programmed by our lifestyle, distorted by habit and liable to make us believe that certain views of the world are obvious, ‘self-evident’ even, when they are not. The development of physics in the past few decades has opened up a world of vastly greater complexity and vastly greater dimensionality than was ever suspected by our ancestors. We owe it to ourselves to try and explore the implications of this new and strange world for our understanding of our self. One thing is certain: we do not have to stick to the dogmatic assertions of the thing-ideology that assures us that the self is nothing at all and that objects are everything. The self, on the contrary is our most immediate experience and the indispensable condition of all other additional experience. It is also the source of all modes of expression tied to that experience. The self is therefore not only ‘beyond’ its language, its music, its mathematics, its logic, it is also beyond the hypotheses delivered to it by its brain on the basis of the stimulation of the senses. The brain does its best to convince the self that the world is a collection of separate three-dimensional objects for that is doubtless an economical and practically valuable strategy; but the self does not have to take this at face value and indeed never has. The self is now mature enough to explore the ways in which its own multi-dimensional reality can be integrated into the many-dimensional reality of the universe. Perception does not have to be viewed as the passive, slavish reception of the deliverances of a monolithic objective world that we have to take without question. It can become an active process in which the old theory of a three-dimensional world of solid, separate objects can profitably be laid aside by the self, viewed as a fiction generated by the brain and its mechanisms, left behind and transcended. The very fact that we can do this demonstrates the distinction between the self and the brain. The self clearly uses its brain; it is not its brain.

If the self were not ‘beyond’ its brain such that it uses its brain rather than being generated by it, we would as a species be as tied to our knowledge of the environment as some non-human animals appear to be. The fact that we are not so tied; the fact that we constantly generate new knowledge, and transcend that knowledge in yet more new knowledge, strongly suggests that the self actively uses the brain to explore reality and does not necessarily have that reality imposed upon it either ,by an immutably objective world of brute facts or by an all-dominant brain. The brain could be considered to be a kind of interface between the self and whatever constitutes the non-self; but it is conceivable that this interface could become a barrier, a distinct hindrance as it imposes ‘theories’ of the world that our prosthetic devices suggest are untenable. It is certainly a hindrance if these theories are considered by any human group, scientific, religious, political, or what have you as beyond question.

We can, of course, view the ‘beyondness’ of the self as just another brain activity, as temporal lobe activity, perhaps, in which the processing and storage capacity is so powerful that multiple drafts of experiences, all subtly different, can be entertained all at once. In this way, the imagination, for example, is reduced to a mere mechanism. But we are not obliged to see things this way if we ditch the thing-obsession and the notion that the self just has to be identical with its brain. If every particle of matter in the universe is accompanied by an information-bearing field, distinct from it, that connects it to the rest of the universe, then the brain, too, could be accompanied by a very complex field, the information of which could conceivably be separated from the ‘matter’. We can see the extraordinary processing and storage capacity of the brain as a tool of the self for the exploration of possibility. On such a view, the self would be the indeterminate origin of the new structures of the imagination, and the storage and processing capacity of the brain no more than the facilitating hardware, the repository of raw material derived from perception. If, in addition, the brain is regarded as a quantum computing-device that operates with the infinite superposed potential of its possible material states, then the self can be seen to have potential access to sources of stimulation that not only blow the commonsense notion of perception to smithereens, but that open up to the mind an infinity of possible worlds.

The ‘beyondness’ of the self with regard to both the objects of its sense-experience and to its imagination is illustrated by Bohm’s view of the relationship between perception, imagination and mathematics in the exploration of physical reality.

Bohm points out that many contemporary physicists regard mathematical equations as providing their most immediate contact with nature and see the relevant experiments as simply confirming or refuting the correctness of this contact. Thus for them, since the objects of their investigations are so far from the objects of common sense, without the equations there is really nothing to talk about. For Bohm, however, a return to the old attitude to the maths, in which the maths was regarded as simply a more precise way of talking about the physical reality, is not the way forward: the way forward is rather to see these two attitudes as extremes and to adopt a manner of thought that moves freely between them. Simply striving to make progress from the mathematical side alone is, says Bohm, too limiting. The physical concepts that we can discuss in natural language are not simply imaginative displays of the meaning of the equations, but can be seen as a guide for the development of new equations (as, for example, with Einstein’s youthful fantasies concerning the behaviour of light). In this way, the creative advance may come from one side or the other, from the maths or from the imaginative concepts.

The upshot of this particular method is that Bohm does not expect to come to the end of the process of discovery, as do certain other physicists with their talk of ‘Theories of Everything’. He does not expect to find any ‘ultimate’ object. His view is rather that nature is both qualitatively and quantitatively (i.e. in its depth and subtlety of laws and processes) infinite. Our knowledge at any stage is, he says “an abstraction from this total reality and therefore cannot be expected to hold indefinitely when extended into new domains.” (The Undivided Universe, Routledge 1993 p.321) In the past, physicists have regarded their discipline as more or less finished, apart from one or two insignificant little clouds upon the horizon. These clouds, however, had a habit of turning into paradigm-overturning hurricanes in the form of vastly broadened areas of investigation (e.g. the effects of the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment, and those involving the problems of black body radiation, upon Newtonian physics). Contemporary talk of tying up all the looses ends of physics into one definitive Theory of Everything cannot, therefore really expect to be free from a similar fate to that suffered by all previous attempts to achieve the same sort of thing.

Our understanding of the concept ‘matter’ has steadily undergone transformations and increasing abstraction up to the present state of affairs in which what we had previously thought of as an ‘object’ possessing the primary qualities attributed to it by Locke is turning into empty space. This process is carried further by quantum field theory in which particles are treated as simply quantised states of a field that extends over the whole of space. The successive replacement of what was seen in one age as essence by the notion of appearance in a later age, where the appearance concerned is appearance of a much deeper essence (from things to atoms to sub-atomic particles, to quarks, to superstrings for example), seems to Bohm to be a pattern that never comes to an end. “Ultimately”, he writes, “everything plays both the role of appearance and that of essence. If, as we are suggesting, the pattern never comes to an end, then ultimately all of our thought can be regarded as appearance, not to the senses, but to the mind.” (ibid. p.322) The process of science is therefore the elimination of illusion from these appearances. Science extends the appearances, but the ultimate reality is unlimited and unknown.

III

The fundamental problem associated with our claims to knowledge seems to be that we can only with difficulty detect the habits of our perceptual apparatus. Appearance gives rise to new conceptions of essences; these turn out in their turn to be appearances and a new essence is posited to account for them; but no matter how far this process goes, it will still be bound up with perception. Thus our theories are not primarily forms of definitive knowledge about the world but rather forms of insight concerning our own experience that arise in our attempts to obtain a perception of a deeper nature of reality as a whole. This process can no more come to an end than the senses can arrive at some ultimate perception. We can go on putting on ever more powerful ‘spectacles’, this definitive sense-perception will never come into view.

Thus both the mathematical and the physical ‘imaginative’ concepts are appearances which guide our actions towards the unlimited and unknown reality. It is for this reason that the imaginative concept is just as important in the overall process as the precise mathematical concept. The two together present a more comprehensive appearance and cross-fertilise each other.

This view of the infinite process of science has consequences, of course, for the understanding of the nature of the observer. As part of the same infinite system of nature, the observer, too, is ultimately unknown and unlimited. Thus any mechanistic or deterministic theory of the observer is utterly inappropriate if regarded as final. The self-determination of any system must be held to be as relative because it will always depend in some way on what has been left out. Determinism and indeterminism are extreme abstractions that constitute different views of an overall set of appearances. The ultimate reality, whether of object or of subject must be thought of as being always beyond any theory whether deterministic or indeterministic. Different views, deterministic or indeterministic, are called for, depending on the type of contact we wish to have with the reality at issue. But the unknown and unlimited essence, either of self or of world, is not restricted to any of these views. In a passage that has distinctly Kantian overtones, Bohm says of this ‘essence’ and of its relation to the views we have of it: “it may be thought of as somewhere between them and ultimately beyond them, as indeed it is beyond what can be captured in thought, which is always limited to some abstraction from the totality.” (ibid. p. 324)

Given that all our categories of thought are ultimately appearances, Bohm himself asks the question, what is the point of talking, as he does, in terms of an ontological approach to the entities of quantum theory (as opposed to the epistemological approach of Niels Bohr)? His answer is extremely subtle. It is that the entities of every theory are not only mere appearances, but also more than this in the sense that the theory’s basic concepts must be said to “reflect reality within its own domain” by which is meant ‘in the domain of the theory’ (ibid. author’s italics). In all other existent ontological theories, the basic concepts (‘objects’, ‘atoms’, ‘electrons’, ‘quarks’ etc.) are deemed to correspond to some independently existing entity, for example and not to be dependent upon context or on deeper levels of being. Bohm describes his own ontological approach as being such that a basic concept in it may reflect a reality that is inherently dependent upon either context or “deeper levels of being” or both. For example, our perception of a round table as elliptical may be seen as a reality, despite its ‘really’ being round and despite, on, say, the atomic view, its being more empty space than solidity. This may be done by considering the light coming from the object to the eye, making an elliptical image that is in some way carried back into the brain. This may be considered as an essential part of the reality corresponding to the elliptical appearance. This reality is not independently existing, but depends on a context including the whole process of observation of the circular object which is taken to be the essential meaning of the elliptical appearance. However, the circular object is dependent for its existence on a wide range of contextual parameters and especially on the atomic constituents which are considered to be its essence. But this set of considerations is then repeated as we go through a series of deeper essences and appearances, sub-atomic particles, quarks, superstrings etc.

In the quantum domain it is necessary to state explicitly the relationship between appearance and essence by considering the totality that includes the measuring instruments as well as what is measured. In the quantum domain, there is an irreducible participation of object and observing apparatus in each other. For this reason the extension of the traditional approach into the quantum theory was problematic. The basically epistemological approach of Bohr and Heisenberg was a recognition that the quantum concepts were taken to represent only the state of our knowledge. The abandonment of an ontological approach by Bohr and Heisenberg depended on the assumption that such an approach would rely upon finding some final essence that was not dependent upon anything at all. For Bohm, by contrast, the ontological approach entails considering appearance and essence as a totality. Since appearance and essence are a single totality, observer and observed are also a single totality. The absolute separation of these two is untenable.

The image Bohm uses to make this totality comprehensible is the hologram. The whole is always contained in any of the parts. Thus the ontological approach is always in the form of a totality, including observer, measuring apparatus and everything else. Of course this does not give all the information about the entire universe or any final picture. However it is important for any cosmsology that is adopted and for a mature understanding of the relation between observer and observed.

The view that theories constitute appearances, says Bohm, does not deny the independent reality of the universe as a whole. “Rather it implies that even the appearances are part of the overall reality and make a contribution to it” (ibid p. 326). It must be emphasised, nevertheless, that the content of the theory is not by itself the reality, nor can it be in perfect correspondence with the whole of this reality, which is infinite and unknown, but which contains within it the processes that make theoretical knowledge possible.

If one tries to sort all this out to one’s own satisfaction, one may begin to suffer from vertigo, the sort of vertigo one experiences when one looks at one’s own reflection in two mutually reflecting mirrors that present an infinite series of images that fade into indistinctness or veer off to the right, to the left upwards or downwards. The observer is inseparable from what is observed, just as the apparatus is inseparable from the quantum entity observed. The observer is of course understood as a classical object and his or her powers of observation seem to depend upon classical effects. At all events, we do seem as creatures to be narrowly associated with the classical domain, despite our inference of the quantum domain. If the classical domain is implicate in (folded into and unfolded from) the quantum domain and if the images that we make of the classical domain are dependent on the context of our location in the classical realm as well as on all the effects of the deeper levels, it is difficult to see whether the reality of appearances is limited to the distinct level of reality concerned, or whether it has a counterpart at all other deeper levels. To use Bohm’s example again: suppose I view a round table. What I perceive is the appearance of an elliptical something. This elliptical something is the appearance available to me of the round essence. Then on the atomic level, this round essence is the appearance of the granular, atomic reality that is more empty space than solidity. This atomic level is then the appearance of the essence of the quantum processes supporting the atoms. But here it gets very spooky: these quantum entities are dependent for their particular identity upon me as observer and on the apparatus that I happen to be using. This implies a feedback loop between levels in which the appearance on the classical level becomes decisive for the evolution of processes on the quantum level. This can only mean that there is no such thing as the kind of objectivity that our everyday use of our senses seems to suggest, only types of participation by the observer in the increasingly subtle universal processes. This would imply that the universe as a whole (since unbroken wholeness and quantum entanglement exist) changes according to the perceptions and intellectual operations of observers. Of course, where the essences are considered to be so mathematically complex that they pass out of the range of our imagination, the strong link between our acquisition of knowledge and the passive reception of sense-perception (the corner-stone of empirical science) has definitively been severed. Thus we no longer have to consider the observer as fundamentally distinct from the observed, nor perception as mere passive reception of the world ‘as it is’. Such antique prejudices can be abandoned.

IDENTITY

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 16:40:00 +0000

Mens cuiusque is est quisque (Cicero)

The word ‘identity’ has a number of distinct meanings. Only the principal meanings, as they apply to the individual person, are of interest here. There is no point in getting bogged down in recondite logical problems, but one or two of them can be mentioned. There is, for example, the problem of the ‘identity of indiscernibles’. Broadly, this asserts that if two entities have everything in common then they are one and not two. Similarly, the ‘paradox of identity’ claims, roughly, that if one says of two entities that they are identical, then one is either mistaken (because they are distinct) or uttering a tautology (because they are one and the same thing). Though they do have consequences for issues such as ‘brain-mind identity’, these fine logical distinctions are of no particular interest here, a fortiori since they arise largely from habits of perception. What we are interested in here is simply the common practice that persons have of saying of themselves that they are ‘such and such’ (where this can be any label from a huge range of nouns, proper names or definitions) and identifying themselves, as common parlance has it, with what is mentioned. We are also interested in the common insight that in the concept of identity some essence of the person is being talked about when a person refers to his or her own or someone else’s ‘real’ self, what they essentially are. We shall not bother with the logical problem of picking out two distinct entities of importance to the self and calling them identical with the self; nor shall we bother with the closely related problem of the apparently tautologous character of any attempt to establish the relation between the self and itself, between an ‘I’ and a ‘me’, in an effort to circumscribe identity. We shall stick to common usage of the word ‘identity’ and simply assume that the question of human personal identity, involves the self’s comparing or relating itself to identifiable aspects of its activity, constitution, situation or whatever and saying ‘that is what I am.’ Or, alternatively, we shall assume that the question of identity involves the self’s comparing or relating itself to identifiable aspects of its activity, constitution, situation or whatever and saying, ‘that is not what I am.’

There is a fashionable theory of mind that makes use of the notion of the ‘identity of brain and mind’ as if this were a provable – or even proven – state of affairs. If the thesis were provable, this would of course involve showing, rather than just asserting, that the set of all mental properties of an individual is identical with the set of all physical properties of the brain of that individual, i.e. that there is no difference at all. No current use of language, which enshrines the distinctness of the mental and the physical, suggests that this is any way a reasonable thing to try to attempt. Despite the current fad for confidently and loudly (too loudly) maintaining the opposite, there is no reason to suppose that, by means of current language-usage, any identity between brain and self can be arrived at. We simply end up with flat, counter-intuitive assertions of the sort ‘x is y’ where x and y have no obvious points of contact and where what is actually happening is that either x or y is being denied reality. The so-called ‘brain-mind identity’ is no more than an article of faith of certain thinkers who cling to pet theories because the alternatives seem abhorrent. So here we nail our colours to the mast and simply state our view that such an identity is impossible. It is after all the thing-ideology that strives to equate self and brain and for no other good reason apart from the fact that the brain can be seen, handled, dissected, weighed, squelched, smelled and tasted, its geometry agreed upon, and otherwise treated as a three-dimensional object. But if one does not believe in any ultimate separate existence of things, except as abstractions, then one is quite at ease with the notion that the self is distinct from its brain, even though many functions of the self may be closely associated with structures of the brain. The self-brain identity theory disappears when the thing-ideology is ditched.

All material systems, particularly living systems, not only have a whole function which is more than that of their parts, but also depend upon their position within superordinate wholes for that function. Feedback loops exist not only within the system, but also between the system and its environment. That our brain can, to our experience, be an object, in no sense means that isolating and probing that object gives us exhaustive insight into every aspect of the way it works. The brain is clearly in some sense the focus of the self’s interaction with the world, just as the retina is in some sense the focus of the visual experience of the world; but this in no sense indicates either that vision is reducible to processes in the retina, or that the self is reducible to some processes in the brain. Given the interconnectedness of all matter, the self may well be a function of a far larger energic field than that of the chunk of matter that our senses and our objectifying tendencies cut out of the entire material nexus in which our body as vehicle of experience is set.

These latter reflections do not oblige one to adopt any traditional philosophical position, such as Cartesian or any other kind of dualism. The simple fact is this: thinking in terms of the thing-ideology is what creates the so-called ‘mind-body problem’ in the first place; drop the thing-ideology and you either no longer have a problem, or you have a different and much more interesting one. It has always been a mystery to many of us why the ‘self-brain identity theory’ stopped at the brain. Why didn’t it call itself the ‘self-body identity theory’? And if it became this, why should it stop there? Why should it not be the ‘self-body-and-contiguous-environment identity theory’? After all, my body is only separate from the world around it as an abstraction; in fact we know it to be in perpetual chemical contact with all contiguous matter. And it’s undeniable that that chemical contact is decisive; after a few large whiskies, my mind is very different from what it was before beginning to drink them.

The three-dimensional object that we see as the brain is a construct of our habits of mind, one more object in a world that these habits tell us consists only of objects. It should be sufficiently clear by now that this is precisely the view of the world that needs to be contested if the self is to be understood at all, rather than being abolished by identifying it entirely with a chunk of ‘matter’. But if we do not identify the self with its brain, then we do not have to identify it with any of the other definable structures that people use in order to pick themselves out and to designate the uniqueness of their self. We can reject each one of these conventional sources of identity as being in any way essential and home in on the irreducible core of the self to which all these ancillary features, such as name-identity, body-identity, memory-identity, ego-identity, persona-identity, role-identity, function-identity, group-identity, team-identity, national-identity, and so on, act as modes of expression. As human beings, we are always in search of some invariance, some stability of structure, some repeatable permanence – in short, some essence – within the process of uninterrupted change, not only in the universe at large, but also in the self. But the question must be asked whether beyond any physical object – body, brain – beyond any physical organisation – family, clan, team, church, nation – there is any other more essential source of individual identity. The philosopher David Hume was quite clear on this point: if we look for the self, we will find quite simply nothing apart from perceptions of these things. We can drop all of these empirically comprehensible sources of identity without coming upon, but equally, without abolishing the core of the self, in which surely our identity must be set.

It would seem that the fundamental paradox of the human is that only in stripping away all these structures that seem to give the context and character to human life, only in penetrating to the intrinsic nothingness of the inner self, do we come upon any real essence. Naturally, the thing-ideology would instantly claim that in arriving at an entity that seems not to be a thing, we have precisely ‘no-thing’ and therefore no subject of discussion, no entity to be investigated, no issue at all to be addressed, nothing to which any permanence at all can be attributed, no repeatability. But that is precisely the point. It may be, of course, that what we call ‘matter’ invariably involves what we call ‘mind’, but that it is only in the complex energic fields that are our physical selves that the intelligence, the mind-aspect becomes self-reflective and capable of experiencing itself. It may be, moreover, that the informational content of that complex field provides a degree of permanence within change that we may equate with the permanence of the conscious self. But this is quite a different matter from equating the self with any discrete object that the sensory-cognitive apparatus may cut out from the entire material nexus of our experience. And even if we could do this, equating the self with an isolatable body of information is essentially no more helpful than equating it with a three-dimensional object.

The permanence of the self, however, need not be tied to any sort of mechanical or physical invariance, no sort of repetitive objective stability, since the self, as an entity primarily structured by information, feeds on itself. It is intrinsically an ever-renewed, permanent opportunity for growth. This ever-renewed opportunity is the opportunity of creative re-discovery of what we may have so far identified ourselves with and of the ways in which we may have so far understood ourselves. The self is precisely this open-ended, ever-renewed process and it is utterly pointless to try to tie it to the illusory invariance of a three-dimensional object. The ego and the rational intellect under the dominance of the ego with its thing-obsession, will naturally reject this construction on human life and insist upon equating any source of identity with thing-like entities or indeed with things themselves. It will ‘prove’ such equations by pointing to circumstantial evidence such as the apparent disappearance of the self in degenerative disorders or other kinds of brain damage. But it would do that wouldn’t it? The ego, with its craving for control is tied closely to the language-engine (the function of the right-brain in current brain-mythology) and can only come up with names – i.e., things – and their apparent isolation in space. The scientific theories of the self are driven by this language engine and can only come up with more and more ‘things’. Thus every exploratory and explanatory activity of the scientific ego becomes an exercise in self-confirming theories, since it is incapable of emerging from the habit of viewing the world as a collection of things. In only looking for things, that is all it finds; and identity becomes no more than a matter of equivalence between things. Now since this is an ideological position, there is absolutely no reason at all not to adopt a contrary position based on the experience of the self and declare that only in the indeterminate core of the self, beyond perception, beyond language and beyond the perceived world, only in the hyperworld connection that we have with all of reality do we encounter something like a permanent identity, some focus of the self, where the self can convince itself that it remains the same. It is the confrontation with the indeterminate ‘no-thing’ in self and in world that constitutes the essence of the human and the essence of everything that makes us intrinsically what we are. This is not, moreover, an anti-empirical position. We know that we are an intrinsic part of the world, but we do not have to believe that we have to identify ourselves with a three-dimensional thing: if we experience ourselves as indeterminate, immaterial parts of the world then only an ideologue can say we are deluded. We shall try and put a little more evidence for this view in the next chapter where we discuss perception. For the moment, we shall simply assume that the notion of the indeterminate core of the self as identical with the essential indeterminacy of the world is understood.

This indeterminate core of the self is the cockpit of the soul, the vantage-point from which we view all determined structure that we may see as attributes of our self, but which, in reality are only the sloughed-off husks of the self. These husks are the determinate locus of the self’s indeterminate presence in the world. It is from the vantage-point of the indeterminate core of the self that all structure is found to be expressive of some agency that is not part of the structure itself. This is the essential lesson of Gödel’s view of formal systems. It is from the vantage-point of the indeterminate self, for example, that language is discovered to be a ceaseless striving to go beyond its own boundaries, mathematics a ceaseless striving to transcend its limitations in new and more powerful formalisms and experience itself a ceaseless striving to penetrate beyond the veil imposed upon the world by our senses and their habits. We are not bodies, not, brains, not functions, not cog-in-machine components of contingent material structures such as crowds and nations, we are beyond all of those avenues of self-expression, we are unique selves, uniquely creative entities whose inner nature is only comprehensible as an inseparable aspect of the indeterminate inner nature of the world. The fact that this inner nature is no-thing, precisely not a thing, does not mean that in talking of it we are talking of illusion and self-deception. If it sounds like that, this is because language is tied to the objects of sense. Language is a kind of consensus tied to a certain mode of habituation of the senses. Its principal purpose is the communication of practical meanings concerning shared experience of things. Language becomes strange and analogical, it cracks, splits and becomes paradoxical when the self sees beyond the habituation of the senses to perceive only things and beyond the linguistic consensus that reflects this habituation. But it is the lot of every discoverer to run the risk of appearing to attack and to damage this consensus and to draw the ire of those whose identity is apparently bound up closely with it.

The individual who has discovered the creative core of his or her self, knows that it is this core that is the focus of the self’s identity and of all its experience and that all the empirical features of identity are incidental. The self is the infinitely dimensional ‘space’ where the caesura between subject and object ceases to have any meaning, where the difference between world perceived and perceiving consciousness no longer counts, where the difference between the products of the mind, in language or any other medium, and the world they are meant to portray, ceases to have any weight at all. In the encounter with the indeterminate self, the true source of identity, the individual is pure hyperworld, world in its character as pure creation. Things appear as mere temporary phantasms, mere transient fictions and utterances about them have the same character. The body appears for what it is: a transient structure, a transient world-tube, in how many dimensions, we know not, that emerged around the time of our conception from the universal energy-field and that will disappear, at our death back into it. That body constituted a unique viewpoint on the universal process; but the viewpoint is not the same as the view and the view can potentially be from anywhere.

Given that general picture of human life, in which the body is no more stable, no more permanent than the virtual particles that appear and disappear, that are ‘created’ and ‘destroyed’ by emerging from and being re-absorbed into the universal energy field, our identity need not be associated with any specific aspect of that material process. Indeed, our identity is all the poorer, all the more illusory, all the more trivial, if we are so identified. The indeterminate in mind and world is the source of the wave of information that accompanies all particles of so-called matter and that to a much greater extent accompanies all aggregations of such particles. Hyperworld, the world as such, moves constantly according to its own indeterminate core of intelligent, creative innovation. The self that has discovered in its own depths the indeterminate, intelligent link to that universal fount of perpetual innovation has in the truest sense discovered its identity. The self that finds its identity in any-thing else still has a long way to go.

Self is indistinguishable from world, though the undeveloped self experiences this as an absolute opposition: self and non-self. Identity, essentially is the discovery of identity of self and non-self; it is not ego-identity. The so-called problem of identity arises because the ego-dominated self becomes itself part, and only a part, of its world. Both the sense of the self as ego, as a substantial, stable, persisting entity initiating and causing effects, on the one hand, and the sense of one’s ‘world’, out there, as a stable, persisting object of perception and use in which the self’s cause has effects, on the other, are alike, the one and the other, both illusions. Both illusions can be uncovered only in the self’s discovery of its own indeterminacy and the correlate indeterminacy of the world; and that requires a complete separation of the self from the desires, plans, wishes, intentions and even perceptions of the ego. It requires even more, perhaps, separation of the self from the additional level of illusion, namely the purely linguistic dimension in which the ego is structured by the stories it spins to account for itself to itself, the stories in terms of which its enquiries are dealt with ‘rationally’, i.e. in midworld. When this separation of the self from language takes place, the self enters the state of understanding quite spontaneously, for understanding is its natural state. The problem of identity then disappears: there remains only the one universal process, the perpetual creativity of hyperworld, and identification with any single part of this, either as body or mind, is thereafter impossible. It is, of course, rare for this kind of self-identity to blossom without the luxury of contemplation. It can, however, be grasped by considering the experience of perception, to which we now turn.

SELF AND OTHER

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 16:16:00 +0000

Lupus est homo homini (Plautus)

Plautus’s remark about man being a wolf to man relies on a couple of misconceptions. For one, rapacious predation is not the only characteristic of the wolf, which tends to exhibit collaborative and ‘loving’ behaviour towards members of its own species and does not deserve its caricaturally bad press. Secondly, and more importantly, it is the ego that adopts so-called ‘wolfish’ behaviour towards its fellows, not the self. The ego is almost exclusively predatory in that its interest in the other – whether that other be personal or not – is as an object of exploitation, control or opposition. The ego assesses the other exclusively in terms of its own advantage. It objectifies the other. It turns the other into an object of use or consumption.

The fundamental opposition in the self is that between hindworld, the individual sphere of awareness, and hyperworld, the wholly other. The other as another human self, is certainly the most crucial aspect of the self-other dichotomy, but there are more. The self is a relation. As such it is able – and indeed, some say, constitutionally predisposed – to relate to the whole of reality in what could be conceived as a personal manner. Without such a relation, the person remains trapped in the ego. Indeed, the self may need to feel a personal relation to reality in order to function properly. This tendency has for long been regarded as regrettably primitive anthropomorphism in the human attitude to the world. But increasingly, the scientific community is trying to show how humans fit into nature, in order to neutralise the alienation that grew as a consequence of the thing-ideology that completely de-personalised the world. Persons are repelled by the notion that fundamentally they can only relate to things. Physicists and biologists are now trying to show us that we belong in nature and are not anomalous beings, goggling at the natural world in absurd disconnection from it. We can feel integrated into reality, they tell us, because the matter in our bodies was created in a process lasting aeons of time from the beginning of the universe; or they point out that we can feel related to nature in that natural selection cobbled us together over billions of years in common with every other organism on the tree of life. Some evolutionists even recognise a ‘religious’ urge in us put there by adaptive pressure. But if we’re honest, we have to recognise that such connections to what after all remain mechanical, determined or accidental material systems ultimately fail to satisfy and indeed alienate. To adapt Pascal: Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis nous effraie – the eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies us.

We need a personal relation; and it does not help if the evolutionists tell us that our urges amount only to some neural kink put there by our evolutionary past. The self is intrinsically a personal relation. Some will say that this is infantile, that only children need to feel personal warmth from the world. If that is so, then we all remain children, because despite the strident rationalistic bravado of the ego that fears, and tries to devalue, our emotions, the need remains strong in us to our last breath. Of course there is no obviously personal side to reality except in other human (or perhaps sentient) beings. There is certainly no parental figure smiling from the heavens, no ego-approved plan to nature. But though nature does not exhibit personal characteristics we may not assume by that token that it is necessarily less than personal. Since nature is patently intelligent there is another possibility: it may be more than personal. This is a no less logical and rationally acceptable possibility than the alternative. Both the less than personal and the more than personal could be experienced by us as impersonal. If the latter alternative is contemplated, then it becomes possible to think that our urge to establish a personal relation to reality as a whole may well make sense.

The problem of the current self-world relation

The self-world duality is not one in which a propertyless mind observes the propertyful object. It is the dogmatic materialism of the rational ego that creates this divorce from nature. The self is not a thing. The self’s knowledge, in contrast to that of the ego, emerges from confluence, from the unpredictable confluence of self and other. This gives rise to unpredictable creativity from which issues innovative understanding. Such innovation is an intrinsic feature of the natural world. We are intrinsic parts of nature; and so is our useful knowledge. The particular knowledge that regulates our relations to others (i.e. the knowledge that constitutes ‘moral goodness’ or ‘virtue’) must be seen in this context. That this is generally speaking knowledge ‘how’ rather than knowledge ‘that’ makes no difference, since ultimately all of our knowledge has to become praxis in order to persuade us.

Nevertheless, knowledge ‘that’ has a special significance for us language-using mammals. For millennia we as a species have been convinced that if only we could find the right method, the right linguistic trick, the right incantation, the right form of words and so on, then the mystery of the universe would open up to us. We have been convinced, since we acquired the trick of representing the world symbolically to ourselves and to others, that some special use of that ability would guarantee us privileged access to reality. We have used magic spells, open-sesames, religious rigmaroles, philosophical and logical methods, received procedures and so on to convince ourselves that the hidden door giving access to the inner nature of the universe was about to be opened by the device. After the emergence of monotheistic religion, we imagined that the Creator himself possessed the right form of words and could perhaps be induced to pass it on to us. When we got rid of him, the ego imagined that it alone could invent and possess this set of world-creating and world-controlling formulae.

Our doctrine of mechanism, our materialism, our determinism, our mechanical logic, our mathematics – all these are the last refinements of the same essential impetus: the impetus to control reality by means of right speech, right action and right method. Knowledge ‘that’, we believed, inevitably entailed knowledge ‘how’. The modern ego still clings obsessively to this idea, but something of the conviction has gone out of it as we become aware of our destructiveness. The post-modern world suspects that there is no absolutely right method and that even our precious scientific method has its disadvantages. It has realised that all methods can be deconstructed to reveal a particular agenda of the human species – usually to do with the gaining or retaining of power. At all events, the deconstruction of method shows that there has to be a response to reality that is beyond method. Why is this so? Because methodical approaches to reality are driven by ideology and the ideological assumptions that drive the method bring distortions in the results.

A non-methodical approach to reality is one in which there are no presuppositions, no unconscious assumptions, no ideological prejudices but simply an authentic, total response dictated by the nature of the self. We need not suppose that this response will be ‘objective’ in the sense that the thing-ideology imagines to be possible. But that in no sense means that the response is mere ‘subjectivity’ and thus not reliable, not to be trusted. Trust, here, is the operative word. We have to trust the self, rather than putting faith in this or that fashionable method. This is particularly true when we approach the current ethical crisis of mankind which boils down to our understanding that our favoured method of understanding – the scientific – can never make us good. The ethical crisis exists not because we do not know how to do right, but because all our ideologies and methods of defining the right have failed to convince us on the one hand, and – more importantly – because our favoured method of deciding all issues – the scientific – is incapable on the other hand of deciding ethical issues. And yet, once we have ditched all ideologies and methods of finding the right, we still know how to do it. We know what the right is even when the ego impels us to do the opposite. We do not know the Good abstractly in the Platonic sense; but we do know it practically, as in Aristotelian notions of virtue once they are stripped of the element social conditioning. Once we have realised that it is in the nature of the self creatively to understand the right, the next stage in the process has to be the realisation that all our methods of finding the good and the right, have so far been dictated by the rational ego. They thus bear all the hallmarks of the ego’s influence: all our deontological and consequentialist methods of ethical enquiry, from divine command to utilitarianism, are ultimately disguised forms of egoism since they aim at control. In transcending the ego, we transcend them, too.

It is clearly the spontaneous creative response of the self that ultimately generates all knowledge and therefore all ethical knowledge. This total response is not under our rational control, any more than our emotions are. We convince ourselves that our beliefs arise in purely rational ways; but they don’t – particularly not our ethical beliefs. These arise – as does all other knowledge – as a result of the confluence of self and world. Emotions are inseparable parts of this process; and they do not conform to a method. Moreover, in admitting the emotions to the cognitive process, we assent to our essential lack of control over that process. But that is how it should be, since our creativity cannot be commanded by us. How the confluence of self and world operates is not clear to us, we are afraid of not feeling in full control of it, and for that reason we remain stuck in rationalisations. But it is obvious to anyone whose mind is not completely corroded by rationalisation that the confluence of self and world happens: there is an interchange between self and world that results in the creative insight and in the new structures that we call ‘knowledge’. It also happens in the behaviours that we regard as ‘right’ or ‘good’. The old myth of complete objectivity, according to which the observing subject has no properties at all, cannot and should not be sustained – particularly not in ethical reasoning. Objectivity – the view that there is an absolute divorce between subject and object – is a simple distortion of the way our minds encounter the world and the way the world manipulates our minds. The mind-world distinction is a vitally necessary one, but it has to be admitted that fundamentally such a distinction is a convenient fiction. What we have in the mind-world interaction is a single, seamless process.

In order for such a set of ideas to have force and value, we have to understand that self and world are anyway so intimately related that they are inseparably entangled. The modern intellectual climate, created by the ego, has so separated the self from the world that produced it and in which it derives its being that the self has no place at all in the world, it is an anomaly, an inappropriate monster, an outcast, an abortion. Only as the qualityless subject of observation, the completely vacuous, staring, empty eye of so-called ‘objectivity’, only as the Faustian ‘experimenter’ or the ‘researcher’ or the ‘investigator’ can the subject continue its insubstantial existence. As a self whose very being in the world requires a sense of meaningful relation to that world, the subject of materialistic rationalism has no status whatsoever.

Now this state of affairs is clearly deeply silly, since not only is the self constituted by a world, the world is only structured by a self. The effort to wrench the two apart in the interest of so-called ‘objectivity’ is near psychotic. The purposes that appeal to the self in its ethical thought are therefore part of the dynamics of the self-world connection. They are not simply features either of the self or of the world. There is no absolute vantage-point (be that within a method or within an observer) from which the real structure of the world might be supposed to be revealed. All observation of the world is from a point of view and from within a particular frame. That frame is inevitably provided by the self. There is no other vantage known to us. Thus all worlds that the self can conceive inevitably owe their structure to the nature of the self as well as to the nature of the world. The modern world is structured by the ego and its predatory emotions. There is no better illustration of the ruinous effects of this than modern tyrannies, presided over by puffed-up egoistic dictators of the most uncreative, inhumane, arrogant and rationalistic sort. The whole self, however, has emotions which are not those of the ego, not egoistic, not ‘selfish’ but essentially collaborative and the world that it structures is necessarily structured by them. The creative gains of modern democracies derive from this source. It is the self that knows the right; it is the ego that tries to possess and control the right by means of method and ends up thinking and doing the wrong.

Clearly, the one set of motives (same root as ‘emotion’) structures the world differently from the other. A world structured largely by a need to control the other – as is the case with the ego’s world – is fundamentally different from a world structured by trust for example. If we absolutely must have our mechanisations – and there is no doubt that they are useful – we should hold them heuristically without taking them too seriously. We could then use our mechanisations for exploration while retaining in some other type of model the full, rounded, whole response to reality of the whole self which is essentially one of trust. If we do not do this, we will continue to find that ethics is impossible. The sterile mechanical world of the ego has outlived its usefulness. The means of its abolition must be the experience of wholeness: wholeness of self and wholeness of world. The two are one and the same. The self cannot inhabit a world of impersonal fragments, for such a world ends up damaging the self. The self has to belong to its world – intimately. Conscious awareness is always a relation, whether we like it or not. It is a mirror of the self-world connection; and if we mechanise the world, we mechanise both the self and the other and cripple the self-world relation. The dimensionality of that relation is far more than we suspect; but one thing is certain: the relation of self to others cannot flourish except as an expression of the total self in its relation to a total world. Relations to others that are driven by ideology or method are more prevalent than one would think and they are invariably destructive.

