Charles D. Laughlin & Biogenetic Structuralism

Crisis on the Planet of the Hairless Apes (Part VIII): Defining The Crisis

2008-11-16T10:59:00.000-08:00

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity;and I am not sure about the universe.
Albert Einstein

You can’t fix stupid.
Ron White

First of all, let me apologize for the lengthy delay between my last post and this one. If you have followed me on this journey, you have been very patient and kudos to you. Pardon the cliffhanger several months ago, but it’s been a busy summer, and my only excuse is that I got interested in other things. For one then, I have fulfilled a fifty year ambition to become a ham radio operator. Now, let me get on with it. [May I urge you to watch the 20 minute video, "The Story of Stuff" (see link at right), before reading on. I will assume you have in what I choose to write and leave out below.]

It has taken us a long time and lots of words to get us to this point in our understanding of the human condition – the point at which we can flesh out The Crisis in detail, and begin exploring solutions and options, if any. Defining The Crisis is pretty simple, but it is equally important to understand the factors producing The Crisis. These factors are not so simple and perhaps not so obvious. Also, wide-spread understanding these factors is critical I think as part of any solution that has a real chance of success. As we have seen, the factors producing The Crisis are numerous and complex, and hence there is no quick fix. Call me a cynic, but I don’t think any politician or party can do it, especially in our so-called democracies where policies and strategies look no further than the next election, and where individuals and collectives can be bought by corporations and other special interests.

We have addressed what I think are the main factors producing The Crisis and thwarting its solution: We have emphasized our animal nature – calling our species "hairless apes" has not been intended as a cutesy joke or some sort of elitist put-down, but rather to force us to acknowledge our animal natures. Any approach that ignores our biological nature is doomed to fail. If the word "sapient" (as in Homo sapiens sapiens) means "wise", then the old joke that "the missing link between ape and true Homo sapiens is us" turns out to be a fairly astute observation. Keeping always in sight that we are a big brained primate, we have looked at how the brainworld works, how it develops during the lifetime, and how it is transformed through technology, how intelligence structures comprehension, how the effort after meaning usually trumps (and in our ignorance is often mistaken for) the effort after truth, how spiritual realizations often true our understanding of entanglement among all things and beings in the universe, and how mature contemplation can train the mind to see our conditioning and limitations more clearly. So, it is high time we put all these factors together and define The Crisis in a way that we may be able to consider possibilities and solutions (if any in fact ARE possible).

Keeping in mind that I have become lazy about keeping this blog going, I will complete this analysis of The Crisis in several parts, so as not to frustrate you further.

Let’s start back at the beginning. Here is how I defined The Crisis to start out with:

"These [pollution, overpopulation, energy crisis, global warming, pandemics, asteroid strike, etc.] are all real threats to our ways of life –– no doubt about it –– but what I mean by crisis is something more fundamental to the human condition –– something that lies behind and (partially at least) causes these more dramatic and dangerous threats. What I am referring to is a crisis in consciousness -- namely, that humans collectively are too stupid to comprehend the unintended consequences of their conscious acts. And I mean stupidity literally here: "A poor ability to understand and to profit from experience," as well as technically: we are collectively (as societies and as a species) not smart enough to model our contemporary environment, ecology, and global society as dynamic and vulnerable systems at risk, and take appropriate effective and adaptive action to rectify our destructive actions."

I am not the only analyst to come to this conclusion – not by a long shot. Consider the words of Imre von Soos from his article, "The Four Horsemen" (see link to the right): "Overpopulation, Pollution and Erosion are pseudonyms of one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Famine. The other three: Plague, War and Death follow naturally in his path. . . Ignoring warnings, this super-predatory subspecies called Homo sapiens lives in the self-generated illusion that he is the crown of creation, and this planet and its other living beings are there, by divine decree, for his pleasure, exploitation and abuse. . . Factual evidence has mounted up beyond ignoring; it has become a problem we must solve, but cannot do so with our present culture's tools and ways of organizing reality." I would interpret his words as meaning in part that hairless apes are too stupid to alloy their arrogance with comprehension of the truth of their condition.

A Metaphor: The Chick in the Egg

As I say, we are now in a far better position to understand the plight of our species. Let me suggest a metaphor which, if we do not stretch it too far, will represent the crisis we face here on planet Earth. As anybody who raises chickens knows, there is a critical period in the development of a chick (the chick of any bird actually) during which it is able to emerge from its shell. Before that period, the chick is too weak to peck its way out of the shell, and after that period, if the chick has not successfully escaped from the shell, its yolk is all used up and the chick begins to starve, become weaker and weaker and then dies. So far as I know, every bird in creation faces this life crisis.

Planets that develop sentient life forms (undoubtedly millions of them in the universe – let’s call them sentient planets for our purposes, without implying anything like the Gaia Hypothesis) are like eggs within the life layer of which sentient species evolve, live and die. Each sentient planet is like an egg, and will present its most advanced sentient species with such life crises. The "yolk" represents the resources required to sustain life and activity until that species "escapes" or "emerges" from the planet and learns to inhabit its solar system. If the species does not establish itself permanently off-planet in colonies that can utilized the vast resources of the interplanetary system before the resources of the sentient planet begin to disappear, then the species will be planet-bound until either another opportunity for escape arises in the future, or more likely the species becomes extinct, taking a lot of other species along with them.

[Sidetrack: Before some eagle-eyed critic accuses me of propagating rank teleology, let me support my contention that the laws of physics produce something like a weak version of the anthropic principle – which is to say, that the lawful evolution of the universe makes the emergence of sentient beings all over the universe inevitable (the principle should therefore be called the sentient principle, rather than the anthropic principle, for we hairless apes are only one of many possible kinds of sentience that could be and probably have been produced on other planets. In sentience, the universe becomes aware of itself.]

Now, while the yolk of an egg is simply a biological resource that sustains the chick’s life until it can free itself from its protective shell, the set of resources that sustain life and evolution of hairless apes and other sentient beings are more complex and involve fantastically interconnected, entangled causal relations among all the different factors that produce a "life layer" on a planet – the life layer being comprised of the atmosphere (life in the air), the biosphere (vegetation above and below the soil and life within and dependent upon vegetation), the hydrosphere (life in the oceans, lakes and streams), and the lithosphere (life in the soil). Together, these four zones comprise a very thin layer on top of the crust of our planet.

How thin? Well the habitable layer of the atmosphere alone is something over 5,000 meters. That’s thin! Imagine the Earth was shrunk to the size of a basketball. The habitable atmosphere would amount to the thickness of a clear sheet of plastic wrapping the basketball, a sheet only 7/100ths the thickness of Saran Wrap, or less than half the thickness of a human hair.* And of course there are the habitable lithosphere and hydrosphere to consider as well. We would not be far wrong in imagining the life-layer of our basketball-sized planet Earth as about the thickness of a Saran Wrap sheet (probably less) covering the surface of the basketball. How thin and vulnerable our life layer really is! Yet this is the source of most of our physical resources, save for those dug up from the lithosphere and hydrosphere below the life layer – principally oil – and, of course, the energy from our sun.

So, humanity’s "yolk" in part consists of what nature has available (remember our earlier discussion of "affordancy") within Earth’s life layer – breathable air, water, habitable climates, nutriments, resources for building shelters, clothing and technologies to aid us in our adaptation to our various niches. More than this, our evolutionary process – a process that extends back millions of years – has provided us with our genetically conditioned bodies and brains. The brainworld we each carry around with us in our body is limited in so many ways by the processes of biological adaptation that have preceded our time. The same "nature" that provides the life layer has provided us with our highly human brainworld, with all its clever tricks and dangerous limitations and activities.

Part of our "yolk" includes our own cognitive and behavioral acts, both individually and in groups. Keep in mind that we hairless apes are a social primate, which means that through all of our past evolution, our predominant adaptive strategies have been social ones. We have more in common, say, with the arctic wolf, which lives in social groups and which hunts both alone and in packs, than we do with the solitary red fox which lives and hunts by itself and has no social strategies to rely upon. Society is such a popular adaptive strategy among animals that according to Edward O. Wilson, social adaptation has arisen independently over 30 times in different phyla during the evolution of life of this planet.

Our strengths and limitations as a social species are thus another aspect of our "yolk." That includes our cultures – that is, the ways we are individually and severally conditioned by our society to see some things as valuable and others as not, to acknowledge some behaviors as proper and others as improper, to do things in certain ways, to interpret events in particular ways, and on and on. We have been through all this before in earlier posts. The fact that we are all culture-bearers is part of our species’ "yolk." If we as a society value material wealth above all things, then it may make sense to allow, even encourage folks to lay waste to the lands and seas in search for minerals. Hence one bit of our "yolk" causes the disruption of another bit or our "yolk." If we have a sociocultural system that values an increase in jobs or material production over a sustainable and renewable life layer, then the life layer will continue to deteriorate, and the window for "emergence" of the dominant sentient species into space may be foreshortened – that is, our "yolk" may run out sooner.

As I say, we don’t want to stretch the "yolk" metaphor too far. It is just a symbol representing, for me at least, the fact that our days are numbered with respect to "emerging" into a fully extraterrestrial sentience and civilization.

[Sidetrack: Soviet Union astronomer Nikolai Kardeshev [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale] proposed in 1964 that there are three types of mature civilizations among sentient beings: Type I civilizations are those that learn to efficiently utilize the energies and resources available within a planet’s life-layer, Type II civilizations are those that learn to efficiently utilize the energies and resources of an entire solar system, and Type III civilizations are those that learn to efficiently utilize the energies and resources within an entire galaxy. Needless to say, we hairless apes have yet to even approach a Type I economy. The question we are examining here is whether or not we will ever become a Type II civilization when we have such a struggle even approaching the Type I level.]

The Crisis may now be defined as the approaching window of opportunity (a set of "affordances)" for our species to emerge from this planet and into interplanetary space, and to shift our dependence upon the resources of the Earth’s life layer to the resources available from the sun, from the moon, from the asteroid belt and other extraterrestrial materials and energies. We are nearing the beginning of that window and are, technologically speaking, preparing for it. No one knows how long this window will remain open. We hairless apes with have a large say in how wide that window will be. But what is certain, at least to me, is that the window will eventually close. And if it closes without our species accomplishing an extraterrestrial civilization, then we will be in deep trouble, and very likely will face extinction.

Our greatest hindrance to accomplishing an extraterrestrial civilization is our own nature. Frankly, I have a hunch we are really too stupid to comprehend as a collective either the inevitable window, or the factors that thwart our exploitation of that window. There are many individuals who comprehend systems thought at that level, but as a society, our judgments and actions are extremely ignorant, short-sighted and concrete.

Enough out of me for this time. Future posts will examine some of the variables that may hinder and facilitate a collective response to the opportunity of the window – issues such as the importance of the evolution of social democracy, the importance of education for space exploration, the problem of tracking UN-intended consequences of our collective actions, cybernetic approaches to increasing human intelligence, and the role of empathy in producing a climate conducive to a self-sustaining economy and resource base.

* Let’s say that the life supporting atmosphere is roughly 6 kms. high. The radius of the Earth at the equator is roughly 6,378 kms. thick. Hence the habitable atmosphere would be roughly .094% of the radius. Now, let’s suppose the Earth were shrunk to the size of a basketball. How thick would the habitable atmosphere be in relation to the ball? A size 7 basketball has radius is approx. 4.7 inches. That means that the atmosphere of the basketball-size Earth would measure about .00044 of an inch. How thin is this? Well, it would be roughly 7.3% the thickness of a sheet of Saran Wrap (thickness = .006 inches), or 44% the thickness of a human hair (thickness roughly .001 inches).

References:
Wilson, Edward O. (1975) Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Crisis on the Planet of the Hairless Apes (Part VII): The Mystical Brainworld

2008-07-06T11:09:00.000-07:00

. . . the spirit is the life of the body seen from within, and the body the outward manifestation of the life of the spirit--the two being really one. . . .

C.G. Jung

[I am indebted to my nephew Scott for the conversations that led to this post.]

Some of you may wonder why I would want to discuss spirituality on the same level as I have ideology and intelligence. Surely that is a tangent and has less to do with The Crisis than, say, technology? Why isn’t this just a side issue? But those of you who have lived long and have perhaps followed a spiritual path for years may know that the spiritual poverty and hunger in Euro-american-aussie society is part and parcel to the materialist cultures we inherited from our parents and our culture history. One cannot have the one (extreme materialism) without the other (spiritual poverty) at the cultural level. And I do NOT mean by "poverty of spirit" what Christian theologians sometimes mean – the opposite of blind faith in a deity or supernatural hero figure. [If you want have a more complete understanding of what I will be saying, first read Sam Mackintosh's blog, posts #33-36.]

As usual, we have to go back to beginnings, because words come with all sorts of unintended meanings. The word spirit derives from the proto-Indo-European term, "to blow." The Latin spiritus means "soul, vigor, breath." These ancient terms referred to the animating force in organisms. The word soul of course predates Christianity and Islam and referred as well to the "spiritual and emotional part of a person," or what animates living beings. Our ancient forebearers, like so many other traditional peoples on the planet, noticed that when people and other critters die, they stop breathing. It is only a small leap to the interpretation that their breath "has left them." The breath (soul, spirit) "passes on." There is an interesting early connotation of "soul" with "sea" – many people perceive that the individual’s breath (spirit) comes from and returns to the sea of air. The traditional Navajo believes that our spirit is that bit of the Holy Wind that moves within us and animates us, comes and goes from the body, and upon death returns to the one great Holy Wind from which it has never been apart. It is also not lost on people that one cannot see the breath or wind, for it is invisible, yet it causes things to move, as with frosty breath, leaves moving in breezes or dust columns in whirlwinds. And some peoples reverse the causation in breathing – we are not breathing, we are being breathed into – literally "inspired." Implied in even this level of folk understanding is the view that we are motivated by a force that is invisible to us, and that we are an inextricable part of that force. A bit of that force enters us at conception or at birth and leaves us at death – perhaps even causes our birth and death.

There are of course more complex and esoteric views of spirit. A particular spiritual path may include some form of meditation and contemplation at its methodological core. Through contemplation of the inner self, one can bring to bear all the powers of observation and comprehension we modern materialists normally expend in our explorations of external reality. In the olden days, contemplatives used to speak about "a turning in the seat of consciousness," which could well refer to what I am talking about. This is a profound shift in curiosity and question toward the nature of one’s inner being. Small wonder then that in such traditions of inner exploration that people develop more complex models of "spirit," and that such people come to understand external reality in a different way than do materialists. What I want to do here is explore the spiritual dimensions of The Crisis – if for no other reason, because this piece of the puzzle will shed light on why we Euro-american-aussie materialist/capitalist types experience the alienation we do from nature, and have such a devil of a time understanding the simple truth that when we rape and pillage Mother Earth, we are doing violence to ourselves.

ALTERNATIVE STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS

When our BS group began writing about the brain and consciousness, we recognized that there are experiences that few people in our own societies have, but which inform the world views and self-views of peoples in other societies. We chose then to call these special types of experience "phases of consciousness." We experience phases of consciousness of course – one is perhaps drunk and then sober, one is awake and then asleep (and maybe dreaming), one is "high" and then one "crashes." Phases of consciousness, we reasoned, are recurrent, recognized and labeled by folks. At about the same time the psychologist Charlie Tart was thinking about the same kinds of stuff and he chose to use the term "states" of consciousness. We had considered the term "state," but concluded that it was too static and rigid. I still think it is too static, but, well, his term caught on and ours did not, so what we have done in more recent years is refer to states of consciousness and to alternative states of consciousness (or ASC, changing Tart’s term from "altered" to "alternative") while retaining the more anthropological perspective that Tart’s "altered" implies something unusual or abnormal about the state when such a state may be perfectly normal in another society. For instance, people who have good recall and elevated awareness while dreaming are said to be "lucid dreamers" by western psychologists – an unusual, but learn-able, skill in our society. But of course lucidity of dreaming is commonplace among Aussie Aborigines (and many other peoples) who consider dreaming as a state when they connect most intimately with the spiritual realm, and can move around without being glued to the physical body.

Why all this terminological blither? Simple. Peoples on the planet often encourage their individual members to enter and explore ASC using all sorts of (from our cultural perspective) weird and wonderful methods, including sleep deprivation, rituals, ordeals (like, hanging from a limb by hooks in the flesh, running for hours until totally exhausted, and my very favorite, wearing shirts with live hornets sewed into the fabric), repetitive rhythms (drumming, chanting, dancing, whistle-blowing), ingesting psychotropic drugs (ayahuasca, datura, peyote, tobacco), sensory deprivation, meditation, etc. So it is important to be able to talk clearly about this remarkable fact, am I right? In the best study to date, Erica Bourguignon, an anthropologist at Ohio State University, completed a study of ASC cross-culturally. She found that roughly 90% of the 488 societies sampled exhibit institutionalized techniques for evoking trance states of one kind or another. In virtually all of these cases ASC were considered by peoples to be both positive and sacred in nature. These data are so impressive that it has lead scholars to suggest that our species seems to have an inherent drive to alter its state of consciousness in extraordinary ways. The central question is, why? Can it be that they know something we don’t? Consider this: a member of the Native American Church, who use peyote in their rituals, once told anthropologist J.S. Slotkin, "The white man talks about Jesus, we talk to Jesus." Hmmm..... Wonder what that’s all about????

Monophasic and Polyphasic Cultures

Modern Euro-american-aussie cultures tend to be monophasic in their world view – that is, they are cultures that value experiences and knowledge gleaned from only one state of consciousness, namely what we call "normal waking consciousness." Most cultures on the planet, however, as we have seen above, are relatively polyphasic in their world view – they value experiences and knowledge occurring in a variety of SOC, and tend to pay close attention to lucid dreams, trance states, possession states, shamanic journeys, meditation states, visions, etc [keep in mind that this is what WE call these states, not what other peoples call them]. Yet one of the great advantages (and in some contexts disadvantages) of living in modern society is that one may opt-out of the dominant monophasic world view and seek what might be characterized as a path to greater "balance" in self-awareness. In fact many people today follow a variety of spiritual movements ranging from eastern traditions like tai chi, Sufism, and Buddhism, and aboriginal paths such as neoshamanism, the Sundance, the Native American Church (so-called "peyote religion") and the Medicine Wheel, to western European approaches like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Wicca, Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, Jungian analysis and "rave" culture. Some paths are derived from ancient traditions, others from recent innovations, and of course one will find a variety of symbolism, values and procedures appropriate to each. But one thing that all of these movements have in common is that they espouse a polyphasic orientation – they positively value experiences had during discrete ASC which are interpreted in ways that reinforce their respective world views. They all seek wisdom by way of ritual procedures that are designed to evoke ASC, and when these experiences do occur, they are treated as valued sources of information about the self and the normally invisible forces of external reality, which in due course are interpreted according to their belief system.

Hairless apes, being as they are a species of social primate, derive much of their knowledge from their group’s culture, which is in turn filtered through the lenses of their individual interpretive frames. There is an intimate interaction between the shared knowledge made available in the group’s culture, and the knowledge accrued by individuals in the context of their own unique personal histories. The world views of most of the world’s 4,000+ cultures are informed to some extent by neurognosis -- which is to say the inherited, species typical, archetypal knowledge about reality, knowledge that is (so to speak) "wired-into" the infant brainworld, and that includes self-awareness and knowledge of the individual’s own being. As we have seen, societies commonly encourage or require their members to participate in rituals that are designed to evoke ASC, and the interpretation of these extraordinary experiences is at least partially informed by the society’s world view. Because of certain fundamental attributes of ASC, such experiences may operate to minimize the discrepancy between the society’s world view and the nature of reality. In other words, in certain contexts ASC may operate as truers of individual and cultural knowledge. By integrating the experiences had in ASC, cultures are able to maintain a minimal level of realism in the interests of adaptation to an ultimately transcendental reality.

I should quickly point out, however, that not all ASC experiences are necessarily wholesome in this sense. Everything depends upon the social and environmental circumstances attending the experience. There are of course instances where ASC may have the opposite effect -- that of decreasing the accuracy of beliefs relative to reality. But anthropologists have long known that socially important ASC tend to occur within the context of ritual circumstances in which the group is in control of both the conditions leading to extraordinary experiences, and the interpretation of such experiences if and when they do occur -- for example, trances occurring among participants during a Sundance are monitored carefully by shamans. The intent of social control of ASC is to place the socially proper interpretive spin on ASC in the interests of the commonweal. So, you can see that socially sanctioned interpretations tend to be conservative.

What is so characteristic about polyphasic societies is that the experiences had during ASC are never compartmentalized, but rather are integrated into a single, polyphasic world view. We have seen that ASC may operate as truers of a culture’s world view – a process we may call ASC trueing. Of course there are other processes that operate in a similar way to true culture, among them an inherent pragmatism in all social animals with brainworlds that rely upon learning for adaptation. But few of these other mechanisms true knowledge pertaining to both inner and outer reality. Given what appears to be the cross-culturally ubiquitous presence of ASC trueing, one might suspect that the inherent drive to ASC has been with us for a very long time. Indeed, although it would be hard to prove short of owning a time machine, there is reason to suppose that ASC have been important to human society at least back to the beginnings of the Upper Paleolithic, some 35 - 40,000 years ago.

It is the nature of materialist cultures to ignore the inner being, and thus disattend ASC that might in non-materialist cultures inform one’s self-understanding. Thus the absence of the trueing effects of socially controlled ASC leaves us vulnerable to an unhealthy imbalance between our comprehension of external reality, and our lack of comprehension of our inner being. It is the nature of materialist cultures to produce unbalanced – as Eric Fromm once put it, "un-sane" – personalities. This is one of the costs of being reared in a monophasic society. We typically only pay attention to our inner life if things have gone wrong in some way – we are having psychological problems that require treatment which might include techniques like "free association" and "dream analysis" to reestablish communication between consciousness and the inner being. Much of what is called "psychopathology" in modern society is caused by the psychological development appropriate to extreme materialism, and as such diagnoses have as much to do with politics and economics as they do with actual symptoms (check out anthropologist Allan Young’s remarkable book, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). The great popularity of various spiritual paths in today’s Euro-american-aussie societies attests to the natural inclination of hairless apes to seek psychological balance. Ironically, it seems like a virtual spiritual smorgasbord out there these days.

The Cycle of Meaning

As we have seen from the start of these posts, everyday experience, regardless of whether in "normal" waking consciousness or in other SOC, is a combination of sensory input and stored meaning. For cultures to control the impact of ASC on members, it must in some way control the process of interpretation, especially in situations where experiences are novel to the spiritual neophyte. With the exception of alcohol and drunkenness, ASC are almost never sought in traditional societies outside the context of socially prescribed and supervised ritual circumstances. The reason for this seems clear enough. Any human experience is open to a multitude of interpretations. The same experience may be seen as negative and destructive in one context and as positive and wholesome in another. Societies that encourage ASC tend to embed these experiences within a socially sanctioned cycle of meaning so as to control both the range of experiences that may occur, and the interpretation of those experiences that do occur. To this end, interpretations are often couched in terms of the society’s world view in such a way that the experiences evoked are understood to confirm and enliven that world view.

A society’s world view is for the most part carried around in the minds of people, which of course permeates their bodies by way of their nervous systems. Individuals often express their world view in the form of stories, songs, aphorisms, mystery plays, and sacred and dramatic (sometimes masked) dances, as well as rituals and other patterned behaviors. In literate societies, these sources may be committed to writing and form a sacred canon and associated actions (like sacred readings). Either way, a world view is expressed and enacted in various kinds of symbolic ways, including art and iconography, ritual, dramatic production, pilgrimage, and so forth. The most powerful expressive aspect is of course ritual performance, and it is within this context that extraordinary states of consciousness are most likely to arise. Rituals may incorporate a variety of ritual drivers such as drumming, hallucinogenic herbs, flickering lights, fasting, fixed concentration, sleep deprivation, painful ordeals, chanting, prolonged dancing, etc. When ASC do occur as a consequence of participation in a ritual, there is almost always a process by which culturally appropriate interpretations are laid-on by elders. These interpretations are derived from and tend to reinforce the efficacy of the world view. For instance, Moroccan folks, upon having really dramatic dreams, may seek advice about the dream’s portend from a professional dream interpreter, and the dream interpreters in turn normally account for the events described to them in terms consistent with the Koran. Some societies consider dreaming as an important resource for the divination of future events – so-called "oneiromancy."

In short, we see that the relationship between a particular world view and the varieties of experience evoked in the context of a society’s various rituals is one that is characterized by a relatively conservative feedback loop – a cycle of meaning – in which the world view is expressed symbolically in ways that give rise to ASC , which in turn are interpreted in terms of the world view. Mind you, this kind of system is a living tradition, not a mechanical contrivance, and that means it is far more flexible than it might appear in any simplistic drawing of mine. In fact this pairing of experience and knowledge allows for change within the world view, and over generations both the experiences that occur and the interpretations associated with them allow for a process of "revitalization." As I have said, cultural knowledge is always to some extent refracted through the lens of individual consciousness -- a consciousness that is always informed though the experiences harvested during the course of life’s trajectory. Indeed, it is often through processes of personalizing cultural knowledge that novel interpretations and experiences arise, and which may, given the appropriate circumstances, serve to transform the existing cultural system.

It is also important to note that the interpretation of experiences had in ASC will be structured, not only in relation to the culture’s world view, but also by the level of cognitive complexity of which the individual participant is capable. Two people having similar experiences may interpret those experiences at widely disparate levels of comprehension. It is often the case that the shamans in a society (Paul Radin’s "philosophers") understand spiritual experiences far more complexly than other participants (Radin’s "men of action") in rituals. There are in fact societies that recognize levels of increasingly complex understanding of "the mysteries" and mythological narratives. And of course in those traditions where the connection between the originating experiences and ideology have been historically severed, it is often the case that the ideology presents in very concrete, non-dynamic expressions.

It seems very likely that ALL of the major religions on the planet originated in this way – from transformations of earlier spiritual world views produced by new and dramatic ASC on the part of very charismatic and adept leaders. All too often, the originating experiences have been lost to history and only the stories, texts and institutional values remain. And without access to the originating experiences that gave rise to the founding interpretations, these religions form schisms and factions that argue endlessly about the "true" meaning of the sacred words. The religion may lose its capacity to "revitalize" itself by way of new extraordinary experiences. One need only consider the profoundly transformative impact of the visions of certain mystics upon orthodoxy – like those of St. John of the Cross and St. Margaret Mary Alacoque upon the Catholic Church, or of Handsome Lake upon the religion of the Iroquois – to understand the social role of individual ASC upon society.

Sensate, Idealistic and Ideational Societies

How a society receives information derived from ASC depends upon its dominant values. And the values of society are typically congruous with how people in that society make a living – that is, with its economy. The dominant values in Euro-american-aussie culture devalue and even prohibit members from seeking ASC. Indeed, our nations are virtually schizoid about taking psychoactive drugs, using them by the ton for psychiatric purposes (Prozac nearly rivals aspirin in popularity) and putting people in prison for using them for "entertainment," alternative healing or spiritual purposes. We foster and sometimes value "getting drunk," yet criminalize "getting high." There are deep cultural, historical and political reasons for this attitude toward altering consciousness having to do with maintaining the range of states requisite for the functioning of materialist/capitalist economy. As in so many other ways, the way we handle ASC is aberrant with respect to most other societies on the planet. Let us examine this issue a bit further so as to better understand the relationship between ASC and cultural world view.

Cultures privilege modes of knowing in different ways. Some cultures will emphasize knowing in ways that accord with mythic/mystical modes of knowing, while others will emphasize knowing in the local, empirical sense. And many societies are characterized by systems of knowledge that privilege both modes of knowing to one extent or another. Sociologist Pitirim Sorokin has modeled these distinctions in an interesting and dynamic way. Sorokin has shown that sensate cultures privilege empirical, material ways of knowing external reality over knowing in the spiritual or mythopoeic way. Sensate cultures are interested primarily in the material world of the senses, and do not encourage or foster knowing of the inner being by way of dreams or other esoteric ASC. Thus such cultures produce populations that are off-balance in their understanding of the world and the self. Because they are off-balance, sensate cultures will tend over the course of generations to compensate by swinging back toward a more balanced view in which knowledge derived from the local material mode becomes integrated with knowledge arising from development of a mythopoeic outlook (Sorokin called these idealistic cultures). This compensatory swing toward a greater balance between sensate and idealistic values seems to be happening (albeit in fits and starts) in Euro-american-aussie culture at the present time with an increasing tolerance for mysticism, and with the rise of an enormous variety of New Age cults and spiritual movements. It seems to me that Sam Mackintosh is describing this current oscillation when he speaks of the Immense Transition.

The thing is that cultures never stand still, and the balance struck in one generation between local, empirical and universal, "mystical" ways of knowing may be lost to subsequent generations in the continued swing of the culture toward becoming an ideational culture in which more "mystical" ways of knowing are privileged at the cost of local, empirical, pragmatic ways of knowing. It is in the balanced idealistic and more mystical ideational cultures in which a corpus of mythological tradition forms a living core of knowledge, and in which ASC are often encouraged and even prescribed. But of course, extremely ideational cultures are equally off-balance and the demands of balance eventually require a compensatory swing in the other direction, back toward the middle ground of idealistic culture and eventually back into sensate culture.

From the point of view of folks in an ideational culture, what we in sensate cultures might consider "mystical" knowledge or experience is not mystical at all. It is simply "the way things are." After all, the English word "occult" just means "hidden from view" or "hard to see." When we experience and comprehend the mysteries, they are no longer hidden, and hence no longer "occult." As we have argued, the human brainworld is neurognostically prepared to apprehend the mysteries, but to the extent that we have been enculturated not to do so (for instance, conditioned to ignore our dream life) is perhaps to that extent that we must apply effort and exotic techniques to produce mystical experiences (say, learn to apprehend and interpret our dreams, our meditation experiences or our experiences resulting from twirling around in Sufi dancing). One of the characteristics of a sensate culture is that it will not exhibit a living mythology while a society out on the ideational pole will relate everything of importance back to the culture’s mythological tradition and core symbolism. A member of an ideational culture has the opportunity to be enculturated into the mythological world view by way of the group’s corpus of sacred stories and rituals designed to evoke ASC.

As we say, the brainworld is born knowing reality in both the unitizing mode of mystical experience and in the particularizing, empirical mode of local adaptation. During its maturation, the brainworld will strive for a resolution of the tension produced by these two ways of knowing. But our brain is a living system of cells, and if the press of environmental and social conditions result in an over-emphasis upon localized adaptational development -- which is a condition that seems endemic to sensate cultures -- the inherent processes of integration will tend to reassert their activities wherever possible. Such compensatory activities may be experienced by the individual as spontaneous "mystical" dreams, visions, spirit possession or entity channeling, and other transpersonal phenomena -- perhaps as Carl Jung taught, a calling to greater attention to the deeper workings of the psyche. In the absence of a corpus of sacred stories, these experiences may produce confusion and uncertainty for the individual having them. A society that supports a sensate culture and which has lost touch with its mythopoeic tradition is awkwardly positioned to guide its people to a way of life in keeping with the more unitary aspects of reality and experience of self. Indeed, spontaneous transpersonal experiences may be greeted by negative sanctions, the individual experiencing these phenomena being perhaps labeled as "crazy," "dangerous," a "kook," a "religious nut," "out of it," and so forth.

ASC, MYTH & UNIVERSAL COSMOLOGY

We have reached another crucial point in our long and often complex journey to an understanding of The Crisis. It is the point at which we must more fully understand that we are born knowing reality and that knowledge has been trued through the millions of years of our evolution. The point is crucial because it runs counter to the commonsense view in our culture that babies are born with "blank slate" minds into which the society pours knowledge and meaning. Nothing could be further from the case. A baby’s brainworld mediates a fully operating, neurognostically structured, experiencing consciousness who’s nascent models are trued by virtue of its genetic programming. Neurognostic structures develop and if the child is reared in an ideational culture, it will grow into a world view that is compatible with its compliment of deep archetypal structures present in the womb and after birth. These deep structures are reflected in universal properties of a people’s mythology, and what I will call the universal cosmology depicted in mythology. I am not using the "cosmology" in the way we use the term in astrophysics -- which is a whole other discussion. For now, I am not talking about scientific cosmology, but rather the deep structural knowledge of reality with which we are all born. Universal cosmology is a meta-characteristic of how our brain codes reality.

What most folks mean by "myth" is synonymous with "falsehood" – as in, that’s an "urban myth!" And this fact alone indicates how far our sensate culture has come from an ideational society. What I mean by myth and mythology is what anthropologists usually mean – a society’s corpus of sacred stories which comprises a highly symbolic, but coherent description of a people’s origin (their "cosmogamy"), as well as the origins of significant aspects of the environment (animals, food plants, changes in the weather, social roles, institutions, etc.), and sometimes their "eschatology" (or their understanding of the end of things). The stories encode and transmit knowledge about the primal relations in the cosmos upon which the existence and well-being of the people depend. The stories form the primary warp and weave in the fabric of a people’s "field of tropes," a field of interconnected meaning in which each of life’s significant experiences finds a position, much like a patch finds its appropriate place in a quilt.

