Are minds today different from minds in the past and why? An equally interesting question is why do some minds seem to reflect entirely the values and attitudes of the past and others to arrive at entirely new values, some of which seem to have no obvious past equivalent? How is the 'now' constructed? I am not going to try to deal with these questions here but only to pursue a train of thought circling the position of radical scepticism about what we can know about past minds.
One major problem is, of course, that we cannot know other minds even when they are present to us. This is that central issue raised by Thomas Nagel of what it is like to be a bat. We cannot really know what it is to be a bat. We are constantly imagining what it might like to be another human just as we can imagine that we know what it would be like to behave like a bat yet we cannot ever be a bat. Other humans are, in this sense, bats. We cannot be other humans. We can only surmise the contents of other people's minds from our own mind's operations and their behaviour as seen through the lens of our own experience. We rely on evidence and if the evidence is flawed, our analysis must be flawed.
Language (texts in particular) are false friends in telling us what other minds are like. Those people who say that they know that people in the past thought in such-and-such a way are really only telling us what they think other people may have thought (a 'best and most probable guess'), generally based on these false friends (as texts) which say only what a few people said in specific literary contexts or as reported by people seeking to use the words as weapons or tools for their own purposes. Even very recently, we may have archives of papers and they may tell us a great deal about how decisions were made, the tensions between people and what people said they believed but they can never give us access to the private conversations, silences and thoughts of people who may have been playing very different games from the ones outlined in those texts.
Past minds are thus largely unknown except in defined historical conditions where the minds are really just functions of a social operation and what we do know is often based on merely textual material that the past has used for its own purposes with the inner motives often masked. All texts are performances where we do not know or perhaps care what the actor is really like but only what he or she is trying to present themselves as on stage. We reinterpret the play, guided by the script and the skill of the actors, in order to present them to ourselves as what we paid to see - as exemplars, as warnings, as tales, as imaginings, as the building blocks to an argument in our local context.
However, there do seem to be differences in minds between generations that can be observed by us in the here and now and we should not assume that such differences did not exist in the past. Things do change even if we are unsure of what we can know. For example, there seem to be functional 'brain differences' emerging between minds that depend for their meaning on texts and the rest of the population and between minds that rely on printed texts and those that rely on internet 'textuality'. There is no reason why these effects of technological change should not apply as much to the past as the present. The technological conditions of each age appear to dictate not merely the forms of thought but also our ability to contextualise and judge content so the current age of high complexity and mass interactive communications suggests that the past is going to be mentally different from the present even if we cannot know much about the minds of the present and less about the minds of the past.
The shift of minds from printed texts, cinematic story-telling and still photography and art works to fast-moving video game play, internet grazing and interactivity does seem to be, literally, changing minds. Most of this is represented in the media by standard issue cultural hysteria but the issues raised are serious and they may take some time to work their way through to changes in our own capacity and culture.
Memory effects seem to be of most interest under conditions where there is no now requirement for memory palaces and loss of interest in rote learning for anything but basic skills. However, the mind that thinks in terms of textual 'canons' (where part of the personality has been pre-templated from 'great works') is very different from the mind that operates synchronically with a fast-moving world in a constant revision of mental drafts. Rote learning is also associated with traditionalist text-based canons for a good reason - both are emergent properties of the Iron Age yet we are now in the Silicon Age where general information is broadly free and widespread and not held tight by small elites. There is no point in 'valuating' this as good or bad, worse or better, but there is equally no point in resisting the facts of the matter - minds are changing and must have changed in similar ways in the past. If we have problems understanding these changes today, how can we possibly believe we know how minds functioned even in the recent past.
There are many thinkers who have prepared the ground for the new ways of thinking based on new technologies - we have often pointed out the role of the existentialists and phenomenologists and, more recently, radical trans-humanist thought - but there are also contributions from psychologists. Again, the tentative findings of consciousness studies, neuroscience and the cognitive sciences seem to be lock-stepping with our use of the new technologies. We have already noted the flawed but dynamic reasoning of Wilhelm Reich and the absurdity of behaviourism except as a functional tool but another fruitful line of enquiry is that of Lacan.
Lacan is a problem in many respects but one stands out. It is the problem of all thinkers working within a pre-ordained theory. The truth becomes impenetrable because the thinker is operative within a framework which is mere mysticism at root. Lacan's mystical belief system is Freudianism - much as others operate within Marxist or scholastic frameworks. Early Reichian theory - for example - is hobbled by Reich's commitment to Marxism. It might be argued that Lacan cannot be removed from his framework any more than, say, Lenin or Aquinas from theirs. There is some truth in this but only if we insist on treating these thinkers as texts and not as door-openers, introducers of new ideas that help drive culture even as the texts begin to ossify their followers. One should follow the ideas through to new ideas and not dwell amidst the textual interpreters of ideas.
Lacan was imaginatively engaged in the mind and was closely associated with the surrealist movement which was a living cultural force in the interwar period. It was not just that surrealism responded to a psychological theory (Freudian) but that Lacan's thought and surrealism engaged in a direct dialectic with the intellectual life of artists and thinkers.
The first Lacanian case (amongst scarcely any published) is that of Marguerite. Forget the detail (which involves a 'mad' attempt to murder a famous actress of the day) except to note that we have a paranoiac who identifies with the actress, in herself a 'false front' for social performance. Forget also that Lacan stank as a psychotherapist and was a consummate narcissist on his own account (in the minds of some, a brilliant high functioning sociopath) and see him as an interpreter of culture which is where he may have something to say to us. The desire to be an actor or actress is not uncommon but it is madness to seek to kill one because you have over-identified with her (if we accept Lacan's interpretation).