Behind the notion of a total response of the self to the world is a very old idea: the idea of man as the microcosm, mirroring the macrocosm. The methodical, mechanising, repetition-obsessed ego structures the scientific world-picture for the most part and that has resulted in a distortion. The distortion is entirely due to the fact that the ego is only a small, split-off portion of the self, and a primitive one at that. All views of the world structured by the ego’s fear-impelled mechanisations are necessarily going to be distortions; and this is a fortiori true of views of other persons. Only the total self can create a total world. Ethics, moreover, can only be intelligently practised within the context of a total world and by a total self. The discovery of the total self involves a discovery of the emotional depths that relate us, that always have related us and all non-human creatures, to each other and to our environment. The emotional depths determine our spirituality. We are animated by a deep need to relate emotionally to any world in which we live as if to another self. If we fail to do this, we dehumanise ourselves in proportion as we despiritualise the world. The simple truth is this: we cannot live in a despiritualised world. Such a world does not suit our self and when our self inhabits a world in which it is uneasy, it is truly ill at ease. It is subject to malaise, sickness, pathologies of various kinds and pathological behaviours. If ‘spirituality’ means anything, it means being connected, related, sustained and emotionally fulfilled by the world that the self inhabits. It is futile for the ego to riposte that the world is an unspiritual place: it is the ego and its methods that have made it thus and nothing obliges us to continue with the ego’s delusions. For a truly effective ethics we need in some way to respiritualise the world. There is no purely methodical, rational (read ‘objective’ or ‘unemotional’) way to practise ethics because the relation that is required cannot be subject to rules: it has to be creative. Creativity is the inner connection between self and world.

It is only in the discovery of the intimate creative relation between self and world that something like the self’s understanding of its onward destiny can be gained. The self provides the frame from within which the universe is viewed, the point of view from which the universe is understood. But far from being a qualityless observer, the self is in dynamic interchange with the world and is, by that token, part of the universal process of change. This is the essence of time. The confluence between self and world not only reconstitutes the world, it also potentially reconfigures the self. Only the ego clings to a crazy belief in acquiring a definitive state of knowledge and control of the world by observance of the right method.

The self cannot remain in or return to former states in its evolution. There is no such thing as arrival and no such thing as repetition. That constitutes the irreversible nature of real, deep time as opposed to the reversible time of mechanistic models of the universe. The belief that one can control the creativity of deep time is a redundant delusion. The self of the twenty-first century cannot be the same as even the self of the twentieth. The wave-front of reality is perpetually moving on to a new, unique position. As the locus of evolution in the human species, the self is a changing structure; it is constantly being created and re-created as it discovers the deepening relation between it and its world. The self does not discover ‘the world’ as such, except in a transferred sense. The self discovers the world that it is able to discover at any one point in its evolution. Of course, it makes contact with the world as such, but only with that portion of it that it can conceive and grasp at any particular stage in its development. The world in itself remains hidden and subject to an inscrutable principle of change. Nevertheless, in understanding the intimacy of the relation between the creativity of the world and the creativity of the self, the process of cognitive advance can be sustained without the need for certainty, without the need for a terminus, since it is sustained by a connection the is based upon trust.

The perpetual development of the self makes it nonsensical to talk as if the self had an absolute vantage-point, a God’s-eye view of the other. There is no more reason for this belief than there is for our old, long-abandoned conviction that we viewed the universe from a point of absolute spatial centrality or absolute temporal actuality. The scientific ego of the last three centuries is a passing configuration of the self, and a particularly restricted one at that, since it carries with it all the dangers of exclusive dogmatism to which the ego is prone. Its vantage-point is therefore considerably more of a distortion than the vantage-point of any previous types of self. The benefits of this distortion in terms of sharp focus and increased comfort are real, but we can no longer maintain the distortion for reasons of comfort alone, since our comfort now depends upon our moral attitudes and not just on the satisfaction of our physical needs. The speculative self of the Ancient Greeks, the religious self of the Medievals – these are more rounded selves than the modern scientific ego. The strength of the scientific ego is its ability to force consensus concerning its mechanical obsessions through maths and logic; but it can only do that with essentially similar kinds of self, with the ‘emotionless’, objectifying selves which believe the thing-ideology. But the point being made here is that the rational ego, despite the vast accomplishments due to its specialisation, has produced a distortion that now has to be put right, or else we perish. The scientific ego has to be put in its place and the total self with all its collaborative responses to reality re-discovered. This is the challenge of ethics in our time: to rediscover our creative connectedness to reality.

The sense that one’s self is inseparable from one’s world, that self and world are one and interdependent, is a very ancient state of consciousness. But it is precisely this that we have to re-discover on a higher turn – a post-egoistic turn – of the developmental spiral. If this is mysticism, then so be it, but ‘mysticism’ is in fact the wrong word, for it has the same origin as ‘mystification’. It should rather be seen as what Bohm calls ‘transparentism’, for in it the self-world relation becomes completely self-evident and the benefits of its discovery also become completely self-evident.

The specific problem of ethics.

The ego looms large in ethics of whatever coloration. In modern ethics the fundamental issue is the extent to which an individual chooses to act egoistically or not. To act egoistically one has to follow the dictates of the ego. One has to believe that one is an ego. That is to say, one has to be mistaken in one’s conception of oneself. In Greek ethics, it was naively assumed that enlightened self-interest, the pursuit of happiness, was the main issue; and for that reason, Greek systems of ethics had the character of egoistic eudaimonism. The question was, ‘how can I maximise my happiness?’ rather than ‘how can happiness be maximised?’ Nowadays, the word ‘egoism’ does not imply any particular value-judgement in philosophy, though in unphilosophical circles it may. There are those for whom the term can only be used in a positive sense, as in ‘rational egoism’ and there are those for whom the concept is almost a form of abuse. For some, the egoist is a kind of monster; for others the egoist, if left to go about his or her egoistic business rationally, will actually end up fostering the benefit of all. John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith (and more recently, Margaret Thatcher) were among the most famous defenders of this sort of notion. For those who discover the self, the ego is intrinsically neither good nor bad, but damaging if its value is overestimated. The ego is a structure that fosters the interests of a highly evolved mammal; but the mammal in question no longer needs to rationalise its animal passions (lust for power, territoriality, sexual conquest etc.) since it has the means at its disposal to leave those practically useful beliefs behind and develop a more capacious consciousness. In thinking of ourselves as an ego, we distort ourselves to a dangerous degree and that distortion shows up in our efforts to develop a rational (i.e. controlling) ethics.

The fundamental question in ethics has become, ‘why altruism?’ We are concerned, it must be emphasised, with ethics – i.e., the regulation by the individual of his or her behaviour towards others – and not with legislation – i.e., the regulation of a society by means of laws and sanctions imposed on its members. The confusion of these two different things lies at the heart of our modern moral confusion. Good legislation is ultimately rooted in ethics; but ethics is not about social regulation. Social regulation reflects the ethical considerations of society members; but ethics comes first and is fundamentally – as the word itself suggests – about regulation of individual life, about character. The character of the self is to know how to do good; the character of the ego is to try and control the good.

Aristotle had it right. Ethics is fundamentally about the development of a full humanity. Development is the issue, not the sort of stasis that the ego envisions. The human individual cannot be fully human without a dynamic connection to other human beings and to reality as a whole. We can only love ourselves if we love our neighbour, and vice versa. The reason for this is that there is no fundamental separation between self and others. So much is clear from our relation to our ‘nearest and dearest’ (for we are not only finite but very limited); but it can also become clear, at least intellectually, with respect to the whole of mankind and the natural world. The extent of an individual’s humanity would therefore seem to depend very much on the extent and richness of the connection to others. This entails far more than mere restrictions on egoism. It has much more to do with a creative self-project in which the creativity in question consists in the self’s growing awareness of being created by the universal process of uninterrupted creativity that is the world. Since the world is not mechanical, creativity cannot be reduced to rules, so it would seem that the desire to reduce ethics to a code of rules is simply misguided. Rules may indicate something of the character of this creativity; they cannot capture its essence. This essence has to do with the understanding that the same self is instantiated in all human beings and all are – consciously or unconsciously – expressions of universal creativity.

Natural history documentaries are a popular offering in the media, but we often fail to spot the wilful anthropomorphism that is implicit in the ‘stories’ told by the voice-over, particularly when what is shown is the life of the higher mammals. The animals are often being used, tacitly, not only to tell a tale, but also to make a moral point. Sometimes the moral point is that animals can be nice and cuddly and exhibit traits strikingly similar to human virtues; but sometimes the point is that the animals show up the ‘dark’ side of nature, and possibly of humankind, in their predatory, perfidious, selfish mode. We see films of chimpanzees turning from their peaceful grooming of each other’s fur and from their vegetarian diet to form ‘ferocious’, co-ordinated marauding bands of monkey-hunters, that tear their prey from limb to limb and devour the flesh with ‘grisly enthusiasm’. We then see father gorillas at one point dandling their young on their knees, playing with them with all the ‘tenderness’ and ‘delighted affection’ of a devoted human father and then aggressively charging a rival, teeth bared and drumming his chest to intimidate. Noble savage and King Kong. We then draw the conclusions from these two different sets of images that our nearest cousins in the non-human animal world combine in their range of behaviour aggressively violent urges and peaceful, generous tendencies. Which of the two we choose to emphasise is largely a matter of taste. The lesson at all events seems to be that humanity, too, is both thuggishly predatory and peaceably collaborative.

And indeed, this would seem to be the case when one considers the history of the social order and of the ethical codes that have developed with it. Interest has always seemed to have centred on stably inhibiting the lusts of the human animal. Our interest here, however, is not so much with traditional ethical theories of the deontological (i.e the ‘thou shalt’) type. These usually bolstered their claims by appeals to ultimate metaphysical authorities and were as unconvincing as the efforts of modern western ethical codes which are saddled with the problem of ‘proving’ themselves by means of a language that can only describe the disposition of objects in space. Modern ethics tries in vain to prop itself up with various types of ‘proof’ as if rules for living could be arrived at in the same way that theoretical knowledge of ‘facts’ is established. Since there are no certain facts about the universe, it seems bizarre to expect any certainty from ethical rules. Yet we are still searching for just this certainty. This is because same ideology governs our attempts to establish a convincing ethical code as governs our collecting of scientific knowledge. The same ego-driven obsession with repeatable rules and control governs both. Needless to say, the shortcomings of our scientific method are greatly amplified when we try to apply it to matters of such ‘unreality’ as ‘the way the world or our lives in it should be’. The rational ego entirely lacks the intellectual means for dealing with this should except as the more or less disguised compulsion of rules, codes of practice and laws.

Modern ethical codes essentially fall into two categories, the descriptive and the non-descriptive. The descriptive codes try to derive their rules and guidelines from a ‘naturalistic’, i.e. scientific portrayal of how humans have evolved to live together and how compromise and mutual respect seem to be basic requirements for any sort of stable social structure. All of these are more or less confused as ethics since they suffer from the logical handicap that values cannot be derived from facts. No ‘ought’ from ‘is. Facts imply no values; and so prescriptions cannot be derived from descriptions. The non-descriptive codes, on the other hand usually hope to find the means by which humans may be forced by rational proof to obey rules that they would not otherwise respect, just as in science they may be forced to believe things they would otherwise not believe. The descriptive theories try to derive the inductive ‘evidence’ for their case from what appears to be ‘good’ practice in human groups, that is to say, useful practice that permits the widest range of chosen behaviour with the minimum of restrictions, the greatest possible complexity in unity. The non-descriptive theories, by contrast, try to derive their rules and principles by logic itself and try to demonstrate, according to some premise (rationality, respect for persons, God etc.) that it is somehow contradictory for any one member of a given group to want to indulge in practices that he or she is not prepared to permit to others. The metaphysical beliefs that underpin such systems, however, have to be taken on trust.

But our concern here must not be with the competition between two types of rival theories but rather with the phenomenon of ethical rule-making as such. Why is it that the human animal feels obliged to give itself (or rather the other) mechanical rules for living? The non-human animals have no need for rules, in the sense of sets of sentences prescribing codified instructions. How could they, since they don’t have sentences in which to codify their rules? For us, these sentences are a sub-group of all the sentences that we as a species think of as ‘knowledge’: they constitute a special kind of knowledge, namely of what actions are to be desired or what actions are in our interest. As such, they suffer from the same shortcomings of all propositional knowledge: they serve the ego and its ambitions for ever more power and control.

There is, of course, a large body of philosophical and scientific opinion that states categorically that no sentence of an ethical type can constitute knowledge, simply because knowledge is a matter of describing contingent facts or stating logical tautologies whereas ethics is a matter of enunciating values and values are neither self-evident truths nor observable entities. The non-descriptive ethical theories may agree with this analysis in concentrating on trying to argue for moral precepts in ways that make no appeal to facts. The descriptive ethical theories, on the other hand, try to describe the facts in such a way that they seem to suggest by themselves that certain types of rules are desirable or necessary, given our needs and wishes for certain ends. But behind both types of theory, there is the notion that rational discourse with practical significance can only be about states of affairs one can actually observe: now what one actually observes is just the disposition of objects in space and no more. Since no principles that value one state of affairs over another can actually be observed, as the arrangement of objects in space is contemplated, no evaluative principles can, by definition, be talked about rationally. It does not need a great deal of thought to see that this kind of restriction of the ethical debate is driven, as is so much in our culture, by the thing-ideology and by the belief that only mechanical states of affairs can be the subject of rational discourse. The upshot of this culturally determined inability to talk about what is of most interest to human beings – namely the value, sense and purpose of human life – is the existence of two equally defective types of ethical system, both of which are skewed by the same restrictive view of the world, by the same defective belief concerning the sorts of entities that are supposed to be in it.

The two types of system of ethical precept-making are: 1) those that simply state flatly what is normative according to some metaphysical principle; and 2) those systems that argue from observation. The arguments in the first systems are essentially deductive and the will of the human being exposed to these rules is supposed to be inclined to bow to the force of logic and accordingly follow the rules. The other system of ethical precepts argues empirically, according to the facts of the matter and draws the conclusion that, given the nature of the facts, such and such a set of rules needs to be agreed or imposed by the majority of the group and the uncooperative minority can justifiably be punished or otherwise eliminated. Both types of system rely rather optimistically on the belief that the ability to know what is ‘good’ determines the will to choose it.

Most ordinary, unphilosophical people, however, are unaware of their ‘confusion’ in matters ethical and cheerfully use both types of argument even though logically speaking they are mutually exclusive. Most people will happily argue from principle and from the facts at the same time. For example they might say: “you can’t tell lies, because dishonesty is just wrong, and anyway, human life would be impossible if you couldn’t trust anybody.” The first part of the sentence argues deontologically from metaphysical principle and the second part consequentially from supposed facts. And indeed, ordinary moral debate throughout modern western society is characterised by this sort of confusion. On the one hand, for example, grand principles are enunciated to justify rules, such as, ‘the rights of man’, ‘respect for persons’, ‘ the sanctity of life’, ‘equality of opportunity’ and so on; and on the other we talk of ‘what is good for society’, what is ‘useful’, what the ‘majority thinks’ or what is ‘in the interests of everyone’. This confusion, it must be said, is only troubling to philosophers who are concerned to come up, as in all systems of knowledge, with a coherent and consistent set of propositions from which all the rules of morality can be derived. They want to ‘prove’ that one set of rules is binding on everyone, either because of its logical force or because of its derivation from the facts of human life. This would constitute objective ethical knowledge analogous to objective scientific knowledge. Needless to say, no agreement has ever been reached on any single coherent set of precepts arguing from any single set of premises. No one thinks to reflect that it is the aim of discovering the definitive set of rules and the method adopted to accomplish this that are at fault. Thus we are left with the actual situation in which we allow ourselves to argue from two quite different and mutually exclusive sets of premises. That shouldn’t really matter, since physics does the same and relies upon there being a deeper consistency than would be achieved by opting for one side or the other. But we don’t do this in ethics: we still strive for the complete coherent set of rules. The question is, why do we need any provable rules in the first place, why can’t we just do without them altogether? The discovery of definitive laws of nature is looking increasingly like a pipe-dream; why then should we suppose that moral rules are decidable?

The search for scientific knowledge seems predicated on the assumption that the final goal of this search is to discover the ultimate mechanism governing the universe, the mechanism that will demonstrate that all reality is a mechanism. We have attributed this particular striving to the ego’s desire to control things. If ethical knowledge has any similarity at all to scientific knowledge, then mechanism and ego-ambition would seems to feed the arrière-pensée here, too. The strangest thing about all of this striving is that the possibility of a mechanised human life within the context of a mechanical world appears to be an attractive notion to the ego. It becomes less strange when one understands that it is attractive to the ego because it is a method of controlling others. A little imagination and a little passion for the human condition are enough to convince one that such nightmarish fantasies are repellent in the extreme. They are the basis of what journalists with shaky knowledge of Greek derivations call the ‘dystopic’ visions of the future found in many novels such as those of Zamyatin, Orwell, Huxley, and many others. The ego’s desire to control, to inhibit other egos fuels such fantasies. The ego never desires to inhibit itself but merely to neutralise the competition. Thus anarchism has always been understandably favoured by those who tend to see the negative side of the desire to control, whether by education or by laws. But as with all these polarising and divisive styles of thought, it appears to be basic misconceptions concerning the nature of the self and of reality that keep them alive.

Societies have throughout the ages been structured according to rules and members of those societies have always fallen, from time to time or habitually, into two banal groups: rule-keepers and rule-breakers. But it is impossible to equate the former with the ethically good and the latter with their opposite. Much of the highly ‘moral’ behaviour in traditional societies – the ferocious punishments for example – are now regarded as immoral, just as much traditionally ‘immoral’ behaviour is seen as liberating and therefore moral. The reason for this is that we are increasingly troubled by the difference between morality and keeping rules. Indeed, we know that morality and rule-keeping are different. In most societies before the arrival on the scene of modern western ‘scientific’ ways of viewing the world, the rules were derived from principle and generally from allegedly ‘divine’ principle: everyone just had to act in a certain way, because that was the way of the world, the ordained order of things. Those failing to toe the line were generally treated harshly. The supposed origin of the rules in the divine mind made them particularly binding and their non-respect particularly heinous. The sanctions for not obeying them were often therefore correspondingly ferocious. And this can still be observed in sharia-dominated Muslim societies. It seems that from the emergence of societies of any complexity at all, complex enough to require detailed guidelines for behaviour of their members, this was the pattern of rule-making. It was only with the arrival of scientific modes of discourse and their rise to the position of unique authority that they now hold in the western mind, that the problem of how rationally to justify the rules of human life arose. It seemed that rules ought to have scientific backing, too. We are now in a situation in western democracies, however – where the ultimate moral authority is supposed to be not the voice of God, but the voice of the majority – where we find it impossible to found our basic moral and legal principles on science at all. We threw out the voice of God because the ego found the notion of omnipotent competition intolerable. The ego tried logic and empiricism as a means to impose its will, but this didn’t work either. And so we are left with the current practice of not looking too closely at how we arrive at our rules. It is our confusion that allows us to use ‘contradictory’ principles. Fortunately, however, there is another route to ethics that relies neither on logic nor empiricism: the ethical codes that arise spontaneously as universal features of human social life do not need proving in order to be of service. Recognising desirable human behaviour has always been an act of the creative imagination and has operated wherever homo sapiens and maybe other species have lived in groups. This ability of the human species has never been in doubt; it is the codification of ethical theory that has distorted and often perverted the pure instinctive capacity of moral judgement. There is world of difference between instinctively recognising and disapproving the injurious nature of theft, on the one hand, and announcing that thieves have to be fined, imprisoned, mutilated, killed or condemned to everlasting torment in Hell, on the other.

But this question remains: why have people throughout the ages felt the need for rules? And why have they always felt the need to justify those rules by some sort of argument? The principal reason is the tendency of the human individual to operate according to a set of beliefs that prop up the ego’s need for control and the persona’s attachment to appearance. Such principles are still at work in the modern Muslim theocratic states such as Iran and Saudi Arabia with their policing of people’s morals. Since the ego associates itself closely and uncritically with what, on the basis of its emotions, it values most – in Islam, the Koran – and since it desires above all control, its most fervent wish is to impose cooperation in its designs upon others. This is the source of much ethical rule-making and therefore of conflict.

Both the ego and the persona are structures laid over the self in order to facilitate the satisfaction of desires, wishes and lusts, or to enable the realisations of plans, designs, projects or intentions. These desires and designs have their origin in human ‘nature’ and that would seem to suggest that they are purely ‘natural’ phenomena. This is not necessarily the case, however, for desires and designs are often constructed socially and bolstered by purely social pressures. They can be entirely ‘artificial’. Nevertheless, certain desires and designs are common to all human beings and can be regarded as ‘natural’. These include sexual wishes, needs for nutrition and shelter, but also desire for power and influence, wishes to eliminate competitors possessing the same desires and designs and the like. Both the ego and the persona are structures that can facilitate the integration of the self in question into the social structure in which it finds itself. But this integration is not necessarily achieved. The ego and the persona can also serve to facilitate the satisfaction of wishes and the achievement of designs that militate against the structure of the ambient society. It is for this latter reason that those who wish to organise the lives of others deem rules and sanctions to be necessary or useful. It is then from the tension between the ‘good’ ego that obeys the rules and the ‘bad’ ego that wishes to break them that all the hypocrisy of social behaviour results.

It is the supposed selfishness and the supposed dissimulation of the human animal vis-à-vis its fellows that makes rule-making and rule-observing a vital part of human groups. The ego is insatiable; but the resources available are finite. The desires of one ego have therefore to be weighed against the desires of all other egos, for the ego cannot abide the thought of not permitting to itself what others permit to themselves. The question is, is there any other substance to ethical sentence-spinning? Is there not perhaps a wider or more fundamental purpose involved? Could it be that preventing selfishness and deception and the resulting predatory exploitation are not the only purposes of morality? These may be the principal purposes of the laws of a society, but morality is an altogether different matter. Could it not be that the inner purpose of morality, far from merely guaranteeing stability in society, is to provide a structure to human existence in which life itself has meaning, purpose and direction? If this is so, morality is of a piece with creativity and externally imposed rules are quite inappropriate to both.

Morality as a striving that serves the growth of consciousness beyond the ego.

We have got away from the traditional conception of morality, where observances of various kinds integrated the observant individual into the order of things as a whole. The reason for which we have got away from this conception of morality is again the thing-ideology and the obsession with a granular or atomic structure to the world. Each human individual who firmly believes in the thing-ideology and who considers him- or herself, by that token, as a thing, will tend to be convinced that his or her only duty is the fostering of the interests that are properties of that thing that is his or her self. The thing-ideology is incapable of comprehending any reasons for which wholes are referred to as wholes and not simply as collections of parts. Thus ‘society’ simply means a collection of egoistic selves. ‘Community’ means the same thing. The two words are empty as Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of Britain so cheerfully pointed out. And her economists cheered her on. The dynamics of such societies and such communities are thus seen by the thing-ideology as entirely driven by the dynamics of the ego. It is therefore time we got back to a conception of morality that related it closely to spirituality and personal growth.

The ego is a selfish entity and will always seek its own interests. Thus, since no single ego is more important than any other ego, this selfishness has to inhibit itself or be inhibited in the interests of all the other, equally demanding egos that go to make up the group. But it is the inhibition of selfishness that counts and not anything else. The selfishness of the ego and the deceitfulness of the persona are thus the principal reasons for any rule-making. This fragmentary view of human groups is the dominant view in the modern west, though, as we have seen, there is some hang-over still detectable from a former age when morality was a matter of conformity by means of non-egoistic principles of one sort or another to some super-ordinate, overarching totality believed to be the ‘right’ order of reality.

The question is, is there any possible sense in a principle that is not simply that of inhibiting the essential selfishness of the human ego? The ego is at fault not only in the keeping or breaking of rules, but also in the manner in which they are arrived at. It is also at fault in the modern world in setting impossible ‘scientific’ conditions upon the ethical striving of humanity. Is there then any possibility of a morality that tends in the direction of forging wholes out of groups of human individuals, wholes that are true wholes possessing emergent properties and that are not simply the accumulated effects of the properties of the parts? Is there any sense in morality that makes wholes composed of many individual humans more than the sum of their parts, that makes wholes ends in themselves in the manner in which the ego regards itself as an end in itself? Is there any sense in which morality does for the group what desires and designs do for the individual self? The thing-ideology, with its reductive atomism, cannot understand this possibility at all; but this in itself may be sufficient reason to drop the thing-ideology as our exclusive method of approach to reality. If we do not find a morality that relates us to the world, we are finished. In dropping the thing-ideology, shedding our egoism may become that much easier. If there could be such a ‘holistic’ approach to morality and ethical sentence-spinning, how could it work?

The ego and its self-centred dynamics are fairly easy to understand in accordance with the materialistic-mechanistic-deterministic dogmatics of the thing-ideology. What we need to understand is the possibility of dynamics that are not self-focused at all, but that tend to foster the creation of cohesive, collaborative groupings. Freud postulated not only ego-instincts, the selfish lust for personal pleasure, but also the wider effects of the libido – of ‘Eros’ as he called it, using a quasi-mythical term – that were visible in the tendency of matter to bind itself into ever more complex unities: cells, multi-cellular organisms, troupes, herds, families, societies, and finally the world-community. We have seen something similar in the work of biologist Stuart Kauffman. But Freud’s theory was a mechanistic one and the thing-ideology was not able to accept the postulate of a mysterious life-force acting in addition to the simple mechanics of particulate matter. Modern physics, however, and the kind of complexity theory that Kauffman uses, have come up with a new conception of the mechanics of matter that does allow thinking of wholes in terms of ever more complex and ever more unified aggregations of material systems. Of course, one has to drop the conception of reality as a collection of three-dimensional objects and begin to work with a conception of matter that regards each unit under consideration – even down to the fundamental units of the so-called ‘strings’ that are the ultimate constituents of matter – as essentially reflective of the whole, analogously to the hologram, each part of which contains the whole. This way of looking at the holistic emergence of ever more complex unities in nature, from the bacterium to the human brain, is able to break the stranglehold that the thing-ideology has over our minds and permit the postulation of forces that are not simply those of the unit, the atom or whatever ‘thing’ you want to designate as your fundamental ‘particle’-component, ‘causing’ the dynamics of whatever system you want to consider.

To consider society as driven entirely by the dynamics of the atomic ego and by the various devices needed to restrain it, is a niggardly and unnecessarily reductive approach. The holistic approach could consider other phenomena of human society, namely those that tend to indicate a non-egoistic force that achieves ever greater unity in diversity, simply by virtue of the intelligence of the system as a whole rather than that of its individual parts. Why, after all, should intelligence be entirely the prerogative of the human brain? We attribute intelligence to creatures ‘below’ humanity on the evolutionary scale, why can we not attribute intelligence to, let’s say, human groups? Why can we not postulate a sort of group intelligence that is different from and superior to the intelligence of the individual member? We regard animals as mechanisms impelled by sub-mechanisms that we call ‘instincts’ without knowing really what we are talking about. Why should we not see animals as sensitively operating according to the intelligence of those systems upon which they depend? Why should we not see certain humans as sensitive in a similar fashion? The ego closes itself off from any such input by its egoistic beliefs; but it is entirely possible that the ‘benevolent’, ‘selfless’, ‘saintly’ giants of human morality have possessed a consciousness of the intrinsic intelligence of the human species, a consciousness that is conceivably clouded or obscured by the centripetal desires of the ego. Why should ethical thought not reflect the expansion of consciousness that one is able to observe in the evolution of species and societies? The thing-ideology has permitted the creation of a technological paraphernalia that has immeasurably extended our senses and physical capacities and immeasurably enhanced the physical possibilities of life. On the other hand, its attendant egoism has stunted us morally and taken away any possibility of talking intelligently about the constructive, collaborative forces (or ‘virtues’) that foster the cohesion of human groups and that by increasing the complexity of those groups and enhancing their power also vastly augments the potential of existence to acquire meaning, sense and direction. It is a sad feature of modern ethical theories that it is primarily the destructive (vicious) forces that they elucidate. Only virtue-theory does not do this; but it is decried by (ego-inspired) theoreticians as defective because it cannot compel anyone to do anything. But only virtue-theory is holistic in relating moral principles to the actual character of being in the world. Rather than trying rationally to compel, it presents a choice: do this and flourish, do the other thing and perish.

Ethics as a matter of ‘scientifically’ established rules for ego-inhibition is a waste of time. Holism should be given its head in ethics. We should be able to talk in terms of whole patterns of behaviour that regulate the dynamic relation of self to others. Once the ego’s creations, the thing-ideology, the reductive spirit and the mechanistic dogma have been put in their place, the holistic intuitions can be allowed to flourish and the moral crisis of the west, in which we find ourselves incapable of arguing persuasively for any principle of ethics apart from egoism and the inhibition of egoism, can be perhaps overcome. What is needed, in fact, is no more than a change of mind, a shift in fundamental outlook, a change from the thing-ideology to a preparedness to consider nature as a whole hierarchy of nested wholes. Of course, this involves looking at units not simply in terms of the properties of their parts. It involves attributing intrinsic order to units that are in some sense ‘greater’ than or ‘superior’ to the human individual. Virtues are regulated not by individual wishes but by the dynamics of the whole of human society. We have to attribute intrinsic order to groups, to processes and even to nature as a whole, if we are to postulate a more than egoistic ethics. Some ordering force (why not just call it ‘intelligence’ or ‘creation’?) produces the synthesis of emergent wholes that is not just the dynamics of the parts.

The thing-ideology maintains that only the dynamics of the parts can be taken into consideration, but not only is it a logical howler to say “because the parts are thus, the whole is thus,” it manifestly does not have to be the case. We no longer have to think of the thing-ideology as the only possible approach to reality. This change of mind may be sufficient to break our habit of always trying to solve problems by reductive arguments. In reductionism, very often our solutions become part of the problem because we are fundamentally confused about ourselves and about our connection with our fellows and with the world. If the universe as a whole is a co-ordinated energy-field, in which no part is fundamentally separate and in which each part is in dynamic, informed contact with every other part, then we can begin to regard the emergence of more complex wholes as the work of an intelligence that, while not human, nevertheless can be considered as working in human intelligence to foster its evolution to higher states of unity in complexity, higher states of consciousness. If we begin to think of the universe as intelligently coordinated and as composed of systems that are intelligently coordinated, then we will have achieved an important mindshift with implications for all areas of thought but particularly for ethics. Obviously this is not a proposal for another method of writing yet more rules

If rules are not what we need (except in legislation), what is the nature of ethical proposition-making? The answer seems to be: the expression and exploration of the virtues as creative, emergent, holistic, innovatory forces. This expression would be a kind of psychology; but a non-reductive psychology, future-directed and to that extent teleological. Thus altruism, love, generosity, kindness, benevolence, humanity, compassion, and all the other social, cohesive ‘virtues’ can be seen not just as woolly attitudes, but as forms of intelligence above, and superior to, that of egoism, rather than as anomalies to be explained away by reductive sophistry. It is simply not intelligent to consider the rational ego and its (unacknowledged) desires and designs as the sole repository of intelligence in the world. Of course the ego is bolstered in its self-belief by the thing-ideology and this ideology will always argue in its own favour because that suits the ego. That is the self-perpetuating and self-validating nature of this particular prejudice. But a simple effort of the imagination, a simple preparedness to gamble in favour of the holistic view of things may be all we need to break out of the vicious circle of the ego-driven thing-ideology and the morality of rules. We need a more contemplative, listening attitude to both ourselves and to nature as a whole. We need a more meditative, unhurried attitude to what the self if left to itself finds ‘obvious’. It may well be that a generalised meditative attitude would foster creative solutions to social and political problems that are currently impossible given the reductive, ego-driven methods in use. The ego will never be convinced that it simply ‘has to’ act in a particular way, if it does not particularly want to act in that way, simply because the wants and aims of the soul-atom are, according to the thing-ideology, ultimately and uniquely authoritative, just as the wishes of the monotheistic God (a kind of gigantic ego) were uniquely authoritative. Everyone knows what the virtues are and why they are of value. There is no dispute about this. Trying to reduce these constructive patterns of behaviour to rules is simply not necessary. The only rule would thus appear to be: ‘act in accordance with the virtues’.

It is the thing-ideology that has made ethical debate so problematic and there is no reason to perpetuate this. The European ego is still listening nostalgically to the last reverberations of the anthropomorphic, monotheistic, legislative conception of the divine and hoping to hang on to its authority. This should be allowed to die away along with all its predecessors. The new conception of the divine, if we need one, would be the simple perception that the whole is more than the sum of its parts and that nature exhibits intelligence – for example in the concept of ‘virtue’ that seems to be present in all societies without exception – in ways that cannot be grasped except by holistic, non-reductive, non objectifying means that abandon the thing-ideology in matters moral altogether. After all, it was the thing-ideology that created the moral crisis of the west in the first place, by announcing that only things could be talked about intelligently. Seeing nature as a totality of nested processes, some of which surpass our understanding, but which we can nevertheless consider as intelligent, would be a very salutary state of mind to adopt for the purposes of ethics.

Seeing nature as bound together in ever greater complex unities by a dynamism, by a creative ‘playfulness’ (lila is the Sanskrit word) that seems to have value built into it (or ‘dynamic quality’ as the imaginative alternative thinker Robert Pirsig calls it in his book Lila) would get us out of the cul-de-sac we have created for ourselves through our reductive deterministic view of the world and with our obsession with material atoms and mechanical rules. It would get us out of the tendency that we have developed from the dawn of the scientific age to consider human life from the ego’s animalistic point of view as a bellum omnium contra omnes, a war of all against each that was Hobbes’s version of Plautus’s principle. If humanity is no more than a collection of egos out to get what they can, this is indisputably the case. A holistic view of humanity as growing towards a consciousness of the self, i.e. towards an intelligent relation to reality as a whole, would enable us to locate the ethical striving of man within the general purposiveness of natural creativity and thus provide a sense to existence in a way that mere ego-inhibition cannot. This way of seeing the world may only be comprehensible as a myth. But that does not mean it would be untrue. It would be a post-egoistic, post-scientific myth of enormous practical value. To ground this myth emotionally rather than rationally we can talk of ‘love’ – the love of the self for the intelligent system that sustains it: the world.

This notion of love of the self for the world is of course essentially similar to the love of the soul for God found in traditional Christianity. That, too, does not mean that it is untrue.

THE CONCEPT OF THE SELF

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 14:19:00 +0000

The self is of course not a concept, but a living reality that, despite being the essence of our daily conscious experience, can be only imperfectly characterised in language. Whereas the ego and the person are closely allied to language, the self eludes precise description in language and indeed the attempt at such a description generates paradox. All human individuals have some consciousness of the self, but it is all too frequently obscured by the ego. The ‘concept of the self’ referred to here is therefore no more than an inevitably vain attempt to describe the self in conceptual terms. The living reality of the self gives the raw material of this discussion, but its translation into conceptual terms suffers from all the infirmities of language and of the person using the language. The basic difficulty is this: language is inseparably linked to sensory experience, whereas the experience of the self is non-sensory. This combination more properly generates poetry; but I am not a poet.

The concept ‘self’ is much broader and deeper than the concepts ‘ego’ or ‘person’. As an emergent phenomenon in human psychology, it is far easier to talk of it in negative terms – i.e. in terms of what it is not – rather than in supposedly positive terms. It is certainly impossible to talk of the self in the ego’s favoured terms of empirical observability and mechanical repeatability. It is impossible and unnecessary, moreover, to talk of the ‘identity’ of the self, since the self is not identical with itself in the way that the ego imagines itself to be: the self’s awareness of itself is based upon the essential ‘otherness’ of the self that makes the notion of ‘self-knowledge’ a bit of a contradiction in terms (though acquaintance with and increasing understanding of its dynamics are clearly possible). The Socratic injunction to ‘know thyself’ has to be understood as the old fox himself intended it to be understood: ironically. Knowledge of the self entails knowledge of its impenetrability. The self is unbounded, of indeterminable extent and of only dimly understood dynamics; but it is essentially a growing awareness of itself without limit. It is in this sense that the self is not known to itself. The essence of the self’s consciousness of itself is that it is a both mystery to itself and a constant illumination of that mystery. The self is both conscious of itself and unconscious of itself. It has understanding of itself to an extent, but that understanding involves the understanding that it does not understand itself. That is why is cannot be identical with itself. Where the ego is formed and identifiable, the self is a work in progress, an unrealised project, pure evolution. It is the ego that makes definitive pronouncements concerning the self, and for that reason such statements have to be treated with caution. The self’s lack of understanding of itself is necessarily supplemented by what the religious call ‘faith’. While the ego is convinced it both knows and controls itself, the self knows that neither is possible and has no other option than to maintain an attitude of trust. It is in the self that the tension between faith and knowledge is most immediate. The ego can affect the stance of knowledge and rational conviction and switch off the attitude of faith; but the price of this self-truncation is precisely that. It is a self mutilation that can have disastrous consequences.

