Frontiers 6 - Precognition

Can we see the future? Is there any way that we can rely on our perception to predict certainly rather than our reason to extrapolate uncertainly what will happen in the future? Since reasoning has a very poor track record on prediction in practice (observe The Economist on the 2008 Crash) and often the best personal predictions are those made on instinct, it is not axiomatic that analysing the future should follow the same patterns of thought as analysing the past, especially as the data that we require is simply not there. The past has things and events in it which we might possibly know and any failures of analysis come down to our imperfect knowledge of those things and events. The future, of course, has no events or things about which we can reason except as extrapolations from the past and the present - and, as any fool investor knows, past performance is no predictor of certain future success.

The problem is that, notwithstanding the research and ideas of J.W Dunne in the 1930s and others since, we have no hard scientific evidence of our being able to know future events and things although that only means that we have no evidence of precognition and not that precognition does not and cannot exist.The most obvious challenge to precognition is that our experience of the world says that no effect can exist before its cause. Cognitive biases are also well attested that give cause to be suspicious of many claims of precognition. Yet what is puzzling perhaps - given the widespread fascination with the alleged phenomenon - is why no independent and open-minded scientist without a prejudice in either direction has yet conducted a series of experiments that can fully stand up to peer scrutiny in order to decide the matter one way or the other - either finally to quash this last bastion of irrationality or, alternatively, show some interesting effect that needs material explanation. Those experiments that come nearest to the necessary scientific criteria tend to show that there is no such phenomenon but not decisively.

Perhaps the only suggestive finding that one would think would be explored further, if only to eliminate it from the enquiry, is the possibility that precognitive effects exist for some persons in a heightened state of erotic or other arousal. This is intuitively interesting because, inconveniently for scientific minds, if shown to be true, it offers the hint of proof for the practice of sex magick and the claims of Alastair Crowley, altered states and magick and Austin Osman Spare. Of course, it has not been shown to be true, merely a possibility to be investigated further.

The argument that no effect can exist before its cause is not an absolute truth that can be demonstrated philosophically. It is true enough about the world in which we live and in which we experiment but it is not necessarily true. The best that can be said is that it is pragmatically true for a species whose existence arises from a series of causes and effects, whose relationship to the world is one of cause and effect and whose observations have always been made under conditions where time always flows in one direction and where no effect can exist before its cause.

Unfortunately, this also means that, though philosophically it might be possible to conceive of an effect existing before its cause (that time can flow backwards), scientifically and pragmatically we are 'stuck' in a world of forward moving time. Those physicists, psychologists and neuroscientists who poo-poo the possibility of parapsychology are probably to all intents and purposes correct - within their observable world. However, the assumptions of selective bias, unconscious perception, self-fulfilling prophecy, the 'law of large numbers' and memory biases may equally be presumptions since no psychologist can possibly know what is happening in another person's mind at any one time. That cognitive biases are possible or even probable is a reasonable working assumption but that they are certain is not something that any scientist can or, if they are honest, would claim.

Perhaps we should simply accept that 'to all intents and purposes' precognition is not possible from the perspective of not only rational science but also usefulness and probability but also that it is not proven that it does not exist simply because such a claim is impossible to prove. Just one precognition that is true by one person amongst the human billions taking place at just one moment in the long history of the species would mean that ... precognition is possible. And there are philosophical reasons for not entirely closing the door on the possibility because of a healthy scepticism about any scientist who makes absolute claims to knowledge (which no good scientist will do). But the 'to all intents and purposes' is sufficient to make precognition a non-issue for social and cultural investment. As we suggest below, the lack of interest in research may owe more to psychological barriers in dealing with the implications of a definitive answer far more than it does to rational engagement with the utility of such research. After all, the horrible discovery that sex magick might work might seriously frighten the horses.

In an excellent overview of the state of play in research as at May 2014, Schwarzkopf tell us what is at stake:

Such findings of “psi” effects fuel the imagination and most people probably agree that there are things that current scientific knowledge cannot explain. However, the seismic nature of these claims cannot be overstated: future events influencing the past breaks the second law of thermodynamics. If one accepts these claims to be true, one should also be prepared to accept the existence of perpetual motion and time travel. It also completely undermines over a century of experimental research based on the assumption that causes precede effects. Differences in pre-stimulus activity would invalidate baseline correction procedures fundamental to many different types of data analysis.

Which is precisely why precognition is recognised in our series as a Frontier. It is not only the implications for science and religion if a scientifically validated discovery of precognition is presented to the public that matter here but equally the implications for human culture of a major unquestionable test of the claim that appears to prove or disprove beyond any reasonable doubt (and in a replicable form) that precognition exists. At the moment, the fact that psi has not been discovered to be true is not taken (by any reasonable scientist who has not turned his appropriate scepticism into a rationalist cult) to mean that it is not existent but only that it cannot be demonstrated to exist and so only 'to all intents and purposes' does not exist. The door is open at all times to a genuinely fool-proof replicable experiment by open-minded scientists that demonstrates its probability. This must then raise questions of the sort raised by Schwarzkopf.

This is where it gets interesting because the recurring problem in parapsychological research is poor methodology and blatant distrust between the scientists involved. It should not, however, be impossible - though one suspects rationalist and believing partisans are both reluctant subconsciously to put the matter to the test, given what is at stake culturally, lest the experiment comes up with the 'wrong answer' - to construct a devastatingly simple large-scale controlled psi investigative experiment using artificial intelligence within a few years as the objective assessor of the statistics involved, including such variables as sexual or erotic or other emotional excitation. This is the Frontier to be broken - a decisive experiment that sends our culture in one clear direction or the other.

There are probably no better clues to the problems presented by psychical phenomena than those provided by Professor Broad, a serious mid-twentieth century Cambridge analytical philosopher but also twice President of the Society for Psychical Research. Psychic phenomena, in his view, would challenge five basic limiting principles of philosophy (he proposed nine basic limiting factors in philosophy but it is these five that 'stick' in this case). He is not saying that these limiting principles actually are limits but that they are only unquestioned principles that underpin our view of the world and are hard to refute in terms of experience, habit and experiment. Here, I update the five limiting principles to take account of some beliefs and theories about quantum mechanical processes that have emerged as classical physics has not so much been superceded as added to. Part of the problem of 'psi' is that it does not fit into a materialist view of the world based on classical physics but that quantum physics has introduced concepts that seem to permit the theoretical possibility of something materialist permitting, in turn, something approximating psi effects. It is quite possible that one, some or all of the limiting principles could be shown to be philosophically unsound or not quite as sound as they appear at first sight though, as humans living in a human-centred material world, the struggle to do so and be credible is immense. However, accepting that the limiting principles as not necessarily absolutely true philosophically gives us an argument similar to that which notes how 'common sense' is frequently overturned by science: in short, current science may be being faced with subversion by the possibility that it is the common sense now to be overturned by itself.

