Position Reserved, at various times, has been an outlet for
exploring a variety of cultural and political issues of
interest to me as well as a means of putting my case and the facts
in controversial areas where the mainstream media have failed to 'get it right'. I am, with perhaps just very rare future interventions 'for the record', reducing activity, not only because of pressure of work but also because I may have run out of things to say in public. This posting says most of what I have left to say until the world changes again: then my opinions may have to change in response. From now on, you are likely to get only very rare personal ruminations as the mood takes me, maybe odd discussions of obscure academic papers that don't fit with my Goodreads account or anywhere else and, of course, statements of fact if some malign media half-wit decides to have another go at me.
There are three great lessons learned from several years of writing these posts.
First, that search for some special meaning in the world is pretty futile. The world is as it is. It should be understood just as it is. This is not simply a matter of having a prejudice towards science but having an essential scepticism towards all human narratives. The questions have always to be - who invented the narrative and for what purpose and who is using the narrative and why as well as whether a narrative is true. Truth is a sticky issue. Many facts are not recoverable. All facts are interpretable. A moderate scepticism about all stories we tell ourselves, while understanding that narratives are still necessary for society to function, is the way forward.
The end game is thus detachment but with a degree of compassion for peoples' need to tell stories and a decision somewhere along the line to construct a workable but flexible story for oneself that best accords with the facts of one's condition in life. In my case, my narrative is rather workaday. Having exhausted most evenues surrounding the magical and the spiritual and the ideological, I am really perfectly happy just to go with the flow now and maintain an ethic of civilised survival. My core values are what they always were - a mish-mash of existentialism, libertarianism and basic compassion for the weakest and most troubled.
Second, the melange of social narratives criss-crossing our culture and competing with each other have now gone beyond a joke. It is easy to condemn the dreamers and ideologues as stupid but even the most formally intelligent seem to have extended their psychological flaws and preferences into complex systems and structures that seek to bend reality to their will. There is nothing more deviantly sinister than the human ego that denies that it is an ego. Again, detachment and a determination to stand one's ground with one's own story, while being questioning about its own validity against the facts, is easily the best stance. Social existence is a brutal struggle within a framework of accepted conventions and order and it should be seen as such. It cannot be otherwise and those looking for reason and perfection are doomed to disappointment. Two areas of recent life brought this into focus.
The Exaro experience, whether good or bad in the sum, demonstrated the degree to which power manipulates narrative. The conduct of the mainstream media in this matter made me understand, without condoning, the resistance of populists to the claim that their propagandistic fake news was actually any worse than the constant devious manipulation of the MSM. It often struck me that the MSM's real gripe with Trump was that he was exposing their monopoly of falsehoods by simply making what they do subtly be done more crassly.
Fortunately the internet permits the individual to challenge the MSM on the record (which is what I have done on several occasions) knowing that, while the exercise is rather futile, the bulk of MSM coverage is equally transient and distrusted by anyone with half a brain. At least there are now many voices telling half-truths and porkie pies rather than just a few with presumed authority - that is progress of a sort since the detached observer can now compare far more narratives and then use their judgment to come up with some rough approximation of reality.Admittedly, most apparently highly educated people seem to have a problem with their judging faculty but, hey (as Tony Blair used to say), you can't have everything.
The second area of interest was and remains transhumanism which I intend to remain involved with, albeit in my classically detached way. This is a school of thought of considerable importance in translating the coming technological revolution into sets of questions that need asking and which still pass most politicians by. This community has produced creative ideas around the application of innovation like cryptocurrencies and technologies like automation. It has promoted ideas that are now being looked at by policy-makers such as Universal Basic Income. It has also created, however, some insanely apocalyptic thinking about existential risk and a quasi-religious narrative that can make practical men like me cringe with embarrassment.
And why? Because too many of the enthusiastic nerds and engineers involved still read too much science fiction and find themselves driven by their own extrapolations and weak understanding of 'really existing humans' rather by any understanding of social and political reality. Still, although the hysteria surrounding these communities and their often shambolic organisation is a bit depressing at times, nevertheless, these are the people throwing up all the ideas now about the possibilities for humanity, ideas that correct our stupid belief in certainties. Square the flaccid complacent folk culture of the establishment with the trans-human lunacies and you might yet get to see a pathway to understanding future probabilities.
Finally, there is politics. Oh my God, politics! This has become the art of posturing one's story as if your powerlessness mattered, at least as far as most social media discourse is concerned. Most people simply do not understand the nature of power and how to use it. They cannot accept that simply having strong opinions is too often just posturing that expresses psychological anxieties or is a primitive demand for respect in the ape-like world of social competition yet moves the world not one jot forward. We all have opinions but few of us truly understand where power actually lies, when and where we can make some small difference and how acquiring more power by its very nature shapes us into the victims of our own wielding of it if we are not aware of what is happening to us. We all need to make positive decisions on how to use the little power that we have effectively and with full understanding of probable consequences.
I have come to the view that politics must be treated either as a cynical game played by moral inadequates (which is not to my taste) or be considered as an expression of core sentiments and values, beyond conventional morality, where one chooses rationally to see through the expression of our prejudices according to the power that one actually has. There are people out there who we should not want to have any power because of their intrinsic irrationalities and cruelties. Representative national democracy still strikes me as the best means of keeping these wolves off our backs even if our representatives are deeply flawed and not always the sharpest tools in the box.
Most people's values are rarely thought about, contradictory and situational but they do make up who we are and democracy squares millions of confused world views into something broadly consensual. Reforming the machinery of it all (as liberal nerds want to do) is less important than reforming the informations flows and education that enable people to make better judgments in their own interest and according to their own values. Even sociopaths have rights in this respect if only to balance out those dangerous radical empaths who think so much of themselves. To cut the posturing, I certainly put the economic and personal survival of myself and my immediate family first and anyone who doesn't do the same is already probably someone who needs to be kept an eye on.
Beyond that, I have a hierarchy of values which include the general sanctity of life (a Catholic upbringing), a loathing of bullying and sympathy for the underdog, a gut patriotism for soil though not blood, a distaste for people who break promises without clear explanation, a distaste for the use of secrecy to gain advantage and a prejudice against all forms of abstract universalism. There is also a belief in the benefit of pragmatic non-ideological flexibility that permits opinions and actions to change easily with new information. Part of that pragmatism is that you cannot take on the burdens of the world ... concern should start with the self and work outwards through concentric circles lest one become the sort of humanitarian Napoleon who destroys the world in order to save it. Much liberal universalism strikes me as being derived from immaturity and anxiety in weakly formed selves who are unable to build an independent existence outside the group-think of the ideologically like-minded.
I also seem to have been surrounded, through Brexit and recent political events, by many people who have taken what values they have out of their mental box but then constructed rigid systems from them that seem not only completely out of kilter with the facts but drives them to believe that things could be as they never can be. This is the idiotic politics of naive idealism, wide-eyed hope that almost always presages great cruelties and incompetencies. It is compounded by the hysteria of the media whose interpretative and analytical skills are barely existent in the drive to tell stories thoroughly detached from reality. Reading the FT on Brexit is watching a sort of cultural oozalum bird in full flight. Watching the BBC is like watching a rather confused old dear try to deal with the i-phone someone gave them for Christmas. Reading the Daily Mail is like being cornered by a perpectually snarling mad dog.
Over the last few years, I have decided that I don't really like people who don't have clear values (I have no problem with people whose core values are not mine) and who cover up their feelings with ideology and pretence. I have removed them quietly and without rancour from my social circle as intrinsically rather stupid and boring. Those who cover their class interest or personal interest with a coating of emotional idealism, whether it be their stake in the NGO industry or their interest in cheap labour to keep their fluffy businesses going, are perhaps the ones who most exhibit 'mauvaise faux'. Unfashionably, I still have an admiration for people who can put personal material interest second to personal values and I always prefer the ruthless materialist who knows that he is a ruthless materialist to the self-deluding clown who pretends they are not.