There is obviously a close connection between the ego and the self, since the former emerges out of the latter though the latter transcends the former; but the self can almost be defined as everything the ego is not. Of course, this has to be qualified heavily since the self is consciously aware; but in the self, ego-consciousness is subsumed under a much more capacious type of individual awareness. The ego is, as already emphasised, a temporal, time-bound and temporary structure, tied to a timetable of goals and schemes. The essence of the self, however, in contrast to the time-bound nature of the ego, is its timelessness and boundlessness. The ego is a mechanism, the purpose of which is the preservation and promotion of the individual body. The self is nothing of the sort. The ego as ‘I’ is conscious of a ‘me’ and that ‘me’ includes the thing that is ‘my’ body as well as those aspects of the person that do not form part of the ego; but the ego, particularly the rational ego identifies itself, both as ‘I’ and as ‘me’, as something known. The self, by contrast, is conscious of being no thing, having no parts and being neither subject nor object. It is rather both at once, without identifying itself with any single object, body or otherwise. The ego thinks in linear, sequential form in terms of means and ends, cause and effect, time-lines and so on. To the self, all thoughts are potentially present to it simultaneously as aspects of a perpetually expanding sphere of awareness. The ego is obsessed by the thought of knowledge as acquisition and is as wedded to its propositional beliefs as it is to its personal possessions. The self simply is a state of perpetual cognitive expansion from the centre. The ego is devoted to the notion of repetition. The self understands that the nature of reality is to preclude the possibility of repetition, since every entity without exception is strictly unique despite apparent similarities to other entities and has a unique trajectory. The ego is tied to language and to the empirical nature of language. The self is post-linguistic since it has transcended the naive view of language as able to represent any mental or physical content whatever. The ego is essentially rational. The self is intrinsically creative and uses any medium at its disposal to externalise itself and give itself objective presence. Where the ego believes only in positive, direct communication, the self expresses itself indirectly.

The human individual is conscious of a world and of space and time. But in addition to mere consciousness – i.e. an inner representation of the external world of space through time – he or she is also self-reflectively conscious of being conscious of those things, i.e. conscious of being conscious of the world. This is what we mean by the ‘self-consciousness’ of the human individual. It is second-order consciousness. This type of consciousness is distinct from that which we attribute to the non-human animals and it is by many dimensions and by many degrees of freedom more complex. It is distinct, too, from ego-consciousness, which can indeed exist without very much self-consciousness. Consciousness of the self is not structured or bounded by that of which it is conscious. That, of which it is conscious, is neither bounded nor structured. The self is not just the bundle of sensations that Hume for example thought constituted the conscious mind. It is rather a vantage-point from which the temporal flow of consciousness is contemplated; and thus the most rudimentary self-consciousness is in a sense ‘beyond’ the world of space and time. Human self-consciousness is analogous to a hall of infinitely self-reflecting mirrors, and the reflection is not mere recursion, since what is reflected is subtly changed in each reflection. It is this reflection that permits the symbolic representation of thought and the understanding of that symbolism. Every human mind is a complex and subtle entity that only partially understands itself; and we do well not to try and over-simplify it in ways that are dear to the ego: by objectification and mechanisation. The problem in this respect is made doubly complex by self-reference, i.e. by the fact that when the ego tries to express the results of investigations in language, the investigating subject is the subject of investigation – a fact that the ego tries to ignore or obscure by ambiguous use of pronouns (‘I’, ‘me’, ‘it’ and more). Already, the ego is a terrible simplifier and itself a grotesque simplification of the mind. If we identify the mind only with the ego, we distort what it means to be human and risk reducing the individual to a paranoid, self-seeking, power-hungry, repetitive monomaniac. The human ego is never, of course, entirely devoid of experience and understanding of the self; but it tends to confuse and distort this knowledge in ways characteristic of the ego. It is not helpful, moreover, to point out that human individuals displaying such characteristics abound, and then to claim that this is the essence of human consciousness, since so to speak, ‘the majority is always right’. Given that the human self is an unfinished project, the majority is always wrong. The understanding of the self is rare, since it is a state towards which humanity is progressing and the process has only recently begun.

It is because of the rarity of understanding of the self – at least in the west – that the ego, particularly the rational ego, tends to deny the existence of the self or at least to simplify it out of existence. But there are other sorts of simplification that we impose upon ourselves and by means of which we restrict ourselves. One of these is the notion of the ‘persona’. The word ‘person’ comes from a Latin word meaning ‘mask’. That is very appropriate, since the person is a particular kind of façade that each of us shows to the world although each of us is aware that many aspects of our personality are deliberately left out of that public image. The persona is the manner in which we identify and advertise ourselves to those around us. We apply all sorts of words, all sorts of labels to ourselves by means of which we confer ‘identity’ upon ourselves. We call ourselves by a particular name, our proper name, and we feel that the pronouncing of that name says something unique about us. We then apply all sorts of categories to ourselves: 'accountant', 'doctor', 'dustman', 'prime minister', 'astronaut', 'hairdresser' and so on. We are ‘father’ or ‘mother’ to someone. We are ‘uncle’, ‘aunt’. We are ‘Jewish’, ‘Moslem’, ‘Buddhist’. We are ‘socialist’, ‘democrat’, ‘fascist’. We are ‘extravert’, ‘stingy’, ‘careless’, ‘generous’. We are ‘stylish’, ‘dowdy’, ‘eccentric’ and all the rest. But you get the picture. With these words and labels, we build up our own identity as well as that of others. The ego, of course, chooses its personal labels carefully to maximise its advantage in any set of circumstances. But whatever the purpose of the labels, we tend to equate those sorts of descriptions with the self, not only of others but also our own. In this we are profoundly mistaken. The self cannot be identified with any recognisable role or mask, since it is a piece of nature, a natural event, albeit of a very special sort since it is our origin.

The identity built up by the use of labels may be something that we believe in or not. We may be entirely convinced by our own persona or we may not. The point is that it is a definable set of characteristics, to which, genuinely or not, we equate ourselves, with which we identify ourselves as individuals. Obviously the persona can be an elaborate deception, a confidence-trick. Or it can also be an elaborate self-deception. Many successful crooks and conmen use a well-honed, studied persona to deceive others, gain their confidence and defraud them. But equally, many people develop a persona in the belief that that really is who and what they are or ought to be; whereas they may throughout their whole life simply be doing what they think others expect of them - and thus defrauding themselves. The crook can shed the persona with relative ease. The individual who identifies him- or herself entirely with the mask shown to the world is in a rather different position and may be storing up problems by such a total investment of energy in a social role. The so-called ‘mid-life crisis’ is often the irruption into the mind of a long suppressed realisation that the persona no longer fits the self. The individual concerned suddenly wakes up one day to the realisation that the social role has begun to wear out or cease to fit. In such circumstances the real self underneath, though showing a determination to emerge, can often lack the expressive equipment to externalise itself. This can be an acutely distressing experience and one accompanied by all sorts of bizarre and uncharacteristic behaviour on the part of the individual in question, even by mental illness. The person can be quite literally ‘beside him- or herself’. Alternatively, it can be a completely liberating experience in which the individual changes tack completely and successfully sets off in a totally new, perhaps surprising direction, but a direction felt by that individual, whatever others might think, as supremely creative and positive. The success of the self’s emergence is not guaranteed and it is more often than not the ego or the persona that spoil things.

It is for this reason that a distinction has to be made not only between the ego and the self, but also between the persona and the self; and these distinctions are not clarified by the stark opposition of conscious and unconscious mind employed in psychoanalysis. Just as the ego constitutes a structure by means of which certain deep animal passions – territoriality, fear of competition, acquisitiveness, rivalry, desire for control, need to dominate, and so on – are channelled in particular ways and constitute a specialisation or simplification of the self, so the persona does an analogous job; though its particular function is to make the self identifiable and acceptable to critical and often wary fellows. The persona is often developed in very close collaboration with the ego for the achievement of certain definite ends. The ego provides the energy and the drive, while the persona provides the public relations. This is to a certain extent what makes the current human world go round and what confers upon the human individual the particular focus and motivation that characterises many people who ‘get things done’, ‘achieve’ and obtain ‘success’. The advantages of these simplifying and specializing structures can be very real in terms of what the ego understands as immediate benefits, wealth, status, regard, power and so on; but the dangers are equally real. The dangers concern the extent to which the self may get out of harmony with its ego or with its persona and the various domains of the mind begin to go their separate ways. The ego and the persona are largely social constructs. The self, however, as a piece of nature is pure world, and the imposition of any structure upon it that inhibits or handicaps it in any way results in distortions and deformations just as any other natural structure – a plant, let’s say – will suffer distortion if forced to grow in unnatural, unfavourable or otherwise restricted conditions. It is for all of these reasons that what is popularly referred to as ‘personal development’ is a process fraught with difficulty and attended by many pitfalls. It is in essence a delicate tightrope or balancing act.

We have called the self a ‘piece of nature’, but the use of the word ‘natural’ here is very problematic. It is easy enough to define what the natural circumstances of a tree or of a rabbit are when growing ‘in the wild’. With a human individual, this word is almost impossible to use, because it is impossible to define the human, or the role of a human, in the way that we can define other creatures on this planet in terms of their activities. It seems obvious what the role of a tiger or of a millipede is: such creatures all seem to behave in similar ways to each other member of their species and their behaviour simply is their role. Though there are obviously many human constants, human beings seem to get up to all sorts of things and, moreover, to change their habits constantly from generation to generation and from place to place. The ego and a fortiori the persona are often no more than a piece of the prevailing society and would be totally definable were it not for the association with the self that exists – in however stunted or embryonic a form – in all human individuals as the essence of their consciousness. The self has to be a piece of nature, since it is specifically not a product of society, but of the same forces as those that gave rise to all the other creatures, before civilisation, and civilisation notwithstanding. The question is, how can we expect a purely ‘natural’ growth or development in any humans given the clear fact that every aspect of human life appears to be both a socially engineered construct, a departure from a purely ‘natural’ existence, and an extended adventure into a landscape of apparently infinite, socially constructed possibility? The answer to this is found in the extent to which individual human consciousness can transcend its own socially constructed aspects and subsume them into that which allows them to be self-reflective, self-conscious, self-critical and otherwise ‘beyond’ their own consciousness, namely the perpetually emergent self. For it can be stated as the essential principle of human psychology that the human mind is a self-transcending structure that presupposes an irreducible entity at its core that is above and beyond all identifiable and classifiable features of observable psychology and is, indeed, their ultimate source. The history of human culture is the history of the emergence of the self into consciousness. Though the intrinsic knowledge of the self is entirely subjective, knowledge of the self can be objective insofar as every cultural product is understood as an externalisation of the self. The self is knowable in retrospect and indeed ignorance of history – particularly cultural history – is in many respects ignorance of the self. Eastern philosophy, both Chinese and Indian, constituted the first great articulation of the dynamics of the self. But these traditions were in many respects pre-ego. The ego developed fully with monotheism and western rationalism; and the self’s development subsequent to monotheism has to be post-ego, that is to say it has to be grounded in transcendence of the ego rather than in relative innocence of it.

The Role of the Self

If we ask, what is the role of the self? the ego will reply with characteristic self-confidence that the human individual can become whatever it sets its mind upon becoming: for the ego it is sufficient to desire the end and then invent the means. But here the ego is (as ever) talking about the ego, not about the self. The ego is the universal Mister Fix-it for whom nothing imaginable is impossible. But for the ego, this eager, busy effectiveness is nothing to do with the ‘naturalness’ or otherwise of the self; it has rather to do with the feeling of power, even of omnipotence that the ego likes to cultivate with respect to itself. The modern ego, the modern scientific or technological ego as inheritor of the mantle of the monotheistic, lawgiving deity, as sole and absolute ruler of the universe, has taken over all the powers traditionally attributed to God and therefore has no use for the concept of ‘naturalness’: the ego is its own god and its own creator. After all, even the Creator of the natural world is unlikely himself to be called ‘natural’ either by those who believe in him or those who deny his existence. But we do not have to operate with immature fantasies of this kind. The ego is a limiting, preservative structure imposed upon the self; which is why, though the ego is clearly ‘egoistic’, it is less obvious that the self is ‘selfish’, except perhaps in the eyes of the ego. The persona is similarly limiting. Both may be useful fictions by means of which much is achieved by the human race. This social and cultural value of the ego and the person as limiting structures, however, has to be set against their disvalue with respect to the growth of the individual self. Both the ego and the persona loom very large in recent cultural history since their rise to prominence is a relatively recent phenomenon, but their recent inflated importance is an illusion, as illusory as a gigantic shadow projected on a mist. In and of themselves, neither the ego nor the persona achieve anything of note at all, since they are rule-governed and entirely uncreative. It is their - largely unconscious - collaboration with the self that constitutes the motor of their achievements. But one thing has to be made clear before any understanding of the relations between self and ego, or self and persona, can be understood and it is this: all the structures of the conscious personality have their origin, in and emerge out of, the self. It is from the self that the ego and the persona and all the other daylight structures of the conscious mind grow as vegetation from the earth; and it is to the self that they return, since the self is our access to the humus of being, to what we have called ‘hyperworld’.

It is time we overcame the modern, ego-generated delusion: the real accomplishments of the human race throughout history are not the work of the ego nor are they the work of the persona. Both of these structures function according to definite algorithmic procedures in specific contexts; and it is that strict limitation, that focus, that supplies them with their energy. The ego is an animal structure that promotes the interests of the individual in a world of advantageous or injurious objects. The persona is a structure that fulfils much the same function in a world of social hurdles. We could say that their collaborative activity is under the tutelage of the left-brain with its labels and reasons providing the logical rigour in the pusillanimous calculus of personal advancement. The ego in its ordinary functioning will always seek its own advantage whatever the obstacles by manipulating its particular environment. The persona, if working smoothly, will always measure up to what is expected of its particular social role. But it is definite method and definite procedure that count in the success these structures, since their purpose is to maximise the advantage of the individual within a definite context with definite rules, definite functions, definite goals, definite pay-offs and the like. The energy with which the ego and the persona pursue their aims is also of enormous social value. The function of the self in history, by contrast, though making use of all of this functional efficiency, is completely different from it in that it is intrinsically creative, and as such has no identifiable method. Creativity cannot be reduced to a routine, a procedure or a method. The creative accomplishments of the human race cannot be traced to the repeatable and repetitive methods of the ego and the persona, even though these latter may have provided a vital impetus in the implementation of synthetic insights that arose sensu stricto from ‘no-thing’, that is to say ex nihilo – from the ‘no-thingness’ of the self.

The self cannot but be creative, since it is the wave-front of the evolving, perpetually emergent cosmos. It is that focus of creativity that has left the entire phenomenal world of the past in its wake and forges into the unknown future.

We have alluded already to the apparent ‘formlessness’ of the human self, its lack of tramlines to run on, its lack of pre-determined patterns of behaviour to structure its existence, its lack of ‘essence’, in short. How does this chime with the apparent tendency of the average human to define itself entirely in terms of ego and person and to fit itself into the existing milieu by various means: thrusting ambition, manipulation, clever dissimulation, conformity, reactive non-conformity, and so on? If the self were identical with and no more than the artificial structure that society imposes upon it, how could we ever understand it as in any way ‘natural’, a piece of the natural world? If, on the other hand, there is something more to the self than a mere structure by means of which it interacts with society, then perhaps, if we can mark out that something, we will be closer to an understanding, without Romanticism, of what a ‘natural’ self could be. Failure to mark out the province of the self would be to admit that the human self is an artefact, not to say an artifice and that the best it can hope for is that the guises in which it invents and re-invents itself will turn out not to be too restrictive or otherwise damaging. But it is of the essence of the creativity of the self to understand that it is transcendent to any of the means by which it invents, i.e. externalises itself. It is that transcendence, that ‘beyondness’ that constitutes the ‘naturalness’ of the self. There is nothing easier than a denial of the transcendence of the self; but such a denial results in the loss of what is most valuable to the human individual.

The transcendent self is the source of all human development. But we need to take a closer look at that notion of the self’s ‘inventing’ itself. What can that possibly mean? It is clear that human society has changed radically and coherently over the last ten thousand years or so of identifiable social and cultural history. This change, which has constituted our transition from the purely ‘natural’ state of our ancestors before civilization, is the direct result of the co-ordinated or uncoordinated action of many human individuals. It is the human self in its self-externalisation that has accomplished this. The fact that human society has changed radically means that the potential of the self temporally and spatially to realise itself in various social roles – acceptable or unacceptable roles – has been exploited. It means that the self has been caught up in an accelerated process of creation that is directly analogous to the evolution of the animal species, in that habitat has been exploited, social structure developed and various types of cultural and behavioural response to the world arrived at. One sometimes wonders, given the variety of human life, whether it is correct to talk in terms of humanity as a single species or whether it is not more intelligent to regard it as a large group of species each with a similar physical morphology but distinct by virtue of behaviour and culture (and maybe by level of consciousness). If that is the case, then perhaps any distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ is misguided. It could be argued that everything that the human does is natural. But that cannot be right, since it is entirely obvious to anyone that certain types of human behaviour – just think of Saddam Hussein’s crazy thrashing around in Iraq, or Pol Pot’s massacres of countless innocents, let alone the ecological and political mistakes that we are committing all the time – are all profoundly damaging, far more damaging than the emissions of methane from the digestive tracts of cows. ‘Naturalness’ surely cannot mean ‘injurious to nature’ or ‘essentially against nature’. So if we are to consider any aspects of human existence as natural, we have to conclude that the unnatural aspects of our being are those that inflict damage on our world on ourselves and on each other. Predation and exploitation in nature have always been sustainable; our damaging behaviour is not. So what makes us different? Perhaps we are at a point in cultural evolution where we can see the damage we inflict as arising from a confusion of the self with the ego or the persona. It seems that we are condemned either to understand in what way the self transcends both of these and move beyond them, or else succumb to their depredations.

Perhaps we can make this radical distinction between the damaging structures that simplify the self and the self itself: the ego and the person, if allowed to hypertrophy, produce nothing but aberration, since they prevent the natural functioning of the self. The ego and the self are predominantly artificial social constructs. The ego has an almost unlimited ability to develop social ambitions that are deeply damaging because they are rash, hasty, short-sighted and generated by an addiction to feelings of power. The persona has the ability to create a very effective set of responses to social milieux, but it also has the ability to create a carapace on the mind that separates the individual from his or her essential self and in doing so stunts and distorts individual development according to natural rhythms. The structures that simplify the self are the unnatural ones, the origin of the damaging behaviour, while the self, if correctly cultivated, is more benign, less ‘artificial’ and less inclined to get things catastrophically wrong, precisely because it is a piece of nature. Tigers and millipedes do not get things catastrophically wrong, so why should humans be so radically different? Do we have to believe that we are cursed? According to the Jewish mythology that turns the Socratic equation of knowledge with virtue on its head, the Fall of Man and the stain of Original Sin came about because of knowledge. But this must have been a very particular kind of knowledge; and from the context it looks suspiciously like knowledge structured by the vanity and self-regard of the ego. According to Jewish mythology, our first parents were flattered and misled by that very image of the ego, Lucifer. It is at least conceivable that the self is endowed with a type of (non-egoistic) creative intelligence that, if given its way, could constitute a post-egoistic reconnection with a sort of lost innocence.

It is entirely possible that all the villainies and idiocies of which the human race has been guilty (do we really need to list them?) have been the result of the distorting beliefs that constitute the essential structure of the ego and the persona and that give the knowledge possessed by the ego its particularly toxic character. Humans are products of the creative transformations of the biosphere (what is generally called ‘evolution’) as much as all the other animals; so why do we indulge in behaviour that is destructive not only of other creatures and of the natural environment, but also of our own support-system? Why is it that we so busily saw through the branch upon which we are perched? Why is it that we soil the nest in which we hatch, poison the water we drink, pollute the air we breathe, and even corrupt the very genetic code upon which our species depends? Can it be that evolution has overreached itself and produced the most unadapted of species, a species that is so deluded that it sees itself as the most successful being on the planet when it is in fact unfit to survive? Or are these aberrations the temporary effect of a temporary imbalance within the human psyche? The answer to these and similar questions must lie in the dynamics of the self and in the extent to which it moderates or even supplants the ego. Let us see if there is any hope at all of achieving stable and sustainable relations between the self and those structures that simplify and channel the energies of the self.

The Discovery of the Self as Antidote to the Ego

Both the ego and the persona are propped up by beliefs about the world, that is to say by systems of propositions whose purpose is to structure individual or group action. Both ego and persona view the world in a definite way and these beliefs constitute motives for various kinds of behaviour, some of which is useful, some of which is deeply damaging. While beliefs are indispensable to the functioning of the mind, it remains true to say that they are frequently the source of much that is wrong with the human species. The essential structure of the ego and of the persona is a certain inductive theory about how the world works and how it can be used to the individual’s advantage. There is also a system of values in there too, a system of beliefs about what is good, what is to be desired, what is valuable, worthwhile etc. This value-system is, of course, intimately related to the instincts that enabled our species to prosper: fight, flight, sex, nutrition, power and so on. It is worth considering, therefore, whether the beliefs that sustain the ego or the persona are now causing more damage than the species and its environment can sustain. In the modern world these instinct-generated goods are subordinated to the overarching ‘good’ of rationality. Despite loud denials from its proponents, rationality is equated with virtue, such that every other attitude is viewed as vice. The goods prescribed by instinct are regarded as self-evidently worth obtaining and they are therefore automatically attached to the supreme good of rationality. It is regarded as self-evidently good not only to satisfy instinctive desires but also to maximise desire-satisfaction in as rational a way possible. There are many different rational models of reality, but since the prevailing model of the world in the west is the so-called ‘scientific’ one (by which is usually meant the philosophy of materialistic Naturalism) and it is to this that the rational ego has attached itself with particular devotion, it is motivated by vast caricatural ‘rational’ versions of the old instincts mentioned above while denying that this is so. In actual fact, the current most fashionable model of the world is only scientific in the sense that eighteenth or nineteenth century science was scientific. The reasoning and the models used in current physical science at least are far in advance of those employed in previous centuries, but the public at large and those working in the biological sciences have, for the moment, not caught up with these developments. Nevertheless, the culture of the west is dominated to such a great extent by a conception of what is scientific, and the value of its claimed certainties, that this outdated nineteenth-century conception of science allied to the hypertrophied ego governs most aspects of everyday life and largely constitutes the world-view of the common man. The fact that such respect is bestowed upon outdated notions of what is scientific makes no difference to the disproportionate power they exert over people’s minds. The fact is that nineteenth century science, with its emphasis on certainty and materialism, and the ambitions of the ego support each other and are indissolubly connected with each other. The two stand and fall together. The fact that cutting-edge science has in fact moved so far beyond the models and ideals of the nineteenth century gives one hope that the ego’s time, too, may be up.

This ‘scientific’ attitude, to which most of the identifiable social roles in contemporary society require adherence, is none other than what we have called throughout the ‘thing-ideology’ and the ‘mechanistic-deterministic-materialistic dogma’. It is the science of the ego. The mind that, through the ego and the persona, is structured by this set of beliefs, may belong to an individual with a very effective set of behaviour patterns and one that is to that extent ‘successful’ in a conventional sense. But such a mind is often one that is fundamentally divorced from itself and storing up for itself all the distortions and deformations that result from such a divorce. The reason for this is that the modern European ego and the modern European persona are almost entirely structured by a conviction that three-dimensional things are the only existents and that therefore the self is a thing – identical with the thing called its brain – but a thing with a quite astonishing property of being the unique source of all authority in the universe. There have always been individuals who have held these beliefs in one form or another, crazy though they may be. The difference in our time is that these beliefs are almost universal. For that reason they are particularly dangerous in that they are ultimately destructive not only of the self, but also of its world. The self, as a piece of nature, necessarily understands itself as such unless distorted by the ego. It is therefore incapable of the sort of psychotic self-destructiveness that can and does characterise the behaviour of the ego. It is the ego’s obsessive preoccupation with the possession of certain knowledge that generates the lunatic craving for just one truth It is this craving that fuels the illiberal persecution of alternatives and the totalitarian ambitions of many individuals for complete control that inevitably accompany it. Unless the human species can understand this tendency of the ego, reject it and learn to live according to the undistorted self it will find itself sitting in the wreckage of a destroyed world that can no longer sustain it. The marriage of ego with scientific rationality leads to aberrations such as belief in infinitely extendable economic growth, infinite technological ambition, infinite political ambition and suchlike and such hubris, it is easy to see, is unsustainable. It is, moreover, futile to seek solutions to the world’s problems that arise from this hubris in the methods and beliefs of the ego. They can only be found in the dynamics of the self. That these are incomprehensible to the ego means that the ego has to go and its methods have to be replaced by the self’s intrinsic spirituality. It is possible to trace the development of the ego in history not only in the stories of individuals such as Sargon, Alexander, Genghis Khan, Napoleon and many more who stand out from history as of ‘world-historical’ significance, but also in the sheer expansion of the human race as consciousness progressed from mere consciousness of the environment through group and tribal consciousness to a consciousness of the coordinated activity of the entire species. The alliance of such ego ambition with Greek rationalism and monotheism gave our species its modern obsession with celebrity, certainty and instant gratification. The ego-driven cultural explosion that has transformed the world by technology has brought us to a point in our history at which we can with ease contemplate our own self-destruction. It is perfectly obvious that a move away from the fantasies of the ego is now not only necessary, but urgently so. ‘What shall it profit a man,’ asked Christ, ‘if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’ We have reached a point at which we either gain a soul or lose the whole world.

The thing-ideology, the ego’s favourite dogma, is the principal source of ruinous fragmentation in the modern world. It is the reason for which the ego and the persona are considered to have thing-like identity in their own right. A self that regards itself as a thing and all other selves as things will experience a profound disjunction between itself and the world around it. It will regard the surrounding world as alien and other selves as mere objects. It will privilege itself above all other objects. It will be essentially lonely, isolated, disconnected and will be permanently prey to all the self-protective mechanisms that are activated when the animal feels fear. It will be divorced from itself by this fear but driven constantly to seek refuge either in flight or fight or in the comforting behaviours linked to reproduction or nutrition. The reason for this divorce is be a set of beliefs that are not only intuitively wrong, but wrong according to the best physical theory that we currently possess. The belief in the world as no more than a bunch of three-dimensional objects and the belief that the self, too, is one such object now have the status of pathological obsessions. Thus if a fundamentally false belief is the culprit as far as the ‘artificial’ behaviour of the human species is concerned, what sort of ‘true’ belief could one put in its place that would cure our inveterate tendency to damage ourselves and our own interests? The answer is found in a rejection of the ego’s conviction that some one ‘true’ belief is necessarily the source of every solution to every problem. Do we need a new belief or do we not rather need to free ourselves from beliefs that are usually adopted to flatter the ego? Is there not a sense in which the discovery and experience of the unencumbered self, as itself inalienably linked to the inexorable course of nature, is enough? The self as a piece of nature understands and trusts that of which it is a part. The instinct of the rationalising and rationalistic ego will be to reply ‘defeatism!’ or ‘fatalism!’ to this suggestion; but let such an ego pause and reflect for a moment that its own attitudes are self-defeating and ultimately fatal. We lose nothing in trusting the dynamics of the self. We simply abandon the ego’s immature over-estimation of the worth of its own beliefs and put these latter into more reasonable perspective.

The Creative Work of the Self

What possible behaviour could free us from our destructiveness?
The answer to this is the Holy Grail of all ethical theories in philosophy and there is no immoderate ambition here to find it with a few quick formulae. Nevertheless, perhaps we can work out a more ‘natural’ conception of the self and a role for the self that is not dominated by the thing-ideology and its attendant everyday beliefs, by the ‘egoism’ of the ego and by the intrinsic ‘hypocrisy’ of the persona. Ego and persona will continue to be significant parts of any human self; it is their relative dominance that is the issue. They are currently blown up into hypertrophied caricatures of themselves and as such need puncturing like huge, ridiculous balloons. Perhaps if we can see the modern world as operating with an absurdly defective notion of the self, obscured by these over-inflated blisters, we can, by the consideration of more traditional, more spontaneous human approaches to the world, come up with a view of the self that would see it as entirely integrated into reality and not fighting with it, dominating it or otherwise sticking out from it like a sore thumb. Perhaps that would bring us to a more ecologically sustainable understanding of the self that sees it as an inalienable and dependent part of the cosmos; and perhaps this understanding of the self could divert us from the path upon which we are still embarked. Thanks to the prevalence of the thing-ideology, the path of objectification and reification, along which our western culture still largely runs, is one that ultimately sucks the life and the value from everything. Perhaps we can work out a notion of the self that re-integrates it into the process of creation that produced all the marvellous creatures on this planet, including ourselves, without any contribution at all from the ego. Perhaps we can work out a conception of ourselves that is not dominated by the ambitions of the ego nor by the arbitrariness and falseness of the persona. Perhaps we can ditch the thing-ideology with regard to ourselves and see ourselves as aspects, intelligent aspects of a universal, intelligent process that has always been producing and continues to produce the world. This process that produced us and everything else is vastly older than we are and it is not vacuous to consider it as vastly wiser, and as deserving of our trust. If that is the case, then perhaps our recognition of our dependence upon it and subservience to it is part of the wisdom. We may not be able to prove that this is where we belong, but since the ego’s rationalistic thing-ideology, for so long pompously confident of its having been proved true, has now been proved to be false, its replacement by a belief in the self as unfinished intelligent aspect of the universal intelligent process of nature might just save us from the worst inanities of sticking psychotically to a set of beliefs that are making us and our world profoundly sick.

What we have to understand is how the human species has achieved so much, has created so much and how this creative work differs from its destructive work; and we have to know if we can effectively separate the one from the other. We need to find out if we can draw any conclusions concerning the self from what has been gained through the history of culture as a whole. If we can find a way of enjoying the positive benefits of our obvious creativity without the negative effects of our destructive activities and tendencies, then we will have obtained something really worth having.

If we consider the historically important accomplishments of individuals, there would seem to be two types of mind that are quite distinct: the essential difference between them seems to be between the genuinely creative minds that produce something entirely new (often called ‘geniuses’), on the one hand, and those minds that are merely clever, but that know how to exploit the discoveries of the creative to their own advantage, on the other. The ego- or persona-dominated self works most effectively with well-established patterns of thought, second-hand patterns of thought, methods, procedures. Both ego and persona are often mechanical and inflexible in their functioning and anxious to control. The creative minds by contrast are perfectly plastic, malleable and above all consciously open to – and consciously dependent upon – those universal natural forces that make them anew. The ego and the persona think methodically, repetitively, sometimes brilliantly so, and are galvanised by the promise of remembered pleasure. The creative mind, the mind that is centred on the self, does something different and unique in its production of novelty. It is in that sense truly intelligent, since it faithfully reflects and expresses the operation of the universal intelligence of nature. Its creativity is in the truest sense a passion and it is the essence of its being. Of course, self, persona and ego remain too frequently confused and no absolute discrimination like this can be made in respect of concrete individuals, but the distinction is useful nonetheless. Mere thought follows procedure and method, follows routines and rituals. The outcomes are known in advance. These routines, methods etc. harden into dogma and orthodoxy; and it is very often that rigid aspect of the mind that, allied to the energy of the ego and the hypocrisy of the persona, produces the implementation of short-sighted, possibly inhuman, possibly damaging courses of action. This is definitely not creative thinking, though it may be consummately clever and finding the point at which creativity parts company from mere cleverness is a prominent feature of the cultural task facing humanity.

All the positive benefits of human thought have originated in the minds of creative individuals. Committee-work and procedure never got humanity very far despite their obvious everyday value. The bulk of the creative work of history has been accomplished by hosts of nameless individuals, but the great and eminent innovators nevertheless pick out the principal tendencies with stark clarity. The creative individual is precisely not a routine, rigid, method-driven thinker, but an intelligent generator of genuinely new reality. Creative minds are in contact with domains of the self of which the ego- or persona-dominated minds have little conception. The creative self is under the influence of the indeterminate self-transformation of the world, whereas the uncreative is only in touch with its more mechanised aspects. We are only just getting our heads around the notion of ‘quantum indeterminacy’, but what we do understand of it suggests that there is nothing disreputable in the thought of a universal, indeterminate intelligence at the heart of matter. The intelligence of the creative self could be seen as the expression of the intelligence of nature itself and as functioning in direct analogy with this: by producing new syntheses that cannot be arrived at either by chance or by method. The intelligence of the self is not mechanical; but it is no less intelligence because of that.

Despite many clunky theories that claim the opposite, we do not know in mechanical terms how human creativity works, but we know that it does work and we know that we owe everything in civilization to it. The possibility that it might simply be part of the universal creativity of nature (and fundamentally misunderstood despite the said clunky theories) will be explored later. We will also try and examine ways in which it might be fostered. It is sufficient here to suggest how it happens that the self-conscious mind has turned out throughout history to have access to such a fertile source of staggering new creations. If we could foster the connection of the self with this source and reduce the depredations of the simplified and false selves, ego and persona, we would have accomplished much. Here is a sort of scientific myth as a kind of explanation of human creativity.
If a simple test-tube of liquid – a quantum-computer – can perform the most staggeringly complex calculations at staggering speeds simply by virtue of all its molecules’ being in contact and communication with the infinity of possible states that quantum-theory requires as constituent of reality, then perhaps the matter that makes up our bodies, perhaps that stuff which makes up our brains, is likewise in analogous contact with both real and virtual or possible worlds. If this world of ours is the only one that is realised, the rest being merely virtual, or if all the others are likewise realised, then the result is the same: whether all the others are merely potential or whether they are actual, if the self is connected dynamically to them and to the information that drives them, then the self has a source of creative new combinations in its essential processes that is infinite and that could be considered as ‘divine’. Of course the self does not control this source of creativity, however much the ego would like it to. The self has to submit to creativity, trust it and respect it, but not ultimately control it. This defines the relations that must exist between the creative self and the ego. The self does not even control what is perhaps the most fertile arena of creative innovation: language (i.e. the whole of midworld). Language is the product of a purely ‘natural’ incremental growth. The self can nevertheless cultivate the creative contact, foster the creative contact, value and believe in the creative contact, and coolly and unhurriedly allow it to re-create a human world that is now in the process of being corrupted by hasty, egoistic reifications, half-truths and falsehoods. This sort of creativity requires great modesty, great humility and a readiness to expect and accept even radical change – behaviour that the ego finds hard to achieve. It will also require that the stranglehold of ego-driven institutions on intellectual life, such as governments, companies, universities, etc. be relaxed. All of these modifications to intellectual life are vital if our understanding of the world is not to be distorted by dogmatism, by the reifications of the thing-ideology and by its objectifying inhumanity. Perhaps the effervescent exchange of ideas through the internet and the potential of this exchange for large-scale revolution will demonstrate this aspect of what is vulgarly called the ‘wisdom of crowds’ and is in fact merely the harmonious collaboration of natural self with natural self and natural world.

The life centred on the self is a life of doubt, uncertainty and faith or pistis. It is also a life of creative joy. Where the ego pretends nervously to know with certainty in order to be able obsessively to command and control, the self lives life forwards on the basis of joyful trust. Of course, the personality centred on the self is not entirely free of the attitudes of the ego any more than the ego is hermetically sealed off from the dynamics of the self: all is a matter of degree. It is safe to say, however, that the life of an individual is lived successfully if the ego increasingly recedes as the self emerges. It seems also true to say that the recession of the ego and the emergence of the self are vital to the continuing success of our species.

THE EGO (2)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 15:44:00 +0000

Le moi est haïssable – Blaise Pascal

Ego-ethics

In an interview on matters of a non-technical nature, David Bohm launched into in a series of speculations on the possible factors involved in the origins of the modern ego that bear some similarity to Nietzsche’s ideas, with the obvious difference that Nietzsche approved of the ego and Bohm didn’t. Bohm sees the ego as predominantly the result of the discovery by certain individuals that other individuals could be exploited. He sees the invention of exploitation, plunder and slavery as the origin of the conviction that the ‘hero’ (that is to say the slave-owner) is essentially the superior type of human being. Thus war and the warrior became the very image of the ‘virtuous’ man. This is certainly the case in Aristotle who, says Bohm, could only sustain the view by postulating the existence of an essentially inferior type of human being, the slave-being. Nietzsche perpetuated a similar fiction in his theory of the master-morality and the slave morality. But the intention of this was to propagandise in favour of the ‘master’. The ego’s methods are essentially those anti-Utilititarian ones of the gratification of personal pleasure at the expense of the pleasure of others. The ‘other’ becomes no more than an object for one’s use, in violation of the second formulation of Kant’s Categorical Imperative – the one about not using other humans as means to one’s ends rather than ends in themselves. The ego cheerfully and gleefully thumbs its nose at both consequentialist and deontological ethical principles. That is the essence of so-called ‘egoism’.

In order to sustain this behaviour and justify it, the exploited have to be turned into things, de-humanised, reified and de-personalised. These methods are, of course, our old friends objectification and domination (in science, this comes about by means of ‘objective’ methods of ‘proof’). As widespread methods for dealing with experience, they are a fine illustration of the confused character of the modern mind. We perpetuate them along with older, emotionally charged imperatives to treat members of our own species and even other creatures decently. On the one hand, we praise the ruthless, go-getting predatory macho male hero, be he businessman, soldier, politician, scientist or whatever, who appeals to the ego. We practise ‘master-morality’ in Nietzsche’s terms. Then on the other hand, we pay lip-service to quite contrary, more female feelings of concern, gentleness, compassion and the like that exclude the ego. We pretend to practise Nietzsche’s ‘slave-morality’. No wonder our children occasionally throw our morality back in our faces and reject it lock, stock and barrel, for it is deeply and intrinsically confused. Its inherent contradictions lay us open to the justified charge of hypocrisy and make us profoundly uneasy. The ego’s ethics are both deontological and consequentialist since, if it were articulated as a theory, egoism dictates that the ego shall serve only itself, on the one hand, and asserts that the end of the ego’s desire-satisfaction justifies any sort of behaviour whatever. When this sort of egoism remains as an unconscious determinant in any ethics that attempts to take into account the needs of others, the result is a rationalistic theory – either the categorical imperative or the greatest happiness principle – in which the emotions are disguised by the appearance of logical persuasiveness. The inner logic behind the formal logic is the ego’s desire to protect itself from the egoism of other egos. The ego’s conviction that any assault on itself is an act of lèse-majesté is at the heart of the ego’s theorising about ethics. This is the origin of our ethical confusion, hypocrisy and failure. It never occurs to the ego that the solution to the ethical problem of humanity is precisely the abolition of the ego.