• Backward causation - that effects can precede causes is the most evident limiting principle although at the quantum level, it is clear that there is plausible theory that posits something like this actually occurring though not in ways that affect the world which we experience. Quantum backward causation is the straw which those determined to see psychic phenomena as really existing will clutch at without any proven basis for any link between quantum physics and psychic experience other than belief. However, if a 'psi' phenomenon is proven, the scientists have nowhere else to go but here to describe what is happening without having to abandon a materialist conception of the universe. Cause and effect will not be abandoned, just redefined in the context of new thinking about time and matter.
• An argument is that, if minds are non-physical and the world is physical, there is no means by which non-physical things can act on the world without actually being physical. Psychokinesis would seem to demonstrate that dualism is wrong (a major event in philosophy) and that monist materialism is correct, raising only the issue of the physical process by which minds can move matter - which brings us back to the current fantasies but theoretical realities of quantum level events in the mind having physical effects.
• If minds can actually communicate with each other (as in 'mind-reading') then the notion of minds being of a separate substance from the physical might start to fall apart (although, of course, it is possible, that insubstantial entities might be able to communicate on equal terms even if that stil begs the question of how insubstantiality communicates with substantiality in order to crerate effects). Skepticism about the non-interaction of apparently non-physical things becomes dubious. The cat is set amongst the pigeons because scientists, again, either have to accept some mystical spiritual explanation or seek a material mechanism by which information can flow over distances between minds. This, again, might be resolved by minds being material and being connected at another level of materiality - which brings us back again to quantum physical effects as the only current road to go down (or to postulate some materiality undiscovered).
• The ability to perceive events in other places than those available to the senses in one body located in one particular place not only offends human reason but offends our assumptions about perception, that perception is limited to five senses plus prioperception (our groundedness in the world), in order to add a sixth sense or set of senses. This is the key claim of those who champion a strong view of parapsychology and the subject of the experimentation by these scientists (for scientists at their best, they are) though not yet proven. If they do prove the existence of a sixth sense, then the offense to reason begins to place reason itself in doubt insofar as reasoning in the human being is calculated on the evaluation of sensory inputs combined with logic. Mental reasoning finds itself having to take account of intuitions that may be pulling data private to the individual from other sources that cannot be evaluated by an outsider ... such 'romanticism' becomes 'true' if science finds that the mind's perception of things outside immediate sense-data observable by others is true. Psychology and the social sciences become far more problematic as alleged sciences on the uncovering of such a 'sixth sense'. Power shifts a little from the expert to the 'volk'.
• A final limiting principle is that persons cannot live without their bodies. The denial of this belief represents the very heart of the transition from folk culture to modern rational and scientific culture. It offends or puzzles many folk with strong beliefs in spiritual matters but educated and rational man can see no means by which persons can live without their bodies. Elaborate schema have been proposed by such religiously-minded scientists as Tipler to give persons their bodies back at the resurrection of the dead but few are persuaded according to the dictates of reason. The idea that persons can live without their bodies is a matter of mere belief while speculative transhumanist science still presupposes that persons as information can only survive if embodied elsewhere - in machines as emulations. Although the least likely of all parapsychological phenomena to be true (because of the complexity of the claim compared to simple experiences of sensory psi), if ghosts (for example) were shown to be 'true', then the idea of insubstantial immateriality as capable of existence in the world as (say) pure thought or experience shatters the rational materiality of the age or at least forces the scientific community to reconsider the material underpinning of reality, It might lead to a sceptical belief that we cannot know our own deep materiality: the uncertainty in itself will shift power a little back from the expert to the volk.

So where we are left is in a state where any form of proven psi (not only precognition) might unravel the materialist assumptions of our time (and so the ultimate reliability of science) if science cannot reasonably quickly and certainly come up with an alternative material theory that can be tested through experiment. It is one things to prove that 'psi' exists. It is entirely another to demonstrate how it works if it exists. The 'mystery' left by scientific inability to prove rather than surmise the processes involved leaves sufficient gap for folkish spirituality to slip through the gaps. There is no philosophical reason why any of these unravellings of accepted reality could not be theoretically possible even if they cannot currently be reasonably argued for. All it takes is one piece of super-verified, fully tested, replicable proof that backward causation exists beyond the quantum level, that quantum effects have material effects on higher levels of matter, that psychokinesis happens, that the 'sixth sense' exists or that a ghost exists (the least likely of all) and a lot of rethinking has to be done about the nature of matter (though not necessarily about materialism) and of reality. Perhaps Cramer's ideas on testing retrocausality based on the quantum entanglement of photons (which might have important communications benefits) will get the funding and interest it requires. If it does and it proves retrocausality at the quantum level, then the first tiny crack may have appeared in our current cultural paradigm. A lot is at stake and scientists and funders seem to be steering clear of the psi area not only because of the unlikelihood of results given current understanding but also because the implications might be beyond what they can cope with in terms of career or mental models. It might be left to a major trading house or the Mars Programme to follow through on retrocausality but that still won't tell us anything about human precognition.

On the one hand, a decisive probability for precognition (even if highly specialised and rare), to take our main example, will raise questions about the second law of thermodynamics and so about the inherent nature of the cosmos that will overnight thrust our cosmology and physics from near-certainty into the more pragmatic realms of 'to all intents and purposes' true for nearly all available situations but yet not all. The gap created may encourage all sorts of spiritual nuts and loons to project their fantasies on to the results but that particular effect does not necessarily follow on from that cause. More likely, the discovery would have a lot of immensely clever mathematical minds considering how, why and when such things might be - assuming every aspect of the experiment had been passed as viable and replicable. It would be a revolutionary event if only because of its effects on the presumption of man in his claims to knowledge if no mathematician or physicist can come up with a viable explanation or an explanations that are not demonstrable except as dodgy but entertaining thought experiments ('speculative science').

On the other hand, a decisive and relicable proof that there really is no replicable scientific basis for precognition (and the psychologists have a slew of alternative explanations for most claimed phenomena) and the matter can be passed finally to the realm of private folk belief and left for its expansion into public life to the fraudster and aforesaid spiritual nuts and loons. Outside these areas, the elimination of precognition as last hope (for many) of the mystery of existence that underpins much private spiritual belief will be an important final cultural nail in the anti-materialist vision of our condition. Not enough to destroy it for all the reasons that make precognition still a viable subject for research today (no proof to date does not equate to non-existence of a phenomenon) but enough to make it an even stronger signifier of difference between the educated (and so culturally 'intelligent') and the uneducated (or culturally 'stupid').

So much is at stake and yet the lack of interest in this field - given the extent of folk belief in it - is curious from this perspective. It is as if no one actually wants to have to deal with the answer to the question. The risks of being proven wrong are far too great for the world-views of the competing radical spiritualist and radical materialist camps. Perhaps that final decisive set of experiments is held back because it is a weapon in the cultural equivalent of a nuclear exchange and some instinct - some sixth sense - stops the species from taking any decisive move that would force humanity to choose one or other fork in the road towards either absolute materialism or renewed uncertainty.

Cultural Evasion - Sacralising Sexuality

I have suggested in previous postings that the attempt to take language and conceptualisation from a traditionalist culture (such as South Asian) into a modernised and modernising one was more likely to obfuscate than enlighten. On the other hand, I suggested that traditionalist cultures had a great deal of a practical nature to teach us about techniques for personal development. The problem here is that the West’s tendency is either to dismiss non-Western thinking entirely as non-scientific, or even dangerous if mishandled, or to turn it into a fetish by adopting the forms of a tradition but not investigate the deep meaning of the thinking involved with a philosophical eye.