What is important here is not the case but the use to which Lacan put it. Here were the seeds of the uncovering of something that divides the contemporary mind and those who just 'exist' in inherited versions of the past - an understanding of how our identities are constructed by our appropriation of the social (of objects and of others, both real and imagined). This awareness is revolutionary and certainly derives from the 'uncovering' of the unconscious as a central cultural concept. Once we know this, then the search for individual identity or individuation (to leap across to the world of Jung) requires a shift from having the social thrust upon us in order to create our identity from without to re-ordering the social in order to have it reflect an identity that we have created for ourselves alongside the social.
What is interesting about this is that cases like Marguerite are 'mad' only because they have taken a step towards liberation (the attempt to construct an identity that chooses what to appropriate in the social to meet psychic needs) but have imaginatively detached themselves from the functional reality of the social. One is reminded of the 'mad' Last King of the Imperial Dynasty of America in Chambers' the Repairer of Reputations: the hero has a collection of books on Napoleon, the quintessential mad appropriation of the nineteenth century, on his mantelpiece. It could be argued that the fully socialised who are mere reflections of social order and have 'no individual mind' represent one radical category, the individuated who can see the social as just a set of tools for individuation as another radical category and the 'mad' (especially the paranoiac) as representing a half world radical category between the two. The 'mad' simply seek to appropriate the social (in Marguerite's case, the adulation and status of the actress) as a tool without understanding how it all works.
From this perspective, 'madness' (and an awful lot of persons are mad by this definition) is a perceptual problem about the social and its functional reality equivalent to the perceptual problems of inadequate sensory inputs but it is one that is essentially a failure of reason (as madness is classically understood) combined with a failure to 'know thyself' in a socialised context. Madness' thus lies somewhere between the rationality of the social and the reasoning of the individual - the first operating as a blind machine underpinned by manipulative social engineers (the 'reasonable' basis for individual paranoia) and the second struggling to assert the individual will against the enormity of the first (whilst not descending or ascending to the status of high functioning sociopath).
Some cannot cope with the strain - if a mind is not intellectually able to understand the machinery of the social and yet desperately seeks to be something that is not represented solely by the identity thrust on it by the social, then paranoia and other forms of mental disturbance become understandable, ranging, in the paranoid case, from the rigid conspiracy theory of the half-socialised to complete break-down. Lacan is most interested in what he thinks of as narcissism (perhaps because he identifies with it deep down) but there is a fine line here between the narcissism of the maladapted and the sensible narcissism of non-sociopathic self development on the one hand and the need to collaborate and co-operate in a complex society and the loss of self in total socialisation on the other.
And how does this fit with our introductory comments about knowing other minds in the past? Only that, when trying to understand how other past minds might have thought, the relationship between the complexity of the social and the individual and the amount of self awareness permitted in analysing the social in order to assert the individual claim against the social become relevant. To say that minds were like ours in the past is both probably true and probably false (though unknowable). Probably true is that the basic substrate of the mind is biologically similar (for simple evolutionary reasons) across vast tracts of time and probably false because that substrate is dealing with its own dialectical relationship with exponentially increasing social complexity and increasing awareness, through communications, of not only the fact of the complexity but the contingency of the complexity. Existential anxiety is thus not only a matter of death (as we have from the classical existentialists) but of the problem of social complexity and the death of social stability - of uncertainty in the relationship between the individual and the world.
Of course, while there is still room for madness today, there is less room for attributing madness simply to not being adequately socialised. So, for example, being homosexual is no longer seen as a deviation (from a norm), someone who hears voice is no longer automatically seen as insane and someone is no longer requiring treatment for saying they are a woman trapped in a man's body. Attitudes to these things represent material differences in 'what it is like to be a human being' and until we know what people in the past actually thought of such things at the micro-level of 'ordinary people' who did not write texts and did not use texts in elite contexts, we simply have to start admitting that we really do not know how past minds worked. We scarcely know how our own minds work.
Position Reserved - amateur philosophical and political news and reflections ... "Qui non intelligit aut discat aut taceat"
Showing posts with label Thomas Nagel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Thomas Nagel. Show all posts
Saturday, 6 December 2014
Monday, 5 May 2014
Consciousness Studies, Degenerate Liberalism & 'Libertarian Socialism'
The amount of work on consciousness in academic scientific and philosophical circles has probably never been more intense. Yet every participant in the debate on what it is and how it works agrees that nothing has been resolved. Some (such as Colin McGinn) plausibly claim that we will probably never know what it is.
Mind & Language
Or is that so? Maybe any introspective human knows what it is very well but simply cannot describe it. Perhaps it is description that is the problem - or rather the fact that any description of being and the experience of being are always going to be impossible to align.
There is a school of thought that says that mind is the construction of language. The implication is that consciousness does not exist without language. But if this is so, then, if language creates minds then minds should be able to be expressed in language and yet this is not so.
As we learn more from neuro-science about how perceptions are ordered and filtered in the mind, we see that our consciousness is presented with only a working approximation of reality rather than what is actually out there in all its huge complexity.
Minds exist somewhere beyond language. It might be argued that language itself is a barrier to understanding. As we realise how little our internal theatre accords with what is 'out there', it becomes more credible that language is part of that filtering process between matter and mind and, as intermediary, partakes of the character of neither.
Language unrealises reality so that it can then be pragmatically used by a mind that has been constructed emergently out of matter. So, if language cannot represent matter precisely, this emergent mind that arises out of matter operates in a way that can not only not be described in language but is the tool-user of the tool that is language.
Convergent Theories
This reflects something of a convergence in recent decades of the analytical and continental philosophical traditions. The analysts cannot, linguistically or logically, provide a credible description of the totality of consciousness but can merely present various reasonable paradigms that must be experienced to be understood.