My own ideological positions are simple, pragmatic and contingent - for Brexit, for an intelligent democratic socialism (which, in my opinion, is only possible under conditions where sovereign democratic nation states can be abstracted from regulatory empires) and then for strong national defence directed at peace. War should be the ruthless defence of the homeland and never more. But even these are flexible positions. Brexit is a necessity for example but I see no reason why it should require a primitive and inflexible nationalism. I would go with the Corbyn-McDonnell approach if I trusted the Labour Party more, while I see no inflexible nationalism in the Johnson-Gove position. In other words, once Brexit is decided (as it has been), there is every reason to go with the flow of national consensus (which actually there is, despite the whining of Remoaners and the posturing of the Populists) and then and only then engage in struggle over whether it is to be a Brexit for Labour or a Brexit for Capital. The behaviour of Remainers is now a national embarrassment.
The same apples to democratic socialism. My heart is very much with Corbyn and McDonnell and I find myself cheering much of their speeches but then I look at the detail and sometimes blanch. The aspirations are great - they are mostly my aspirations - but then I look at my own experience in international affairs and the market and I see that the populist promises currently under offer, combined with the failed ideological liberalism of the still dominant soft Left of the Party, create reasons for serious concern. Will we see a twentieth century welfarism, shorn of warfarism, that still fails to understand the massive import of the coming technological revolution, fails to lead it and misses the boat just as Globalisation 2.0 takes hold as a mix of anarcho-capitalism, strong nation states and decaying authoritarian empires? Quite possibly.
At the moment, I see little more than platitudes reminsicent of Harold Wilson's 'white heat' and a weak sub-Marxist understanding of power. At the time of writing, I feel disinclined to renew my Party Membership in September. It would be better to become, once again, truly independent and observe with my customary detachment, employing what tiny power I have very carefully in the direction of understanding and managing Globalisation 2.0 rather than granting it to a mass party of semi-educated enthusiasts whose programme seems doomed to disappoint. Once Brexit is done, one might reconsider one's position.
However, all in all, I know what I want. I want a smooth Brexit broadly along the current Government's lines. Accordingly and logically, I want a stable Tory minority Government until that is completed precisely because the PLP and Labour activist membership cannot be trusted on the issue. This does not seem compatible with Labour Party membership for the next two years or so. And then, two or three years on, I want to see a strong and stable, radicalised and intelligent Labour Party come to power with a working majority of 50 or so to implement a programme of democratic socialism better than the one we saw in the catch-all 'package of measures' Manifesto of a few weeks ago. Brexit first, a credible democratic socialism second, Globalisation 2.0 third.
Position Reserved - amateur philosophical and political news and reflections ... "Qui non intelligit aut discat aut taceat"
Showing posts with label Transhumanism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Transhumanism. Show all posts
Thursday, 22 June 2017
Saturday, 3 October 2015
The Flaw in Thinking Artificial Intelligence Can Solve Our Problems
I recently knocked out a review of Frank Tipler's 'The Physics of Immortality: Moderm Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead' (1994) on GoodReads. One passing claim struck me as particularly interesting in the light of my blog postings that cast doubt on speculative science as useful - not that it is not worthwhile but that it seems to be fuelling a cultural hysteria about scientific possibility that is distracting us from what is achievable. I have a similar critique of the social sciences and I covered my concerns about excessive claims in that area in another GoodReads review - of Lawrence Freedman's 'Strategy: A History' (2013).
Tipler's passage gave me yet another useful bullet for my gun of scepticism about claims not only about what we can know about the world but what any machine created by us may know about the world although Tipler's main task is to postulate (amongst other things) omniscient total information at the Omega Point of history.
On page 297 of my Edition but also elsewhere, Tipler explores the amount of information required to be or do or understand certain things in the world. He points out that if something is more complex than 10 to the power of 15 bits of information, then it cannot be understood by any human being whatsoever. This is the level of complexity of the human brain itself. He points out that human society is 10 to the power of 15 bits of information times the number of humans in the world.
We have to invent higher level theories to attempt to explain such complexity but these higher level theories over-simplify and so may (I think, will) give incorrect answers. The problems of human society, in particular, are far too complex to be understood even with such theories to hand which, in my view, are not scientifically valid but merely probabilistic guidelines.
Often human instinct, honed on millions of years of evolutionary development which screens out more information than it actually uses, is going to be more effective (assuming the human being is 'intelligent', that is, evolved to maximise that evolutionary advantage) in dealing with the world than theory, no matter how apparently well based on research. Tipler's omniscient Omega Point is, of course, classed as something completely different but no one in their right minds would consider any probable AGI coming close to this level of omniscience within the foreseeable future. Tipler does not make this mistake.
Therefore, in my view, an AGI is just as likely to be more wrong (precisely because its reasoning is highly rational) than a human in those many situations where the evolution of the human brain has made it into a very fine tool for dealing with environmental complexity. Since human society is far more complex than the natural environment or environments based on classical physics (it is interesting that humans still have 'accidents' at his lower level of information, especially when distracted by human considerations), then the human being is going to be more advantaged in its competition with any creation that is still fundamentally embedded in a particular location without the environmentally attuned systems of the human.
This is not to say that AGIs might one day be more advanced in all respects than humans but the talk of the singularity has evaded and avoided this truth - that this brilliant AGI who will emerge in the wet dreams of scientists may be a reflection of their rational personality type but is no more fitted to survival and development than a scientist dumped with no funds and no friends into a refugee camp short of food and water.
In other words, species or creature survival is highly conditional on environment. The social environment in which humans are embedded may be tough but it also ensures that the human species will be operating as dominant species for quite some time after the alleged singularity. Pure intellect may not only not be able to comprend the world sufficiently to be functional (once it moves out of the realm of the physical and into the social) but, because it theorises on the basis of logic and pure reason, is likely to come up with incorrect theories by its very nature.
Worse, those human policy-makers who trust to such AGIs in the way that they currently trust to social scientists may be guilty of compounding the sorts of policy mistakes that have driven us to the brink in international relations, social collapse, economic failure in the last two or three decades. Take this as a warning!
Tipler's passage gave me yet another useful bullet for my gun of scepticism about claims not only about what we can know about the world but what any machine created by us may know about the world although Tipler's main task is to postulate (amongst other things) omniscient total information at the Omega Point of history.
On page 297 of my Edition but also elsewhere, Tipler explores the amount of information required to be or do or understand certain things in the world. He points out that if something is more complex than 10 to the power of 15 bits of information, then it cannot be understood by any human being whatsoever. This is the level of complexity of the human brain itself. He points out that human society is 10 to the power of 15 bits of information times the number of humans in the world.
We have to invent higher level theories to attempt to explain such complexity but these higher level theories over-simplify and so may (I think, will) give incorrect answers. The problems of human society, in particular, are far too complex to be understood even with such theories to hand which, in my view, are not scientifically valid but merely probabilistic guidelines.
Often human instinct, honed on millions of years of evolutionary development which screens out more information than it actually uses, is going to be more effective (assuming the human being is 'intelligent', that is, evolved to maximise that evolutionary advantage) in dealing with the world than theory, no matter how apparently well based on research. Tipler's omniscient Omega Point is, of course, classed as something completely different but no one in their right minds would consider any probable AGI coming close to this level of omniscience within the foreseeable future. Tipler does not make this mistake.
Therefore, in my view, an AGI is just as likely to be more wrong (precisely because its reasoning is highly rational) than a human in those many situations where the evolution of the human brain has made it into a very fine tool for dealing with environmental complexity. Since human society is far more complex than the natural environment or environments based on classical physics (it is interesting that humans still have 'accidents' at his lower level of information, especially when distracted by human considerations), then the human being is going to be more advantaged in its competition with any creation that is still fundamentally embedded in a particular location without the environmentally attuned systems of the human.
This is not to say that AGIs might one day be more advanced in all respects than humans but the talk of the singularity has evaded and avoided this truth - that this brilliant AGI who will emerge in the wet dreams of scientists may be a reflection of their rational personality type but is no more fitted to survival and development than a scientist dumped with no funds and no friends into a refugee camp short of food and water.