Myth may do many things for people in their daily lives. For instance, mythology provides a charter for many of the society’s important institutions – it tells people where the institution came from, how it should operate and why it is necessary. Myth can also provide a conventional moral order to be applied to situations faced by people, offer explanations for natural phenomena and catastrophes of various kinds, incorporate formulae for controlling happenings in the world, and operate as a repository for cultural information. But there are two other important functions of myth we need to address here, for we are not just interested in myth as a repository of culture, but rather how myth mediates the relationship between experience and reality. Those two functions are: (1) the transmission of socially important vicarious experience and (2) the co-ordination of individual conceptual systems relative to socially valued experience. Myth is a primary mechanism for developing and maintaining what the great sociologist, Emile Durkheim called the "collective consciousness" fundamental to a people’s religion and world view. Important domains of experience are described in story and transmitted in such a way that the listener lives the experience vicariously (meaning "imaginative or sympathetic participation in the experience of another") through feelings, thoughts and images -- through, say, the imagined adventures of a hero or sacred being. Moreover, the didactic quality of myth makes it possible for people to share the same body of core symbols and the sacred context in which those symbols apply. Everyone more or less agrees that some particularly salient event in real life is an instance of some general force or phenomenon depicted in the stories. For instance, a number of my Navajo friends are convinced that much of the social upheaval being encountered by Navajo people today is due to the failure of the people to conform to certain prescriptions (like keeping winter and summer ceremonies distinct and not overlapping) that are clearly expressed in the sacred stories.

These sacred stories, then, act as theories of proper relations within the world and among people. As Durkheim himself noted, the reality expressed in myth is not just a figment of people’s imagination, but is reality itself imagined – take a moment to reflect on this distinction, for it is absolutely critical! Sociologist Mircea Eliade understood myth as a comment on the human condition generally, and noted that traditional peoples code myth as a "true story" or a story about reality. Both anthropologist Earl Count and theologist Paul Tillich saw mythology as a description of a people’s understanding of "the world as problem" – an expression of the "ultimate concerns" of a society. Social phenomenologist Alfred Schutz went further by suggesting that myth refers to transcendental experience and the boundaries of a people’s comprehension of "multiple realities."

Joseph Campbell, who perhaps has given myth more thought than any other scholar of our age, recognized the problem societies face in assuring that each member’s consciousness develops in a way that maintains a collective accuracy in depicting reality:

"Thus a mythology is a control system, on the one hand framing its community to accord with an intuited order of nature and, on the other hand, by means of its symbolic pedagogic rites, conducting individuals through the ineluctable psychophysiological stages of transformation of a human lifetime – birth, childhood and adolescence, age, old age, and the release of death – in unbroken accord simultaneously with the requirements of this world and the rapture of participation in a manner of being beyond time. ...Their effect, therefore, is to wake the intellect to realizations equivalent to those of the insights that produce them." (Campbell 1986:20)

Campbell also suggested that universal mythic themes may operate as innate "releasing mechanisms" for archetypal structures in the depths of the human psyche (he was very Jungian in this respect). Mythic elements, operating as metaphors, are images that may be more effective than naturally occurring phenomena for triggering the development of latent, inherent, neurocognitive structures in the human brain. The society’s mythic system may be organized in a unique way so that it activates, and causes development of constellations of neurocognitive models of appropriate types. For instance, hero myths may operate as initiators. The imagery penetrates to the depths of the psyche and activates and potentiates development of those psychological faculties valued by the society (like the persistent, unsatisfiable greed for more and better appropriate to the "American Dream"). By manipulating the motifs and elements of myth, a society may orchestrate deep psychic development requisite to psychological growth along certain lines. These become the "collective consciousness" of a particular people – a collective understanding that is keyed to both the local and global reality within which people are embedded.

BRAIN, SPIRIT AND REALITY

Mountains are symbols, like pyramids, of man’s attempt to know God. Mountains are symbolic meeting places between the mundane and spiritual world.

Alan Hovhaness

We can see now that our consciousness of reality is trued by both myth and experience, and the latter may be either direct or vicarious. It is through ritual activation of ASC that experience comes to reiterate and reinforce the truth of totality and connectedness among all things in the world, and among people who are inextricably embedded in and dependent upon this universal entanglement for their survival. All spiritual paths lead to and through this truth. The truth of interdependence is experienced and reified in every generation within ideational and idealistic cultures. But the tenuous ritualized link between the mythic narratives and direct individual experience is broached during the process of producing a sensate culture – with its inevitable monophasic world view (and particularly its epistemology). The sacred stories become, if they survive at all, merely a corpus of amusing "just-so" stories. This leaves people vulnerable to the delusions of a separation between the empirical ego and everything and everybody else, and between the people (or the culture) and nature. The psyche becomes unbalanced (in Eric Fromm’s sense, "un-sane"). Spiritually unawakened people tend to be shallow, out of touch with the primordial (neurognostic) wisdom of not just their elders, but more importantly of untold millennia of neural evolution. The truth of connectedness and interdependence of all things lies dormant and undeveloped within the psyche of sensate peoples. Such people are hence vulnerable to psychological alienation and a spiritual thirst for "in-depth" meaning in their lives that can inform the existential "matters of ultimate concern" facing each of us: why am I here, where did I come from, what is my purpose in the scheme of things, why do I feel alone, why do I suffer, why must I die and what happens after death?

An Aside: The Perils of Finding a Spiritual Path

This does not mean however that people raised in sensate societies are spiritually dead. Far from it. Rather, from the perspective of truing consciousness to reality, they are simply unbalanced in their development. They have the same brain as people raised in more spiritually aware, polyphasic societies, and they live in the same real world. But their compliment of primordially truing, "mystically" charged neural models remain dormant. Yet these models may be potentiated and developed under the right conditions (a la Joe Campbell’s comment above). Typical of an extremely sensate society, there are enumerable teachings available in our societies today to exploit this thirst for spiritual awakening. Some paths are ancient, tried and true teachings, while others are re-discovered or new teachings. And of course, many people are left vulnerable by their inability to distinguish the genuine path from the false path, the true teacher from the charlatan. Ironically, there is more information available to the neophyte spiritual practitioner now than at any time in history, what with the Internet, TV, magazines and other media. If you are interested, read some articles on the Internet, like this one.

If you are a beginner – a spiritual neophyte – then as you seek a spiritual path, pay close attention to how the leaders of a cult or teaching live their own lives – pay less attention to how they rationalize their lifestyle, and more attention to what they do. As Jesus reputedly put it, "by their fruits shall ye know them." Do they get rich playing the guru role? Are they sexually kinky or promiscuous? (I know of one young "guru" type who spread HIV among his followers because he thought he was so pure that his semen was purified. Right. By their fruits shall ye know them...) Do they drive around in fancy, expensive cars? Are they physical or psychological bullies? Do they take undo personal advantage of the spiritual naivete and gullibility of their followers? Do they seem to get off on telling people what to do, on having people groveling in front of them, on exercising power over people? Do they claim to be deities? All of these things can be tipoffs to narcissistic personalty types who are in the spiritual awakening game for their own aggrandizement. Avoid them like the plague. Remember Charlie’s Law of Inevitable Perversion: namely, if an occupation can be defined in such a way as to fulfill perverted needs, it will draw perverted people like bees to honey. Any occupation that places a person in control of other people WILL draw power-trippers. Any occupation that places children under the control of an adult will inevitably draw pedaphiles. Any occupation that allows the use of physical force against other people WILL draw sadists. A word to the wise, then...

Remember also that there is no such thing as a single spiritual path that has all the answers, or that is right for everyone. Trust your instincts. The whole point is to awaken and that is a process of self-empowerment. Most people I suspect will intuitively know when a path is right for them. You will be comfortable with the people and with the practices. Also remember Charlie’s Principle of Multiple Interpretations: namely, that there is no such thing as an experience that admits of one and only one interpretation. Recall the cycle of meaning. All paths to spiritual awakening of which I am aware have a core set of techniques and practices, and these give rise very predictably to a certain range of ASC. And they will tend to interpret these ASC according to tradition. Remember, you are under no obligation to buy into any one path’s interpretation of your experience. Be especially wary of interpretive frames that are DIS-empowering – that are interpreted in such a way as you become bound by role or status to the teaching or teacher. Many cults out there are designed to entrap members into a system of higher and higher teachings, each subsequent level (and perhaps requisite courses) requiring more money and commitment – a sort of spiritual pyramid scheme.

It has been my impression for years that eastern traditions of spiritual awakening are often poorly designed to deal with the typically neurotic, unbalanced, "un-sane" sensate personality type. Yes, there are eastern teachings pertaining to balancing the personality. There are Buddhist meditation practices for instance that are assigned to people that may be considered unbalanced according to eastern lights. The overly greedy person might be told to meditate on death and impermanence – might even be told to stake out and observe the decay of corpses in a charnel ground. But these eastern spiritual psychologies do not seem to understand neurosis – that is, the existence of an unconscious, anxiety-ridden, infantile, and often traumatized sub-personality that stands as a serious barrier to advanced personal development. If you sense that you are getting nowhere in your spiritual path, despite considerable effort, and are experiencing intense negative emotions inappropriate to your circumstances, then perhaps you need to begin your spiritual work with therapy to deal with the emotional blocks in your being. You can always return to your chosen spiritual path after dealing with your issues and healing yourself. End of the aside! Let’s get back to the main point of all this...

The Spiritual Brain

Spirituality then is the process of getting in touch with our primordial Self. It is the process of truing-up our consciousness to the reality of both our being and the world. Each of our brains is "wired" to know the truth of totality, and this truth can be directly experienced in an instant of insight, given the right conditions. Our brainworld is inherently mystical. My late friend Gene d’Aquili liked to call this the apprehension and realization of Absolute Unitary Being (AUB for short; see link at the right of the post). First the direct experience of absorption into the All, followed almost immediately by the comprehension of the meaning of the experience. Please note however that the experience of AUB may or may not come as the result of mature contemplation, and is also not necessarily related to the systems thought level of cognition. Indeed, the experience may occur spontaneously, and may lead to a total alteration of one’s life, for it is always transpersonal and thus will bring the delusion of the empirical ego, and its sense of alienation into question. One consequence of this experience and realization of AUB may be that reality becomes transformed in our experience and comprehension as cosmos – one comprehends onself to be but a scintilla of consciousness in a timeless, boundless sea of energy in which every star in every galaxy is implicated within one’s consciousness and visa versa. There is no separation between Self and cosmos, for separation is as unnatural as it is impossible.

There are many techniques one may try to "invite" the realization of totality. One of the simplest methods I learned from my friend, Tarchin Hearn. One meditates upon one’s breathing while gazing at a bush or tree or even a single leaf, and as one breaths out one is aware of breathing for the plant, and as one breaths in one is aware that the plant is breathing for one’s self. That’s all there is to the meditation. Out breath "I’m breathing for the plant," in breath "the plant is breathing for me." Do it and see what happens.

Another meditation I invented for myself is a bit more complicated and works very fast for me. But I don’t really know how efficacious it will be for you. Try it and see. One meditates in a park, or somewhere else outside where there are both other people and nature. One becomes aware of one’s own sphere of consciousness – that "radiant sphere" sitting atop one’s shoulders – and how it "puffs-out" to incorporate all the other people and the plants and animals and ground and sky and so forth. And then one shifts one’s awareness ever so slightly to imagine that each and every person and other animal in one’s puffed-out consciousness is also experiencing a puffed-out consciousness that likewise includes you and everything else within sight or hearing. And then alternate between contemplating the puffed-out nature of one’s sphere of awareness and then the same puffed-out sphere of awareness going on in everybody else’s head. That’s it, that’s all. Just keep that alternation going and see what happens.

If and when the experience of AUB occurs, how one interprets it is another question. One may only comprehend an experience to the maximum level of their cognitive capacity. If a person is capable of systems thought, then their understanding of the world and their place in it may come to resemble something like a "deep ecology." The entanglement of everything with everything else will inform all their thoughts and understandings. A person with a more concrete intelligence may just become more religious and perhaps more fervent in their belief system. Or perhaps they may conclude they have been "born again," or become vulnerable to conversion into one or another interpretive frame that makes pre-digested sense of the experience. Same experience, different interpretations. Whatever the case, the mystical brainworld has strived to true itself to its primordial awareness of entanglement. Individuals undergoing this experience and its cognitive and emotional sequelae have taken a giant step back from the understanding of the world typical of materialistic, sensate culture. The eye is at least partially turned inward to the source of self-revelation and awakening. How far one may travel along this new course is an empirical question and depends upon many factors. It is said that "many are called, but few are chosen." This may refer in part to the arduous hurdles one may face in following a spiritual path in a sensate society.

If one is clever about it, one may establish in one’s own development a balance of view typical of ideational societies, a balance of mystical and materialist views that will stand as a corrective to any appeal from either the sensate or the idealistic poles. This is the standpoint most productive of balanced comprehension and penetration into the heart of The Crisis. This balance is a dynamic one, and hard to hold, for the mid-point shifts and changes over time and situation. Veer to either extreme and one will lose sight of the core problem of The Crisis, and fall into the error of certainty. On one side the shallowness of materialist orientation, on the other the fervency and cognitive dullness of true believer-hood and ideology. Imagine you are traversing a knife-sharp ridge leading to the summit of a mountain. This is the only path you can take if you hope to stand on the summit and see to the other side. On either hand there are chasms that will suck you down below and distort and hide your path. It makes no difference whether you are climbing the mountain alone or roped in a line with a guide and fellow climbers – you must tread each and every step along the way by dint of your own insight and effort. Only when you stand upon the summit, mid-way between the chasms of distortion and delusion, can you hope to see The Crisis most clearly. And even when you comprehend The Crisis, I cannot tell you what you should or will do about it, if anything. That is for you to ponder. In a sense, it is now in the dialog between you and your Mother Earth that your decisions will be made.

We have at long last reached the point in these discourses that I can deal with The Crisis directly. I want to thank you for your patience. All the essential elements have been discussed, and I feel certain that many of you will have already seen to the heart of the matter. But I still want to describe The Crisis as I see it, and in so doing perhaps prod you all into both clearer reflection and the sense of urgency I feel. As a preparation for this next discussion, may I suggest a bit of homework? Easy and pleasant homework. Go to the link over to the right and watch the 20 minute video called the "Story of Stuff." This is important to my presentation, for I want us to start out on the same page. I will have some things to say about this really quite brilliant video, and they won’t make sense unless you have watched it.

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SUGGESTED READING

Bourguignon, Erika, 1973. Religion, Altered States of Consciousness, and Social Change. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press.

Bourguignon, Erika and Thomas L. Evascu,1977. "Altered States of Consciousness within a General Evolutionary Perspective: A Holocultural Analysis." Behavior Science Research 12(3):197-216.

Campbell, Joseph, 1959. The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology. New York: Viking.

Campbell, Joseph, 1986. The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion. New York: Harper.

Devall, W. and G. Sessions, 2001. Deep Ecology: Living As if Nature Mattered. Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith.

Dobkin de Rios, Marlene, 1984. Hallucinogens: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. [Written by one of the real experts on drugs and ASC cross-culturally.]

Forman, Robert K.C., ed., 1998. The Innate Capacity: Mysticism, Psychology, and Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [The propensity for ASC is inherent in our genetics and our brainworld.]

Laughlin, Charles D. and C. Jason Throop, 2001. "Imagination and Reality: On the Relations Between Myth, Consciousness, and the Quantum Sea." Zygon 36(4):709_736. [Jason and I develop these notions further in this paper, and relate "universal cosmology" to the world according to quantum physics.]

Pinker, Steven, 2003. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Penguin. [A brilliant and very readable analysis of the false notion of baby brainworlds being informational "blank slates."]

Slotkin, J.S. , 1958. "The Peyote Way." in Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach (first edition), ed. By William A. Lessa and Evon Z. Vogt. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson and Company, pp. 482-486.

Sorokin, Pitirim A., 1957. Social and Cultural Dynamics. Boston: Porter Sargent Publisher.

Sorokin, Pitirim A., 1962. Society, Culture, and Personality. New York: Cooper Square Publishers.

Tart, Charles, 1975. States of Consciousness. New York: Dutton. [Invented the term "altered states of consciousness."]

Winkelman, Michael, 2000. Shamanism: The Neural Ecology of Consciousness and Healing. Westport CT: Bergin & Garvey. [The best single source on shamanism and ASC.]

Young, Allan, 1997. The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [An anthropologists analyses the social and economic factors involved in inventing diagnoses.]

Young, David and Jean_Guy Goulet, eds., 1994. Being Changed by Cross_Cultural Encounters: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press. [Articles written by anthros who report their own ASC while in the field, including yours truly.]

Crisis on the Planet of the Hairless Apes (Part VI): Development of Natural Intelligence

2008-05-24T11:26:00.000-07:00

Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality.

Jean Piaget

So far I have discussed how the brainworld makes sense of the real world. The senses capture patterns of stimuli from the real world and these patterns penetrate (or "propagate" as neural geeks like to say) into the core brain to produce a pixilated sensorium. The patterns are rapidly paired with meaning associated with the patterns and this gestalt comes together as our world of experience. So we can see that the world we experience is a construct – a kind of replica – that is fabricated by the cells of our brain for their own consumption. Each and every moment of our conscious experience is organized around some object, be that focus a thing, an idea, an image, a feeling, a thought, whatever. And the focal object is meaningful to us because of this automatic association with knowledge stored in our memory. We have built up our library of meaning during our lifetime by way of truing-up interactions with reality, so that our meaning is more or less accurate.

This is now old hat for us, right? We know that the world of experience is not the real world itself, but only our uniquely individual point of view upon reality, trued by constant testing and alteration and growth of our neural models. We feed-forward into the world and get automatic feedback about the obdurate and affordant nature of the object and the world. And the fact that we only see the world from a point of view – the fact that the real world is ALWAYS transcendental relative to any knowledge or view we have of it – has everything to do with producing The Crisis.

But what I have not addressed yet is the internal organization of meaning that becomes attached to the object like iron filings around a magnet. The iron filings of meaning are not isolated islands of information, but rather are organized into systems. This is an issue that is equally important to our understanding of how the consciousness of hairless apes has produced The Crisis, and may yet be able to negotiate their way through The Crisis to a more or less rosey future. I started these posts by claiming that The Crisis is produced by the fact that hairless apes are too stupid to comprehend the unintended consequences of their actions in the real world. This post will examine the issue of natural intelligence directly so that we can see more clearly where the danger lies, and what "stupidity" means. [I want to acknowledge the very important role my late friend and soul brother, John McManus, played in teaching our BS group to integrate a developmental perspective into biogenetic structuralism.]

NATURAL INTELLIGENCE

Let me say right up front that what I mean by intelligence is NOT synonymous with what IQ tests measure. IQ tests are related to natural intelligence, but most such tests are culturally loaded and require mastery of particular content. Natural intelligence refers to the neurobiological systems of control that have evolved to intervene between the sensory input and behavior output of organisms. In humans, natural intelligence refers to the internal cognitive organization of the brainworld. Because these control systems are biological, they have evolved through millions of years, and they develop over the course of each lifetime. So, for hairless apes we are talking about the cognitive development that all humans undergo as they mature. More specifically, natural intelligence involves the growth of increasing complexity of organization, irrespective of content. In other words, how complexly do we comprehend what we are experiencing, thinking, imagining, calculating, so forth. Generally speaking, the more complex our cognitive systems become, the "smarter" we are about what we comprehend and decide to do.

The methods that developmental psychologists and neuroscientists use to research cognitive/brainworld development from our early life in the womb til we become adults are extremely technical, and there have been many controversies over the exact details of theories about all this. I have no desire to get into these methods and controversies, for they are well covered in the literature and on the net, and besides, they would take us off-point. The point is that we are not born as smart as we become later in life. Our intelligence develops over many years, and involves the growth of neural structures, just as our hands and feet grow more and more adult-like and capable over the years.

The Work of Jean Piaget (1896-1980)

We have the great Swiss philosopher and psychologist, Jean_Piaget, to thank for having started us down the path of understanding the development of natural intelligence in people and other animals. In his research with thousands of children, he was able to show that the internal structure of knowledge, comprehension and judgment develops through a series of definable stages, each stage organizing the content of the previous stage in ever more complex ways. Cognitive competence grows in active dialog with real life, everyday situations, including engagement with the obdurate and affordant aspects of physical reality. Again, whether or not there exist discrete stages of cognitive development is unimportant for our purposes, and in point of fact, Piaget himself didn’t care one way or the other. What he was at great pains to show empirically is that:

1. Cognition is a biological function, and thus is the same for all members of the species,
2. Cognition develops in the interaction between the cognitive structures and reality,
3. Cognition is an activity or "operation" of the brain, which is to say the drive of the organism is to transform its internal structures in order to adapt to changes in the environment,
4. Meaning and knowing are a product of cognitive structures,
5. Changes in internal cognitive structures occurs as a consequence of accommodating (changing to meet the requirements of) reality, and assimilating (taking into) reality into the structures.
6. The higher levels of cognitive development require and are the products of so-called "reflecting abstraction;" that is, the capacity of the person to contemplate their own cognitive operations, and the properties of their own actions,
7. The higher stages of cognitive development are marked by greater complexity, levels of organization and abstraction from mere sensory content,
8. And cultures can facilitate or hinder the development of higher levels of natural intelligence.

Almost every normal person reaches the level of concrete operational thought. Children begin to demonstrate logical thought around age 7, plus or minus, and continue to develop operational abilities into adolescence. Many factors may influence the onset and rapidity of development, especially diet. Malnutrition is known to slow down cognitive development, and even stunt intellectual development altogether. Remember, we are talking about natural intelligence, hence neural cell growth, and growth of connections among millions of neural cells, all of whom must feed in order to grow and prosper.

Concrete operations are so named because they are logical operations applied to concrete events. A child/person may be fully operational at a concrete level, but find abstract or hypothetical thinking difficult or impossible. The concrete operational child/person can order things according to qualities, like color, number, size, shape, etc. They can learn to count and do arithmetic. They can move from specific instances to general principles – like, observe a flock of sheep and then classify the different kinds of sheep according to general properties (all are wooly, some are white and some are not, some are babies and some are grown up, so forth). They can also perform reversible operations – if five and five make ten, then if I take five away from ten, I get five. They can comprehend that things in one category may be included in a larger, more inclusive category – like "my budgie is a bird and a bird is a kind of animal. So my budgie is also an animal.

A very important concrete operation isolated by Piaget is conservation. Before a certain point, if you pour a tall thin glass full of water into a short wide glass, and ask a pre-operational child which glass has more water in it, they will usually answer the tall glass. But after the onset of concrete operations, the child comprehends that the same amount of water has been held by two glasses of different shapes. Things may change and yet some properties are conserved. Moreover, the child/person who has developed concrete operational thought can to some extent remove their ego from a calculation. If in a story a dog buries a bone under a bush and leaves, and then another dog comes along and finding the bone, re-buries it under a fence, when the first dog comes back, and looks for his bone, the child knows that the first dog will look under the tree, even though the child knows the bone has been moved.

Notice that I keep referring to the child/person, rather than just child, for it is the case that most people never develop very far past concrete operations, if at all. Most think about experienced things and events, goals for the future, things that have transpired in the past. Some eighty years ago, the anthropologist Paul Radin concluded that all societies are like that in that they each produce a handful of "philosophers" while the rest of the population are "men of action." In fact, there are no nations, countries or societies that have any more than a fraction of their population capable of thought above the concrete level, and in many societies, no one develops beyond that capacity.

Those people who do develop the ability to think abstractly are those that have entered the stage that Piaget called formal operational thought. In our society where adequate nutrition is widely available over the course of childhood, formal operations begin to present in early adolescence, but onset may be delayed until much later. Cognitive development continues into adulthood of course. People are not just able to have goals, they can carry out complex systematic planning. They can think about abstract ideas and relations. They become capable of logico-deductive reasoning. Hypothetical thinking (thinking about options that have never been experienced), empirical-theoretical relations (as in science), and higher mathematics make sense to the formal operational person.

Piaget also recognized that abstract thought may not be generalized to all experiential domains. The development of thought may in fact demonstrate a vertical decalages (French for "lag") between domains of content – that is, a person may become abstract in their thought about one set of problems and remain concrete with respect to another domain. For instance, a particle physicist may operate at a very abstract level with respect to her cosmological thinking, while remaining very concrete in her social, moral or political thought. Indeed, few people are universally abstract across all domains of application.

The Work of Michael Commons (1939- )

Work has continued along Piagetian lines, fleshing out what we can know about the development of the internal complexity and functioning of the brainworld. Numerous additional stages of development have been added – which Piaget himself anticipated. Of interest to us is the addition of stages beyond formal operations. Perhaps the most elaborate empirical research so far is that done by Michael_Commons and his colleagues. For Commons, formal operations involves mastering the skill of arguing from empirical or logical evidence requisite to correct scientific problem solving. There follows a stage he calls systematic operations which is implied to some extent in Piaget’s formal operations, and is characterized by the ability to think in terms of multivariate systems. Systems are made up of complex relations, and thinking transcends one dimensional unknowns to consider multivariate coordinates. Following systematic operations comes metasystematic operations which involves the ability to construct metasystems, supersystems, multi-systems and global views of embedded systems. One is also able to comprehend the property of systems and relations among systems. At the level of paradigmatic operations one is then able to construct paradigms from metasystems, and at the final level of cross-paradigmatic operations, to construct entire fields from multiple paradigms.

Without getting into any great detail about these stages (which may or may not prove to be discrete stages at all), the two things to emphasize here are (1) that these higher levels of thinking have to do with cognizing, recognizing and constructing systems of relations at higher and higher levels of abstraction from observed reality, and (2) fewer and fewer people are capable as adults of each subsequent level of abstraction.

Conceptual Systems Theory and Social Cognition (CST)

There are other scientific theories, like those of Piaget and Commons, pertaining to the development of thought, comprehension, judgement and decision-making about the physical world. Then there are others that help us understand social cognition and decision-making. One such is called conceptual systems theory which was developed in the 1960s to understand the relationship between complexity of social cognitive abilities and complexity of social environment. These theorists posited four stages from low complexity of thought to high complexity of thought.

I. Low Complexity: These people (in fact most people in our society) apply low cognitive complexity characterized by uni-dimensional thinking and very concrete operations. They are categorical in their thinking and judgements. They will see things and people classified by a single attribute – say, all people who are black are in one category that is characterized by the same set of stereotypical qualities. These are people who are the least flexible and adaptable under conditions of change, complexity and stress. These folks have trouble generating alternatives and things are judged to be either black or white – with no gradations. Situations under stress reach rapid closure, and things are either in one category, or excluded from consideration.

II. Moderate Low Complexity: People can comprehend multiple dimensions and alternatives, and rules that connect these dimensions. They are less likely to be "absolutist" about decisions, and are able to consider choices and weigh probabilities. They are less likely to cave under the stress of environmental change and complexity, for they have alternative ways to move and rules for applying them.

III. Moderate High Complexity: Abstract thought begins to prevail, and there is a lot less deterministic thinking. Far more alternatives are available to thought and decision-making. Many more ways of viewing the environment within the same overall structure of thought. Multivariate dimensions and rules may fit without conflict within the same structure. A person can conceive of more than one point of view in social situations, can weigh different views relative to strategic solutions, can evaluate different behaviors to outcomes. Social strategies are far less categorical, and more fluid. This person is even less likely to cave under stress.

IV. High Complexity: The rules for comparing strategies and points of view are more numerous and more flexible and more integrated within a single structure. Highly abstract decision-making among a host of possible strategies and schemes makes this level on at which a person can generate novel solutions to complex problems. There is greater creativity in reorganizing schemes and systems of rules. This person is relatively independent of past experiences and "tried and true" solutions, and is the least likely to cave under complexity, novelty and change.

It is important to our picture here to realize that people who test high on Piagetian and Commons measures, do not necessarily test high on social cognition. But anyone who tests high on social cognition will be capable of formal operations or above. That also means that there are fewer people capable of abstract social cognition than are capable of abstract thought about the physical world.

The Work of Lawrence Kohlberg (1927-1987) on Moral Development

Still another stage theory of cognitive development has to do with the development of moral thinking and decision-making. This is the stage theory of Lawrence Kohlberg. Again, we see the development of cognitive structure from simple, unidimensional, egoistic and concrete thinking to highly complex, de-centered, abstract moral thinking. His scheme lays out three main stages of moral reasoning, each with two sub-stages. I won’t bother to distinguish the sub-stages.

I. Pre-conventional: Preconventional reasoning is typical of children, but many adults retain this level of thinking applied to the moral domain. At this stage people are making moral judgments abut their actions dependent upon their direct consequences – like, if they get punished for doing something, it’s wrong. They are only interested in themselves and reason entirely from an ego-centered perspective. One acts purely out of self-interest. It is good if it is good for me.

II. Conventional: Most late adolescents and adults operate on a conventional level of morality. The hallmark of moral thinking is its social orientation. Interpersonal relationships, especially one-on-one friendships and family relations are at the core, and then later obeying social rules predominate. Things are "good" or "bad" relative to how they effect other people we know and care about. Social rules are "good" because it benefits the commonweal. "Good" citizens follow the laws, and "bad" people break the laws, and the latter harms society.

III. Post-conventional: People at this level begin to view society abstractly and ponder the principles that make society work. They no longer advocate support for society for its own sake, because some societies can do really dumb and unjust things. Not all societies are "good," even though they function well – dictatorships can be very efficient, but are rarely just. There can be "good" laws and "bad" laws. They conceive of an ideal society in which all human rights are valued and upheld, and then make judgements about their own society by comparison with the ideal. Society is now considered to be a social contract among individuals and that contract can be changed, renegotiated and improved. Evaluations are made in relation to "higher" principles of justice and fairness, and to democratic institutions that give everyone their say.

Moral thought, as with thinking about the physical world, develops though application and through interaction with the social environment. They cannot be taught, anymore than Piagetian stages can be taught. Moreover, as with social cognition, one may have reached formal operations in the Piagetian sense, but remain at a conventional level in moral thinking -- remember the phenomenon of decalages (above). The particle physicist who spends her days thinking about multidimensional string theory may also be socially retarded and act like a tyrant at home. But there is no such thing as a person capable of post-conventional moral thought that is not also operating at the formal operational stage of Piagetian development.

NATURAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE CRISIS

The fields of developmental psychology and developmental neuroscience are rich and very technical. I have only been able to give you a flavor of the findings that are integral to our discussion of The Crisis. In my second post back in March, 2008, I quipped: "...humans collectively are too stupid to comprehend the unintended consequences of their conscious acts. And I mean stupidity literally here: ‘A poor ability to understand and to profit from experience,’ as well as technically: we are collectively (as societies and as a species) not smart enough to model our contemporary environment, ecology, and global society as dynamic and vulnerable systems at risk, and take appropriate effective and adaptive action to rectify our destructive actions." I did mean "stupidity" literally, but in relation to the development of natural intelligence, not scores on an IQ test – and certainly not as an epithet directed at people with who’s views I disagree. There is no doubt that there are relations between intelligence in the Piagetian and neo-Piagetian sense described above, and general intelligence (or g), a theoretical ability as measured by a whole battery of tests. General intelligence is presumably what all intelligence tests have in common, and help to measure. But this is both controversial and beside the point for our purposes here.

What is relevant is that optimal development of natural intelligence is correlated with (1) neurophysiological development, especially development of the prefrontal cortex; (2) diet, especially dietary considerations in the womb, in infancy and early childhood; (3) complexity of social and physical environment during development; and (4) genetic background, for intelligence is heritable. Let’s take each of these factors in turn:

1. Brain and natural intelligence: Intelligence (g-factor) is correlated highly with both overall brain size and with the size of the prefrontal lobes. Hence, any factors that facilitate or inhibit brain growth (disease, inheritance, diet, environmental factors) contribute to the overall optimization of the development of intelligence.

2. Diet and natural intelligence: Diet has a direct impact upon physical growth in the embryo, infant and child. Research has shown that dietary deficits will inhibit brain development and stunt the development of intelligence. When scientists realized this powerful factor, policies were established that created the "head-start" programs in the United States and other countries. But there are societies who’s children are still routinely malnourished, and as a consequence, few if any adults ever reach optimal, higher level cognitive stages. The picture is even worse than this, however. Research also shows that if a pregnant woman is malnourished over the course of her pregnancy, her offspring will suffer intellectual deficits, regardless of whether the offspring after birth have access to a good diet or not. In other words, bad diet stunts brain growth and hinders the optimal development of natural intelligence. Let me emphasize this yet again: bad diets produce unnecessary and avoidable stupidity!

3. Complexity of Environment and Natural Intelligence: Research has also shown that children raised in enriched physical and social environments are more likely to reach optimal development of brain growth and intelligence. Remember when I said that the brainworld grows in dynamic interaction with reality? The more varied and interesting the environment of the child (also kitten, pup, cub, etc.), the more challenges there are for intellectual growth. Conversely, children raised in sub-optimal environments have their intellects stultified.

4. Inheritance and Natural Intelligence: Intelligence is heritable. That is beyond dispute. But as we have seen, the development of the brainworld is complex and there is often no way to parse out how much is due to environmental factors such as complexity of environment and diet. Plus the issue of the inheritance of intelligence got all mixed up with racism and politics which further muddies the water. But there is no doubt at all that individual intelligence is in part due to genetics, and this factor will become important when I take up the future of space colonization in a later post.

Natural Intelligence and The Crisis

Hairless apes can only be as intelligent as their individual brains can develop. And no matter how smart any one person can become, he or she is still too stupid to comprehend all the unintended consequences of human actions in the world, because (1) reality is always transcendental relative to what we can know about it, (2) no human brain reaches a systems consciousness sufficiently intelligent to comprehend the vast systems we impact with our actions, and (3) most of the causal relations we set in motion or alter with our actions are invisible to our senses or measuring technologies. Imagine you are cruising up a river in a speedboat. Can you comprehend all the unintended consequences on the physical world of your outing? You may be aware the waves you cause are wearing away the banks, slowly but surely – but what else? How many creatures have you killed or maimed? What kind of interactions does this cause? What pollutants have you let loose into the atmosphere and water, and what are the consequences of that? And what about all the other causal interactions about which neither your nor I know nothing about, but that happen anyways? See what I mean? Most human beings haven’t a clue about the systemic impact of their actions in the world, nor can they know because they are too stupid to comprehend – in the same sense that a chimpanzee is too stupid, or an elephant is too stupid.