Meanwhile, the phenomenological origins of the continental approach must bend not only to logic (rather than language) but to neuroscience and explore the experience of being conscious in relation to Existence not in terms of an abstract spirituality but in terms of a relationship to the complex matter of the brain.
The most reasonable current models for understanding consciousness are two. These two could turn out to be two sides of the same coin, inexpressible except in dualistic terms because there is not the language for their conjoining. There are other models but these others come down to acts of faith or hypotheses that it is hard to see can be testable.
The first model is monist and sees consciousness arising or emergent out of matter as a function of the properties of matter - we have physicalist, electro-magnetic and quantum physical theories to account for this. We will surely have others derived from, say, research into dark energy.
The second is dualist and posits the reality of mind as something that might be substantially dependent or even emergent on matter (the living brain) but which has become a class in itself. By analogy, complex systems as large as the universe might, possibly, have a consciousness of sorts if consciousness is such an emergent property.
Cartesianism Crumbles
The leap within dualism into a Cartesian absolute separation of mind and matter now seems less and less credible as even the highest alleged states of consciousness appear linked to matter as substrate or necessary pre-condition. Descartes worked within a tradition that had to find a place for the soul as emergent from God - we do not.
All the remaining attempts to retain high dualism, with mind operative outside matter, draw us towards 'faith' which is territory where we cannot go. In this writer's view faith is a misperception of one's own consciousness but, by its very nature, the matter cannot be argued with those who have it.
The monist-dualist opposition to one another may be illusory in itself. Mind is experienced as a known thing different from all other forms of matter but having aspects shared with, say, animals. Unless we postulate the grant of souls from 'above', the most likely hypothesis involves evolutionary emergence.
The debate about animal souls is absurd and we do not want to go where souls only arise with intellect but that consciousness does seem to be emergent on matter operates in a way that is uncomfortable for Judaeo-Christians - we deal with this later.
Mind has not only no reasonable basis for existing outside of its dependence on matter but modern neuroscience has been whittling away many of the higher functions of the mind as biologically based, demonstrating the brain's role in developing a person's perception of reality yet leaving behind, as unexplained, its sense of itself.
Monistic Dualism?
The 21st century working model of the mind is not Cartesian but rather is contingently monist - that is, the mind is a function of matter but has emerged from matter through evolution and through its own relationship to matter has become something that we may say is both matter and mind.
Of course, we end up here by saying that mind is matter in the tautological sense that anything that exists can be termed matter but which, from the perspective of the anthropic universe, is actually very different in quality.
As any philosopher will aver, it is possible to think two impossible things before breakfast. The 'impossibility' here that is that mind is both matter and not-matter simultaneously.
Mind is dependent on matter to exist and for its origin but its emergence has created something so remarkably different from matter, even if it is constructed out of components of ultimate matter beyond our current understanding, that, in effect, it is a new substance, mind.
Dualism thus re-emerges but not in the pure Cartesian form that has sustained Western culture since the Enlightenment and certainly not in the dualist form that has generally dominated religious discourse where the mind (spirit) has descended from some force entirely outside and preceding matter.
Implication
Things are thus flipped on their head. Instead of the body being seen as mere receptacle for some sacred soul or spirit which animates or is the essence of mind, the mind is seen as whole to the degree that it is integrated with its material substrate, its body with all its complex biochemical and genetic components.
It is also a consciousness that can, to a greater or lesser degree, command and control its direct perceptions of reality (the matter beyond the body and the interpretation of other minds through matter) in order to develop a 'realistic' (meaning pragmatically useful) sense of its own self and needs.
The self does not need transcending (because there is no transcendence that is not illusory) but only transforming in real time and in accordance with its relationship to the matter it commands or which commands it (both bodily and in society). This consciousness is rational but only given its inherited bio-chemical nature and historic relation to the world.
Any sense of 'transcendence' is not in accord with some privileging of the mind against matter (which is always implicit in the religious and Cartesian mind-set) but is a process of integrating (individuation) the mind-thing and the body-stuff in order to stand against and manage the social-thing, other mind-body things and raw matter.
This brings into play the insight of Thomas Nagel's What Is It Like To Be A Bat (1974) - a text whose revolutionary social importance, coming after the work of the phenomenologists and existentialists but before the neuro-scientific revolution, has yet to be fully appreciated by the wider public.
Bats & Humans
In order to bring the thesis up to date here, we might suggest that 'being like' something is to take on the total effect of all their sensory inputs as well as the tools for ordering those inputs in the brain as the 'being like-ness' that we have to come to terms with in trying to think like or have the experience of being, say, a bat. Needless to say, we cannot.
The thesis has been of great importance in understanding a whole slew of philosophical problems surrounding consciousness, including the appreciation that an artificial intelligence will not think like a human because it does not have the same tools as a human nor the same ordering system in its hardware.
But what has not filtered through to the general public is that what Nagel is saying does not apply just to the difficulty, or rather impossibility, of humans being able to credibly imagine themselves as bats or AI as human but the impossibility of any human seeing the world in the same way as any other human.
This is more challenging than it appears because it is not simply saying that we all have different histories and upbringings and so we should all be understanding of each other or, another conclusion, struggle politically to 'reform' other persons and draw them out of their culture and history 'for their own good' or that of 'humanity'.
The implicit ideological position in such models is that there is the same perception in all humans and the same ordering mechanism, perhaps with 'intelligence' alone being allowed to differentiate between persons (in that over-privileging of reason that has also over-privileged all intellectuals in the West).