In other words, species or creature survival is highly conditional on environment. The social environment in which humans are embedded may be tough but it also ensures that the human species will be operating as dominant species for quite some time after the alleged singularity. Pure intellect may not only not be able to comprend the world sufficiently to be functional (once it moves out of the realm of the physical and into the social) but, because it theorises on the basis of logic and pure reason, is likely to come up with incorrect theories by its very nature.
Worse, those human policy-makers who trust to such AGIs in the way that they currently trust to social scientists may be guilty of compounding the sorts of policy mistakes that have driven us to the brink in international relations, social collapse, economic failure in the last two or three decades. Take this as a warning!
Thursday, 18 June 2015
Frontiers 3 - Time & Reality
We have covered the probable drive to explore and quasi-colonise the solar system during the coming decades and the search for exo-planets that may, one day, in the very distant future be colonisable. It may seem odd now to consider two abstract concepts - time and reality - as possible frontiers. In practical day-to-day terms, we live in sufficient reality to serve our purposes and we experience time in a shared social setting. The frontier nature of time and reality is often, for most people, the realm at the further reaches of speculative fiction. And yet the conceptual search by physicists and cosmologists, perhaps also by imagineers in speculative fiction, is a cultural frontier of immense importance.
Einstein famously introduced the idea of a space-time that precluded any single and objective definition of simultaneity. This relativism has not yet worked its full way back through our culture as a relativism about reality itself. Yes, of course, there has been a form of widespread post-modern cultural relativism but this evades the issue. Social reality imposed by one prevailing order into which persons fitted was replaced in post-modern environments with a fragmentation that created many social fictions where there had only been one. The effect was to create a half-way house of identity politics and cultural relativism between the world of monocultures, ruling whole territories and suppressing dissent, and the reality of reality which is that individuals construct their own personal realities out of the shared reality of really existing material reality. This is now a world where the individual can believe what it is necessary for them to believe and have a structure of reality that is as unique as their fingerprint and yet one which can only be materially functional if it accords with the laws of physics that limit every social reality that has ever existed. No magical culture has fed its people through using magic alone.
The most interesting tension in this respect is between the magical thinking of human beings and material reality. The individual who is a magical thinker certainly cannot fly without the help of the technologist but vast tracts of experience can be made to fit into a magical model. While the technologists and scientists drive one frontier - the one that makes matter utile and more knowable - the magically-minded are driving another frontier - the one that can make life livable. The realities that are being squeezed between the two are those constructed out of the collapse of geographically centred dissent-resisting monocultures. The idea that monocultures can be collapsed into sets of identity without going further and seeing each individual as a self-transforming contained creator of their own reality who subverts (in time) the identity cultures as they once subverted the monocultures is the cultural frontier of our time. What we see is massive human variation emerging in ways that are not just creatively anarchic but potentially dangerous since the destructive outliers within the variation who understand technology can become murderous in their intent. They may desire to create, reversing the process moving from monocultural social reality to the realities of autonomous individuals, a culture of malignity finding and merging with like-minded malign individuals. Thus not only are socially constructed realities broken down into their components but new social constructions of reality arise out of those components, often for brief periods of time, making use of the instabilities of the current communications revolution. Nothing like this has appeared before in history.
The investigative frontier that is the scientific or philosophical investigation of time and reality (and space) has helped create this world of Heraclitean flux but the individual and bottom up social constructions involved highly volatile. In themselves they depend on belief, which may include unthinking belief in the claims of philosophers and scientists and on interpretations of what are thought to be those claims even if the scientists and philosophers have actually claimed nothing of the sort. A speculation which is logical or rational becomes detached from the original reasoning process to become a claim that becomes the basis for fear, hope, speculation, the struggle for status or resources - indeed, all those things that make us human-all-too-human. We see a lot of this in the disconnect between sober assessment of existential risk and the massive levels of apocalyptic hysteria to be found amongst the dimmer frightened rabbits who latch on to environmentalist or transhumanist movements. Rushing around like 'chicken-licken', they can make no sober assessment of either the original claim nor of the actuality of scientific method as hypothesis nor critique the use of a claim by special interests. They are, in short, at the frontier of human stupidity.
Einstein suggested that the passage of time itself is a fiction. This fictionalisation of reality is another factor that we have to take account of in describing ourselves as being at a cultural frontier as wild as the American West in its hey-day. It is our limitation, as a material creature existing as an autonomous unit within material reality, that constructs our perception of reality out of our senses and out of the structure of remembrance and of experience, created in turn out of our past sense experiences and possibly our genetics and somatics. We are stuck in a perceived reality, even as individual components, of all these social and material realities, one that is highly volatile but which we also know is uncomfortably contingent philosophically. Whatever it is we experience (Reality I) is known now not to be the reality of the external world in all its forms (Realities II, III and so on). Beyond all these realities, there is the reality of that which can never be known and which the most advanced cosmologists and physicists explore through pure number - merely creating a mathematical reality that may still have nothing to tell us about an Ultimate Reality which may not, in the end, be there at all.
The next frontier, I would suggest, is the cultural unravelling of the last true determinism - mathematical determinism - and even perhaps of the magical thinking behind accepting that cause and effect are necessarily absolutely true rather than true in our reality. This does not mean that magic is real - this is most unlikely - but only that the cultural frontier that appears to be dominated by number and logic at the high point of scientific culture, one that will get us to the stars one day (perhaps), is now justifiably capable of being critical of the ultimate reality of number and logic and so offering the opportunity to challenge its claims at those points of human existence where their technical use becomes meaningless. As the scientists try to move ever deeper into existence and into the conscious mind (expressed in advanced neuroscience), so the philosophical uncovering of the impossibility of knowing very much outside our own world carves out a subversive space that undermines science's implicit suggestion of meaning other than as an efficacious way of providing the basis for doing things in the world. If we do not want or need to do things in the world, then we do not need science quite as much as we thought. Increasing numbers of people may find it useful to stop doing and start dreaming solipsistically or in cultic shared dreams (or at least with the illusion, perhaps through shared ritual, in the existence of the shared dream).
This is the challenging aspect of the case. Let us return to Einstein who is said to have said (you can never tell with these quotations): "People like us, who believe in physics [note that word 'believe'], know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion". The uncertainties of science flip the mind from the clinical atheism of traditional materialism into a form of stubborn pseudo-theology in which speculation based on the intellectual perception of reality reintroduces magical thinking by the back door - this is as contrary to the expectations of three decades ago as feminists working with faith-based groups to control sex work or Pope Francis courting another religious group, the 'scientific' environmentalists, to win his debates on stem cell research. Meanwhile those who embed themselves in the simple business of being human and constructing their reality out of the business of being human in the world, perceiving reality as something lived, tend to materialism and atheism as pragmatic realities that allow life to be better lived on a day to day basis between birth and death. The tendency of an element of the scientific community to discover naively deism, spirituality, transhumanism, eschatology, meaning and platonic wonder (all the flummery of deep anxiety) contrasts with the ordinary Joe's increasingly happy abandon of religion in favour of pleasure and experience. It is as if the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century is going into reverse in the Twenty First century at one level just as (in the developed world) the masses are finally discovering the sheer freedom of not having a priest or a magistrate breathing down their backs at another.
But one frontier is absolute. The present, which is just the remembrance of the nano-past while a finely honed somatic machine wards off threats and seeks out opportunities, cannot become the future and the past cannot be experienced but merely remembered as in the past - as a present remembrance. We live in a perpetual present where the past is simply the accumulated historic tool box of past presents and the future is a set of guesses that relies on material reality being predictable and social reality being probabilistic. The arrow of time is the sea in which we swim and there is no cultural work that can counteract this reality, no frontier at all, except speculative imaginings that paradoxically can only take place in the presents of the individuals concerned. That these speculative imaginings can now include the complexities of quantum mechanics changes nothing about the actuality of this presentism moving in one direction, even when remembering, even when in altered states. The perception is thus, once again, at odds with the material reality. We have the basis for belief starting in the very difficulty of accepting presentism as at the core of our being. Once we take our present recalling as the past and our speculations about the future as the future, we have created a past and a future and from there we have the imaginative basis for theory, ideology and religion. We are made human by our utter refusal not to invent complex realities moment from moment, building on the substrate of past experience and its predictive capacity as an evolved tool for survival.