We hairless apes are a species of social primate. We are reared in groups and most of us live out our lives in groups. And we tend to do things and make things happen in groups. We tend to do things we were taught to do by our group and that are valued by other members of our group. Group interactions have an impact upon our strategies and upon the consequences of our actions, and to a very real extent upon the development of intelligence in its members. Cross-cultural psychologists have shown that horticultural societies tend to thwart the development of individual thinking and abstract intelligence, while hunting and gathering groups value and encourage individuation and complex thought. This is in complete alignment with the way the two types of society make a living and organize their social interactions. The one society tends to dumb-down its members, and the other creates conditions that facilitate advanced cognitive development.

While I will spend an entire post spelling out The Crisis in more detail, what I can say here is that planets are organic systems so complex, few if any hairless apes can comprehend planets as unitary systems. To make matters worse, planets are also dynamic systems, changing all the time, so that what impact we hairless apes have on planetary events becomes mangled in with all the other causal factors, so that we have a hard time parsing out our overall footprint. But meanwhile, the population of hairless apes on Planet Earth has, in just my 70 years here, grown from just over 2 billion to nearly 7 billion. If you were born in 1950, the world population was something over 2.5 billion, and if you were born in 1970, then the population was around 4 billion. Do you realize that there are more people alive today than have ever been born and died in the past? Hairless apes are everywhere – a virtual contagion of endlessly jabbering, socially dependant, greed infested, resource consuming, often starving hairless apes! We have known for decades that overpopulation alone is an ecological and economic catastrophe waiting in the wings. People are living longer, marrying later, and using contraception, on the average, and yes, having fewer babies, but still the explosion goes on – estimates have us at over 9 billion people by 2050! Yet there are people by the millions who will argue adamantly for the inalienable "right" of women to make babies, while others take to the streets and threaten violence to protect frozen embryos that will never become babies. Truly, we are collectively too stupid to comprehend The Crisis and to do much about its onset or duration.

Let me repeat, I am not using the word "stupid" in a pejorative, misanthropic sense. I am just stating the situation, sans sugar coating, as best I see it. People cannot help it if there is an inherent limit to what they can understand and know anymore than an earthworm with its rudimentary nervous system can know, or a dolphin with its huge, complex brain can know. We have evolved a brainworld that was very, very adaptive during the hundreds of thousands of years of Upper Paleolithic ("upper stone age") adaptations. When we began the rapid increase of population at the beginning of the Neolithic ("new stone age") some ten thousand years ago, population is estimated as having been between 1 and 10 million people – MILLION, not billion. There were probably way less than half a billion people on the planet at the time of Christ, and still less than a billion people in the world at the time the United States became a republic. So our population growth and its effects on the natural environment is more a result of our very clever technological brainworld, than much in the way of an evolutionary advance in neural complexity and wisdom.

The capacity for advanced or optimal intelligence does NOT guarantee smart choices, judgments and comprehension. And it certainly does not guarantee good or wise choices. Advance intelligence has to be applied to produce really intelligent results. Various factors influence how a person will apply their intelligence, or not as the case may be, including:

1. Challenging environment: The complexity and challenge of the environment is a major factor. If the problem or challenge is not interesting to the person, they may give a less than optimally complex intellectual response. Highly intelligent students get bored in school for instance when the material is pitched to the mean abilities in the class, well below that level of complexity that will challenge the really bright minds, and the bright student may just blow off the tests and projects and end up with a low mark. In a real sense the environment "calls forth" the level of intelligence appropriate to its complexities.

2. Decalages: Let’s not forget that the available potential for high intelligence in one domain of experience may not be matched by that person in another domain – the physicist who is very concrete in his social life or moral judgments. I have personally known members of Mensa who are socially inept and narcissistic. We Americans once had a fabulously intelligent president who was caught out having had embarrassing sexual adventures in the Oval Office. How dumb is that? The point is that a totally rounded-out advanced abstract systems intelligence with no decalages is a rarity.

3. Social pressure for conformity: People can be socialized right out of any inherent intelligence they might, under optimal conditions, apply. People can get caught up in social groups that demand a dumbing down of their intelligence in order for them to be socially acceptable. Bureaucracies all too often have that effect. It is said by some that it is all your job is worth in NASA to voice novel ideas that might require changing things. That is a common situation in bureaucratic organizations with their internal politics and pressures for social conformity. Some people get caught up in fundamentalist religious groups that inhibit intelligence in favor of strict adherence to dogma. Honestly, there are hundreds of thousands of "born-again" Christians so dumb they think Jesus spoke in English! And you want to know what is REALLY scary? They vote!

4. Mood and smarts: It is a fact that those with higher intelligence are more susceptible to depression, and depression has a dampening effect upon interest in reality. Thus depression can inhibit the full application of advanced intelligence. Why are more intelligent people more likely to become depressed? Some clinicians suggest that intelligent people have a greater capacity for internal analysis and self-evaluation, and come to the conclusion that they are unworthy. As many or you know from direct experience, loss of a sense of mastery is one of the root causes of depression. Others think that because highly intelligent people are aware on a daily basis of the general stupidity around them over which they have no control, they are more susceptible to mood disorders, solitary life styles and lack of interest.

5. High intelligence does NOT equal "good": Just because someone has applied optimal intelligence to a problem does not mean that they have reached a "good" solution. Indeed, they may apply their analytical skills in an essentially amoral way. Sherlock Holmes’ arch nemesis, Professor Moriarty, was no doubt highly intelligent, but as cruel as a black fly in May, and as evil as the Devil himself. Highly intelligent people can end up in powerful positions in corporations and in government and choose to do destructive and evil things in order to up their profits and keep their constituents happy. So there is no guarantee that intelligence alone can get us out of the pickle in which we find ourselves.

6. Metabolism: The energy state of the body of course influences the state of the brainworld. In order to operate at an optimal level of intelligence, a person has to have enough food. Malnutrition not only inhibits the development of advanced intelligence, it inhibits the application of advanced intelligence. So too does fatigue. The brain weighs roughly 3 lbs., and in a 150 lb. person constitutes one 50th of their body weight. And yet average brain activity consumes 5% or more of one’s metabolic energy. You have to eat to think. Cognition and experience are energy dense activities. That’s how come you can get really tired doing homework or writing stuff.

RECAPPING

This has been another dense post, I know. So let me run over the high points we need to carry with us as we examine The Crisis. We aren’t born smart, though we may be born with the genetic potential for smartness. Natural intelligence develops, and development can be facilitated or thwarted by different factors. Most people on the planet and in any particular society do not develop intellectually beyond the concrete operational stage (indeed, in some societies nobody is capable of abstract thought). Other people do develop more complex, abstract thought, but few of these continue to develop full systems consciousness. Development may be optimal in one domain of experience, but not in others (decalages). Moreover, just because a person is capable of complex, abstract thought – even full-on systems thought – it does not mean that they will necessarily apply higher reasoning to particular problems or situations. And, even if they apply higher intelligence to a situation, it does not guarantee morally good, compassionate or wise solutions. Very smart decisions can be made that result in further damage to the environment, loss of human life, and impoverishment of other people.

And lest I have left you with the impression that all of this talk about intelligence is merely academic blather, consider the real-life cost of the acts of culturally-conditioned, ideologically infected, emotionally driven stupidity:

Second Tower Hit, Sept. 11, 2001

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SUGGESTED READING

Calvin, William H., 1997. How Brains Think: Evolving Intelligence, Then and Now. P/B.

Commons, Michael L. et al., 1984. Beyond Formal Operations: Late Adolescence and Adult Cognitive Development. Praeger.

Harvey, O.J. et al., 1961. Conceptual Systems and Personality Organization. New York: Wiley.

Lynch, Gary and Richard Granger, 2008. Big Brain: The Origin and Future of Human Intelligence. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Radin, Paul, 1927. Primitive Man as Philosopher. New York: Dover.
Schroder, H.M., M. Driver and S. Streufert, 1967. Human Information Processing. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Crisis on the Planet of the Hairless Apes (Part V): Technology and the Brainworld

2008-05-14T11:22:00.000-07:00

We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

One of the most important ingredients in our picture of The Crisis is technology. There are perfectly obvious reasons for saying this. Our addiction to fossil fuels, for example, is undoubtedly effecting global weather patterns and atmospheric toxicity, which in turn effects the lives of hairless apes and other critters all over the planet in unintended ways. But there are less obvious and more subtle reasons that are crucial to our picture, for they both produce The Crisis and offer opportunities for negotiating The Crisis. The key to shifting our understanding to these subtle reasons is to understand that technologies inevitably alter our brainworld and thereby our consciousness and experience; reasons often overlooked or ignored, because the tendency of people infected by dualistic thinking is to associate technologies with the body, but not the mind.

What I want to do in this post is discuss technology in such a way that we can see how it intervenes in the interaction between the brainworld and reality – inevitably altering BOTH brainworld and reality. In order to do this, we have to come to a common understanding of what we mean by technology, so that we can get a better feel for what is meant by techno-consciousness and technocratic culture.

What Do We Mean By "Technology?"

Unfortunately, there is confusion over the exact meaning of "technology" in the literature. In its most simplistic and commonplace usage, the term technology refers to tools and the use of tools to do things. In its broadest sense, however, the term, and its related terms "technique" and "technical," can refer to any attention to procedure in accomplishing some practical end. Robert Spier, in his book From the Hand of Man, while acknowledging this broader sense, chooses to restrict himself to the most narrow materialist sense of the term:

"’Technology’ is used... to refer to the means by which man seeks to modify or control his natural environment. Excluded are the magico-religious means by which he may seek the same ends. It is tempting to confine technology to "rational" means, but this is best avoided when we are unable to examine others' rationalities. It should be noted here that technological pursuits may have their magico-religious aspects, but these are auxiliary to an avowedly technical approach" (Spier 1970: 2).

For Spier, as for many anthropologists and philosophers, a clear distinction between things physical (or natural) and things mental seems to make perfect sense. By way of contrast, A.F.C. Wallace in his text, Religion: An Anthropological View, uses a broader and more cross-culturally accurate sense of technology by including aspects Spier would code as "magico-religious" -- for example, ritual:

"Technological rituals are rituals intended to control various aspects of nature, other than man himself, for the purpose of human exploitation. There are two obvious and ubiquitous kinds of technological ritual: divination and hunting and agricultural rites of intensification. Ritual that aims to extract useful information from nature is called divination. Ritual that purports directly or indirectly to control the availability and fertility of game..., of flocks and herds, or of wild and cultivated vegetable crops is called rites of intensification. We may also add a third category: protective rituals, intended to prevent or avoid a diversity of ills or disasters..." (Wallace 1966: 107-108).

Yet even in Wallace’s view there is a distinction being made between those things of a physical nature and those of a non-physical nature. As we have seen in the previous post, this mind-body dualism distorts the reality of the process we refer to as "technology." Technology in fact is the physical extension of technique, and technique is already physical due to the intervention of the body between the brainworld and reality. As the philosopher Martin Heidegger has pointed out, restricting our understanding of the concept "technology" to tools, tool-use, or even practical, tool-like rituals, will result in our failing to get at the full essence of technology.

As I will use the term here, "technology" includes both techniques and artifacts. Techniques are procedures for getting things done in the real world, and imply some alteration of both brainworld and real world through the intervention of somatic activity. If I am having trouble keeping the deer away from my garden, for example, I may have recourse to putting up a ten foot fence to block the deer’s hungry ingress. Or, I might keep watch day and night and shoo away or shoot any deer or other critters that enter my garden. Or, I might stake a junk yard dog right in the middle of the garden to scare the deer and everything else away. These are different techniques for getting the same thing done. They both involve activity of my mind AND body. Which technique I choose depends a lot on what I know about gardening and wildlife, so the technique I use to get the job done depends upon the knowledge I have stored in my brainworld.

All of these techniques also happen to involve artifacts. Artifacts are the material transformations of the physical world that are used to alter and extend the limitations of the unaided body. We have many labels for different kinds of artifacts we use in our daily lives, including "appliance," "tool," "utensil," "weapon," "vehicle," "tackle," "text," "art," "monument," "clothing," and on and on. Anything whatever that hairless apes make with their clever hands to aid them doing stuff (keeping the deer at bay) is an artifact (leash for the dog, shotgun, fencing materials and tools to build fences). Because artifacts are meaningful objects to those who make and use them, they are symbols to the brainworld, and thus we can refer to all artifacts as artifacts of knowledge -- the material products, representation and expression of the brainworld and it’s knowledge. Some artifacts facilitate the occurrence of desired sensory events; for instance, a shotgun brings down a deer (mmm... yummy venison!). Other artifacts may operate in a primarily symbolic way; for instance, little tags at the head of rows informing us of what was planted there. The same artifact may operate in both ways; for instance, a physician's stethoscope may facilitate the physician's desire to hear a heartbeat, and wrapped around her neck, may be a symbol of the physician's status as "doctor" for the patient. And in each and every case the artifact is perceived and is meaningful to the user prior to and during its use. It is this technological interaction between the brainworld and reality that is facilitated and expressed by material transformations in the physical world -- transformations that we normally refer to as technology.

What we have done here is change what we mean by "technology" to incorporate the brainworld, body, physical artifacts and reality in a single process of interaction. Orientation toward the processes of interaction, rather than merely toward the material artifacts, will allow us to see that: (1) treating artifacts as if they are the essence of technical culture is wrong-headed, (2) artifacts and techniques feed back into and alter human experience and hence the brainworld; (3) artifacts are both the product of, and the expression of the brainworld’s cognitive competence, (4) language and technology evolved in tandem as two media for manipulation and control of the physical and social events in the world, (5) technology through much of human evolution has for the most part been an existentially empowering process, but for much of modern humanity has become a disempowering process, (6) technologies feed back into and produce transformations in the human being, and (7) the technological process influences the way in which individuals come to experience and know themselves.

Heidegger On Technology

We are relying here on the phenomenology of technology, so it would be useful to spend a brief time looking at the origins of this perspective in the writings of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger wrote in reaction to the naively commonsense notions that: (1) technology is inherently either good (the utopian error), or that it is bad (the dystopian error), and (2) human technological culture is somehow distinct from nature. These are cultural fictions derived from our failure to understand technology from the perspective of mature contemplation, and to be constantly trapped in our culture's "natural attitude" toward mind-body dualism (mental-physical, cultural-natural), as we saw in the last post.

To understand technology phenomenologically means that we are grounded in our direct experience of the technological process. This PC in front of me is not just a thing "out there" that I somehow relate to. Rather, the machine is an extension of my brainworld by means of which I fulfil my desire -- in this case the desire to set down my ideas and to communicate with you. Actually, my desire to communicate with you cannot be fulfilled without a whole system of technological extensions to my brainworld, including my computer, my modem, my telephone, the intervening telephone system with its grids and up and down links to satellites, the mainframe servers, your terminal or computer/modem setup, perhaps your printer and your eye glasses (if you wear them) -- and then the return process if your were to respond to me online. All of these extensions are integrated into a single process from intention to fulfilment, and it all withdraws from our consciousness to the extent that it does its work well.

By "withdrawal" Heidegger means that just as our body's activities get lost to consciousness when they are carried out habitually and with competence, so too does technology. Heidegger uses the example of someone learning to use a hammer (the famous "Heidegger's Hammer" metaphor). If I am just learning to use a hammer, at first I am very aware of the hammer and its possibilities are alien to me. But with repeated use and explorations of possibilities, I become transformed. My motor systems and neural systems adapt to the new movements necessary to become a competent hammerer. And during this period of transformation the hammer recedes from my consciousness and becomes more and more an extension of my brainworld and its intentions and activities. And eventually, of course, the world becomes a collection of hammer-able things. My entire consciousness of the world changes, profoundly or subtly, because the technology allows (in Heidegger's terms) nature to "announce" its functions to me -- i.e., the world reveals to me how it can be used. The meaning of the hammer becomes its hammering limitations and possibilities.

A word more about this "announcing" business -- for this is from the early Heidegger of Being and Time vintage. Nature can just be present for me ("oh, what a lovely tree!") or it can "announce" its properties to me ("the windmill tells me that the wind can produce power that lifts water out of the ground"). As Heidegger would say, technology transforms mere presence into announcement -- the world becomes "ready for us to use." The telescope did not merely change the presence of the cosmos, it opened up a whole new body of knowledge and applications of the cosmos. So, according to this early Heideggerian view, I not only learn to hammer, the hammer-able world opens up with a new body of knowledge about the hardness and penetrate-ableness/penetrating-ness of things. I gradually begin to experience the world as a carpenter does. The world is not merely full of pretty trees, but of usable lumber that can be hammered into knew configurations.

Now, the later Heidegger, of "The Question Concerning Technology" era -- the best source for Heidegger on techno-consciousness, by the way -- goes farther than this to say that for modern humans, technology is so all-pervasive that it conditions our entire experience of self and world. This is Heidegger of the "we dwell in the house we built" phase of his thinking. Technology "enframes" all of our knowledge and experience. As such, this is neither good nor bad. It’s just our nature. Our nature is technical. Technology is the extension into the physical world of our brainworld intentionality and somatic activity. And in more modern times, our capacity to extend our brainworld into the physical world has so radically changed nature that, for us, nature becomes a repository of resources we can assimilate into our intentionality, and use for our own purposes. It is our primary window into truth because technology allows nature to "announce" its properties to us.

What is neat about the phenomenology of technology is that it allows us to avoid all those tacky, misleading dualisms (nature vs. culture, natural vs. technological, mental vs. physical, etc., etc.) that trap our thinking about technology and its lawful development. Technology is a window into nature, and nature "announces" (reveals its features, becomes transparent) itself to the inquiring mind. And to learn is to change. Consciousness extrudes into nature via technology and because of inevitable feedback, thereby changes itself. And as the body is part of nature, consciousness can extrude into its own embodiment. How we understand our own body opens up and "announces" itself via technology and is changed thereby.

Technology Changes Reality’s Obduracies and Affordances

Heidegger’s language here is similar to our own. Remember what I wrote a few posts back. The brainworld knows reality from encountering both reality’s obduracies and its affordances – that is, what reality will not let us do (stick our finger through the table top) and what it does allow us to do (stick our finger into a glass of water). What Heidegger means by "announce" is that reality affords us possibilities – in the above case, hammer-ability. The world is no longer just there, it becomes a field of possibilities. So the central point to be taken here is that techniques are adaptations to the obdurate-affordant nature of reality, while technologies actually change the obduracies and affordances in our comprehension of reality. No technique will allow me to put my finger through the table top, but I can put a hole in the tabletop using a drill and then stick my finger through the hole. Technology changes the force and nature of obduracy and at the same time opens up possible affordances. And here we begin to glimpse both the boon and the danger of technologies – an inevitable multiple value (Don Ihde would say, "multistability") attends technologies, and has done since the first hominid picked up his or her first rock and used it as a hammer or ax or weapon. The self-same rock can be used to open a cocoanut, chop a tree, or kill an enemy – the multiple values being already partially determined by the nature of the technology. The same spear can facilitate us in hunting or murdering. The coal-fired power plant can generate electricity to light our homes while polluting the atmosphere we breath.

Moreover – and this is the BIG, BIG, REALLY BIG point – there are always unintended consequences hidden within these multiple values – to how technologies change obduracies and affordances -- and these consequences may be good or bad, and usually both, depending upon how they are deployed. Who knows what the intention was of the first being, Henrietta Hominid, to pick up and retain a sharp rock to do stuff later on. Maybe she intended to take it home and open those pesky elk bones to get at the marrow, but when she got home she caught her husband Herman Hominid in the mammoth skins with another woman and she used the new tool to cleave Herman’s skull, a use she never intended. Albert Hoffman had no idea while fiddling around with possible antibiotics that the new drug he discovered, LSD-25, would afford people with life-altering, spiritual insights and experiences – become what he would later call a "medicine of the soul." Nor did the Wright brothers anticipate that their flying machine would one day morph into huge passenger jets capable of whisking people around the world in hours, and of being used as missiles by religious fanatics to destroy tall buildings.

TECHNOLOGY AND TRANSFORMATION

What most of us seem to mean by "technology" are somatic activities that result in more or less enduring transformations of the physical world we live in. We are less likely to realize that technological transformations of the world are generally accompanied by changes in our brainworld. Indeed, some technologies are created and used in our own and other cultures precisely to change the state of our brainworld. To give an example, Tibetan Buddhist practitioners will execute meticulous paintings intended to aid in perfecting internal visualizations and meditations. The paintings are not strictly necessary for the visualization practices, but are useful as an intermediary step in the internalization of complex eidetic images. Thus, at the same time, the painting is an artifact – a tool – used to penetrate into the deep unconscious and to access the domain of arcane knowledge.

The Problem of the "Practical"

The distinctions we take so for granted between our being and the world, between the mental and the physical, and between the supernatural (mystical) and empirical are not so clear cut, if indeed they are made at all, in most traditional and non-western societies. Much technology in other societies is designed to access and control the hidden cosmic forces in the world, or the hidden aspects of one’s being, while other technologies are made for what we perceive through our Euro-american-aussie materialist eyes as strictly practical ends.

A classical example of this blending of intents is Trobriand Island canoe-building. The Trobrianders are a sea-going society living in Melanesia who make a living in part by fishing, and who take part in exchange expeditions (called kula) to neighboring islands. These expeditions involve lengthy and dangerous deep-blue sea voyages. The canoes used by these people for fishing are of two types: One called kewo'u is owned by an individual, is relatively simple in construction and is used for local personal needs. There are no ritual or magical ingredients to the manufacture of these canoes. Another called kalipoulo is owned by a headman of a team of fishermen and is more complex and seaworthy in construction. There is some ritual and magic involved in the manufacture of these canoes. And there is a third type of canoe called a masawa that is used exclusively for sea-going expeditions. The masawa is carefully manufactured and the ritual-magical preparations involved in the construction are elaborate. It is owned by a large social organization and there is a specialist who supervises all aspects, ritual-magical and technical, in its construction.

It is interesting that no clear distinction is made by the natives between "practical" labor and "impractical" ritual-magic during construction of these huge boats. Rather, both are requisite to the construction of a safe and seaworthy canoe and subsequently to a successful expedition. The canoe must not only be built, but it must be protected from the dangers it will confront on the voyage, as well as malevolent social influences upon and potential failure of exchange transactions. It is significant that the simplest canoe, and the one in which people confront the least risk, has no ritual-magical component to its construction. The larger vessel in which more serious fishing is carried out does require some ritual-magical protection. But it is the sea-going canoes that pose the greatest risk to life and reputation that are the subject of the most severe ritual-magical sanctions.

EMPOWERMENT AND DISEMPOWERMENT THROUGH TECHNOLOGY

A crucial point made by Don Ihde in his book, Existential Technics, is that it is not possible to reorganize our world without transforming our own being in the process. This is because we interpret ourselves in our interactions with the world. Remember a few posts back I said that a principal role of behavior is the control of perception so that the desired sensory experience actually happens? That is why an important dimension of self-interpretation is the sense of power, or mastery, that we develop by way of the practice of matching sensorial events against anticipated outcomes of our actions. Think about how you would manage to have that first coffee/tea experience in the morning without the intervening technology. It would be virtually impossible, right? No cup, no grinder, no kettle, no espresso machine, no spoon, no bottle of milk, no package/pot of sugar, no coffee or tea bags. All those things integrated into a single set of procedures to bring about that first, heavenly sip of hot beverage!

[Pause while your erstwhile blogger recharges his cup with another measure of brew...]

And, of course, insofar as we interact with the world through the medium of technology, and insofar as we dwell within the context of an environment that has been transformed by technology, we thereby technologize ourselves. Both the developmental and the transcendental repercussions of technological adaptations are evident enough in the ethnographic literature of preindustrial peoples. Hunter-gatherers are quite different in personality type and social identity than horticultural peoples. They view themselves differently, organize their societies differently, view the cosmos differently. So too are pastoral peoples distinct. The technological stance toward their environment taken by a people will influence the way they interpret both themselves as agents in the world and events in which they become involved in the world. The overwhelming sense one gets from reading ethnographies is that technology is largely formative, influential and empowering in the experience of traditional peoples. The canoe building technology of the Trobrianders gives them a sense of mastery over the complex and unpredictable forces of the open sea so as to assure a successful expedition.

Considering our own Euro-american-aussie cultural tradition, the dual aspects (development and transcendence) of technological intervention in the world have become very dramatic during the past couple of centuries, what with the industrial revolution and its myriad consequences. Indeed, so prevalent has technology become in our lives that most of us live within a thoroughly technologically mediated reality, and by way of feedback into our brainworld, within a technological society and technologically impacted conception of self.

Yet technology is not as empowering for us as it has been for preindustrial peoples. In fact it is equally disempowering for the hairless ape on the street, and this influence of modern technology upon our society and consciousness has raised alarm in various circles for decades. Sociologist Jacques Ellul (see his 1980 book) has taught that the modern condition is not merely one of mind relating to machine, but rather hairless apes developing within a technological world that’s already in place. Much of a person’s enculturation centers upon values and skills requisite to serving a highly technologized economic and political society that has come to evaluate effort solely upon the criteria of efficiency and material practicality. Education for "technological man" is oriented towards producing technicians who are becoming ever more educated and specialized in their occupations. Such individuals come to perceive themselves as competent only within the narrow confines of their occupations, but as disenfranchised, ignorant, alienated and helpless within the greater sphere of their social and economic lives. Technicians come to rely upon other technicians whose proficiencies are outside the limited purview of their own specialties to carry out the technologically loaded interactions requisite to their life styles. The otherwise proficient factory worker in her home relies on electricians, plumbers, carpenters, construction workers, TV repair people, appliance repair people, cable TV people, barbers, auto mechanics, physicians, dentists, child psychologists, marriage councilors, on and on. This dependence upon technical expertise pervades every realm of experience in our modern life. In a somewhat cynical vein, we are born by the grace of obstetrical expertise and die in the hands of palliative care nurses and mortuary science practitioners, and in the interim we are conditioned to adapt to a pervasive technological world:

"This influence is a lot greater than that of school or work. The technological system contains its own agents of adjustment. Advertising, mass media entertainment, political propaganda, human [resources] and public relations -- all these things, with superficial divergences, have one single function: to adapt man to technology; to furnish him with psychological satisfactions, motivations that will allow him to live and work efficiently in this universe. The entire mental panorama in which man is situated is produced by technicians and shapes man to a technological universe, the only one reflected toward him by anything represented to him. Not only does he live spontaneously in the technological environment, but advertising and entertainment offer the image, the reflection, the hypostasis of that environment." (Ellul 1980: 213)

Accepting Ellul's depiction of the essentially disempowering effects of technological society, George Grant – perhaps Canada’s greatest 20th century philosopher -- carried the alarm further with specific reference to the English-speaking social world:

"For those who stay within the central stream of our society and are therefore dominant in its institutions, the effect of nihilism is the narrowing to an unmitigated reliance on technique. Nietzsche's equivocation about the relation between the highest will to power and the will to technology has never been a part of the English speaking tradition. With us the identity was securely thought from the very beginning of our modernity. Therefore as our liberal horizons fade in the winter of nihilism, and as the dominating amongst us see themselves within no horizon except their own creating of the world, the pure will to technology (whether personal or public) more and more gives sole content to that creating. In the official intellectual community this process has been called "the end of ideology." What that phrase flatteringly covers is the closing down of willing to all content except the desire to make the future by mastery, and the closing down of all thinking which transcends calculation. Within the practical liberalism of our past, techniques could be set within some context other than themselves -- even if that context was shallow. We now move towards the position where technological progress becomes itself the sole context within which all that is other to it must attempt to be present.

"We live then in the most realized technological society which has yet been; one which is, moreover, the chief imperial centre from which technique is spread around the world. It might seem then that because we are destined so to be, we might also be the people best able to comprehend what it is to be so. Because we are first and most fully there, the need might seem to press upon us to try to know where we are in this new found land which is so obviously a "terra incognita." Yet the very substance of our existing which has made us the leaders in technique, stands as a barrier to any thinking which might be able to comprehend technique from beyond its own dynamism. "(Grant 1969: 40)

Grant argues that the influence of modern technology upon the very consciousness and culture that produced it is transformative. Modern technological society is antithetical to the values that produced the original social consciousness requisite to both modern science and English justice and democracy possible. In particular it is the sense of justice that has marked English-speaking culture for centuries that is in jeopardy from the effects of technological society. The same system of values produced both this sense of justice (essentially the attitude that human rights trump individual, cultural, or ideological points of view) and the free and individuated scientific intellect. Yet the modern byproducts of science, such as a mechanistic conception of the world and of ourselves, heavily technologized life-styles, automated production processes, vast depersonalized data bases and bureaucratized social institutions, produce unintended changes in that system of values in service of those byproducts and against our traditional sense of equality, individuation, fairness and justice (a great read here is also Neil Postman’s book, Technopoly).

The Potentially Improving Influence of Awareness

As both Ellul and Grant have noted, these unintended consequences of the process of technologizing cultures only operate in a detrimental way so long as they remain unconscious to participants. The values and other elements of social consciousness at risk are so basic that they are largely taken for granted. They are thus vulnerable to change without our being aware that they are changing. Indeed, we may well become aware of these components only when they have eroded away beyond recovery. More heinous still is the fact that corporations, always on the lookout for profitable economic opportunities and ventures, will pounce upon any catastrophic event where they can force policy changes and capitalistic development before people, at first deep in shock, can rally to block corporate efforts (I strongly suggest you read the 2007 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise in Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Kline). I will return to the dark underbelly of capitalism, and the erroneous claim by Chicago school economists like Milton Friedman that capitalism is the best and most advanced economic system, in a later post.

However, raising the consciousness of these transcendental consequences may to some extent ameliorate their destructive influences upon our cultural values. Of course awareness of the consequences will not stop the culture change, nor will it cause us to technologically regress. But awareness may allow facilitation of an alternative organization of social consciousness and social relations so as to retain both the unique level of individuation upon which optimal science depends and the realization of freedom and empowerment upon which justice and true democracy depend. What is necessary in part to increase this self-awareness is an educational curriculum geared as much to the development of awareness of fundamental values as it is to the inculcation of technological/bureaucratic skills. At the core of this curriculum should be training in self-awareness and the empowering effects of an active exploration of our own way of life. It takes but a slight elevation of awareness to see that there are many, and perhaps better ways to evaluate events and projects than whether or not they are efficient, lucrative to a handful of already wealthy people, and merely practical.

TECHNO-CONSCIOUSNESS AND TECHNOCRATIC SOCIETY

The real problem is, however, that our childhood brainworld developed within the context of a technocratic society already in place, so a lot of what is going on around us is either taken for granted or makes sense to us in a sort of knee-jerk way. Elevating consciousness above the hum-drum everyday busy-busy life style with it’s attendant technocratic values of productivity, efficiency, practicality and commerce is not easy. We buy a cell phone today and find that next year when we go to get a part for it, that it has been long outdated and obsolete – and we accept this constant change as "inevitable progress," rather than rampant commercialism. This is one reason why in order to become a mature contemplative one needs to go on a long retreat at least once a year in order to really chill out and work on increasing one’s awareness. I have known many serious meditators that find that after meditating for just a while, there is a vast list of things and jobs they won’t consider doing anymore because they become obviously detrimental and unwholesome relative to their heightened self-awareness.

Technocracy is only possible when most everybody in society shares a kind of techno-consciousness. Progress is seen as both inevitable and a boon. People feel they have to have the latest "time-saving" devices (curious that so-called "primitive" hunting and gathering societies work approximately 4 hours a day to make a living, compared with our 8+ hours a day on the job), the next "up-grade" in information technologies (my PC only has a 1.5 gig processor – "so not fast enough!", the next iPod because it holds 7,500 songs instead of the old one that only held 3,000 songs, the next cell phone because it not only lets you call people, but you can text message, take photos, record addresses and lists, record appointments, trim your nose hairs, on and on. Genetically modified foods are one of the latest "boons" to be considered progressive and inevitable, and despite negative reactions of people all over the world to GM foods, they have been approved by governments. Now, as we speak, the Beyer company has been forced to acknowledge that their GM rice, recently approved, has gone wild and contaminated the world’s rice supply – and of course, they will fight any liability whatever for damages caused by the unintended consequences of their actions. But hey, that’s just one of the costs of progress, right?

Efficiency becomes the preeminent criterion of evaluation. Our new car is better than our old car cause it is more fuel efficient, it is easier to drive, it comes equipped with all the new gadgets, including a GPS that talks to you incessantly, and a remote starter so you don’t have to sit in a cold car in the morning. I evaluate myself by how competent I am in my job – I may suck as a parent but I am one damn fine mechanic (accountant, teacher, cop, CEO, musician, etc.). This new policy of ours may not make you as happy with us, but it is more streamlined. Oh, and we can make more widgets using less people. We can make these widgets more cost effective by installing robots and laying off 400 workers – robots also do not need lunch breaks, or health and retirement benefits. We can sell these widgets far cheaper if we have them made in Sweatshopistan than here in Detroit, and thereby pay higher dividends to our shareholders. I’m not kidding here, if you buy a shirt or shorts at Walmart, you may not be aware that they were made by young girls in Bangladesh forced by their families and the company to work 12 or more hours a day, paid less than 20 cents an hour, with no benefits, no health care, no maternity leave, escorted to the bathroom, and kicked out for any complaining whatsoever.