The Uniqueness of Persons
However, minds do not appear to work like this, simply because they are embedded in bodies. Every person's perceptual apparatus and brain structure is as different as are their fingerprints. Each person, therefore, sees the world in a different way from others - in other words, we are nearly as different from each other as we are from bats.
Or rather, we have become as different from each other as we are from bats because we have evolved (thus perhaps giving a clue to the source of the emergence of mind from matter) as social animals. On our genetic and bio-chemical differences are overlain massive cultural differences that affect both perception and ordering.
A complex brain and perceptual apparatus (including the possibility of perceptual apparatus that may operate on the sub-conscious mind) has not only been under variable genetic change over millennia but the neuro-plasticity of the brain and accident create very different and unique mental maps for every living human.
Any rationalist social or political discourse based on a fixed view of what it is like to be human is doomed to failure as a practical project for the simple reason that the mind or sets of mind that think like this are as much 'sports' as any other type of mind.
Pure reasonableness will neither persuade those who simply do not see the world in the way that 'rational' people do nor have any effect on internal self-rational behaviour that conflicts with the social rationality of the rationalists.
The Failure of the Enlightenment
This is not a situation that will improve for the rationalist Left in the coming millennia. The numbers of perceptual inputs and the numbers of persons multiply massively the numbers of ways of seeing the world.
The ability of persons to conceal their thoughts in their own interest will also create a fantastic range of ways of undermining every rationalist project that is ever presented to humanity by the rationalists.
The obvious historic example is the Soviet experiment. This touted a New Man but crumbled on sclerosis with a flourishing underworld and it required massive murderous onslaughts on its own population. But the American experiment, based on the assertion of a fixed view of humanity in its Constitution, is not in much better state now.
The US is innovative and creative and we would not be discussing these matters if it was not for that quality but it is dysfunctional in other respects. Its rationalist commitment to a single 'form' of liberty derived from a fixed text means that it is poorly adapted to deal with mass inequality or the creative destruction of its own preferred economic system
There is no easy answer to the social and political problems arising out of this quality of humanity - that rationality lies within individual humans who are socially irrational, can hide thoughts and who misperceive reality (or rather can never see all reality like 'God' in order to make best judgement in their own interest let alone altruistically for others).
What Not To Do
One solution is not merely unworkable but cruel and stupid. This is to impose rational solutions from above and then try to bend the 'crooked timber' of humanity to will. This just does not work - or at least it works only for a while if the State is permitted to engage in authoritarian or brute measures.
The current Western situation is that States are attempting to deal with the problem of order and lack of force by 'invading minds' so that the subject receives the perceptual inputs that States want in order to transform minds. The intent is often benign - racism and sexism have been reduced drastically by such methods.
But, given the relative lack of force available to the State in the West, this has degenerated into soft corporatism, media management, coalition-building through various 'progressive' alliances, 'soft power' international relations, surveillance and the creation of an atmosphere and anxiety and the sort of economic populism that has created recent public debt problems.
Much of this works well enough when there is no sustained crisis but withdrawal of the bread and circuses of economic populism, combined with resentment of surveillance and social engineering and the 'truth-telling' role of the internet (noting Wikileaks and Snowden's revelations as just the top of a massive pyramid of alternative information) hole the ship below the waters.
Technological innovation and structural economic and administrative failure mean that the rational discourse of the ruling order in the last economic cycle has been displaced by a return to direct negotiation and alliances between individuals - all with their own individual rationalities. This happened first as consumers and only now as 'subjects' of politics.
Why The Elite Cannot Cope
Elite rationalists loathe 'tribalism' because they fear it and because it offends their universalism under which liberal-minded people are always superior to traditionalists, individualists or socialists and where universalists across the world are of more importance to each other than any of these other categories are at home.
But libertarian and communitarian solutions to problems from the ground-up are much more in tune with the problem of 'being like a bat' than anything that liberal universalists or other ideologues can offer.
The libertarian will work with others to defend his internal rational perspective while others, who perhaps seek order and security before liberty, will combine into families, localities, tribes, societies and so on, building not the activist-style liberal civil society but a community which owes something to both mentalities - but not to universalism.
The new consciousness studies, in this context, may prove as socially and politically revolutionary as Cartesian thinking was to prove after the seventeenth century. The creative tension between bottom up libertarianism and communitarianism or traditionalism looks to be far more dynamic than the sclerotic face-off between top-down liberalism and authoritarianism.
The mind is now no longer abstracted and made universal (except as private belief) but is re-centred in the Self as a mind-body from which it negotiates with others through struggle within, one would assume, shared rules and regulations designed to isolate and contain the harmful psychopath and monster.
The Problem of the Intellectual
The West has seen successive disasters as intellectuals who think in universalist terms have attempted to over-ride private life, community and history in order to change not the world (both material and social) for the better (which is reasonable) but persons as persons.
Enlightenment liberalism, Marxism and (bringing universalism conceptually down to the level of the nation or race) fascism and national socialism have not stopped at improving the freedoms and material conditions of the population (which is good) but have sought to impose a way of seeing the world and forms of language. Specific words are banned, appropriated or promoted!
These have been seen as oppressions against persons, against the particular and concrete and in favour of the general and abstract - and the intensification of these oppressions has generally arisen out of brute frustration that people do not obey the grand narratives of intellectuals, politicians, bureaucrats and technocrats.
Of the great questions of consciousness, the how it works is still under examination by the scientific and philosophical community. It may yet come up with some clear answer but what it is is never going to be fully describable in words or numbers.
The question is why it exists. The obvious response is to deal with this question as a scientific description of its evolutionary and adaptive role within the organism but this begs the real question. Consciousness exists because of its history in our species but we should ask now why it exists when we are aware of its existence.