Once we understand this, whereas making a spacecraft that can divert asteroids is a frontier, speculation about the nature of time and reality is not quite such a frontier at all. The frontier is billions of consciousnesses taking advanced and creative speculations about time and reality, incorporating them (literally insofar as the mind is embedded in the body) and constructing reality present by present in seven billion muted solipsisms embedded in a social reality that allows each component to feed off the others and feed the others in an excess of mutual vampirism. That is the frontier. We are vampires of the real, sucking the life force of the past to create the future through our presentism.
Intellectually the idea of the arrow of time as simply an emergent phenomenon arising out of a unified bloc of space time and of quantum physics strikes me as 'logical' and probably 'true' but it is irrelevant if the only thing we, as humans, can experience is presentism within the arrow, a state of being in which the arrow permits us the illusion (which is now a reality because we are constructed to convert it into a reality) of participation in the arrow of time ... which, of course, therefore exists. The experienced world may be less 'true' in one version of reality than the unified bloc but it is more 'true' in terms of what really matters. This is our own existence in the world - indeed, after all, if it has no use-value, one starts to ask why we are so engaged with constructing an understanding of the reality outside ourselves, especially when only very few humans are mathematically mentally fitted to even come close to understanding what it is they are later going to want to popularise and which the 'educated' public will take on trust with the same trust in the authority of the scientist that they once had in the authority of the priest. There is little functional difference in this trust even if we have very good reason to believe that the scientist is inherently more intellectually trustworthy than the priest. The trust, however, is relativistic and should not be accepted as absolute.
What the intellectual modelling of theoretical physics is tending towards, in terms of cultural belief, is a subtle undermining of the degree to which we can know anything for sure about or within complex systems, a move towards acceptance of the unknowability of other minds and, more debatably, one towards acceptance of the contingency of human existence and non-acceptance of any meaningful form of mental survival after termination. It also operates in favour of free will and against determinism insofar as it may be feasible that the evolved consciousness of the human being operates with a quantum unpredictable aspect. Tiny unpredictable quantum events may conceivably randomly change the things that happen in the material world of which we are part - or not! It can reasonably be argued that we are so embedded in the material world that a simpler model of cause and effect necessarily applies to us and that quantum effects would be so miniscule as to be meaningless in such lumpy creatures as ourselves. The doubt has been sown however - cultural leadership passes from the predictive assumptions of Calvinists and Hegelians to the dodgier game played by slippery Pelagians and Existentialists. This is not to say that the quantum world is not just an extension of an overall materiality in which we are all embedded but only that, whether we term things to be quantum or even spiritual, in fact they are still part of the same damn material continuum. So there we have it ... the frontier of time and reality is not to be found in the work being done to create new knowledge of time and reality but how we use these fictions to construct society and ourselves. Whatever we are in fifty years (the non-dead ones of us at least) will be partly dictated by the myths currently being created by the scientific-magicians at the farthest ends of such speculation.
Einstein famously introduced the idea of a space-time that precluded any single and objective definition of simultaneity. This relativism has not yet worked its full way back through our culture as a relativism about reality itself. Yes, of course, there has been a form of widespread post-modern cultural relativism but this evades the issue. Social reality imposed by one prevailing order into which persons fitted was replaced in post-modern environments with a fragmentation that created many social fictions where there had only been one. The effect was to create a half-way house of identity politics and cultural relativism between the world of monocultures, ruling whole territories and suppressing dissent, and the reality of reality which is that individuals construct their own personal realities out of the shared reality of really existing material reality. This is now a world where the individual can believe what it is necessary for them to believe and have a structure of reality that is as unique as their fingerprint and yet one which can only be materially functional if it accords with the laws of physics that limit every social reality that has ever existed. No magical culture has fed its people through using magic alone.
The most interesting tension in this respect is between the magical thinking of human beings and material reality. The individual who is a magical thinker certainly cannot fly without the help of the technologist but vast tracts of experience can be made to fit into a magical model. While the technologists and scientists drive one frontier - the one that makes matter utile and more knowable - the magically-minded are driving another frontier - the one that can make life livable. The realities that are being squeezed between the two are those constructed out of the collapse of geographically centred dissent-resisting monocultures. The idea that monocultures can be collapsed into sets of identity without going further and seeing each individual as a self-transforming contained creator of their own reality who subverts (in time) the identity cultures as they once subverted the monocultures is the cultural frontier of our time. What we see is massive human variation emerging in ways that are not just creatively anarchic but potentially dangerous since the destructive outliers within the variation who understand technology can become murderous in their intent. They may desire to create, reversing the process moving from monocultural social reality to the realities of autonomous individuals, a culture of malignity finding and merging with like-minded malign individuals. Thus not only are socially constructed realities broken down into their components but new social constructions of reality arise out of those components, often for brief periods of time, making use of the instabilities of the current communications revolution. Nothing like this has appeared before in history.
The investigative frontier that is the scientific or philosophical investigation of time and reality (and space) has helped create this world of Heraclitean flux but the individual and bottom up social constructions involved highly volatile. In themselves they depend on belief, which may include unthinking belief in the claims of philosophers and scientists and on interpretations of what are thought to be those claims even if the scientists and philosophers have actually claimed nothing of the sort. A speculation which is logical or rational becomes detached from the original reasoning process to become a claim that becomes the basis for fear, hope, speculation, the struggle for status or resources - indeed, all those things that make us human-all-too-human. We see a lot of this in the disconnect between sober assessment of existential risk and the massive levels of apocalyptic hysteria to be found amongst the dimmer frightened rabbits who latch on to environmentalist or transhumanist movements. Rushing around like 'chicken-licken', they can make no sober assessment of either the original claim nor of the actuality of scientific method as hypothesis nor critique the use of a claim by special interests. They are, in short, at the frontier of human stupidity.
Einstein suggested that the passage of time itself is a fiction. This fictionalisation of reality is another factor that we have to take account of in describing ourselves as being at a cultural frontier as wild as the American West in its hey-day. It is our limitation, as a material creature existing as an autonomous unit within material reality, that constructs our perception of reality out of our senses and out of the structure of remembrance and of experience, created in turn out of our past sense experiences and possibly our genetics and somatics. We are stuck in a perceived reality, even as individual components, of all these social and material realities, one that is highly volatile but which we also know is uncomfortably contingent philosophically. Whatever it is we experience (Reality I) is known now not to be the reality of the external world in all its forms (Realities II, III and so on). Beyond all these realities, there is the reality of that which can never be known and which the most advanced cosmologists and physicists explore through pure number - merely creating a mathematical reality that may still have nothing to tell us about an Ultimate Reality which may not, in the end, be there at all.
The next frontier, I would suggest, is the cultural unravelling of the last true determinism - mathematical determinism - and even perhaps of the magical thinking behind accepting that cause and effect are necessarily absolutely true rather than true in our reality. This does not mean that magic is real - this is most unlikely - but only that the cultural frontier that appears to be dominated by number and logic at the high point of scientific culture, one that will get us to the stars one day (perhaps), is now justifiably capable of being critical of the ultimate reality of number and logic and so offering the opportunity to challenge its claims at those points of human existence where their technical use becomes meaningless. As the scientists try to move ever deeper into existence and into the conscious mind (expressed in advanced neuroscience), so the philosophical uncovering of the impossibility of knowing very much outside our own world carves out a subversive space that undermines science's implicit suggestion of meaning other than as an efficacious way of providing the basis for doing things in the world. If we do not want or need to do things in the world, then we do not need science quite as much as we thought. Increasing numbers of people may find it useful to stop doing and start dreaming solipsistically or in cultic shared dreams (or at least with the illusion, perhaps through shared ritual, in the existence of the shared dream).