The classic case study is Neo-Tantra where the use of sexual activity for personal transformation on an occasional and highly disciplined basis linked to a very traditionalist vision of society has been transformed into a sort of couple guidance therapy for confused liberal adults. These ‘followers’ persist in using Sanskrit names, about which most must have limited understanding, to act as cover and excuse for something for which there should be no cover or excuse at all – good sex between willing adults.

The sacralisation of sexuality is getting out of hand. One of the reasons for this is that sexually healthy Westerners, especially women, constantly have to make excuses in our prevailing culture for having a perfectly healthy or business-like attitude to what is often a risky (though less so today than at any time in history) but otherwise highly pleasurable, amusing and very creative activity. Having to engage in personal relations with a ‘blessed be’ or a ‘namaste’ in tow is a back-handed compliment to the dominant repressive culture. It takes open attitudes to the body and sexuality (and to transgression that harms no one) and puts them into a box that contains the libido as far away from the ‘normal’ world as is possible in a free society.

This containment process uses ritual and strange language forms in order to make a high price of entry to anyone who wants to express themselves openly but without the ritual baggage. It is self censorship with sacral sub-cultures doing the system's work for it. ‘Conventional’ culture, outside these ‘sacred’ models to which we might add Thelema and many others, then throws healthy sexuality into two challenging pots – the ‘normal’ which avoids the subject altogether and ‘swinger’ or ‘fetish’ sub-cultures where identity is sexual and little more. True sexual normality is avoided in every way possible – conventional, sacral or sub-cultural.

Those who lose themselves in ritualised separation are not to be condemned or blamed for this at all. As we have seen from the sheer effort required to expose something that was an ‘absolute wrong’ yet protected by conventional attitudes to the inconvenient truth (priestly child abuse), those with a radical or free sexuality, having seen previous waves of liberation crushed by material reality and cultural conformity, have every reason to create closed self-protective societies. In this, they are like early Reformation reformers faced with the sheer weight of Catholic cultural power. The excessive sacralisation of sexuality in mock-traditional clothing liberates in one direction only to create psychological bondage in another.

The Early Reformation analogy is a good one. The Reformers rebelled against the Church but only within some of the same assumptions about the existence of God on peculiarly Christian magical lines and men were killed over transubstantiation in a way that now seems absurd. A genuine revolution against deist obscurantism only seriously took hold in the eighteenth century and saw equal status for conventional God-worshippers and more relaxed and indifferent others (and then only in the most advanced communities in the world which still do not include those of the American backwoods) in the last fifty or so years.

You still do not get much a choice in the matter across the bulk of the Islamic world or, if you accept communism as a world religion, where Communists rule. Our current revolution in sexuality is still operating on Judaeo-Christian assumptions redrafted in the forms of nature religion and traditionalism. It has still to break free and become a non-essentialist and humanist response to the scientific understanding of the merging of brain and body. Let us concentrate on just one concept that has migrated from the East to the West – Kundalini, the coiled bodily energy allegedly positioned at the base of the spine that is analogous to the source of libido in the West, unconscious and instinctive.

This energy, which some of us feel more than others, was placed in the Western brain by scientists at the beginning of the last century but is now seen to be as much operative in the flow of chemicals throughout the body as in some free-floating unconscious.  The South Asians literally embodied this force, with great imagination, as a snake or as a goddess. The force is Shakti and it comes into play when Shiva and her consort make love. We (as humans) repeat with appropriate reverence this divine coupling when we make love. It is an approach to 'spiritual experience' deliberately abandoned by the Christian priesthood.

But this is not going to be a polemic against the New Age appropriation of the idea of Kundalini or against the simplicities of Neo-Tantra. On the contrary, the arrival of every new idea has to be seen in its context – what purpose did it serve that made it attractive? The arrival of bastardised forms of South Asian thinking have proved a powerful liberating half-way house between a previous state – in which Judaeo-Christian mentality wholly disembodied libido – and a future state in which (thanks more to the slow process of scientific discovery than revelation) libido and embodiment require no special rationale but are seen as two sides of the same coin of simple human ‘being’.

One of the great questions here, because Kundalini is described in goddess and snake terms, is whether art or imagination hinders or helps true understanding. I would contend that, where there is no materialist or scientific language for what we ‘know’ from introspection or experience (but which a whole culture insists on denying), art and imagination have to come into force to avoid total dessication of the soul. But sometimes art or imagination can become neurotic, obfuscate and cause us to avoid the truths that scientific investigation reveals. So it is with sexuality and Kundalini. The reality of Kundalini is ignored in one culture (the West) but then turned into a goddess or sleeping serpent in the other (the East).

The latter is an improvement on the former but it is not ‘truth’ and it gives excessive power to priests and gurus and teachers who allegedly interpret the signs and symbols of the practice. The point being that the central lesson of Kundalini thinking is that it must be a release from signs and symbols. In a traditional society, the language of signs and symbols are less easy to escape than in a modern society precisely because we have so many of them. We have so much choice that we can be cavalier about their importance and being cavalier about signs and symbols is the first step towards rejecting them to ‘find oneself’. Simply replacing one set of signs and symbols with another – as in Neo-Tantra – misses the point.

The truths in Kundalini are perhaps best understood in terms of ‘visualisation’ – the ability to master the body through the systematic use of imagination (which involves focusing down on signs and symbols in order to eliminate them) is analogous to the rational mental modelling used to master one’s immediate social environment. The self and society are interlocked through body. The body encases the physical systems that underpin the emotion and instincts that interpret perception and make the paradigms of thought. The body is also the tool by which the mind communicates both directly and through social signs to others.

The body, in short, is central to the flow from mind to society and from society to mind. Social control of the body is a means of controlling the mind and mental command of the body liberates one from enslavement to others. Disembodied mind (especially when infected by pure reason) is useless in managing society effectively. The body in its animal state cannot have any form of meaningful consciousness, let alone a ‘spiritual’ one. The coil that is Kundalini sits at the core of the sacrum bone. This, in itself, is significant. It is where our ‘gut’ meets the ground when we sit, rested. Our feet connect to the ground, of course, but our feet connect in action and action is our working on the world, our social self.

When we think we sit - just as we lie down to sleep and lose ourselves in our unconscious dreams at the other end of the awareness spectrum. Sitting places the base of the spine close to the ground. In the visualisation, we uncoil ourselves from our base in matter, not accidentally closest to the point where we exude matter in defecation, in a series of stages up to the highest experience of being within the mind itself. The process of unravelling self from ground to mind can presuppose what that ground is (all matter is much the same at core) but cannot presuppose how the expression of self will develop though to the final state of alleged ‘pure consciousness’ which seems also to be much the same at core whoever experiences it.

The variability of imaginative meanings for Kundalini matches the variability in selves so that the libidinous truly represents only one type of mind that is of equal value to the mind whose highest method is thinking and another whose method already implies the sense of being ‘at one’ with all things as pure consciousness from the beginning. The common denominator is that the highest state of possible being is one where a person recognises themselves as integrated with matter as matter-consciousness even if some are deluded into thinking that they have become pure consciousness (as if the mind can ever actually detach itself from the body).