If you are old enough to do so, can you remember back when all you had to do to vote was show up at the voting station and make marks with a pencil on your ballot and then slip the paper in the top of the ballot box? But hay, this is just too inefficient for words. Then came the voting machines, and of course once one accepts voting machines, there are new and better and more efficient voting machines with every passing year, and somehow over a few years time, the voting process became co-opted by voting technologies with towns and cities forced to apply for loans and grants to pay corporations for the latest voting widgets. And now, you’re not even sure the machines aren’t being rigged. Or they malfunction and of course there is no paper trail to rely on for a recount. Ask yourself then, did you ever have a choice in the matter of new, and still newer voting technologies and all of the complexity and controversy and screw-ups that followed? Would you like to go back to the ballots and ballot boxes and real people counting and recounting the ballots? What is stopping you from doing that? Well, hey, it is so inefficient, right? And there are all those shiny new, ever more efficient machines...

And in technocracy, technology is all-pervasive. Here is an excellent meditation for the budding mature contemplative. Note every activity you do from waking in the morning to falling asleep at night, and note the technologies that mediate each and every experience. I have had students do this and it can be a profoundly life-altering exercise. I wake in a bed with a mattress and pillows and cotton sheets and a wool blanket, clothed in a tee shirt and shorts. I have never in my 70 years slept naked on the ground without at least a sleeping bag and tent and ground cloth and pillow. In other words, I have never even slept at night without technology augmenting my experience. I get out of bed and slip my feed into sandals (slippers, clogs, ?) and head for the kitchen where I make coffee using a gas stove, tea kettle, filtering system, coffee grounds, and cup. I take the coffee to the bathroom where I sit on a ceramic toilet and sip coffee and defecate (I have rarely ever defecated without a toilet or some equivalent contrivance that makes the experience more comfortable, and makes disposal of waste more efficient). And so forth... Carefully listing each activity throughout the day. Then make another list of each and every artifact involved in mediating my experiences during the day, beginning and ending perhaps with the mattress, etc. With this list one can then do things like check off each artifact that you feel you could manufacture yourself. Add up the different specialized skills necessary for the manufacture of all the artifacts you use. Like, when you take that daily aerobic walk – perhaps you are accompanied by walking shoes, sweats, walking shirt, walking cap, walking stick, pedometer, belly pack with perhaps a plastic water bottle, and maybe your head is plugged in to your iPod. You walk along a concrete sidewalk or forest path. You stop for that rewarding latte at the local Starbucks, served in a disposable cup. How many of these artifacts could you make from scratch if you had to? What many people find is that virtually their entire day is mediated by technologies -- hundreds, maybe thousands of technologies. One comes to understand that having a moment of consciousness unmediated by technology is rare in the daily course of events. And all these artifacts are made by people, some of them from other countries and cultures all over the planet.

You are able in this way to appreciate how your brainworld and your life is embroiled in techno-consciousness. Perhaps you may carry the reflections on to ponder how your life came to be that way. If you are like me, we were both born into it, raised in it, taught what we need to know to survive and even flourish in it. But we never really consciously chose to be so pervaded by technology. And if we finally decide to opt out of it entirely, we may find it very hard to accomplish. Some do, but not many. The more common and easier route perhaps is the elevation of awareness of the extent we are trapped into techno-consciousness and consumerism. I personally know family and friends who opt out to the extent that they grow much of their food and buy wherever possible used clothing, furniture, cars, so forth. They haunt the Goodwill, eBay and Graig’s List. Again I say, it takes very little increase in awareness to effect dramatic changes in one’s perceptions, understanding to alter one’s techno-consciousness and relationship with the all pervasive technocracy.

BRINGING IT ALL BACK TOGETHER

Ok now, this post has been dense, even for me. So let’s draw the elements of our argument together again and integrate technology into it so we can share the big picture. We have seen that consciousness and experience are what the brainworld does to construct an internal world for itself. It makes sure that this internal world is an accurate picture of reality by engaging with the obdurate and affordant aspects of reality. It presents reality as meaningful, trued-up models experienced within a vast field of sensorial pixels – that radiant sphere of pixilated and meaningful forms and relations hovering on top of our shoulders. We have seen that separating that sphere of consciousness from physical reality is wrongheaded, that mind-body dualistic views distort the real process by which the brainworld adapts to the real world. And we have seen that part of that process of adaptation is the learning of techniques for deriving desired experiences by manipulating the real world through tried and true actions. Some techniques result in transforming the physical world into artifacts that in turn are used to mediate in the interaction between brainworld and reality. But during this process, the internal models of reality that make up the brainworld are themselves altered because of feedback from reality – feedback about changes in obduracies and affordances that result in changes in our internal models of self and world.

We will come to see in future posts that this process by which technologically mediated changes in reality result in changes in our brainworld will contribute, both to the exacerbation of The Crisis, and to possible avenues for negotiating and solving The Crisis. We will get to that later on when we discuss the evolution of the cyborg, and the pivotal importance of the permanent presence of hairless apes in space.

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SUGGESTED READING

Davis_Floyd, Robbie E., 1992. Birth As an American Rite of Passage. Berkeley: University of California Press. [How technocratic society through the birthing industry to reflect technocratic values.]

Ellul, J., 1980. The Technological System. New York: Continuum. [A major sociological study of technological hairless apes.]

Grant, George, 1969. Technology and Empire. Toronto, Canada: House of Anansi.

Grant, George, 1980. English-Speaking Justice. Toronto: Anansi.

Heidegger, Martin, 1962. Being and Time. New York: Harper and Row.

Heidegger, Martin, 1977. "The Question Concerning Technology." in Basic Writings (trans. by D. Krell). New York: Harper and Row; or in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York: Harper and Row.

Ihde, Don, 1990. Technology and the Lifeworld. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. [Ihde's book is the best single source on the phenomenology of technology ever written.]

Kline, Naomi, 2007. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Metropolitan Books. [A horrific picture of how corporations exploit the suffering of people during social crises and natural disasters to force through economic policies and developments that profit the corporations.]

Malinowski, B., 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New York: Dutton. [In case you want to read more about the Trobriand Islanders.]

Postman, Neil, 1993. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. NY: Random House.
Rothenberg, David, 1993. Hand's End: Technology and the Limits of Nature. Berkeley, University of California Press. [Traces the history and prehistory of technology.]

Crisis on the Planet of the Hairless Apes (Part IV): Mind-Body Dualism and the Denial of Death

2008-05-04T08:30:00.000-07:00

The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity - designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.

Ernest Becker

There is another serious problem hairless apes have in understanding their brainworlds. They persist in wanting consciousness to be in one way or another separate from the body. When folks ask the question, "What is the relationship between the mind and the body?" – and some of the more philosophical folks in all societies do that – their answer almost inevitably posits some degree of duality between their conscious minds and their physical beings. This is called the mind-body problem in Western philosophy, and a virtual library of learned tomes has been written trying to solve the problem in one way or another.

Why should I want to spend time talking about this age-old problem here? Just cause it’s intriguing? Not a bit of it. I want to examine it in detail because in my opinion the methods we are using here to advance our understanding may be able to shed light on the cause of the illusion of mind-body dualism, and even more importantly, the tendency to hive the mind off from the brain and body participates directly in producing The Crisis, and in failing to perceive its solutions. Take for example the belief system of religious fanatics who care nothing about dying by suicide bombing and taking other folks with them because they are absolutely certain that they will be rewarded in the afterlife. They steadfastly believe, with no empirical evidence, that while the body may be blown to bits and decay, their consciousness (soul, spirit, essence, karma, whatever) will survive and be transfigured into a spiritually glorious place.

What I want to do in this post is explore what I believe to be the very heart of the dualistic illusion. It is an intractable problem facing our self-awareness partly because its real cause is unconscious to people. Yet, because we CDL/BS blog readers are armed with the methods of neurophenomenology and mature contemplation, the existential roots of mind-body dualism be laid bare to rational scrutiny. When these roots are revealed to direct perception, setting aside dualistic beliefs and assumptions not only becomes necessary, but it is in fact easy to accomplish and makes a lot of common sense. Once we have exposed the roots of dualism, I will explain the inevitability of the illusion by way of neurophysiology, and show that this existential split is to some extent universal to humans in all cultures because all human beings face the same experiential conundrum. I will share with you the results of a cross-cultural study showing that most peoples believe to some extent in mind-body dualism, and will describe how some of these cultures make sense of the brain in their particular world view.

SPOILER ALERT!!! Beware! Many folks require the illusion of a continuing immortal soul or the transmigration of consciousness after their physical death. In fact, as friends of mine can tell you, I have avoided talking about this issue for fear that I might inadvertently harm someone who needs religious dogma of this sort in order to face their own inevitable death, or the death of loved ones. I can understand and respect this need, so if you are one of these people, perhaps you may wish to skip this post. It is not essential to following the general chain of arguments that lead me to such great concern about The Crisis.

OK. You’ve been warned.

THE NEUROPHENOMENOLOGY OF GRASPING

We will begin our exploration of mind-body dualistic beliefs by doing some mature contemplation, and applying what we have learned in earlier posts to look at dualistic experience. It is my contention that the belief in dualism is so persistent because there is something about our experience that invites it. You might want to go back and refresh your memory on "mature contemplation" in the post above. It is important that you renew your understanding of "reduction," for what we will do here is set aside our preconceptions and certainties and begin with the structures of experience themselves. We want to avoid our "natural attitude" about things mental and physical, and just pay attention to our own experience.

Phenomenology of Grasping

Let’s call this exercise the "phenomenology of grasping." Although the same lessons can be learned from studying the acts of walking or blinking your eyes, grasping has a special significance because of the common use of the word "grasping" as a metaphor for coming to know something – e.g., we "comprehend" something (the root "prehend" means "to grasp"), we "get it," the answer is "within our grasp," he was "grasping at straws," "hang on to that idea,"so-forth.

The exercise is best carried out with your arm and shoulder bare so you can see your skin, and what is happening under your skin. Let me suggest that you sit comfortably with your arm resting palm upward on a table. Let your arm relax and your mind be as calm and thought-free as you can manage. Doing calming exercises before doing any such "reduction" exercise is preferable. When you are chilled out and focused, then slowly flex your fingers, bunching them into a loose fist. Focus alternately on the external image of our hand grasping and then the internal feeling of your hand grasping (remember, your body is the only thing in the whole world you can experience from the outside-in and the inside-out at the same time). Look at your arm and feel the movement, and see how much of your arm is involved in the process of grasping (or clenching your hand). Then close your eyes and just feel the process from the inside using your inner senses alone – your sense of touch and your somesthetic (meaning "body-feeling") senses, the kinesthetic sense that tells you about the position of your muscles and joints, and your cutaneous senses that inform you about what’s happening on your skin. Notice that with your eyes closed, you always know where your hand is in the process of grasping – you don’t have to open your eyes to know whether your hand is clenched or open. Also, feel where movements in your hand and arm begin and end. Then, while closing and opening that hand, use your other hand to explore the various muscle movements up your arm as you make a fist. How far up your arm can you feel the activity of your muscles using all the visual, somesthetic and tactile information available to you? If you are not moving your forearm and upper arm while grasping with your fingers, then you will probably conclude that the act of grasping involves your fingers, hand and forearm – that the act of grasping disappears somewhere around your elbow.

Do this exercise slowly for a period of time and become familiar with the physical processes that combine to produce the act we call "grasping." Explore the limits of your awareness of that activity. For instance, flex each finger independently and in combination with other fingers. Notice the different muscle movements that produce each combination. Also note that you cannot make a fist in the opposite direction; that is, toward the back of your hand instead of toward the palm. You cannot will the hand to do what it is structurally incapable of carrying out, and if you do try this hard enough, you will feel strain, and maybe even pain. If you were to super glue your thumb to your palm (please, don’t try it!), this would impose new limitations upon your ability to grasp, would it not? There are clear limits to the grasping movements you can make, and these limits are determined by the structure of your hand and arm.

When you have explored the physical act of grasping to your satisfaction (or more professionally until no more novelty pops up), shift your awareness to the act of willing your hand to grasp. Relax your fingers and then "make" them grasp, as you have already been doing. In the first place, notice that your conscious awareness is like a glittering sphere of sensory experience (you already know this to be a pixelated field) sitting atop your shoulders. You are experiencing your hand within that radiant sphere of awareness. You gaze at your hand and will it to grasp and virtually simultaneously with the intention, your hand moves. Your consciousness is that radiant sphere of sensory experience within which the experience of your body is occurring. Yet just where are "you" in that sphere? Notice that "you" are an observational standpoint at a distance from your hand. There is "you," the watcher, and "your" hand. Play with this relationship for a while. Do the same things your were doing before, only pay more attention to the relationship between "you,"the watcher, and "your" wilful act of grasping. Do it with your eyes open and your eyes closed. Explore each of the senses, seeing the hand grasp, feeling the fingers touch the palm and visa versa. Feel the changes in the cutaneous sensations from the skin as the hand changes position, the pressure of the arm on the table top. And now notice that whichever sense the watcher attends, there is always an experienced distance between "you" the watcher and that which is being watched.

Now reflect upon the linkage between your will to grasp that arises within your sphere of awareness and the physical act of grasping by your hand. You have already ascertained that the physical act of grasping occurs out at the end of your arm. You have seen that the grasping action stops somewhere between your hand and your shoulder – perhaps at the elbow. Note that there is no obvious physical link between "you" the watcher and the physical act of grasping. And yet every time you will the act to occur, it does so, as if by magic. Let us call the lack of any discernable linkage between your mental act of willing (what philosophy calls "intentionality") and the physical act of grasping the mind-body gap. If you will extend the exploration to other physical activities, you will discover that this mind-body gap is apparent in every one of them, from walking to opening and closing your mouth to blinking your eyes and typing on a keyboard. "You" the watcher are a standpoint within the radiant sphere of consciousness sitting atop your shoulders, and are always at a remove, at a distance, from the physical act "you" have willed.

Invisibility and the Illusion of Mind-Body Duality

We have been focusing upon the conscious act of grasping. But you know of course that your hand can grasp things unconsciously. If something suddenly frightens you, your hands may wrap around something until your knuckles turn white. In fact we are born grasping, and we can do things with our hands unconsciously while our awareness is involved with other things. We can be engrossed in reading a book and drink coffee at the same time. The physical act of grasping the cup and transporting it to our lips is easily accomplished unconsciously – almost like our body is a kind of robot programmed to do our bidding. Indeed, this is one of the first tricks we develop as a child. Watch an infant grasp things and put them in his mouth, an act he practices over and over again. This fundamental act is "wired in" and genetically determined, and only requires development to become refined. Considerable development has gone on in the interim to allow you to do the remarkable things you can do with your hands. Perhaps you play the piano or can do slight of hand magic, take a radio apart, pitch a curve ball, or fly a plane. These are activities based upon this fundamental, genetically programmed grasping ability – in other words, we hairless apes evolved to grasp things. Moreover, we are also designed to lose track of our physical abilities once we have learned them. When techniques and skills are accomplished, they tend to fade from our awareness and become relegated to unconscious processing – to the robot -- a cybernetic property of our body that further exacerbates the sense of a mind-body gap.

If you have done this exercise with sufficient concentration – and let me assure you that like any other phenomenological exploration, you really have to do it to understand it fully, and to escape the trap of your own conditioned "natural attitude" – you have probably come to realize the significance of the mind-body gap, and it is this experienced gap that provides part of the riddle behind the illusion of mind-body duality. We become aware that although we have the freedom to will our hand to move, we cannot be aware of the exact causal mechanisms between our willful watcher and our grasping hand. In other words, the causal link between our mind and our body is invisible to us.

Of course, being Westerners, we all know something about this invisible linkage. We know intellectually that our body comes equipped with a nervous system that connects the higher brain functions mediating our sphere of awareness and the muscle groups that move our limbs. But be careful here! Our knowledge of the internal physiology of the body is part of what we have bracketed and disattended – and for good reasons. In the first place, we Westerners take this physiological information so much for granted that it may well get in the way of exploring the mind-body gap in direct experience, and may even inhibit our intuitive comprehension (Ahem! No pun intended) of the gap itself. We may naively project the information we have learned about anatomy and physiology into our experience of our own mind-body relationship and fail to appreciate the lack of an experienced link between our will and our grasping – thus missing the crucial fact that the linkage is always invisible, no matter how much or little we know about the nervous system. In the second place, few of us have ever seen a nervous system, and know about the brain and nervous system only because we watch TV programs, or have read articles about it in Discover magazine. We certainly are unable to empirically observe our nervous system intervening between willing our hand to move, and the hand actually moving. And in the third place, as we shall soon see, most traditional peoples do not know much about physiology, especially about the neurophysiology of the human body, and though they may have anatomical information about nerves, they have virtually no way to discover the function of nerves.

So, if you do the above exercise while dropping any and all preconceptions, and, as Husserl taught us, if you "return to the things themselves" (return to what is, and only what is presented in direct experience) with perpetually fresh eyes, then this experiential gap becomes obvious, and you can better appreciate why I have suggested that this phenomenon is so fundamental to our accurate self-awareness. It is so fundamental because it presents us with the problem of modeling the causal relations that exist between our mental and our physical acts. As you can now appreciate, the only way you can bridge the willing mind and the grasping hand is by some theory that explains the invisible linkage between mind and body.

Neurophenomenology of Grasping

Let’s explore the neural correlates (NCC) of the experience of the mind-body gap, which are very straightforward. They also contradict our commonsense experience of the mind-body gap – and that’s the most important point. We see and feel our hand by way of sensory cells in our eyes, joints, muscles and skin that send electrochemical signals up to the brain by way of nerve tracts (neurophysiologists call this inward movement of neural signals "afference"). We cannot see or feel the nerve tracts do their thing, because they don’t move (they don’t ripple the skin when they work), and we are not wired-up to track their activities – part of the transcendental nature of our own real being. These sensations come together in our sensorium (remember, our brainworld’s total conscious sensory system) which is part of the cortex of our brain. The watcher is mediated by an organization of cells within the prefrontal cortex of our brain (just above and behind our eyes, the part that makes our foreheads bulge outwards) and it is in the dialog between our prefrontal watcher and the sensorium that the radiant sphere of our consciousness situated on our shoulders is generated – what Antonio Damasio (1999: 160) calls the "single Cartesian theater" of our conscious experience. Again, we cannot see or feel our cortex. The brain itself cannot sense anything about itself – believe it or not, it cannot even feel pain. When you have a headache, it is caused by pressure in the skin-like covering of your brain, not the brain itself. That is why brain tumors are so dangerous. You can’t feel them til they press on the outer covering of the brain and cause pain, or disrupt brain functions.

Now, as to our intentions and movements, we were born with the neural wiring necessary for grasping (remember neurognosis = wired-in knowledge), and that wiring developed during our childhood within cells of what is called the premotor cortex (just under the top of your forehead) and other areas or our brain. Our automatic motor sequences, like sucking, grasping and walking, are mediated by networks of hundreds of thousands of cells. When we will our hand to grasp, it is this premotor area that sends electrochemical signals down through nerves that end up stimulating our muscles (signals going out to the muscles are called "efference"). And once again, we cannot see or feel those nerves doing their thing. The entire process of afference-efference is invisible to us, as are the neural processes that produce the experience of a watcher. All that we are aware of is the product of brain functioning, not the brain itself. We are aware of watching and intending our hand to flex and then relax, not the wiring that makes all that happen. Because most of the body processes involved in the act are themselves invisible to our scrutiny, this produces the experienced illusion of a gap between our intending ego and our physical body (= there’s "me and then there’s "my body"). The only way we can learn about the wiring invisibly connecting watcher and hand is by use of complex techniques and technologies that have been developed in neurobiology over generations of research. These researches are available to us, if we care to learn the language of neuroscience, but they are never available to us in immediate experience. Even a professional neuroanatomist experiences the mind-body gap. The only difference between her and the rest of us is that she may interpret the experience differently than we would out of our culturally-loaded, natural attitude. The point to retain from all this is that to our direct experience, there exists a mind-body gap between the our watcher and the activities of our body, while from the view of neuroscience, there is really no gap at all.

THE MIND-BODY GAP

Imagine you are a primitive hunter-gatherer. One day you call out to your usual companion, Joe, and ask him to join you in a hunt, but he does not respond in the usual way. You walk over to him and see him lying motionless. (He is dead.) You call him again; he does not answer. You shake his arm; it moves but falls limp as soon as you let go. Obviously some change has come over Joe. What might strike you is that compared to the day before, he is completely motionless; he initiates no movement, not even breathing. Since his body still looks the same, but no part of it moves, you may imagine that he has lost some kind of a motion-producing force or spirit. Now if, a few days later, when scavengers have demolished the corpse, you see Joe in a dream, you may reason that Joe’s spirit still exists – independently of his body. You would then have invented animism, the idea that an immaterial, impalpable, motion-producing spirit with an independent existence can enter and leave bodies (stones, trees, animals, man), and thus make those bodies capable or incapable of movement; this is animism in the simplest, most undifferentiated form.

Dalbir Bindra (1980:7-8)

The mind-body gap is thus the way we all experience a fundamental schism between our experience and how things really are, regardless of our cultural heritage. Ironically this control system is both adaptive in our day-to-day existence, and erroneous in that it systematically distorts the real nature of our physical being by rendering causality within our body invisible to us. This invisibility is produced by two attributes of the nervous system: In the first place, as I have said, nerves do not move like muscles do. Hence, we cannot perceive their activity. In the second place, the nervous system tends to relegate and lose track of processes that need not be conscious in order to be carried out. Physical movements like grasping utensils, walking or tying our shoes are learned with great attention in childhood, and then attention moves on to other more important things. What is essential is that the brainworld can recognize and track objects and events in the environment and control physical responses to events in the world. To accomplish this, it is not necessary for the brainworld to track the mechanical links between the watcher and the muscle groups carrying out movements. Actually, if the brainworld had to track all of these connections, it wouldn’t be able to single out and focus on objects of adaptive importance in the real world. As adaptive as this system is for responses to the external environment, it also produces a systematic bias, and impedes our experience and comprehension of a fully embodied mind.

The Mind-Body Gap in Other Cultures

Let’s not make the mistake of assuming that the mind-body gap is in any way unique to people raised in our culture. True, materialist cultures are more likely to exaggerate mind-body dualism – conditioned as we are to pay more attention to the external world than toward the inward experiences of our own being. But the mind-body gap is more or less universal to humans everywhere, and each culture will face the problem of mind-body relations within its particular world view. What differs among societies is the kind of intellectual/imaginative model developed to interpret invisible causation. There is an empirical problem faced by all traditional peoples when (and if) they try to puzzle out mind-brain relations. This factor is represented by a wonderful quote from a Jivaro Indian: "The people who say that we think with our heads are wrong because we think with our hearts. The heart is connected to the veins, which carry the thoughts in the blood through the entire body. The brain is only connected to the spinal column, isn't it? So if we thought with our brains, we would only be able to move the thought as far as our anus!" (Brown 1985:19). The Jivaro are a people who have developed considerable expertise in anatomy, as this quote evinces – and in particular neuroanatomy. But their neurophysiology sucks – it is both empirically wrong due to the lack of the technologies required to track neural functioning, and inextricably blended with mythological and cosmological stories. Let us look at a few examples of mind-brain accounts from other peoples:

1. The Ancient Greeks. Although our English word "brain" probably derives from the Greek word for the front part of the head, the very early Greek (as well as later Roman) notion of "mind," or thymos, was centered in the chest area, associated with the lungs, breath and speech, and included the unified functions of thought, feeling (including love and desire) and action . Thus one could be "inspired" by the breath of the Gods, and could have thoughts "blown into" the mind. Divination was due to the Gods breathing into the prophet's thymos. Speech was conceived as the transmission of knowledge from lung to lung via breath -- the breath passing to the ears, then through the pharynx to the lungs. The unconscious "soul," or psyche, was located in the head and was what passed on after death. The psyche was thought to sleep during the mind's waking period, and to awake to produce dreams while the mind was asleep -- this being a similar belief to that of the Ancient Hebrews whose Kabbalah also held that the spirit resides in the head. The head was associated with the divine while the body (that which carries the head) was associated with the mundane mind. The brain and fluids in the head (together called enkephalos) was conceived as a continuation of the spinal cord, and both with the "marrow" of the bones and the semen. Only later in classical Greek times did the notion of mind and soul, chest and head, merge to form more of an interactive consciousness.

2. The Desena. The empirical problems of constructing an accurate understanding of mind-body relations is repeated in many other cultural traditions. One of the better ethnographic descriptions among non-Euro-american-aussie cultures is that of Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff (1981) on the Desana people of Amazonia. The author describes how the Desana, being "passionate hunters," have the opportunity to examine the anatomy of animals in great detail while butchering their kills. Shamanic knowledge is based upon these anatomical explorations and includes careful distinctions pertaining to the development of the body through the stages of gestation. This developmental knowledge includes an interpretation of the emergence of consciousness associated with the development the various senses. Due to their anatomical explorations during hunting and warfare, the Desana have acquired a good deal of anatomical information about the brain of both humans and animals. They make a point, for example, of the similarity between the brains of monkeys and human beings. They know from accidental head injuries among humans, and the observation of animals with head injuries, that certain kinds of brain damage will influence behavior. Their word for brain, dihpu ka'i, glosses "head-mind," and incorporates the root ka'i, "essence of awareness." The convolutions (kae) of the cortex are conceived as distinct compartments, and the brain as the sum of these compartments which also make up the mind. The metaphors they use are a crystal made up of many smaller crystals and a honeycomb containing many cells. However imagined, the different compartments are associated with the different qualities and functions of mind for which they are named (e.g., "the yellow place," "the place of rough stones," etc.) and are connected by "threads" that transmit energy from compartment to compartment. Desana shamans are very aware of the two hemispheres of the brain:

“The two hemispheres are said to be essentially [anatomically] symmetrical; in Desana, the terms "right" (diaye) and "left" (kupepe) have little or no directional importance, but imply hierarchy. Thus, what we call the left hemisphere is called "side one" and is more important than "side two," or our right hemisphere. The great fissure is seen as a deep riverbed; it is a depression that was formed in the beginning of time (of mystical and embryological time) by the cosmic anaconda. Near the head of the serpent is a hexagonal rock crystal, just outside the brain; it is there where a particle of solar energy resides and irradiates the brain. The fissure can also be seen as a stream, a current of boga, or cosmic energy. In many shamanic images human existence is compared to a river, and the great fissure is this life-giving and orienting stream... ."
(1981:81)

The left lobe is considered superior to the right, but each operates as a mirror image of the other. Each hemisphere carries out different, but complementary functions (ibid:84). The left hemisphere is associated with solar energy, the colors, male, shamanic knowledge and techniques, divine laws, music, dreams, visions, geometric patterns, abstract thought and intuition. The right hemisphere is associated with female, subservience, putting into practice judgements made by the left hemisphere, practical affairs, customary laws and rituals, animals and plants, illness and death, biological processes, pictorial imagery, skill and know-how. The left harbors the ideal, while the right the practical and active. The left is abstract, the right existential. The left decides what must be done and the right carries it out.

Desana understanding of neurophysiology is thoroughly cosmological. The brain is a microcosm of the longhouse, the longhouse in turn is a microcosm of the environment, and the environment is a microcosm of the cosmos. The celestial sphere is likened to an enormous brain with the Milky Way equated with the great fissure and the hemispheres with various constellations. The complementarity of consciousness and the cerebral hemispheres is operating at every hierarchical level of the cosmos and is symbolized by two intertwining snakes, the one male and the other female, which lie within the central fissure of the brain (ibid:87). The interaction among the various compartments and the two hemispheres is used to account for a welter of experiences, many of them phenomenologically astute, encountered under the guidance of shamans, or during bouts of illness.

3. The Navajo. Traditional knowledge of anatomy is also reasonably complete among the Navajo people of the American southwest. There are names in Navajo for all of the major body parts, including the brain. The word for "brain" is ats'iighaa', probably a combination of the roots atsii, "hair" or "head," and ghaa', "top" or "summit." However, as with most peoples, traditional knowledge of physiology is poor, especially when it comes to the functions of the nervous system. Like the Desena, Navajo theories of consciousness are oriented toward cosmology and symbolic healing rather than physiology. Everything in the world, including the human body, has an outer and an inner form -- the inner form called nilch'i, "Wind." And all of the Winds in all the many things in the world are part of the one great Holy Wind. Thus, although the human life-force -- or nilch'i hwii'siziinii, "the Wind within one" -- is located throughout the body, and enters the body at conception and leaves the body at death, it cannot be considered as a "soul" somehow distinct from the cosmic Wind. The human life-force is considered a part of the great Holy Wind, and is never separate from it. Winds of various sorts influence one's every thought and behavior throughout life. Winds may enter or leave the body at any of the "doors" provided by the swirls on the digits, cowlicks, etc. Physical and mental diseases are diagnosed as the influence of spirits of various kinds, and healing rituals are geared to eliminate those influences and return the patient to a state of balance with the cosmos.

Thought (ntsahakees) is located in the head -- more specifically where the eyebrows come together above the bridge of the nose (the eyebrows and eyelashes are referred to as "the wings of thought") -- but one thinks from the heart, lungs and other organs. The connection of thought with the functioning of the brain is actually quite vague. It is relevant here that the Navajo do not make a clear distinction between nature and culture, between body and Wind, or between thought and action. Rather, the human is both body and Wind, and both are an inextricable part of the cosmos. Thought is a manifestation of Wind and develops through life in a series of stages. At death the pure, untainted Wind returns to the cosmos while the evil parts of the human spirit remain with the dead body as a somewhat malevolent ghost.

Our Cross-Cultural Survey

Of course it is easy to pick and choose among the 4,000+ cultures on the planet to find examples that fit the argument. But once upon a time some students* and I did a more rigorous study of mind-brain relations using a large sample of societies. I won’t bore you with the methodological niceties here – I will just run through some of our findings as they bear on our main topic.
We found overwhelming evidence that most societies do not equate the mind and body. To some extent at least, part of the mind is not associated with the body, or the mind may at times be separated from the body (as in the case of "soul loss" causing disease or death). There appears to be more of a balance in the distribution of societies that understand the mind as a unified monad, and those that understand the mind as fragmented into two or more elements, like a thinking mind and a soul.

Of the societies for which there was enough information to answer our questions, part or all of the mind is located in the head in a large percentage, while for many other societies no portion of the mind is located in the head. A large majority of societies seem to locate all or a portion of the mind in various body parts, including the head). Some societies associate all or a portion of the mind with bodily functions like the breath, sweat or saliva, while many do not. Of those 77 societies for which there were enough information, only 5.2% located the mind solely in the head, while 31.2% distributed the mind in the head and other body parts and functions, and 22.1% limited the location of the mind to the body below the head. The rest (32, or 41.5%) locate the mind in the body, but the data do not allow us to ascertain the precise location of the mind.

Another relevant question had to do with whether societies acknowledged "out of body experiences." Such experiences were considered evidence of some degree of mind-body separation while folks are alive if the mental entity that left the body possessed any of the attributes of mind. Turns out that belief in out of body experiences had in dreams, drug trips and other alternative states of consciousness is quite common cross-culturally. But it would be a bad mistake to assume that belief in out of body experiences would signal an extreme mind-body dualism, for many of these societies conceive of the mind and body as unitary, except in circumstances that separate the two – say at time of death.

The final variable examined in our survey was the presence or absence of a concept of an afterlife. Belief in an afterlife involves the immortality of one or more elements of the mind which survives after the death and dissolution of the body. A corollary question we asked was whether one or more of the surviving mental elements remains in the same environment as the living, or do they all pass on to a separate "afterworld." Of those cases where there was sufficient information on both mind-body identity and elements remaining after death in the same environment as the living, only one case was coded as having both variables present, while 21 cultures (11.3%) exhibiting mind-body dualism believe some mental element remains in the world of the living and 35 cultures (18.8%) believe the whole mental entity passes to another domain.

There were a lot of problems we faced in doing this survey, primarily because of the sptty nature of the ethnographic record, but what we did find out tends to confirm the impressions obtained from reading those few ethnographic and historical studies that have explored the relationship between consciousness and the brain more fully. It seems likely that most cultures have a concept of the brain, but many of those who do may not understand the anatomy of the brain in any detail, and probably few have any idea of the anatomy of the nervous system as a whole. Even among those societies that do have a good grasp of neuroanatomy, few, if any, have an accurate body of neurophysiology -- that is, peoples generally have at best a very inaccurate idea of how the brain works compared with modern, technologically sophisticated neuroscience.

CONCLUSION: THE DENIAL OF DEATH

...the essence of man is really his paradoxical nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic.

Ernest Becker

In this post I have shown that the root of mind-body dualistic beliefs is to be found in everyday experience. Because we cannot perceive nerves doing their thing, we experience ourselves as a sphere of consciousness that is in a sense disconnected from our body. Our mind wills the body to move and it moves. We can see and feel our muscles and bones doing their respective thing, but not the tissues that connect our brainworld to our body. Hence the experience, constantly reinforced in daily experience, of the mind-body gap. We may be sophisticated intellectuals and know very well there are nerves connecting everything, but that knowledge does not manifest as actual sensory experience – which is primordial.