This is the challenging aspect of the case. Let us return to Einstein who is said to have said (you can never tell with these quotations): "People like us, who believe in physics [note that word 'believe'], know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion". The uncertainties of science flip the mind from the clinical atheism of traditional materialism into a form of stubborn pseudo-theology in which speculation based on the intellectual perception of reality reintroduces magical thinking by the back door - this is as contrary to the expectations of three decades ago as feminists working with faith-based groups to control sex work or Pope Francis courting another religious group, the 'scientific' environmentalists, to win his debates on stem cell research. Meanwhile those who embed themselves in the simple business of being human and constructing their reality out of the business of being human in the world, perceiving reality as something lived, tend to materialism and atheism as pragmatic realities that allow life to be better lived on a day to day basis between birth and death. The tendency of an element of the scientific community to discover naively deism, spirituality, transhumanism, eschatology, meaning and platonic wonder (all the flummery of deep anxiety) contrasts with the ordinary Joe's increasingly happy abandon of religion in favour of pleasure and experience. It is as if the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century is going into reverse in the Twenty First century at one level just as (in the developed world) the masses are finally discovering the sheer freedom of not having a priest or a magistrate breathing down their backs at another.
But one frontier is absolute. The present, which is just the remembrance of the nano-past while a finely honed somatic machine wards off threats and seeks out opportunities, cannot become the future and the past cannot be experienced but merely remembered as in the past - as a present remembrance. We live in a perpetual present where the past is simply the accumulated historic tool box of past presents and the future is a set of guesses that relies on material reality being predictable and social reality being probabilistic. The arrow of time is the sea in which we swim and there is no cultural work that can counteract this reality, no frontier at all, except speculative imaginings that paradoxically can only take place in the presents of the individuals concerned. That these speculative imaginings can now include the complexities of quantum mechanics changes nothing about the actuality of this presentism moving in one direction, even when remembering, even when in altered states. The perception is thus, once again, at odds with the material reality. We have the basis for belief starting in the very difficulty of accepting presentism as at the core of our being. Once we take our present recalling as the past and our speculations about the future as the future, we have created a past and a future and from there we have the imaginative basis for theory, ideology and religion. We are made human by our utter refusal not to invent complex realities moment from moment, building on the substrate of past experience and its predictive capacity as an evolved tool for survival.
Once we understand this, whereas making a spacecraft that can divert asteroids is a frontier, speculation about the nature of time and reality is not quite such a frontier at all. The frontier is billions of consciousnesses taking advanced and creative speculations about time and reality, incorporating them (literally insofar as the mind is embedded in the body) and constructing reality present by present in seven billion muted solipsisms embedded in a social reality that allows each component to feed off the others and feed the others in an excess of mutual vampirism. That is the frontier. We are vampires of the real, sucking the life force of the past to create the future through our presentism.
Intellectually the idea of the arrow of time as simply an emergent phenomenon arising out of a unified bloc of space time and of quantum physics strikes me as 'logical' and probably 'true' but it is irrelevant if the only thing we, as humans, can experience is presentism within the arrow, a state of being in which the arrow permits us the illusion (which is now a reality because we are constructed to convert it into a reality) of participation in the arrow of time ... which, of course, therefore exists. The experienced world may be less 'true' in one version of reality than the unified bloc but it is more 'true' in terms of what really matters. This is our own existence in the world - indeed, after all, if it has no use-value, one starts to ask why we are so engaged with constructing an understanding of the reality outside ourselves, especially when only very few humans are mathematically mentally fitted to even come close to understanding what it is they are later going to want to popularise and which the 'educated' public will take on trust with the same trust in the authority of the scientist that they once had in the authority of the priest. There is little functional difference in this trust even if we have very good reason to believe that the scientist is inherently more intellectually trustworthy than the priest. The trust, however, is relativistic and should not be accepted as absolute.
What the intellectual modelling of theoretical physics is tending towards, in terms of cultural belief, is a subtle undermining of the degree to which we can know anything for sure about or within complex systems, a move towards acceptance of the unknowability of other minds and, more debatably, one towards acceptance of the contingency of human existence and non-acceptance of any meaningful form of mental survival after termination. It also operates in favour of free will and against determinism insofar as it may be feasible that the evolved consciousness of the human being operates with a quantum unpredictable aspect. Tiny unpredictable quantum events may conceivably randomly change the things that happen in the material world of which we are part - or not! It can reasonably be argued that we are so embedded in the material world that a simpler model of cause and effect necessarily applies to us and that quantum effects would be so miniscule as to be meaningless in such lumpy creatures as ourselves. The doubt has been sown however - cultural leadership passes from the predictive assumptions of Calvinists and Hegelians to the dodgier game played by slippery Pelagians and Existentialists. This is not to say that the quantum world is not just an extension of an overall materiality in which we are all embedded but only that, whether we term things to be quantum or even spiritual, in fact they are still part of the same damn material continuum. So there we have it ... the frontier of time and reality is not to be found in the work being done to create new knowledge of time and reality but how we use these fictions to construct society and ourselves. Whatever we are in fifty years (the non-dead ones of us at least) will be partly dictated by the myths currently being created by the scientific-magicians at the farthest ends of such speculation.
Friday, 15 May 2015
What Is This Thing Called 'Spirit'?
Trying to define ‘spirit’ comes down to an
interpretation of Existence itself – does it even exist or is it an invention and, if it exists, is it based within matter or does it arise from consciousness?
These are probably non-questions if we start from the existentialist
position of accepting Existence’s ultimate un-knowability and then make the nature of spirit a matter of choice and so of belief.
That would be easier all round. If it is a choice made without any associated ability to know the truth of the matter (full knowledge that is), this must suggest an attitude of tolerance to those who make another choice than ours. We cannot know. They cannot know. And so we each choose in our own way. Where do we go from here?
The Investigative Project
If we choose the primacy of matter, then we choose either a creator of matter as (at the least) implicit (against which spirit is to be judged and by whom spirit is judged) or we choose no creator at all but just pure eternal and boundless materiality. If we choose the principle of consciousness, we choose an implicit immanent consciousness within Existence (even if it is ultimately unknowable) or we choose our own integration into an unknowable Existence as its own creator through our belief and action.
In simplistic terms, we have the theocratic systems, scientific materialist systems, systems of immanence or systems of existential or magical engagement. The choice for exploration in this text is the last of these. A belief that might sustain us here is that we create ourselves and our world even if we know that there are material limits to that creation, ones that ultimately derive from the very unknowability of Being.
That we can describe and even utilise matter does not mean that we can know matter and in perceiving, ordering, filtering and manipulating matter, we and not some outside party are the creators of its use-value, even when and as we use the creations of similar others for our own purposes. So, those who believe in a God, those who believe only in scientific materialism and those who believe that consciousness exists outside ourselves in Being need not read on - except out of curiosity as to how other minds than theirs might think.
What we offer is a concept of Being grounded in the expansion of our own day-to-day consciousness to encompass itself and what it can grasp through itself – and through the mystery of its engagement with other consciousnesses that strive in similar ways to live and thrive. Human, alien, machine, animal, plant or, in the spirit of open-mindedness to possibility, brute matter without apparent life or source of creation (whether from procreation or invention), the unknowability but potential equality of other components of existence remains a nagging constraint on us.
This expansion of our own consciousness is a constant revelation based on a permanent struggle with Being in all its manifestations. Liberation is existential yet acquired through perception and cognition. Whether fully achievable or not within actually experienced social reality, an individual reality can be developed in which, even if momentary, an irrational and profound altered state of consciousness can express a true will of sorts.
This, in turn, may point to an existentially constructed nature that may become, for a moment, apparently all consciousness, boundless and without object. These moments may be less interesting (certainly no cause for the abnegation implicit in such searching within systems of immanence) than the transformation that takes place within the person from before to after a moment of heightened experience. The moment is, in this sense, far less interesting than the state of 'being' afterwards and its contrast with that state of 'being' that existed before. The project may thus be four-fold:-
Some Notes on Method
A central issue in the history of exploring consciousness has been the recognition that some personalities (without disrespect to others) have a powerful internal drive towards engagement with these questions. A second has been the attempt, often for apparently noble reasons, by some who have followed this searching path to keep their findings secret, to be transmitted only in a certain form to certain people as a ‘tradition’.
The first is a fact of nature, applicable only to some and not all, and in itself certainly argues against religious universalism. The attempt to create a way of relating consciousness to reality that all can understand not only requires excessive simplification but it demands institutionalization and, in the end, the oppression of the minority of those who could continue their exploration beyond tradition.