Being Aware of Being Aware
This self-reflexive aspect to the why is not answered sufficiently by appeal to its functional role in the context of evolutionary history. By becoming aware of consciousness, we turn ourselves from its subject to an awareness of consciousness as a tool for its own purposes. We introduce at this point notions of will - and free will at that.
Intellectuals have got very gloomy about free will in recent decades but this is because they have swung like a pendulum from Enlightenment rationalism to an absurd nihilism. There is an argument against free will in an absolute sense but this tautologically simply extends cause and effect to a level meaningless to the human condition.
Just as the mind is both monistic in origin and substrate but dualistically defined in terms of its emergent properties and actual reflexiveness, so it is possible to accept cause and effect and then note that, in real terms as humans, the substrate is so dense and unknowable that, to all intents and purposes, will exists and is free.
The free will, again, is not granted by a deity but arises out of the human condition as an emergent property of higher consciousness. This is a big issue which should not distract us here but the logic of the situation is that moral responsibility can be returned to centre stage as can the right of resistance to universalist claims.
Consciousness becomes the thing which exists for its own sake and, in existing for its own sake, it becomes the argument for that position which formerly required the existence of god to justify it - the intrinsic worth of itself, the intrinsic worth not of some abstract humanity but of the person who reflects on himself.
The Dark Side
The only danger here is the privileging of the truly self-reflexive over the non-reflexive who might then be seen as little better than bats. This is a fascistic or elitist concept that might see the diminishing of the less educated, the less intelligent and the damaged.
Fortunately, this is easily countered by a rather neat truth for which we can be grateful insofar as it does not require us to rely on moral responsibility as an attribute of higher consciousness (which it will not bear) - this is that no mind can judge another mind because no mind can know another mind. We can see this in two thought experiments.
The most famous postulates a world of zombies able to behave as if they were sentient in a world which only you (or I) have true consciousness.
More useful is the experiment that suggests that, though I am conscious, all others are not only conscious but more intelligent but have been spending their existences pretending to be more or less ignorant, ill-educated and disabled in order to make me believe that I was more conscious than they. This paranoid fantasy makes its point.
I cannot judge the intrinsic worth of any other mind so that, far from fascistic, the new thinking in consciousness drives us to the opposite pole of the political spectrum - towards an egalitarian attitude to minds which demands that all minds have equal body and material chances and that no one should be intrinsically privileged over another.
The Logic of 'Libertarian Socialism'
Such egalitarian individualism is a form of socialism in its ideal sense, one that is neither Marxism (which is really a Judaeo-Christian heresy) nor liberalism but something more respectful of difference than most of the so-called progressive ideologues.
Egalitarian individualism or libertarian socialism does not persecute sex-workers (feminism), demand special privileges because of crimes against the dead (identity politics) or bring rights to the world through the barrel of a gun (liberal internationalism).
Libertarian socialism is thus not universalism nor is it progressivism - it is sui generis, respectful of the private reasoning powers of the individual in a society in which they are given the tools to make their own judgements without fear or lies.
But there is another aspect to the case. Modern consciousness studies are unthinkable without the insights of the phenomenologists, notably Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.
Phenomenological Perspectives
Both these philosophers understood that the process of investigating one's self required not only specific training and effort but 'the ability to adopt alternative perspectives on one's experience' [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosopy, Consciousness]
This process of adopting alternative perspectives is death to ideological grand narratives. Looking at oneself creatively from different perspectives is only one step from looking at others and their motivations from different and more empathetic perspectives.
Doing so does not necessarily mean that you will agree with others. However, empathy does enable one to draw a distinction between what is good for you and what is good for them and not confuse either with what is necessarily good for humanity. One can have an opinion on the latter but it is contingent on the facts.
The ideologist who places humanity before themselves will soon be placing abstract humanity before you and all other really existing persons so that abstract humanity consists of no persons at all, just a projection of the mind of the neurotic originator of the fantasy. The extreme version of this is the neurotic who places the planet, the distant 'transhumanist' future or God before persons.
Conclusion
What we see here is a direct connection between the revolution in consciousness studies and the potential liberation of the individual in Western culture. What we also see here is a different sort of mind with a different sort of politics.
Under the old mentality, the mind was separated from the body and God was replaced with Reason. Sexuality and desire were denigrated and an abstract vision of humanity treated persons as units to be controlled for some grand narrative that had no relation to the real and complex nature of humanity.
Under the new mentality, we have a fluid and flexible community of equal and creative individuals who seek individuation through coming to terms with their own identities, their bodies and their eventual ageing and dissolution and who build communities through struggle from below.
We can refer here to another philosopher of mind, Daniel Dennett, whose multiple drafts model (by which the mind is continuously redrafting reality and itself according to its assessment of inputs) gives us a way of seeing politics as something that is fluid and contingent, based not on absurd rigid principles but on the achievable.
Not only persons but self-organising communities can reinvent themselves continuously on the basis of multiple drafts with every citizen being an input. This is a model of democracy that is greatly at odds with the actual practice of the degenerate liberalism inherited from the Enlightenment.
Mind & Language
Or is that so? Maybe any introspective human knows what it is very well but simply cannot describe it. Perhaps it is description that is the problem - or rather the fact that any description of being and the experience of being are always going to be impossible to align.
There is a school of thought that says that mind is the construction of language. The implication is that consciousness does not exist without language. But if this is so, then, if language creates minds then minds should be able to be expressed in language and yet this is not so.
As we learn more from neuro-science about how perceptions are ordered and filtered in the mind, we see that our consciousness is presented with only a working approximation of reality rather than what is actually out there in all its huge complexity.