Weaning the Self off the Addiction of the Ego to Memory

There is something very significant in Bohm’s theory of the ego as essentially confusion, illusion, delusion and “poison”. He sees “the ego process” as an essential problem of humanity, a problem responsible for the moral difficulties of the race. He is clearly thinking of the scientific ego that craves a Theory of Everything, the political ego that craves total power, the economic ego that craves unlimited growth of wealth and so on: this structure is essentially pathological; and it is precisely this structure that drives the universities, the economies and the political systems of the West. The essence of the ego process, according to Bohm, is the strong association, formed in the mind of the infant, of perception and desire and/or aversion. This association skews all acquisition of knowledge and all goal-setting: the individual (or the “dividual” as Bohm thinks we should say, since the ego is precisely division and not indivision) is perpetually in a state of confusing desires and perceptions, desires and objects of desire. The objects of desire are intrinsically unsatisfactory and the ego is invariably disappointed, because the desires that are supposedly being satisfied are those connected with the old attractions and aversions of childhood. These latter are “played back” to the ego by memory which has so strongly attached them to perception that they are evoked by any perception similar to the original. These desires and aversions are false feelings that the ego mistakes for true feelings. True feelings, says Bohm, only arise from genuinely new experience, not from eternally repeating old ones.

Now new experience is what is hardest for the ego, which tends to want to see every present in terms of the past. We are, we mutter resignedly, ‘creatures of habit’, but we are misled in this by the ego. Only new, fresh perception combining understanding on the intellectual side and love or creativity on the emotional side can lead to satisfaction, and these are activities that are beyond the ego and involve the self. “Creative living” is what Bohm calls this and it is not simply the same as creativity in art or science. It involves changing one’s attitude to memory. Taking memory seriously is dangerous, because it compels the mind to see the new in terms of the old and from that point on, nothing really new ever happens to the ego, particularly where desire is concerned. The alternative to this is quite simply to do nothing about desire, neither to suppress nor to fulfil it, but just to do nothing and to watch how the desire unfolds of itself as the self observes it.
“Desire,” says Bohm, commenting on this ‘do-nothing’ approach, “does no harm if it is not attached. In other words, desire is something different if you understand it. For recall, ‘As a man sees, so he is.’ If you see your desire in a new way, then desire is different in its operation in you.” (Lee Nichol Ed.: The Essential David Bohm, Routledge, London 2003 p.207) So desires are not to be satisfied, repressed, shaped, controlled, sublimated or whatever, they are simply to be observed. In this situation, where desires no longer determine actions, perception of what is true and what is false will simply operate by itself, if it is deep enough. Once the individual has realised that he or she is confused, then real perception begins to operate and the mind clears itself without the effort of the ego. He alludes to deep perception causing the ego-process to “fall away like a dead leaf”, but declines to say precisely how this is possible. This is not psychoanalysis, because unlike psychoanalysis, there would never be any attempt in what Bohm recommends to readjust the person to society, simply because the “norm” is mere confusion. Adjusting to confusion is a kind of madness.

The attitude towards desire recommended by Bohm can, however, be tried out by anyone who is a victim to any sort of craving. If the observation is sufficiently sustained and penetrating, the craving (which every craver knows to be inherently incapable of satisfaction, beyond obsessive repetition) is guaranteed to fall away. The precondition, of course, is that the craving-satisfaction loop be viewed negatively by the craver as futile, damaging or whatever. When the whole complex ‘craving and satisfaction-of-craving’ are seen as a single obsessive repetition within the ego and observed as such over time by the self, it can be quite easily separated from the self and conquered in the person. Such experiences are very valuable in the entire process of overcoming the ego and developing the self. They can be tried with respect to any sort of obsessive desire.
This rejection of the ego by a scientist of Bohm’s eminence is highly significant and all the more significant in that his views are beginning to achieve prominence. The ego-dominated science of the last three centuries has to fall away ‘like a dead leaf’ if anything positive is to happen in the intellectual and economic (and ultimately spiritual) life of the Western World. It is impossible to speak of the other parts of the planet, since their movements are as yet somewhat diffuse; but it could be that the eclipse of the ego in intellectual life begins with developments in non-Western societies. The development of Western culture from Christianity gave it a coherence and a precision that ultimately compounded the problem of the ego, but at least this coherence imparts clarity and should make the perception of its negative aspects easier. It is difficult to fight with the thesis that the ego, its desires and its self-delusions, lie at the heart of most of the severe problems faced by the world. It is however also the perpetuation of ego-guided thinking about them that prevents our solving them. When the ego thinks about the ego in the manner of the ego, the result is to pile confusion upon confusion. For this reason all ‘scientific’ thought about the mind, consciousness, the self and suchlike is as yet mere perpetuation and intensification of the confusion. This is particularly the case where theories of mind are based upon the ego’s objectifications and attempts to control. So-called ‘physicalist’ theories of mind are all of this type and the reason for which no other types of theory seem possible in current science is found in the structure of the ego. Get rid of the ego and you change the structure of science from one based on objectification and control to one based on unprejudiced observation.

Post-egoism

“Unless you become as little children...” said Christ.
Why are a great many adults far less alive and far less curious than children, more formed, predictable, given to routine thoughts and liable to repeat themselves? Why are so many children wide-eyed and enthusiastic, short on prejudices and preconceptions, more raw and unstructured? Why are children more full of hope and more likely to inspire hope? Why are children more insightful, more creative and penetrating than adults? Why are adults in the main persuaded that they have understood the essence of the world even though they have not? Why do so many of them think that there is nothing new to discover? Why do adults long to impose their rigid truth upon the young? Why have adults inflicted such cruelty on children throughout history? This is no fault of the world. The world remains irreducibly marvellous and children remain sensitive to that. So what is wrong? Why have adults been so determined to render the world tedious and predictable and to stifle thereby the joy of the young? The answer must lie in the extent to which the individual concerned becomes dominated by the ego and its repetitions, its sterile habits. The ego becomes deeply attached to its repetitions and to the notion that it has grasped something of great value to itself in these repetitions. The so-called changeless aspects of the world are the aspects the ego most wishes to master. The world does indeed not change its being: it is still a perpetual epiphany and a perpetual miracle rediscovered by every human being that comes to consciousness. The essence of the world is uninterrupted, coherent and unpredictable change. The child, being closer to the self preserves an authentic total contact with this feature of the world. That the world ceases to be a miracle for the adult has nothing to do with the world itself and everything to do with the increasingly rigidity of the ego-dominated mind. Only the self, that is free of repetition and habit, preserves its creative contact with the world’s ceaseless flow. The ego that loses touch with the self is in trouble. Hindworld (to borrow terminology from an earlier post) in such a state, is dominated by repetitions from midworld and foreworld and congeals into cyclic banality; all contact with hyperworld is lost. The main job of culture in the West is now to break the stranglehold of the ego over everyone and everything for if it fails to do this the West is finished. The ruling conception of knowledge as mechanical, clanking, repetitive mechanism, is an indication of the sterility of our science. Maybe the sterility of our science is a dead-end. If so, the West is finished. Maybe that is a good thing. Maybe the stage is being set for the rise of a new and more benign culture. But it had better be quick about it because the ego’s desire for control knows only mechanism and is dead set on establishing the universal machine as quickly as possible.

A Bit More History
The ego may have its origins in Greek rationalism, and in the Renaissance emphasis on the human as the criterion of value and measure of all things. The ‘Man is the measure of all things’ attitude of Protagoras is the principle at the heart of humanism; but its elevation to an absolute criterion of truth, reality and value was post-Medieval, post-Christian. The dawning realisation that the ego lacks any intrinsic authority of its own is by contrast post-modern and post-just about everything else. Where in the Middle Ages, all intellectual and artistic activity was that of a closed community contemplating God (e.g. in the plainchant), the Renaissance set up the idea of the individual in conflict with destiny (witness the emergence of the concerto in post-Renaissance music in which the heroic virtuoso asserts himself against the power of the orchestra). In modern atonal music, this heroic, assertive aspect of the activity disappears in chaotic exploration and the disappearance of the individual into the whole. The social order was put above the identity of the individual in the Middle Ages, just as the cosmic order was put above that of the social and individual in Eastern thought. In post-modern thought, the cosmic, the societal and the individual dimensions all have their importance; one is not subordinated to the other, but all three are subsumed into an attitude that is neither fatalistic, socialistic or egoistic: this is the holistic. Science has yet to cotton on seriously to this development.

The notion that the one who thinks – the Cartesian ‘I’, the ego behind the cogito – is completely separate from the object of thought, is profoundly related to the nature of Indo-European languages, to the subject-predicate form of their grammars, which tends to present all reality as the action of one entity (the subject) upon the other (the object) and to foster the belief in the essence of reality as being separate and static units (things). The Cartesian ‘thing that thinks’ the res cogitans is merely the clearest articulation of this sort of hypostatisation. In this scheme, the ego, as a special kind of object, thinks the world, as the totality of physical objects, and the world is passively the object of the ego’s thought. We have remarked before, that while the human body can be seen as a separate object among objects and the brain likewise, an analogous separation of the ego and its object of thought can not be sustained in this way. The ego can never possess what it thinks it can possess and thus fervently desires: absolute, objective knowledge of reality. At worst, there may not be any knowledge of the world as it is, only the influence of one determined set of objects upon another: those in the environment upon those in the cranium. But even at best, the ego must be part of the flow of reality; that is to say that its thought must also be part of the flux – i.e. instability – of reality. How this can be so is a very deep issue that is not amenable to facile or even easy answers. It is sufficient to grasp that human knowledge simply cannot be other than provisional.

We need a conception of the totality of the world and its flow that combines the properties and phenomena of both what we call ‘matter’ and what we call ‘mind’ before we can even begin to understand the relation of the ego to the world. This is a problem for physics as much as for any other aspect of modern culture. For the physicist Roger Penrose we will make no progress in the search for ‘quantum gravity’ – the holy grail of current physics – until we have to some extent sorted out the problem of the mind. And this is not to be done by denying the mind by means of so-called physicalist theory. Physics will get no further in its understanding of the relation between quantum theory and relativity until it has sorted out the relation of the subject of observation to the observed phenomena. This relation can no longer be the absolute and absurd separation of property-less subject (no properties means conveniently no existence) and brute insensitive object. There has to be some understanding achieved of the intimate, seamless connection between so-called ‘subject’ and so-called ‘object’. The mind that views the world as nothing more than a collection of senseless things flying around according to the ‘laws of nature’ has necessarily to view itself as one of those things. This outlook ‘mind-as-thing’ is the basic structuring force of the ego, the godless res cogitans. This remains true even if one adopts a computational or ‘software’ conception of mind (as Penrose does not). The ego, as object among objects, will have to identify itself only with itself or possibly with the social structure with which it is bound up, its club, tribe, clan, party, nation or whatever. Whatever the case, the ego will recognise and favour itself as a thing reacting to other things. For this reason, if understanding is to increase, it has to be overcome and abandoned in favour of the creative self.

Some Dynamics of the Ego

The ego is almost inevitably, almost naively dishonest because it defends its limited point of view tooth and nail with the territoriality of an animal. This means that its perceptions are distorted, but also that it will do anything to win a particular argument. Accuracy thus suffers. Winning, for the ego, is more important than the ‘truth’. Winning is truth. The ego and its machinations are entirely structured by emotions, the largely negative emotions associated with fight and flight; yet the very possibility that this could be so is denied by the ego, particularly if it calls itself ‘the rational ego’. The ego is essential confusion and thus dishonesty incarnate. Small wonder that academic science is so riddled with rivalries, schools, orthodoxies, vested interests and competitive hatreds.

The ego derives its everyday identity from the conviction that it remains the same from day to day. It repeats itself. The ego is a machine, a nexus of routines that is constructed of unshakable belief in repetition and therefore of repetitions themselves. That is why the science of the rational ego is devoted to detecting and defining repetitions (‘laws of nature’) and extrapolating them into the future as ‘predictions’. It is a delusion to believe that the world repeats itself from day to day. It does not. What repeats itself are the beliefs to which the ego is attached. That is why all predictions ultimately fail – even those predicting the movements of the heavenly bodies or those of fundamental particles. The ego, whose essential structure is repetition, is reassured by the thought of repetition because of its close association with the body which is objectified fear of death, fear of non-existence. The repetitions of the ego are a hedge against the uninterrupted flux of the world in which, if it thinks about itself as a perishable part, it disappears without a trace, both in the past and in the future. The ego believes in repetitions and fixes them in words and logical theories (as the mechanism of ‘proof’). It therefore not only believes in itself as a repetition, but also in its inner processes as repetitions (“I always do that”, “that’s the way I am”, “that’s me”, “this is how the world is”, “there’s nothing new under the sun”, “history repeats itself”). This objectification of the ego in its repetitions provides the delusion either that the ego is going to live forever, or the opposite delusion that the self disappears with the body. In truth, despite superficial appearances, nothing is really repeated in nature and the self can get beyond the ego’s repetitions with a little practice. The self, which is not a repetition of anything, which knows without demonstration that there are no real repetitions, can reach a point where it recognises that each moment of consciousness is unique, timeless and neither the result of repetition nor objectification, but only of the unpredictable flow of the cosmos. When the self drops the ego and thus realises its ‘no-thingness’, it has achieved a great deal, not least an awareness of its own indestructibility. The self is not a thing, it is a no-thing, but it is not by that token devoid of reality, nothing at all. Repetitions are the ego’s very essence and that is what makes it an unnatural structure. The self knows that it ceaselessly flows within the universal flux. Abandon the repetitions, the belief in repetition, and the individual self is liberated. If the self can then make the transition to an understanding of itself as a point at which the timeless universal intelligence ceaselessly incarnates itself in the flow of time, it becomes a truly unique individual, a true undivided part of the whole.

The ego induces us to make use of a whole range of anthropomorphisms. When we become aware of these, we drop them. At least that is what has generally happened in history. But we are, even as rational egos, still indulging in many of them. Those that we are still practising are necessarily unconscious. It’s time we recognised them, withdrew them and dropped them, too. In the past, the ego projected itself upon the cosmos and generated humanlike gods. We then got rid of these too human gods. Then the ego thought up the monotheistic ego-God and put itself at the centre of the universe as the apple of such a God’s eye. Both the monotheistic ego-God and the anthropocentric universe have now gone. The rational ego, however, still hangs on to some more subtle anthropomorphisms, the most important being this: it views its cognitive methods as self-evidently authoritative if not absolute. What it considers to be true it believes to be binding on all rational beings.

The ego still views itself as the most important creature in the cosmos and its ratiocination as normative for the cosmos. In both of these latter beliefs it is deluded because it is making use of what may be the last of the anthropomorphic prejudices: the ego’s conviction that what is true for it is true without question. But human knowledge is just what humans make, much as the mole makes hills; but the delusion persists. The ego is the agency that props up the belief in an anthropomorphic God, for such a God is the image of the ego. He is the supreme ego. The ego is also the agency at the back of atheism, which is merely negative belief in the monotheistic ego-God allied to the quite understandable desire of the ego to take his place. Thus, for example, the atheist cannot believe in God, let’s say, because of the existence of evil, which is incompatible with God’s benevolence and omnipotence. But if you think about it, ‘evil’ means ‘what the ego does not like’ and only by considering the needs, thoughts and wishes of the ego as normative for the entire universe can the concept of evil be maintained. Alternatively, the atheistic ego will say, ‘God cannot exist, because he cannot be detected by my methods of discovery’. But to deny the deity existence either because he doesn’t observe the ego’s priorities on comfort or because the ego cannot get its hands on him is merely typical of the ego’s confusions and delusions. Let’s be brutal: the human ego is not the most important entity in the universe. It is simply a feature of a small contingent creature with many handicaps on an obscure planet circling an unremarkable sun far out on one of the arms of an undistinguished galaxy. If life is common throughout the universe, and if there are many millions of galaxies, why should the human ego have any special claim to the acquisition of understanding?

Perhaps more needs to be said about the ego’s mechanical repetition of its own pleasure that leads to the mechanical repetition of those structures by means of which it achieves dominance. More must be said about the ego’s complete lack of creativity, its animal craving for dominance, pleasure and unique authority. To repeat and repeat what is pleasurable is the aim of the ego. If it can write this repetition into the very fabric of the universe and then control the universe by the same method, it will be happy – or so it thinks.
The animal urge for dominance and control are at the root of the ego’s atheism. The ego conceives of God as an ego – how could it be otherwise, for nothing is superior to the ego? – and in conceiving of God thus, espies the worst of competitors: the invincible, omnipotent competitor. This competitor arouses in the ego all the fight/flight-reflexes of the cornered animal, but far from simply putting up its fists or running, it sets out to make the deity impossible. The job is not a difficult one, since an ego-God is an absurdity and since the ego’s mechanistic thought-forms can easily show that there is no room for any such sort of God in the universal machine. But both machine and ego-God are the fantasies of the ego itself to begin with. They live and die with the ego. The ego, insofar as it engages with the deity, is involved in a punch-up with itself.

The Ego’s efforts to Establish its Absolute Primacy

The ego in the old psychoanalytic model of the psyche was the recent, rather feeble structure that sat on top of the unconscious like an unsuspecting settler on a volcano and suffered the turbulent heaving and boiling of the unconscious forces beneath. It was, in many senses, a victim. This general view of the ego as prey to the bullying of the vastly more powerful irrational parts of the psyche goes back to Plato and Aristotle at least. Plato famously compared the mind to a chariot pulled by rearing, powerful, uncontrollable steeds. The ego – although he didn’t call it that – was the tiny charioteer, struggling ineffectually with the careering vehicle. The theme of the constant battle between ‘the will’ and the ‘passions’ is one that runs through western thought from its first beginnings, through the development of Christianity, through the Enlightenment, through the Romantic Movement and into the twentieth century with Freud and his followers. The reason for these accounts of the opposition between the embattled ego and the irrational forces of the mind were all the same: they contained a prescription for gaining control over the powerful forces of irrationality, usually by rigorous training of the ego in the methods of rational argument. They were therefore expressive of the sense of the ego’s powerlessness and of its desire to achieve power. Both Plato and Aristotle believed that the rational mind should conquer the irrational, since they considered the latter as inferior and more or less bestial. Christianity had an interest in teaching that the conscious mind should eschew or at least control the irrational lusts by obedience to God’s commandments concerning their expression, but it kept the ego in check by teaching that God had ultimate control. Even old Kant, perhaps the least passionate of individuals, thought that reason should subjugate and dominate the passions; indeed his entire ethical philosophy was based upon the not very convincing idea of the victory of the rational will over desire. The Romantics, it is true, had a slightly different line and believed that the conscious mind could profitably gain from a partnership, a collaboration with the irrational, but the aim even there was still the illumination and ultimate advantage of consciousness. In Freud’s theory, the job of the psychoanalyst was to drain the unconscious of its turbid, surging tides of filth (“schwarzer Schlammflut”), abolish them altogether, and enthrone he ego as sole master in its own house. He viewed this job as analogous to the draining of the Zuider Zee. For the ego, what is not ego is filth.

It is this general model, moreover, that won the day in the twentieth century and that is still so to speak, the official doctrine as far as relations between the ego and any forces that are not directly under the ego’s control are concerned. We in the west are perhaps less well equipped than we have ever been for managing our minds in such a manner that the ego is in productive rather than destructive partnership with those portions of the psyche that appear to be able to lead a more or less autonomous life of their own and that can not be regarded as merely rule-governed as the rational ego can. The contemporary western ego is more than ever convinced that it is sole master in its own house and completely able with its own resources to run not only the energic economy of the mind, but also every other economy, including that of the world at large and perhaps the universe as a whole. The modern ego has, perhaps more than at any other time in the history of the race, lost touch with its roots and with the forces that make it what it is. Its obsessions with definitive theories (i.e. repetitions), things (i.e. more repetitions) and rules (more repetitions) have blinded the modern human mind to an instinctive grasp of the perpetually changing nature of reality.

The modern ego suffers from delusions of omnipotence that would have been impossible in the past, not least because the universe was regarded as the work of creative agencies not in any sense under human control Now, however, the scientific ego believes itself capable of grasping the forces of nature in every sense: grasping them intellectually and grasping them literally in the sense of keeping a controlling grip on them. The first reason for this is the success of the thing-ideology in retrenching our culture in the mechanistic-deterministic-materialistic dogma that has convinced the modern ego that it is a self-contained atom of all-conquering intelligence, entirely separate, uniquely authoritative and self-sufficient. The second reason is the belief in the success of technology in solving all manner of daily problems and in organising the everyday universe of things into various sorts of smoothly running machines. The combination of these two streams of thought has imparted a structure to the conscious mind that induces it to believe itself to be uniquely and solely powerful and to have before it the goal of complete domination of all things. The modern rational ego finds it impossible to conceive of any other focus of power and authority in the universe apart from itself, since everything else is merely a mechanical device, a robotic slave, an insensible machine. Apart from these things, there is, for the modern ego, nothing else. So what is the ego, fundamentally?

As we have already maintained, the ego is essentially the agent of the instinct for survival, the structure that acts for the self-preservation (self-repetition) of the organism and for the maximisation of the organism’s pleasure and power. It co-ordinates all the tactics, strategies, tricks and devices by means of which the subject interacts with the environment in such a way as to maximise its own advantage and to repeat those experiences found to be rewarding. The ego is number one and its job is to look after number one. It is thus entirely unprincipled except for the principle that its own advantage must be sought. Because it is ‘egoistic’, it will lie, cheat, defraud, corrupt and destroy ruthlessly in pursuance of this basic aim without considering these types of action as in any way negative. Of course, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this, within certain limits. All the creatures on the planet are to that extent self-seeking that they are equipped with instincts and reflexes that ensure their survival, at least when they have left infancy and entered the adult state. So the ego is in essence a practically useful agency. In the adult human, however, it can and does become hypertrophied and puffed up by cosmic ambition out of all proportion to the simple daily needs of the individual, ballooning into a mighty blister of self-important self-seeking that takes no account of others, even though others are the majority and therefore more powerful. It can become an unprincipled and aggressive gangster, a tyrant, a despot, a monster of pitiless selfishness, a world-swallowing snatcher after a wholly delusory divinity.
How the simple instinct for self-preservation can engender the psychic inflation that turns the ego into a self-appointed god whose needs and demands eclipse and cancel those of all others, is somewhat of a mystery. But it happens and some progress can be made in understanding how it happens by studying the effects of the thing-ideology and the doctrine of mechanism on the individual psyche. The simple truth is this: the mind that ceases to view itself as part of a superordinate system that brought it forth, that created and continuously creates it and that it can trust, will react with a sense of its own unique importance on the one hand and with a (perhaps unconscious) sense of alienation and anxiety, on the other. This anxiety can then be expressed as aggression or retreat. Such a mind will either fly to seek refuge in another system of which it can feel a part, or else it will elevate itself to the level of that very superordinate system it has abandoned and arrogate to itself all the authority, all the power that was previously located outside of it. Thus, whereas in the past, God was regarded as supreme authority of the universe, and the ego as God’s obedient and loyal servant, this order has been turned on its head. With the disappearance of the divine, the ego either casts around for God-substitutes, or else it appoints itself to the top job.

The archetypal image that encapsulates the latter strategy of the ego is that of Satan, Lucifer, the Devil – particularly as portrayed in the great literature of the western tradition. Milton’s devil is the very image of the ego at work. Competing authority is, to the ego, the red rag waved in front of the nose of the bull: it rouses the ego to a passion of rejection and opposition. It is a very adolescent reaction, a parricidal urge to dethrone the power that orders that things shall be done in a certain pre-determined way. The ego is determined not to take orders on the basis of authority alone. It is determined to question authority and to establish its own credentials as equal in authority to any other agency. Prometheus is another image of the ego. The hero of the ancient world was impatient with the powerful but capricious gods, wanted to create his own human beings and wanted to rule over his own universe. He stole their fire; but they took their revenge upon him by chaining him to a rock and having birds eternally eat his eternally regenerating liver (a powerful image of the sterility of the ego stuck in its repetitions). Faust is another ego-image, as are all the despots and tyrants of history, Alexander, Genghis Khan, Attila, Nero, Caligula, numerous kings and popes of the medieval period, various European emperors, Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, Saddam Hussein and so on. All of these incarnations of the ego and its lust for power have a great deal in common: invincible self-belief, ruthless preparedness to use anything and anyone as instruments in the struggle for power and a massive pride that in the end turns into the hubris that brings about the final downfall.

These images from history, however, are almost caricatural in their exemplifying of the ego. In everyday life, the normal ego seems to have its ambitions painted on a narrower canvas and to strut on a less impressive stage. Nevertheless, the modern, everyday ego functions in exactly the same way as its high profile, more highly coloured cousins from the history books. It functions in an apparently smaller sphere, an intellectual or scientific specialism, a company, an organisation, an institution, a political party, a family, a gang, a pair, indeed in any structure that can be subject to an individual’s desire for power, influence and control. It does not, moreover, have to show any of the features of the despot: it can be a subtle and self-effacing specialist in the manipulative use of weakness and remain an ego. But we are not primarily interested here in the tyrants and despots of varying shapes and sizes as much as in the influence of the ego and its instincts upon the intellectual life of western civilisation. For the ego, particularly the scientific ego, is responsible for many monumental blunders, many disastrous policies and many deeply damaging beliefs from which the general population as a whole has suffered and suffers gravely. It is the ego that drives our current absolute conception of knowledge as definitive certainty and that keeps in place the outmoded thing-ideology and the system that underpins it: the mechanistic-deterministic-materialistic dogma.

It is the ego with its identity-anxiety and its fear-impelled desire for power and control that drives the modern intellectual enterprise and gives it its particular character. It is the ego that determines the current conception of knowledge as absolute truth and that links the search for understanding to the need for control. The modern rational ego is the control-freak par excellence and it is this ego that determines the authority of science, the use that is made of it, its institutionalization and the ultimate aim of all organised gathering and dissemination of skills and information. The motor of the ego is the fear of domination and the desire to dominate. If we wished to sum up in a single term the nature of the emotions that motivate the ego and co-ordinate the modern drive for knowledge, we could do better than to use the term ‘pride’ in all its negative connotations. Pride is one of those human qualities that can be both vice and virtue. A justified pride in one’s achievements, one’s group, one’s offspring etc. can be wholly benign, positive and inoffensive. The pride we are talking about here is the negative, destructive desire on the part of the ego to elevate itself to unique power and influence by means of its own efforts and to hang onto that power and influence at all costs.
In the field of knowledge, this pride is the cause of all dogmatism, all orthodoxy, all academic in-fighting, all scientific skulduggery, all intolerant, exclusive persecution of alternative points of view, all suppression of inconvenient facts, all distortion of the truth, all eliminative theorising, all pronouncements on the impossibility of certain things, all claims concerning the unique and definitive validity of some knowledge, all action instigated on the basis of imperfect understanding, all persecution or exploitation of the weak, all ecologically disastrous policies, all damaging and misguided interventions in nature of any sort.
The ego with its pretensions to omniscience and omnipotence is quite simply, at the heart of all the self-inflicted problems of humanity.

Ego-methods

The ego is prepared to take half-knowledge and even falsehood for absolute truth and moreover prepared to act upon it. It calls this 'being decisive'. Descartes was aware of this and talks in his Méditations of the dangers of rushing to conclusions on the basis of imperfect understanding. He puts this human tendency down to what he characterises as the infinite demands of the unrestrained ‘will’, describing this latter as unlimited in its ambition though limited in its ability to understand (an accurate picture of the ego). He cautioned against an insufficiently critical attitude to what strikes the will as convincing and urged reliance on the ‘natural light’, the God-given faculty of rational criticism. Unfortunately, the intellectual tradition of the West shows that few took his cautions seriously. The ego in the modern version of the cogito sees itself as entirely self-contained and self-sufficient, not in any way dependent on God as in Descartes. This tradition of the authoritative ego has been characterised by dogma and intolerant orthodoxy from its very inception in the pre-Christian era of the Ancient Greeks. Christianity in the hands of the medieval ego bolstered the generally intolerant and dogmatic character of western intellectual life, the dogmatic conception of knowledge, by attempting to thrust down the throats of all and sundry the ‘absolute truth’ of the Gospel and burning any who dared to dissent. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment then, as inheritors of this general notion of truth, continued the essentially intolerant, adversarial tradition and set up an ideal of knowledge as absolute certainty that also brooked no opposition and tolerated no dissent. This notion of knowledge went hand in hand with the theory that knowledge had to be ‘proved’, that is to say demonstrated with all the irrefutable rigour of a mathematical equation or an exercise in formal logic and thereby established for all time.
This notion of ‘proof’ that smuggles deductive demonstrations into what are no more than descriptive inductive generalisations, that pretends that the deductive certainty is applicable to the imperfectly informed empirical generalisation, is in fact a tool of the ego. It is a kind of intellectual violence, or at least the threat of violence. The trick is to pretend that the formal validity of the deduction makes the assertion impossible to doubt; whereas the shakiness of the premises is glossed over breezily. For example, this formal equation: ‘All As are B; C is an A, therefore C is B’ is absolutely valid. But one can imagine it being used by despotic egos in some ghastly totalitarian society in the following proposition: ‘All swans are white, this is a swan, therefore this is white’ (even where the bird in question is Antipodean and black) and dissent from the proposition being met with punishment. One can even adduce examples of formally invalid arguments with shaky premises being used (All Communist spies are trades union members; X is a trades union member; therefore X is a Communist spy). Such things have happened throughout human history. The notion of force is essential to the notion of proof: proof forces the opposition to accept it on pain of accusations of stupidity. Since the logic works formally, insists the ego, the assertion about the world is demonstrated absolutely – a piece of false sophistry if ever there was one. This conception of knowledge goes hand in hand, moreover, with the atomism of the thing ideology. All atoms are identical and can therefore be used as mere ciphers in equations. Equally, however, the mind-atom, because it has no properties, is completely separate and distinct from everything else, uniquely and magnificently alone, cut off from all other mind-atoms and from the world itself, in which it has no place. The resulting feeling of alienation generates the fear that in turn generates the defensive and aggressive attitudes.

Thus the ego has a huge amount of emotional energy invested in those structures that bolster its self-regard, that defend it, that raise its profile and its level of power. This emotion is essential to its methods. The social and psychological fragmentation consequent upon the rise to prominence of the thing-ideology created conditions more propitious than any before for the ego-instincts to be unleashed in all their force and to allow them to make a move for ultimate domination. The thing-ideology, the doctrine of mechanism and the notion of knowledge as definitively ‘proved’ created the right psychological circumstances for a totalitarianism not only of the political sphere, but also of the intellectual. It created the circumstances for a despotism of the scientific ego. The successes of Newtonian mechanics in the eighteenth century created an optimism and a sense that ultimate knowledge of everything was just around the corner. This optimism – exemplified, as already mentioned, by the Comte de Laplace – was heady stimulation for the ego and its instincts. It was this combination, in fact, of apparently successful theory uncritically believed to be absolute, and alienated ego desiring absolute control for itself, that led to the scientific climate of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a scientific climate that nurtured the thought that absolute power and control were within the grasp of any human being. This scientific climate is perpetuated today in the doctrine of Naturalism that underpins much popular writing on science. Small wonder that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw the most determined efforts in the direction of universal political empire. Fantasies concerning the elevation of the human mind to godhood abounded. Intelligent individuals asserted, ‘man has become god’. This was felt to be the perfect alternative to the old religious subjection of the past and the ego thrived upon it. It goes without saying that it was this very climate of intellectual opinion that created all the totalitarianisms of Communism and Fascism. It also spawned all the confident pronouncements on the impossibility of the existence of God or of an immortal soul, all the barmy and now mercifully discredited medical interventions such a lobotomy, all the misguided technological adventures, such as the invention of nuclear weaponry and the pervasive tendency towards mechanisation and mechanical control that we see in modern institutions, modern organisations and modern society as a whole.

The Ego is not Fitted for the Top Job

It is the ego and its instincts for self-preservation, for self-protection, for elimination of the opposition that largely drives the processes just mentioned. Though there is something else: the ego’s devotion to its own pleasure and its desire to repeat its pleasurable states of mind at all cost. The ego, as we have repeatedly stressed, is mechanical structure for the repetition of those experiences that have given and that give it pleasure – the law of diminishing returns notwithstanding. The ego’s rationality is to a large extent a method for the achievement of this sort of repetition. The ego craves comforting repetition more than anything else and it is for this reason that the thing-ideology seeks to understand the universe in terms of repetitive structures, or ‘laws’. The lawgiver God of monotheism was the modern ego’s role-model. The best way in which a pleasure can be repeated is to discover the mechanism that provides it and to activate this mechanism repeatedly – like the laboratory rats, incessantly bashing the switch that stimulated their pleasure areas. The best way to guarantee that the pleasure in question continues – let’s say the pleasure from feelings of control – is to make the belief giving rise to such pleasure into ‘eternal’ laws, that is to say into laws that repeat the pleasurable notion for ever.

As Nietzsche knew, all pleasure craves eternity and the best way for the ego to guarantee such eternity is by means of the self-repeating machine. Of course, Nietzsche was subtle enough to understand that such an Eternal Return of the Same was more of a challenge than the contemporary scientific ego of the Dawkins type could ever understand. But then Nietzsche was in many respects far ahead of his time, so far that we still have to catch up with his understanding of the ego. In other respects, he was also remarkably muddle-headed. He understood the dynamics of the ego, he understood the dynamics of creativity, but he failed to understand that the ego can never be the sole authority in the world. It is human creativity – rather than rationality – that holds the true authority in the human world; and the ego is the antithesis of creative, it is mechanical. Nietzsche’s Übermensch is in many respects the very image of the post-religious ego and since for him God was dead, there remained only the authority of the ego to carry us forward. But Nietzsche’s mistake was to see that ego as the replacement for God, even though he knew its weaknesses. This is surprising for he understood very well how dependent the ego is upon the non-ego, the creative mind, what he himself called long before Freud had borrowed the term, the ‘it’, (though what is intended is what we less tendentiously call ‘the self’). Nietzsche’s philosophy reposes upon a belief in the ability of the non-rational creativity of the world to produce the new creation. Unaccountably, he viewed this new creation as a kind of mega-ego. Consequently, his atheism, given his understanding of creativity, is suspect and may have been just one more of his philosophical masks.

The modern scientific ego is not only completely lacking in an understanding of creativity, but also lacking in any means of understanding it. It is therefore far more primitive than Nietzsche’s ego. The modern ego is both within and outside of science characterised by an animal craving for the feelings of dominance, and unique authority and for the pleasure of the incessant repetition of these feelings. To repeat and repeat what is pleasurable is the essential aim of the small contemporary ego. If it can write this repetition on the very fabric of the universe itself and dominate the universe by method, it will be happy. Nietzsche’s atheism was ironic, methodological and theatrical, for he understood creativity too well to be entirely without some understanding of the non-rational, intelligent coordination of nature. The scientific ego has to resign itself to the fact that its search for certainty by means of its own resources alone is doomed to failure precisely because of the murky roots of its methods. The death of the scientific ego is on the horizon and it is a death that will have been caused by developments in science itself. What comes after the rational scientific ego is difficult to predict; but one thing is certain: it will not brandish its own ‘proven’ certainties as eternal truths.

Towards the Self

It was the contemporary ego that created the thing-ideology and the dogma of mechanism and it created it by elevating to absolute status what it knew in its deepest recesses to be imperfect knowledge, imperfect experience and imperfect understanding of the world. The value of this partial knowledge was that it flattered the ego’s sense of self-importance and therefore provided its most exquisite pleasure. In the new absence of any other authority in the universe, after the decline of religion, the ego felt itself entitled, indeed obliged to assert its claim to complete authoritativeness for its own well-being. Fortunately events overtook it and developments in science, the developments of relativity and quantum physics began to demonstrate that human knowledge was not all that it had so far been cracked up to be, not the absolute, mechanically repeatable certainty that the ego had been claiming it was. Nevertheless, the ego continues to rule the roost in the west and continues to make the running in much of intellectual life. This continues to be the case even though all manner of insights have been acquired in the hardest of hard sciences that suggest very clearly that the ego-driven confidence in what is ‘self-evident’, what is ‘obvious’ is sadly misplaced. A new modesty and humility is creeping into front-rank science that was not there in its period of explosive development, in the first flush of its confidence and optimism. Science is realising that nature is far more complex than was ever suspected before, so complex, indeed, that we may as well abandon the old ambitions for complete understanding of so-called mechanisms. Chaotic systems are considered to be so subtle as to defy understanding in old, mechanical ways of thought indeed to defy understanding tout court. Theory now is much more tentative and apologetic, much more expressive of the search than of any arrival at a final destination.