This has been the way of the great institutionalized religions of the West, especially Christianity, Judaism and Islam, where the necessity of a universal or ethnic message has perforce ‘dumbed down’ the spiritual. The searching mind is only permitted to explore within the ethical and intellectual framework permitted it by priests and elders. Mystical traditions - whether Sufi or Qabbalistic or that of, say, Boehme - have got around this but in a very unsatisfactory way, spirit operating at half-cock so to speak.
Today, the clash of institutional norms with genuine personal engagement in moral questions has never been clearer than in the mishandling of recent child abuse scandals within the Catholic Church. On the other hand, the secret society or the romantic belief in Hidden Masters might charitably be regarded as a response to the institutionalization of spirituality but this is being far too generous about what is a process of exclusion rather than inclusion of the searching mentality. It suggests that a few give themselves the right to the resources to explore their individual spirituality without any recognition of all those searchers who they leave behind.
Here is the Scylla of spiritual conformity where the search is curtailed by custom (with perhaps various mystics or Swedenborg representing the limits of what might be achieved by someone under such circumstances). There is the Charybdis of introverted tradition where the search is limited by the very forms required to build a system that can maintain a few adherents over many generations. The answer lies only in part in the tolerance and respect for others outlined at the beginning of this introduction.
For example, we might accept that sincere Catholicism is greater than the monstrous and sclerotic clericalism of the Vatican while the need for ritual and secrecy is a legitimate one for those seeking immanence, even if it may be a block to a direct relationship with Being. The recognition that ‘searchers’ are a substantial (rather than a small) minority but still a minority suggests that the searcher paradigm does not seek to create an institutional structure that will compete with or universalise its discoveries.
The process of 'searching' is also driven ineluctably towards a free and open society (though not necessarily in its current kleptocratic form) in which the rights of other types of minds are respected so long as they permit the full freedom to search – in other words that tolerance and respect are reciprocal throughout society. The freedom to search is also implicitly a total freedom of thought and expression, to transgress without harming others … in other words, it is, necessarily and both despite and because of its minority status, a liberal or rather libertarian attitude to life and to the lives of others.
At the same time, the search is private so that the right to micro-institutionalise the search into social forms, whether secret or not, must be recognized wherever other like minds are found, especially where such like minds may feel that they will face prejudice and social or economic disadvantage. But the position that the search must be constructed and passed on in forms that are necessarily secret is untenable.
This position represents the triumph of form over content, the error that because something has been authorised then it is true – indeed, this in itself expresses the essential spiritual failure of institutionalized structures of religion. Authority is never truth because the truth shifts with new facts. Moreover, there comes a point where the safety of searchers will require radical public expression as a defence against attack especially if the search involves transgressions that harm no-one and that require that ‘norms’ be questioned. Secrecy isolates and the isolated person is the most vulnerable to destruction - as trades unions have showen us, there is strength in collaboration.
The path of self exploration and of calculated transgression can learn from other spiritual approaches in both method and content but each search will be personal and individual. Social engagement in spiritual matters will be precisely linked to the degree to which a person, without value judgement from others, can find their path alone or not. For some, indeed, there may be a return to an institutionalized religious structure in the long run because, in fact, this best fits their spiritual needs. Imagine Catholicism (for example) thus invigorated!
So, to conclude, searching must start as anti-traditional and eclectic even if it leads back to paths that are ultimately existentially chosen as a tradition. The only tragedy in this would be if the searcher, having discovered a traditional or very particular destiny, pulled up the ladder behind them, as that intellectual monster Augustine did, and deny others the free right of search in subsequent generations. Such institutional sclerosis must always push us back to that form of spiritual liberalism in which all are free to follow their True Will in relation to Being.
The Starting Point – Structures of Reality
For the search to begin, it must be made axiomatic that material reality exists as something that can be analysed and made useful for the individual and social will. We extend our mind-bodies outwards to make Matter work for us. Interconnected in society over time, there is a continuum between our social and historical selves, our extended bodies, our dependence on and constraints from other selves (as social reality) and the utile Matter in which selves are embedded. To deny Matter as real is to complicate things unnecessarily.
Where the zone of doubt lies is at the extremes that are to be found in the vortex of this reality – both at the smallest and broadest (in space and time) limits of what our minds can comprehend and in the mystery of our inner Being which we intuitively understand to be interconnected with Matter. This inner sense of Being, in reality, cannot be understood in analytical terms, neither by us as thinking selves nor by society at large.
The reason for this profound ignorance is two-fold: the limits of perception (even extended through technology and through mathematics); and our inability to fix the movement of matter in the mind. We see a complex self awareness, uncommunicable to others and played out in a real time that is not always the same as perceived time.
Even if we could match brain states to mind states with considerable accuracy, any attempt to reduce the mind to assumptions based on pure materialism would be as presumptuous and absurd as assuming that the limits of our perception in the wider universe must necessarily relate to some omniscient God.
Thus, we have expressions of faith at both ends of the spectrum – from one party in believing that what cannot be known necessarily leads to deity because of ‘intelligent design’ and from the other that what cannot be known in the brain must be purely material in nature and structure. Theists and materialists merely direct their faith in different directions but with the same arrogant purpose of claiming more knowledge that the evidence permits, one filling the vacuum at the macro-level and the other at the micro-level.
Why should it not be equally true that there is nothing beyond our perception or that there is a soul within existence or that an inner soul is embedded in the body or that soul is embedded within social as well as material reality? Whatever is true, the functioning of whatever truth we choose operates beyond any possible human knowledge.
Perhaps (as much a matter of faith as that offered by the materialists for the non-existence of spirit and soul or the deists for the existence of God) we can take what we can experience of Being within ourselves as the spiritual starting point (especially since we cannot cognitively manage the universe!) We can then explore non-rational and non-materialist models for entering into a relationship with Being or at least with that unknowable reality that lies beyond perception and beyond mathematics.
Cultural Perspectives
Engagement with these issues may well reshape reality as we humans experience it (which is partly social and partly perceptual as well as objectively malleable) in a way that is precisely magical, that is concerning the use of the Will (which has to be defined further) to effect change in the world. Drawing down a very imperfect but transcendental perception of inner non-material reality might well recast both man and society in ways that we cannot yet predict - and which might cause fear as well as awe and joy.
We might reasonably postulate that, in the brain, is material energy (the electrical operations of the brain) but, beyond that, a transcendent scarcely knowable energy (the consequent connections and awarenesses). We (as ‘searchers’) in both worlds, ‘scientific’ and ‘spiritual’, draw down from the last to the first as ‘searchers’ and, through technological innovation, from the first to the last as ‘users’ – just as we might if we created an AI that could tap into that same transcendent energy on its own terms.
This changes our perspective on what it means to be conscious with some potentially frightening conclusions that require caution and compassion, given that each person lies somewhere different on the flow of experience between matter and spirit. The double danger is that moral value is given to those higher in the cosmic evolutionary scale over those who prefer to live in a world that is given and that we fail to recognize as equal those new consciousnesses, machine or alien or evolved, that come to match our position on the scale.
The first creates the danger of elitism, the weakness of many followers of both Eastern and new traditions. The second creates dangers of species-ism and the limitation of the good only to the human species under circumstances where much human behavior is vile - to its own type let alone to others. These are serious moral issues but they cannot be swept under the table as they are by the great universal religions, which include socialism and liberalism in this respect.
Other than compassion, the guard against elitism is that no person can know the spiritual nature of another. No outward forms or right conduct or right language can state that this person or that person to be ‘better’ than another, certainly not the observer over any observed. In this sense, Christ was right that all persons might enter his Kingdom of Heaven. No-one could say that they were ‘without sin’ and could judge another.
The point here is that the lowliest Indian peasant might be more advanced in this respect than a top cosmologist at an American University or the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. None can know. All must be regarded as equal in potential for lack of any possible evidence to the contrary. Equality is the default position so long as other minds are unknowable. Fortunately, sensible public policy in the modern world militates against the arrogance of superiority amongst those who believe themselves to be uniquely blessed.
