Tag Archives: Hornby Island

What Are You Anyway?

Bits and Pieces,

The challenge to understand consciousness was once called the mind-body problem, but is now known as the hard problem of consciousness, to distinguish it from the “easier” task of accounting for behaviour neurologically. It has beleaguered philosophers and scientists at least since Descartes. The “problem” is that we appear to ourselves as both subject and object. You have a body, but is that body your thinking, feeling, and speaking self? You have experience; but what exactly is that compared to things in the world it is experience of, which includes the body? Language is intimately involved. Since we humans are the only creature known to use grammatical language, it seems that consciousness is a problem specifically for us.

Of course, we imagine that other creatures, and possibly aliens and even machines, could be conscious too. In our language, consciousnes is a noun, so it is easy to imagine it as a sort of ethereal substance, potentially permeating everything. (After all, even physics indulges such abstractions as ‘energy’ and ‘field’.) If consciousness is somehow substantial, then the question of how “it” might interact with traditional matter then seems legitimate, even scientific. It is not, however, because consciousness is not a thing but an activity or relationship—not a noun but a verb.

Other creatures (though not stones) actively respond to stimuli and do not just passively react according to physical laws. Sentience is thus about observed behavior of things, which makes no presumption about their possible experience as subjects. (The very idea of ‘experience’ is a human imposition.) We see that people are sentient, and we also intimately know our own personal experience, so we associate the two. In addition, other people can tell us verbally about their experience, from which we conclude that they must be “conscious.”

Indeed, there is every reason, beginning with our similar physiology, to believe that other people are subjects with an inner life like one’s own. However, consciousness is an ambiguous notion, which for humans implies not just awareness of the world but awareness of one’s awareness. (Or, to keep with behavioral language: sentience concerning one’s sentience.) This reflexivity characterizes some human minds, at least some of the time. It should not be assumed about other creatures, even if they happen to be human.

To return to the issue of language, some English pronouns refer to persons—as speaking and experiencing subjects. These can be singular or plural: I, you, we. English also has pronouns to refer to objects, and to others as though they were objects: it, they, them. It has genders for some of these: he, she, and recent variants. Interestingly, there is no gender for the speaking/feeling subject—except when perceived and referred to as an object. This underlines the fundamental category difference between subject and object, which permeates the problem of consciousness. While gender is a matter of the biological body and certainly colours our consciousness, consciousness presents the uniquely embarrassing problem of having (or being) at a self that is a (gendered) biological body. The mind-body problem is a highly personal form of schizophrenia, expressed linguistically in the tension between first and third “persons.”

Consciousness implies an inner agent, a self, which is the apparent subject for one’s experience of the world (including one’s own and other bodies), and is also presumably responsible for one’s actions. Consciousness involves the troubling relationship to the world, the gendered body, and other beings. It raises the question of what it means to be this particular “one”—a subject that is also an object. Indeed, a subject that is only fully conscious some of the time.

Why Be Kind?

Uncategorized,

Dawkins’ catchy phrase, “the selfish gene,” hints that even altruistic behavior is explained by genetic self-interest. One is kinder to kin, to those of one’s kind. Yet, genetic theory alone does not explain human behavior. One also learns to like those perceived as like oneself.

Whatever the grouping—from family to nation state—people are motivated to uphold the changing interests of their kind against those of outsiders. This made sense for small tribes competing for ecological space. Translated into competing national identities, it results in world wars and ethnocides. For a theoretically united humanity, for whom there are no outsiders, it makes common sense to be kind to everyone—a Christian ideal.

Of course, the ideal is never the reality. While legal institutions and human rights evolve toward global community, economic institutions evolve toward further class extremes. Genes and religion still dominate reason. (Why did capitalism arise specifically in Christian Europe?) Western modernity is still permeated with patriarchal gender tensions. Yet, our very individualism attests to free will. Free even from the morals of the group, we are thus ultimately isolated from any absolute source of guidance. While there are good social arguments for being well disposed to one’s fellows, these seem contingent on changing circumstance, prevailing ethos, and personal sympathies. A deeper commonality might be the ephemeral human condition: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

The hourglass empties even for those now setting forth in life. Sickness and death, physical and emotional suffering, are built in to the price of admission, prerequisites for the momentary joys and satisfactions we may find. The pathos of our common lot makes one reluctant to add to the burden others already bear in their tacit contract with biology. While that doesn’t necessarily improve behavior, it does give pause. Conflict may be inevitable, but it always bears the stain of moral failure and remorse.

The limiting view and self-interest involved in pitting one’s will against others’ renders us pathetic by definition. Opposing aims are vain to start with. The sad stories and histories that drive us, and drive us apart, and which we project onto others, merely testify to our fundamental conditioning as products of natural and personal history, creatures of habit, fumbling with free will. That we are meat machines is the insulting truth that bad behavior rubs in our faces. The only way to prove one’s dignity is to actually exercise that free will in spite of that conditioning.