Minds exist somewhere beyond language. It might be argued that language itself is a barrier to understanding. As we realise how little our internal theatre accords with what is 'out there', it becomes more credible that language is part of that filtering process between matter and mind and, as intermediary, partakes of the character of neither.
Language unrealises reality so that it can then be pragmatically used by a mind that has been constructed emergently out of matter. So, if language cannot represent matter precisely, this emergent mind that arises out of matter operates in a way that can not only not be described in language but is the tool-user of the tool that is language.
Convergent Theories
This reflects something of a convergence in recent decades of the analytical and continental philosophical traditions. The analysts cannot, linguistically or logically, provide a credible description of the totality of consciousness but can merely present various reasonable paradigms that must be experienced to be understood.
Meanwhile, the phenomenological origins of the continental approach must bend not only to logic (rather than language) but to neuroscience and explore the experience of being conscious in relation to Existence not in terms of an abstract spirituality but in terms of a relationship to the complex matter of the brain.
The most reasonable current models for understanding consciousness are two. These two could turn out to be two sides of the same coin, inexpressible except in dualistic terms because there is not the language for their conjoining. There are other models but these others come down to acts of faith or hypotheses that it is hard to see can be testable.
The first model is monist and sees consciousness arising or emergent out of matter as a function of the properties of matter - we have physicalist, electro-magnetic and quantum physical theories to account for this. We will surely have others derived from, say, research into dark energy.
The second is dualist and posits the reality of mind as something that might be substantially dependent or even emergent on matter (the living brain) but which has become a class in itself. By analogy, complex systems as large as the universe might, possibly, have a consciousness of sorts if consciousness is such an emergent property.
Cartesianism Crumbles
The leap within dualism into a Cartesian absolute separation of mind and matter now seems less and less credible as even the highest alleged states of consciousness appear linked to matter as substrate or necessary pre-condition. Descartes worked within a tradition that had to find a place for the soul as emergent from God - we do not.
All the remaining attempts to retain high dualism, with mind operative outside matter, draw us towards 'faith' which is territory where we cannot go. In this writer's view faith is a misperception of one's own consciousness but, by its very nature, the matter cannot be argued with those who have it.
The monist-dualist opposition to one another may be illusory in itself. Mind is experienced as a known thing different from all other forms of matter but having aspects shared with, say, animals. Unless we postulate the grant of souls from 'above', the most likely hypothesis involves evolutionary emergence.
The debate about animal souls is absurd and we do not want to go where souls only arise with intellect but that consciousness does seem to be emergent on matter operates in a way that is uncomfortable for Judaeo-Christians - we deal with this later.
Mind has not only no reasonable basis for existing outside of its dependence on matter but modern neuroscience has been whittling away many of the higher functions of the mind as biologically based, demonstrating the brain's role in developing a person's perception of reality yet leaving behind, as unexplained, its sense of itself.
Monistic Dualism?
The 21st century working model of the mind is not Cartesian but rather is contingently monist - that is, the mind is a function of matter but has emerged from matter through evolution and through its own relationship to matter has become something that we may say is both matter and mind.
Of course, we end up here by saying that mind is matter in the tautological sense that anything that exists can be termed matter but which, from the perspective of the anthropic universe, is actually very different in quality.
As any philosopher will aver, it is possible to think two impossible things before breakfast. The 'impossibility' here that is that mind is both matter and not-matter simultaneously.
Mind is dependent on matter to exist and for its origin but its emergence has created something so remarkably different from matter, even if it is constructed out of components of ultimate matter beyond our current understanding, that, in effect, it is a new substance, mind.
Dualism thus re-emerges but not in the pure Cartesian form that has sustained Western culture since the Enlightenment and certainly not in the dualist form that has generally dominated religious discourse where the mind (spirit) has descended from some force entirely outside and preceding matter.
Implication
Things are thus flipped on their head. Instead of the body being seen as mere receptacle for some sacred soul or spirit which animates or is the essence of mind, the mind is seen as whole to the degree that it is integrated with its material substrate, its body with all its complex biochemical and genetic components.
It is also a consciousness that can, to a greater or lesser degree, command and control its direct perceptions of reality (the matter beyond the body and the interpretation of other minds through matter) in order to develop a 'realistic' (meaning pragmatically useful) sense of its own self and needs.
The self does not need transcending (because there is no transcendence that is not illusory) but only transforming in real time and in accordance with its relationship to the matter it commands or which commands it (both bodily and in society). This consciousness is rational but only given its inherited bio-chemical nature and historic relation to the world.
Any sense of 'transcendence' is not in accord with some privileging of the mind against matter (which is always implicit in the religious and Cartesian mind-set) but is a process of integrating (individuation) the mind-thing and the body-stuff in order to stand against and manage the social-thing, other mind-body things and raw matter.
This brings into play the insight of Thomas Nagel's What Is It Like To Be A Bat (1974) - a text whose revolutionary social importance, coming after the work of the phenomenologists and existentialists but before the neuro-scientific revolution, has yet to be fully appreciated by the wider public.
Bats & Humans
In order to bring the thesis up to date here, we might suggest that 'being like' something is to take on the total effect of all their sensory inputs as well as the tools for ordering those inputs in the brain as the 'being like-ness' that we have to come to terms with in trying to think like or have the experience of being, say, a bat. Needless to say, we cannot.
The thesis has been of great importance in understanding a whole slew of philosophical problems surrounding consciousness, including the appreciation that an artificial intelligence will not think like a human because it does not have the same tools as a human nor the same ordering system in its hardware.
But what has not filtered through to the general public is that what Nagel is saying does not apply just to the difficulty, or rather impossibility, of humans being able to credibly imagine themselves as bats or AI as human but the impossibility of any human seeing the world in the same way as any other human.