The second drives us in the other direction. It must be a fear to many that some may transcend the human condition through evolution, that machines may transcend humans or that we may find aliens who do so. This may be hypothetical and not require too much practical concern today. However, this may arise, in some far distant future, and we must then embrace such change and understand that the ‘rights’ accruing to the less conscious (like animals) stand under the twin rules of compassion and equity precisely because we may be in that place ourselves some day.
Further Lines of Research
We have laid out the four-fold project but the pathway to understanding the new consciousness are very similar to those of traditional philosophy but with this one difference, that the analytical takes us only so far. The analytical and the experimental limits us by suggesting what cannot be so in the present but it cannot tell us what might not be so in the future. These are some of the central questions for us:-
Even that philosophy of the East that has (arguably) the most positive attitude to the world and is most tolerant of difference, Kashmiri Shaivism, still holds to the illusion that an individual can ‘rise’ from individuality to ‘universality’ through knowing their innermost Self. The illusion lies not only in the error that absolute knowledge of the innermost Self is possible but in the equal error that such a Self could ever be like other Selves and some Higher Consciousness i.e. be part of something universal. If the Self was known, it would not be universal and if it became universal, then it ceases to be the Self. However, once the illusion is removed, there are insights to be had from three of the four theories of Trika –
That would be easier all round. If it is a choice made without any associated ability to know the truth of the matter (full knowledge that is), this must suggest an attitude of tolerance to those who make another choice than ours. We cannot know. They cannot know. And so we each choose in our own way. Where do we go from here?
The Investigative Project
If we choose the primacy of matter, then we choose either a creator of matter as (at the least) implicit (against which spirit is to be judged and by whom spirit is judged) or we choose no creator at all but just pure eternal and boundless materiality. If we choose the principle of consciousness, we choose an implicit immanent consciousness within Existence (even if it is ultimately unknowable) or we choose our own integration into an unknowable Existence as its own creator through our belief and action.
In simplistic terms, we have the theocratic systems, scientific materialist systems, systems of immanence or systems of existential or magical engagement. The choice for exploration in this text is the last of these. A belief that might sustain us here is that we create ourselves and our world even if we know that there are material limits to that creation, ones that ultimately derive from the very unknowability of Being.
That we can describe and even utilise matter does not mean that we can know matter and in perceiving, ordering, filtering and manipulating matter, we and not some outside party are the creators of its use-value, even when and as we use the creations of similar others for our own purposes. So, those who believe in a God, those who believe only in scientific materialism and those who believe that consciousness exists outside ourselves in Being need not read on - except out of curiosity as to how other minds than theirs might think.
What we offer is a concept of Being grounded in the expansion of our own day-to-day consciousness to encompass itself and what it can grasp through itself – and through the mystery of its engagement with other consciousnesses that strive in similar ways to live and thrive. Human, alien, machine, animal, plant or, in the spirit of open-mindedness to possibility, brute matter without apparent life or source of creation (whether from procreation or invention), the unknowability but potential equality of other components of existence remains a nagging constraint on us.
This expansion of our own consciousness is a constant revelation based on a permanent struggle with Being in all its manifestations. Liberation is existential yet acquired through perception and cognition. Whether fully achievable or not within actually experienced social reality, an individual reality can be developed in which, even if momentary, an irrational and profound altered state of consciousness can express a true will of sorts.
This, in turn, may point to an existentially constructed nature that may become, for a moment, apparently all consciousness, boundless and without object. These moments may be less interesting (certainly no cause for the abnegation implicit in such searching within systems of immanence) than the transformation that takes place within the person from before to after a moment of heightened experience. The moment is, in this sense, far less interesting than the state of 'being' afterwards and its contrast with that state of 'being' that existed before. The project may thus be four-fold:-
- To explore how subjectivity (the sense of self) can expand to levels that can encompass a perception of the non-self of existence;
- To explore how external representations and archetypes outside both mind and body can be brought into the self in order to create a willed internal order that unites body and mind in a wholeness in its relation to the world;
- To explore how the body itself can represent the self (the mind) in its journey to existential wilfulness;
- To explore the role of ecstasy in particular (any form of ecstatic state) in engaging the body and mind as one whole in the non-self of existence.
Some Notes on Method
A central issue in the history of exploring consciousness has been the recognition that some personalities (without disrespect to others) have a powerful internal drive towards engagement with these questions. A second has been the attempt, often for apparently noble reasons, by some who have followed this searching path to keep their findings secret, to be transmitted only in a certain form to certain people as a ‘tradition’.
The first is a fact of nature, applicable only to some and not all, and in itself certainly argues against religious universalism. The attempt to create a way of relating consciousness to reality that all can understand not only requires excessive simplification but it demands institutionalization and, in the end, the oppression of the minority of those who could continue their exploration beyond tradition.
This has been the way of the great institutionalized religions of the West, especially Christianity, Judaism and Islam, where the necessity of a universal or ethnic message has perforce ‘dumbed down’ the spiritual. The searching mind is only permitted to explore within the ethical and intellectual framework permitted it by priests and elders. Mystical traditions - whether Sufi or Qabbalistic or that of, say, Boehme - have got around this but in a very unsatisfactory way, spirit operating at half-cock so to speak.
Today, the clash of institutional norms with genuine personal engagement in moral questions has never been clearer than in the mishandling of recent child abuse scandals within the Catholic Church. On the other hand, the secret society or the romantic belief in Hidden Masters might charitably be regarded as a response to the institutionalization of spirituality but this is being far too generous about what is a process of exclusion rather than inclusion of the searching mentality. It suggests that a few give themselves the right to the resources to explore their individual spirituality without any recognition of all those searchers who they leave behind.
Here is the Scylla of spiritual conformity where the search is curtailed by custom (with perhaps various mystics or Swedenborg representing the limits of what might be achieved by someone under such circumstances). There is the Charybdis of introverted tradition where the search is limited by the very forms required to build a system that can maintain a few adherents over many generations. The answer lies only in part in the tolerance and respect for others outlined at the beginning of this introduction.
For example, we might accept that sincere Catholicism is greater than the monstrous and sclerotic clericalism of the Vatican while the need for ritual and secrecy is a legitimate one for those seeking immanence, even if it may be a block to a direct relationship with Being. The recognition that ‘searchers’ are a substantial (rather than a small) minority but still a minority suggests that the searcher paradigm does not seek to create an institutional structure that will compete with or universalise its discoveries.
The process of 'searching' is also driven ineluctably towards a free and open society (though not necessarily in its current kleptocratic form) in which the rights of other types of minds are respected so long as they permit the full freedom to search – in other words that tolerance and respect are reciprocal throughout society. The freedom to search is also implicitly a total freedom of thought and expression, to transgress without harming others … in other words, it is, necessarily and both despite and because of its minority status, a liberal or rather libertarian attitude to life and to the lives of others.
At the same time, the search is private so that the right to micro-institutionalise the search into social forms, whether secret or not, must be recognized wherever other like minds are found, especially where such like minds may feel that they will face prejudice and social or economic disadvantage. But the position that the search must be constructed and passed on in forms that are necessarily secret is untenable.
This position represents the triumph of form over content, the error that because something has been authorised then it is true – indeed, this in itself expresses the essential spiritual failure of institutionalized structures of religion. Authority is never truth because the truth shifts with new facts. Moreover, there comes a point where the safety of searchers will require radical public expression as a defence against attack especially if the search involves transgressions that harm no-one and that require that ‘norms’ be questioned. Secrecy isolates and the isolated person is the most vulnerable to destruction - as trades unions have showen us, there is strength in collaboration.
The path of self exploration and of calculated transgression can learn from other spiritual approaches in both method and content but each search will be personal and individual. Social engagement in spiritual matters will be precisely linked to the degree to which a person, without value judgement from others, can find their path alone or not. For some, indeed, there may be a return to an institutionalized religious structure in the long run because, in fact, this best fits their spiritual needs. Imagine Catholicism (for example) thus invigorated!
So, to conclude, searching must start as anti-traditional and eclectic even if it leads back to paths that are ultimately existentially chosen as a tradition. The only tragedy in this would be if the searcher, having discovered a traditional or very particular destiny, pulled up the ladder behind them, as that intellectual monster Augustine did, and deny others the free right of search in subsequent generations. Such institutional sclerosis must always push us back to that form of spiritual liberalism in which all are free to follow their True Will in relation to Being.