Does pineal gland activation have some link to the sense of heightened awareness associated with reality (confirming an intuition of Descartes)? The research is unclear but the scientific exploration of ‘spiritual states’ is still in its infancy - some of it indicates that “the practice of meditation activates neural structures involved in attention and control of the autonomic nervous system.” The physiological basis of spiritual states seems increasingly likely to be demonstrated as biochemically connected without in the least diminishing the importance and value of those states.

The self-awareness of matter-consciousness arises ultimately and only from the manipulation of matter in stages - not always through conscious mastery of the body but also (as in the tantric or shamanistic approaches) through the employment of different aspects of the body, moving stage by stage until that aspect of the body that is mind-without-social-signs-and-symbols can come into play. A combination of visualisation and the awareness of the different aspects of the body can become the means to experience the body-mind as far from its social creation as is possible. The mind is not detached from matter at all but only from the signification of the social which is presumed to be matter because it is based on matter (which is not quite the same thing).

Indeed, against all doctrine, it might be said that the final stage of awareness is as much pure matter as pure consciousness. It is not a stance that we can hold for long without a large peasantry servicing our needs or a very modern leisure economy – there were good socio-economic reasons for the turning away from sacral ideas in modernity: they become inutile, unnecessary. The full range of techniques to be desacralised are varied – meditation, breath control, physical movement, chanting. I have privileged visualisation only because this is the technique that is most conscious of the breadth of symbols that surround us and which will detach us from our own matter-mind best, not by isolating the brain into one set of symbols (such as sound or patterned image) but by developing a narrative of symbols that shift and change to reduce phenomenal noise.

All techniques may have the ultimate effect of detaching us from a world made up of signs and symbols and attuning us with our own inner matter as refined ‘consciousness’. Both alchemical analogies of moving from base lead to gold and various Gnostic formulations spring to mind. The difficulty lies when we detach a convenient tradition from the scientific basis to the process. The ‘shaktipat’ (blessing) of the Siddha-Guru may be regarded as a signal of permission to begin but there is no reason why, after a commitment arising from oneself, one might not bless oneself, give oneself permission, if you like, to exist.

Injunctions on purification and strengthening of the body might equally be seen as a discipline of detachment – a removal of distractions in order to concentrate on the job at hand and it should need no funny little rituals if the mind is aligned properly. The aim is to ‘sense’ the energy move from sacral bone to crown of the head and the metaphor of unification of the goddess with the Lord Shiva of Creation is only a metaphor of apparent unity of personal matter-consciousness. The profound illusion that the mind is one with the greater matter-consciousness of the Absolute is a physiological one but the illusion does not matter. The transformative power of the experience is what matters.

Far from not being a physical matter (as Eastern adepts insist), the final moment is the ultimate physical occurrence where we use ‘consciousness’ to describe only a state of a matter that we have not described before. It is not the world that is the illusion (except insofar as the signs and symbols of social intercourse are an illusory shell over very real matter) but our own pretensions. In gnosis, our mind is physically enabled to see things and to make connections that mere rational thought does not permit. If this is gnosis’, it is gnosis of a higher state of matter that embodies a consciousness of a more sophisticated nature, detached from phenomenal distractions. The state of being that arises – repeated in its attributes amongst people from many different cultures – is ‘gnosis’ of oneself and one’s place in the world and it tells us nothing about an Absolute which remains unknowable.

To experience this state of being and to allow oneself to wallow in its illusion is to misuse the experience. Its purpose is to re-ground us in the world, giving us a more critical understanding of the reality of the world that has been presented to us as real but is actually based on perceptions of underlying reality that are so often given to us rather than chosen by us. Similarly, despite the fears of ‘experts’ at the dangers of this sort of thinking, it is wonderfully democratic in its potential – once the priests and gurus have been put in their feudal place, modern man can make eclectic use of these techniques and others to develop a critical stance to authority and the ‘given’ without becoming lawless.

The energy derived is natural (in the original culture, Shakti is also Prakriti which is associated with the idea of nature) and as much a part of the world of science as the building of an aeroplane. The base of the experience is the formlessness of all of our past, including forgotten things that make our habits what they are. The start of the visualisation process requires an engagement with the fact of the unconscious, the deep well of rubbish that is ourselves as constructed by others. From that simple truth, the serpent uncoils, forcing its away up - unless impeded by a fearful conscious will. Even amongst the scientific papers, you can sometimes sense the fear of the rational mind at what this thinking might do to their world of signs and symbols.

The principle is also feminine for only accidental cultural reasons. It is a principle in defiance of order and the order of society is presented as a male principle. It suits the male who is an adept to see the principle as operating against his given nature which is male and it is no accident that the final stage has the principle of the feminine uncoiling and then bumping against a masculinised Absolute. This, in itself, should make us cautious about the tradition as it is promoted in the West because the energy does have libidinous and erotic aspects and does involve coupling of sorts and yet it might be considered in other ways by other minds. The sexuality involved though is 'normal' - a means to an outcome.

Nor is there anything inevitable in nature about the process. The normal mode of being in the world is actually to avoid questioning and to embed one’s self in given signs and symbols. Only a few people, often because of an edgy dissatisfaction about the given world, feel obliged to start a search for ‘meaning’ (in itself a futile search except in the performing). It requires much hard work and some risk in terms of social benefits to pursue something that may be a necessity for some (and so ‘natural’) but by no means for all. There are no intrinsic impulses in nature, only in some persons. The particular association of the sexual and spiritual, for example, is a private one (even when such practices involve groups engaged in experimentation) but all methods have in common a sense of increasing internal unification based on a ‘working’ of the libido and the body. Jung seems to have grasped this better than most in seeing the process as one, essentially, of individuation.

Reflections on Personal Identity

The common Western idea of personal identity has depended on continuity of memory since John Locke and is a central element in English individualism. This was contrasted with ‘mere’ bodily continuity, with mind and body firmly separated, which was assisted by another notion – that mind was associated with a ‘soul’ which had some being or continuity beyond the body after it had died (or even outside the body, while the latter was still functioning separately, in some schools of thought).

This idea of a continuity beyond death, based on a separation of body and mind, is still held by many people as a matter of faith. It gives psychological comfort to some but it has not been demonstrated as ‘true’ (scientifically probable). It is a possibilian concept. Continuity of memory, however, is a different kettle of fish. Since Locke’s day, we have seen ‘scientific’, certainly suggestive theoretical, evidence that conscious memory, accumulated in layers of perception and constantly constructing the ‘self’, is only a small part of the story.

We have Freud’s postulate of the unconscious to contend with but also growing evidence that the historic genetically constructed structures of the brain construct both our perceptions and the selection and holding of those perceptions in such a way that memory becomes a very slippery matter in its relation to what actually happened even in the moments before it is formed. Memory is not just the accumulation of perceptions into a form of identity but the unwitting selection of perceptions, one that relies on discontinuities, redrafts and revisions that are built-in to the ‘person’ by their genetic and experiential history.

There may be an inability to perceive some things or a determination to forget in the context of trauma or some other need. If personal identity is memory then that personal identity is not smoothly constructed in many cases but is a partly wilful and partly unconscious creation which involves as much forgetting as remembering. This is not incompatible with, say, the metaphysics of Nietzsche to the effect that we can be nothing other than we are and that we are doomed to repeat ourselves eternally.