This is more challenging than it appears because it is not simply saying that we all have different histories and upbringings and so we should all be understanding of each other or, another conclusion, struggle politically to 'reform' other persons and draw them out of their culture and history 'for their own good' or that of 'humanity'.
The implicit ideological position in such models is that there is the same perception in all humans and the same ordering mechanism, perhaps with 'intelligence' alone being allowed to differentiate between persons (in that over-privileging of reason that has also over-privileged all intellectuals in the West).
The Uniqueness of Persons
However, minds do not appear to work like this, simply because they are embedded in bodies. Every person's perceptual apparatus and brain structure is as different as are their fingerprints. Each person, therefore, sees the world in a different way from others - in other words, we are nearly as different from each other as we are from bats.
Or rather, we have become as different from each other as we are from bats because we have evolved (thus perhaps giving a clue to the source of the emergence of mind from matter) as social animals. On our genetic and bio-chemical differences are overlain massive cultural differences that affect both perception and ordering.
A complex brain and perceptual apparatus (including the possibility of perceptual apparatus that may operate on the sub-conscious mind) has not only been under variable genetic change over millennia but the neuro-plasticity of the brain and accident create very different and unique mental maps for every living human.
Any rationalist social or political discourse based on a fixed view of what it is like to be human is doomed to failure as a practical project for the simple reason that the mind or sets of mind that think like this are as much 'sports' as any other type of mind.
Pure reasonableness will neither persuade those who simply do not see the world in the way that 'rational' people do nor have any effect on internal self-rational behaviour that conflicts with the social rationality of the rationalists.
The Failure of the Enlightenment
This is not a situation that will improve for the rationalist Left in the coming millennia. The numbers of perceptual inputs and the numbers of persons multiply massively the numbers of ways of seeing the world.
The ability of persons to conceal their thoughts in their own interest will also create a fantastic range of ways of undermining every rationalist project that is ever presented to humanity by the rationalists.
The obvious historic example is the Soviet experiment. This touted a New Man but crumbled on sclerosis with a flourishing underworld and it required massive murderous onslaughts on its own population. But the American experiment, based on the assertion of a fixed view of humanity in its Constitution, is not in much better state now.
The US is innovative and creative and we would not be discussing these matters if it was not for that quality but it is dysfunctional in other respects. Its rationalist commitment to a single 'form' of liberty derived from a fixed text means that it is poorly adapted to deal with mass inequality or the creative destruction of its own preferred economic system
There is no easy answer to the social and political problems arising out of this quality of humanity - that rationality lies within individual humans who are socially irrational, can hide thoughts and who misperceive reality (or rather can never see all reality like 'God' in order to make best judgement in their own interest let alone altruistically for others).
What Not To Do
One solution is not merely unworkable but cruel and stupid. This is to impose rational solutions from above and then try to bend the 'crooked timber' of humanity to will. This just does not work - or at least it works only for a while if the State is permitted to engage in authoritarian or brute measures.
The current Western situation is that States are attempting to deal with the problem of order and lack of force by 'invading minds' so that the subject receives the perceptual inputs that States want in order to transform minds. The intent is often benign - racism and sexism have been reduced drastically by such methods.
But, given the relative lack of force available to the State in the West, this has degenerated into soft corporatism, media management, coalition-building through various 'progressive' alliances, 'soft power' international relations, surveillance and the creation of an atmosphere and anxiety and the sort of economic populism that has created recent public debt problems.
Much of this works well enough when there is no sustained crisis but withdrawal of the bread and circuses of economic populism, combined with resentment of surveillance and social engineering and the 'truth-telling' role of the internet (noting Wikileaks and Snowden's revelations as just the top of a massive pyramid of alternative information) hole the ship below the waters.
Technological innovation and structural economic and administrative failure mean that the rational discourse of the ruling order in the last economic cycle has been displaced by a return to direct negotiation and alliances between individuals - all with their own individual rationalities. This happened first as consumers and only now as 'subjects' of politics.
Why The Elite Cannot Cope
Elite rationalists loathe 'tribalism' because they fear it and because it offends their universalism under which liberal-minded people are always superior to traditionalists, individualists or socialists and where universalists across the world are of more importance to each other than any of these other categories are at home.
But libertarian and communitarian solutions to problems from the ground-up are much more in tune with the problem of 'being like a bat' than anything that liberal universalists or other ideologues can offer.
The libertarian will work with others to defend his internal rational perspective while others, who perhaps seek order and security before liberty, will combine into families, localities, tribes, societies and so on, building not the activist-style liberal civil society but a community which owes something to both mentalities - but not to universalism.
The new consciousness studies, in this context, may prove as socially and politically revolutionary as Cartesian thinking was to prove after the seventeenth century. The creative tension between bottom up libertarianism and communitarianism or traditionalism looks to be far more dynamic than the sclerotic face-off between top-down liberalism and authoritarianism.
The mind is now no longer abstracted and made universal (except as private belief) but is re-centred in the Self as a mind-body from which it negotiates with others through struggle within, one would assume, shared rules and regulations designed to isolate and contain the harmful psychopath and monster.
The Problem of the Intellectual
The West has seen successive disasters as intellectuals who think in universalist terms have attempted to over-ride private life, community and history in order to change not the world (both material and social) for the better (which is reasonable) but persons as persons.
Enlightenment liberalism, Marxism and (bringing universalism conceptually down to the level of the nation or race) fascism and national socialism have not stopped at improving the freedoms and material conditions of the population (which is good) but have sought to impose a way of seeing the world and forms of language. Specific words are banned, appropriated or promoted!