Yet the ego continues to have its way. The old thing-ideology and the old mechanism continue to dominate, particularly in the biological sciences. They will dominate, moreover, because the ego’s ultimate pleasure is bound up with its absolute self-regard, and this self-regard is bolstered by the feeling that its mechanically repeatable ‘knowledge’ is its own achievement. The ego’s deep attachment to mechanical method is of a piece with its desire to repeat the pleasure of domination. Along with this domination goes a kind of free-for-all in which the lust for power, naked, selfish ambition, ruthless insensitivity to others and dogmatic preparedness to act on imperfect knowledge continue to inflict damage upon individual and group alike. It is the defensive conservatism of the ego that ensures that fundamentally outdated modes of thought and fundamentally unprincipled modes of action continue to hold sway. It is for this reason that a mindshift is urgently required in the modern world that will definitively banish these features of the ego from intellectual life. We have no room for despots and tyrants in politics, and no room for exclusive, eliminative theories or intolerant orthodoxies in science. The world is too small for these and the potential for destruction too real. The only hope for the modern world is the critical faculty and above all the self-critical faculty of the subject. Only unending discussion and the consequent modification of the invariably rigid positions adopted by the ego can save the world from the idiocy of a god that will invariably fail. Only a new modesty and a new preparedness to trust the processes of nature and to listen to them, conform ourselves to them, rather than trying to bully them into conformity with our will, can prevent us from sawing manically through the branch upon which we are sitting. This planet is all we have and as long as the ego is allowed to pursue its crazy self-aggrandizement and action according to faulty understanding, it and we are in danger. The rational ego in all its forms, scientific, religious, political, managerial, intellectual, or whatever, has to abandoned. The way in which this could be achieved is by means of a new ethics of non-atomic, non-mechanical selfhood.
The self has to be revealed as vastly more than the ego and as integrated into a system that is nothing less than the entirety of reality. The ego as a system of animal self-defence has to be shown to have outlived its usefulness. The ego is a mechanical system that cannot create anything, because its fundamental modus operandi is the rigid method. The self, by contrast, is not master in its own house and does not desire to be; it is intrinsically and inherently dependent. The sooner the human self realises its complete umbilical dependence upon a system far larger than it can even imagine, the system of hyperworld, the better. The sooner the self learns to trust this system, to listen to this system, to abandon the strident, selfish, manic, monomaniacal vapourings of the ego, the better. Not until the ego has learned to lose itself in the meditative and contemplative calm of egolessness, in which the universal oneness of nature is experienced will it begin to turn into a much more benign, much less destructive type of consciousness. The human race has this stark choice before it: either to ditch the ego and its selfish purblindness or to develop the self and its sense of integration into the whole. The left-brain (to use this creaking brain-mythology, for a moment) will continue to tell its little rationalising, ego-flattering tales and to feign dominance of the right-brain. If we do not find a way of fostering the self and allowing the ego to wither as a consequence, we will fail as a species. There is no longer any need for the ego, since it served our survival when we were just a mammal among competing creatures; but we have long since left such competition behind. By continuing to elevate a structure designed for our individual survival to spheres where it has no relevance, however, we destroy our chances of evolving into what we could be: successful collaborators with the universal process of reality as a whole.

For much of recorded history, human beings have dreamt of complete control of their lives and of their environment by means of ritual – right method, right, words, right actions – and have believed that the pronunciation of certain formulae imparted power. These things are still alive in the scientific ego and it is about time we grew out of them. The self has no such magical faith in language; it is to that extent not merely post-modern, but post-linguistic. The human consciousness that has ditched the ego and come to a consciousness of itself as a self has no further need of precious propositions in which it must believe for its peace of mind. The self is by definition in a state of knowledge and no longer requires sentences to encapsulate its treasured beliefs. The self is understanding per se and as such uses language allusively and ironically as a necessarily oblique reference to a knowledge that is too complex for language.

THE EGO (1)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 15:12:00 +0000

There are many varieties of the human ego. It’s as multifarious as the beetle. There are egos that flourish in every walk of life, from prima donnas to dictatorial managers, big egos, small egos, even egos that work by self-effacement and weakness. All egos are self-regarding, self-promoting and in extreme cases narcissistic; they are all number one for themselves and all represent the fantastically effective self-preservation and self-advancement mechanisms that operate in all higher forms of life. But we are not concerned with the general run of egos here. What interests us here is a particular kind of ego: not the common or garden ego, but the rational or scientific ego. The scientific method is one of the most powerful intellectual tools ever invented by the human mind and we are not interested in discrediting it in any way. It is purely disinterested and objective. The scientific ego however is a different matter, because the alliance of the scientific method and an ego-agenda is generally an abuse of science for the personal self-aggrandizement of the individual ego in question and tends in the direction of totalitarianism. It is all the more pernicious as it is an abuse, for what are ultimately purely personal reasons, of the only remaining cultural authority left to human beings.

A Little History

The rational ego has been around for as long as people have used argument to account for the world and to convince others of their beliefs. But it is probably with the Ancient Greeks that it first came to historical prominence, probably with the Athenian Sophists. The famous dictum of Protagoras ‘man is the measure of all things’ by which he clearly meant ‘I am the measure of all things’ (this being self-evidently true, in his view, for everyone who uttered it) signalled the first clear understanding of the cultural role of the normative certainty of the rational ego. It signalled this dawning conviction: that the immediate awareness of the individual consciousness, allied to a logically persuasive descriptive discourse is the sole authority in the universe. The old authorities, the gods, demons, oracles, revelations, dreams and illuminations of traditional culture had begun to leave the stage to a single strident voice that was characterised by one thing alone: a compelling method for expressing invincible self-confidence and self-belief. Protagoras and his ilk seemed to have overlooked completely the fact that it was the objective phenomenon of language with its wealth of stored insight that constituted the essence of rational authority. Just as no ego can claim credit for the creation of language, so no ego is entitled to claim privileged insight into the nature of the world. But most rational egos from Protagoras to the present do so nonetheless.

Greek culture waned, the Roman Empire arose, inheriting much that was Greek, and the ancient ego played a prominent role in the accomplishments of Classical civilisation throughout the pre-Christian history of the western world; but the growing success of monotheism in the form of Christianity injected new life into the ego and puffed it up into its present incarnation as monstrous, self-adoring, self-advertising blister of rational certitude. Many scientific egos have clearly demonstrated their understanding of their indebtedness to the monotheistic God by their fervent wish to kill him off. Once the Renaissance had performed its vital task of separating the acquisition of knowledge from the mystifications of the Church, the ego began to understand itself in the manner that achieved its clearest articulation in the philosophy of Descartes. The famous ‘I think, therefore I am’ is the most lucid statement of the ego’s determination to make its own awareness and its own criteria of clarity and distinctness into an absolutely normative set of strictures that continue to structure human knowledge to this day. These strictures boil down to this one essential principle: what strikes the ego as self-evidently convincing, such that its opposite would be a contradiction is absolutely true. Of course, for Descartes, this principle was disguised by the unabashed dependence of his philosophy upon the monotheistic deity. For Descartes, reason was the only road to knowledge. Mathematical reasoning was the gold-standard of all human reasoning and therefore mathematics became the basis of all human knowledge. However, Descartes was aware that in order for human beings to claim that their knowledge was absolutely true, rather than being merely something that humans had to believe because of their particular constitution, the basis of reasoning had to be underpinned by – and rooted in – some external authority that guarantees the applicability of human reason to the world. This authority Descartes found in the monotheistic God. His God was not exactly the God of the monotheistic religions; He was still the providential Creator of the universe, but Descartes’ God was much more the repository of all mathematical truth than the colourful deity of Judaism. For Descartes, God was the guarantee that the universe was based upon mathematical principles and the guarantee that the human intellect – made in God’s image – could grasp these principles by the application of its God-given ability in maths. Thus, for Descartes, human reasoning was absolutely normative and could not be gainsaid simply because it was underwritten by the Creator of the universe, the monotheistic deity. God was the Creator of both the Laws of Nature and the Laws of Thought by which nature was to be understood. But he had given access to these two sets of laws to human beings in the form of the ‘natural light’ of reason, which, if adhered to in strictly deductive chains of inference, would yield the kind of insight into the working of the universe that hitherto had been the prerogative of God himself and only God. For Descartes, human reason was in fact a hotline to counsels of the divine mind. The third section of his Meditations ends with a hymn of praise to the God who has thus endowed human beings with this aspect of his own divinity.

Of course, such theological thinking did not last long. The ego has never been very good at sharing its limelight with any other authority and the Enlightenment finished the off what had been started by the Greeks and the thinkers of the Renaissance. By the eighteenth century, Descartes’ underwriter God had been found to be superfluous to requirements, and human reason was pronounced to be normative in and of itself, independently of any reliance on external factors. It was triumphantly announced that what formerly had been projected upon the heavens, as anthropomorphic divine agencies, was in fact the birthright of every rational human intellect: absolute knowledge was within the grasp of human beings as long as they observed the correct method of thought. The absolute authority of the monotheistic deity was thus taken over by the rational ego; and the latter enthroned itself where the monotheistic God had so far sat: on the throne of universe-comprehending and universe-controlling omniscience. The throne was admittedly a bit on the large side; but the ego was persuaded of its own ability to grow into it. Monotheism thus revealed itself for what it was: the end-game in the process of religious evolution, by which projections had been progressively withdrawn. Monotheism was the last cultural stage before the triumphant atheism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and indeed, the scientific atheism of these centuries cannot be understood without a grasp of the manner in which it grew out of the monotheism of Judaism, Christianity and Islam: only the absolute ego-God with his absolute power and control could provide a worthy competitor to the rational ego. It was for this reason that the parricidal lèse majesté that dethroned God and elevated the rational ego to its lonely height had to be performed.

Inevitably, of course, the rational ego had to camouflage its god-almightiness and no individual scientific ego was so conceited as to assert that it alone was the repository of all truth (though this secret belief was nurtured by some). There were no doubt many who wished to make such an assertion, but those who tried it on were discredited by their own appearance of madness. The overweening ambitions of the ego were thus disguised and the disguise adopted by his rational, scientific majesty the ego was the pronoun ‘we’. The rational ego hid behind its scientific method and the guardian of such a method became not the individual – as it had been in Descartes’ philosophy – but rather the scientific community, the scientific 'we'. It then became de rigueur to use the pronoun ‘we’ in any account of the victories accomplished by science and by the application of reason. No rational ego would ever announce, ‘I am within a hair of understanding all the essential processes of the universe’; nor would it ever dream of claiming, ‘I am close to discovering the key that will give me absolute control over all of reality’; but such immoderate fantasies were nevertheless entertained and even articulated to some extent in the language of community. Where the mad, cackling ‘I’ of the scientific ego was taken as the hallmark of power-crazed villains of the cinema-screen, the more diffuse ‘we’ became the camouflage of the ego, slipped into performing the ego’s task and got away with it. The ego got away with hiding behind the group-identity, claiming that ‘we’ would soon have all understanding of the world at our disposal; and ‘we’ would soon solve all the problems of the world thereby. But even the ego no doubt saw through its own subterfuge. There is no corporate ‘we’ in the business of understanding that functions as some sort of gigantic ego. The ‘we’ is no more than a disguise for the individual scientific egos that wished to claim absolute validity for their particular chains of reasoning. One still hears today what wonders ‘we’ are in the process of achieving and will soon achieve by means of science; but in all cases where one hears such talk, behind the ‘we’ squats the rational ego, anxious to assert its own godlike authority. The ‘we’ is a phantom and a fiction insofar as it is deemed to show the virtues of the rational ego. How could the ego submit itself to a committee? The things that emerge from the ‘we’ – language, mathematics, science – may well result from the combined efforts of a number of rational egos, but no rational ego can claim credit for them. The creations of human groups have something extra that is not the ego’s to command or control. In short, what ‘we’ create cannot be considered to emerge from the rational ego. But that is a story for another occasion.

Now this is meant to be a bit of history. But we have to ask, what has become of the rational ego today? The mad claims of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries concerning complete certainty and final understanding have perhaps waned; and along with them have waned the madder claims concerning complete control. The supreme authoritativeness of the scientific method and purely rational criteria of understanding and decision-making have been called into question, as people have begun to see and feel the consequences of the unbridled rational intellect allied to a determination to control. The current sad state of the natural environment is the direct effect of the arrogance of the scientific ego; and people have rightly concluded that some other authority, some moral authority is needed to mitigate the ego’s crazy destruction of the planet that brought us forth and still nurtures us. But has the rational ego gone away or become less arrogant? It does not seem that it has. So this bit of history has to end on a cautionary note: unless the value-free ambition to dominate the world by purely mathematical calculations and mechanical means is restrained by some comprehension of the ethical constraints on human life on the Earth, our precious ‘we’ faces extinction. Unless the rational ego begins to understand that its rationality is merely one aspect of the total functioning of the human psyche, unless it understands that it needs supplementing by a more instinctive understanding of our place within the web of life, we, as creatures are likely to pronounce our own death-sentence. This may be a good thing, from the point of view of the non-human population of the world, but not if we take them with us. But perhaps something can be done about it, perhaps some less mendacious use of the pronoun ‘we’ can be developed that will show up the self-adoring god-almightiness of the rational ego for what it is: a delusion. We are creative, certainly, but there is no way in which the creativity of the ‘we’ can be claimed by the rational ego.

The Origins of the Ego’s Delusions.

The essence of the ego is a set of instincts sculpted by evolution and fostering our success as a species. These instincts have two main purposes: 1) the immediate satisfaction of human desire for food, sex and power and 2) the discovery of practical methods by means of which competitors are outwitted and desire-satisfaction obtained. As far as the rational ego is concerned, the desire element can be reduced to the wish for power alone; and the practical element boils down to the application of the scientific method to nature. Every living creature on the planet has evolved by the kind of arms-race that is not explained by mere ‘survival’, but rather by the need of all living systems to maximise their sphere of influence. Mere survival is defensive; power-hunger is offensive. The human ego thus evolved as a means of attack upon the rest of the biosphere, the aim of which was the biblical one of ‘domination’. The ego saw itself as empowered to dominate first by the Creator of the universe and then thereafter by its own internal dynamics alone. What is the nature of these internal dynamics?

The manner in which the ego developed is lost in the mists of history; but we can nevertheless speculate that it was the perfect combination of tool-use, social-living and language that gave the ego the most favourable conditions for its development. No doubt the dawning sense of self, facilitated by the swelling neo-cortex helped things along; but let us be in no doubt: the sense of self is not the same as the ego. The ego is not identical with the sense of self. Though quite distinct, the two are disastrously confused in our culture. The ego evolved for the achievement of control and the means of this control was the group of cognitive capacities that involved the sharp human eye for repetitive patterns (the basis of our abstracting ‘inductive logic’), the ability to decompose the objects of perception into parts (the basis of our famous powers of analysis) and the linguistic ability to name the objects of perception and their parts.

Patently, such formidable accoutrements were of enormous benefit and the world-beating edge they gave to humans is clearly seen in the development of our exploitation of the natural environment. But we need to look a little closer at these abilities and find how they function at the heart of the rational ego. This has to be done because the rational ego is in essence a result of several confusions, and dangerous ones at that.

All animals practise induction to a greater or lesser extent. Without some inductive ability to remember regularity, they would be unable to function in their environment. But such inductions are instinctive and pre-linguistic and given to breaking down when the environmental conditions change. The horseshoe crab that evolved before the birds and laid its eggs on the beach to avoid marine predators can almost be seen as a failure of induction on the evolutionary scale: the poor creature had not reckoned on the aerial predators, and still has done nothing about them. The famous case of the chicken given by Russell is a fairer example of animal induction: the farmyard pet that became used to dashing across the farmyard to be fed on hearing the tin of grain rattled failed to factor in the family lunch and ended up getting its neck wrung as a direct result of its inductive habits.

But if all animals practise induction, no species does it with the thoroughness and the comprehensiveness of the human animal. The human ability to detect similarities and differences in the environment gave to the ego a powerful engine of thought and control capable of the minutest analytical decompositions and the most detailed synthetic generalisations. It was clearly of great benefit to human beings to be able to analyse the elements of their environment into nice and nasty bits, helpful and harmful bits, tasty and toxic bits and so on; it was clearly of much greater benefit for them to be able to name these bits, to make general statements about them and to share these generalisations with the rest of their kind. But these abilities, once detached from their immediate purpose of survival, attached themselves to an omnivorous curiosity about the whole world independently of any considerations of survival; and thus the scientific ego with its urge to understand all and to control all was born. It was in this process of detachment that the confusions of the ego began to take root; and it is these confusions that are still with us today in the form of the overweening ambitions of the rational, scientific ego. It seems self-evident to the rational ego that what is effective for manipulating the environment is necessarily effective in the total understanding of reality. But in this, the ego all too often behaves like a child with a shiny new toy that is a little too sophisticated for its intelligence. Rational discourse is a stupendous creation of nature (not of the ego nor of the ‘we’); but the ego is naively convinced that its exciting complexities give it the occult ability to capture the essence of reality. A little reflection should convince anyone that this is a rash extrapolation to say the least.

The Rational Ego and its Origins

At the risk of appearing to commit some of the grosser errors committed by the reductionist fervour of the rational ego, some attempt must be made here to relate fundamental aspects of the scientific ego to evolutionary adaptations in order to show that they are far from being the absolute access to final knowledge of the cosmos that they have been cracked up to be by the rational ego. The chief purpose of these connections will be to show not only that the ego labours under many confusions, but also that the abandonment of these confusions (while retaining the benefits of rationality) can only be a positive step.
The first feature of the ego to be mentioned is its connection with the reductive mania of the thing-ideology which claims that the ultimate reality is the three-dimensional physical object. The ego, in accordance with its evolutionary past, is devoted to the decomposition of the elements of its environment into parts, and to the naming of those parts, as a precursor to controlling them. This urge to decomposition gave us the reductive method of science and the wild goose chase that is the hunt for the ‘ultimate particles’ of the universe. It was thought, in accordance with the discriminating, decomposing, reducing habits of the ego, that since the way to real understanding is by means of decomposition, there must be some point at which this decomposition stops and ultimate particles are revealed. This search for the ultimate components of whatever was being considered, provided the essential methodology of science, but it also shaped decisively the view that the human intellect began to take of itself once the theological way of viewing reality began to wane. Since the universe contained only three-dimensional things or collections of three-dimensional things, then logically, the human being, the human intellect, the human ego must ultimately be a three-dimensional thing or a collection of three-dimensional things. This subject-object confusion was the direct result of the thing obsession and it could only be maintained by means of a brain-splitting bit of self-delusion. The universe is merely a collection of things, but the scientific observer was considered to be somehow outside of the realm of things. Thus arose the distinction between subject and object. It is one of the rational ego's grossest misapprehensions to believe that there is an absolute though incomprehensible distinction between subject and object, whereas there is none. But the ego’s distinction arose from a misguided notion of objects (derived from induction) and from the realisation that it could not itself be one of those objects. Yet even today, it has not grasped that it cannot keep the dogma of the three-dimensional object and at the same time hang on to the subject. Only a complete reassessment of its own cognitive limitations will permit the ego to progress scientifically to a better understanding of itself.

The second source of confusion arose from the naming of things. Since things were named and since everything that was named was a thing, it was tacitly assumed by the rational ego that every name designated a thing, by which was meant not simply individual objects, but also classes of things. The individual object and the class to which it belonged became indistinguishable. Even advanced understanding of the nature of abstraction did not prevent this particular piece of nonsense. It was assumed, from everyday experience, that every ‘thing’ thus identified was separate, self-identical and could not simultaneously be something else; and since individual things were only instantiations or repetitions of the essential properties of classes of thing, it was also assumed from the same source that every name could be used in discourse as designating a self-identical object. Things were considered to be representatives of certain universal classes. Thus was born the fundamental law of logic, the law of non-contradiction or the law of identity. It was assumed that since names designated things and since things (as individual objects or as classes) were stable, definable entities, such names could be used in strictly logical equations almost as integers are used in arithmetic. The name thus appeared to the ego as a kind of magic spell, conferring the power of control upon the namer.

The thing-ideology and the obsession with repetition of certain patterns (also regarded as things) led to the Democritean or Laplacian delusion that the universe was simply a finite collection of things moving according to immutable laws. Within this universe, that had more to do with human nature than with the world, however, the essential phenomenology was that of repetition: classes of identical things were repetitions of a basic design, and classes of events were no more than repetitions of certain patterns of movement. It was this complex of beliefs, liberated from any notions that an ultimate lawgiver set the basic designs, that led to the crackpot, nightmarish vision of the Comte de Laplace, according to which everything would soon be known and knowledge of all future events would be a simple matter of calculation. It also led to the nightmarish vision of Nietzsche, the so-called ‘Eternal Return of the Same’ according to which nothing happened in the universe except vast cycles of repetition within which each ego was condemned not only to live its present life an infinite number of times but also to accept the conclusion that it had already lived the same life an infinite number of times already. To cut a long story short, the combination of the two confusions mentioned above led to the ideology of scientism on the one hand. This was the ideology devoted to the mapping of every separate thing in the universe and the identification of principles according to which such things operated, with a view to controlling them all. On the other hand, it led to the complete alienation of the modern ego from its world because in a universe composed of only three-dimensional things, the ego could not help but feel its position as anomalous. The rational ego still occupies this anomalous position in its own universe and moreover sticks to it fanatically without thinking for a moment that it might be mistaken. The methods it uses to understand the world are not applicable to itself and thus the very name ‘ego’ denotes something that, on the ego’s own criteria for a thing’s existence, does not exist. This state of affairs should really suggest to the ego that something is wrong with its whole approach; but the ego is impervious to such thoughts.

The feeling of its own anomalousness had two effects on the ego: on the one hand it made the ego see itself as a fragment, a kind of atom, analogous with the other atoms of the physical universe, but an atom cut off by its apparent immateriality from any intrinsic connection with them, unaccountably blown about by the winds of necessity and chance, without origins, without future, intrinsically alienated and lost, an empty, absurd identity wandering in a trackless waste of material particles, to which it had no possible relation. On the other hand, the ego, as the very essence of the instinct for self-preservation, even though alienated, yearned to protect itself in the only way that seemed possible: by the achievement of control. The ego might be a lonely anomalous, absurd soul-atom within the universe of physical atoms, but at least it could rule intellectually over those inferior, mindless material beings the things, control them and bend them to its will. Thus was born the ideology of scientific determinism and with it the ambitions of the scientific ego with respect to prediction and manipulation of natural processes. We humans could have held our mechanistic assumptions heuristically; but we didn’t: with a confusion of words and things, a confusion of epistemology and ontology quite characteristic of us, we regarded our sentences as capturing the essence of ‘the way the world is’, almost as taking the place of the world, rather than as mere descriptions of our experiences.

By taking the arguments that underpin mechanistic assumptions too seriously, the ego has become in the modern world very largely a pathological structure cut off from its universe – to which it has no relation – and obsessed only by the things that it believes constitute this universe’s essential nature. The objectivising intellect of the rational ego has no time for the complex dynamics of the subject that it views with the greatest of suspicion. The subject is, however, the elephant in the room, as far as the scientific ego and its ideologies are concerned; and the ego, recognising that the subject is beyond its powers of comprehension or control, ignores it or feigns contempt. It does this for very good reasons given the ambitions of the ego: if it took the subject seriously it would have to begin taking seriously the universal subject, i.e. God and the rational ego is still spooked by the idea of such overwhelming competition.
The ego’s prime ambition is to control any world it imagines; and this desire to control is driven by the most potent of motivators: fear. The modern ego is caught in a loop from which it cannot escape because of its intellectual habits: on the one hand it is wedded to the thing-ideology and can see the world in no other terms; on the other hand it feels alienated by that conception of reality and seeks solace and protection. This protection can only be achieved, however, with the means available to it, namely further analysis in terms of things, further mechanisms and further mechanical control – all of which further alienate the ego. This mechanical control enhances the ego’s feeling of difference from the world; and the cycle begins again on a tighter twist of the spiral. This process, that is progressively fragmenting the populations of the west into individual soul-atoms, is at the heart of the much lamented disease of ‘egoism’ and the regrettable phenomenon of ‘selfishness’ in the modern western world. We can only hope that the ever-tightening spiral of logic will lead to the rational ego’s disappearance up its own fundamental orifice.

These two fundamental aspects of modern intellectual life, fragmentation and mechanistic control, feed the modern alienated ego like a powerful drug. The modern ego is completely intoxicated by and completely addicted to fragmentation and control. The only way to break out of the latest loop is through a change in intellectual habits. This, it seems likely, can only come about through crisis. Whatever the nature of the crisis – and there is no point in speculating how it will look, though it will conceivably arise from the vice of egoism – the result has to be a burgeoning realisation on the part of the majority of human beings that as human beings they are in fact at home in the universe as a whole, integrated into its essential reality and not anomalous beings shivering on the outside. This notion of being ‘at home in the universe’ is central to the biology of complexity found in the writings of people such as Stuart Kauffman, for whom the reductive Darwinian picture of evolution, by chance mutations of DNA and selective amplification of advantageous mutations, has to be supplemented by a holistic theory that derives from the creative dynamics of whole complex natural systems. In Kauffman’s account of the origin of species, it is the dynamics of the biosphere itself and then, sub-divided, of all the subsystems in the biosphere that produce the changes in forms of life. It is not merely the amplification of the accidental effects of mutation on molecules of genetic material; it is rather the very emergent property of complexity within the biosphere as a whole that drives the process of evolution. Kauffman’s universe is a creative whole. If this is the case, then the ego with its self-obsessed concentration on the perspective of number one is already a pathological structure. It is, however, this lonely selfishness of the western ego that makes western man ‘homeless’, ‘alienated’ and neurotic. If, by contrast, the human being is in reality inextricably woven into the warp and woof of the creative web of life, then almost certainly the ego is an illusion, not to say a delusion and all the fears and distortions of the ego are concomitantly delusory.

David Bohm’s View of the Ego

The notion of the undivided totality or wholeness of man and the world is at the core of the writings of David Bohm, who as a physicist was profoundly preoccupied with the inseparability of subject and object in quantum physics. For Bohm, the delusory quality of the ego is beyond question, as are the faultiness of the thing-ideology and the philosophy of alienation. He writes: “man needs a general over-all philosophical view, which orients him in the chaos of shifting and unstable appearances that present themselves, when he focuses only on what is momentary and narrow. And I believe that my work in physics gives at least some elements of such a philosophy. For I am beginning to see that even in the apparently lifeless world of so-called “inert” matter, each thing, each particle (e.g., electron, proton, etc.) is not what it at first seems to be, i.e., a separate point in space, indifferent in its inner being to all the others, remaining always and only what it is, and interacting only externally with all the others.

"Rather each entity is continually being formed from the infinite background and falls back into the background, to be regenerated again and again (as long as it continues to exist). Thus each thing has its roots in the totality and falls back into the totality. Yet it still remains a thing having a certain degree of independent being. And this is possible because each thing contains in itself, its own special image of the totality (cosmos) out of which it formed itself, and into which it is always dissolving (and re-forming). The apparent separateness of things as we see them immediately is that each thing has a certain degree of relative indifference to the others. But this indifference does not belong to it alone. For it is the cosmos itself which determines this indifference and which also determines the limits of this indifference.

“If the above is true of the most elementary and inert kinds of things, it is much more true for the more organized things, such as living beings, man and his consciousness and society. Each man draws his being from the totality and his effects fall back into the totality. His separateness, loneliness and indifference to the others are only relative, and determined by his relation to the totality (in this case, society). Change this relation and you bring out the deeper essential relations between man and man.” (The Essential David Bohm, Ed. Lee Nichol, Routledge 2003 p. 202)

For Bohm, The essence of the ego is its confusion. The essence of the ego’s confusion is to think of itself, on the one hand, as a kind of object, comparable to other objects in being stable, enduring and capable of initiating effects, and at the same time as a mysterious subject in which the world of objects is reflected as a perpetually shifting, changing pattern. The inchoately understood difference between an object and an ego is that the ego initiates its effects in some ill-understood manner that gives them the appearance of being voluntary rather than mechanical. The ego is, however, quite able to pronounce its effects as mechanical after all, since as object it is part of the nexus of the physical world and as such governed by the laws of physics.

Nevertheless, having announced its objective, mechanical nature, the ego then abstracts itself from this nexus, by using two different words to designate itself, calling itself in those circumstances where it is determined not ‘I’, but ‘me’ and in those circumstances where it is initiating action and insight, not ‘me’, but ‘I’. So it splits itself into two parts, one of which is a determined object among objects and the other of which is an undetermined, property-less, anomalous observer. This split-off portion it calls ‘I’ and this ‘I’ has quite a different identity from the ‘me’. Where ‘me’ designates a passive object of observation, ‘I’ designates an active subject of action (including the action of observing). The ego equivocates in this identification of ‘I’ with ‘me’ and manages to talk about the undetermined ‘I’ as if it were talking about the determined ‘me’ so it manages to talk as if the ‘I’ were a mere thing, and a determined thing at that, while maintaining a mental reservation to the effect that the particular ‘I’ that is doing the talking is undetermined. This equivocation is mostly unconscious in those that practise it, but it is at the heart of all scientific conceptions of so-called ‘knowledge’ and a fortiori at the heart of all so-called ‘scientific’ knowledge of consciousness, of the self. The tensions in this ‘I-me’ duality had already been worked out by Kant and Schopenhauer, long before the scientific ego became the widespread phenomenon it is today; but the duality continues to generate confusion nonetheless.

In point of fact, psychology notwithstanding, there is no such thing as the possibility of scientific knowledge of the true subject, of consciousness which is not the ego, but the self. The only knowledge that is possible is of those structures through which the self achieves presence in the world. The ego can thus be understood because it is a determined, mechanical structure, dependent upon memory, upon the repetition of memories. The self cannot be so understood. Where no understanding of the confusion of ego and self exists, no possibility exists either of any real understanding of the connection between the individual, the individual’s insight, society and the development of culture. As long as the confused ego rules in the world of science, every scientific conclusion and every action based upon such a conclusion will be a perpetuation of the confusion and the results will be a continuation of the disastrous policies that have half wrecked our world.

The world of the scientific ego is the world of confusion, par excellence despite the marvels of technology. These marvels continue, despite the confusions that are inherent in the philosophical underpinnings of the science that gives rise to them. There will be no solution to this confusion until the self has understood that it is not the ego, that the ego is a delusion created by a combination of animal passions and mechanically activated memories. The neo-cortex with its immense power of representation excites the mammalian cortex to activate its ancient fight or flight reactions with an increasing tendency to the former because the ego is not inclined to back down in any situation. The self can achieve a consciousness that is beyond these brain mechanisms and understand itself as a process that merely makes use of them. This is possible because whereas it is clearly the brain that generates the ego, for the self, the brain is no more than an object of experience. The self, along with the experiences vouchsafed by the body, perceives its memories as the grooves in a record and experiences the ‘playback’ of memories as an objective process. That is perfectly understandable. The confusion arises 1) when the ego – in ignorance of the self – assumes that it is an object identical with its memories, that the ‘I’ is the same as the ‘me’ or 2) when it acts as if it were an object distinct from these, for when it does this, it becomes incomprehensible to itself. The reality of this confusion is that the ego, as the brain’s co-ordinator of all the separate memories of the accumulated experience of the body, assumes the role of the self, or mistakes itself for the self. The self is not the ego; the self is simply the immediate state of the universe, the universe’s self-contemplation, so to speak, from the particular point of view of the body concerned.

The ego, by contrast, is essentially a contingent memory structure; it is not the indeterminate immediacy of the self. It is a structure wholly constituted by the individual past of the body. The ego is to that extent already dead and gone. It is a walking corpse, it is the living dead. It is the past repeating and perpetuating itself. It is the mistaking of the past for the present. It is the obsessive repetition of the past. It is the loathing and dread of death, because of its connection with the instinct for survival. It is the desire to halt time. It is the ultimate delusion of consciousness. It craves a kind of immortality which, were it to achieve it, would be the very worst of nightmares: Nietzsche’s Eternal Return of the Same.

The ego’s fear of its own disappearance is ultimately the origin of most of its activity. The ego identifies itself obsessively with the memories of the body’s actions and yearns for these to be eternal, insofar as they were pleasurable. Thus it defends with animal ferocity those memories that seem particularly to bolster and to constitute its uniqueness and to constitute the pleasure of its existence. It repulses with equal ferocity those memories that have caused it pain. It tends to reinforce the precious memories, by strengthening the traces they have made, and to suppress the painful memories by main force. Thus the memories become self-confirming ‘theories’, pet ideas, personal ‘discoveries’, ‘beliefs’, ‘inventions’ and so on. The ego identifies itself with these memories and clings with great emotional intensity to the value of their repetition.

The self, on the other hand, surveys all of these memories as the history of an ephemeral body, as past, unrepeatable states of the universe, and is incapable of identifying itself with any of them. Where the ego is the body’s enjoyment by repetition of the pleasures of the past and the determination to avoid past pains, the self is the self-enjoyment of the universe in the timeless present of its co-ordinated flow. This is why the emotions of the ego are distinct from the emotions of the self. This is why the emotions of the ego lead to fight or flight reactions that are generally destructive, whereas the emotions of the self are the reverse: they are contemplative and constructive. The ego’s emotions are an animal’s attempt to prevent an extinction that is inevitable. The self’s emotions are the direct experience of the wonder of the universe’s intelligent, indeterminate self-creation and perpetual innovation.

The ego’s confusion is essentially due to the failure of the individual concerned to discover the self and to the persistent confusion of the self with the body, with the ego. The ego’s emotions arise from the ancient self-protective, limbic mechanisms of the body, encoded within the brain’s mammalian cortex. The self’s emotions are of quite a different order they do not arise from the brain but are intimately connected with the intrinsic creativity of nature. The creative dynamics of the self are the true birthright of every human being. They represent the only means of release from the idiocies of the ego.
But that, too, is another story.

THE SUBJECT

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 21:48:00 +0000

Daniel Dennett tries to convince all who read or listen to him that consciousness does not exist, that according to a naturalistic account of things it is an elaborate illusion. He does this by showing us that we are not conscious of most of the contents of consciousness, or at least not conscious of them in the way that we think we are. But one has to wonder why there has to be a naturalistic account of consciousness to begin with. Then one has to ask whether it is not rather the fact of being conscious of our consciousness, rather than a detailed inventory of the so-called contents of consciousness, that is the important issue. Self-consciousness is a world away from mere consciousness. And anyway, consciousness is not an all-or-nothing thing. There appears to be an infinite rising gradation of consciousness. We don’t know how conscious we may be on this scale, nor where, if anywhere, it ends. But we do indisputably know that we are conscious and more conscious than our pet dog or goldfish. That is what is meant by being self-conscious. Now self consciousness, although dependent upon simple consciousness is quite distinct from merely being aware of this or that object and so on. Once consciousness is present, philosophers are flogging a dead horse in thinking up arguments designed to convince that consciousness does not exist, because in humans, consciousness is inseparable from consciousness of being conscious and such a consciousness cannot deny its own existence without contradiction. Philosophers may convince themselves of the non-existence of consciousness, but they will never convince ordinary people whose lives are not governed by academic rivalries, the imperative to publish or the need to obtain funding.

The subject is by definition the conscious and self-conscious focus of experience. That is what we mean by the term ‘subject’. From the first glimmerings of consciousness far back in the history of evolution and well down the tree of life, to the emergence of self-consciousness perhaps with the later mammals, and on upwards to the highly differentiated conscious self-consciousness of the modern educated human being, this area of awareness of a world has been expanding. But whether a consciousness expands its awareness of a world that was always there, or whether the expanding world and the expanding consciousness are one, is a conundrum that has intrigued people for millennia without any solution having been given

Bohm wonders what is the relation between scientific theory and reality. He asks the question whether all hope of objectivity has to be ditched, if our theories are no more than metaphors. His reply to his own question is that there is indeed contact with reality made and this reality can be considered as apart from ourselves, but all our knowledge of it must include ourselves, for our sensory-cognitive apparatus determines the type and extent of our knowledge of reality. We can have knowledge appropriate to our experience, which is experience of a world of three-dimensional objects. But our experience and knowledge of a world of three-dimensional objects is the result of our uniquely human participation in the world that involves ourselves, our senses, the instruments and experiments, and the ways we communicate and choose to describe nature. Thus, says Bohm, this knowledge is both subjective and objective in nature. There is no way to prise these two apart: they will continue to determine the character of our knowledge for as long as we are human.

But this attitude to scientific knowledge has nothing at all to do with Logical Positivism or with naturalism. There can be no primacy given to simple description of sense data, since much scientific activity is not concerned with direct sensation but rather with the mental activity of theorizing. The questions of science arise out of previous scientific theories. They do not arise out of so-called direct perception though they may be tested by this. The Logical Positivists adhered to the ridiculous, because incomprehensible fiction of the propertyless observer. They imagined that the world is presented to the qualityless observer at every moment in complete and incomprehensible divorce between subject and object: the brute object experienced without mediation by the empty subject who brings nothing to the encounter. The positivistic subject has to be propertyless, because attributing properties to it would have got the Positivists into the serious difficulty of having to admit mental entities to their vocabulary. That the state of affairs imagined by them to be the act of observation does not exist, never has existed, is evident from the fact that the Logical Positivists’ conception of truth (truth = the manner of its verification) was no more than a prejudice. It relied on the erroneous belief that statements about the world could be validated without taking into consideration the subject of those statements. The simple fact is, there is no separation to be found between subject and object and the two come together seamlessly in language, in the structure and use of language. There is no such thing as completely objective, i.e. subjectless language. The area of language expands and the object-subject reflection gains consciousness.

What then is the subject? Answer: the wave-front of the seamlessly changing universe experienced from a particular vantage-point.