The ‘will to power’ (in his sense) of an organism that integrates body and mind into a being that is also integrated into raw existence can easily accommodate the idea that we are not conscious of the discontinuities as well as conscious of the apparent continuities in our identity. Indeed, the mix of conscious and wilful (or apparently so) change in ourselves with part-conscious (or illusory) and with unconscious (or biological or environmental) changes to the forms by which our perception is structured is in greater accord with Nietzsche’s existentialism than with Locke’s gentlemanly English liberalism.

Modern psychologists are only the professional end of a truth universally recognised by most of us who can see the world in a critical way – that memory is as often false as not and so, by extension, that our personal identities are ‘false’ constructions that: a) depend on our body’s and earlier mind’s determination of what should be perceived and then held for future use; and b) are what that same mind should unconsciously choose to forget or bury deep in the process of creating the present which we can then call our ‘self’ at any one time.

Memory, in short, is not all that personal identity is but is only its expression to our consciousness. Placing the possibility of existence beyond the body to one side, our personal identity may be a memory at each point in our life but that memory is possibly false and our personal identity is probably false if we believe it to be true without further questioning. By a paradox, if we know and believe our memory and identity to be ‘false’, it becomes more ‘true’ (yes, truth can be relative here) because the entry of the thought of a false memory as possibility, even probability under certain conditions, gives us the opportunity to choose to be ‘critical’, that is either to accept our personal identity as ‘true’ for us in its falsity as an act of will and freedom (insofar as we can ever be free) or to investigate, critically, what may be false in order to make ourselves more ‘true’.

We are not valuing the ‘true’ here as the ‘good’ – being ‘true’ is merely defined as according with objective or at least scientifically validated reality. Being in accord with objective reality has no necessary relationship in itself with the value of ‘good’ but that is another debate.  Personal identity, in fact, is never anything other than ‘true’ in value terms because it is ‘true’ to the person that has that identity. The ‘falsity’ arises only when the person perceives a ‘falsity’ themselves in what they had held to be true, hence the argument in this note – that realisation of ‘falsity’ requires a new ‘truth’ or new identity formulation even if this is a reaffirmation of the ‘falsity’ as ‘truth’. In this way, once we understand that Locke’s assertion that personal identity is memory is to be taken as a truism of sorts, but one without much relationship to the objective truth of our condition in the world – that is, that ‘false memory’ means ‘false identity’ in any terms that are not totally subjective to the person and so represents more or less of a disconnect between persons and their world – then we can rethink that position in the world

This must generally result in one of three responses – denial, conscious reaffirmation of the given or critical investigation of the self.  Let us pause here and say that no value judgement can be ascribed to any of these responses. The denial that a person is anything other than memory, even if the memory (say) includes the assertion that the person was once Emperor of France when all the external evidence points to this not being case, is a legitimate human response to their condition in the world.

The assertion that the historic world leader and this person who believes themselves to be (wrongly) that past world leader are different in personal identity terms just because one accords with objective reality and one does not is merely a matter of the degree by which the identity is practically adaptive to the world. All those unaware of their ‘falsity’ have more in common, mad or not, than any of them do with those who are aware of it. Madness and 'inauthenticity' (to use an older and rather value-ridden existentialist term) are far from identical however. 'Inauthenticity' may be a necessary condition for personal survival in the world as it is constructed. Madness is a poor way of physically surviving in the world outside the most caring of welfare states, communities, tribes or families.

Each personal identity in its particular case of unawareness has been constructed to function for that person but both cases, madness and 'inauthenticity', have in common the fact that neither is aware of their condition or, until having become or made aware of it, are able to treat that condition critically. The thought experiment here is of the man who chooses madness in response to conditions and becomes mad - is this possible?  Did Nietzsche do this? Was this his genius? Human society, on the other hand, could probably not function easily without the vast majority of persons not questioning their condition for most of the time. Unquestioning is a necessary element in the construction of the social.

Left critics of the workings of society have been fully aware of this for some time, hence their frustrated assertion of the need to act to raise consciousness in order to effect change because, left to themselves, most people would accept existing conditions as true and construct their personal identities precisely to fit their environment. These people become their world – cogs perhaps but also able to survive where those who question might end up in camps or penury. It is the source of the instinctive conservatism of the mass of the population and the difficulty behind attempts to effect change even when all logic points to it.

But being or becoming aware of the fact that our personal identities are ‘false’ to the degree that our memories are false because we are our memories (albeit embedded first in a body with its memory and a society with its collective memory) creates only persons who are different not better and the uncovering of this truth about identity does not necessarily result in more than marginal change. The conservatism of society is often very logical – just as are the narratives of the great movements that challenge this conservatism.

Our bodies, meanwhile, are repositories of unconscious material memory. Their genetic component (without going down the route of the collective unconscious) means that a proportion of that memory exists from before the actual creation of that body. Societies too are repositories of collective memory. The habits and instincts of persons are easy to transfer from one community to another (certainly under conditions of modernisation) but also respond (without further self-questioning thought) to the ‘norms’ of a particular time and place which then impact on the formation of memory and so identity. Memory is constructed out of continuous socialisation and the relationship between memory and social identity is at the heart of 'tradition'.

To challenge one’s own personal identity may often involve challenging one’s own body image and capabilities, the ‘norms’ of society and the representation of oneself in society – it might even suggest radical action: gender change, migration, abandonment of tribe or faith (or acquisition of one).  The point is that knowing that one’s personal identity as a construct of false memory does not necessarily predispose someone to radical rather than conservative actions.

It enables radical choice, that is true, but radical choices, if based on unconscious reaction to the tension between society and material circumstances and ‘true will’ can be far from conscious. They may derive from a reaction to memory that makes them no more authentic than those of the conservative mind set who determines on full acceptance of his or her condition without further thought. Awareness that memory and so identity can be explored and reconfigured is a-political and even a-social.

The only virtue of awareness is that it does not rely on an unconscious balancing of mind, body and society (which clearly creates contentment for some but not others) but recognises that, where the mind is not in accord with body or society and where personal identity is not in line with something approaching ‘true will’, the person, in that moment of recognition, can make choices and that those choices involve the management of perceptions and the investigation of memory (or the abandonment of acceptance of memories as valid in the rejection of beliefs) in order to realign a person and the conditions of their existence.

In the case of beliefs, memory is certainly slippery. To believe something is a core element in personal identity and the shift of a belief from a present state to a memory of what was once believed represents a major shift of identity in itself. Chaos Magicians exploit this in order to play with their own identities in a way that strikes the vast majority of humanity as wasteful and absurd but these are not idle thought experiments in coming to a view on the stability of identity in our species.

So Locke is, of course, correct that our identity does rely on memory but we must recognise now that memory is constructed and false more often than not so that our personal identities are as much constructs of our bodies and society as of our conscious will and actual experience. Although this is true, this is not an excuse for a valuation of some minds as better than others just because of their awareness of this falseness of identity because no identity can ever be anything but false in an absolute sense. Nor can we necessarily draw the extreme conclusion that we have no selves (which is an entirely different argument, if currently fashionable one, to criticise another day).