These have been seen as oppressions against persons, against the particular and concrete and in favour of the general and abstract - and the intensification of these oppressions has generally arisen out of brute frustration that people do not obey the grand narratives of intellectuals, politicians, bureaucrats and technocrats.
Of the great questions of consciousness, the how it works is still under examination by the scientific and philosophical community. It may yet come up with some clear answer but what it is is never going to be fully describable in words or numbers.
The question is why it exists. The obvious response is to deal with this question as a scientific description of its evolutionary and adaptive role within the organism but this begs the real question. Consciousness exists because of its history in our species but we should ask now why it exists when we are aware of its existence.
Being Aware of Being Aware
This self-reflexive aspect to the why is not answered sufficiently by appeal to its functional role in the context of evolutionary history. By becoming aware of consciousness, we turn ourselves from its subject to an awareness of consciousness as a tool for its own purposes. We introduce at this point notions of will - and free will at that.
Intellectuals have got very gloomy about free will in recent decades but this is because they have swung like a pendulum from Enlightenment rationalism to an absurd nihilism. There is an argument against free will in an absolute sense but this tautologically simply extends cause and effect to a level meaningless to the human condition.
Just as the mind is both monistic in origin and substrate but dualistically defined in terms of its emergent properties and actual reflexiveness, so it is possible to accept cause and effect and then note that, in real terms as humans, the substrate is so dense and unknowable that, to all intents and purposes, will exists and is free.
The free will, again, is not granted by a deity but arises out of the human condition as an emergent property of higher consciousness. This is a big issue which should not distract us here but the logic of the situation is that moral responsibility can be returned to centre stage as can the right of resistance to universalist claims.
Consciousness becomes the thing which exists for its own sake and, in existing for its own sake, it becomes the argument for that position which formerly required the existence of god to justify it - the intrinsic worth of itself, the intrinsic worth not of some abstract humanity but of the person who reflects on himself.
The Dark Side
The only danger here is the privileging of the truly self-reflexive over the non-reflexive who might then be seen as little better than bats. This is a fascistic or elitist concept that might see the diminishing of the less educated, the less intelligent and the damaged.
Fortunately, this is easily countered by a rather neat truth for which we can be grateful insofar as it does not require us to rely on moral responsibility as an attribute of higher consciousness (which it will not bear) - this is that no mind can judge another mind because no mind can know another mind. We can see this in two thought experiments.
The most famous postulates a world of zombies able to behave as if they were sentient in a world which only you (or I) have true consciousness.
More useful is the experiment that suggests that, though I am conscious, all others are not only conscious but more intelligent but have been spending their existences pretending to be more or less ignorant, ill-educated and disabled in order to make me believe that I was more conscious than they. This paranoid fantasy makes its point.
I cannot judge the intrinsic worth of any other mind so that, far from fascistic, the new thinking in consciousness drives us to the opposite pole of the political spectrum - towards an egalitarian attitude to minds which demands that all minds have equal body and material chances and that no one should be intrinsically privileged over another.
The Logic of 'Libertarian Socialism'
Such egalitarian individualism is a form of socialism in its ideal sense, one that is neither Marxism (which is really a Judaeo-Christian heresy) nor liberalism but something more respectful of difference than most of the so-called progressive ideologues.
Egalitarian individualism or libertarian socialism does not persecute sex-workers (feminism), demand special privileges because of crimes against the dead (identity politics) or bring rights to the world through the barrel of a gun (liberal internationalism).
Libertarian socialism is thus not universalism nor is it progressivism - it is sui generis, respectful of the private reasoning powers of the individual in a society in which they are given the tools to make their own judgements without fear or lies.
But there is another aspect to the case. Modern consciousness studies are unthinkable without the insights of the phenomenologists, notably Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.
Phenomenological Perspectives
Both these philosophers understood that the process of investigating one's self required not only specific training and effort but 'the ability to adopt alternative perspectives on one's experience' [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosopy, Consciousness]
This process of adopting alternative perspectives is death to ideological grand narratives. Looking at oneself creatively from different perspectives is only one step from looking at others and their motivations from different and more empathetic perspectives.
Doing so does not necessarily mean that you will agree with others. However, empathy does enable one to draw a distinction between what is good for you and what is good for them and not confuse either with what is necessarily good for humanity. One can have an opinion on the latter but it is contingent on the facts.
The ideologist who places humanity before themselves will soon be placing abstract humanity before you and all other really existing persons so that abstract humanity consists of no persons at all, just a projection of the mind of the neurotic originator of the fantasy. The extreme version of this is the neurotic who places the planet, the distant 'transhumanist' future or God before persons.
Conclusion
What we see here is a direct connection between the revolution in consciousness studies and the potential liberation of the individual in Western culture. What we also see here is a different sort of mind with a different sort of politics.
Under the old mentality, the mind was separated from the body and God was replaced with Reason. Sexuality and desire were denigrated and an abstract vision of humanity treated persons as units to be controlled for some grand narrative that had no relation to the real and complex nature of humanity.
Under the new mentality, we have a fluid and flexible community of equal and creative individuals who seek individuation through coming to terms with their own identities, their bodies and their eventual ageing and dissolution and who build communities through struggle from below.
We can refer here to another philosopher of mind, Daniel Dennett, whose multiple drafts model (by which the mind is continuously redrafting reality and itself according to its assessment of inputs) gives us a way of seeing politics as something that is fluid and contingent, based not on absurd rigid principles but on the achievable.
Not only persons but self-organising communities can reinvent themselves continuously on the basis of multiple drafts with every citizen being an input. This is a model of democracy that is greatly at odds with the actual practice of the degenerate liberalism inherited from the Enlightenment.
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