![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I'm beginning to understand. Maybe.
Feb. 19th, 2012 12:38 pmNow I think I can summarize—or more likely, reword in more linear fashion—my previous 2000 word ramble, starting from a slightly different premise and extending the overall model, thanks to an unintentional intervention by Grady Harris. I shall probably post my response to the piece he cited (http://www.gq.com/news-politics/big-issues/200802/john-jeremiah-sullivan-violence-lambs-future-human-race, a GQ article that was meant to be satirical) since he says my e-mail is one of the clearest and most cogent things I have written, ever. But for now the main points of that e-mail are embedded in the unusually linear argument below, which takes a bit more than 1500 words to get from the problem of consciousness to someplace between the Paleolithic caves and the present day:
“I’m Beginning to Understand”(?) or Not
Assuming that “consciousness” exists at all…oops, let’s stop there for just a moment. Even if our—okay, my consciousness, let’s bracket the pseudo-philosophical problem of whether “other minds” such as yours exist—even if my consciousness is just a working compilation of impulses put together through the cooperation of a whole bunch of mostly autonomous bodily programs, the agglomeration of impulses exists. The “self” is as real as the Buddhists say it is; for them the self is just an agglomeration of impulses that holds within it the possibility of inner realization of that truth—we see that “I am not this emotion” and “I am not this other impulse” until at last we—I (I wish)—have peeled away the entire onion, and yet I am still saying “I” as though I were something eternal rather than a part of a dialectic between parts of a unified environment, a swirl of momentary energy that nevertheless organizes and perceives the entire dialectic, though not the entire environment. “Where is there any duality?”
So now that we have established that consciousness exists, how far down the evolutionary ladder does it exist? There is indisputably (when people say “indisputably,” it means the point is disputed) a level at which there just isn’t enough of a nervous system to support more than an automatic response generated by pain or hunger—even if the organization of perceptions that we call “consciousness” were something like a radio message being received from some unknown source, as David Eagleman’s thought experiment has it, there aren’t enough parts there to make a radio receiver.
But at some point we do have the makings of a radio. When does the message start to come through, even if it is faint and filled with static?
Franz de Waal (author of Our Inner Ape) summarizes the state of research by discussing the species for which experiments have demonstrated evidence that they know that a reflection in a mirror is an image of themselves and not another member of the species behind glass. (We could go into the question of animal emotions, but then we’d never get to the point. Let’s keep gazing into the mirror.)
We can’t really be certain of the point at which animals stop being instinct-driven automata and start knowing that they feel emotions or physical pain, but we can know the point at which they respond to the fact that they are individual selves (again, the “self” exists, okay?)—or at least we know when they look annoyed at that splotch of paint on their head once they see it in a mirror, and then try to get it off. (That isn’t the only experimental variable, but I haven’t followed up on the research.)
That doesn’t get us very far towards the existential awareness of death, or the making of art—though Melvin Konner cites in The Tangled Wing a really striking case of something like aesthetic awareness in creatures of the African savanna when confronted by a huge waterfall, which regularly elicited less than functional contemplative moments, unless of course the moments of risky inattentiveness were just a response to having finally gotten a drink of water. Tool-making, now, that occurs across species…and “making,” too, not just found-object explorations.
But we don’t come from those species, we come from a mostly quarrelsome line of primates (give or take a bonobo or two—we’ll bracket de Waal’s life work on the roots of cooperation and empathy) that seem more task-driven than aesthetically inclined, most of the time. And for a mind-numbingly vast number of years, we find our ancestors chipping exactly the same damn off-balance spear points and hand tools, for all the world like that was good enough, and who wants to change something that works?
So something changed at a certain point in terms of evolutionary advantage, because the roots of mathematics appeared (stone tools with an awareness of proportion and what certainly looks like the use of marks to keep track of quantities—regardless of whether they gave names to something called “numbers”), and the roots of art, and what may be the world’s earliest musical instruments. We just don’t know what that something was, and it needn’t have been enough of a stimulus to launch an abrupt explosion of creativity—the “brain boost” only needed to be a gentle shove towards insight where previously there had been no insight whatsoever, or just enough to get by on, day to day.
But once we have that gentle or brutal shove (which I suppose could have been simply environmental stresses eliciting new and previously unknown forms of behavior), all kinds of things become possible. Originally, they may have been not just possible but necessary; environmental stress, once somewhat relieved, would have been a sufficient causative factor for art and music and mathematics arising all at the same time, without our resorting to the hypothesis of bursts of radiation from comets or what have you. A brutal shove towards practical inventiveness does form all sorts of templates within which disinterested creativity can flourish once the emergency at hand has been brought under control. The presence in the population of imaginatively inclined genetic tendencies that would be advantageous would be preserved by the group even when the possessors of such tendencies were not otherwise well endowed for survival—I gather that there is a really badly imagined caveman novel that explains sentimentally why one of the earliest known burials contains an adult male with a physical handicap that would have made survival impossible unless the group chose to maintain him. But we don’t actually know what talents this gentleman had that made folks want to keep him from dying before his time. We just know they valued him enough to keep him going for as long as possible and then give him a decent burial.)