Having an identity that is true to itself is still having an identity that is constructed or that has been constructed out of perceptions that can never tell the whole story about external reality (not to mention our ignorance of other minds and the workings of a society where so little can be observed directly by the subject).  An identity expresses the needs at any one time of a person who is made up of a mind set in a body constrained by social and technological reality. Thus, there is never any absolute freedom but nor is there any requirement for total determination of circumstances.

Liberation is merely a cast of mind, a calibration of society, body and mind and so a calibration of perception, of memory and of identity. The constant struggle between the psychological and physical continuity theories of identity thus rather misses the point. What might be better considered is a theory of constant discontinuities in which a body (and a society) and a mind with only apparent continuity are both required but in which the ‘normal’ integration of the two can be discontinued without either mind or body ceasing to have some ‘memory’ of itself.

A body without a mind is still the body of the person and can be reactivated as such under certain conditions (as after a coma) and that body would influence a new mind that entered it through its biology and brain structure. Perceptions and capabilities would change identity – we only have to consider the male/female difference and the effects on a mind with memories of another gender in a body swap to know how identity would adjust with biology. Continuity perhaps but also a recasting of memory to fit biology would be likely.

A mind might be reloaded or transferred or duplicated in a machine or another body but, from that point, the new material conditions would create new ways of perceiving and thought that would create a separate identity from any identical mental clone in another body, whilst still showing continuities with the past through inherited shared memory. In the memory clone case, each ‘person’ has a separate identity based on possibly small changes in material circumstance despite shared memories – reproducing the ‘I’m Sharon but a different Sharon’ problem of Battlestar Galactica.

Identity is not fixed but changes and shifts in relation to the environment. It is fraught with discontinuities even when simplified down to one mind in one body. The recognition of this complexity should make the psychological-physical debate redundant. It should also help us to be suspicious of the truth-claims made about ourselves by ourselves and by all other persons of themselves and create a scepticism about claims that any single mind can have the answer to any social problem without the help of other minds or that any person can have the ultimate solution, if there is one, to one’s own problems except oneself.

On Male & Female Brain Differences ...

To many liberals honed on the language of equality, evidence of fundamental differences in the architecture of female and male brains can be dealt with in only one way - denial. But at some stage, they are going to have to face the implications of any neuroscientific findings that undermine much of their universalising project.

We have already provided a number of essays on how social reality is constructed but the essence of that reality is that it is a simulacrum, a creation of often a minority of leading persons in order to enable effective communication and to ensure the control and management of resources.

We have looked (elsewhere) at how sense inputs reconstruct objective reality as individual reality and at how no single individual can see the world precisely as another sees it. The conclusion we have drawn is one of mutual toleration within a framework of a culture that is designed to limit exploitation and protect the vulnerable on a broadly democratic basis.

The Problem of Universalism

The question of male/female difference of brain function is important because the universalism that so often denies individuals the rights of dissident self-expression against the social norm is criminally compounded if this difference fails to be recognised where it exists.

By taking two sets that have already been inappropriately normalised as the type of man or the type of woman (to the detriment of particular individuals in both abstract categories) and repositioning them as one abstract category of human, male and female individuals are being even further alienated from their intimate individual natures.

This is not to be construed as a statement against the equality of persons in regard to their rights to make their own choices within their categories or in relation to other categories but only as a statement against the turning of persons into abstractions where the equality is simply the equality of things to be manipulated by 'guardians of values'.

Understanding differences between broad categories is a first step in unravelling the claims of universalism on the path to understanding the differences between all persons and so their equality as persons with free choices rather than as objects of ideology.

The Politics of Sexual Difference

This is politically important. The then-President of Harvard University was lambasted simply for asking the question in 2005 whether innate differences in male and female brains might be a factor in the scarcity of women in scientific fields. He was right to ask the question but not to assert an answer.

It is a legitimate question.To introduce quotas within functional elements in society that do not accord with objective reality (even if that reality may have cultural or social aspects) is asking for social functionality to be diminished. It may place the liberal who asks for quotas, as social engineer, on a par with the creationist in their potentially damaging effect on knowledge.

The questions must be asked but the answers must not be assumed because it is factually true that there are great women scientists (though few) just as there are men who cannot count beyond ten. The reasons why this is so should be uncovered before blundering in with short term solutions that damage the very enterprise of science itself. The issue may not be one of ability but of will - will to be a scientist perhaps.

This applies across society and across categories. We need to understand difference and then build a society in which difference has no meaning in relation to fundamental equality - which is the equality of autonomy between free individuals rather than the equality of categories manipulated by their leadership cadres.

Culture and Nature

Let us be clear - there is no evidence at all that brain difference is linked to any intellectual ability that should stop women from becoming scientists if they so choose so the issue may be one of certain ideologues trying to demand that women make choices that they do not wish to make and then getting angry at their 'failure' to fit the model as much as one of some claimed patriarchal denial of the right of women to be scientists.

Difference may lay partly in genuine economic or social disadvantage (i.e. blocks to free choice) or it may lie in free choice itself (in which case, it is no-one's business but that of the woman herself). She does not have to become anything she does not wish to be, especially something implicitly dictated by an ideological feminist.

The modern liberal mind seems unable to draw this distinction, one which leads (in this author's view) to a commitment to a socialism of enablement and a libertarianism of uptake that works against the ideology of the middle class progressive who is obsessed with avoiding the serious investment required in social change whilst imposing his or her own values on others.

But let us return to the science - where are men and women really different and what may this mean? The answers are vital medically because, as in issues of race, inheritance does have meaning in disorders of the body and the mind and, if we do not understand these differences, we cannot cure them.

The Revolution in Understanding Difference

If brains are different, then perception and use of language may be different. This means that the very structure of research and experimentation in the social sciences will need to take account of these differences even before research starts.

The revolution in understanding male and female brain differences is very recent. It is no accident that the world of the baby-boomers who are like a sclerotic dead weight on our culture had an academic view that restricted sexual difference to reproduction and mating - and so the brain bits related to sex were judged the only points of difference.

Any liberal of a certain generation with a smattering of scientific education would have assumed, without further enquiry, that males and females were different only in their sex hormones and hypothalamus. The fact that observable human behaviour day-to-day suggested otherwise was put down to culture, not entirely without reason but not entirely with reason either.

All this has been overturned very recently - so recently that the world-views of someone under thirty and over thirty may be be radically different. A conceptual revolution is taking place where the dead weight of the past may culturally inhibit the revolutionary changes required to progress. A conflict expressed perhaps in the war between feminist generations as much as anywhere.

Where Differences Lie

There are now demonstrable differences in many areas of cognition and behaviour - memory, emotion, vision, hearing, the processing of faces and responses to stress hormones and across the brain, far beyond the hypothalamus.

Given that we construct the world through the management of sensory inputs, any differences in mind management techniques and sensory input imply qualitative differences in how men and women construct their reality. Here are some of the findings:-

•     parts of the frontal cortex (basis for many higher cognitive functions) are bulkier in women than men
•     parts of the limbic cortex (involved in emotional responses) are bulkier in women than men
•     parts of the parietal cortex (involved in space perception) are bulkier in men than women
•     the amygdala (which responds to emotionally arising information) is bigger in men than women

The existence of these discrepancies (which, of course, do not relate to particular individuals but to the bulk of persons in a category who are identifiable as being in that category) is a sign (based on experience with other animals) of difference in function - brains are working differently. What this means beyond the crude fact is up for grabs.