Also, we have seen that virtually all people face this experiential dilemma, regardless of the culture in which they are raised. Hence the tendency to at least partially hive consciousness off from the body is universal. People everywhere get it wrong, even when they may have a fairly precise knowledge of anatomy. And because they get it wrong in a systematic and self-reinforcing way, it means that hairless apes continue to labor under the illusion that there is a part of themselves – their spirit, their soul, their Wind, their best part, their karma, their consciousness – that somehow is able to transcend death. Thus a phenomenological error is elevated to a virtually universal existential error – that is, a self-perpetuating distortion of the reality of the human condition. This existential error is the virtually universal denial of death about which the great anthropologist, Ernest Becker wrote in his 1973 book of that title. Becker argued that hairless apes are unable to face the consequences of acknowledging their own "creatureliness." In order to escape the possibility that they inevitably die (which is an empirical fact obvious to all peoples) and that nothing of themselves survives after death (acknowledged by very few, if any cultures), they create fictions about the here-after, the after-life, happy hunting grounds, reincarnation, re-entering the Great All, or whatever. And these fictions are fundamentally supported by the everyday experience of the mind-body gap.

At the very least, this existential distortion of the human condition muddies the waters in our understanding of our Self, and The Crisis. It is one thing to figure that "Hello, I may blow it down here, but when I get to the Hereafter, everything is going to be all milk and honey," and quite another to acknowledge that I am an animal just like all the other animals on this planet, and when I die that’s the end of it for "me" just like it’s the end for my dog Toby and my friends the birds who pester me for seeds all winter. Think of all the soldiers in all the various wars (all tolled, an estimated 200 million soldiers and civilians died in 20th century wars alone!) that have died fervently believing they were headed for a better place ("no atheists in a foxhole") – into the arms of Jesus, Mohamed, Krishna, Guido, Fannie, whoever. Sorry Sergeant York, but you’re just dead, that’s all. No land of milk and honey, no honor roll in Heaven. Think too of the crazy Islamic martyrs (mimicking the crazy Christian martyrs of the various Crusades) who daily blow themselves and others up, fervently believing that Allah will honor them as soldiers of jihad, and reward them with 72 virgins in the afterlife. Sorry Ahmed, no virgins, no honor from Allah, no rewards at all. Just bloody pieces of dead people you killed in your stupid, deluded, hateful cause. And oblivion of course. Don't forget the oblivion. You bought into a really dumb ideology and now have paid the price.

And also think of all the people who work to get brownie points (merit, good karma, dispensation for sins, etc.) with the gods, ancestors, prophets, priests, archetypal heros and such. Statistically it is the case that most people on the planet buy into whatever ideology they are taught, and have little or no urge to test those beliefs in an effort after truth. We hairless apes are a clannish lot, and quite naturally separate our group ("us") from other groups ("them"). And part of the symbolic distinctions we make between "us" and "them" have to do with religious ideologies – which in turn have to do with how different peoples answer all those nagging existential, "ultimate concern" questions, foremost being questions about death and the afterlife.

As I have said, ideologies are the bane of truth. And systematic existential delusions, like the mind-body gap, serve to distort our understanding of our Selves, our human condition and our impact on the planet. Thus it is part of the root of The Crisis. It increases the likelihood that we will fail to recognize The Crisis for what it is, and fail to perceive the window of opportunity that may allow our species to participate in the grand diaspora of sentience moving outward into the cosmos. But more on this in a later post. Can one be religious (or spiritual) without being trapped by ideology? Yes. Most certainly. But only if the effort after truth is unfettered by dogma – if there are no taboo questions or ready-made answers that block questions. Remember, the pursuit of knowledge is a dialog between the efforts after truth and meaning. Nothing must stand in the way of truing-up meaning – save of course for compassion. Compassion should trump cruelty every time.

Well, we have proceeded quite far in our understanding of the various factors that contribute to producing The Crisis. We have explored the fine structures of consciousness, we have seen what truth and truing are all about, and we have shown in this post why mind-body dualism distorts our experience of reality. The next post will continue to build on this perspective and examine how technology extends and alters consciousness, transforms our encounter with reality, and both exacerbates and presents opportunities with respect to The Crisis.

* The students involved in the cross-cultural study were: Mike Brown, Glenn Edwards, Jessica Fraser, Pat Grant, Olaf Krassnitzky, Debbie Lozner, Rob MacLeod, Jo-Anne McCadden, Grant Myers, Llew Priestley, and Tom Rorke. Many thanks for your efforts guys!

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SUGGESTED READING

Becker, Ernest, 1973. The Denial of Death. New York: Free Press.

Bindra, Dalbir, ed. (1980) The Brain’s Mind: A Neuroscience Perspective on the Mind-Body Problem. New York: Gardner Press.

Brown, M.F., 1985. Tsewa's Gift: Magic and Meaning in an Amazonian Society. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Crane, Tim, 2001. History of the Mind-Body Problem. New York: Routledge.

Crick, Francis, 1994. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Damasio, Antonio, 1999. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt.

McNeley, James K., 1981. Holy Wind in Navajo Philosophy. Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press.

Onians, R.B.,1973 [1951]. The Origins of European Thought. New York: Arno Press.

Reichel-Dolmatoff, G., 1981. "Brain and Mind in Desana Shamanism." Journal of Latin American Lore 7(1):73-98.

Crisis on the Planet of the Hairless Apes (Part III): Truth, Meaning & Ideology

2008-04-27T17:22:00.000-07:00

Ideology is the bane of truth. Ideology stops question, confounds reason, prejudges distinctions, blinkers experience, concretizes interpretations and is the antithesis of open-minded study. Ideology not only dumbs-down adaptive intelligence, but is also fundamentally anti-truth. Ideology is the scourge of our modern era here on Planet Earth. In short, ideology is part of the taproot of The Crisis.

What is ideology? Where does it come from? How does it operate? How can it present such a danger to negotiating the perils of The Crisis? We have built a common understanding of the brainworld, you and I, and how it works. Oh, you may not agree with me entirely, but we have a language in common at this point and we can apply this perspective to answering these questions. What I want to do in this post is to show that most people most of the time are driven, not by an effort after truth, but an effort after meaning, and it is this latter process that leads to the formation if ideology among families, bands, tribes, clubs, churches and nations. In short, wherever hairless apes gather, there is the breeding ground of ideology.

But I think the best way to approach ideology is to first come to some kind of understanding of what truth is. For it is in the inherent tension between truth and meaning within the brainworld that the dynamics of ideology arise. You see, one cannot know the truth of things without establishing the meaning of things, but establishing the meaning of things can happen with little or no reference to truth. (My late friend Shelley Higgins used to chant, "What the f**k is he talking about? What the f**k is he talking about?" when I would lose her in one of these loops. Bear with me... It’ll be worth it.).

TRUTH & TRUING

What does "truth" mean? (HA! We’re already into the thick of it. Of course you know what "truth" means. We both understand something about the word "truth." What I am attempting to do is reach a COMMON understanding of "truth" in each of our brainworlds so that when I talk about truth, we both understand what I am saying in the same way. And right there we have the roots of ideology – the social standardization of meaning. I am attempting to exercise control over the meaning in your head so that you come to see things as I do.)

Anyhow, let’s get on with it. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "truth" derives from an ancient root which connotes being faithful to one's friend or commander, characterized by good faith, keeping one's promises, keeping faith with a covenant (as in the related word "truce"), being firm in one's allegiance, being loyal, trustworthy, and constant. It is associated with the qualities of honesty, virtue, and trustworthiness, so being a "true" or "truthful" person meant in olden days, as it still does today (consider our contemporary phrase "being true to one’s word"), that one could be trusted in word and deed -- being characterized as being "true-hearted" or a "truepenny" (being a coin of genuine value). The word also connotes that one's statement is consistent with the facts, is in agreement with reality, represents things as they really are, or matches the description of the way things are. In other words, the root refers to "telling the truth" in both the sense that what one says is consistent with reality, and is consistent with reality as one knows it to be and without deceit (i.e., both a subjective and an objective connotation of genuineness). The root of the word also refers to agreement of an act or statement with respect to some standard, rule or pattern – it is "as it should be," or correct. Notice right here the historical ambiguity in the meaning of truth: (1) truth relative to reality, and (2) truth relative to a socially standardized point of view.

Modern English is, of course, a very nominalising language. We tend to make things out of activities, objects out of processes, nouns out of verbs. In trying to understand the relations between the experiencing brainworld and reality, it is often more accurate and revealing to speak of the verb "to true." Used as a verb, instead of as a noun or an adjective, the word true is, like so many of our more familiar words, a metaphor which is rooted in the experience of physical and mechanical activity. In this case, the term implies architectural activity. To say a wall or joist or window frame is "true" means that it is accurate as measured relative to a plan or some measurement like a plumb line or a level. When in the proper configuration, the wall may be said to be "in true." And used as an active verb we can say things like "trueing a door," the connotation being an activity that makes the door true relative to the wall in which it has been inserted. One may "true" something by adjusting or shaping it into accurate conformation with a pattern or plan. To "prove something true" is to verify it in relation to something else. And a tool or device used to true-up something was once called a "truer."

Etymological lesson finished for the moment. Henceforth in these posts I intend to use the term "true" in a very technical way. Hereafter, trueing refers specifically to the functions of the brainworld that produce a world of experience that is accurate with respect to our sensory and somatic interactions with reality. Trueing is a property of the inherent organization of the brain and drives the development of models of reality from their nascent organization in infancy to ever more complex, mature and accurate knowledge of self and world. The universal, even archetypal appeal of truth for all peoples derives from the inherent and experienced drive of neural cells to organize their internal order in such a way that critters anticipate and fulfil their anticipated experiences in interactions with the world. Moreover, any neuropsychological, technical or cultural process by which experienced reality is brought into greater accuracy relative to the experience of reality is called a truer.

A "scout" is a person sent ahead to obtain more accurate information, and is thus a cultural truer. A West African griot or "praise singer" who is constantly updating the history he recounts in story and song is a cultural truer. Journalism at its best may be considered a cultural truing institution. Moreover, a camera, a tape recorder, a telescope, or a seismograph may be considered technical truers, for they are devices used to increase the accuracy of our knowledge of the world. But the primordial truer of course is the brainworld itself, or more specifically those neurophysiological processes that develop, alter, augment, correct, and disconfirm knowledge as a result of interacting with the world. On this account, technical and cultural truing may be considered evolutionary elaborations of neurophysiological truing – that is, technical truers augment and extend the limitations of unaided sensory truing, while cultural truers institutionalize these natural processes within individuals to bring them under the control of social processes.

Truth and Language

Wow! Now wasn’t that a clever exercise in linguistic manipulation? Bet you never thought of the word truth in this way, or even bothered to think about what the word really implies. If you are like most folks, you just took the word for granted, like you do "eggplant," or "democracy." And, if you are more or less average in your vocabulary, you have tens of thousands of other words in your head the meanings of which you take for granted. You take them for granted primarily because you learned most of them while you were still a kid. You normally didn’t decide, "aha! I need a word for this new thingy" and then invent one: "This will hereafter be known as a ‘gwigmer’!" You very likely learned a lot of the connotation of the word "truth" you have in your head by getting caught-out lying – your Mum demanding you "tell the truth right now!" Somehow in your upbringing the individual quest for truth in reality, and speaking the truth within a social context got mangled. Yet the root experiences of the reality of truth are so fundamental to the unfolding of experience that the source of all truing is lost sight of. But before we get into the phenomenology of truing, let us stick with the linguistic aspect a while longer. This is important for understanding the roots of ideology.

Language is very much at the heart of trueing among hairless apes, and for very sound evolutionary reasons. Humanity is a species of social primate, and more than any other big-brained social animal, we humans depend upon communication in the formation and sharing of our experience. Language evolved over the course of human evolution in order that members of social groups could share experiences vicariously (= participation in the experience of another person). As we have seen in previous posts, much of the activity of the brainworld in mediating experience is given to the integration of memory into current sensory activity. And for hairless apes, much of the material stored in memory was not experienced directly, but was derived vicariously from parents, teachers, peers and others in the group. Our heads are choc-a-block with secondhand experiences – experiences we read about or heard about – experiences perhaps that never actually occurred in reality.

Sharing experiences seems to be uniquely vital to human adaptation. Other species of primates with big brains, like our closest relatives the chimpanzees, do not seem to need to communicate in a manner sufficiently complex to share much in the way of vicarious experience. Honey bees do of course – they have evolved ways of communicating the location of food resources so that other members of the hive can help collecting the goodies. Yet we humans do it so effortlessly we take it for granted – just as honey bees do I imagine. Our friend can go off on a vacation to the Bahamas and return to describe his experiences in such vivid detail that we almost feel we have been there. More than that, his description of the places he has been become a part of our own internalized view of the world. We may end up knowing a great deal about the Bahamas without ever setting foot on one of the Caribbean islands.

And herein lies the clue to why language evolved among humans -- namely, because the hominid brainworld evolved the capacity to model reality in a way that transcends the limits of immediate perception. Picture if you will a species like ours having a brain capable of modeling a vast world of experience, but with no means of communicating experiences to each other.
Social action, and hence society itself would simply not be possible. As we have seen, a primary component of experience is interpretation, and without a body of socially standardized interpretations (meanings) the experience of group members would diverge to such an extent that no one would share a common experiential world. Social coordination of internal brain states (models) and external social action would be impossible. Thus language evolved in concert with the remarkable expansion of our brainworld as a mechanism for coordinating socially shared features of individual knowledge.

As long as a social species shares pretty much the same cognized world, and a capacity to model an environment not much greater than the field of direct perception, then the need for communication remains rudimentary – like for birds and honey bees. Communication is limited to transmitting information such as where the food source is, the presence of a predator, the type of predator, an inclination to move, to copulate, etc. But once the capacity of the brainworld expands to the creation of a cognized world bigger, ore complex and transcendent of immediate perception, then more complex forms of communication had to develop in order to maintain the advantages of a social adaptation.

Obviously, with an increase in the reliance upon vicarious experience in adapting to reality, the issue of the accuracy and honesty of reported, vicarious experience emerged as an important factor. The biological roots of the sense of honesty and accuracy are to be found in the everyday testing of information derived by communication in the crucible of direct, individual experience. If our friend describes the beach he played on in the Bahamas, how are we to evaluate the accuracy, the truth, of his report? After all, he may be lying. He may have gone to Disneyland instead and may never have been in the Bahamas in his life. This, of course, is the crux of the problem of truth and language. Verity in communication is also rooted in the biology of the evolving brain. As Pinker (1995:265) notes, all languages on the planet exhibit the universal property of querying the truth-value of utterances.

Indeed, some researchers have suggested that the ability to deceive others and dissemble during communication is a sign of advanced intelligence in a species. Some authorities have even argued that self-deception may have evolutionary and adaptive value. And it is true that chimpansees can dissemble while monkeys cannot. Be that as it may, as reliance upon vicarious experience increased in the formation of human knowledge, the issue accuracy and honesty of reporting of vicarious experience became more and more crucial to adaptation. With modern humans, recognition of truth and falsehood in communication is a cultural universal. The possibility that people can and do lie is also universally recognized. There is no such thing as a human society that does not acknowledge the value of truth over falsehood. Moreover, no matter how the concepts are culturally symbolized and elaborated, all the world's languages have words that easily gloss "true" and "false," "truth" and "lie."

Truing and Development

Despite the admitted adaptive importance of truth judgements about communication of vicarious experience, a major failing of philosophical accounts of truth is that they tend to be limited to logical evaluations of statements and propositions. Truth theorists continue to focus on language and logic despite a history of phenomenological reflection that shows the critical importance of grounding any theory of truth in the judgements and intuitions occurring within direct experience – knowledge constructed by the brainworld to correspond, not with other statements, but with the perceived world as it arises in perception.

Moreover, the trueing of knowledge relative to reality is evident in the activity of other animals. It is clear that we evolved a neurocognitive system designed to true an internal model of the world, and that this function of the brain is primordial and predates the evolution of language by millions of years. Indeed, it is now clear that animals as simple as honey bees operate upon an internalized brainworld which generates a kind of map of their environment and which develops in individuals over the course of their lives. Thus it is to the relationship between experience and reality that we must refer to understand the primordial roots of truth, not to the relations among sentences in utterances and texts. For it is in the direct experience of trueing that we all obtain our fundamental intuition of truth – the intuition that makes such a profound mark upon those from whatever cultural background who value truth in everyday life.

Truing is integral to the development of the brainworld in children. The role of behavior in trueing is fundamental, especially, as Jean Piaget argued, in the early development of babies. The trueing of knowledge in the course of early development is a wired-in, biological process. In numerous works throughout his long life, Piaget developed the view that knowledge is a property of the internal biological organization of the brainworld and the body, a property serving primarily to regulate the relationship between the being and its environment.

A major trend in the evolution and development of the human brainworld was the "progressive escape from dominion by the most accessible perceptual features in the environment" (Gold 1987:27). Cognition, in other words, provides a buffer of meaning that stands between sensory input and action output. Intelligence, in the Piagetian sense, refers both to the complexity of organization and the accuracy of internal, neurocognitive models. Moreover, Piaget realized that the most important aspects of reality for adaptation are often those that are invisible to the senses -- a major theme in the traditional cosmologies of peoples all over the planet -- so that consciousness as it develops strives for adaptive accuracy in modeling both the visible and the invisible aspects of the world. As Piaget showed, this regulatory function of the brain manifests an essential tension between the demand for adaptive responses to the environment on the one hand, and the demand to maintain internal integrity of neural organization on the other hand.

Because of the polarized tension between adaptation to reality and the necessity for maintaining internal organization, our brainworld strives to regulate its own internal organization in a way that simultaneously addresses this tension. Both of these properties you see are necessary for the survival of animals that – like hairless apes – rely for their survival upon an internal world of experience in dynamic interaction with reality. The tension between the demands of adaptation and internal regulation keeps neurocognitive systems relatively open to the environment while using energy resources to develop these structures through the course of life.

Our understanding of the dual demands of adaptation and organization grounds our understanding of the biological basis for trueing within the very organization of our cognitive being. Knowledge is the function of neurocognitive systems that are open to what we would now call negative and positive feedback, negative feedback being defined as information that has the effect of conserving and reinforcing structures in the brainworld, and positive feedback being information that results in changes in these internal structures. It is precisely within the context of this dynamic and complex system of feedback into neurocognitive systems that we want to situate our quest for primordial origins of "truth." For as Piaget himself noted, the truth is not simply a copy of the world – there is no such thing as knowledge of the world that is not constructed by the knowing brainworld – nor is truth a property of the world apart from the process of knowing.

The Effort After Truth

Alright. Time to pull it all together again. We have said that most people’s awareness of truth has to do with statements. Is some claim true or false. Is it true with respect to the facts? Or is it true with respect to some system of knowledge. Consider the statement:

Guido the Great is the one true prophet!

Is it true or false? You bet its true. Statements just don’t get much truer. It is profoundly true in fact... if, of course, you happen to be a member of the Cult of Guido the Great and believe in the pronouncements of Guido as reported in the holy scriptures called the Book of Guido. On the other hand, if you happen to be a member of the Cult of Franny the Fairy Princess, you might find the above statement to be not only false, but blasphemous. Why, because it contradicts the sacred text, Franny’s Musings.

But we have gone on to say that the primordial meaning of "truing" comes from direct experience by the brainworld of the real world. Truing is the process by which neural models seek to adjust their information to information from the senses. Primordial truing is wired-in, is pre-linguistic in evolutionary origin, and is fundamental to human development, as well as development in other animals with brains. Humans everywhere have wired-in to their brainworld an effort after truth that is part and parcel to the drive of the organism to adapt (remember: find food without becoming food). This is the power of the brainworld, to adjust the internal world of experience so that it anticipates events in reality in an accurate way. This is truing in action. I walk along the path, humming a tune and looking at the birds, and WHAM! I trip over a root I did not see. I did not see the root because I wasn’t paying any attention to the act of walking. The robot was walking while I (the watcher) was busy with the birds, and I only shifted awareness back to walking to see what had tripped me and to make sure it didn’t happen again. Now I know there are impediments on this path – the world and its damned obduracy again! Now I can go back to walking and watching birds, but with a new sense of caution, watching the path a bit closer to avoid such impediments. In other words, the higher cortical structures controlling my perambulation have been trued.

Every moment of consciousness is a test of the accuracy of the brainworld. Our consciousness literally feeds forward into the next perceptual epoch with a set of expectations that reality may or may not meet. The more accurate our internal models, the more likely reality will "rise" to meet our expectations. We take a breath... and low and behold the air is there to fill our lungs – so automatically that we are rarely aware of the activity at all. But if there is suddenly no air (this can happen while scuba diving), then we become suddenly alive to our peril. We literally breath into the future, and too we walk into the future. We pick up a foot, move it forward and bring it down, fully expecting solid ground. But it could be quicksand, or a depression we failed to see. Again, we come instantly aware of our peril. In other words we are always prepared to adjust our expectations -- true our models – in response to positive feedback from the world. How often have you thought, "I’m not myself today!" Well, of course you were your Self. You might not have been acting and feeling within the bounds of your ego-expectations. So we feed forward into our own being – we watch ourselves extend our boundaries of identification and we learn – we true-up our internal model of our Self. We feed forward into an encounter with our own transcendental being.

This is the effort after meaning at its rudimentary level. And it is repeated within the organization of each level of cognition up to and including ideation, imagination, theorizing and all the other forms of meaning mediated within the advanced, cortical portions of our brainworld. The natural human tendency is to true-up ideas, images, feelings, beliefs, and so forth by either direct encounter with reality though personal perception and action, or vicariously by way of the experiences reported by others. One anthropologist who worked with the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa reported that this Bushmen hosts had formed a theory about the contrails they saw high in the sky that went north to south and then south to north. They hypothesized that white people on the northern and southern lands bordering the vast desert had built great cannons and fired huge toilet paper rolls with messages to each other back and forth. This satisfied their quest for an explanation, but when the anthropologist told them about the huge flying machines that traveled very high up, so high that it was very cold and froze the water vapor streaming from their engines, the Bushmen readily gave up their toilet paper theory of contrails in favor of the new explanation from someone who claimed, not only to have seen these flying machines, but had ridden in them across the desert. In other words, even at the group-cultural level, the people true their views in response to new, though vicarious, and valued experience.

MEANING

The effort after truth is in the service of adaptation – wired-in from our earliest days as infants to allow our internal models to grow in intimate interaction with the way things really are.. But there is another drive to consider as well, and that one has to do with meaning. Once again, it is instructive to trace the word back to its original roots. In Old English the term means to tell, to say or to complain about something. Throughout much of its history of use, it has connoted intention, presuming something, to have an opinion about something, or to have thoughts about something. A "meaningful glance" is a facial signal intended to transmit information. If something is meaningful, it is symbolic of something, it stands for and expresses a greater significance. An act may be significant and have purpose which is not actually contained in the act, but only interpreted by the observer."He is well-meaning" implies his intention and intended significance behind an act are good. Meaning, thus points directly to the intentionality of consciousness. We express and do out of understanding and knowledge. I am intentionally manipulating the symbols on this page in order to transmit the information in my brainworld to your brainworld. I can only do this via symbols. And as we have said before, if the symbols I use do not penetrate to meaning in your head, then there is no communication ("communication" from the Latin root "to make common"). To express something in common, there must be a lot of meaning we all hold in common in our heads.

The effort after meaning, then, is the drive to make things meaningful within our brainworld – it is the organizational imperative we were talking about above with respect to Piaget’s understanding of development. We have seen that every moment of consciousness pairs patterns of sensory pixels with information stored in memory. The information stored in memory is originally neurognostic (wired-in, inherited meaning) and later developed meaning. Let’s recall how this works. There is a distinct pattern arising in my sensorium. It is a dog. In fact it’s not just any dog, but it’s my dog Toby. Pattern + identification. Fast as the pattern arises there is the recognition. If I was calm enough and attentive enough I could discern the arising of the sensory pattern, and a split second later the ID-ing of the form as "Toby." But there is nothing "out there" about the real dog that says to me, "Hi, I’m Toby." Rather, the distinct pattern that Toby impresses on my senses is recognized – literally RE-cognized. Hence, in a way, everything in the real world that we can sense -- including Toby for me, and me for Toby -- is a symbol. Things bounce or emit energies that my senses pick up. They present as patterns in the field of pixels, and these patterns penetrate into the brainworld and activate meaning stored there in "in-formed" neural models. Hence everything that I sense and identify within my stream of consciousness is a symbol, for the patterns from reality present only partial information about themselves, and my memory provides the rest. The words you are scanning are symbols. The monitor is a symbol, the chair you’re sitting on is a symbol, and you are a symbol to your own Self. "Who am I?" "Why am I here?" These are questions about meaning. Put in other words, "Who am I to myself?" "What is my purpose here?" "What is the intention and significance of my being to myself?"

Once again, the prime directive of the brainworld is to constitute before itself a meaningful world that allows the animal to find food without becoming food. Every normal act of consciousness is inherently symbolic (philosophers like to say "hermeneutic" or "interpretive"). The prime directive is accomplished by making everything and every event it can sense a symbol, and it organizes as much information about each and every symbol it can, while at the same time organizing all this meaning into a single coherent understanding of the real world and all the other things and happenings encountered in the real world. I like the metaphor of a kid’s magnet: You remember how you would put iron filings on a piece of paper and move them all over the paper, and make nifty patterns using a magnet underneath the paper? Well, think of the magnet as the symbol and the iron filings as the organization of information that becomes activated when the symbolic pattern penetrates into the brainworld.

We hairless apes get a lot of the meaning we store in memory from our culture. In fact, some anthros define "culture" as an information pool which members of the group have access to. We are, as we anthros like to say, "enculturated" into a whole vast library of meanings – into the information pool. We are often biased by our cultural conditioning when we encounter novelty. We run into something new and very likely there’s already meaning in our brainworld we project upon the novelty, and POOF... novelty all gone! Morever, during the normal course of events, we attend novelty only so long as we master it and relegate it to the familiar. But watch out here! (Alarm bells ringing in the background!) Remember, the real world, including our own being, is transcendental relative to anything we can know about it. There is always more potential meaning than we are typically satisfied with. We tend to pay attention to novel things and happenings only so long as we render them familiar. "Oh, yeah... been there, done that, added it to my tee-shirt collection."

Yet if we decide to make a study of something novel, it would become richer and richer in meaning, and we might discover there is no end to the novelty. It is our consciousness that decides the novel is now familiar and no longer of interest. And if we get further into our study, we may mature into a scientist of that thing – we might become a Rolling Stones-ologist, a bicycle-ologist, a meadowlark-ologist, a rose-gardening-ologist, whatever. And along the way we might find out one of the great lessons any real scientist learns, and that is that what is really important about meaning (often in the form of theory) is all the anomalous evidence that pops up contrary to, or disconfirming the meaning. This is why real science is an interminable dialog between theory and the transcendental nature of reality.

Is there truth without meaning? Absolutely not! To ask what reality is like apart from our knowing it is a self-contradictory question. We cannot know anything about the world without making it meaningful within and for the brainworld. Is there meaning without truth? Sure. There are closed systems of meaning (like in the heads of the true-believers of the Cult of Guido the Great, or of the Cult of Fanny the Fairy Princess. I say they are "closed systems" because their respective statements about the world admit of no contradiction. They are closed to empirical evidence. Their truth value cannot be ascertained by reference to direct experience. Their belief system cannot be trued in the crucible of reality. The Bushmen belief in great cannons firing huge toilet paper rolls was not a closed system, for it would admit to contradiction, and it was dropped when a better explanation (a kind of meaning) presented itself.

So when I speak of the effort after truth, I am talking about an inherent drive in hairless apes and other critters to true-up their systems of meaning by reference to direct experience and observation of the world. But when I speak of the effort after meaning, I am emphasizing the organizational imperative that may trump truth value. One of the great psychological anthropologists, Professor Anthony F.C. Wallace (incidentally one of Gene d’Aquili’s teachers at Penn) was once hired by the government to research human responses to disaster. He found that very often people who experience the massive destruction of tsunamis, tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes and so forth often act as though their entire system of meaning had failed. They are frantic to maintain their normal everyday lives. So people would be found doing the weirdest things, like a housewife sweeping the stoop of her house that had blown away during a tornado, or people chatting across the fence about the price of corn while their family lay dead in their yard. One of the interesting things he found was that the primary determinant of whether someone’s meaning system failed was whether or not they had previously experienced disaster of some kind. People who had experienced the horrors of war had far more durable meaning systems, and were able to track reality better. And of course we all know of people who cannot track reality well at the best of times, and who seem to live in their own internal world – they are called "psychotic." All of this has to do with the effort after meaning becoming so predominant, so urgent that the meaning system is virtually closed to testing in reality.

IDEOLOGY

An ideology, therefore, is any system of knowledge about Self and real world that is relatively impervious to truing. The word literally means "a body of ideas," but its connotations often refer to a system of thought that is prescriptive, to be expounded as a proper approach to political, moral or economic activity. As I am using the term, ideology refers to the systems of thought and accompanying texts that support a point of view about the world that has little or no reference to empirical research or direct observation. Ideologies in this sense tend to focus upon a correct interpretation of events, and the "truth value" claimed for ideological statements derive from received wisdom, reference to sacred texts, appeal to authority and other essentially non-rational and non-empirical operations. A good example is the evangelical Christian insistence upon "intelligent design" as the correct interpretation of Biblical scripture, and as opposed to scientific theories of evolution. Both intelligent design and the Darwinian theory of evolution are systems of ideas about reality, but whereas there exists no possible evidence that intelligent design folks would accept as disconfirming ID and affirming evolution, numerous theories about evolution have arisen over the last 150+ years in response to additional evidence from naturalistic and laboratory research. ID is an ideology and the scientific theories of evolution are not

If we understand from our own self-awareness how the efforts after meaning and truth work in concert to produce a meaningful brainworld that is more or less in touch with reality, then we have some appreciation of the capacity of ideologies to wreck harm on people and the planet. We all know there are religious ideologies today that produce crazies by the gross that are more than willing to blow themselves up in order to destroy other who do not believe as they do. But as horrific as this may be, it is merely an annoying and tragic symptom of The Crisis. Far more people die in automobile accidents each year than die from suicide bombings. No, it is the existence of ideologies that concerns us here, for it is the dumbing-down influence of culture generally that co-produces The Crisis. It is quite human of me to believe something or other about the world or about my Self that is (1) disconnected from any effort after truth ("I don’t care what all the girls say, I’m still a hunk!"), (2) disconfirmed by my own experience, yet I continue to believe it anyways ("yeah, I know I’m seventy-five and haven’t seen my penis in twenty years, but all the girls consider me a dreamboat!"), or (3) unaltered even though I also believe in self contradictory views ("Sure I’m every girl’s dreamboat, and yes, I am the proud great grandfather of 15!"). This dumbing-down of the natural interaction between truing and belief is rampant among hairless apes. It does not matter how intelligent some folks are in certain domains of their lives, they are commonly unintelligent in other domains of their life. A particle physicist can be an Einstein at work, and an Archie Bunker at home or in the political and moral domains.

And ideologies make this worse. There is no such thing as a really intelligent ideology. Ideologies are universally concrete in terms of internal logic (i.e., a concrete, simplistic, often storybook and unidimensional point of view about things), and stupid in terms of any recognition of complex and dynamic systems (little or no recognition of complex causation, indeterminacy, alternative interpretations, so forth). Ideologies admit to only a single point of view, and there is little comprehension of the transcendental nature of reality. And ideologies are commonly associated with intense emotion. "My country right or wrong!" "America, love it or leave it!" "There are believers and infidels (meaning ‘one without faith’), and the latter should be put to the sword!" "Global warming is bad!" "Democrats will spend us into the poorhouse!" "Republicans are uncaring and greedy people!" We’ve all heard these kinds of ideological statements – maybe even uttered them ourselves. They are indicators that, in that domain at least – especially if they are emotionally charged – our cognitive faculties are operating at a really dumb level.
One of my favorite ideological beliefs is the very common American belief that "America is a peace-loving, non-violent nation." If this is not a belief held in total denial of the truth, I do not know what is. The truth of course is that we Americans cannot, as a nation, steer clear of wars. Our whole history since the latter part of the 17th century has been one of warfare, skirmish, and intrusion into the affairs of other nations. Consider the following partial list of our military activities:

American Involvement in Wars from Colonial Times to the Present:

July 4, 1675 - August 12, 1676 King Philip's War (New England Colonies vs. Wampanoag, Narragansett, and Nipmuck Indians)

1689-1697 King William's War (The English Colonies vs. France)

1702-1713 Queen Anne's War (The English Colonies vs. France)

1744-1748 King George's War (The French Colonies vs. Great Britain)

1756-1763 French and Indian War (Seven Years War) (The French Colonies vs. Great Britain)

1759-1761 Cherokee War (English Colonists vs. Cherokee Indians)

1775-1783 American Revolution (English Colonists vs. Great Britain)

1798-1800 Franco-American Naval War (United States vs. France)

1801-1805; 1815 Barbary Wars (United States vs. Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli)

1812-1815 War of 1812 (United States vs. Great Britain)

1813-1814 Creek War (United States vs. Creek Indians)

1836 War of Texas Independence (Texas vs. Mexico)

1846-1848 Mexican War (United States vs. Mexico)

1861-1865 Civil War (Union vs. Confederacy)

1898 Spanish-American War (United States vs. Spain)

1914-1918 World War I (Triple Alliance: Germany, Italy, and Austria-Hungary vs. Triple Entente: Britain, France, and Russia. The United States joined on the side of the Triple Entente in 1917)

1939-1945 World War II (Axis Powers: Germany, Italy, Japan vs. Major Allied Powers: United States, Great Britain, France, and Russia)

1950-1953 Korean War (United States and South Korea vs. North Korea and Communist China)
1960-1975 Vietnam War (United States and South Vietnam vs. North Vietnam)

1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion (United States vs. Cuba)

1983 Grenada (United States Intervention)

1989 US Invasion of Panama (United States vs. Panama)

1990-1991 Persian Gulf War (United States and Coalition Forces vs. Iraq)

1995-1996 Intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina (United States as part of NATO acted peacekeepers in former Yugoslavia)

2003 Invasion of Iraq (United States and Coalition Forces vs. Iraq)

Source: The New York Public Library Desk Reference, 3rd Edition. Borrowed from
the website:
http://americanhistory.about.com/library/timelines/bltimelineuswars.htm

Interesting, no? Approximately a million and a half Americans have died in all these wars. And I have not mentioned most of the 40+ times over the years that we have militarily intervened in the affairs of South and Central American nations under the aegis of the Munroe Doctrine, or the constant (usually covert) belligerence we have shown post-revolutionary Cuba since 1959. Peace loving? HA! Yet one more example of the dumbing-down effects of political and cultural ideology. There is no other country on the planet that perceives us as "peace-loving," whether they be allies, enemies or neutrals.