The Starting Point – Structures of Reality
For the search to begin, it must be made axiomatic that material reality exists as something that can be analysed and made useful for the individual and social will. We extend our mind-bodies outwards to make Matter work for us. Interconnected in society over time, there is a continuum between our social and historical selves, our extended bodies, our dependence on and constraints from other selves (as social reality) and the utile Matter in which selves are embedded. To deny Matter as real is to complicate things unnecessarily.
Where the zone of doubt lies is at the extremes that are to be found in the vortex of this reality – both at the smallest and broadest (in space and time) limits of what our minds can comprehend and in the mystery of our inner Being which we intuitively understand to be interconnected with Matter. This inner sense of Being, in reality, cannot be understood in analytical terms, neither by us as thinking selves nor by society at large.
The reason for this profound ignorance is two-fold: the limits of perception (even extended through technology and through mathematics); and our inability to fix the movement of matter in the mind. We see a complex self awareness, uncommunicable to others and played out in a real time that is not always the same as perceived time.
Even if we could match brain states to mind states with considerable accuracy, any attempt to reduce the mind to assumptions based on pure materialism would be as presumptuous and absurd as assuming that the limits of our perception in the wider universe must necessarily relate to some omniscient God.
Thus, we have expressions of faith at both ends of the spectrum – from one party in believing that what cannot be known necessarily leads to deity because of ‘intelligent design’ and from the other that what cannot be known in the brain must be purely material in nature and structure. Theists and materialists merely direct their faith in different directions but with the same arrogant purpose of claiming more knowledge that the evidence permits, one filling the vacuum at the macro-level and the other at the micro-level.
Why should it not be equally true that there is nothing beyond our perception or that there is a soul within existence or that an inner soul is embedded in the body or that soul is embedded within social as well as material reality? Whatever is true, the functioning of whatever truth we choose operates beyond any possible human knowledge.
Perhaps (as much a matter of faith as that offered by the materialists for the non-existence of spirit and soul or the deists for the existence of God) we can take what we can experience of Being within ourselves as the spiritual starting point (especially since we cannot cognitively manage the universe!) We can then explore non-rational and non-materialist models for entering into a relationship with Being or at least with that unknowable reality that lies beyond perception and beyond mathematics.
Cultural Perspectives
Engagement with these issues may well reshape reality as we humans experience it (which is partly social and partly perceptual as well as objectively malleable) in a way that is precisely magical, that is concerning the use of the Will (which has to be defined further) to effect change in the world. Drawing down a very imperfect but transcendental perception of inner non-material reality might well recast both man and society in ways that we cannot yet predict - and which might cause fear as well as awe and joy.
We might reasonably postulate that, in the brain, is material energy (the electrical operations of the brain) but, beyond that, a transcendent scarcely knowable energy (the consequent connections and awarenesses). We (as ‘searchers’) in both worlds, ‘scientific’ and ‘spiritual’, draw down from the last to the first as ‘searchers’ and, through technological innovation, from the first to the last as ‘users’ – just as we might if we created an AI that could tap into that same transcendent energy on its own terms.
This changes our perspective on what it means to be conscious with some potentially frightening conclusions that require caution and compassion, given that each person lies somewhere different on the flow of experience between matter and spirit. The double danger is that moral value is given to those higher in the cosmic evolutionary scale over those who prefer to live in a world that is given and that we fail to recognize as equal those new consciousnesses, machine or alien or evolved, that come to match our position on the scale.
The first creates the danger of elitism, the weakness of many followers of both Eastern and new traditions. The second creates dangers of species-ism and the limitation of the good only to the human species under circumstances where much human behavior is vile - to its own type let alone to others. These are serious moral issues but they cannot be swept under the table as they are by the great universal religions, which include socialism and liberalism in this respect.
Other than compassion, the guard against elitism is that no person can know the spiritual nature of another. No outward forms or right conduct or right language can state that this person or that person to be ‘better’ than another, certainly not the observer over any observed. In this sense, Christ was right that all persons might enter his Kingdom of Heaven. No-one could say that they were ‘without sin’ and could judge another.
The point here is that the lowliest Indian peasant might be more advanced in this respect than a top cosmologist at an American University or the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. None can know. All must be regarded as equal in potential for lack of any possible evidence to the contrary. Equality is the default position so long as other minds are unknowable. Fortunately, sensible public policy in the modern world militates against the arrogance of superiority amongst those who believe themselves to be uniquely blessed.
The second drives us in the other direction. It must be a fear to many that some may transcend the human condition through evolution, that machines may transcend humans or that we may find aliens who do so. This may be hypothetical and not require too much practical concern today. However, this may arise, in some far distant future, and we must then embrace such change and understand that the ‘rights’ accruing to the less conscious (like animals) stand under the twin rules of compassion and equity precisely because we may be in that place ourselves some day.
Further Lines of Research
We have laid out the four-fold project but the pathway to understanding the new consciousness are very similar to those of traditional philosophy but with this one difference, that the analytical takes us only so far. The analytical and the experimental limits us by suggesting what cannot be so in the present but it cannot tell us what might not be so in the future. These are some of the central questions for us:-
- What language is best suited to describing the moments of transformation which might involve both a perception of personal transcendence in a context of immanence?
- What precisely is our True Will when actions based on cause and effect appear buried in our history and in instinct? How do we exist as actors in a drama in which the playwright is history and we may wish to get off the stage at any time to make our own life choices?
- How can we know anything when all knowledge is based on sensory inputs that are biologically determined? What is behind our perception of Being that would permit us to experience a relationship to it without recourse to the abstractions of mathematics?
- What is our relationship as conscious beings not merely to the reality ‘out there’ but to the many varieties of consciousness, semi-consciousness, altered states and non-consciousness (including death) and to time?
- How do we regard the biological drives within our body and their relationship to mind? (Religions have been afraid of the flow of chemicals that shift and change our perception and cause deep distress as well as great pleasure: will engaging with these material aspects of the self be far more fruitful in their potential for our True Will than seeking to crush or deny our animal natures?)
- What is the relationship between analytical thinking, the management of the body and the use of images, sounds and other sensory inputs from the outer world in constructing our own True Will?
- How do we connect with the unconscious mind and body, our autonomic system, so that we can learn to see things as our body sees them and not just as our mind collates sensory information into a simulacrum of reality?
- Can we have a concept of evil even as we consciously seek new states of consciousness and alterations of reality? Can we take responsibility for consequences without avoiding necessary and creative risks?
Even that philosophy of the East that has (arguably) the most positive attitude to the world and is most tolerant of difference, Kashmiri Shaivism, still holds to the illusion that an individual can ‘rise’ from individuality to ‘universality’ through knowing their innermost Self. The illusion lies not only in the error that absolute knowledge of the innermost Self is possible but in the equal error that such a Self could ever be like other Selves and some Higher Consciousness i.e. be part of something universal. If the Self was known, it would not be universal and if it became universal, then it ceases to be the Self. However, once the illusion is removed, there are insights to be had from three of the four theories of Trika –
- There is the attempt to understand the totality of the universe (or our relation to the absolute nature of Existence) which is not to be confused with understanding the universe;
- There is the realisation of the individual but as individual (interpreted in Western terms as True Will);
- There is the recognition that all Existence depends on vibration (which might recast as the recognition that all Existence is a matter of waves and particles that we may never understand in full but which offer theories of reality that we can seize upon to build a theory of our relationship to Existence).
- The tool of perceptual transcendence by which we alter our consciousness periodically to bring massivity and scale to our thinking, placing immediate and sensory concerns in their proper proportion as units to be shuffled in alignment with our True Will;
- The tool of constant self-questioning as to our own inner true nature, notably the correct balance between our body, our history, our environment and that powerful residual core of True Will, a personality that rises beyond socially constructed reality;
- The tool of science, directed both to the material base of mind and universe, insufficient to tell us how things are in the absolute but able to improve our own ability to align who we are with the structures of matter into which we are embedded.
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