Differences also exists at the cellular level. Women have a greater density of neurons in the parts of the temporal lobe cortex associated with language processing and understanding. Similar findings have been made in the frontal lobe. What this means (perhaps nothing) is also not yet clear but it may have a great deal to do with enhanced female verbal fluency - or it may not.

This fact of difference (if not the meaning of difference) is all just common sense and it is amazing that it has taken so long to sweep away ideological presuppositions and think about what we are as biological entities. Sex hormones affect the fetal brain so if sex hormones were recognised as a cause of difference as early as the 1960s, then other effects should have been expected.

The Thorny Question of Toys

The latest thinking is quite clearly that sex differences in cognition are not just cultural and do not result from later hormonal changes in puberty but owe something to these sex hormones and are present from birth. To a degree, men and women think a little differently even before they are born. Again, common sense to any non-ideological mother.

The obvious bone of contention has been the way children choose toys in a sexually dimorphic way, with saddened liberal mothers unable to get their daughters weaned off Barbie or their sons from guns. They have been wasting their time. Even monkey kids choose the same type of gender-specific toys.

What is going on - male toys are things that are propelled through space (cars) or involve rough and tumble play whereas female toys are centred on nurturing. This much is in accord with otherwise over-egged behavioural psychology.

To bend the child away from these instincts is to try to drive brain plasticity from outside - an aggressive approach to acculturation that might be feasible, much as the Soviet theory of the New Man was theoretically cogent, but is asking for trouble with most kids in most situations.

Babies, Faces & Anxiety

One year old girls spend more time looking at their mothers than their male equivalents who prefer film of cars rather than film of faces. Hollywood budgets are built on these differences. When extended back to one day old children, still we apparently find that girls prefer faces to mechanical objects and vice versa for boys. That's day one of existence if true ...

Differences are also clear in how the sexes react to the environment and stress, a material political fact in itself. There are indications (in experiments unrepeatable in humans for ethical reasons) that separation anxiety has different effects in young males and females which may help to explain why anxiety disorders may be more common in girls than boys.

The difference in size of the hippocampus (memory storage and spatial mapping) also appears to be relevant. Men appear to navigate by 'dead reckoning' (estimating distances in space and orientation) while women navigate by landmark. This again is observable in daily life and in rats, so it seems to be in-built in mammalian sexual difference.

Rats!

Although the experiments are done with rats and not humans, females seem to increase neuronal connections in a highly stimulated environment and this is linked to memory formation. Complexity seems to have no effect or the opposite effect on males - they start to forget, perhaps to trim the sensory inputs that they cannot cope with.

However, if a complex but stable environment (with many persons involved) enhances the life of female rats but slightly troubles the male rat, the opposite takes place when stress is induced into the picture - and this accords with everyday observation to a degree.

Male rats learn better if stressed but stress has the opposite effect on female rats. On the other hand, female rats are better at dealing with chronic stress than male rats whereas female rats suffer more from acute stress. Rats are not humans but intuitively we can see two possible social conclusions straight away:-

• A society of men and women must be sufficiently stable and complex with many personal interactions to keep women happy but men need to escape periodically or they become dulled, stressed and unhappy: this seems intuitively correct;
• Teaching boys requires very different approaches to teaching girls - optimal learning requirements are different for the sexes: again, intuitively, this seems right.

Memory is another area of difference where ethical guidelines permit the scientists to move from rats back to humans. There are hemispheric differences in processing emotional difference in responding to stressful events that suggest that the sexes require different approaches to dealing with trauma.

Medical & Social Considerations

Depression also looks as if it should be considered differently in men and women. Men, generally, produce serotonin at levels 52% higher than women. This may be a factor in increased incidence of depression amongst women. Findings on addiction suggest that women can become dependent, on stimulants in particular, more easily than men. We do not present all this as fact but as possibilities - not to be evaded or avoided for ideological reasons but investigated.

There are also (apparently) differences underlying schizophrenia which are currently poorly understood but the point has been made - overall, biological sexual difference is becoming important in understanding the treatment of medical disorders of the brain and, I contend, is becoming a relevant factor in social and political policy as well without in any way diminishing the fundamental human equality which is now accepted as a value in a modern liberal society.

The sensible approach remains one based on the equality of individuals as rounded persons (rather than as universal abstracts) but, within this, the recognition of sexual difference suggests a true equality between males in general and females in general which takes account of their separable nature. We may go further and say that the equality of individuals is not in the least compromised by recognising any form of difference, including age, ethnicity, interests or whatever is simply different.

To force a little boy into playing with a doll for ideological reasons is as oppressive as placing a teenage girl under high achiever stress in a mixed school. To force a male into the chronic misery of a large communitarian household without escape or authority is as cruel as to deprive a woman of extended society and intellectual stimulation.

Some Tentative Political Conclusions

A 'liberal' society that is built around turning a few women into male-type leaders and suppressing the risk-taking and experimentation of males is not a liberal but an oppressive society, as oppressive as one that treats women as second-class citizens and deprives of them of full access to education and their fair share of resources.

And it is important to understand that there is no 'normal', average or typical type of person but only massive variation within a general type of difference so there will always be the man who is more like most women in some aspect than some women and vice versa.

The point is that, in treating persons as individuals, the differences do not matter but the differences do need to be understood when generalising into public policy that is (as a fundamental value) fair to all individuals. Identity politics, for example, is a negation of difference but politics that enable notionally 'normal' male or female behaviour to flourish (even if some men flourish undertaking female modes and some women male modes) is getting closer to a truly liberatory political culture. 

[This posting owes its science to the neuroscientist Larry Cahill's article 'His Brain, Her Brain' in Scientific American but the social and political conclusions are entirely my own]

'Nerve Zero' and Speculation on Human Happiness

R. Douglas Fields. the neuro- and cognitive scientist, wrote a curious and very cautious account of a cranial nerve in the sperm whale in Scientific American some four or five years ago which, true or not, gave rise to some thoughts on our perception of reality.  He has postulated that this Nerve Zero is an additional 'sense' and that it might be operative as such in the human being, given common mammalian structures.

Whether his thesis will be confirmed or not, Fields is dealing with a mystery - whether a tiny nerve, hitherto ignored, at the base of the brain, is at the heart of subliminal sexual attraction. Do pheromones hit this nerve and relay deep subsconscious signals to the brain? Does this explain 'instant attraction' and what does it mean for sexual free will?

Most nerves enter the brain through the spinal chord but cranial nerves go direct to the brain and so to the 'mind'. They are linked to our sensory inputs and to the way we express ourselves, so a 'sixth' sense linked to a cranial nerve looks to be intimately connected to the way we construct our reality and the way that we behave.

Such a nerve is a part not of the autonomic process or of our willed movement (though we can will much of our expression) so much as of the system by which sensory inputs compete for attention and so create our model of the world - if the nerve exists quite as Fields suggests. It may also have (see below) an expressive component of its own.