Have patience, we’re almost there. This is how I roll, to quote an outdated mal mot.
Now that we have the roots of mathematics and art and music and possibly even proto-writing (I keep skipping over the roots of spoken language because the evidence is so tangential and tedious), we may have the roots of politics and psychology and philosophy arising at different moments or the same moment. I am saying “psychology and philosophy” because those are what religions contain, although they also contain speculative and experimental science and possibly responses to real invisible forces as well—even if the forces are only complex configurations of radiation and air pressure—but let us bracket that part of the problem, too.
Although, again, our remote ancestors are not operating with anything like the same cultural assumptions as ourselves, it seems logical that once you have a sufficiently complex nervous system to be developing art and music and mathematics, you have a sufficiently complex nervous system to have, well, uh, complexes. You could probably discern the basic lineaments of Jung’s personality types (the only part of Jungian psychology that has given rise to a more or less empirical method of categorization) in the population of the Paleolithic caves. And once you have personal problems, you have the roots of psychotherapy, or at least that is what the inheritance of the world’s teaching stories would lead us to believe. Some of these wisdom tales and jokes are very old, though in their present form they can’t date back further than the Neolithic.
But at the same time that external behavioral modification arose in the form of power politics (as in, “Do what I say or I’ll bash your head in! and by the way, I have God on my side.”), it seems likely that internal behavioral modification arose in the form of shamanism, or something else akin to it. The proto-psychoanalysis in question is combined with proto-medicine in some shamanic traditions—although in other shamanic traditions, shamanism is simply a convenient vehicle within which to contain some folks’ pure craziness by making it into something purportedly useful.
But we as a species have had more or less as much time to develop methods of internal perceptiveness and emotional-response modification as we have art and music and mathematics. And that means that although some of the methods are as crappy as that first spear point that shows evidence of understanding what a straight line is and how it forms a diagonal, some of them are more like the cave paintings of Chauvet (never mind Lascaux twelve thousand years later, though that does raise the art historical problem of influence and/or aesthetic revivals—I’m joking here, please!).
And I like to tease out what may be some of the methodological survivals that got encoded in bizarre cultural overlays—abstract meditational traditions combining with the use of images of local deities designed to channel aggression in productive directions, and such like.
I also like to analyze the sources of systematized hallucinatory experience so as to distinguish it from types of visionary experience that may or may not be hallucinatory at all—though the simplest of the latter are no more than heightened states of perception.
And when I have nothing else to do, I work on problems of globalization and the digital revolution, plus a few reflections on writing science fiction, as well as doing art reviewing to earn a meager living, but I think this 1600-word chain of thought has taken us far enough along the human story for one post.
“I’m Beginning to Understand”(?) or Not
Assuming that “consciousness” exists at all…oops, let’s stop there for just a moment. Even if our—okay, my consciousness, let’s bracket the pseudo-philosophical problem of whether “other minds” such as yours exist—even if my consciousness is just a working compilation of impulses put together through the cooperation of a whole bunch of mostly autonomous bodily programs, the agglomeration of impulses exists. The “self” is as real as the Buddhists say it is; for them the self is just an agglomeration of impulses that holds within it the possibility of inner realization of that truth—we see that “I am not this emotion” and “I am not this other impulse” until at last we—I (I wish)—have peeled away the entire onion, and yet I am still saying “I” as though I were something eternal rather than a part of a dialectic between parts of a unified environment, a swirl of momentary energy that nevertheless organizes and perceives the entire dialectic, though not the entire environment. “Where is there any duality?”
So now that we have established that consciousness exists, how far down the evolutionary ladder does it exist? There is indisputably (when people say “indisputably,” it means the point is disputed) a level at which there just isn’t enough of a nervous system to support more than an automatic response generated by pain or hunger—even if the organization of perceptions that we call “consciousness” were something like a radio message being received from some unknown source, as David Eagleman’s thought experiment has it, there aren’t enough parts there to make a radio receiver.
But at some point we do have the makings of a radio. When does the message start to come through, even if it is faint and filled with static?
Franz de Waal (author of Our Inner Ape) summarizes the state of research by discussing the species for which experiments have demonstrated evidence that they know that a reflection in a mirror is an image of themselves and not another member of the species behind glass. (We could go into the question of animal emotions, but then we’d never get to the point. Let’s keep gazing into the mirror.)
We can’t really be certain of the point at which animals stop being instinct-driven automata and start knowing that they feel emotions or physical pain, but we can know the point at which they respond to the fact that they are individual selves (again, the “self” exists, okay?)—or at least we know when they look annoyed at that splotch of paint on their head once they see it in a mirror, and then try to get it off. (That isn’t the only experimental variable, but I haven’t followed up on the research.)