The timeless moment of innovation of the entire cosmos is experienced on the human level as the individual trajectory of one human body through space-time. This body is the focus of influences emanating from the entire cosmos. This vantage-point is more or less conscious depending upon the individual. In some individuals, whose minds are functionalised, it is virtually unconscious. In others, whose minds are in a constant ferment of creativity, it is intensely conscious. Creative intelligence in the human is indistinguishable from the timeless and undetermined creativity of the cosmos itself. Only the creative self is fully human, a truly conscious human subject. Using as analogy the principle of self-similarity, uncovered in chaos-theory, and particularly in fractal geometry, the subject could be viewed as the mirror of the object, where ‘object’ means the entire universe. The subject could be thought of as an analogy of the universe as a whole (just as those little curls in an obscure corner of a Mandelbrot set recall the entire set); and it becomes comprehensible, if that it so, how the subject can generate an infinity of analogies for the universe and for its relation to itself.

The radical and unwarranted distinction between subject and object is at the heart of all the pseudo-problems that have plagued western philosophy for the past few centuries. Consequent upon the demise of belief in the God-given soul, the subject shrivelled rapidly like a pricked balloon until, at the height of the power and influence of the thing-ideology and the mechanistic-materialistic-deterministic dogma, the subject had no status whatsoever except (absurdly and inexplicably) as the ‘scientific observer’. The position was anomalous because science had to retain the subject of observation as a substantive entity while denying the possibility of its existence. The subject simply was unable to exist in a universe of things, yet it had to exist since without an observer, nothing could be observed and thus known. This queasy state of affairs was maintained by simple flat denials, by burying inconvenient facts in obfuscation and bad arguments or by simply brushing them under the carpet. And this fiction could be maintained in the scientific community because it was an aspect of the reigning dogma.

But falsehood will always be detected when successive generations of people realise that they are being fed unsustainable beliefs and being given very shaky arguments for counter-intuitive ideas merely because they are part of a fashionable consensus. With the arrival of relativity and then a fortiori with the development of quantum physics, the subject was seen as an indispensable part of all observation and therefore of all knowledge claims. Not only could the notion of an absolutely privileged point of view not be retained, the notion of an absolutely objective observer could no longer be sustained either. Truth in the Einsteinian world-view was seen as necessarily relative to a particular frame of reference and that frame was inevitably set by the subject. The old notion of ‘absolute objectivity’ that the scientific observer had arrogated to itself, as some kind of ‘God’s-eye’ view was revealed to be a fantasy: there was no privileged point of view, no absolutely objective standpoint, no unique vantage-point in the universe available to humans from which its universally invariant features could confidently be viewed.

The subject was further implicated in the act of observation by the insight in quantum physics that the observer is part of the large-scale experimental apparatus and that in observing the sub-atomic processes it actually interferes actively with them and determines their nature. It began to seem that just as talk of absolute space and absolute time had had to give way to a less definite notion of ‘space-time’, so absolute distinctions between subject and object would have to give way to a conception of a process that could be called the ‘subject-object’. Truth, in this scheme of things is not the absolute, immutable commodity that nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century philosophy fantasised about. It appeared much more as a stage in a perpetual enquiry, a dynamic interchange between the human subject and the source of the experience that makes it a subject. A subject is a subject of something. Of what? Of experience of that which is not subject, of course. But what is not subject can no longer confidently be pronounced to be ‘object’ in the sense that our everyday experience suggests to us. The subject is the locus of a mysterious interchange, a mysterious exchange between the self with its particular fund of memories, the familiar world as a source of certain notions of invariance, language as a fund of preconceptions about experience, and overarching it all, the ultimate mystery, the unknown world as such, of which all these apparently separate activities are integral parts. The subject is a dynamic exchange, a dynamic relation between foreworld, hindworld, midworld and hyperworld. The emphasis here is on the word ‘dynamic’. It is all process, never stasis. The subject is not fixed any more than the ‘objects’ of its experience are. The subject is more like a flame than anything else, in being an open system; and it is only by means of analogies of this nature that we can inch towards an understanding of it. The flame is a stable process, it is not a thing. This stable process is maintained by a constant stream of input and output within a propitious nexus of circumstances. The old notion of the subject as a thing against which ‘things’ rubbed, causing ‘perceptions’ which exactly matched the ‘things’ of which they were reproductions, has now disappeared entirely. And with it has disappeared the absolute separation that was required by the scientistic dogma.

Thus we are no longer plagued by a view of the human mind as an anomalous hole punched in the material fabric of the universe, through which an anomalous self, that has no place in the fabric of the universe, nevertheless peeps, contemplating in shivering, anxious homelessness that essentially inhospitable fabric. What we have now is a partnership between subject and object such that it is impossible to drive a wedge between the two. The world is no longer the collection of three-dimensional objects that we used to think it was. Its multi-dimensionality confers upon it degrees of freedom that we cannot even begin to grasp with the aid of the imagination. Nevertheless, if these degrees of freedom are real characteristics of reality, then we can expect that there is room in it both for the three-dimensional constructions, that our brain foists upon us and that we call ‘the world of objects’, and for the subject that receives and works upon these constructions. That they are constructions and that they are foisted upon us by our brain is beyond question. We could even call them ‘metaphors’. The old mythological views of the universe arose in exactly the same way and possessed exactly the same power of conviction as ‘scientific’ syntheses. The subject was a subject of ‘revelations’ that came to it in response to its eternally questioning attitude. These revelations then were expressed in various types of formal language. According to current brain-mythology, the brain contains two powerful engines, the left side (in the majority of humans) has a mighty language-device that strives to account for every aspect of experience in terms of a rational story with reasons and coherent arguments. The right side has a device in it that strives to integrate all experience holistically and to represent to the subject the world as a coherent totality. These two mighty engines deliver to the subject tales of origins and destinies, tales of gods and demons, tales of anthropomorphic agencies putting the world together and situating human life in it. But they also deliver tales of universal laws and rules, universal regularity, universal matter and the like. Thus they deliver to the subject any story that the subject can be induced to swallow. Of course, over history, stories fight with stories, memes with memes as Dawkins might say, and some are found by subjects to be more convincing, ‘fitter’ for survival than others. Thus the mythological stories with their inherently unconvincing postulation of anthropomorphic gods and demons as the managers of the world-system, yielded to stories that only spoke of three-dimensional objects and mechanical ‘laws’. Yet the old stories continued to fascinate and to convince on a different level, for the subject knows that to exclude mind-like agencies from the cosmos was a hasty piece of folly. Now that science itself has dissolved the mechanistic story and included the subject in even the precisest observations, the two cerebral engines are beginning to deliver stories to the self to account again for the entirety of the universe. The thought that consciousness may be a unitary phenomenon analogous in that sense to matter did not arise from mythology, but from physics. The average subject in western civilisation, having lost the narratives of the past, is now, open to manipulation by any story that comes along and that can make itself convincing. This is a situation of great promise, but also of great danger since the loss of the old narratives deprives us of our powers of discrimination.

The dangerous and volatile nature of this state of affairs is that it cries out for a new paradigm to make human life in the world possible again. It cries out for a paradigm that will incorporate our genius for technological innovation, our genius for the construction of mechanical models for our understanding, with our craving for holistic meaning to the world that will provide us with values and reasons for continuing to exist, values and reasons that go beyond the simple exigencies of maintaining the body in life from day to day. We are not satisfied with the niggardly Darwinian notion of ‘survival’. The subject requires as part of its make-up a sense of the coherent structure of universal change, a sense of the meaningfulness of history, a sense of the attractiveness of the future and a sense of the trustworthiness of the entire universe. It desires to believe that its boundless curiosity and hope, its questing creativity and optimism are not mere tricks of the struggle for survival. These things were traditionally given to the subject by thoughts of God as an essentially anthropomorphic being. Now that that particular notion has been dissolved by scientific rationalisations, a gaping hole has been left; and though we strive to fill that hole with all sorts of stop-gaps, we nevertheless feel the need of some analogous set of concepts or images to replace it. It would seem that in the insight of modern physics that the world is a co-ordinated and seamless, creative and possibly intelligent whole, we have the beginnings of that replacement. Once the subject is truly integrated by physics into the strange fabric of the cosmos it may just begin to feel itself at home and as having a stake in the future, however distant.

The subject is a focus of conscious awareness of a world that is apparently not subject. It is entirely obvious to anyone who thinks for a moment about this state of affairs that there can be no absolute distinction between subject and so called ‘object’. The re-integration of the subject into the world that generated it and that sustains it would seem to be the sine qua non of the subject’s well-being. Why should the subject give in to stories that pronounce it non-existent? The subject remains the receiver and focus of these stories. The brain delivers them to it, but it is, in some sense that we have yet to understand, ‘beyond’ them all and in a position critically to assess them all. Whatever conceptual structure the brain presents to the subject as a story concerning the nature of the world, the subject is able to assess whether it is convincing. The fate of every story ever presented to the subject has been to be found ultimately unconvincing by the subject. The subject therefore appears to be a very powerful agency in its own right, endowed with a vantage-point that is above and beyond the logic of any systematic construction on the world that the brain might generate. It seems therefore that the subject would do well to relax and to be at ease with itself, be confident of its own status, sit back and ‘enjoy the show’. This process of the generation of new constructions on reality will doubtless continue for as long as there are subjects. Why then should the subject imagine that at some point in the process, an end-station is arrived at? Knowledge has turned out not to be a process of approach by the subject to a definite limit called ‘the truth’. It has turned out to be a series of constructions that combine ever greater quantities of complexity in unity. These constructions do not simply add to some fund of acquired knowledge, some fund of absolute cognitive possessions obtained in the past; their chief effect is rather to overturn all previous conceptions of knowledge and truth in a completely new angle on the world. This new angle on the world is a new type of self. It seems obvious that this process will continue for as long as there are subjects, for as long as there are right-brains delivering visions of totality and left-brains delivering rational ‘explanations’; and since there is no end-station, no ‘end of history’ in sight, there is no reason to believe in one. Our craving for stories with not only beginnings and middles, but also ends, final consummations, is perhaps something we have to give up. We have always been besotted with our own models of reality and frequently convinced that they represented the final word. They never did and they never will. The subject is in constant change as is the world. This change is coherent and co-ordinated, not random and chaotic. The common invariant feature of change in the subject and in the world may simply be what we understand as that most indefinable of properties, ‘intelligence’. How this intelligence is to be characterised is a very deep and difficult problem because it involves talking about the indeterminate and we have simply no vocabulary with which to do this. Thus all talk of intelligence is going to be a matter of hit-and-miss analogy.

The subject is intelligent, of that there is no doubt; but its intelligence is expressed in many different ways. Nevertheless, one can home in on one aspect of its intelligence that seems more intrinsic to it that any other: its critical faculty. The subject has the strange ability to stand outside of all its structures, all of its methods and to view them from some indeterminate point of view from which it is able to spot the weaknesses, the lacunae, the shortcomings of any of the structural features of knowledge and of the methods and processes by which the subject obtains the same. We have, therefore to attribute to the subject a portion of its functioning at least that is beyond all obvious modes of reasoning and methodological criteria. This ‘beyondness’ of the subject puts it altogether out of the domain of things. The subject is precisely not a thing; from a thing perspective, it is no-thing, it is ‘nothing’. With this thought we seem to have taken a step backwards and to have joined the alienated scientific mind whose status as observer was precisely the status of nothing at all. But in saying that the subject is no-thing, we do not deny it reality, we simply demonstrate that we cannot account for it in terms of the language of things. We can account for the brain in the language of things and to a large extent account for the functioning of much of the brain in the language of things. But in regarding the subject as ‘not-a-thing’, we can attribute to it an indeterminate status and a pivotal role therefore in the perpetual process of creation that is the human mind. The brain generates stories to account for the experience of the subject, but the subject perpetually subjects these to criticism and destruction and opens up a void for the emergence of further, improved, more capacious stories. The subject itself, however, remains beyond all of these stories, that one can quite legitimately regard as configurations of material states of the brain, whether they are codified in language and written down as part of the fund of ‘knowledge’ or not.

It is the subject that is the locus of the new configurations that arise in response to the critical destruction of all previous stories about reality. These new stories stream into the world via the subject; they achieve presence as incarnations only through the subject. They obviously depend to some extent on input from the brain of the subject, some factual or theoretical input, but for the radically new character of the new insight, they seem to depend upon a dimension of reality that we have to consider as indeterminate. This is a dimension of the subject, but it is no less a dimension of the world, since the subject is inseparably an aspect of the world. The indeterminate zone of the world and of the subject, we call ‘intelligence’. Intelligence is the sole authority of the human mind and the sole authority in the world. It is that which makes us individuals. It is that which makes us self-conscious. The fact that it is intrinsically indefinable should not bother us (‘energy’, too, is indefinable), since we intuitively know what it is. What it is, is an inexhaustible ability to conceive possible worlds when faced with apparent worlds and to perceive the possibilities of congruence or divergence between the two. This latter congruence is what is often hailed as truth, which is why truth is always the possession of a subject, why ‘objective truth’ is a contradiction in terms. The divergences from the apparent worlds are often decried as fictions, but it is frequently from these that new forms of congruence arise.

The subject may be a sort of quantum-computer, in touch with an infinity of possible worlds whether understood as actually existent or merely virtual. It cannot be formalised or understood in terms of any procedure, since it is itself the origin of all such procedures and preserves a distance from them that puts it above them. There is no way in which this intelligence can be regarded as a thing or as an aspect of a thing and treated according to the logic of things. Other aspects of the subject, however, can be so treated.

One such aspect is the structure known as the ‘ego’. For a few reflections on this structure, see the two posts archived under 'January 2011' and 'February 2011'.

DOES DAWKINS BELIEVE IN MIRACLES?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 16:31:00 +0000

The genome of every living creature on this planet is a mind-bogglingly complex text of digital information. Our own genome contains more information than the Encyclopaedia Britannica and if written out in full would fill far more library shelves. The improbability of hordes of immortal chimpanzees bashing randomly on typewriters and thereby producing even a single speech of Hamlet is nothing compared to the improbability of our genetic text’s having arisen by chance. So anyone thinking about life clearly has a very large problem to solve, since in our experience, complex and specified information (which is what the genome is) does not arise by accident.

No-one with any imagination can fail to be entranced by Richard Dawkins’ books. Without exception, they all contain masterly descriptions of the most jaw-dropping, improbable, magical yet wholly physical processes. Facts that enthral and amaze are described and explained with impressive literary skill. We have a right to question, however, whether what is offered is science. Given that no-one has the faintest idea how life emerged from non-life, how the vast quantities of encoded digital information in the genome arrived there, and given that these are fundamental questions for an evolutionary theorist, one has to be sceptical of his confident assertions to say the least. Dawkins declares his faith in chance and selection and expresses faith on the subject of life’s emergence: “We’re working on it.” But the Intelligent Design folk also express faith and announce with regard to both emergence and adaptation of life: “God did it”. The bottom line is that neither knows because nobody knows; yet both believe. Their faith is a device for claiming knowledge where there is none. In both cases it is remarkably similar to the old belief in spontaneous generation. Faith in theism or faith in deterministic materialism is still faith. But faith is not science.

Since science is essentially a descriptive method directed towards the representation in ever more precise terms of ever smaller-scale features of the material world, it moves progressively further away from the sort of grand syntheses that were still possible in Darwin’s simpler age, when the cell was thought of as an uncomplicated blob of protoplasm rather than the complex computerised factory that it is. Since Dawkins is still devoted to grand syntheses involving ideas on God, just-so stories about how things came about and so on, without real understanding of the essential facts, it is evident that what we have in his writings is metaphysics masquerading as science. It is metaphysics moreover in which miracles appear to play as prominent a role as they do in ID.

The differences between the Dawkins-style account of the evolution of life on earth and that of the proponents of so-called Intelligent Design (a very ill-chosen notion) are less important than their similarities. The similarities are all to do with an open-mouthed admiration of the staggering and improbable complexity of life and of the information-rich organisation it displays, from the molecular level to the cellular and on upwards to the level of complete organisms. But more importantly, they are both to do with propaganda for a particular world-view.

Both accounts work boldly with massive unknowns where caution would be wiser; so both ultimately postulate a source of miracles in the impenetrable set of evolutionary steps by which information is created in the genome from the first reproducer onwards. This is evident in the ‘awe’ and ‘wonder’ that both sides claim in their contemplation of the processes of life, because things that are fully understood do not provoke awe. The differences in the two accounts arise in the attitude each side takes to these unknowns. The Dawkins-style thinkers claim to understand the unknowns (if only ‘in principle’); the ID proponents consciously leave them outside the range of human understanding and put them in some ‘divine’ realm. But both, we cannot stress too much, do not understand what they describe, however much they might believe they do. No-one does. We are thus dealing with miracles in both cases.

For the ID proponents, this source of miracles is a mind – let’s say the mind of some god. Though as Dawkins also allows, it could be some powerful alien intelligence within the universe. Encoded and purposeful information can only be generated by a mind, the ID people argue, and thus the very complicated information in the genome of even the simplest of organisms has to originate in a very complex mind. Now it is important to stress that the ID theoreticians do not claim to understand such a mind – except by analogy with their own – but simply postulate it abductively as the best explanation of the phenomenon. To this extent, their understanding is consciously negative.

The Dawkins-style theoreticians, on the other hand, argue that the information arrives in the genome by strictly materialistic processes that they claim to understand – at this stage ‘in principle’ only, but positively nevertheless. But whereas the ID proponents avoid any claim that they understand the process of information generation, the Dawkins-style theoreticians feign full and positive understanding without qualm. They pretend that we, the human race, are already in possession of a grasp on all the essential material processes involved in the purely random and purely physical steps by which complex information is generated in the genome. They insist that it is only a matter of time before all the actual detail is supplied for a definitive and absolute analysis of the mechanism. In actual fact, they are in a state of ignorance that exactly parallels that of the ID proponents, with this difference: they gloss over their lack of understanding. They therefore believe in a miracle while claiming to have grasped its non-miraculous nature. They have, of course, not grasped anything of the sort. If one refers to a ‘god-of-the-gaps’ with respect to ID then one surely has to refer to a similar ‘evolution-of-the-gaps’ with respect to Dawkins. There is simply no known physical mechanism for information-generation, no known law according to which information can arise from non-information. Those who claim to understand either lie or delude themselves.

Both the Dawkins-camp and the ID camp have no more than belief, more or less strongly held.

In saying of the information in the genome, “God put it there” the ID proponents are satisfied with that because the analogy with their own intelligence seems to provide some measure of understanding. It does not require much intelligence to see that such a view could never satisfy the Dawkins-style scientific mind. Why not? The answer to this involves scientism and the scientistic (not ‘scientific’) ego. Scientism claims that only reductive, naturalistic science produces knowledge. It is in the nature of the scientistic ego not to be satisfied with anything less than a full and complete grasp on the phenomenon concerned in mechanical terms; and it will confidently claim that grasp whatever the state of science. In science we have to have the mechanism, where ‘mechanism’ means material process. We don’t have this in evolutionary theory, but unfortunately, the scientistic ego regularly claims full understanding where it only has belief. A chief difference between the ID proponents and the Dawkins-style theoreticians is this: if you scratch a defender of ID you quickly discover faith; Dawkins and his followers, however, work hard to disguise their faith as science. But on the question as to how information gets into the genome, faith turns out to be providing the answer in both cases. The presence of complex specified information in the genome is a complete enigma.

But those who claim to understand life either do understand or they do not. They cannot have it both ways. But do they understand how the information of the genome got there? No. So why do they claim to understand how life evolved? The scientistic ego wants to claim that it understands everything that it understands by means of its own unaided efforts alone and that any other type of understanding is not understanding at all. The trouble with this is that it can sometimes lead an ego to declare fervently that it understands the miracles it observes when it does not. There is then only a short step from that to dogmatic claims of definitive understanding where one only has an imperfect and provisional model. Some scientific egos have always practised this kind of self-delusion or dishonesty, which is why there has always been scientific orthodoxy of one sort or another that has tried to stifle debate. Such scientific orthodoxy exactly parallels the discredited religious orthodoxy of the past or present.

As an example of this claiming understanding where none actually exists, take Dawkins’ computer model that generates the sentence ‘methinks it is like a weasel’ from a random string of letters, in only 43 steps. Dawkins greets with loud cries of victory the fact that his computer programme homes in on the target phrase so quickly; and he announces that this proves in principle the ability of random processes in nature to come up with complex, coherent encoded information. The most incompetent IT specialist can see in an instant that this is a bit of crude propagandistic mystification. The process is not only not random, it is pre-determined from the start by the target phrase at which the programme aims and by the ‘selection’ principles by means of which similarities to the target phrase in the configuration of letters are retained. It is guided by intelligence. The whole thing is a clumsy set-up and yet vast numbers of people are inveigled into the belief that this constitutes a true model of the process by which information arrives in the genome. This is not understanding, it is belief in miracles masquerading as understanding and bolstered by fraud. Why does Dawkins do this?

The answer to this last question is found in Dawkins’ ego. He wants to claim a full grasp of the phenomenon, whatever the cost. Even at the cost of appearing ridiculous in the eyes of people he should most want to convince, namely the information-theoreticians. But it doesn’t matter: for the ego, it is more important to claim full understanding and play to an adoring crowd of worshippers than actually to understand. That is the nature of the ego, scientistic or otherwise. Self-love, self-regard, pride and vanity will always compel the ego to claim understanding of processes that are not understood. Some scientific egos thus manages to believe in miracles while denying the miraculous, while covering up the miraculous in a veneer of half-understanding. Dawkins may well believe that he does understand where in fact he doesn’t. That, too, is in the nature of the ego and always has been. It is a matter of the personal investment the individual has made in a certain set of ideas that determines the strength of the belief. The step from here to oppressive propaganda is, by the way, a very small one.

So the difference between belief in Dawkins-style evolution by natural selection (so-called ‘neo-Darwinism’) on the one hand, and Intelligent Design, on the other, is not understanding of the scientific detail, which is actually neutral as to any final conclusion. The grasp of factual detail, moreover, is probably equal on both sides despite the mutual vituperation. It is rather the world-view and the personal, ego-driven attitude to the fundamental processes involved that constitutes the core of the difference. Neither the ID people nor those of the Dawkins camp understand the fundamental information-rich processes of life nor how the information got there. No-one does. But both claim a kind of understanding in quasi-mythical terms. The acrimonious conflict – which is a separate issue – arises from the difference of attitude. The ID people are prepared to remain within the realm of analogy (as are all religious minds) and postulate a divine intelligence grasped dimly on analogy with our own intelligence. The Dawkins-style evolutionists want to claim full possession, by their individual ego, of understanding in commonsense materialistic terms, where in fact they only have a set of images. It is a matter of the degree to which the ego is flattered by the belief in question that determines the ferocity with which it is defended.

The ID proponents are willing to leave things ultimately to a universal, non-human intelligence. The Dawkins-style thinkers will accept only what they believe fully to have grasped with the resources of their own rational ego alone. What is it then that allows one side to accept the miracle with a kind of gratitude and leave it at that, but that pushes the other side to claim understanding of the miracle that it does not possess? The answer is religious subservience, on the one hand, and the vanity of the scientistic ego on the other. The religious mind has always been satisfied with analogies; the scientific ego has often rushed to judgment in any claim to understanding. Certain egos will always want to claim absolute finality for their belief, whether religious or scientific. This latter fact is the reason why the history of science, no less than the history of religion, is a history of theories that rule as orthodoxy for a while and are then overturned despite the resistance of the orthodox, as Kuhn has described. The orthodox theories are always overturned by an upcoming generation that sees the shortcomings of the prevailing wisdom and is not prepared to claim understanding where it has only a pleasing model. The orthodox, who are always quick to claim that the theories are not theories but facts, have to die off and disappear physically before their influence gradually wanes.

But let’s be quite clear about understanding: as humans, we only really understand what we ourselves make. We only really understand our technology and our mathematics. We cannot reconstruct the history of the world and of life upon it, so we should recognise that we have only myths and models in the domain of evolution where all is a matter of historical interpretation.

The tussle between the Dawkins-style theoreticians and the defenders of ID is a battle for people’s minds, a battle that strives to convert people to a faith: deterministic materialism, on the one hand, or theism on the other. It is in both cases propaganda. Faith has no place in science and it is no surprise that the faith of the ID defenders is rejected. But so should Dawkins’ faith in naturalism be rejected. Both should be banished by the scientific community. It is really time that a truly scientific consensus rejected both. It is time that it repelled dogmatic figures such as Dawkins with as much vigour as it rejects the essentially religious character of the ID movement. Both damage the scientific enterprise. Neither of these two types of theory does any service to science since both rely on accounts of miracles cloaked in ideology. Science can never be identical with any ideology, be it theism or naturalism, for ideology kills free inquiry. The ID movement, if victorious, would stultify scientific investigation. But so would the Dawkins-style approach. Both claim an understanding they do not have. The ID people should stick to their religious convictions and not claim to be doing science. The Dawkins-camp should abandon their claims to complete materialistic understanding of the miraculous processes they describe and just do the science, going wherever the evidence leads – even if it leads away from naturalism.

One last thought: many a scientific life has been enriched and made more productive by religious sensibility even if this meant developing a scepticism as to the ability of science to provide definitive answers; and every true religious consciousness is rejuvenated by doubt, even if this has occasionally entailed a conversion to atheism as a necessary stage in the growth of consciousness. Great innovators of the past have often demonstrated that science has nothing to fear from religion, nor religion from science. The two have often cross-fertilized each other with great befit to both. They are both doing different things, without necessarily being ‘non-overlapping magisteria’ in Gould’s phrase. Along with poetry, philosophy, art and music they are aspects of the continuing human interrogation of the cosmos; and as yet, this interrogation (thankfully) does not have only one idiom and is not practised in only one register.

EXISTENCE

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 14:40:00 +0000

Existentialism is one of the main streams of late western philosophy, if not the main stream. Though it has many forms, Existentialism finally lays to rest the old conception of knowledge as the discovery of invariable essences and the articulation of this discovery as ‘absolute truth’. Some in the scientific community have yet to discover the provisional character of truth and continue searching for invariable principles behind the apparent repetitions of nature. But the philosophical foundations of the provisional conception of truth are secure. These are: the absence of any good philosophical reasons for believing that reality is intrinsically a group of repetitious phenomena determined by identifiable essential principles; and the absence of any language not tied to a purely relative frame of reference.

Western science is still mired in the Greek metaphysics that the Existentialists after Kierkegaard and Nietzsche rejected decisively. Anglo-Saxon (largely academic) philosophy has had its nose buried in logical analysis for most of the past century, but this concentration on technical matters, too, was imposed by the same anti-metaphysical tendency that characterised western thought at least from the time of David Hume and Immanuel Kant onwards. The striving to understand precisely what limited set of aims language and logic could be relied upon to achieve was the last remaining clean-up job of the sceptic.

The Existentialist philosophy based itself upon the belief that existence, far from emerging from eternal essences, was itself the origin of the whole notion of essence. No eternal, immutable essence dictates how the existent will turn out. Rather the opposite is the case. It Sartre’s famous slogan: existence precedes essence. What does that mean? Sartre used the phrase with reference to human existence, to the pour-soi. If one extends the principle to nature as a whole (as Existentialism broadly speaking does not) it means that the world, far from grinding through the possible permutations allowed by unchanging laws of nature, makes itself up as it goes along; and man, as a part of the world, does the same. It means that no understanding of human life in terms of any definitions of nature or of the human are possible. It is no longer possible to proceed as if the course of human life was mapped out according to some sort of ‘instructions for use’, set by who knows what agency, God, The Form of the Good, Natural Law, or whatever.

The opposite of the old Platonic-Aristotelian-Christian Essentialism with its insistence upon some sort of pre-existent ‘good’ giving meaning and direction to existence, is the thesis that human life is entirely free of any guidelines whatsoever, entirely free of prescriptions, entirely free of definitions, entirely free of typical characteristics, entirely free of repetitions. Typical physical characteristics are unimportant to the individual who is condemned to create him or herself. Within the Sartrean conception of human life, the individual is obviously all at sea. There is no sense of direction given by the body, since the body is simply a thing, an en-soi, and things have a completely different sort of existence from selves. Things just lie around being things. And Sartre seemed to have believed that naturalistic science gives a full account of these. Theirs is an uncomplicated and unquestioned form of existence. On the mechanistic hypothesis, they are keyed into the universal nexus of physical forces and operate in accordance with them. They have, in fact, no choice in the matter and do not need choice. The mechanical laws of nature look after that and their destiny is all necessity. Sartre’s dualism arises from an uncritical acceptance of the account contemporary naturalistic science gave him of the body and the inability of science to deal with the mind. The absolutely free individual self is utterly incomprehensible in terms of the body and the Sartrean free individual represents no more than an outraged revolt against the iron necessity of the deterministic, scientific account of the body.

Science examines and explains the thing-nature of bodies and pays no attention at all to the self, since the self is not a thing. In scientific terms, the self has no existence, except as an aspect of the body; and therefore it obviously has no meaning. The result is that the self – which is firmly convinced that it exists and not able to be convinced by arguments to the contrary – is obliged to carve out its own conception of meaning for itself. It is obliged to create its own meaning in a world of things that does not cater for it, that has no place for it and that cannot even assent to its existence. In short, the existing self has to create itself and in creating itself, i.e. in existing, it has to arrive by its own efforts at its own nature. It is for these reasons that Sartre announced that existence precedes essence. We as humans exist before we are forced to find out what we are.

The upshot of this philosophy is a pervading sense of non-sense, non-meaning, non-value, non-identity that the great existentialist philosopher Heidegger refers to as Geworfenheit or ‘thrownness’. We are thrown into a universe that has no place for us, that cares not a hang for us and for our preoccupations, that is composed entirely of insensible objects and nothing else and that rolls on according to the laws of physics in complete disregard of the human self.

But as we have been at pains to stress in other contexts, this histrionic-tragic wailing about the lack of meaning has its origin in an unwarranted surrender to and uncritical swallowing of the prevailing mechanistic-deterministic-materialistic ideology of the scientific world-view and the thing-ideology. Obviously, if this mechanistic stuff is taken seriously, if the scientific method (i.e., the sorts of things it allows to exist) is considered to be an ontology rather than merely a procedure, considered to be the way things are in themselves rather than the way we look at them, then any entity that does not fit into its system is made nonsensical by that very fact. This is the characteristic of any codified or systematised scheme of thought that seeks complete internal coherence: it operates by setting the rules for what is to be included and what is to be excluded and proceeds by including what confirms the overall coherence and by excluding what would damage that coherence. We do not need to proceed this way, but as soon as we regard our knowledge as some sort of complete or perfect truth, then we will operate in this essentially totalitarian manner. We will deny the facts in order to save the theory. There is something deeply human about that practice.

Thus the Existentialists, though convinced that the dynamics of the self – from which the philosophy starts – could not be accounted for by the scientific approach to reality, nevertheless accepted the scientific picture of the world in terms of which the self and its dynamics were nonsensical and had no place in the universe. They had no real reason to do this apart from their bowing to the cultural dominance of the scientific approach to reality that had replaced the religious picture of the world. Nietzsche, though aware of the limits of scientific knowledge, was nevertheless brow-beaten in a similar fashion. If the Existentialists had extended the ‘existence precedes essence’ idea to the universe as a whole (by denying the existence of ‘laws of nature’), that would have allowed them to consider nature as a creatively not to say intelligently dynamic whole in which the human has its creative, intelligent place. In ditching determinism on the macrocosmic scale, they would have diffused its consequences for the microcosm. In this way, Existentialism would have found itself closer to Kierkegaard than to Nietzsche.

It never occurred to the Existentialists seriously to question the prevailing naturalistic ideology, even though a perfectly good critique of scientism was present in the writings of the fathers of the movement. It never occurred to the Existentialists that if human existence can be given no meaning and is absurd in terms of the materialistic-mechanistic dogma, then that does not necessarily mean that human existence has no meaning. Logically, it could just as well mean that the latter dogma has no meaning. But harping on the theme of the absurdity of human life allowed the Existentialists the pathos of striking grand tragic poses, allowed them to indulge in the delicious dramatic bravado of the little man against the hostile universe. It allowed a very gratifying defiance: little Sisyphus taking on the bullying gods and beating them by demonstrating the grandeur of his weakness. But like the mechanistic world-view that spawned it, Existentialism was destined to wither away with the changing climate of thought in the post-scientific age. It began to occur to quite ordinary people that the scientific denial of the self and of its dynamics was simply another piece of authoritarian nonsense. It did not have to be believed. Indeed, it couldn’t be believed. The scientists can insist upon their ‘proofs’ until they are blue in the face, if these fail to convince, they fail to convince; and that does not necessarily indicate stupidity on the part of those rejecting those proofs.

So what are the alternatives? How does human existence become more than a simple exercise in mock-heroics? How do we progress beyond the ‘anything goes’ philosophy that urges us simply to make our lives up as we go along and make them into anything at all? The simple fact is that the Existentialists did not fundamentally believe that ‘anything goes’. The movement spawned more sects than Protestantism. They managed to argue for all kinds of very traditional-sounding value systems. They embraced versions of Christianity, Judaism, Socialism and other ethical codes. Even when they professed to reject all traditional value systems, they managed to argue, illogically for the most part, for decency and niceness and helpfulness to others. The basic reason for this is that the nihilism that is never far away from Existentialism can not in fact be sustained. Everyone knows that the Gidean acte gratuit is a piece of pretentious nonsense. It is a sterile adolescent pose. Everyone in the end turns away from a philosophy that intones ceaselessly that ‘nothing has any more value than anything else’. Various spin-offs from nihilism were tried, anarchism, egoism, irrationalism and other intellectual dead-ends; but the human minds craves structure and meaning and will not do without it, will have it whatever the arguments against it. Moreover, the human mind will always conceive of this meaning in terms of integration of the individual existent into a system that transcends, enlarges and subsumes individuality. Human existence was made meaningless in the universe by so restrictive a view of that universe that it could not accommodate the human mind, let alone the human soul. Abolish this system as outdated, and you abolish the principal problems of Existentialism: the divorce between the en-soi and the pour-soi.

And this system is indeed outdated. The thing-ideology was responsible for alienating the human self from the world. It replaced the human self with the fixed, goggling eye of the ‘propertyless observer’ of scientism – i.e. by absolute nonsensical piffle. The mechanistic-materialistic-deterministic dogma with its obsession with three-dimensional objects forced the human mind out of nature except as the ‘objective’ observer (who does not really exist). But this was a piece of self-deceptive fiction. Science has never been driven forward by bloodless, characterless, emotionless observers. It has always been driven forward by the emotions of passionate people, real persons, animated by the desire to slake their curiosity and to find answers in precise terms to all their questions. Human existence is a constant and passionate probing of reality, a constant interrogation of it. Our intelligence is a combination of reason and emotion. We do not probe reality dispassionately like robots; we do it because it is our deepest wish to discover its meaning. The thing-ideology was extremely powerful and influential for many decades and considered to be the definitive answer to this interrogation; but its influence began to wane and with it the problems of Existentialism, the anomalies of existence, began to appear as distortions created by the ideology rather than coherent philosophy.

The thing ideology shut man out of the universe and made everything that renders his life worthwhile, nonsensical. The atomisation of human life, the fragmentation and alienation, the Angst-ridden, sport-, money- and celebrity-obsessed modern psyche was entirely the creation of the thing-ideology. Replace the thing-ideology by a science that views the whole of reality as a co-ordinated and seamless totality, in which man has his place, mind and all, and you get rid, at a stroke, of the so-called problem of existence. Existence means something like ‘standing out from a background’ and that is what happened to man as a consequence of the thing-ideology: he stuck out from the mechanistic universe of things like a sore thumb. It took us some time to realise that the problem was not with man, but rather with the theory. But we have realised that and now existence is looking like having more benign features than we suspected, though we are still terrified of the possibility of disappearing without trace into the dark embrace of matter in death.

It looks as if there is indeed a place for us in the universe, as though we are indeed at home in it. We may not have the old essentialism; but we have our place in the order of things. Our intelligence is conceivably an aspect of the overall intelligence of nature. The mind is part of nature, but it is also in a sense above nature insofar as nature is viewed as a collection of objects. If we ditch our obsessive belief in the primacy of the 3D object, the mind (as indeterminate intelligence) can view itself as transcending the brain (as determined thought). The mind can comprehend itself as part of the universal, undetermined and meaningful movement that is the uninterrupted process of universal creation. We don’t know how this proceeds but we can now begin to avoid all preconceptions and simply accept ourselves as self-conscious aspects of the indeterminate, universal creative process. We are far beyond naturalism, but we are in no danger of falling back into the trap of naïve teleology, arrogantly assuming we understand the ‘goal’ of natural processes. Traditional modes of harmonising mind and world are nonetheless coming back into focus.

Meditation of the ancient Buddhist type, we are beginning to realise, has its own observable regularities, including a powerful ability to re-integrate the mind, to centre it and to focus it. There are forces in the self, we now realise, that are analogous to the self-healing forces of the flesh. Existence is no longer a matter of sticking out like a sore thumb in a world of objects in which we have no place. Existence is now considered to be a process of dynamic interaction with a system – the world – that brought us into being, that is vastly more resourceful that we with our rational intellect will ever be, that can be credited with an intelligence of which ours is only a faint reflection. We must broaden our understanding of intelligence and see it as more than mere rule-following: we should understand it as almost synonymous with indeterminate creative innovation. Existence now is gradually being transformed by the perception that we and our intelligence belong in the world, that we both create it and are created by it in its ceaseless production of novelty. Our job, in these terms, is not to think ourselves up, not to work out the rule for hoisting ourselves by our own bootstraps, but rather to let ourselves be created by the ceaseless creativity of Creation. Intelligently to create and intelligently to be created are one and the same thing. Our crazy desire to dominate the world on the basis of shaky beliefs has turned out to be an unsustainable piece of madness. The old belief in the rational ego as master of the universe and new god on the block has to go.