As you may or may not know, I am a dual American and Canadian citizen, and have spent half my life living in Canada, and I can assure you that Canadians do not perceive us Americans as "peace-loving." So where do the Americans who are dumb enough to buy into this unrealistic self-identification get this peculiar notion? Simple. They are taught it. They don’t evaluate it by reference to an effort after truth – they don’t go looking for confirmation or disconfirmation of the belief. Rather, it is part of the patriotic, self-referential, rhetoric that they have been fed as children, and nothing has brought that belief into question. And the culture of belligerence doesn’t stop with actual combat. We make a war on everything we don’t like – the "war on drugs," the "war on poverty," "the war on illiteracy," war on this, and war on that. Why not the "healing drug addiction program," or the "Americans reading together program?" No, we reveal our dark natures in the words we use. Yes, we use the terms metaphorically, but why do we think and speak in military metaphors? Why do we not automatically think in peaceful metaphors? The answer is that we do it unconsciously. As C.G. Jung wrote, "...anything we have heard or experienced can become subliminal, that is to say, can pass into the unconsciousness. And even what we retain in our conscious mind and can reproduce at will has acquired an unconscious undertone that will color the idea each time it is recalled."*

Americais, alas, not the only militaristic nation on the planet. There are belligerent nations all over the Earth and wars all over the place much of the time. What makes America quite distinct however is a persistent denial of the fact that we are a militaristic society. Hence the dangerous dumbing-down of our own self-evaluation. Americans are generally unconscious of our fundamentally unconscious militaristic nature, a nature promulgated and perpetuated in part by what President Eisenhower warned us all about in 1961, a military-industrial complex – a sub-culture that profits vastly by our constant round of belligerence and warfare (see the link to Eisenhower’s speech on the right). Consider also how naturally we organize things on militaristic lines. Uniformed police agencies throughout the States are organized along quasi-military lines, with officer ranks, stand-at-attention ceremonies, chains of command, quasi-special forces units ("SWAT teams"). Quasi-military organization is not the only model for police organizations. Even the Germans gave up this model in post-war era policing, choosing rather to organize more along the constabulary lines of England and other countries (thanks for this Karen!). We Americans just automatically think along those lines. Even the early notions of what space colonies might look like to NASA planners was along military lines, until social scientists showed planners there were better and more efficient and productive models. Political races are called "political battles," court trials are called "legal battles," domestic disputes become "battle royals." The militaristic metaphors are everywhere. We love our violent movies, and we think in terms of "good guys and bad guys" with the "good guys" almost always winning the "fight." We are in Iraq and Afghanistan at the moment to "bring the battle" to the "bad guys" and make the place safe for democracy. Meanwhile an estimated 300,000 American soldiers are suffering from various mental illnesses (such as post traumatic stress disorder) due to having to face the actual, horrible truth of war. This will cost the American taxpayers billions of dollars and leave life-long scars on thousands of people.

But America’s militarism isn’t really the point here. If you have two brain cells to rub together, you know all this. I am just giving a very painful example of the dangers of ideology. Warfare isn’t the essence of The Crisis at all, it’s just a symptom. Not even the possibility of nuclear warfare is all that huge an issue compared with what really threatens our survival. Again, arms races and belligerent cultures are just another symptom of the underlying stupidity of hairless apes, a stupidity that IS at the center of The Crisis. The unconscious, culturally perpetuated dumbing-down of our collective brainworlds.

Religion and Ideology

Organized religions are very productive of ideology. And these ideologies are very often socially constructed to placate inequalities and injustices operating in everyday life of a people. Moreover, they foster values in service to a people’s economic system. It is not a coincidence that the industrial revolution took off in a Protestant cultural milieu with its emphasis upon hard work and individual responsibility.. If a society is a two-tiered one with a handful of nobles at the political and economic pinnacle, and the rest of the people in servitude to the interests of the nobles, then the society’s religion will normally justify this class system in some way, and teach a morality that transforms servitude into a righteous occupation. It is not for naught that Karl Marx considered religion to be the opium of the masses. As Marx wrote, "The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo."

However, that said, the ideological roots of all the major religions in one way or another eschew violence, belligerence and warfare (see the excellent analysis entitled "God and War" the link to which you will find on the right), and embrace peace, love and interconnectedness (more on this in a later post). Despite their non-violent and peace-seeking values, theistic religions are often used by warring nations to justify and forward their belligerent actions – "God is on our side!" And of course fundamentalist crazies are dead-sure that they are doing God’s will by blowing up people in a just cause. And the evidence for God’s favor? Well, success in fighting and faith.

But what do we mean by "faith?" There are two kinds of faith, blind faith and empirical faith. Blind faith is, as the term implies, a belief that is held with no reference to evidence of empirical efficacy – that is, there is no reference to truing. "My country right or wrong!" "Guido loves me, this I know." "Those who fight and die in our Holy War are honored by God, and head straight to Heaven without any time in purgatory." Empirical faith on the other hand is the kind of faith we have in a good guide or map. The map gets us from LA to San Francisco, and all the landmarks noted on the map are right where they are supposed to be. So there is an increasing confidence that the map is, in its entirety, true. Faith grows with experience of the truth value of whatever we place our faith in. Blind faith puts blinkers on our eyes, while empirical faith opens our eyes to the truth of things.

Those who seek God’s grace for their belligerence and violence are appealing to blind faith, not empirical faith. They are "true believers," not seekers after truth. A "true believer" (Eric Hoffer’s term) is a person of blind faith fanaticism who is ready and willing to sacrifice everything, including his/her life, for a holy cause. It was true believers who marched away to war during the Crusades, and it was true believers who brought the Twin Towers down. It is evangelical Christian true believers who will shoot a doctor rather than allow abortions to be performed. The true believer does not appeal to reality for the testing of their ideas, nor to any kind of truing, but rather sees the moral universe as a stark contrast between black and white, good and bad, with no recognition of shades of gray, much less the intelligent acknowledgment that there are alternative points of view on every issue, bar none. For various reasons having to do with frustration and trauma in their lives, true believers are people who have sacrificed intelligence for concrete meaning and purpose – they are folks on a mission!. In pursuing that mission, they have allowed themselves to embrace stupidity, narcissism and violence.

So distrustful of organized religion have people become nowadays that it is quite common for people to distinguish "religion" from "spirituality." What they usually mean is that religion is an organized institution that may not be addressing the spiritual needs of its faithful, while spirituality is the personal quest for an indepth understanding of what the great theologian Paul Tillich called "matters of ultimate concern" -- that is, death, birth, why am I here, what is my nature, what is God's plan for me, so forth. We will come back to this issue in another post, for it relates directly to The Crisis, but suffice to say here that all organized religions began as cults that involved direct, transpersonal, mystical, or "spiritual" experiences of some or all the members.

Science and Ideology

We also need to understand that a scientific theory may become an ideology for the unwary scientist, or the professional (like a doctor) relying upon scientific views. This happens all too often when scientists let their egos become overly identified with a theory, and the effort after meaning comes to dominate over the effort after truth such that they miss the inevitable anomalous data that every theory tends to leave in its wake. But there are always other scientists who will eventually point to the anomalies in public forums and insist that the theory be altered or scrapped. Just like the Bushmen toilet paper roll theory of contrails, they eventually fall and a better theory takes its place. At worst, ideologues die off. I think it was Max Planck, the father of quantum physics, who quipped that science progresses... one funeral at a time.

We used to think that science is ideally focused on truth for truth’s sake. This was a naive view of science, as it turned out, for as a number of philosophers of science (most notably Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, and Paul Feyerabend) have shown, there is a great tendency in science to produce ideologies. Well, hell people! Scientists are hairless apes too, whether they have a Ph.D. after their names or not. And their consciousness works just like everybody else’s. They are infected with the illusion of the empirical ego and they identify with their pet theories and methodologies, just like traditional shamans are all bound up in their cosmologies and ritual methods for evoking invisible powers. As I have said, REAL science, when it is real science going on, privileges the effort after truth over the effort after meaning.

But here we have to look briefly at theory and the methods we use to explore the truth value of theories. As the philosophers of science I mentioned above show, often a theoretical position comes with methodological blinkers. Not only does the theory claim to explain something, it also determines how that something is to be viewed. Let me give you one of many possible examples. Much of modern physics involves sub-atomic particles. There are theories of the universe that have to do with these particles. And the methods used to explore particles range from a double split apparatus costing no more than a few hundred dollars to particle accelerators spread over acres of land and costing hundreds of millions of dollars. And you know what? No one has ever seen a particle. No one has seen a quark, no one has seen a boson, no one has seen an electron or a proton or a neutron or an alpha particle. And there are some, like yours truly, who have suggested that there really are no particles in the real world, and that the "particle-ness" of observations have as much to do with the machines we use to observe and measure happenings in the world of the very tiny as they do with what is really there. I will likely have more to say about the physics of the "world of very tiny happenings" in the future. Here, I am just giving an example of how it is hard to get away from the tendency hairless apes have to make sense of what they observe in terms of stable points of view, and ideologies that come equipped with methods of observation that tend to confirm meaning.

So, both religious ideologies and scientific ideologies tend to be overly conservative. The ego wants to know, and it identifies with "its" knowledge – and is this intolerant of uncertainty and change. The history of science is the history of one ego besting another ego in rituals of social status called "conferences" and "peer reviews." If you would like to read a very tragic example of how the ego-wars go on in science, and can thwart the pursuit of truth, read Arthur Koestler’s wonderful little book, The Case of the Midwife Toad.

That said, do NOT make the error of concluding that just because "science" as a social institution is riddled with ideology, that REAL science – that is the doing of science – is equivalent to just another belief system or religious dogma unrelated to reality and full of true believers. This is the fallacy promulgated in recent times by postmodernist philosophers who are characterized by poor research skills and an attitude. No, science, when it is REAL science is a cut above, and it is a cut above because, and solely because, its efforts privilege truth above more stable meaning. As Timothy Ferris has written, "Science is not a static body of dogma, to stray from which is to risk having one’s epaulets stripped off in a ceremony of banishment from the scientific community. It is a self-correcting system of inquiry, in which errors – of which there are, of course, plenty – are sooner or later detected by experiment or by more careful analysis" (pp. 13-14). Mature sciences progress and are cumulative in their data and understanding of their scope. They are not just a jumble of opinions of long dead white guys.

TRUTH, MEANING AND IDEOLOGY

Let’s recap. This has been a heavy post, I realize. But simple at its core. What have I said here? Namely:

1. Truing is a process by which ideas about the real world are kept accurate. Truing is fundamental to our cognitive adaptation, and in the development of cognitive models of the real in childhood. Indeed, when we watch kids learning, it is quite obvious that truing is wired-in to the structure and development of the brainworld.

2. Meaning is all that information we have about whatever arises in our sensorium. What arises in the field of sensory pixels is identified and linked automatically to the field of information stored in memory pertaining to the same or similar things.

3. The efforts after truth and meaning are really two sides of the same functional coin. Whichever side is privileged, the energy will go into truing up ideas or conserving ideas.

4. Ideologies are dogmatic systems of knowledge that have little or no effort after truth incorporated into their belief systems. They stop a state of question, eschew individual inquiry after the truth of things, and are concerned only with tried and "true" answers ("it is God’s will...") and the conservation of belief.

5. And, both organized, institutional religions and institutional science is riddled with ideology, but real science privileges the quest for truth above all other factors (institutional agendas, grantsmanship, pandering of egos, over-identification with pet theories, so forth).

The Crisis is both partially produced by, and is exacerbated by the tendency of cultures to value ideologies (conservation of meaning) more than the effort after truth. It is the cross we hairless apes carry as "culture-bearers." It turns out that our greatest adaptational strategy as a social mammal – culture – may well contribute to our failure to negotiate The Crisis. One of the hallmarks of this adaptational ambiguity is the near universal belief that consciousness and the physical body are to some extent separate, and that consciousness can survive the demise or destruction of the body. This is the impediment we can call "mind-body dualism," and it will be the topic of the next post.

* Jung, C.G., 1964. Man and His Symbols. Aldus, p. 27.
_________________________________________
SUGGESTED READING

Falk, Dean (1992) Braindance: New Discoveries About Human Brain Evolution. New York: Henry Holt.

Farris, Timothy, 1997. The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report. Touchstone Books.

Gold, Ron (1987) The Description of Cognitive Development: Three Piagetian Themes. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hoffer, Eric, 1951 [2002]. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. Harper.

Pinker, Steven (1995) "Facts About Human Language Relevant to Its Evolution." in Origins of the Human Brain. Ed. by Jean-Pierre Changeux and Jean Chavaillon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 262-283.

Mature Contemplation

2008-04-15T17:27:00.000-07:00

Every man takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.

Schopenhauer, Psychological Observations

The very best student of consciousness is one who has learned to study their own brainworld. In these posts I take the results of this phenomenological standpoint seriously – so seriously in fact that I consider them fundamental to all other sources of information and observation about consciousness. First the phenomenology, second the neuroscience or quest for the NCC mediating what we have found phenomenologically, and lastly the cultural aspect – how do different peoples view the matter. The study of consciousness WITHOUT input of phenomenology is a fool’s game, patently absurd considering that each of us has a consciousness and ample "wired-in" resources for studying it directly. So let us look at mature contemplation: What is it? How is it developed as a skill? When is it appropriately applied? And why do it at all?

WHAT?

Phenomenology, as I have said previously, is a broad term – there being many kinds of phenomenology represented in the philosophical literature (see Kockelmans’ classic history of phenomenology). But what I mean by it is what Edmund Husserl himself meant by it – the dedicated, systematic, trained application of introspection, and the clear description of the results of introspection. What I do NOT mean by it is what might be called the "as I gaze out my study window at the oak in the back yard" brand of naive introspection. This is not Husserlian phenomenology, but rather unconsciously conditioned rationality in search of instantiation in experience. If someone is conditioned to believe that swatches of color are solid, then they are not likely to discern the actual pixelation in their visual field. Beliefs and conditioned knowledge make up what Husserl called the "natural attitude" toward phenomena. Training as a phenomenologist requires whatever instruction and training is necessary to parse out these beliefs and bits of knowledge so that they may be set aside ("bracketed" in Husserl’s jargon) and the focus of awareness be directed at phenomena as they actually are presented in consciousness.

What is required then is what we have called mature contemplation. We have written a lot about mature contemplation. Chapter 11 of Brain, Symbol and Experience is on about the topic, and is perhaps the most technical definition of the skill, relating it to research that has been done in transpersonal psychology on meditation, as well as practical Buddhist psychology. There is also a little book that I published privately in a limited edition that is the transcript of a series of seminars I gave in 1986. It is entitled An Ibis in the Tree and you can now find it online at the link at the right of this blog. There are a couple of chapters in that source that apply – again, if you want more technical details.

Mature contemplation simply means that a phenomenologist (one who is studying their own consciousness) has developed skill in meditation and contemplation sufficient that they have at least put the illusion of a permanent ego (what Husserl called the "empirical ego") behind them. In terms of Buddhist psychology, this means that the mature contemplative is someone who has realized at least stage 4 of the 12 stages of the development of insight. How one accomplishes that we shall get to in a moment. But what is required for mature contemplation to take root is practice in focusing on aspects of consciousness or phenomena with unwavering and enduring concentration to the exclusion of all other demands on attention. Most people cannot do that right off, because they are conditioned to move the spotlight of their awareness from object to object – the natural prime directive again: seek food without becoming food. My friend Jon Shearer and I used to team teach classes and one trick we would pull is walk into the classroom, tape a Canadian dollar bill to the blackboard and later on challenge the class to meditate on their breath without distraction while they counted from one to ten, and if they were distracted at all, they had to start at one again. It was amazing how long it would take for the first student to raise their hand and win the buck.

There are at least three important realizations along the path of developing a mature contemplative skill set. The first, as I say, is the reduction of the empirical ego, the second is the experience of totality and the third is learning the stage in meditation sometimes known as "access concentration." We have mentioned the reduction of the empirical ego already. That is, the bracketing of the idea that there is a permanent "me" in here somewhere. The maturing contemplative inevitably learns that the empirical ego is an illusion. By this time the mind-set of self exploration and discovery are well developed in the being. That is, one knows by this time that one may choose any element of experience or consciousness to single out for scrutiny, and one has the requisite stillness to carry it out effectively.

The experience of totality, or what is sometimes called the coincidentia oppositorum (or union oppositorum = "union of opposites") realization, is an absorption experience in which the conceptual barriers between self and world vanish, and one realizes that all things are interconnected – that the universe is a true cosmos, a vast, perhaps infinite monad or system in which nothing whatsoever is isolated from the whole. Thus falls the illusion that "I" am distinct from the world, or that the world has no influence upon "my" being. It is this realization that is fundamental to all religious systems of whatever brand. Indeed, the word "religion" basically means the binding together of disparate parts – the same root as our English "ligament," the tissue that ties muscle to bone. Interestingly enough, it is the same root meaning as that informing "yoga," and our English word "yoke," again meaning to bind together. With the realization of totality, the contemplative no longer can credence any world view or philosophy that separates this from that. Mind you, this realization is both an absorption state with perhaps accompanying bliss, and an intuitive realization. It does not necessarily mean that the contemplative has reached systems consciousness – a very crucial factor in producing The Crisis, as we shall see in a later post.

The third, and pragmatically speaking, the most important realization is that of "access concentration" (upachara samadhi) – also referred to in esoteric Kabbala as the "beauty" sepherot. This is a distinct dead-calm mindstate in which focus of attention is effortless and no distractions can drag attention away. All discursive thought, imagery and chatter have dropped away. I say it is pragmatically the most important because it is in this mindstate that the contemplative can get the best and most efficient work done. Access to intuitive knowledge is virtually perfect, and questions will be answered about as fact as the questions are generated. For this reason, the mindstate has also been called the "self-illuminating" void – that is, in more modern Jungian terms, access to the unconscious source of wisdom is seamless and direct. The greater psyche will cooperate with the conscious mind in answering questions and presenting intuitive insights. What matters most for the maturation of the contemplative is the development of more and more subtle questions, and in this mindstate this development proceeds unobstructed by distraction and noise.

Mature contemplation, then, is a skill one develops in the practice of self-exploration. Just as one must learn to handle the requisite equipment in a laboratory on the way to becoming a chemist, or the Dewey Decimal Classification System and computers on the way to becoming a librarian, so too must the contemplative learn to use the "wired-in" functions of the mind directed back at itself. More on this next.

HOW?

Anthropologists have shown that there is an inherent drive in the psyche of hairless apes to alter their state of consciousness. People in differing cultures will fast, run for hours, carry out painful and exhausting ordeals, drop all sorts of psychotropes, participate in demanding rituals, all in an effort to change their experience of themselves and their reality in exotic ways. Folks in our society imbibe booze, toke weed, drop ecstacy and LSD, run marathons, jump off towers with rubber bands on their legs, stand in line for hours to get on roller coasters, each wanting to alter their mind set, see something new, feel something intensely, get high. Why do they do this? The simple answer is that the brainworld of hairless apes inherently knows that any experience of the world or self is partial, never complete, and various means have been discovered through the ages that can expand consciousness. It is VERY significant that in traditional societies – that is, societies that have not lost touch with their root cosmologies – these efforts are NEVER allowed outside of religious activities (save for boozing), while in our society they occur as "recreation." What is missing in today’s Euro-american-aussie society is an interpretive framework that links the alternative state of consciousness (ASC) with a single overarching world view or cosmology.
What distinguishes a mature contemplative from other paths that seek to alter one’s ASC is the intention to explore and describe the essential elements of experience.

When I first learned to meditate forty years ago, I learned a zen technique of sitting in half-lotus position and focusing on my navel region – yes, quite literally navel gazing. And after a while I got quite good at it. I would end up in a bliss state, calm and stress-free – which was damned useful seeing as how I was in grad school with all the attendant work load that entailed. But as time went on, I got bored with bliss. Yup, bored -- cause the meditation never went anywhere, just quiet and blissful relaxation. Only much later did I learn that Buddhist psychology sometimes calls this "frozen ice samadhi." Frozen, cause it was devoid of any burning questions that would use that bliss-energy to carry insight further.

Which is perhaps a long way around to get to the point, which is how does one become a mature contemplative. The answer is that one may reach that goal by various means, different paths, and using all sorts of techniques, many of which are ancient and used in different religious and spiritual contexts. One major difference here is that we are not interested in preternatural goals – we are not interested in seeking experiences that confirm the existence of fairies, gods and goddesses, Nirvana, or the One True God. We are not seeking our totem, our life’s calling, guidance as a healer, lost objects or the path of the next caribou migration. As a contemplative we are interested in only one set of questions, and that is questions that lead us to understand how our brainworld works, how the fine structures of consciousness produce our world of experience. If there are unintended spiritual consequences of this work – and I assure you there will be – they are beside the point unless they forward our understanding of consciousness.

Meditation

That said, the first and most important skill the contemplative must master is centering and calming. Indeed, the word "meditate" literally means centering – the same root as informs our words mediate, median, medicine (back when medicine was on about balancing the four humours), mediocre, and so forth. It means to "middle," or more precisely bring all the body-mind energies into synch and center them in the body. During the process these energies also chill-out, the body begins to relax and calm itself way more than one has ever been used to in the hustle and bustle of our busy lives. And during this process one quickly comes to two important realizations: (1) that the calmer and sharper the mind gets, the clearer one can observe the processes of the body, and (2) that paradoxically the body comes more and more into a restful state while the mind gets more and more active, focused and alert. Because we are conditioned to fall asleep when our body relaxes completely, it is important that beginners meditate in an upright posture. Later one learns that one may meditate in any posture, including laying down. But at first, sit in a comfortable straight back chair with feet flat on the floor and the hands in the lap or on the arms of the chair, and don’t let the head droop. And do not worry about learning exotic postures. People in the East have sat in lotus and half-lotus positions all their lives. In fact there are yoga exercises that mothers will put their infants through in order to limber their joints so that the lotus posture is easy later on. Don’t worry about this. It just does not matter, and attempts to force the body into these postures may actually do injury.

This is the point at which one gets an inkling of the potential for this kind of exploration – that one may be able to learn things doing this that one could not learn in one’s normal state of mind. The key is to focus on a single object to the exclusion of all other distractions. Theoretically one could focus on any object before the mind: a flickering candle flame, a campfire (have you ever wondered why it is so relaxing to stare at a campfire?), a star (Navajo shamans and Tibetan running meditators use stars as foci for meditation), a crystal, a pool of water, a patch of sunlight under the trees, the sound of the wind, a patch of color. The potential objects are endless, and each has its lessons to teach. However, in practice there are objects that are more effective than others in quieting the mental faculties and stopping the flitting from object to object, and all that chatter that clutters the mind. The most direct and effective object of meditation for training the contemplative mind is the breath. It is an object that is (1) directly connected to the system in the body that controls the distribution of energy, and (2) is intermittent, constantly changing and always there, and no matter how proficient one becomes as a contemplative, it will carry you to wherever you need to go to improve.

Meditation on the Breath

The simplest meditation on the breath is to focus one’s attention on whichever nostril is most open and pay attention to the sensation of the air coming in and out of the nose. That’s it, that’s all. Simple, huh? HA! Just try it. Just sit right there in your desk chair, stop reading this and sit up straight and with eyes neither closed nor open – just let them find their own level – focus on the sensation of the air coming in and out of your nostril for the next five minutes. Every time something distracts you from this focus, bring your attention back to your nostril. If you are distracted a hundred times, bring your mind back to the breath a hundred times. That’s all there is to it.

So, what did you find out? That your mind likes to leap around a lot? That there was a lot of thinking going on? Distractions like birds chirping out the window, thoughts about what you need to get done today, itchy patches on your skin? What? Note them all, and if you are serious about becoming a proficient meditator, then begin right now keeping a log of your experiences.

How does this work exactly? How can one tranquilize the body and clear and sharpen the mind in this way? As I said, the breath, along with the heart beat (which some meditators use, but it is harder for many to perceive), galvanic skin response (which you can only perceive using a machine), blood flow (which also requires a machine), is directly connected to the neurological and glandular systems that control energy distribution in the body. This neural system is called the autonomic nervous system and consists of two reciprocally operating sub-systems, one which is called the sympathetic nervous system energizes our fight-flight behaviors, and the other one which is called the parasympathetic nervous system energizes relaxation, digestion, healing and so forth. I say reciprocally operating because the activation of one sub-system tends to dampen the activity of the other sub-system. And meditating on the breath to the exclusion of all other distractions drives the parasympathetic nervous system, which in turn turns off the sympathetic nervous system – thus eventually relaxing the whole body.

How long it takes to reach maximum relaxation and mental alertness depends on so may factors: (1) how much time and effort one puts into the practice; (2) how neurotic one is – that is, how much anxiety arises to thwart driving the parasympathetic nervous system – anxiety is energized by the reciprocal system, the sympathetic nervous system; (3) how much is one in touch with one’s body before beginning this practice – some are into their bodies quite naturally while others are more detached from their bodies; (4) how stressful is the rest of one’s life – a stressful job or home life can hinder relaxation in meditation; and (5) how patient one is towards themselves – does inability to focus get translated into self-castigation, which is just more sympathetic nervous system activity hindering relaxation. Basically, it takes as long as it takes. How much does one want to learn the skills required to become a mature contemplative? The most important factor after intensity of desire to become a contemplative is persistence. Doing the practice day after day after day for months and years if necessary.

Charlie’s Favorite Meditation Technique

When I meditate to chill-out and prepare myself for serious contemplative work, I meditate on the breath, but also use a visualization practice with the focus on the breath that I learned in Thailand. I imagine a pea-size or smaller blue bubble in my nostril as the air passes in and out. Imagine that your nostrils are a couple of transparent tubes that meet to form one tube between your eyes, and that tube curves up to the top of your head and then downwards through the center of your body all the way to your bum. You can put that blue bubble anywhere you want in that tube. Start out with it at your nostril, then when you are sufficiently calm and focused enough to maintain focus without much distraction, move the bubble up to between your eyes on an in-breath and hover it there, still watching the breath coming in and out at that point – the bubble is always associated with the breath at whatever point you place it. Then, as the calm gets deeper, move the bubble and focus of breath watching to the top of your head, still seeing the bubble, transparent tube and breath moving through the tube. If at any point you lose concentration and become distracted, move the bubble back to your nostril and start again. And NO DOWN-RAPPING YOURSELF FOR FAILING! There is no failure in this practice.

When calm gets even deeper, on an in-breath, let the bubble fall down the tube in the middle of your body and come to rest just above your bum, and feel the breath go all the way to your bum. Let the bubble hang there for a while and pay attention to the breath coming in and going out of your belly (yeah, yeah -- forget about the breath only going as far as your lungs -- feel it go all the way down to your bum). When you are very, very calm, then on an out-breath let the bubble rise to the level of your heart, and let your mind rest on the bubble and the breath passing through your heart center.

This is the most profoundly calming meditation I have yet discovered. Not everyone can do it because many people are not very visual. I can more or less see things in my mind’s eye, so I can kind of develop that bubble and tube. But anyone can do the breath meditation without imagining bubbles and tubes. The visualization just speeds up the process of calming. If you want to learn to generate the image of a blue bubble, then get a transparently blue marble, or draw a blue sphere on paper using colored pencils, and practice internalizing the image. The image you see "out there" is called a kasina or "outer object" in Buddhist psychology, while the eidetic image we see with our eyes closed is called a nimitta or "inner object." The important thing is that once you can hold that inner image, don’t use the outer object anymore. It is the internalized eidetic image that counts.

Sidebar: Visualization practices like this one can be used in different ways to
direct energies to different places in the body. A similar practice using
imagined bubbles have been effectively used to increase the concentration of
white blood cells to lesion sites in the body.

Enough said about mediation. This is one of the many things in life that one has to do in order to understand. If you don’t take up the practice, that’s ok. But no amount of talking about meditation is going to effect a super-calm body and mind, and this ability to super-calm the brainworld is requisite to it seeing itself as clearly as it can, to reducing the empirical ego, to reaching the realization of totality, and most importantly for mature contemplation, to learning to reach access concentration.

Contemplation

All the esoteric spiritual traditions of which I am aware make a general distinction between meditation and contemplation. In Buddhist psychology the distinction is between samatha (focus on a single object in meditation) and vipassana (seeking insight into the nature of the object, or a state of intense question about the object). In the West we make, as I have said, the distinction between meditation (calming, focusing) and contemplation (seeking insight into the nature of things). Contemplation comes from the same root meaning as "temple." What the word contemplation connoted in earlier times is "entering a holy place." Now, remember, "holy," "hale" and "whole," all come from the same root. A holy place is a whole place and a healthy place. So the connotation of the word "contemplation" is to enter a place of health and interconnectedness where one may commune with the All.

The meditator learns that at a certain point in the calming process, the work shifts subtly to exploration of some aspect to consciousness, be it the texture of sensation, the relationship between color and form, between form and identification, what if anything is permanent about "me," or whatever. At this point meditation becomes contemplation. The meditator may choose to wait until the mindstate we have called access concentration arises, and then the shift occurs to contemplating whatever question the contemplative is pursuing. This is the most efficient use of the practice because with access concentration, no distractions are cluttering the mind, or even possible. But this is not necessary, for one learns that as the body-mind calms out, the clearer one’s mind gets and the slower the processes of mind become. The field of exploration as it were spreads out, time slows down, consciousness becomes more spacious, and one can discern more and more. And in time, as the skills of contemplation mature, the acts of meditation and contemplation begin to merge and blend. Really proficient contemplatives can enter a state of sufficient calm to do contemplative work within seconds or minutes. And once essential elements of consciousness and experience are realized, they are simply there for the mind to see. I assure you that I can discern the pixelated field making up the blue sky as easily as you can see the pixels making up the picture on the computer monitor before you (if you look close enough).

So, what might I suggest you contemplate once you have chilled-out using your blue bubble and breath work? Several suggestions. One might be to shift your focus gently from the breath to your visual experience. Don’t open your eyes if they are closed or at half-mast. Doesn’t matter if your eyes are open or closed. There is still a visual field. See if you can discern the pixelated texture of everything that arises and passes in your visual system. Now, if you start to get distracted by thoughts or images that might pop up, all you have to do is return to the breath work and stick with that until you are calm and centered again and then back to the contemplation. Remember that at this stage in the process you are mainly teaching your mind to settle down and focus inwardly, and in doing so you are reversing the conditioning you have had all your life to adapt to stress and pay attention to everything BUT your inner self. So be patient. The mature contemplative knows his or her mind well enough that subtle shifts back and forth between calming/focusing and contemplating become automatic.

Another good contemplation -- and one very important to Husserlian phenomenology -- is the empirical ego. How is this done? Turn your focus to anything you identify as "me." It doesn't matter what it is, a feeling, a thought, a sensation, a pain, a self image, a belief -- if you can bring it before your mind, then reflect upon it. Two things you will notice, (1) it is impermanent, transitory, it isn't there all the time, and (2) if it is an object that you are paying attention to, who then is watching that part of "yourself?" Keep this up with every attribute of "me" and you may discover that each and every one of them is impermanent and not the "I" that is watching. Once you have bracketed every atribute you associate with "me," what you have left is the watcher which cannot be reduced. The watcher is what Husserl called the transcendental ego. There reaches an "aha!" point at which you realize there is no permanent "me" -- that "I" am no more nor less than a point of view on things.

Cool, eh?

If you have questions, give me a shout and I will post the questions and answers here for the benefit of others trying to get under way.

Question 1: Is concentrating on a photo of an image as powerful a tool as the image itself -- i.e., photo of a marble verses the marble -- in the attempt to create the eidetic image -- just wondering if the 3-dimensionality of the object is of significance here.

Answer: One may use a photo if that’s all one has. The mind will make the eidetic image 3-D, and as you may find, the mind will also perfect the image. But the real object is better because you can vary the light conditions in a way you can’t in a picture. It is certainly the case that other kinds of visualization practices, such as Tibetan Tantric meditations, use paintings and photos as the outer image. The mind will eventually bring the picture alive on the inner plane.

Question 2: What do you make of the human personality in the context of all this -- while I can see it as an adaptive mechanism, it seems in a meditative context to definitely work against us, serving to reinforce the notion of the "singular me" and making it harder to transcend that notion. Is the personality in evidence at all in that deep contemplative state?

Answer: Features of one’s personality get mangled with the illusion of the empirical ego. "I" identify with certain features of "my" personality, and I eschew other features "I" don’t care to identify with. The fall of the illusion of the empirical ego lays the foundation for greater self-acceptance – one can for instance understand how my being can include contradictory personality features, contradictory feelings, contradictory views, so forth. We can see that we were conditioned into the view that we have only one appropriate set of features that are "me."