That doesn’t get us very far towards the existential awareness of death, or the making of art—though Melvin Konner cites in The Tangled Wing a really striking case of something like aesthetic awareness in creatures of the African savanna when confronted by a huge waterfall, which regularly elicited less than functional contemplative moments, unless of course the moments of risky inattentiveness were just a response to having finally gotten a drink of water. Tool-making, now, that occurs across species…and “making,” too, not just found-object explorations.
But we don’t come from those species, we come from a mostly quarrelsome line of primates (give or take a bonobo or two—we’ll bracket de Waal’s life work on the roots of cooperation and empathy) that seem more task-driven than aesthetically inclined, most of the time. And for a mind-numbingly vast number of years, we find our ancestors chipping exactly the same damn off-balance spear points and hand tools, for all the world like that was good enough, and who wants to change something that works?
So something changed at a certain point in terms of evolutionary advantage, because the roots of mathematics appeared (stone tools with an awareness of proportion and what certainly looks like the use of marks to keep track of quantities—regardless of whether they gave names to something called “numbers”), and the roots of art, and what may be the world’s earliest musical instruments. We just don’t know what that something was, and it needn’t have been enough of a stimulus to launch an abrupt explosion of creativity—the “brain boost” only needed to be a gentle shove towards insight where previously there had been no insight whatsoever, or just enough to get by on, day to day.
But once we have that gentle or brutal shove (which I suppose could have been simply environmental stresses eliciting new and previously unknown forms of behavior), all kinds of things become possible. Originally, they may have been not just possible but necessary; environmental stress, once somewhat relieved, would have been a sufficient causative factor for art and music and mathematics arising all at the same time, without our resorting to the hypothesis of bursts of radiation from comets or what have you. A brutal shove towards practical inventiveness does form all sorts of templates within which disinterested creativity can flourish once the emergency at hand has been brought under control. The presence in the population of imaginatively inclined genetic tendencies that would be advantageous would be preserved by the group even when the possessors of such tendencies were not otherwise well endowed for survival—I gather that there is a really badly imagined caveman novel that explains sentimentally why one of the earliest known burials contains an adult male with a physical handicap that would have made survival impossible unless the group chose to maintain him. But we don’t actually know what talents this gentleman had that made folks want to keep him from dying before his time. We just know they valued him enough to keep him going for as long as possible and then give him a decent burial.)
Have patience, we’re almost there. This is how I roll, to quote an outdated mal mot.
Now that we have the roots of mathematics and art and music and possibly even proto-writing (I keep skipping over the roots of spoken language because the evidence is so tangential and tedious), we may have the roots of politics and psychology and philosophy arising at different moments or the same moment. I am saying “psychology and philosophy” because those are what religions contain, although they also contain speculative and experimental science and possibly responses to real invisible forces as well—even if the forces are only complex configurations of radiation and air pressure—but let us bracket that part of the problem, too.
Although, again, our remote ancestors are not operating with anything like the same cultural assumptions as ourselves, it seems logical that once you have a sufficiently complex nervous system to be developing art and music and mathematics, you have a sufficiently complex nervous system to have, well, uh, complexes. You could probably discern the basic lineaments of Jung’s personality types (the only part of Jungian psychology that has given rise to a more or less empirical method of categorization) in the population of the Paleolithic caves. And once you have personal problems, you have the roots of psychotherapy, or at least that is what the inheritance of the world’s teaching stories would lead us to believe. Some of these wisdom tales and jokes are very old, though in their present form they can’t date back further than the Neolithic.
But at the same time that external behavioral modification arose in the form of power politics (as in, “Do what I say or I’ll bash your head in! and by the way, I have God on my side.”), it seems likely that internal behavioral modification arose in the form of shamanism, or something else akin to it. The proto-psychoanalysis in question is combined with proto-medicine in some shamanic traditions—although in other shamanic traditions, shamanism is simply a convenient vehicle within which to contain some folks’ pure craziness by making it into something purportedly useful.
But we as a species have had more or less as much time to develop methods of internal perceptiveness and emotional-response modification as we have art and music and mathematics. And that means that although some of the methods are as crappy as that first spear point that shows evidence of understanding what a straight line is and how it forms a diagonal, some of them are more like the cave paintings of Chauvet (never mind Lascaux twelve thousand years later, though that does raise the art historical problem of influence and/or aesthetic revivals—I’m joking here, please!).
And I like to tease out what may be some of the methodological survivals that got encoded in bizarre cultural overlays—abstract meditational traditions combining with the use of images of local deities designed to channel aggression in productive directions, and such like.
I also like to analyze the sources of systematized hallucinatory experience so as to distinguish it from types of visionary experience that may or may not be hallucinatory at all—though the simplest of the latter are no more than heightened states of perception.
And when I have nothing else to do, I work on problems of globalization and the digital revolution, plus a few reflections on writing science fiction, as well as doing art reviewing to earn a meager living, but I think this 1600-word chain of thought has taken us far enough along the human story for one post.