We are not masters of the universe. How could we be, latecomers to the party that we are? The old idea that man is somehow different from the rest of nature is on the wane. With this old idea went notions of rational domination that could simply not be perpetuated. The idea that the rational intellect was all-powerful and all-dominant, and its methods exclusively and absolutely valid, brought us to the thing-ideology and to the consequent feeling of the absurdity of human life. The new scientific paradigm that is dawning, though it will be as provisional as all others, nevertheless sees scientific knowledge as only one type of knowledge and as being far from absolute in any sense. It sees our knowledge as part of the universal flow, as part of the creativity of the universal flow and it views our intellect, our emotions, the very dynamics of our self as integral parts of the universal, creative, intelligent flow. This is not cruddy mysticism, it is simply the most rational account of the fact of human life as we know it. If it is part of the process of universal creativity that has produced all the wonders of the natural world, then human existence, far from being absurd, is consummately meaningful. But let us not be under any illusion: ‘meaningful’ does not necessarily mean ‘comfortable’. The human subject as finite existent is precisely that: subject. That is to say, the opposite of master. But there is more going on in the subject than we tend to allow ourselves to believe.

ESSENTIAL HUMANITY

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 22:57:00 +0000

The individual loses all significance within a purely mechanical universe; similarly, within a conception of society that is mechanical and that views the social order as primary, the individual is only of significance insofar as he or she contributes to the efficiency of the machine and as such is a dispensable, replaceable component. To consider the individual as having an intrinsic and absolute worth is one of the cultural accomplishments of Christianity that we abandon at our peril.

The essence of anything we talk about is conceived of as its innermost nature, its most important intrinsic characteristic, the necessary and sufficient conditions that define what it is. But this gives us merely a linguistic definition and a few spoken or written sentences do not seem to accomplish what we really intend. We talk of the essence of a flower’s perfume, of beef essence, of ‘essential oil’ of some plant or other, coffee essence, tea essence and the like; but to imagine that some intrinsic humanity can be distilled by an analogous procedure is to trivialise the question. The word ‘essential’ implies a feature without which an entity cannot be, something vital, something indispensable, something that can’t be left out, the most crucial feature of the entity in question and so on. For most of the recorded history of the human race, human beings have been regarded as having an essence in this way, something that encapsulated what it meant to be human, something that captured the human and made it what it was, something like a blueprint for life, imparted to each individual man and woman as a birth-right as he or she came into the world. Humanity has for millennia believed in some sort of ‘soul’ for this purpose. The drama of philosophy at the end of the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth centuries derived from the dawning suspicion that not only did the universe not have an essence – something like a moral world order – but neither did the human being.

The contemporary belief at the beginning of the twenty-first century is that the deoxyribonucleic acid molecules at the heart of our cells do the trick. Dawkins’ notion of the selfish gene, as the ‘thing’ that determines absolutely and completely what we as humans are, is just the latest and most inflexible version of the ancient notion of the intrinsic essence of the human and is completely in accord with the primacy of reductive thing-obsessed modes of reasoning in our culture. There is, however, a problem with this kind of pars pro toto definition of what it means to be human, beyond the counter-intuitive thought that our essential being is summed up in a few grains of matter. And it is a problem that has occupied a large section of modern philosophy for most of the last century or so, particularly on the European mainland. Needless to say, it has not been solved.

The Ancient Greek philosophers were the first to put this notion of an ‘essence’ on a firm philosophical footing. Plato with his doctrine of the 'Forms’ argued that each thing in nature corresponds more or less to a non-temporal, non-spatial archetype, or template of which it is a more or less dim reflection or approximation. The form of the daisy or sheep or lion or man is a perfect, abstract ‘idea’ of everything that is implied in the generic word, the form of man is the perfect abstract conception of everything that is implied in the notion ‘man’ and is also a definition of the best possible attributes of the human. Plato’s forms define everything in nature according to their best possible state and therefore carry moral worth as a sort of ideal to which everything can be understood as approximating or striving, or from which everything can be thought of as a falling short. So for example, we, as individual humans may be striving to be perfect, but we are actually degenerate failures.

Thus Plato’s universe is structured according to a fund of ideal templates that define the best possible conception of whatever it is we happen to be talking about. And all real things within our experience fail to make the grade. There is nevertheless in his system a role for everything and everything has its role. This role is intrinsic to the structure of the universe, for all the individual forms are, as it were, gathered together within one dominant form called the ‘Form of the Good’ which is understood as organising and co-ordinating the entire universe as a sort of ideal to which the whole order of nature incessantly strives. So the universe and everything in it has a goal.

Man, in Plato’s system, therefore has a definite role allotted him within all this striving. His role is to conform himself as closely as possible to his form, his essence, by means of a disciplined exercise of reason that leads, ultimately, to an understanding of the form of the good. This means that the nature of human life and the nature of the universe are in close harmony. As in Stuart Kauffman’s vision of nature, Plato’s man is ‘at home’ in the universe, though the similarity does not go much further than that. In Plato’s philosophy, a human being’s job is clear-cut – a little too clear-cut for some: he has to develop those portions of himself that are the ‘best’ aspects of his nature, i.e. his intellect, his reason, his understanding. He has to do this because he is conforming himself ever more closely thereby to his form, that is to say to the set of characteristics that would constitute his most noble realisation. Any departure from the ideal is a moral failing.

Aristotle, profoundly influenced by his teacher Plato, whose best and most eminent student he was, reacted strongly to the notion of an abstract human essence. He developed his biological vision of the world, as we have already seen to postulate a ‘form’ of the human that was not ideal, tucked away in some mysterious ‘supercelestial place’, but rather located firmly within the organism itself, rather like the genome. For Aristotle, the essence of the human, its form, was that inner principle, that inner set of instructions, if you like, which ensured that, given the right circumstances and the right input, the individual being would grow to successful maturity and constitute a well turned-out example of whatever we happen to be considering. Thus a well turned-out tree, for example, would require that the seed – which already contains the organising ‘form’ – should fall into suitable ground, be nurtured by propitious forces, rain, sun, atmosphere, drainage and the like, and be allowed to flourish, that is to say to develop, without hindrance, its set of potentials in the best possible way. Similarly, a human being, according to Aristotle, requires an analogous, though much more complex set of optimum circumstances in order to develop his or her set of functional characteristics in the best possible way. The human being requires – along, of course, with correct nutrition and other sorts of physical nurture – benign and wise habituation or training in youth and the right social structure in adulthood to allow the full development of intellectual capacities. If these things are got right, according to Aristotle, and if the individual human being cultivates ‘virtue’ – or to translate the notion otherwise, ‘excellence’ – then the result will be happiness, that is to say a first-rate human life.

This notion of ‘virtue’ will be the theme of a later section. It is enough to say here that for Aristotle this was not understood as some sort of joyless, dutiful do-gooding, some kind of bloodless, bland, unadventurous preparedness to ‘obey the rules’, as many understand the word in our culture. On the contrary, Aristotle’s theory of human virtue (arête) implied no adherence to rules, but rather meant simply excelling at being whatever you were, and was related in meaning to the notion of ‘aristocrat’. Just as you can have an excellent race-horse, so you can have an excellent human being. The virtuous person, in Aristotle’s philosophy does not robotically obey rules; he or she rather develops every aspect of his or her (though given Aristotle’s prejudices, it was probably ‘his’ rather than ‘her’) abilities and characteristics in the best possible way, as skills, such as to achieve an outstanding performance in all respects. These abilities and characteristics are, of course, set by the form of the human, the human essence, and will, if allowed to develop properly, guarantee the success of the enterprise, as long as the individual does his bit. The fundamental point, however, is this: there is an essence of the human – a blueprint, if you like for an optimum human life – and happiness and success consist in bringing this essence out into the world in the most successful way possible. The successful human being is like an athlete, though his principal prowess is not simply in physical activity, but rather in mental excellence. Aristotle’s aristoi or aretai, his virtuous, that is to say ‘excellent’ human beings, perform habitually a kind of intellectual tightrope act of consummate skill, negotiating with intellectual brilliance the predetermined path of human life, assessing with the virtuosity of masters in their field the opportunities and threats of life, steering a well-judged middle course between excess and deficiency, weighing ends to means with consummate skill enjoying the benefits of respect, eminence, friendship, self-respect and personal wealth that come with all these successes. Of course, Aristotle was an Athenian aristocrat and in many ways his view of humanity is the view of his class. But this aside, the understanding of man according to his essence proved to be a remarkably fertile and appealing idea, one that was adopted by the Christian Church with alacrity and used to bolster its particular view of the good life.

The culture of Europe was built on the understanding of man as a being endowed with a God-given ‘soul’ at birth. This soul, for the Christians, was more than the Aristotelian form, however. It constituted the unique individuality of the person in question, it was God’s property, it came from him and would return to him, in some way or another, when physical life was over. The essence of life on earth was the cultivation of this soul in accordance with divine wishes and intentions. There was a certain optimum kind of life set before us all as a goal to be aimed at, and the Christian Gospel was the recipe for success in the achievement of this goal. This goal was ‘salvation’, by which was meant the final conformity of the soul to God’s will in complete abandonment of those aspects of human nature that were regarded as against divine will and therefore ‘sinful’. Thus any behaviour that, though possible, was not in accordance with divine intentions for the physical attributes that made such behaviour possible was regarded as sinful. Extramarital or homosexual sex, for example, was denounced as sinful precisely because it was not in accordance with ‘nature’, i.e. with what God had set as the ‘natural’ order of human life in which sexual activity was for procreation within stable, monogamous marriage and not for any other purposes. However the principal occupation of the Christian was not so much the cultivation of the Aristotelian virtues of as the development of the specifically Christian virtues of faith, hope and charity which represented the specifically Christian advance on the classical virtues of temperance, prudence, fortitude and justice.

Thus the soul of man, in Christianity, came with a complete set of directives, a kind of ‘Instructions for Use’ that could not be interpreted according to individual wishes and inclinations, but only according to what God had pre-ordained. This model of the human life dominated the entire medieval period and determined the entire nature of the culture and of the social order, which it orchestrated. The progress of the soul through the temptations and pitfalls of earthly life – pitfalls that illustrated its departures from its own perfection – was the prime preoccupation of all authority – at least officially. This notion of the soul determined the hierarchical nature of society and set the shape of human life from cradle to grave. The soul was worthy for salvation or ripe for damnation – both of these outcomes being forms of divine disposition – according to the extent to which it had either lived out its earthly existence in obedience to the divinely created essence and developed the Christian virtues, or gone its own way and cultivated a degenerate caricature of its intrinsic being.

Now whatever one thinks of these sorts of prescriptive attitudes to human life that lay down a ground plan for its optimisation – and there are still plenty of them around in the world – it is undeniable that they give a firm sense of identity, a firm sense of purpose and direction, a firm sense of the meaning of individual existence. The individual is conscious of his or her place in the universal order of things. Where the culture of modern western humanity differs from almost any other culture that preceded it is precisely in this lack of prescription, this lack of clear direction and pre-established meaning. Modern western man does not have a soul to begin with. His body can be defined with reasonable precision, but the soul has been pronounced by his science to be non-existent, because it cannot be weighed, measured or otherwise quantified by means of current naturalistic methods. He does not have an essence either, despite his well-understood genome, because it is impossible to define him with regard to any set of values; and values are what make us human. The genetic definition only prescribes the body-plan, not what is to be done with the life it lives. According to the scientific assessment of man, only the body counts and what the body is capable of is simply a matter of fact rather than of value.

Now this is not what worries us when we talk in terms of seeking meaning and purpose to life. Of course, there is the culture of the body beautiful that seems to suggest that there is a certain optimum physical appearance that can be achieved by everyone; but no-one is convinced by such commercial deceit and media chatter. And anyway, it is impossible to define scientifically. The mind, moreover, desires more than the striking of pretty poses. The meaning of life, if there is such a thing, must be entirely separate from any assessment of bodily dimensions, proportions, coloration, efficiency, fecundity or whatever. It must concern an identifiable link between the individual and the universe in which his or her life is set. One can clearly not talk in terms of this link if the prevailing ideology dictates that the only link between a human being and the world is the fact that the body is a 3D thing located in a universe of 3D things. This ideology declares that the laws of things (physics) govern the body as a thing, but that beyond that, the so-called ‘individual mind’ is a delusion that has no role at all in the universe. Thus so far from setting an essential link between human mind and world, the prevailing ideology suggests that it is almost of the essence of the human – at least of that bit of the human that is called the ‘mind’ – to be alienated, unrelated, lacking identity, a stranger in the universe. Unless some arbitrary social role is adopted. The prevailing ideology has set the way we feel about ourselves at variance with the way we think about ourselves: we feel ourselves to be souls; we think we are things. The result is alienation.

This state of affairs will be examined in a little greater detail in the next section. It is sufficient to emphasise here that the thing-ideology permits definition of the human, and therefore identification of any essence, only in terms of physical and functional characteristics. Since that is the case, the self is entirely shut out from any identifiable role, function or indeed significance. The thing-ideology cannot deal with the self, never mind the soul. The self, as the ‘ghost in the machine’ is condemned to a strange half- or non-existence without status or recognition, condemned to haunt the material world like a disconsolate spook, without home, without goal, without meaning, without value. And what is the reason for this uncomfortable, chilly state of affairs? It is not that the self has been found not to exist; it is simply that the thing-ideology lacks the conceptual equipment even to talk about it.

The staggering fact is that the majority of people in the west, at least of educated people, profess to be convinced by what is for them – in their unprejudiced and honest moments – most clearly false. The denial of the soul is a classic case of something that we humans persistently do with great readiness: denying the presence of the elephant in the room, of arguing ourselves into believing that black is white. The essence of the human cannot, simply cannot be tied exclusively to the body as thing, definable as all things are in terms of its space-occupancy and movement. This is impossible because each human person is entirely convinced of his or her status as a unique mind with a unique identity; and the ideology that declares the human existent to be just a lump of matter is not a good reason to abandon this conviction. It is the discovery of that unique identity that ultimately constitutes the principal aim of most people; and it is the discovery of the related destiny that modern philosophy, in the form of Existentialism, pronounced to be the entire, private responsibility of the individual.

Existence, in this philosophy, is a formless, shapeless business and the craving for meaning on the part of the individual can only be satisfied by rejecting all pre-conceptions, all essences and following the logic of this position to the bitter end. It is this notion of the essential freedom of the self that preoccupied Existentialists from Kierkegaard onwards and it is this notion that links Existentialism to many other great philosophical insights. The human being may legitimately be considered as a body, a thing, and as subject to the deterministic forces of physics. But the human being also has to be considered as a ‘thing in itself’ to use Kant’s phrase and as an essentially free self outside of the spatio-temporal structure of matter. Existentialism ultimately had no conceptual machinery with which to discuss the freedom and non-thinginess of the human; but at least it was aware that if essentialism was to be jettisoned, then the material essentialism that tried to understand human existence in terms of physics and chemistry alone could never produce an intellectually satisfying or indeed cogent account of our lot.

For Jean-Paul Sartre, the contents of the world fell into two principal categories, the ‘in-itself’ (en-soi) and the ‘for-itself’ (pour-soi). The in-itself is the world of everything that is not human: objects, plants, animals; and the for-itself is the human. The en-soi for Sartre pursued an unproblematic existence that is dictated by the essence of whatever it is. A stone cannot help being a stone. A tree will simply be a tree, a pig will spend its entire life being a pig. The essence of these entities dictates entirely the type of existence that they enjoy. Their essence precedes their existence and completely determines it. For the en-soi, however, that is to say for the human being, there is no essence. Existence is a matter of complete and total freedom to be and do absolutely anything at all. Human beings, in Sartre’s philosophy have no dictating, determining essence. There is a divorce between what they are and what they do. What they are is complete freedom. What they do then determines what they become. Thus existence, in Sartre’s famous slogan “precedes essence”. This freedom of the human to act without guidelines, without directions, without prescriptions became the heart of the philosophy of Existentialism. Sartre thus embraced a kind of incomprehensible dualism that derived from Kant’s separation of the world into the phenomenal and the noumenal; but in Sartre’s version, unlike in Kant’s philosophy, there is absolutely no way of bridging the gap between the two. Sartre was completely under the sway of twentieth century naturalism and accepted the mechanical conception of the universe as an ontology and not just as a construction. Within the universal mechanism, the pour-soi, as anomalous freedom is absurd and has to carve out its own meaning with its own resources. Existence became problematic because there was no obvious way in which men and women could decide on one course of action rather than another. Everything was of equal worth or unworth.

It is all very well for evolutionary biologists to pronounce that our body-plan is dictated for us by chance and selection and that a contingent collocation of material particles is what we are. Biology more than any other modern science has a vested interest in seeing human beings as determined objects. We all know that that is not what we are. We all know that the question of our existence remains to be solved and it is not solved by our considering ourselves counterintuitively as things. It is just as intelligent to consider ourselves not as things but as selves, and only selves insofar as we experience in contemplative ecstasy the totality of the cosmos as indeterminate, timeless present. This is only a fuzzy notion if one is obsessed by definitions of 3D things. We, in a materialistic age, think it is intelligent to see our being as that of a thing among things; but it is just as intelligent to see our self as the intelligent link with the whole intelligent movement of the cosmos and of that (universal and individual) intelligence as providing our essence. True, such an essence can not be a 3D thing, as our body is a thing; but what of that? If we do not bow to the thing-ideology, if we do not accept the sterile dualism of the incomprehensibly free mind floating around in the inhospitable machine, then we are free to imagine other possibilities. For example this:

The essence of intelligence is coherent relation. If one considers creative intelligence to be the essential characteristic of the human and if one considers the universe as a whole to be creatively intelligent (by no means a silly hypothesis!), then the relation of the one to the other is clearly essential to our intelligent existence. This is certainly not a relation of objects in space; but why should that be the only relation?

MIND AND THE ILLUSION OF KNOWLEDGE

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 17:44:00 +0000

In the modern human ego, the bundle of survival instincts with which most animals are equipped has been turned into a powerful engine for gaining and keeping power. It is a highly focused, self-regarding and self-reflecting structure devoted, initially by means of language, to detecting and exploiting useful regularity in its environment. Its interest is the maintenance and implementation of those strategies that have proved effective in the past in maximising pleasure and in minimising pain, i.e. what is vulgarly called ‘survival’. It is therefore a highly self-protective structure, brightly-lit and showing a distinct tendency to routine and rigidity. It is bolstered by powerful emotions – self-love, aggressivity, fear of competition, territoriality, possessiveness, craving for dominance etc. – and often tries to characterise and describe some sort of ‘unconscious’ mind – a fluid, shifting, ill-defined non-ego – that is somehow connected to it, but that it controls in principle and that it often sees as essentially inferior. The ego’s attitude to this so-called ‘unconscious’, however, is mainly one of mistrust and nervous wariness. It experiences the non-ego as a threat. This is principally because the ego – particularly in its modern incarnation as the ‘rational ego’ – sees itself as the essence of the mind if not the whole of the mind, and the non-ego, therefore, it sees as an interloper, a competitor of perhaps real, perhaps illusory, but clearly unstructured potential that has to be combated.

Clearly, it is mistaken in this. The simple facts are these: the ego is not the mind, but simply a series of well-established routines acquired by habit and reinforced by self-regard, self-preservation and vanity. Far from being in control of the unconscious, the conscious mind is dependent on what is not conscious for its very existence, just as every sub-system of the universe is dependent upon the configuration of the universe as a whole. And since the ego is only part of the conscious mind, this dependence is decisive. The human mind requires a vastly more capacious conceptual machinery for its self-understanding than that which is applicable to the conscious ego. The ego does not reflect upon itself very much; and the rational ego, insofar as it goes in for self-contemplation, irrationally considers itself as a sort of inexplicable, immaterial hole punched in material reality, lacking any properties and legitimately excluded from science. For despite its modern materialism, the ego is wedded nonetheless to a sort of unadmitted Cartesian dualism. It believes in a world composed of chunks of matter, but sees itself as apart and utterly different from this world, whose inexplicable, propertyless, dimensionless observer it is – a conception incompatible with quantum theory. Needless to say, it is the ego’s own confusion that is at the origin of these misconceptions. The ego’s self-misunderstanding – which even extends to a denial of its own existence – is at the root of the modern misunderstanding of the mind, which, in turn, is the root of our modern alienation.

One of the principal misconceptions that the ego has developed concerning the mind is the counterintuitive belief that it is identical with the lump of neural tissue inside our skulls, that it is in fact a 3D thing. Thoughts, therefore, are also 3D things. To begin to change this erroneous and damaging view of the mind it is necessary to take another look at some of Bohm’s revolutionary views on the nature of matter as he summarised them in an interview in 1986 with Professor Renée Weber of Rutgers University and the University of Washington.

Five issues stand out in this interview: 1) the status of material particles and thus of 'matter' within the nested levels of reality, 2) the delusory nature of the mind-matter distinction, 3) the nature of light, 4) creativity as the essence of the mind, and 5) creativity as the essence of knowledge.

Bohm was convinced that de Broglie’s interpretation of the sub-atomic particle was of vital importance despite its having been neglected (albeit accepted) by mainstream physics. He summarised the interpretation thus:

“It was the idea that basically an electron is a particle (I’ll simplify it very much) and that it has a field around it, a new kind of quantum mechanical field which in some ways is similar to old kinds of field, in some ways different. The key difference was that its activity did not depend on its intensity. That’s like saying that it did not act by mechanical pressure on the particle, but it acted from the information content which carried information about the whole experimental arrangement. So the meaning of an experimental result and the form of the experimental conditions were no longer separable, they were a whole, as even Bohr said. This was immediately obvious in de Broglie’s interpretation, whereas it’s a deep, impenetrable mystery in Bohr’s language.” (The Essential David Bohm p.142 – my italics)

Bohm calls the informational field that organises the implicate order of any material system the “quantum information potential” (p.145) and remarks that this implicate order “actively organizes itself”. (ibid) He points out that “This is crucial to understanding thought and the mind.” (ibid) He sees the neuro-physiological aspect of the brain (which is still ‘enfolded’ relative to what we can ordinarily see) as the implicate order of what we are able to observe (the brain), since the latter is the explicate order of the former; but he postulates a “super-implicate order” which is to the neuro-physiological processes what consciousness is to the these. The brain can be viewed as mere “soma”, mere body, mere matter, or it can be viewed as the “activity of significance”.(ibid) Intelligence is this “activity of significance” which, as the super-implicate order, must be seen as distinct from the explicate order of the body, though fundamentally the two are in a sense one. That is to say that the brain is the explicate order of the super-implicate order of the mind and the neuro-physiological activity is located between the two. Thus we don’t have mind and body as two distinct and separate entities, whose interaction is incomprehensible; we have the one – the body – as the explicate expression of what is implicate in the other – the mind. Thus the brain, far from being the essence of mind, is rather the projection of a more complex order (implicate) within a less complex (explicate) domain.

Bohm is furthermore quite unabashed in extending this fundamental model of nested orders to the universe as a whole, and maintains that in doing this he is doing no more than drawing the implications of the equations of quantum mechanics. He calls his multileveled understanding of reality “soma-significance” (ibid) and insists that far from being dualistic, this is an attempt to see reality as single but as knowable under several aspects, just as a written text can be known as both physico-chemical and according to its non-physical meaning. He sees the whole of material reality as organised and coordinated by meaning. The quantum informational field gives significance to the entire material universe. We as humans merely follow nature in our computers, in which the hardware is organised by information. All of nature, says Bohm, is organised according to the activity of significance (which means more than mere information, because it is active and self-organising). Meaning is thus not separate from matter, it is rather inherent in it as its informational field, its implicate order. He points out that in structuring our computers by information, we are imitating nature, not merely injecting meaning into systems that lack it. Thus, “the super or information-potential is related to the implicate order of matter as the subtle aspects of consciousness are related to the material movements of hormones and electrical currents in the nerves.” (p.146) And further: “The quantum field contains information about the whole environment and about the whole past, which regulates present activity of the electron in much the same way that information about the whole past and our whole environment regulates our own activity as human beings through consciousness. (ibid.) This “active information” – a concept picked up by Polkinghorne and others – is not just thought, as we humans understand it, “though it’s similar.” (ibid.) Furthermore, extending such a notion to the whole universe is not just a disguised reference to God. If one were to extrapolate the idea of implicate orders to an ultimate super- super- super- etc. implicate order, one would still not be talking about God, because one would be still conceiving something limited. The ultimate implicate order is beyond us because “we can not grasp that in thought,” (p.147) Nevertheless, just as people in the past had insight about a form of intelligence that had organized the universe, then personalized it and called it ‘God’, so according to the current state of physics, “a similar insight can prevail today without personalizing it and without calling it a personal God.” (ibid.) Of this intelligence, Bohm agrees that one can propose that it is benevolent and compassionate and not neutral.

The lower levels in this hierarchical conception of the universe are transcended by the higher. The higher level is always “immensely greater and has an entirely different set of relationships out of which the lower level is obtained as a very small part, in an abstraction.” (ibid.) The higher level contains the lower. The lower level is the unfolding of the higher. Where the lower level is linear, mathematically speaking, and unfolds in time, the higher is non-linear and timeless. This means that “the linear organization of time and thought characteristic of the ordinary level will not necessarily be characteristic of the higher level. Therefore what is beyond time may have an order of its own, not the same as the simple linear order of time.” (ibid.)

We impose our order of space and time on the entire order of reality and declare that this is the only order that exists, whereas in Bohm’s terms, “this higher order is not basically the order of space and time, but the order of space and time unfolds from it and folds back into it…” (p.148) The super-implicate order is a somewhat Spinozistic notion that gets us beyond the Kantian conception of an epistemological carapace that our minds can not remove. Since the super-implicate order contains the information content out of which the explicate order unfolds, it contains the order of space and time within it. Time is an “order of manifestation” (ibid.) and, a kind of “flowering” of the implicate order; thus evolution is fundamental to it. The individual moment contains enfolded in it the entire process of evolution and all the moments are present at once in the timeless implicate order. The influence of Einstein is obvious here. This entire timeless order is a temporal implicate order, just as the spatial interconnectedness of all matter is the spatial implicate order. Thus: “consciousness is basically in the implicate order as all matter is and therefore it’s not that consciousness is one thing and matter is another. Rather consciousness is a material process and consciousness is itself in the implicate order, as is all matter, and consciousness manifests itself in some explicate order, as does matter.” (p.148) Since all matter is interconnected and interpenetrating, “the consciousness of mankind is one.” (p.149)

Space, for Bohm, is not the empty theatre of common sense in which separate objects interact externally with each other, as points on an imaginary line; it is rather that which unites us, since all matter is a small wave, a mere ripple, on empty space and space itself is the ground of our existence the line uniting us is not imaginary; it is real. The separate points are mere abstractions. As the reality of space is not the measure of space (the units on the line measure only the wave in space) so the units by which we measure time are not the reality either. Reality is universal flow or holomovement and events and objects are merely abstractions created by the mind. The distinguishing characteristics of what we call ‘events’ or ‘objects’ are put there by the mind and create artificial divisions in what in reality has none. The distinguishing characteristics are aspects of the explicate order, but have no reality in themselves. Reality is the emptiness or rather the “plenum” (p.150) of space and what we call ‘real things’ are no more than tiny ripples within it. The notion of an empty plenum is only difficult if one says that the tiny ripples that are matter are all there is; whereas in fact, the ripples are in space itself which in contrast to the ripples (objects) appears empty to the mind, but in actual fact is full because it contains the potentiality for everything.

Naturally in order to think about the emptiness that is the plenum of space – the timeless, multi-dimensional space – we still use our three-dimensional consciousness. Bohm proposes that meditation is a means of avoiding thinking in three-dimensional terms. This is of course no different from the mystical notion of our being grounded in some infinite substance; but far from being a ‘mysticism’, which implies something hidden, Bohm proposes that this should be called “transparentism” (p.152) because as opposed to obscuring the whole, as our fragmented way of viewing it does, it makes the whole comprehensible. The meaning of transparentism is essentially the same idea as that contained in Kierkegaard’s phrase characterising the religious mind as “grounded transparently in the power that constitutes one”. (ibid.)

In response to the question from his interviewer as to why light has always been used as the privileged metaphor for the groundedness of the individual mind in the totality, Bohm gives the following explanation:

“As an object approaches the speed of light, according to relativity, its internal space and time change so that the clocks slow down relative to other speeds and the distance is shortened. You would find that two ends of the ray of light would have no time between them and no distance, so they would represent immediate contact. (...) You could also say that from the point of view of present field theory, the fundamental fields are those of very high energy in which the mass can be neglected, which would be essentially moving at the speed of light. Mass is a phenomenon of connecting light rays that go back and forth, sort of freezing them into a pattern.

“So matter is, as it were, condensed or frozen light. Light is not merely electromagnetic waves but in a sense other kinds of waves that go at that speed. Therefore all matter is a condensation of light into patterns moving back and forth at average speeds which are less than the speed of light. Even Einstein had some hint of this idea. You could say that when we come to light we are coming to the fundamental activity in which existence has its ground, or at least coming close to it.” (p.152f.)

Thus as the time-bound reality emerges out of the timeless, so matter emerges out of light as a kind of condensation. Pure light has no speed at all; only bound light moves at the ‘speed’ of light. In the depths of the implicate order, the timeless state (pure light perhaps) is the primary reality of which what we call reality is the secondary manifestation. It is analogous to two kinds of music, the second ordinary kind of which emerges disharmoniously, or only with limited harmony, from the first which is never disharmonious. The mystics use the image of light for enlightenment because it is the best expression of the experience of the mind as it leaves the timebound state and enters the timeless, spaceless state. Thus, says Bohm again:

“Light is what enfolds all the universe as well. For example, if you’re looking at this room, the whole room is enfolded into the light that enters the pupil of your eye and unfolds into the image and into your brain. Light in its generalized sense (not just ordinary light) is the means by which the entire universe unfolds into itself.” (p.154) This is no mere metaphor, it is actuality; light is both energy and information, it is “content, form and structure. It’s the potential of everything.” (ibid.) For Christians, there are clear analogies here with the notion of God as light and with the Creation and Incarnation as the ‘kenosis’ or self-limitation of the Creator. Light for Bohm does not move. It has no speed. It simply is. There is no transmission time, no distance between items except in our perception. The ordinary conception of time is analogous to a map such as Mercator’s projection of the world which is good at the Equator, but wrong at the poles, because it represents space there as infinite. Thus the ordinary conception of light with the ordinary space-time holds well enough for ordinary speeds but is as wrong at the ‘speed’ of light as Mercator’s map is at the poles.

Light is the background of everything, it can carry information about the entire universe. It can also, by interactions of different rays, produce particles and all the diverse structures of matter. “The ocean of energy” says Bohm, “could be thought of as an ocean of light. But the information-content may be such as to predispose certain light rays to combine so that they move back and forth rather than moving straight ahead, and thus forming particles.” (p156)

The psychological and spiritual significance of this light-doctrine is that the mind may have a structure similar to that of the universe and the particular forms of mind may be analogous to the particles. Getting down to the ground of the mind might be felt as light, getting into contact with the free, interpenetrating movement of the whole. Just as the ocean is all stirred up at the surface, but peaceful in its depths, so the mind experiences this contact with its ultimate depths as peace and harmony, oneness and timelessness. Since the entire information-content of the universe is a kind of intelligence, it experiences also a kind of love. (Though Bohm does not say this, his interviewer suggests it and Bohm does not demur).

This kind of conception of physicality, of the nature of matter and thus of mind is highly revolutionary and light-years away from either the bone-headed physicalism of the so-called ‘eliminative materialists’ or the dualism of the religious. The reason for this is that for Bohm, the concept ‘matter’ does not imply the 3D objects that we abstract from the entire process of the world, but rather an abstraction from an infinitely more subtle substance composed of nested orders. The mind or even the ‘soul’ and even less the ‘spirit’ is not some subtle thing that moves the perceptible things that constitute the body, some subtle thing that is present throughout the life of the body and perhaps pre-dates it. The mind (as also the soul or spirit) emerges in the course of the history of the body. It may well be that aspects of the mind are the ‘form’ of the body (in the Aristotelian sense) and that the growth and action of the body constitute the realisation of this organising principle. But the history of the body also is the context in which the mind achieves consciousness of itself. The body is the medium in which the mind is grown. There may well be a reciprocal relationship between mind and body. The body clearly has a vital role to play, despite its transience in the development of the mind. This role is limited to the temporal period of its existence. But we do not have on the basis of that to believe that the existence of the mind is temporally co-extensive with that of the body.

Some aspects of the mind do not need extra concepts other than the physical to account for them. The repetitive, mechanical aspects of thought, that are intrinsically linked to repetitive personal memory and to the preoccupations of the ego, are clearly physical processes and one must assume that they dissolve along with the body at the latter’s dissolution into its chemical constituents. Other aspects of the mind, however, cannot be so neatly tied to the body. The creativity of the mind has precisely to do with the transcendence of mechanical thought patterns and constitutes in itself a source of novelty which cannot be associated with any repetitive material pattern at all. It is this latter aspect of the mind that can be seen as immortal and as a likely candidate for the entity that survives the dissolution of the individual body. The creative mind is the focus of all the values and patterns of unique insight that constitute the individual’s ability to perceive the ever-renewed movement of the universe and its constantly changing configuration.

The creative mind is, perhaps, identical with the co-ordinating intelligence that is the centre of the universe’s constant evolution to unique configurations. It is impossible to see how this creative intelligence could be subject to the determinations that make things temporal and transient. It is the repetitious nature of consciousness, (i.e. the ego’s mechanical thought-patterns etc. which are the main constituent of most people’s mind) that are materially determined and destined to dissolve. The same cannot be said about the perceiving intelligence of the individual that constantly delivers new insight into the essentially unknown and unknowable, because ever shifting kaleidoscope that is reality. Such insight is only possible on the basis of an intimate affinity between perceiver and perceived, such that the two are one. The certainty of the insight is thus invincible, indestructible and requires no demonstration.

Only in the communication of insight in the refractory medium of language, with its inbuilt mechanisms and repetitions, does the certainty of the creative insight become damaged and lose its original character. The consciousness in which the insight originally arose, however, has already moved on and left behind any linguistic traces in which former states of certainty may have been expressed. It is this indefinable generator of what is commonly called ‘knowledge’ – but which is no more than an image of intelligence – that we must regard as the candidate for immortality and the ultimate guarantor of the individual’s stake in the universe. Of course, the uncreative, mechanical, algorithm-driven mind, will have a very minor stake if any. This is why the attitude of perpetual contemplation is the same as the attitude of prayer. This is the essence of what Kierkegaard called ‘subjectivity’. The attitude of prayer is essentially the perpetual reaffirmation of the essential rootedness of individual intelligence in universal intelligence. Since the latter guarantees the perpetual, unpredictable evolution of the holomovement, the former, as local contributor to this, is inseparable from it and like it, eternal.

So what of knowledge? For Bohm, knowledge is a dynamic contact between the mind and the reality that generates the mind, and not in any sense a stable body of doctrine encoded in some language or other. Thus knowledge, like the universe, is constant change, evolving awareness, or it is not knowledge. For Bohm, The only authentic contact between the mind and the cosmos takes place when creative intelligence achieves a novel insight on the basis of direct perception of the nature of current reality by means of a harmony established between individual and universal intelligence. This creative insight can be expressed in a work of art or a scientific theory. All other forms of contact are to a greater or lesser degree second-hand or mechanical. When the mind contacts reality through the schemata worked out by other minds – schemata that may in their time have represented a truly creative novum – the result is invariably a kind of mechanical repetition, even when, by logical means, unsuspected inferences may be made from the original insights. Most ordinary science involves inferences of this type. All rule-based thinking can only generate knowledge and truth as conventionally understood – both of which are deemed by those who invent them to somehow ‘correspond’ to reality as such. Inherent in such notions of ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’ are some kind of attainable absolute. Knowledge is deemed to be definitive certainty and truth to be a sort of reproduction of reality. However, the delusion inherent in this is generated by the ego’s self regard and is quickly discovered by the creative awareness: since reality is constantly evolving in an unpredictable way, no reproduction of it in any medium is possible and no certainty about its definitive state could ever be achieved. Knowledge and truth as understood by the rational ego, and by those who believe in a terminus to the search for understanding, are therefore illusory concepts; only living, immediate, creative insight into the nature of current reality has the sort of value traditionally attributed to knowledge and truth. The notion of ‘definitive’ knowledge is a contradiction. For the ego that sees its repetitions as of the essence of knowledge and that repudiates any ‘mental’ reality that is not circumscribed by its own awareness, such conceptions of knowledge and truth are of course nonsensical. But then, that is the ego's problem.

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF MEANING

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 12:01:00 +0000

When Nietzsche uttered his famous words “God is dead” he was under no illusion about the significance of the phrase. He meant more by it than some possible victory achieved for atheism by the scientific spirit and the mechanistic-deterministic-materialistic dogma. The phrase was a strange mixture of exultant triumph and horrified regret, for Nietzsche knew that it indicated an event of world-shaking importance. He knew that the complex cultural achievement that the phrase encapsulated would lead to a shattering of almost everything that had held human life and human society together for many centuries and that this shattering would leave in its place a vacuum that nothing seemed ready to fill. To that extent he had an understanding of the consequences of God’s demise that the little media-atheists of today do not even begin to appreciate.