Thanks for the questions, Mary!

WHEN?

Those new to meditation generally, and to the path to mature contemplation specifically, are best served by a daily practice – one might want to begin with one session in the morning and one in the evening, avoiding periods just after a heavy meal when one naturally feels drowsy. Try to avoid times when you are exhausted. It is less important how long one meditates per session than that the discipline of sitting is kept up. Start with, say, 20 minute sessions and work up to as much as 50 minutes per session. Get a non-ticking egg timer to time the session, and never stop the practice before the dinger goes off. The mind becomes conditioned to a regular period of time and one will find that important stuff happens during that window of calm. The unconscious mind becomes used to that window in which to communicate insights. Keep a notebook and pen close to hand and after the dinger rings, record whatever happened in each session with as much detail as possible. No one need ever see this log, so you can be candid.

Serious meditators commonly spend periods in retreat, usually a week to ten days at a time, often once a year. A retreat is a period during which one has no obligations save for meditating five or more times per day for 20 - 50 minutes per session. One plans a schedule before the retreat and keeps to the timing punctually. Ideally one’s meals just magically appear at set times. If one is on one’s own, then plan the meals ahead of time so that little preparation is necessary. The point is to meditate, take quiet walks, talk to no one (ideally see no one), then meditate again, eat simple meals, walk, meditate, so forth. You will come to know what you need to do. During a retreat you can work on a problem – say discerning pixels in various sensory fields, or comprehending an esoteric text. I have taken a book into retreat, like the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch (also called the Sutra of Hui Neng), and between sessions, read it over and over again. This constant reiteration of the text operates as a guide and goad to insight during meditation sessions. One might do this with Harding’s little book, On Having No Head.

Do you need any materials to do this work? Nope. Mind you, as my friend Pat Kolarik used to say, if you want Americans to get into anything, they have to have supplies. You have to be able to go shopping for stuff. So, you could spend a lot of bread on proper meditation clothes, meditation shawl, just the right zen meditation cushion (or zafu), hand-crafted text stand, Persian meditation rug, Tibetan singing bowl, bamboo shoji screen to enclose your special meditation space, bubbling water fountain, incense tray, Zen sand garden, lotus candle holders, and of course a statue of the Buddha, Christ, Krishna, Blue Corn Boy, so forth sitting on a low Korean teak alter table. Or, you could save the bread and find a comfy chair and sit down four-square, armed with your trusty egg timer and meditation log, and just... well... meditate.
It is often said that the greater the question, or the more intense the question, the greater the awakening. This is very true, and the path to mature contemplation is no different, paved as it is with endless questions. No question, no realization. Intense question plus skill in meditation = (often profound) answers.

WHY?

The path of mature contemplation, however, is paved with a particular kind of question – namely questions pertaining to the exploration of consciousness and realizations in service to science. What I am saying here is that there are many paths of spiritual awakening. Mature contemplation as I am using the term is not one of them. We use the methods for calming and centering the mind that were discovered and used by shamans at least three millennia ago, but the intent of the contemplation is to explore the essential structures of consciousness. Other traditions have done this, most notably certain Buddhist schools of meditation. But even with Buddhism, one runs into the potential trap of ideology. Mature contemplation is the search for truth, not meaning, and certainly not for experiences that confirm religious ideology. Buddhist schools for instance all hold the view, unsupported by any empirical evidence science would credence, that consciousness is recycled after death; that one may accrue merit in a future life by the proper application of meditation and good works in this life.

Likewise any of the other spiritual or religious traditions. Many of them have their paths of meditation: Benedictine monks meditate, Sufis meditate (their whirling meditation is the quickest route I know of to the experience of flow), Hindus have their yogas, Jains meditate, and all sorts of cults from Transcendental Meditation to Scientology have their meditation practices. And all of them come with prepackaged ideology, and often with teachers who claim to have a lock on truth. More importantly perhaps, meditative techniques are used (when they are used) primarily to evoke experiences that become interpreted in such a way as to confirm the ideology of the group, path or institution.

But in mature contemplation, there are no questions of interest that are not available to direct scrutiny by way of introspection, and there are no goals or "proper" lessons, no prepackaged interpretations and no teachers with the lock on the truth. There is only the quest for truth for its own sake, and for describable results that may be used as data in the service of consciousness science. A future post will be devoted to the relationship between truth and meaning, for it is a topic that, again, relates directly to The Crisis. Suffice to say here that taking up the path of mature contemplation will not lead to liberation, salvation, brownie points in heaven (in any event you no doubt reserved your spot in heaven during the previous post), spiritual enlightenment, merit in the next life, or any special spiritual status. There is no monkhood or priesthood, or for that matter any hierarchy at all save recognition of skill, in applying mature contemplation to scientific questions. No one will call you "reverend" or "venerable" or "grand poobah." Mature contemplation is a tool, a valuable skill-set that may be applied to certain types of questions.

Does this mean that the path of mature contemplation may not have spiritual or personal developmental consequences? Of course not. One cannot meditate and remain unchanged. For instance, it is very common for people to begin meditating and fairly quickly smarten up about their jobs and other stress factors in their lives that collectively operate to thwart the calming and centering process. I have known lots of people who either changed jobs, or wrote off all kinds of jobs they might have previously considered because they were too stressful for a meditator to bear. Moreover, one cannot experience the fall of the illusion of the empirical ego without it changing your life. At the very least it will probably alter your understanding of soul, if you believe you have one. Gone will be the naive notion of a singular "me" in there somewhere that will pass on somewhere after death. And, the closer one gets to the realization of totality, the greater the compassion grows for other beings. This can change your life as well. And, the very methods of calming and centering you would use to prepare yourself for mature contemplation of the essential features of consciousness are the same techniques you might also apply to spiritual questions – having to do with communion with the depths of the unconscious, worship of radiant beings, communication with dead loved ones, chatting with fairies, whatever. These are just not issues of interest to science.

Can you then be a Christian or Moslem mature contemplative? Sure, just as you can be a Christian or Moslem particle physicist or comparative psychologist. As long as the ideology that is the center of your faith does not get in the way of good science -- does not determine either the questions asked or the interpretations of results -- there is no contradiction. Can you believe in past lifetimes and be a mature contemplative? Yes, ditto. You can believe anything you want to believe, with or without empirical evidence (though it puzzles me personally why anyone would want to do so), as long as the intent of the contemplation into the fine structures of experience and consciousness are not distorted by those beliefs. Remember, this is what Husserl called bracketing the natural attitude.

Next post I think I will go into the relationship between truth and meaning (belief, ideology, etc.), for it follows naturally what we have explored here, and gets us back to the issues that involve The Crisis.

_____________________________________________

SUGGESTED READING

Brown, D.P. and Engler, J., 1980. "The stages of mindfulness meditation: a validation study." The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 12(2): 143_192.

Cahn, B. Rael and Polich, John, 2006. "Meditation states and traits: EEG, ERP, and neuroimaging studies." Psychological Bulletin 132(2): 180_211.

Harding, D.E. (1986) On Having No Head: Zen and the Re_Discovery of the Obvious. London: Arkana. [An absolutely unique book, and if you want to understand what the world and self look like to an enlightened being, read this!]

Kockelmans, J.J., 1967. Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.

Laughlin, Charles D., John McManus and Eugene G. d’Aquili, 1990. Brain, Symbol and Experience: Toward a Neurophenomenology of Human Consciousness. New York: Columbia University Press.

Lutz, Antoine, Dunne, John D. and Davidson, Richard J., 2007. "Meditation and the neuroscience of consciousness." in P. D. Zelazo, M. Moscovitch, & E. Thompson (eds), Cambridge handbook of consciousness. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Lutz, Antoine and Thompson, Evan, 2003. "Neurophenomenology: integrating subjective experience and brain dynamics in the neuroscience of consciousness." Journal of Consciousness Studies 10(9_10): 31_52

Tart, Charles T. 2000. Mind Science: Meditation Training for Practical People. Origin Press.

Varela, Francisco J., Thompson, Evan, and Rosch, Eleanor, 1991. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Wallace, B. Alan, 2006. Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge. New York: Columbia University Press.

Crisis on the Planet of the Hairless Apes (Part II): The Fine Structures of Consciousness

2008-04-04T17:06:00.000-07:00

In the past posts we saw that the world of our experience is constituted between our ears, within our organ of consciousness -- within our brain. The world of our experience, our consciousness, and the society of cells that mediate our stream of consciousness we decided to call our "brainworld." We described the interaction between our brainworld and the real world, and then suggested three gross ways that this interaction contributes to The Crisis: (1) We quite naturally and commonly confound our brainworld with the real world; (2) We therefore systematically fail to recognize the transcendental nature of reality and everything in it; and (3) We fail to take due cognizance of the fact that most of the real world is invisible to us, particularly causal relations that are beyond the bounds of our perception.

What I want to do in this post is to continue looking at the nature of the brainworld, and in particular explore the more subtle fine structure (organization not easily discerned course of naive, everyday experience) of our experience. But here's the rub: There are only two ways to come to know the fine structures of consciousness -- on the one hand by way of the neurosciences and on the other hand by way of phenomenology. So before we get into the examination of these structures, we need to say a few words about these two ways of exploring the same scope of inquiry, one from the outside-in and the other from the inside out.

The Neurosciences

The neurosciences are a large group of clinical and laboratory disciplines that study the brain and include neurophysiology, neuropsychology, cognitive neuroscience, social neuroscience, neurology, developmental neuroscience, neurolinguistics, neurosociology, neuroanthropology, and many other fields. By and large, there are two methods used in neuroscience to empirically study the brain -- both depending upon observations from the outside-in. One way is to measure brain activity using machines of various kinds, including EEGs, PET scans, magnetic resonance, so forth. These are laboratory methods. The other way is by looking at what happens to people with brain damage -- in modern times, with the aid of xray and other machines. This is the clinical method, and is by far the oldest method. Doctors have been noticing patterns of change in behavior and personality due to brain damage for over a hundred and fifty years. Indeed, hunters and warriors in other traditional societies have made similar observations.

If you want a feel for what neuroscience has to say about consciousness, check out some of the books I have listed in the Suggested Readings section below. We will always be coming back to neuroscience in these posts, but I will not spend much space going into the nitty-gritty details of how the brain works. Nor will I spend effort arguing for this or that neuroscience point of view. My whole point in these posts is to bear down on those characteristics of the human brainworld that contribute to our being in the muddle we are now in. I will try to keep this in mind when my inclination is to wander off in unproductive, but ever-so-interesting directions.

Phenomenology

Phenomenology has many meanings in philosophy, but what I mean by the term in these posts is the systematic, trained study of one's own consciousness by methods of introspection. Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), the great German philosopher who advocated grounding all the sciences in the scientific study of consciousness by direct, trained introspection. In modern parlance, what he was advocating is the value of meditation as a method for examining the essential structures of consciousness. One of the problems of course is that science has a long history of poo-pooing the value of introspection as a source of data -- and with good reason. Untrained introspection is about as useful to science as would be an untrained EEG operator or a layperson trying to diagnose a brain tumor. What is required of course is the same degree of training and experience for the phenomenologist, just as any other serious, professional researcher. Trained introspection -- what we in BS call mature contemplation -- is of great value to neuroscience, and consciousness science generally, although there are laboratory-bound experimentalists who would deny this. Without putting too fine a point on it, experimentalists of this ilk are simply ignorant.

Mature contemplation is so important to the biogenetic structural project that I will commit an entire post to this subject next time. Suffice to say here that mature contemplatives take advantage of the special nature of their own brainworld -- its ability to turn its observational, experimental and empirical faculties to bear on its own essential nature, its processes and its acts. It is the only consciousness, as we have said, that can know itself from both the outside-in, and the inside-out. And the results of mature contemplation when paired with findings in modern neuroscience are telling...to great effect.

Culture

The reason we emphasize these two approaches to the fine structures of consciousness is that traditional anthropology is very weak in both areas. Most young anthros graduate with their Ph.D.s without having received any training in either approach. Rather, the strength of anthros lays, as it has always lain, in the appreciation of how vast is the range of cultural views, social organizations, behaviors, and so forth that societies generate in their particular history of adaptations. Because of the natural inclination of people to interpret and experience things from their own society's point of view, anthropology has been a necessary corrective to ethnocentrism, which infests the thinking of Euroamerican-aussie scientists just as much as it does others naively presuming that the way they view the world is the "way it is."

Cultural Neurophenomenology

As BS developed through the years, we emphasized the study of consciousness, and especially of alternative states of consciousness (ASC), and how different societies influenced the use of ritually driven ASC to cultural purposes. We eventually realized the extreme power of combining neuroscience and phenomenology (mature contemplation), and exploring the cultural variance and invariance in phenomena. ONe of my friends and colleagues, Professor Jason Throop came up with the term "cultural neurophenomenology" to describe this combined approach -- especially as the term "biogenetic structuralism," which had made more sense during the hay day of French structuralism (e.g., the writings of the brilliant French ethnologist, Claude Levi-Strauss), had become more outdated with every passing year. Far better a term that actually describes the approach -- cultural, neuroscientific and phenomenological -- so that has been the rubric under which we have written for the last while. It is the contention of this approach to consciousness that no account can be considered complete that does not mine the information available in all three sources. And why the heck not? It can only make the account we end up with all the more substantial.

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Consciousness, as the roots of the term imply, means to experience with knowledge, to be aware of not only the thing you are sensing, but the meaning of the thing. And in many Indoeuropean languages (such as Spanish), the term also connotes awareness of the moral value of the thing -- consciousness and conscience are thus synonymous in these languages. The term experience, too, connotes knowledge gleaned from repeated happenings. Both terms then incorporate both "happening" and "knowing" within their connotations. When I use the terms here, however, I tend to reserve "consciousness" for the entire sphere of our awareness, or the entire process by which awareness is brought to bear on something, while I use "experience" to emphasize the sensory rich happening arising within the sphere of consciousness, or within an act of consciousness. Yet, even when using the terms this way, "experience" almost always involves meaning. Normally if I experience something, knowing about that something is incorporated within the conscious act. The sensing and knowing are normally virtually simultaneous. Look around you right now. Is there anything novel in your environment? Anything that you don't instantly identify? Likely not, but if there is something novel there, you will find your gaze lingering upon it with interest until it has been rendered familiar. You see, as we have said before, the prime function of your brainworld is to create redundancy out of novelty. It does this by creating knowledge within the brainworld about any and everything around it. Hence part of any normal experience of the real world is provided by the meaning already in our head. Our brainworld is not satisfied with seeing things in the world as they really are, but rather in rendering the real world around us, including our own being, meaningful.* We will return to this drive to know, to render experience redundant, below -- as well as in future posts. Right now we want to examine some of the fine structures that make experience possible.

THE FINE STRUCTURES OF EXPERIENCE

A major ingredient of any experience of our being, or of our environment are the sensory impressions delivered into our brainworld from our sensory organs peripheral to, and internal to our body. We have two types of senses, those designed to be impressed from outside our body (light coming from the screen in front of your eyes, the vibrations in the air produced by the ear buds of your iPod) are called exteroceptors, and those designed to be impressed by stuff happening inside your body (hungry, hot & cold, pain, etc.) are called interoceptors. What is the nature of these sensory impressions?

Well, here is where commonsense may lead us astray, for we are conditioned to reflect naively upon the qualities of our own experiences. When we look at a red car, that redness is normally understood to be solid, for isn't the paint on the car solid? If we set our foot upon the floor, we normally perceive solidity, perhaps an unbroken sensation of pressure from toe to heel. Of course, isn't the floor solid concrete? This kind of conditioned assumption about sensations is what the great phenomenologist, Edmund Husserl (see above) called our "natural attitude" toward phenomena. We take certain things for granted about how our experiences are constituted and never think to test them by direct introspection.

But when we bring these natural attitude assumptions into question -- when we put them aside and look closely at how experiences are really constituted, then we begin on the path of discovery leading to mature contemplation. And on this path we will find that things are not as we are conditioned to believe. Two discoveries that a mature contemplative may encounter are the pixelated texture of sensory impressions, and the rhythmic iteration of fields of these sensory pixels.

The Pixelated Texture of Sensory Impressions

Sensory experience presents to awareness as a field of points, granules, or, to use a contemporary term, pixels (the term literally means an "element of a picture").** Sense impressions in all sensory modes present in a granular field of atomic units -- pixels. Sensory pixelation is easiest to explore in the visual system. There are various meditation techniques that can be used to detect visual pixels: (1) One may contemplate the visual field under very subdued light, perhaps as dusk descends into the darkness of night. (2) One may lay on one's back and focus on the deep blue of the sky on a cloudless day. (3) One may use a tiny speck of bright light, such as reflects off of snow flakes under a streetlight and closing the eyes, watch the eidetic image (the after image from any stimulus in any sense mode is called an eidetic image) degrade into darkness. (4) One may make one of Charlie Laughlin's patented Super-Duper Dot Detectors -- which is made by painting or gluing a small white dot (perhaps a 1/4" or smaller in diameter) onto a black 8" X 10" piece of cardboard -- and then using the white dot as an object for stimulating an eidetic image which, once the eyes are closed, degrades into its constitutive particles or pixels. There are many other methods that make detecting the pixelated texture of the visual field evident, and eventually you come to the point where the pixels are easily discerned in any visual experience.

The most important effect of this type of meditation is to break the habit of assuming solidarity. This is what Husserl meant by performing an "eidetic reduction" -- "reduce" literally means to "lead back" and "eidetic" means "essential form;" so, to perform an eidetic reduction in phenomenology means to lead the awareness back to the essential form of things in direct experience. And that is what mature contemplation means, in a way -- the ability to direct awareness to the essential form of things while ignoring any conditioning pertaining to those things.

It is easiest, as I say, to detect the pixelated texture of visual phenomena. The great neo-impressionist painter, Georges Seurat (1859-1891), who had read everything he could get his hands on in the area of the psychology of perception, described his contemplative exercises in many of his paintings -- starting a school of art that came to be called pointillism. Notice that in his painting at the left how the whole field of the painting is in colored dots. As the founder of neo-impressionism, it was Seurat's intention to communicate the fine structure of visual expression in his work. But please take note of the fact that this granular texture is the same no matter the sensory mode. Whether it is the experience of a Mozart symphony or the taste of grape juice or the wind on your skin, the mature contemplative comes to realize that the pixelated texture is universal to the senses, be they exteroceptive or interoceptive, and whether experienced in waking consciousness or in dreaming.

So, while our natural attitude toward experience is to presume solidity in surfaces, color fields, forms and the like, the mature contemplative learns to discern the tiny units that make up our various sensory fields. This discernment is one gigantic step (reduction) on the pathway to learning about the inherent impermanence of all phenomena. Nothing solid, nothing permanent. But that's a story for another day. More importantly for our current purpose, one learns to take the actual structure of experience into consideration, thus overriding the false assumptions of the culturally conditioned, naive, natural attitude.When one is able to discern the granular texture of sensory impressions, one can make a study of the sensory field.

One discovers that the entire sphere of consciousness is filled with pixels (in the East they speak of the "plenum void," or a kind of "filled nothingness"). Pixels are contiguous one with another. There are no empty spaces. Pixels fill the field of each and every sensory mode presenting in consciousness.
Even perceived silence is comprised of a field of auditory pixels. Apparent space between things is an illusion, for the "empty" space is constituted by sensory pixels as well. When we see black, which we are conditioned to associate with "nothing," the black field is constituted by black pixels.
Pixels are NOT sparks, or tiny glittering lights, for these are relatively gross phenomena and are themselves made up of hundreds, even thousands of pixels -- hundreds or even thousands of them. If you watch a spark (a common experience for meditators) degrade (pass away), you can see the pixels that constitute the spark.
Once one has learned to discern the field of pixels, it becomes easy to focus on this texture at any time and in any mode, for one learns that literally every sensory phenomenon is pixelated.

The reduction to the essential pixelated texture of sensory experience can change one's view of consciousness entirely. There is a wonderful little book written by Douglas Harding entitled
On Having No Head: Zen and the Re-Discovery of the Obvious. I checked on Amazon.com and you can get a used copy for $3. Anyhow, everyone interested in their awakening should read it. It is all about DH's discovery one day that he has no head. Everybody else seems to have a head, but where his head ought to be is this radient sphere of consciousness. And the rest of the book is a delightful and very serious analysis of the implications of this discovery. Well, what I am saying here is that the radient sphere of consciousness that seems to float between our shoulders is entirely made up of pixels -- a vast internal universe of pixels. And that is how our brainworld presents itself to itself.

Pixilated Patterns and Knowing

But a radient sphere of pixels is not all that we are aware of in experience, is it? Far from it. If we look around us, we not only see colors and hear sounds and feel textures and smell odors -- we see things that we recognize. Look around you now. Do you see anything you don't recognize? Do you see anything that is novel? If you are like me, then probably not. If I turn my eyes away from this monitor, I don't just see pixels and patterns of pixels, but I see photos of John McManus and Wild Bill Hickock on my wall (two heros of mine), some of my collection of toy ray guns (yeah, ok... that's a whole nother story), a computer tower, books, an XM Radio boom box, and on and on. All familiar things in their familiar places. How do we turn pixels into such a familiar tableau?

Patterns in the pixels, is the answer. Not only are our senses designed to depict the world as a field of pixels, these pixels are stimulated at the periphery of our body (our finger tips, the coclea of our ears, our chemo-receptors in our nostrils, etc.) in such a way that patterns of stimulation from reality are represented in the patterns of pizels, and these patterns are more or less reproduced all the way in from the peripheral sense receptors, via nerve tracts, into the brain where they are processed and combined with information about these patterns in our memory. You might call this reproduction of patterns at each level of neural processing "topographical penetration" (retinotopic penetration in vision, frequency-topic penetration in hearing, so forth).

Each moment of consciousness then is a blending of pixel patterns penetrating into the brainworld and memories of similar patterns and associated feelings, reactions, etc. stored in memory. We literally RE-cognize these patterns, we RE-collect form and meaning. This usually happens so smoothly and rapidly that what we are mainly aware of is the knowing of the pattern, not the pattern alone. As you read this sentence, you are mainly aware of meaning arising in your brainworld, not the black on white patterns I am producing before your eyes. But if I suddenly lapsed into Urdu: وضو کا طریقہ۔۔۔۔۔۔۔ مظلوم اونٹ۔۔۔۔ مظلوم اونٹ۔۔۔۔ U.S. آپ کی راے. ہمارے بارے میں, then the flow of meaning would cease. The black on white images would continue, but yoru brainworld can no longer match the patterns with meaning -- unless, unlike me, you can actually read Urdu (I just lifted the first phrase in Urdu I found when I googled Urdu). So, within our brainworld the incoming patterns of pixels is blended with stored meaning, and we are presented with, not just a world of novel patterns, but a known world of experience where very little is novel.

The Pixelated Sensory Field and Its Iterations

But the blending of pixelated patterns from the periphery and knowledge takes time. It never happens instantanweously. This is why the temporal element of experience is fundamental. The fine structure of temporal experience is even harder to discern for the contemplative because it requires slowing down the mind so that not only the atomic unit of perceived space is discerned (i.e., pixels), but also the atomic unit of time is discernable. It is readily apparent to many mature contemplatives that consciousness does indeed flow, as the great 19th century psychologist William James reported. and that flow of sensations is revealed to present within the sphere of consciousness in iterations or pulses. As the brainworld slows its activities, one comes to perceive that the sensory fields flicker. Each iteration or pulse is called a perceptual epoch. It is by studying the fine structure of perceptual epochs, the relations between epochs, and the binding together of epochs over durations that the contemplative is able to discover the essential and universal nature of time-consciousness – the experience of time that underlies the very structure of our subjective life regardless of our particular cultural heritage. When the contemplative becomes fully aware of perceptual epochs and can apprehend the arising and passing of epochs as they occur, then they may be said to have performed a reduction to the real, ongoing "now" moment. One is able to discern not only the pixelated texture of the entire sphere of consciousness, one may also discern the very rapid flickering of the sphere. In other words, the field of sensory pixels refreshed itself with each perceptual epoch. One is then able to see that the actual "now" moment -- one iteration of the field of pixels producing our sphere of consciousness -- can be opposed to the naive, natural attitude "now" that is actually a blending of perceptual epochs with recent memory and immediate anticipation -- or more imprecisely, the recent past (recollection), present (the real now moment) and near future (anticipated perception).

The neuroscience here is excellent, but it is complex. If you want to read about the relationship between perceptual epochs and how the brain mediates them, check out the article that Jason Throop and I are publishing in the June, 2008 issue of Time & Mind, here in an earlier draft in .rtf format: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfbnkb2c_28txff3c7. Sorry about the lousy formatting, but it is readable, and Google won't let me upload .pdf documents. What we need to emphasize here is that we know that the brain refreshes its perceptual field something like 40 times per second. In order for a temporal experience to arise, changes must occur across epochs. Anything arising within a single perceptual epock is experienced as simultaneous. Our sense of passing time, or duration of experience, is an awareness of events across epochs, usually across tens, hundreds, and even thousands of epochs. These epochs of refreshed sensory impressions occurs so rapidly that the naive, natural attitude toward duration is that it is a seamlessly continuous stream of awareness -- much like a modern movie. Movies come at you around 24 frames per second, while TV refreshes your screen at around 60 fps. But caution here: perceptual epochs are not still photos or frames. They are dynamic, and they take time to arise and pass away. In other words, perceptual epochs are not instantaneous. So we cannot carry the movie metaphor too far. We would lose track of the fact that even within a perceptual epoch there is movement. It is just that temporal judgements cannot be made within an epoch.

SUMMARY SO FAR

We have gotten deep into the nature of consciousness and experience of the world. And if you are not a mature contemplative yourself, we may have traversed into areas where you cannot of your own experience follow. There is then a challenge here for you. Do you want to just take my word for this stuff, or do you want to find out and verify it for yourself. If the latter, then you have no option but to follow in the footsteps of contemplatives that have gone before you. Remember the old addage, "the master is he (or she) who has entered the path before you." I will post a discussion of mature contemplation and how you accomplish it next time. Then it is up to you to either take the challenge or to just take my word for all the esoteric stuff in support of my argument that hairless apes on Planet Earth are facing a great crisis.

Let me summarize what I have said so far, so that these posts don't appear to be scattered ruminations. We have seen that our world of experience, our brainworld, is produced by our brain for its own consumption -- our brain is the producer, director and audience of its own internal movie. We have said that there is no experience, no act of consciousness, that is not mediated by our brain. Our brainworld operates by receiving information from the real world through its senses and modeling recurrent patterns in the world by growth, development and alteration of the primordial neurognostic models we are born with. So automatically and efficiently does this modeling happen that we are normall not aware that our world of experience is NOT reality. We naturally presume that what we experience is real (the natural attitude a la Husserl). We come up against the distinction between brainworld and real world when our actions are thwarted by reality. We also know reality from what the world affords us.

We have also seen that our brainworld presents to our awareness as a blend of pizelated epochs and knowledge (remembering, identification, perception, so forth), and that our temporal sense is derived by the pulsing iterations of perceptual epochs. In other words, our brainworld flickers and refreshes itself so rapidly that we naturally believe our stream of consciousness to be smooth and continuous, another factor that leads us to presume that our experience is reality. Moreover, the blending of patterns of pixels in sensory input and patterns stored in memory is so rapid and efficient that, unless one is trained in contmplating the structures of consciousness, one mistakes the knowledge (meaning) for the reality.

All of these factors become perfectly obvious to the trained phenomenologist who has practiced enough to become a mature contemplative. But herein lays the blinkers -- very few of us are mature contemplatives, and very few of us have accomplished the reductions necessary to see without the blinkers. How then can one proceed to become a mature contemplative? What is a mature contemplative and are their paths or techniques one may learn and thus become one? These questions arise quite naturally I suspect, for people have often queried me along those lines. So what I will do is take a kind of side turn next post and try to answer these questions as best I can. If you are not interested in knowing how one trains to discern the essential structures of consciousness, then perhaps you will wish to skip over the next post and continue on to the next bit on the Crisis.

* In our technical writing we called this quest for the meaning of things, the cognitive imperative.

** In our earlier work we simply called these pixels "dots." ______________________________________

SUGGESTED READINGS

D'Aquili, Eugene G., Laughlin, Charles D. and McManus, John, 1993. "Mature contemplation." Zygon 28(2): 133-.

Azevedo, Jane, 1997. Mapping Reality: An Evolutionary Realist Methodology for the Natural and Social Sciences. Albany: State University of New York Press. [Author uses BS to explore how our "cognized environment" (brainworld) and "operational environment" (real world) interact in evolution and adaptation.]

Changeux, Jean Pierre, 1985. Neuronal Man: The Biology of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Changeux, Jean-Pierre, 2002. The Physiology of Truth: Neuroscience and Human Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Damasio, Antonio, 1999. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt. [Author is a leading authority on the brain and feeling/emotion.]

Edelman, Gerald M. and Tononi, Giulio, 2000. A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination. New York: Basic Books. [Loads of information pertaining to the NCC, and how the brainworld works.]

Fuster, Joaquin M., 2003. Cortex and Mind: Unifying Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [The author is one of the leading experts on the NCC, especially the role of the prefrontal cortex in organizing the brainworld. Very readable for the intelligent layman.]

Harding, Douglas E. (1986) On Having No Head: Zen and the Re-Discovery of the Obvious. London: Arkana. [An absolutely unique book, and if you want to understand what the world and self look like to a mature contemplative, read this!]

Jerison, Harry J., 1973. Evolution of the Brain and Intelligence. New York: Academic Press.

Jerison, Harry J., 1985. "On the evolution of mind." In D.A. Oakley (ed), Brain and Mind. New York: Methuen.

Koch, Christof, 2004. The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach. Englewood, CO: Roberts

LeDoux, J.E. and Hirst, W., 1986 Mind and Brain: Dialogues in Cognitive Neuroscience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Libet, Benjamin, 2004. Mind Time: The Temporal Factor in Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lutz, Antoine, Dunne, John D. and Davidson, Richard J., 2007. “Meditation and the neuroscience of consciousness.” in P. D. Zelazo, M. Moscovitch, & E. Thompson (eds), Cambridge handbook of consciousness. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Varela, Francisco J., Thompson, Evan, and Rosch, Eleanor, 1991. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Wallace, B. Alan, 2006. Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge. New York: Columbia University Press.

Crisis on the Planet of the Hairless Apes (Part I): Brainworld and Real World

2008-03-27T09:40:00.000-07:00

We hairless apes* (technically known as Homo sapiens sapiens) of planet Earth are in a state of mounting crisis. When one thinks of crisis, one naturally thinks of global warming, or the energy crisis, or terrorism, or maybe nuclear war, the shrinking middle class, the military-industrial complex, or movement of geological plates with resulting vulcanism and tsunamis. These are all real threats to our ways of life – no doubt about it – but what I mean by crisis is something more fundamental to the human condition – something that lies behind and (partially at least) causes these more dramatic and dangerous conditions. What I am referring to is a crisis in consciousness -- namely, that humans collectively are too stupid to comprehend the unintended consequences of their conscious acts. And I mean stupidity literally here: "A poor ability to understand and to profit from experience," as well as technically: we are collectively (as societies and as a species) not smart enough to model our contemporary environment, ecology, and global society as dynamic and vulnerable systems at risk, and take appropriate effective and adaptive action to rectify our destructive actions.

Now, if you tuned in to get a quick sound byte punch-line on the human condition on your way to checking out You Tube’s latest rendition of "Chocolate Rain," well, you got it. Carry on and we'll see you later. But if you want an expanded and more reasoned rendition of The Crisis (let’s put it in caps so we always know what crisis we’re talking about), don’t touch that dial. Stick around. We will be back after this message from our sponsor.

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What I want to do in this blog is to extend our BS understanding of the human condition so that The Crisis begins to seem obvious, understandable and even inevitable. In the last blog I argued that consciousness and all its acts are mediated by the brain. Among other things, an act of consciousness cannot be any more complex, any more intelligent, any more creative or insightful than the organ mediating it. We cannot understand more than our brain can model. We cannot experience anything that our brain cannot comprehend. We cannot process information that our brain is not prepared or structured to process. Indeed, every moment of our stream of consciousness and experience is being mediated by the cells in our brain that are structured "socially" in such a way that the experience or act can be produced. We experience between our ears. Our world of experience is constituted by and occurs entirely within our brain. Hence, our world of experience might well be called our brainworld. The extra-mental world – the world apart from our experience of it – we may call the real world.**

The brainworld consists of neural models of the real world that mediate experiences that are projected out upon the real world by way of our actions. Interaction with the real world results in a feedback loop – actually a feed forward loop when the temporal dimension of adaptation is included – which our brain uses to correct its models (see drawing below).

By models, I am not talking about foxy women in outlandish outfits, or toy trains. Models are made up of neural cells by the tens of thousands that organize themselves in such a way that they manifest as an image or thought or feeling or set of these attributes to the "mind’s eye," or repetitive actions like brushing teeth. The brain is both the producer and audience of the mind-movie that is our ongoing stream of consciousness -- producer and audience of our brainworld.

Why did I not just simply call the brainworld the "internal world" and the real world (or reality) the "external world?" Delighted you asked! Simply that our brain and our body (apart from our modelling of them, are part of the real world. We are both beings in the real world and conscious beings that model and experience both our inner selves, and happenings in the external world. We are a special object in the real world in that we may experience ourselves both from the outside in (I see my fingers moving over this keyboard) and from the inside out (I feel the pressure inside my fingers as they press against the keys). Only conscious beings can do that. Moreover I can only do it for myself. I do not have access to you from the inside out. The closest I can get to this is the experience of empathy -- about which we will have more to say in another blog.