The nerve itself provenly exists in all vertebrates (discovered in humans as long ago as 1913) but what exactly it is for is what remains disputed. What we do know is that it sends its endings to the nose which has led some sceptics to believe that it is merely a frayed strand of the olfactory nerve. Field's whale autopsy threw that thesis in doubt.

The role of the olfactory nerve with its complex of 347 types of receptor cell in determining sex, social rank, territories, reproductive status and even the identity of individuals such as mates and offspring is well accepted and there are certainly indications that humans, like other animals, exchange secret pheromone messages.

Pheromones are, according to Fields and others, very different from odor-producing molecules. Pheromones are large molecules that need intimate contact to pass between persons (such as kissing or 'snuggling'), whereas smells are small and volatile molecules that can travel large distances. Pheromones also do not need to 'smell' - if a pheromone goes straight to our brain, it could by-pass our consciousness entirely so the issue is only whether there is a mechanism for doing this. So-called 'nerve zero' allows the possibility of that by-pass.

There is a pheronome detector in the animal brain as it is - a specialised area within the vomeronasal organ which connects to the olfactory bulb in the brain that sorts and makes sense of olfactory inputs but which then routes these to the amygdala (sexual arousal through release of hormones) rather than the olfactory cortex (conscious perception). Pheromones (it is believed) can influence the oestrus cycle, stimulate sexual behaviour and ovulation and even, when it goes wrong, cause abortion. Pheromones from familiar and unfamilar mates can have different effects in this respect.

In 2006, Buck and Liberles (one of whom is a Nobel Laureate) found a new family of receptor proteins [TAARS] on the mouse nose, on the surface of the sense cells that detect pheromones. This, we are told, increases the possibility that mammals, at least, have a separate pheromone pathway. Certainly the mouse pheromones are intimately linked to sexual behaviours. Buck found that humans have the genes to make at least six of the 15 pheromone receptors found in the mice. However, the human vomeronasal organ appears to be vestigial, like gill slits, in humans so if pheromones are travelling to the human brain it is not by that route.

This is where 'nerve zero' may be relevant - its endings are in the nasal cavity (the 'pick up' point) and its nerve fibers reach into those ''hot-button' [Fields again] sex regions of the brain that are concerned with basic reproduction, that release sex hormones and control thirst and hunger, completely by-passing the conssciousness-creating olfactory bulb. The sort of cruel experimentation done by scientists to extend our knowledge - the 'original sin' behind all knowing in this area - has shown that severing 'nerve zero' in hamsters results in a failure to mate. Electrically stimulating the nerve in fish and other animals seems to be related to the triggering of sexual responses. The evidence mounts.

Other research by Fields suggests that nerve zero fibres were stuffed with peptide hormones that led him to conclude that the nerve could even be a neurosecretory organ in its own right, regulating reproduction by releasing hormones. But nerve zero remains a mystery. It is doing something different from analysing smell and it connects to the part of the brain controlling reproduction whilst also releasing a powerful sex hormone into the blood. If its early embryonic pathway is disturbed, the result is a syndrome that leaves the animal unable to mature sexually beyond puberty.

Nor need nerve zero have a solely sexual function since electrical impulses are travelling out from the brain through the nerve with no current understanding of their function, leaving room for some interesting and wholly unscientific speculation about our ability to communicate intimacy beyond immediate consciousness ... could this be love? Fields raises the old free will problem since, if he is right, external stimuli are by-passing consciousness in order to control brain and behaviour.

Psychological experiments seem to indicate that cognitive abilities improve when people smell the sweat of fearful rather than happy people so that the psychological state of one person seems to be able to trigger the cognitive state of another if they are within 'smell' distance. Socially, this suggests that groups can operate at some level like flocks or herds, certainly in states of excitation or danger. Chemical warning signals may be being transferred from person to person at a level well below the consciousness of each.

Women with more pheromone release around their nipples tend to get their children to latch on and gain weight faster than women without such glands - another intriguing example of an instinctive biological operation beyond consciousness. But there is another aspect to the case. It is pretty well established that the mind is selective in choosing inputs from the five senses so that the picture of the world on which we operate is a representation of it but it is not the only possible representation and it is a representation that deliberately excludes large tracts of objective reality in order to allow us to function.

As we have noted in earlier essays, our social reality is a compromise between millions of individual realities where the socialised mind of each individual helps in choosing between sensory inputs, prioritising the inputs into a mental map that starts on the basis of 'prejudice'. To de-socialise the mental map is to re-see the territory. Now we have a sixth instinctual sense to cope with, one that adds intimacy and sexuality to the socialised mind either to subvert it perhaps or to direct it to its own instinctual nature regardless of social norms. This instinct is animal and personal, based on intimate communications with very significant others and on a guardedness about the world beyond.

Universalists and rationalists will hate this. Perhaps they would want this nerve removed. But it is an essential part of who we are and socialisation and failed attempts at 'perfectability' flounder, to our great individual benefit, on the subversion offered by our instinctive desires and our need to flock with those we feel comfortable with. The pheromonal nerve zero may not only mean that love is blind and 'against reason' (which we knew) but that pheromonality represents some higher reason where the mind-body that is more than ego-consciousness is seeking out what is best for it in a world where 'all things are equal'.

Of course, social norms and culture do not permit 'all things to be equal' (this is classic 'alienation' territory) so perhaps this is the dilemma - to have a culture where 'nerve zero' constantly fights for happiness against the acculturation process or one that is adapted to 'nerve zero' and is, thus, happy. Such an integrated culture could be a revolutionary one.

Against Words & Tradition -Ten Propositions for Discussion

1. Each person perceives the world marginally differently at each successive point in time and each generation of persons perceives the world collectively in a way different from other generations. To hold a truth from past experience as self-evident is absurd. New conditions create new truths and all conditions are, in some respect, new conditions.

2. Experience is more than language. All our senses and our sense of being are engaged in knowing the world. The word spoken is only a part of knowing and scarcely the most dominant or reliable part of it. The word written is more distant still from the word spoken in its representation of the true state of affairs in the world.

3. How we use a word and the context of the word is more important than the word itself. The text tells us nothing without the context in which the text is used. The text in itself is a false friend. Our use of the text is what matters.

4. Words can never capture the totality of human experience. Words are a simplification of experience and so of being in the world. To use a word is immediately to begin to tell a lie.

5. When we say that two things are the same, we are not able to say that they are the same, we are merely saying that it is convenient that we treat these two things as the same for our purposes and our purpose only derives from words if we choose to make words our purpose. Knowing our purpose beyond and behind words is a more valuable purpose than inventing a purpose from the words to hand.

6. The space that we exist in is a space in relation to our perception of that space. There are as many worlds as there are persons perceiving a world in which they perceive themselves as existing.

7. To define a thing is to remove it from its existence as experienced by a person in the world -  definition is the begining of the process by which lies are told.

8. Existence is not logical. It merely exists.

9. Metaphysics cannot exist in words. It can only exist in experience, if it exists at all - which is to be doubted.

10. We are what we do in the world in the flow of time. We have no essence beyond our act in a moment of time and personality is an accumulation of such acts under conditions where the next act will not be precisely like any act ever done before.