So what was it that disappeared with the death of the Almighty? What evaporated was any notion of a moral or rational world order or indeed any detectable structure at all to human life in a world seen as completely contingent, accidental, not to say chaotic. Why was that important? It was important because, in Europe at least, the entire structure of society had depended for the entire span of its history upon the sense that an all-powerful, beneficent God took personal interest in the affairs of men, directed them to a certain extent, rewarded those who did well and restrained those who did evil. The entire history of Christendom, and indeed of the world, was considered by the most eminent authorities to be of a piece with the universal history of human salvation. The history of the world had a definite shape. It started with the Creation and the Fall, it included the rise and fall of the Chosen People, it was decisively altered through the redemptive life and death of Christ and it was moving towards some divinely planned consummation at the end of time, when God’s plan of salvation for the human race would finally be entirely revealed. All world history was, from the point of view of European Christianity, the outworking of a divine intention and a divine purpose. Governments, civil authorities and religious authorities were all regarded as instruments of the divine plan and commensurate respect for them was fostered.

But not only did the powerful and privileged have their role to play, the common man did, too. Of course, the role of the common man was to be conscious of his position, not to get above himself and to preserve due respect for his superiors, for after all, the hierarchical social order was instituted by God, too. For the entire medieval period, this overall structure to the world held people intellectually in its grip. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, other movements were gathering momentum, movements based on quite different attitudes to man and nature, but the essentially medieval world-view continued to exert its power well into the nineteenth century. Even in the middle of the twentieth century, the great psychologist C. G. Jung could still say that Europeans were still plunged in medieval values up to their ears.

But those other non-Christian movements alluded to above were to win the day in the end. In the fifteenth century, a new optimism and self-confidence was born in response to a re-discovery of the classical authors of Ancient Greece and Rome. The Greek philosophers, particularly Plato and Aristotle, but also a large number of lesser figures, had already, well before the rest of Europe had any culture to speak of, developed a view of the world that considered it as a rationally ordered whole, in which the road to salvation lay perhaps, not in yielding to the plan of a personal God, as much as arriving at the right rational understanding of the entire system by personal effort and reflection. Both Plato and Aristotle postulated an intelligent co-ordinating principle to nature that to be understood required nothing more than the application of the human intellect rightly trained in logic and dialectic. For the Greeks, salvation, happiness, a perfect social order and everything else of value in human life were there to be obtained by human effort, principally by the effort of the intelligence. They were almost infinitely optimistic in the ability of man to comprehend and master the world and achieve his own salvation.

Now while most of the theories of these philosophers had been gratefully adopted by the Christian Church since its becoming the official church of Europe, after the reign of Constantine, the element of self-redemption in them was distinctly played down. The moral world-order of the Greek philosophers was grafted on to Christianity, but the Church was never happy with the element of rationalism in this. For the Church, man could never be the author of his own salvation – that was something that was to be delivered to him by the grace of God, the saving work of Christ and the mediation of these benefits by the priesthood. The Church had a vested interest in keeping the population of Europe in a state of credulous submission, submission to the grand vision of meaning, maybe, but submission in which it could be manipulated for a variety of political ends. The confident self-sufficiency of the Ancient Greeks was definitely not an idea that medieval Christianity encouraged on anyone’s part. It is all the more remarkable, therefore that the Renaissance, having rediscovered this essential idea, developed from it a new optimism in human nature, a new interest in the world and a new determination to explore both to the limits with nothing else but the human intellect. It was this movement that eventually brought about the Reformation, the splitting of the Church into many factions, the resultant weakening of the centralised religious control over daily life and the rise of the scientific spirit. The Reformation reawakened the spirit of personal enquiry in matters religious and this led ultimately to the Enlightenment with its enthronement of unaided human intelligence as the only authority in the universe. The Enlightenment led to all the philosophical and scientific discoveries that ushered in the modern age and it was this irresistible movement, driven by the determination of people to think for themselves, that brought about the state of affairs in which Nietzsche pronounced his celebrated phrase, “God is dead.”

The effect of all this on the European mind was electrifying. Everything suddenly seemed possible by human effort alone. The physics of Newton seemed to have delivered into our hands a method not only of perfect understanding of the world order, but also of its complete manipulation. Whereas in the past, man had had his life mapped out for him by authorities whose power was rooted in the notion that they were delivering the will of the Almighty, now man could decide for himself; he was free to be and to do whatever he chose, within the limits of what is possible. We just had to discover what was possible. Whereas in the past, the human person had had its structure and essence defined for it by the entire system of which it was a part, now, modern man was free of all that and at perfect liberty to make and re-make himself in whatever form he pleased. The dream of the Comte de Laplace included the notion that even the knottiest moral problem of humanity could now be decided, not by appeal to tradition, revelation or authority, but merely by calculation. It seemed that paradise was almost visible just ahead, and not the paradise of the Church in some ill-defined, celestial place, at some unknown future time, but rather an earthly paradise achieved by the wit and effort of man alone. The optimism of the nineteenth century in the ability of man to achieve his own salvation was unbounded. This was the century in which the Utilitarian philosophy flourished and in which the Socialist movement was born. The spirit was definitely meliorist: things could only get better since the human intellect had been freed from the trammels of entrenched religious authorities with their irrational superstitions and fantasies concerning the nature and destiny of human life. The word ‘modern’ acquired a value-laden meaning that suggested that all previous historical epochs were merely periods of error to be superseded by the arrival of the truth.

Nietzsche, however, who summed up this entire phase of European history in his negative, funereal, ominous phrase, knew that something altogether less encouraging was entailed. He knew that the optimistic spirit of melioristic Utilitarianism, the optimism of men of ‘modern ideas’ was grounded in something of an illusion. It was as if prisoners had suddenly been released from their bonds and were dashing out with loud cries of victory into the sunlight. Their glee would be understandable, since the dungeon had been exchanged for the pure air of freedom. Possibilities seemed limitless. What Nietzsche feared was that this freedom from the intellectual tutelage of the divinely directed world-order was freedom to very little or nothing at all. It was as if the prisoners had rushed out of their cells and beyond the walls of the prison only to find themselves in a waterless, foodless, trackless desert. It was for this reason that Nietzsche set himself the task of taking upon himself all the consequences of the sudden meaninglessness of the world after the death of God a meaninglessness rendered all the more stark by the growing influence of the Darwinian narrative. Not only had any overall moral or rational structure to the world vanished, any form or shape to human life had vanished with it. The moral world order had disappeared and with it, for Nietzsche, so had the rational world order upon which it depended. Life after the death of God was shapeless, formless and directionless. In the words of Dostoyevsky, “everything is permitted,” and if everything is permitted, nothing has value.

Nietzsche set himself up as the prophet of the coming nihilism – the view of the world that claims that nothing has meaning or sense or value and everything is essentially shapeless, worthless and chaotic. Nietzsche knew that the psychological consequences of such a catastrophic shift in attitudes for the common man and for the powerful were disastrous. The departure of meaning from the world meant that meanings derived from social structures were a mere pis-aller and the self was in effect left with no other resources for the achievement of happiness than those of the self. The self was free, but it no longer had any sense of direction. Whereas formerly it had fitted into an entire world-order, now it was left scratching around trying to find any little structure at all into which it could scuttle and in which it could find a sense of meaning.

For this reason, Nietzsche developed his vision of the world as a monstrous self-devouring, self-regurgitating system of undirected energy, without end, beginning or purpose, eternally self-repeating, cyclic and absolutely unredeemed by the slightest glimmer of sense. Within such an “Eternal Return of the Same”, he proposed that the only role for man, the only duty for man, the only meaning for man was that of self-creation: man had to push his Will to Power to the limit; he had to will to become the next thing in evolution: the Superman. Although Nietzsche claimed to be persuaded by the scientific view of the world, the element of teleology in this appeared to escape him. But then he was not renowned for his respect for purely scientific logic. This vision of the self-creating, self-fulfilling human self became the only replacement for the Church’s vision of the human soul as given and designed by God to be saved by obedience to him and to fulfil a destiny decided by him.

And that is essentially where we are today, though the picture has become decidedly more complex as a consequence of our increasing acquaintance with non-European cultures. The Existentialist movement, particularly in its European form, developed a vision of human life as thrown together by chance, endowed with an intellect that served simply to discover the senselessness of existence, situated in a world of things to which it had no possible relation, going nowhere and meaning nothing. Such a life, for the Existentialists, could only be made tolerable by means of a kind of revolt. The revolt was to be a revolt against the cruel absurdity of a senseless existence and it was to be a revolt that asserted the identity and value of human life in the face of anything that an inanimate and unfeeling world could throw at it. There was no point, the Existentialists argued, in taking cowardly refuge in little ready-made systems of second-hand values, in what little meaning could be salvaged from the ruins of the Christian world-view. Such a policy was snivelling, inauthentic and unworthy of the self-declared dignity of man. The only decent policy, according to them, was to shake one’s fist at the meaningless cosmos and create oneself, entirely by one’s own efforts, and with this self-creation, help others to create themselves.

For a world devoid of values, this was no mean accomplishment. This was quite a set of values. The values of self-help and niceness to others seemed to come out of nowhere, bolstered as they were by the human spirit of defiance. But it didn’t help much. It sounded like so much loud, hearty singing designed to raise depressed spirits. We were still unhoused, orphaned, alienated and alone. We were still confused, disoriented and unconvinced.

The Post-Modern movement with its eclectic, ironic spirit followed hard on the heels of Existentialism, but essentially served up a diet of warmed-up and unsatisfying left-overs. All sorts of formerly oppressed and slighted groups began to flex their muscles in the pervading ‘anything-goes’ atmosphere. The youth culture came and went. Deference disappeared entirely from public life and for good. Church, monarchy, aristocracy, class – all of these traditionally valuable structures became material for stand-up comics, no more than ridiculous pretensions appropriate to a world structured by illusion. Splenetic little atheists began crawling out of the woodwork all over the place and gleefully enunciating their negative truth, convinced they were on to something new, but actually just ignorant of the history of the matter.

And so here we are in the twenty-first: unless one embraces a traditionally religious structure, nothing is in essence of any more value than anything else. And yet the world has not come to an end. The ruling values are those of materialism and consumerism despite much hand-wringing about the state of the planet; and although many agencies, including western governments, try to recommend traditional values, the embarrassment is palpable. The mass media, in cahoots with the industrial-commercial complex, foster conspicuous consumption and the accumulation of things as the meaning of life, but actually as the motor of the political and economic machine. People go along with it, but they are not fooled. They know that there is something amiss.

There is a void at the heart of modern increasingly mechanised, increasingly controlled human life that is troubling. Traditional value-systems still exist, but they are becoming more beleaguered and therefore more fundamentalist, more strident and less intellectually persuasive as they batten down the hatches against the surging tides of relativism. Everyone knows that consumption and materialism only palliate the pain. As we enthuse about the wonders of technology, we choke in the effluent from our industry. There is something deeply wrong with human life in the twenty-first century and there is not even a diagnosis of the problem, let alone the suggestion of a cure. The meaning appears to have gone from life for good, but we remain the creatures we always were: creatures who crave structure and meaning, not only to our individual everyday routine, but to the world at large, to the universe as a whole, and if we cannot have this, we feel ill. So what is the future for meaning?

The answer to this question would be equivalent to finding the Holy Grail and there is no pretension to do so here. We have tried scientific meanings, tried the perfect parallax of mind, world and language, hindworld, foreworld and midworld, and it has not worked. Of course, it was doomed from the start. How could anyone possibly find solace in a theory, in a bunch of sentences or mathematical equations, particularly given the undeniable fact that theories come and go and no possibility of a definitive one was either envisaged or desired? How could the banal, repetitive mechanism of some clever-dick ‘proof’ possibly satisfy? A mechanical world-system is a tomb in which to be buried alive. That is the sense of Nietzsche’s “Eternal Return of the Same”. So if meaning is not to be found in some formula, some incantation, some form of words or symbols, even some very big binary number, where on earth can it be found?

Since we’ve tried all the formulae, it can only be in praxis, in an activity, in a discovery of a connection between self and world between hindworld and, not foreworld, but hyperworld. Only in the establishment of a living, dynamic link between the self and the universe, a link of great intimacy, a non-mechanical link that establishes for us, for all time, the conviction that we are at home in the universe as a whole, can we begin to shed our alienation, our sense of disorientation and confusion, our sense of worthlessness and anxiety and begin to live. It may well be that there is an arduous road of apprenticeship to be followed along which all the midworld structures – including practices – considered to be redemptive have to be studied, if only then afterwards to be found to be inadequate, laid aside, emptied of the possible illumination they provide, and transcended. But the end of the process cannot be a definitive state of some absolute ‘knowledge’ in an exhaustive theory of the world, a linguistic structure, an orthodoxy, a dogma. If it can not be a form of words, then it can only be praxis. What the nature of that praxis is, is by no means easy to discover, but some start towards its discovery can certainly be made by considering notions such as ‘contemplation’, ‘meditation’, ‘revelation’ and the like within the context of a general examination of the nature of creativity.

WORLD PHILOSOPHY DAY

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:45:00 +0000

Today is world philosophy day. If it is anything it must be a day on which individual, untrammelled, rational reflection is promoted. Why is that of any importance? Well, if you believe Socrates, ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’. So if you’re living a life that does not include habitual reflection in your own unique way on the significance and purpose of what you’re doing, then your life is not worth living. What this ‘not worth living’ means roughly corresponds to the Existentialist idea of ‘bad faith’ – that is to say, you are living a life that is borrowed from others and therefore not your own.

Pretty harsh eh?

The thing about this sort of rigorous commitment to thinking for oneself is that it’s fiendishly difficult to maintain. Even those thinkers who make great public virtue of it and bang on about the necessity of thinking for yourself often show allegiance to this or that particular school of thought. Do they then think for themselves? They affix a badge to themselves – ‘rationalist’, ‘atheist’, ‘humanist’, or whatever and proceed to articulate the received wisdom of their tribe as if the arguments there in vogue somehow issued from the very purest of unprejudiced rationality. Very often, however, these free thinkers represent the essence of unfree thought, thinking within a particular box and appearing not to realise it. They cite this or that major prophet – Einstein, Darwin, Marx etc. – with great regularity and imagine that their chosen authority is somehow indisputable. We seem as humans incapable of avoiding this sort of credulity.

So is it at all possible to stick to the essential ideals of World Philosophy Day, and if so, is there any point? What’s wrong with a second-hand existence? Why should we not simply scuttle into little shells of belief like panic-stricken hermit crabs? What’s so wonderful about trying to come up with the answer to the world-riddle with nothing but one’s own resources? Perhaps, after all, there’s something wrong with our urge to believe the first set of propositions that strike us as reasonable.

Since all philosophy is a linguistic activity and since language is a group activity, it would seem impossible to practise it outside of a group. Practising it inside a particular group seems to condemn one to the speech and thought patterns of the group and eo ipso to second-hand thinking. The freest thinker still has to follow certain prevailing assumptions and thought-patterns. The point about examining one’s own assumptions is to get out of the straightjacket of prejudice, preconception, received wisdom, dogma and other similar rigid thought-patterns that afflict the human race. So what’s the point?

The point of sloughing off all inherited and acquired thought-patterns and linguistic conventions does not appear obvious at first. It seems to lead to extreme scepticism, cynicism, nihilism and related negative states of mind. But that is merely a first impression. Scepticism is analogous to depression in that it is a highly disagreeable, negative state that once worked through brings real benefits. The trick is not to connive with the depression or the scepticism by adopting it as one’s (more or less fashionable) attitude and thereafter wearing it like a badge. Scepticism is only a means to an end and the end in question has been discovered by some of the greatest philosophers in history. It is the insight that there is an insight beyond language and that it is this that generates all insight expressed in language. Something analogous happens in ethics, when the understanding dawns that virtue lies not in obeying rules, but in grasping the essence of vice.

Philosophy that a) relies wholly on language and logic and on the rules of discourse and b) promotes some particular brand of knowledge as final, will never do any more than create a cosy little huddle of consensus. In creating consensus it will inevitably create opposition to the consensus. So philosophy would seem to be able to accomplish only the creation of yet more second-hand thought and the perpetuation of discord. Unless, that is, the insight of some of the greatest philosophers of all time (Socrates, Kant, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein to name just four) is taken seriously. This insight involves seeing that language can only take us so far and that beyond language there is only the attitude of listening. One listens to the world and to oneself listening to the world and one leaves the generation of new insight to the strange chemistry of mind and world that generates all philosophy. A common word for this is ‘creativity’. Creation is a universal, unpredictable process; and one is oneself inseparably a part of it. But far from rushing into language, having gone beyond scepticism one simply recognises one’s own intimate and dynamic connection to all that is. Giving voice to this subsequently in language is a tricky business, but that is where real philosophy begins.

Fostering the ability of true critical thinking, the ideal of World Philosophy Day, is not as straightforward as many who advocate it seem to believe. So a word of caution: develop a fine nose for intellectual despotism and beware of little ideologues and dogmatists disguised as free thinkers.

http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=46842&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

PURPOSE

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:28:00 +0000

Telling stories to account for the world and everything that happens in it, whether to ourselves or to others, is something that we as humans do instinctively. Our stories, however, have to have beginnings, middles and ends, origins, developments and dénouements, causes, phenomena and purposes. It seems that we find it difficult to account for anything in the world without giving overarching reasons for events as well as historical causes. But even more significantly: we would not get up in the morning if we could not see a purpose in doing so, since there would be no reason to prefer one impulse to another. We would be like Burridan’s ass, paralysed by indecision. Our moral existence is rendered impossible if we cannot attribute purposes to processes.

When the first attempts at a purely rational account of the world were made by the Ancient Greeks, the thought that natural processes were governed by inherent purposes seemed to these early investigators self-evident. Purposes were considered to be quite legitimate as reasons for events. Natural purposes were another of those things that just appear ‘obvious’ to humans. The Pre-Socratic philosophers, who were much more interested in what we would regard as natural science than in any abstruse questions of epistemology or ethics, worked out systems of sweeping universality, tracing every phenomenon in the world to some basic arche or fundamental reason for the world, water, air, the formless, fire, mathematical relations, and so on according to which the natural world ‘grew’ (phusein ‘to grow’ – the origin of the words ‘physics’, ‘physical’ etc.). With this approach, they founded in a sense the method of reduction that was to become exclusively valid in our culture. But the systems they built up on these basic concepts were imbued with teleological notions: things happened for reasons that were not simply a column of antecedent historical ‘causes’ on which the present was supposedly balanced like a ping-pong ball on a spout of water; and the world was thus a comprehensible whole working according to principles of co-ordinated functioning that the human mind could appreciate as intelligent. As old Thales put it: “everything is full of gods”.

It was Aristotle who put the notion of the natural purposes of the world on a firm conceptual footing. He postulated that every separate thing in the world has an inbuilt natural purpose, even if it be only the humble stone whose purpose is always to seek, despite the hindrance of other objects, its ‘proper place’ at the centre of the earth. Aristotle was principally a biologist and interested mainly in living systems. It is not surprising, therefore, that he viewed everything in organic or quasi-organic terms. When he considered the living world, he theorised that each living unit was animated by a ‘form’, a kind of organising principle that guaranteed that the matter composing the creature would be organised during its individual history into the various stages of the organism. This form was a kind of essence, a kind of template, a kind of natural definition of what it meant to be the creature in question; and thus the creature’s existence was, as it were, mapped out from birth to grave in definite formal terms. But Aristotle also knew that matter became organised in the world not just from internal forces but also owing to external forces, heat, cold, water, earth and so on. He knew similarly that different types of material systems organised themselves in different ways. But he postulated that whatever the forces acting upon a natural system, it remained always under the guidance of another principle that as it were functioned as a sort of future goal. Every natural system tended inevitably to the realisation of what, thanks to its inner form, it was destined to become.

This goal or telos was not only the organisation, let’s say of the fully formed adult organism, but also the achievement of the range of typical roles that such an organism was designed to play within the whole system of the natural world. Thus Aristotle came upon his theory of the four types of ‘cause’. He called them individually the ‘formal cause’, the ‘efficient cause’, the ‘material cause’ and the ‘final cause’. In many senses, the first three of these could be grouped together and fused into the one single type of cause that modern science uses. But the last of these was used by Aristotle to construct a complete, coherent and co-ordinated system of nature based upon rationally comprehensible reasons for which everything happened. Every creature in nature, including man, fitted into an intricate and completely orchestrated nexus of interdependences in which each individual existent contributed intelligibly to the functioning of the whole. This conception of nature was to rule European thought for nigh on two thousand years after Aristotle had invented it and it has only been in the last three hundred years that the notion of natural purposes, what is called ‘teleology’ has been condemned as an illegitimate concept in any approach to the world based upon scientific method. The scientific method accounts for all process historically and only allows consideration of the future to exist as an extrapolation of past regularity into the future – what is called ‘induction’.

Aristotle’s four causes were reduced by the modern scientific attitude to just one. The material and the efficient causes were fused, the formal cause disappeared (except, perhaps as the notion of a genetic code which is anyway just another thing with a causal history) and the final cause was simply thrown out of the window as incomprehensible because it required an intelligence in nature that took into account the future of things as well as their past. Modern science set itself the task of constructing a complete and exhaustive world system on the historical cause alone. Only antecedent causes (what Aristotle called ‘efficient causes’) could be regarded as explanatory. Final causes suggested that the changes in nature were either due to some mysterious attraction from the future, or to a planning, quasi-human intelligence and neither of these would do.

Since the science of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries set about exploring purely mechanical principles, only the prior, historical cause mattered because only the historical cause could be understood solely in terms of the properties and motions of physical objects. The result of this was that not only did the notion of ‘purpose’ disappear from scientific language; the very idea of a purpose to any natural system was banished with loud cries of ‘mysticism!’ or ‘mystification!’, or worse. The sciences in which this loathing of the concept of purpose was most evident were the biological sciences. This was perhaps understandable, given the Aristotelian heritage. But the enthusiastic embrace of ever more arbitrarily mechanistic, ever less meaningful principles in the explanation of the origins and functioning of living systems culminated in the Darwinian theory of the survival of the fittest by natural selection, a theory in which any notion of inherent purposefulness to the natural world was pronounced to be erroneous. This was no bad thing, since it reined in the speculative impulse and prevented the religious from pontificating on the direction of natural processes.

After Darwin, the biological sciences developed his insights in increasingly mechanistic ways and the blind struggle for survival, the meaningless competitive development of adaptive advantage, the senseless and directionless battle of all against each became the means by which the natural world and its exquisitely tuned systems were accounted for. Of course, the very notions of ‘struggle’, ‘survival’ ‘adaptation’, ‘competition’ are teleological because they are inseparable from purposes; and the biological sciences have to use all sorts of contortions of language to avoid slipping inadvertently into the language of teleology. Natural systems evolve ‘in order’ to adapt, they adapt ‘in order’ to compete, they struggle ‘in order’ to compete and they compete ‘in order’ to survive after all. The ‘purpose’ of evolution is adaptation and survival. This sort of language, though it is everywhere in evolutionary theory, is huffily pronounced to be no more than a convenient shorthand way of talking, for in fact, everything happens strictly at random and for no other reason than those that are built into the ‘necessities’ of matter.

The principal reason for this reflex-rejection of any hint of purpose in the processes of nature had not so much to do with the philosophical teleology of the Greeks and of European philosophy influenced by them. It had more to do with the fact that the Christian Church in its various forms and deisms and theisms in all their forms had enthusiastically espoused this philosophical teleology and were busily finding all manner of subtle and not so subtle purposes in the course of nature. Most of these purposes, however, were blatantly human purposes and the originators of these teleological theories seemed intent on demonstrating that God had organised the entire course of nature for the convenience of man. This notion was after all at the heart of the founding myths of Judaism and of Christianity, which grew out of it.

Despite the rigorous arguments of David Hume and Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century concerning the impossibility of arguing rationally for any detectable purpose in the course of nature, many people in the nineteenth century – usually religious people with propagandistic intentions, and most notably William Paley – argued that the exquisite order in the natural world that was in the process of being uncovered by an increasingly exact science could only have one explanation: intelligent purposiveness or, to use a more contemporary phrase, ‘intelligent design’. Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection and the later theory of random mutations of the genome, however, put paid to the breezy optimism of these theories. But something of them remained. Something like a worry remained in the minds of the biologists for the temptation of purposive accounts of natural phenomena was ever present. In the popular mind, natural purposes seemed self-evident, as they had to the earliest philosophers. It was for these reasons that the biologists became almost inquisitorial in the rooting out of teleological ‘heresy’ and in the denial of the role of purpose in nature. There is no more touchy and sensitive area in modern science than the issue of purpose in evolution. The witch-finder general still stalks the land in defence of Darwinian orthodoxy. It was for this reason that the biological sciences became the most mechanistic and dogmatic of sciences and post-Darwin, the most fertile fund of anti-religious and atheistic arguments for the essential futility, cruelty and senselessness of all life.

This banishment of any hint of purposiveness in nature was an important factor in the development of philosophical theories concerning the total absence of any sort of sense, meaning, structure or direction to human life that have largely characterised modern philosophy. Religion had provided complete structural accounts of the world within which the individual human life could be seen to have an overall shape, a beginning, a middle and an end and perhaps a destiny beyond that. Everything was under divine guidance and distinctly going somewhere. The post-Darwinian world, by contrast saw human life as just one episode in a meaningless story of struggle for survival, a story that was going nowhere and meant nothing, that was mere senseless gibberish.

Many philosophers, most notably Nietzsche, rubbed their hands at the discomfiture of the religious believers, whose cosy world-system was exposed as an unsustainable fantasy, a mere fiction. With the ‘death of God’, purpose disappeared entirely and even the short-term purposes that human beings give themselves to structure their lives, though explicable in terms of power-relations, were seen as completely meaningless. From this basic perception arose the atheistic version of Existentialist philosophy and the theory that, far from having any essential structure and sense, human life is intrinsically nonsensical and without value. The doctrine of ‘absurdity’ had arrived and, with the support of trendy French intellectuals, enjoyed a very great vogue. The heirs to this nexus of philosophical persuasions are the splenetic little atheists that appear regularly on our television screens and bill themselves as scourges of all who believe in religious fairy-tales.

In the modern world, questions of meaning have dominated many areas of philosophy, but meaning has quite rightly been uncovered as a property of sentences, and groups of sentences, not of lives or worlds. Teleology has been expunged from the vocabulary of science. It still exists in ethics, but only as a theory that claims that ‘the end – or purpose – justifies the means’. Modern man lives in a world from which all overriding meaning and purpose has drained; and that is a most uncomfortable state of affairs, because the partial meanings that can be created (job, family, football team, club, collection etc) somehow lose their shine if they are ultimately situated in an ocean of meaninglessness. We, as creatures, crave a sense of direction and structure that transcends our individual life; and we will not give that up just because someone tells us that it’s just a matter of the little purpose-craving circuit in our brains that’s working overtime.

Teleology is proscribed by science because it is considered to arise in a subjective prejudice: humans crave purposes in everything in order to be able to act coherently; and thus they project these purposes onto the universe and structure universal events according to them. Clearly, however, if knowledge is to be objective, then mere human psychology can not be allowed to interfere with this. What is often overlooked in this striving is the fact that our canons of rationality arise no less from the structure of our minds and depend no less on a particular set of gizmos in the brain. We are built to require rationality; our brains force us to demand it just as they demand purpose. But we are also built to require meaning and to abandon this is no more possible than to abandon rationality.

The whole enterprise of science is based on the purpose of achieving understanding and on the ultimate purpose of achieving ultimate understanding. Nevertheless, the official ideological view of the scientific community – not necessarily of individual scientists – is the theory that since the universe can be adequately described as mere matter in motion, questions of value and purpose are strictly irrelevant. This theory and the not very logical corollary that everything in the universe thus has no meaning have contributed more than any other cultural development to a sense of unease in the modern world that finds its voice in many works of literature. The myopic, local meanings – a pretty garden, impressive culinary skills, shoes that don’t pinch and so on – simply do not satisfy. We seem to need something grander, something more universal. And it is precisely this, according to contemporary science and philosophy, that we can not have.

Well perhaps it is time to question this thesis.

If one thinks for a moment about it, the natural purposes of the world, if they exist, do not at all have to be human purposes. If one thinks further about it, the world is full of purposes that are not human. It would, indeed, be extraordinary and incredible if all purposes were human, since humans certainly did not think up, design or construct the world; rather the reverse was the case. The main arguments for the rational impossibility of arguing for the existence of purpose in nature have generally concerned the impossibility of detecting human purposes in the overall course of events. But only a mind convinced of the existence of an anthropomorphic God, a sort of universal Father Christmas, would even want to begin to detect such purposes. A little thought, as usual, is all that is needed to convince us not only of the intrinsic absurdity of such a world – how could there be a human purpose in the existence of so many things that clearly thwart and frustrate human purposes? – but also of its profoundly disagreeable nature: a universe based upon human purposes would be intolerably claustrophobic and even more absurd than a purely chaotic one.

On the other hand, the non-existence of human purposes in nature could easily go together with the presence of ‘purposes’ of a non-human character. The single inverted commas indicate that we could be talking about something here for which we have no word. Of course, these ‘purposes’ might be undetectable and they might even militate in certain respects against merely human well-being; but there is no logical reason why the absence of human purposes makes every conceivable, or inconceivable type of ‘purpose’ impossible. It quite simply does not. Moreover, the presence of non-human purposes in the cosmos would not necessarily vitiate human purposes, it could merely subsume them, just as human purposes subsume those of the creatures we use for our convenience.

There may well be structure and coherence in the course of nature that we cannot detect with the aid of our mechanising schemata alone. There may also be purposive structure and coherence in nature that we can at least partially, if only partially understand as being intelligent in human terms. We could conceivably understand these without being committed to postulating understanding of any overall purposes. This would be a kind of ‘purposiveness without purpose’ (Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck) in Kant’s term, which is, according to him, the basis of our judgement of the aesthetic purpose of the art object, similar to the principle of Gesetzmäßigkeit ohne Gesetz or ‘lawfulness without law’ that governs our tendency to make teleological judgements about the course of nature. There is no reason why we should not assess the ‘purposiveness’ which we imagine we detect in the universe in ways that are analogous to our assessment of beauty in art. After all, we need some principle to moderate the suffocating and outmoded mechanism of the current intellectual paradigm and this mechanism, itself, arises in human predispositions that are no more authoritative than the predisposition to seek purpose.

It is the case that nature is full of purposes from those of the marauding amoeba to those of the pack of hunting chimpanzees. We can by projection understand the purposes of most biological systems, but there is no reason to suppose that purpose does not structure other agglomerations of matter that we observe in the history of the universe. Because these purposes are not human, there is no logical reason why we should not imagine all the systems of the natural world as governed by purpose and therefore by value. The scientific rejection of both purpose and value in nature is something that derives more from prejudice (‘humanism’ where this word designates a prejudice in the series ‘racism’, ‘sexism’, ‘ageism’ and the rest) than from strict reasoning.

What do biologists say about the human craving for purpose and meaning to life and the universe? Man, they tell us, is a creature that has evolved so spectacularly and in such a short time because of his ability to set himself achievable goals, immediate purposes. Man’s entire consciousness is structured by a sense of purpose. He accounts for everything in terms of purposes. It seems to be an intrinsic feature of his right-brain habit of telling coherent stories about his experience. All the stories he tells himself about the world and events in it have a structure, they go somewhere. Man is almost incapable of viewing any set of events without striving to detect his own purposes in them. The search for purpose seems to be a way of life that governs everything man represents to himself, from the immediate intention to feed himself to the entire course of the universe. It is the fact that human consciousness is so suffused with the sense of purpose that philosophers and scientists first imagined that purpose in nature was simply obvious. Now that we think we know that there is no purpose at all in nature, we have to get used to seeing this particular kink in our minds for what it is and become accustomed to putting it to one side as a delusion. We have to develop the habit of understanding that our craving for purpose is simply a projection onto the world of something that structures our minds. Once we have understood this prejudice of ours, we can catch ourselves at it and each time we do so make an effort to stop it – just like a nasty habit. We can reassure ourselves, every time we find ourselves thinking in terms of universal purpose, that this is just a particular tendency of the mind that evolution has built into us, it has no sense and no application to the world and we can rid ourselves of it.

Well, this is all well and good, but if we are built to expect purposes in nature, certain consequences follow. Firstly, that does not mean that there are necessarily none: logically, it is just as intelligent to say that we expect purposes because they are there and we are equipped to detect them. Secondly, and more importantly, the same argument from projection can be applied to many other aspects of our constitution. If we are cognitively and psychologically predisposed to spot purposes where there are none, might it not also be the case that we are cognitively and psychologically predisposed to find patterns, mechanisms, separate things and rational explanations for things where there are none?

Rationality is just as much a property of our minds – rather than of the world – as our tendency to espy purposes. So the rational explanation of our history and origins in terms of the evolutionary theory may be no more than the projection onto the cosmos of a particular (maybe right-brain) prejudice to which we are inclined. You cannot have it both ways: either our cognitive apparatus makes contact with reality by means of the principles upon which it operates, or it does not make contact. You can’t selectively excise bits of the mind and say, “these are inappropriate to a view of the world” and leave other bits, no less part of our constitution and say of them, “these are absolutely authoritative.” Our search for reasons, rational explanations, is clearly no more authoritative than our search for purposes and meanings, since both are apparently programmed into us by evolution. The world has no purpose, O.K., but by the same token, it has no rationally comprehensible structure either. There is no use appealing to technology to ‘prove’ that our rational explanations truly belong to the world, because our ethics, our codes of law, our societies, our entire history, ‘prove’ the appropriateness of our attribution of purpose. Both evolve together and there is no point in singling the one out as authoritative while dismissing the other as illusory. Our minds come up with mechanisms and purposes in equal measure.

It would seem legitimate to suppose that either the whole of our mind makes contact with reality, and as a whole, or no part of it does, for no part is obviously more authoritative than any other. There is no reason to select the logical principles applicable to our conception of three-dimensional objects as uniquely authoritative and to reject the need for purpose: the one is not more ‘obvious’ than the other. It’s just that we have opted to favour the one and refuse the other. Evolution has equipped us with the ability to reason concerning a world of three-dimensional objects; but that approach clearly has real limits, as Kant showed in his Critique of Pure Reason. It has also equipped us with the ability to structure that world by means of purposes; while being conscious of the limits of this approach, there is no reason why we should not use it heuristically. We can use both of these structuring devices critically, but there is no absolutely convincing reason for favouring the one over the other. What is programmed into us by evolution, or by creation as a whole, by hyperworld, is either authoritative in all its parts or not in any. Either the sensory-cognitive apparatus that makes us think in terms of reasons, causes and purposes is authoritative in all its parts or we may as well believe that it is so in none.

So if you want to think in terms of a world governed by an overall meaning that you may not be able to detect, but that you may wish to trust as coherent, nevertheless, then you may. Science and the modern theory of evolution cannot gainsay you, though the outmoded defenders of the thing-ideology might try. Our very sense of self is connected with our need for meaning and purpose. But this truth is also relevant here and often overlooked: our very notion of rationality is also linked with purpose, since our search for knowledge is closely allied to our human existence. The idea that we can search for knowledge without purpose is simply, absurdly wrong.

The individual sense of purpose and the search for universal purpose – two very different things in fact – seem essential to our functioning as persons. Science cannot forbid us to search for a means to integrate our human purposes into universal purposes on the basis of an argument concerning projection, for to take away projection is to take away any chance of comprehending the world. We project all of our inventions on the world: logic, maths, language, model-making. The astonishing thing is that they seem to fit in so many respects and illuminate the world. Even our emotions at times seem to have cognitive force: think for one moment of the loathing of ugliness that preceded the rational realisation that dirty industry damaged our world. There is no absolutely reliable approach to the world the authoritativeness of which is somehow guaranteed absolutely and independently of us (objectively). The belief in such an approach is a prejudice of a similar order to that which made us believe in absolute three-dimensional space and absolute one-dimensional, linear time. We have to use what we have at our disposal and what we have is a total response to the world, a friction of hindworld against foreworld and hyperworld that gives rise to new structures in midworld. We cannot prejudge which bits of our total response, which bits of our intellectual and emotional constitution are applicable to the world and which are not. We have to play them all off against each other and see if the result is illuminating, if, in our view, it makes contact with reality.

To deny purposes is no more intelligent that to deny rational explanations and it’s time we rehabilitated them in some form. We are not likely to fall into the trap of elevating our immediate human purposes to cosmic significance, but we can think with perfect legitimacy in terms of the intelligent co-ordination of the cosmos in the context of which our existence has sense. A sense of trust in the dispositions of that intelligence would not seem to be in any way irrational. We may think in terms of a mainstream of events in the history of the cosmos, where some hint of accumulation of purpose seems to be detectable – e.g. from the level of the fine-tuned fundamental constants that permit the variety of our world, to the emergence of intelligent carbon-based life on our planet that depends upon them – if not demonstrable in purely mechanistic terms. To trust such a fundamental purpose would not damage in any way the methods or the procedures of science; but it would constitute a source of moral insight that the human race could find extremely valuable.

The moral constitution of man is narrowly bound up with the purpose and value of events. Of course, these purposes and values can be set merely as useful fictions in terms of group conventions and group dynamics. But we want something more; and that ‘wanting something more’ is a total response of the total mind. The total response of the total human being includes every kind of response from the most rational to the most emotional. Listening to all of it at once requires great sophistication. To be able to listen to it and respond to it with intimations (to put it no higher than that) of universal sense and meaning would be salutary indeed for most of the human race, despite the strident opposition of the inflated reifying ego with its pretensions to divinity and its desire to be in mechanical control.