Moreover, when we think about things, reach conclusions, have insights, feel things – the experiences and their mediating neural structures exist only within our bodies. The repercussions of these experiences occur in the real world, but are limited in their effects to that part of reality that is our self. If I fantasize having a gourmet meal with Sharon Stone, the effects of this internal process remain internal to my body. But if I act upon it – say, I pick up the phone and make reservations for me and Sharon at Le Bec Fin, and then whip off an invitation by email to Sharon at hollywoodcelebrities.com, then the effects of my brainworld activity transcend my body and have implications in external reality. Perhaps a while later several beefy men in white coats show up to escort me to a nice, quiet sanitarium. This was not my intended outcome, obviously. I had imagined that Sharon would leap at the chance to have a super meal with someone who’s intelligence, and humbleness for that matter, are equal to her own. Alas, the real world is a terribly fickle place.

Obduracy and Affordancy

More than that, reality is forever resisting my will and conditioning my acts. In the first place, the real world is characterized by its obduracy relative to my intentions. Obduracy is given a very moralistic definition in the dictionary, but in philosophy the term generally means the characteristic of reality to resist the will and intentionality of the psyche. If we try to walk through a wall without the benefit of a door, we will come up against the obdurate nature of reality. While I may imagine or dream that Sharon and I are having a jolly time chatting about string theory over our terrine de saumon aux epinards, attempts to do so in reality may well prove disastrous for me. Also, if I try to solve a puzzle or problem, or try to recall all the movies Sharon has starred in, and I can't seem to do it, it is my brain itself that is the obdurate reality that is thwarting my will. I am demanding more of my brain than it can accomplish. Assuming I am normally sane, the feedback from reality will at least lead me to alter my expectations, and perhaps adjust my discernment between fantasy and reality.*** If I am not able to make those adjustments, then the fellows in the white coats may conclude, with reason, that I am "crazy."

Neurocognitive adaptation has to do with our encounters with the obdurate nature of the world – both physical reality and social reality (solid walls and social conventions). Indeed, much of early development in the baby has to do with exploring the somatic and sensory limits of obduracy – the obduracy of the baby’s environment and of his/her own body.

In the second place, reality impresses itself on the brainworld through feedback. Affordancy is a term coined by the famous psychologist, James J. Gibson, to conceptualize the active interaction between experience and reality. Affordancy is what reality provides for our adaptation, whether the effects be "good or ill" -- reality provides both aliment and poison. The development of knowledge about the real world is the process by which the brain builds models from our stock of inherited neurognosis that match – that anticipate and accurately depict what is afforded by the world. That object over there is a "chair." The range of objects that we recognize (literally RE-cognize) as being chairs is vast, and are precisely those objects we code as "sit-able." Some objects are also "stand-on-able." Some "chairs" are also "stools" that are cognized as both "sit-able" and "stand-on-able." Many "chairs" do not afford "stand-on-ability" and are thus not also "stools," and we would be dumb to use them as stools. Learning all about that is a "chair" and what is not is part of our development. So too is which women are "date-able" and which are not. Alas, Sharon is, for me at least, not only "un-date-able" but probably "un-meet-able."

(*sigh*)

Anyhow, what is obdurate and affordant is determined by the interaction of an animal with its environment. Obduracy and affordancy depend upon the nature of the animal, as well as the nature of the environment of the animal. A stick laying over a stream may afford adequate support ("bridge-ability") for a colony of ants or a squirrel wishing to cross over, but not for a large dog. Flowers afford electromagnetic information in the ultraviolet range for honey bees, but not for hairless apes who cannot perceive in that range of the spectrum. A river may obdurately thwart our crossing, but not a beaver’s. That rock may afford me a weapon, but not for my dog Toby who has no hands. A small body of water may be a puddle to an elephant who walks right through it, a pond for hairless apes who have to walk around it, and an ocean to an earthworm who may well drown in it.

THE BRAINWORLD AND THE CRISIS

There are many characteristics and limitations of the brainworld that contribute to The Crisis. Some of these are fairly gross and obvious, while others have to do with the fine structure of the brain and its activities. Let me run through three of the gross ones to finish off this session. We will come back to others in future blogs.

Mangling Brainworld and Real World

First of all, obduracy and affordancy are really obverse qualities of reality in interaction with the developing brainworld. Both our real body and the external world present, not only as sensory experiences (I see my hands, I hear my voice), but also as obdurate (I can't fly in air no matter how hard I flap my arms, but I can fly in water) and affordant (I can pick up and handle all sorts of objects -- i.e., they are "grasp-able" and "manipulable") limits to our intentionality, and thus operate to guide the development of our knowledge about our physical being, our world and the interactions between the two. We encounter these qualities daily, as do all animals. We only become aware of them per se when we run up against either resistance to our intentions or new opportunities we had not recognized before. Once we have adapted to (adjusted our neural models of) obdurate and affordant features in the world, we generally "adapt-out" and lose awareness of the distinction between our experience and extramental reality. We all remember when we learned to tie shoelaces and neckties, and how the actions became automatic -- the process being relegated to what Colin Wilson once called "the robot" -- once we had learned them.

Indeed, as the philosopher Martin Heidegger noted, to the extent that our technologies are efficient, they tend to "withdraw" from our awareness. We lose track of the hammer and are aware only of the act of hammering, lose track of the automobile and are aware only of the act of driving. If the efficiency of the technology is suddenly lost, then we will again become aware of it, and of a discrepancy between how we model the world and the feedback we are getting from the world. More will be said about technology and consciousness, and the role of technology in The Crisis in another blog.

The point to be taken here is that we commonly and quite naturally mangle the conscious distinction between the brainworld and the real world. We normally operate as though the world of our experience -- the movie in our head -- IS reality, when it is never more than a rendition of reality -- reality as depicted by our brainworld to our brainworld from our particular point of view. After all, I am looking at this bright monitor while typing this blog and quite naturally -- and falsely -- assume that the light is "out there," when it is in fact "in here," inside my brainworld. Light and color is how the brainworld presents the results between electromagnetic energies of a particular part of the visible spectrum to the mind's eye. A congenitally blind person cannot normally experience light and color. His or her brainworld is devoid of light, just as the normal human brainworld is devoid of ultraviolet images that are part of the honey bee's perception, or the elecromagnetic images apparent in the electric eel's perception.

The Brainworld and the Transcendental Nature of Reality

Second of all, because we normally and quite naturally project our brainworld onto reality, we thereby lose track of the fact that the real world is always transcendental relative to our models, comprehension, perception and intentions. "Transcendental" means that there is always more to the real world, and any objects and processes within the real world, than we can comprehend, or even perceive. With respect to self-understanding, we experience ourselves as we think we are, as we imagine we are. We always know our self and other things from a point of view, and that point of view is always partial. I can see the front of this monitor, but not the back. In fact I cannot see all the sides of anything at the same time. The great painter, Pablo Picasso played with this natural limitation to perception in many of his cubist works, like seeing a woman's face from both the front and side at the same time.

So, we are a transcendental reality to ourselves. If we were to change our point of view on ourselves, our model of ourselves would change. For instance, if we make a study of our body scientifically, we soon discover we are less a "person" than we are an ecosystem. Few of us take into account the fact that billions of microorganisms live on us and inside us, and make our body their home. Just which organisms live where on us depends on many factors that effect locations on and in our bodies as niches. Temperature variation, moisture, pH, chemicals present, available forage, access to light, how often and with which products we wash, and so forth. Different places on the skin have different populations of different microbes. In one study of 26 adult humans, it was found that an average of 46,000 living organisms dwell under each fingernail (see Wilson 2004: 87). [Ha! Reflect on that next time you scratch an itch!] The point here is that our own body is a transcendental object to our brainworld. Even our brain is a transcendental object to our brainworld. We could spend the rest of our lives studying the human body -- including our own body -- and never come to the end of knowledge about our being.

It does not matter what aspect of reality toward which we turn our attention, there is more to it than we can ever know. We can study baseball, ceramics, nematode worms, black holes, ocean tides, legumes, robotics -- it really doesn't matter, for we will never come to the end of it unless our brainworld stops the process of inquiry. And that is precisely what the brainworld is designed to do. We naturally will turn toward, and become interested in novelty until at some later point our urge to understand the novelty wears thin, and then we "close" our model and carry on. The more intelligent the animal, the longer and more energetic will be our scrutiny of novelty. Chimps will study a novel object longer on average than will a monkey. And humans will study novelty longer than will a chimp. But inevitably we lose interest and our model of the previously novel object or happening closes. The object becomes redundant. We have adapted to it. Modelled its obdurate and affordant nature.

There is an interesting Buddhist meditation that teaches one a lot about this process. In some circles it is called "doing a Patthana" (named for the last book of the Abhidhamma Pitaka). The Patthana is a lengthy discourse on causation, and isolates through contemplative methods some 24 types of causality (paccaya) that are involved in any and all experiences. "Doing a Patthana" involves meditating upon any phenomenon -- preferably the simplest of phenomena, like an apple standing on a table top -- and parsing out all the causal relations necessary for that experience to be occurring before the mind. Like any meditation of substance -- and this one gets really complex -- you have to actually do it to really understand the point of it. But suffice it here to say, no matter what phenomenon you meditate upon, you end up with the entire universe, as well as its history and to some extent its future. In other words, you never come to the end of it.

So, to repeat: the real world and everything in it is transcendental relative to our ability to model it within our brainworld.

Invisibility of Causation in the Real World

And lastly, another reason that reality is transcendental is that most of it is invisible to our senses. This is especially true of causal relations between otherwise visible things and events. If a causal relationship is very proximal both in space and time, then we can be really accurate in our undersanding of many of its elements. The other car ran a red light and ran into us. I trow a stone and a few moments later see the splash in the lake. But most causation in the real world is relatively distal from point of observation. We adapt to gravity, but we can neither see gravity nor can we totally comprehend gravity. What we do it fill in the gaps with concepts and theories. I don't mean just scientific ideas and theories here. I mean stories and explanations developed in each and every culture on the planet to account for the invisible nature of the world. This is the stuff of myth.

The Navajo people of the American southwest, for instance, hold that all perceivable things in the world have invisible aspects that are imagined as "Holy People" -- for example, the Mountain People, the Star People, the River People, the Rain People, the Corn People, etc. For sophisticated Navajo thinkers, these Holy People are anthropomorphized symbols for the usually hidden and vital element within all things, and which traditional Navajo philosophy equates with "Wind" (nilch'i; see McNeley 1981). People themselves also have such a hidden dimension called "the Wind within one" (nilch'i hwii'siziinii). All these Winds are really part of the one all pervasive and all encompassing Holy Wind. Winds are never distinct entities and there is energy flowing in and out of even the most enduring objects. It is the coming and going of wind that accounts for the tapestry of reciprocal causation typical of their understanding of the cosmos. The choice of "wind" as the central metaphor is an explicit recognition -- common to many cultures on the planet -- that there are forces that normally cannot be observed, save by inference from their effects.

It is very much the function of myth in societies like Navajo to reveal and explicate the invisible dimensions of the world. The hidden energies that are the essence of the world are given a face – a countenance that may be contemplated, that is "pleasing to the mind," that may be enacted in ritual (like mystery plays) and that may be imagined in daily life as the efficient cause of significant phenomena and events. For those members who are well versed in their society’s mythological system, the core myths and their various symbolic extrusions are all-of-a-piece. They form a single, ramified "cognitive map" within the context of which events – even events in the modern world of global politics and economic affairs – make sense and are easily related to both other events in the contemporary world, and archetypal events that unfold in that timeless era of mythological mysteries.

___________________________________

* I borrowed the notion of "hairless apes" from my favorite comic books, Steve Gerber’s inimitable Howard the Duck (http://comicsworthreading.com/2006/10/18/essential_howard_the_duck/).

** If you are more familiar with BS, then what I am calling the "brainworld" here is the "cognized environment," and the "real world" the "operational environment" in more technical jargon.

*** In BS jargon this process of adjusting internal models with respect to input from reality is called the "empirical modification cycle" or EMC.

SUGGESTED READING

Goudie, Andrew, 2005. The Human Impact on the Natural Environment (6th edition). New York: Wiley-Blackwell [This is the standard textbook on human influences upon the natural environment.]

Marples, Mary J., 1965. The Ecology of the Human Skin. Springfield, IL: Thomas. [A classic description of our skin as an ecosystem, host to many different families of microbes that populate us by the billions.]

McNeley, James K. 1981. Holy Wind in Navajo Philosophy. Tucson, AR: University of Arizona Press.

Wilson, Michael, 2004. Microbial Inhabitants of Humans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Very readable and technical exploration of the human body as an ecosystem.]

Looking At Things from a Biogenetic Stucturalist Point of View

2008-03-19T02:16:00.000-07:00

Biogenetic structuralism ("BS" for short – chuckles can be heard in the background) is a theoretical school of thought and an approach to doing research that my late friends, Eugene G. D'Aquili and John McManus and I developed back in the 1970s to integrate what we in science know about human consciousness, culture and neurophysiology in a unified perspective – a single scientific story if you will. This is not the venue to go into the theory in technical detail cause you may not be interested in all that. If you are, then there is a self-guided tutorial on the BS web site designed to take you through the more technical language and systems from which we built up this story. In addition, you may wish to visit Sam Mackintosh’s blog. Sam understands BS better than most and has some interesting things to say about the implications of the theory for philosophy and theology.

What I will do here is summarize the perspective – the story – and then in future blogs discuss some of the implications and practical applications of the perspective. It is rather pointless for us social scientists to build theories of humanity, society and consciousness that have no practical value -- that give nothing back to the society that begot the social sciences in the first place. What I want to do is offer you the benefits of nearly a lifetime's exploration of the human condition, and raise questions that about our collective future and our destiny and particularly the crisis in which we find ourselves as hairless apes stuck here on planet Earth.

BIOGENETIC STRUCTURALISM IN A NUTSHELL

There is a three pound (more or less) mass of tissue between our ears we call the "brain." It is the organ with which we think, imagine, intuit, experience, plan, create, formulate speech, remember, feel and act. Every happening we experience is mediated by that organ. If we are watching TV, we are actually watching pictures in our head stimulated by the TV. If we hum a song, that song is in our head and our brain is causing our mouth to hum. When we gaze lovingly at our spouse, friend, pet or vintage '78 Trans Am, we are projecting an image and feelings about that image outward from within our brain. Putting this in a different way, there is no such thing as our entertaining a thought that is not mediated by our brain. No brain, no thought. Same for feelings. When we feel, our brain (and other parts of our body) is doing the feeling. No brain, no feeling. Again, the same for imagination. If we imagine the smell of a cup of coffee, or the vision of George Bush struggling to appear sincere, it is our brain that is producing these images. No brain, no images. If we intentionally do something like lift a cup, or walk out the door, or drive our car, it is our brain that is intending the act. Thus, once again, no brain, no intentional act. So, this brings us to our first Fundamental Proposition:

Fundamental Proposition 1. Every act of consciousness is mediated by an organization of cells and processes within the brain. Conversely, there is no act of consciousness that is not mediated by the brain.

There are all sorts of notions about the relationship between consciousness and the body (and its brain). Some people believe that the brain is like a radio and consciousness is like a program that is broadcast from somewhere else and is registered by the brain. Other people, while accepting that the more mundane acts of consciousness, like picking our nose or reciting the ABC backwards, are mediated by the brain, but when it comes to "higher" acts like spiritual experiences, consciousness "transcends" the body and brain into a realm of "pure" consciousness for which there are no neurophysiological correlates. Lots of folks will say, well, if we have out of body experiences (OBEs), and many people around the planet report these, then obviously our consciousness cannot be "in" our body. And of course there are those "idealists" who believe that all that really exists is consciousness and that our bodies and brains are an illusion. Some of these folk further believe that the whole universe is conscious, and that our individual consciousness is but a part of the one great universal consciousness.

Biogenetic structuralism rejects these beliefs as overly simplistic and scientifically naive. This is because every time we look for the brain organization mediating some act of consciousness, we find it – depending of course upon whether we have the technology in place to measure the requisite brain activity. Moreover, consider this – the only consciousness you can experience directly is your own. You cannot experience my consciousness directly, and I cannot access yours directly. I can empathize with you, understand you, chat with you. But the only consciousness you and I can access directly is our own. And we are embodied. That is, you have never accessed your consciousness without your having a body (and a brain). Now, I assume you are conscious because you are like me. That is, you are embodied like me. We look alike. We recognize each other as "people." And we can communicate. Some of us will extend the presumption of consciousness to other animals – our pet dog or cat or parrot – although likewise we cannot access their consciousness directly. But there are many in science and philosophy for example who would deny that animals other than hairless apes are conscious. We should thus ask ourselves, if the only conscious beings that we have ever encountered in our life (including our self) also have bodies, why on earth would anyone presume there is such a thing as consciousness with no body or brain? So, until I encounter a disembodied consciousness, I will stick with Proposition 1.

Moving forward (love it when politicians say that), our brain is an organ made up of a vastly complex system of cells – in fact the human brain is by far the most complex system in the known universe! And just like the rest of our body, it emerged out of our development as an embryo and fetus in our mother’s belly. Long before we are born, our brain is mostly complete, and the organization of our brain in utero is largely determined by our genetics. Hence, Fundamental Proposition 2:

Fundamental Proposition 2. At no point in its development from conception onwards is the brain a "blank slate." Put another way, the brain is exquisitely ordered at each and every stage of its development. Hence, there is also no point in development when consciousness is a "blank slate," chaotic, random or unstructured.

We are born with a complex brain that knows in an inherently human way. Some of the ways we know are very, very old, mediated by deep structures inside our nervous system that emerged in the course evolution when our ancestors walked (four footed) with the dinosaurs. There were no monkeys or any other primates then. But we inherit neural structures similar to those that mediated the consciousness of the reptiles. Other ways we know derive from more advanced structures that we inherit from the generalized mammalian brain. Likewise we inherit structures from the ancient primate brain that mediate experiences similar to those had by both ancient primates and other living primates today. Finally, we also know by way of structures that evolved during the course of homination; that is, the evolutionary process by which we hairless apes became distinctly human. Thus, all of evolution is implicit (is represented) in the development of each and every one of our very human brains.

In biogenetic structuralism we use a special term for the genetically inherited structures of knowledge that we humans all share, regardless of culture or history. We call those structures neurognosis, or neurognostic structures (or neurognostic models). Pardon the jargon here, but we found we needed to call these inherited structures of consciousness something. Why? Easy. Because it is so important to an understanding of who we are – plus, most anthropologists and other social scientists in the latter decades of the 20th century, blinded by the excesses of "postmodernism," made the unwarranted assumption that a baby is born with a wee "blank slate" mind and infinitely plastic structures, and all that is required is for its culture to mold its mind into that desired by the society – fill the baby’s little head with culture, as it were.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Babies are born actively conscious and already knowing their world mediated by these neurognostic structures. These structures develop more or less rapidly according to genetically determined growth patterns, and the development is influenced in the babies’ daily interactions with both the physical and social environments. A Oaxacan Indian baby born in southern Mexico will develop along the same lines (influenced of course by the availability of proper nutrition) as a baby born to a family in the Scottish Highlands. But the environments will be significantly different for the two children. The social environments will be extremely different, so that gradually (beginning at least as early as 5 months in utero) the babies’ ways of knowing will become culturally diverse. Each child’s development will be a dialog between the inherent, neurognostic structures of its brain, and the information each assimilates from interacting with its physical and social environments. Thus, we might say, paraphrasing the great psychologist Henry A. Murray, "In some ways all humans are alike, in some ways some humans are alike and in some ways no humans are alike." Which brings us to Fundamental Proposition 3:

Fundamental Proposition 3. All learning is the result of an interaction between neurognosis (genetically determined organizations of nerve cells) and the world. In other words, the inherent neural structures – the organizations of cells within the brain – grow, become modified and influenced in their development during the course of interaction between the growing child and the world. This interaction causes the development of neurognosis to gradually diverge from its inherited organization, producing both culturally and individually distinct patterns of consciousness. This is the great power of the human brain, to change its internal organizations in order to adapt to different environments.

Anthropologists call the process by which society influences the development of the child’s brain enculturation. This is similar to what sociologists like to call socialization. By influencing the learning process, inherent processes of development, like learning a language, walking, using the hands to make things, eating solid foods, become adjusted in adaptively useful way. The Oaxacan child learns to speak Oaxacan and perhaps later Spanish, while the Highland child learns Scottish English, and perhaps even Gaelic. What anthropologists and sociologists usually fail to consider is that all enculturation/socialization has to do with influencing the development of the child’s brain. And herein lies the problem with the social sciences generally in confronting the great crisis faced by hairless apes on planet Earth. I will have a lot to say about this crisis in later blogs. Right now however I am laying the foundations for a common understanding between you and me as to where these ruminations are coming from.

OK. So far I have summarized the basic views of biogenetic structuralism, and have formalized them into three fundamental propositions: to wit, (1) Every act of consciousness is mediated by an organization of cells and processes within the brain; (2) At no point in its development from conception onward is the brain a "blank slate," but rather it is neurognostically structured; and (3) All learning is the result of an interaction between neurognosis and the physical and social world surrounding the child. These propositions are not just philosophical points of view. They are supported by much of the relevant science. Virtually all of neuroscience comes down on the side of the notion that there are always neural correlates of consciousness (or NCC). The NCC are the systems of brain cells that mediate acts of consciousness.

So far, so good. Biogenetic structuralism links consciousness (or mind, or psyche) and culture with the brain. No brain, then no consciousness. No brain, then no "culture-bearer" or "tradition-bearer." There are so many cool tangents we can go off on, and many will be addressed in these blogs – stuff like: What happens after death? What happens when you drop acid, ecstacy or ayahuasca and everything changes? What about my pet dog, she’s got a brain, so is she conscious? What is the nature of evil and good? How can one know the truth? But first things first. We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. It is one thing to build a theory, it’s another to apply it to actual problems and interesting questions. So, how have we used this perspective? What are the methodological implications? How do we actually go about it?

BIOGENETIC STRUCTURALIST APPROACH

First and foremost, because we insist that the brain is implicated in any and all acts of consciousness, whether those acts be common to all human beings, cultural (limited to a social group) or individual (or psychological), we require that we always address what is known about the neural systems mediating those acts. We won’t allow ourselves to ignore the biology and neurobiology of a problem. In fact, the neurosciences are our first stop after clarifying our problem. Now, right here we are way different than most anthropologists and sociologists who know next to nothing about the brain and neuroscience. This is the first of two great weaknesses of anthropology and allied approaches, so we try to buoy-up this weakness by forcing ourselves to look at the neurobiology involved before we get too bogged down in the ethnography of the problem. We neither treat the brain as a "black box" (Get real! There’s nearly 150 years of neuroscience to sink our teeth in!), nor do we ignore the brain as most social scientists do. Rather, we go to the body first – consciousness is ALWAYS embodied, right? – and we ask of the relevant neurosciences what they can tell us about our particular problem (e.g., dietary wisdom, empathy, sexual attraction, the social need for a leader, kinship alliance, the effects of hallucinogens on the experience of time, whatever).

Second of all, we do not forget that our interest is in people and how people interact. People with embodied, brain mediated experience. Society is an abstraction, you see; so is culture. "Society" and "culture," and even "group," or "club," or "church," are just concepts – abstractions about certain kinds of social arrangements people make. What is real is individual, experiencing people who are often interacting in a socially meaningful and efficacious manner. Fundamental to each and every person we study as social scientists is experience – or if you prefer, consciousness. Experience and consciousness are also real – indeed, you can’t get "realer" than your own on-going flow of experience, right? So, if you are studying a group of 20 people, then you have 20 brains mediating 20 experiencing consciousnesses, and the social scientist, a person with his or her own brain and consciousness is trying to understand something about these 20 other consciousnesses. Simple as that. No great mystery. Twenty-one folks with brains, all experiencing from their own, brain-mediated point of view. And this is the second great weakness of anthropology and allied disciplines – namely, poor phenomenology.(i.e., the systematic study of experience). You will find many books and articles written by ethnographers about the significance of the use of ayahuasca, peyote, datura, or some other psychotrope in aboriginal religious rituals, but very few of those ethnographers have ingested those substances numerous times and can be considered authorities on the phenomenology of the experiences associated with hallucinogenic substances.

Third, in the course of our various researches, we have emphasized both the neurological and the phenomenological aspects of problems we have studied. And we keep in mind at all times that abstract concepts like "society" and "culture" are only useful as abstractions and theoretical terms, and that they should never be reified (considered to be real when they are not). What is real is what one can experience. Everything else is conceptual. That is the empirical way. The reason we need theories is because we very often cannot experience the causes of the things we experience. We can experience a lunar eclipse directly, but we cannot experience the cause of the phenomenon directly. That is why there have been so many different explanations of eclipses throughout history and across cultures. Your brain is a fact – each and everyone of us has one neatly tucked between our ears. So is your ongoing experience – each and every one of us is conscious and knows it. And the correlations between the two are supported by libraries full of evidence. But theories are required to account for the hidden bits – the invisible causality linking brain happenings and acts of consciousness.

We have applied this approach to numerous problems over the years. We have been particularly keen to understand aspects of human experience, behavior and sociality that appear to be universal to hairless apes everywhere. One of our first projects was to study the evolution, structure and significance of ritual behavior cross-culturally. Not only is ritual common to all human societies, ritual is also common among non-human animals, particularly those with advanced brains. We have also studied myth, cosmology, psychopathology (d’Aquili was a psychiatrist by trade and McManus was a social psychologist), social responses to periodic resource deprivation, symbolism, the use of masks in ritual, dreaming, symbolic exchange and gift giving, shamanic practices and experiences, the transpersonal aspects of cultural practices, how societies enculturate babies, time perception, the fuzziness of natural categories, and so forth. If you care to visit the BS web page, you will find many downloadable articles and even books that will carry you further into the technical study of BS theory and methods.

How Do We Do It?

So, given all this, how do we go about designing a research project in a BS way? Or. Less formally, how do we think about things in a BS way? Very simply put, the stages of a serious inquiry go something like this:

1. Clarify the problem so that it can be answered empirically. The question or problem you wish to explore has to be defined in a way that it can, in principle at least, be approached in an empirical way – plus, data must be available for both the experiential/behavioral aspects of the problem, and the physiological and neurobiological aspects of the problem.

Asking a question like "does God exist?" is not an empirical question. There is no research project you can design that has a hope of answering it. But if you change the question to something like "many people claim they have had divine experiences, so what can we make of that?" then we are able to think up an approach that incorporates both descriptions of experiences, the cross-cultural study of interpretations of such experiences, and strategies for getting at what is happening inside the brain and body of people having those experiences. And of course this research is actually being done.

2. Demarcate the range of experiences/behaviors under consideration. When you are dealing with cross-cultural issues, you may find that a common phenomenon may be hidden within an apparent diversity of form. You must be able to parse out the underlying essential elements of the phenomenon in which you are interested.

Human ceremonial rituals are both universal to human societies, and extremely varied in their forms. Some peoples may use elaborate masks in their ceremonies, others may take on the form of a parade, some may incorporate music and rhythms, while others may not. So, how you define your question about ceremonial rituals must parse out the common elements, the essential elements of the phenomenon – elements like formalized behaviors, association with mythic stories, use of psychological drivers like rhythm, flickering lights, hallucinogenic concoctions, sleep deprivation, fatigue, fasting, and so forth. By doing this you begin to strip away the culture-specific details and get at the fundamental, universal structure of ceremonies. You are then able to see that the phenomenon may be as diverse as a Catholic Mass and a political rally.

3. Ascertain what physiology and neuroscience is available to allow you to examine the physiological and neural correlates of the essential range of experiences and behaviors.

This is a crucial step in designing any BS project. Your problem has to be defined in such a way that it is possible in principle to examine the physiology underlying the behavior and experience that is your central interest. If you cannot find any physiology and neurobiology related to your focus, then a BS project is not possible, even though it may be valid in principle, if only someone had done the lab or clinical studies you need. But nowadays it is virtually impossible to focus in on some behavior or experience for which there exists no neuroscience whatever. There is nearly always some research available in the literature, and of course you could team up with researchers who would like to cooperate in your project.

One of my friends and colleagues, Dr. Jason Throop (anthropologist at UCLA), and I have done a number of projects like this over the last few years. One of the most interesting has been on the issue of time consciousness. Anthropologists in years gone by wrapped themselves up in all kinds of weird and wonderful knots over the issue of time. A common view was that while modern society experiences time as a lineal duration, traditional peoples experience time in cycles. Just one more way that "primitive" people are supposed to be different than "civilized people. And of course, none of these authorities bothered to look at what neuropsychology had to say about time perception. Of course there wasn’t much neuropsychology of time perception available before a generation or so ago. But had there been a literature, these anthropologists would not have thought to consult it, even as those who came later have failed to consult the rich science literature available to them. A notable exception is Warren TenHouten’s analysis in his book, Time and Society. Warren is a neurosociologist. Well, what we find when we integrate the anthropology/phenomenology of time consciousness and the neuroscience of time perception, we discover that all human beings process time in the same way, but may focus on one or another aspect of time in their interpretations and their cosmologies.

So, what biogenetic structuralism amounts to is a set of theoretical tools, and a set of research strictures that forces the researcher to examine phenomena in a way that she (1) does not forget to embody the phenomenon being explored, (2) never forgets that what is real are people doing things, having experiences and interacting with each other, (3) does not forget to look for the NCC wherever these are available in the neuroscience literature.

I hope this introduction to BS was not as dry as toast for you. I did want to let you know where I am coming from in the blogs to follow. I approach the truth of things scientifically and empirically. In the next discussion I want to jump right into the central concern of this blog site -- the crisis I mentioned above, namely the plight of we hairless apes living here on our lovely planet Earth.

SUGGESTED READING

Calvin, William H. 1996. The Cerebral Code: Thinking a Thought in the Mosaics of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press [Calvin is one of the most interesting writers on the brain and consciousness. Have fun!]

Changeux, Jean-Pierre, 2002. The Physiology of Truth: Neuroscience and Human Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [One the best discussions of brain and consciousness by one of the leading neuroscientists.]

Donald, Merlin (1991) Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press [A well written and excellent discussion of the cognitive models in our brains, and how they are influenced by culture.]

Koch, Christof, 2004. The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach. Englewood, CO: Roberts. [Read about the evidence in favor of looking for the NCC for all acts of consciousness.]

Laughlin, Charles D., McManus, John and d'Aquili, Eugene G., 1990. Brain, Symbol and Experience: Toward a Neurophenomenology of Human Consciousness. New York: Columbia University Press [The single best introduction to biogenetic structuralism, written by its three founders. It is heavy going at times. You can often get a soft cover cheap on the Internet. I just googled it on Amazon.com and there are used copies from $15. If you ain’t got a copy, you ain’t got an excuse.]

Laughlin, Charles D. and C. Jason Throop, 2008. "Continuity, Causation and Cyclicity: A Cultural Phenomenology of Time-Consciousness." Time & Mind 1(2): 159-186 [Our recently published (June, 2008) study of time consciousness which is a good single example of how a BS project is designed and expressed.]

TenHouten, Warren D., 2005. Time and Society. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. [One of the world's few neurosociologists analyses time consciousness and integrates neuroscience into the bargain.]

Introduction

2008-03-18T22:34:00.000-07:00

I have resisted blogging for a long time. Having written my books and written my pieces and articles, and produced my website, I hoped thereby to reach the 10% who can think intelligently about the human condition, and the 2% who could think outside the box of cultural conditioning to see the plight of our fellow hairless apes, Homo sapiens on planet Earth. Having spent 30+ years teaching in classrooms to the upper 10%, hoping against hope they understood the message directed at them from the handful of the relatively awakened, I ended up discouraged and yet at the same time elated. The few have indeed gotten the message and have responded, and I have fed them as best I could over the Internet, as they have fed me.

And then my daughter, my beloved Kate, did her blog and I find it so engaging and such a remarkable medium that I can no longer resist. But unlike hers, this blog will have nothing to do with family happenings, which I consider irrelevant to anyone other than family and friends, and will have entirely to do with the truth of the human condition.

The human condition is one of crisis. A crisis of morality, of destiny, of environmental adaptation, of existence, and of self-understanding. We are a species of primate, an anthropoid ape (our closest relatives are the chimps), that has over-prospered to the point of becoming a cancer on the flesh of the planet. We have reached the point demographically, culturally, and technologically that we have threatened the continued existence of life in this thin layer of life-space on planet Earth. Our continued existence as an awakening sentient species in the universe has been compromised by our own greed and ignorance. Ignorance of our being and ignorance of the nature of the limitations and possibilities of planetary existence. We have prospered to the extent that our species has over-populated the planet, and yet our intelligence has not led us to the wisdom of limiting our population and our desires in accordance with planetary resources and our culturally limited technological means. We have failed in the main to understand the role of a planet as a birthplace and source of nurture of sentience -- a process that is no doubt occurring all over the cosmos -- to support our development to a point, and then cast us outwards into space and into solar system and interstellar regions, and to spread our seed throughout the universe in great waves of sentience -- as it were, God becoming progressively aware of Itself.

We are currently on a cusp between (1) seeding ourselves into space in accordance with the universal, orthogenetic imperative to populate the universe with sentience, and (2) our failure to meet the challenge of the planetary cusp and eventual stultification and perhaps annihilation due to our own folly.

This blog will explore the dimensions of this cusp as far as this one frail, self-limited human brainmind can understand it. Much of what I have done along this line has been published heretofore under the title of "biogenetic structuralism." My next entry will summarise this point of view, one developed by me and my late friends John McManus and Eugene G. D'Aquili.