Are we mini-gods or dinosaurs mired in biology? No dignity is found in rotting flesh. The only consolation is the slack we cut ourselves and each other, simply flaunting the worth of consciousness under the very nose of mortality, asserting dignity against all odds. Respect for others rubs off on self. Acknowledging the fit and value of other pieces of the puzzle supports and helps complete one’s own larger picture and contribution. Seeing through to the core of what they too face, one recognizes the same hapless voyager, in a sinking lifeboat from the start. What can we achieve in this ark, this crusading armada of marvels and horrors? All culture attempts a beachhead outside the bounds of time and matter, to war against the finality of flesh. Yet even the dust that makes the stars eventually returns to space. If all ends in ash, why not at least be kind in the brief moment along the way? It may be the only original act.

Why I Am Not An Art Critic

Uncategorized,

For me to be an art critic in the modern world would be an odious job. I would feel obliged to rail against almost everything that people produce in the name of creativity. I can say this with some confidence because I have just returned from a trip to Florence, Italy, where they keep the good stuff. Of course, every age has had its hacks. But, the gap in competence between hack and master in the Renaissance might be meaningless today.

One could blame Marcel Duchamp, that trickster who deliberately set out to destroy the recognized category of fine art. Or, one could blame Andy Warhol, the industrial revolution, and the inevitable rise of a market for middle class consumer kitsch. The fault may not be in our stars, however, but in the standards for stardom. What, after all, do we now expect from “art,” except to fill blank space with a little colour, shape, or texture?

Florence was the epicenter of the Renaissance, the rebirth or rediscovery of antiquity. Greek sculpture and painting—of the human figure, especially—set the ideal for Renaissance manual skills, while Christianity and ancient mythology set the themes for cultural production. The influence of Greek individualism and humanism eventually transformed the social standing of the anonymous craftsman into that of the recognized master. The mystery of the divine Creation, which these genres had served to reveal in medieval Europe, gave way to the mystique of creativity and the secular cult of artistic genius.

We never recovered from that myth. Vasari saw the culmination of art history in his contemporaries, Michelangelo and Leonardo. In terms of technical skill at depicting the human figure, this may have been a fair assessment. But “art” carried on long after these masters, even without a religious context. Is it a historical coincidence that the art we still revere as great was religiously inspired, or at least arose in a deeply religious world? For modern society, is there some relationship between the waning of religion and impoverished standards of technical mastery? To put it more bluntly, does what passes as art today lack both quality and meaning because it has turned its back on what our ancestors called the Great Mystery? Did art die with God?

Now, a myth is a belief we honour in the measure it is not literally true. For example: any scrap of thing put up on a wall can be “art”; any tinkering is creative expression. Just put a frame around it or a pedestal under it and voila! It may be personally satisfying as a hobby. It might even be saleable. After all (to misquote P. T. Barnum), a consumer is born every minute!

Why The Grass Looks Green(Er)

Bits and Pieces,

Close your eyes and try to image how the world looks when no one is looking. You can’t, of course, because the “look” of something automatically involves you looking. This conundrum has bedeviled philosophy and science for centuries. Some people think we create our own reality. Others think our experience is dictated by atoms, molecules, and genes. But our experience does not depend on one factor only—the subjective self or objective reality—but on both together.

If the grass looks greener in springtime, there must be something about it different than brown grass at the end of summer—and different from the red skin of a ripe cherry. Yes, of course: chlorophyll! But why does chlorophyll produce in us the sensation of greenness rather than that of redness associated with the cherry? This sort of question involves the perceiver’s active role in perception. Perhaps greenness signifies something to the perceiver as an organism, in the way that pain signifies tissue damage and hunger signifies a need for nourishment. But, what?

This is a question that falls through the cracks between science and philosophy. Science has defined itself as a study of the natural world, not of subjective experience. Even psychology often embraces this “objective” approach, so that for decades it was far more about the experimental behavior of rats than the experience of people. Consciousness was an embarrassment, and still is for the physical sciences. Philosophy, on the other hand, is willing to ask silly questions, like: “Could I experience as red what you experience as green?” But the answer is no! You and I can expect to see grass roughly the same way because we are specimens of the same creature. Apart from chlorophyll, there is a reason in evolutionary history why grass looks green rather than red.

Think of experience as a kind of conversation the brain has with itself. Words have meanings, by social convention, which arise through common experience in the world to which they largely refer. Perhaps sensations get their “meanings” in a similar way, by convention that is not social but genetic, arising through experience in the world over thousands of generations. Nevertheless, we have the ability to play with words—and, to a limited extent, with perception. In both cases, we embrace a power to assign meaning and stretch the bonds of reality. Though I cannot will to see green as red, yet imagination, hallucination, painting and stained glass give me access to “greenness” as an experience dissociated from the usual objects.

What the world looks like “when no one is looking” can only mean what it happens to look like to our particular organism. This does not answer the question of why grass looks green rather than red, let alone why the world looks like anything at all. It does not solve the mystery of why consciousness exists, but it may be on the right track. One has conscious experience, in which the world figures prominently, because the human creature couldn’t have arisen and persist otherwise.

This brings to mind another silly question of philosophy: could a person behave exactly as they do, in every detail, but without conscious awareness? Again, certainly not! The fact that we are lit up inside with experience is functional; consciousness is essential to our survival. Not all of our behavior can be automatic or instinctual. If we are to respond to the world in all the sophisticated ways that human creatures do, there must be some particular way that it looks and sounds and smells and feels to us—the story we narrate to ourselves not only in words, but directly in the language of the senses.

Yin And Yang

Bits and Pieces,

The conquest of nature, of geography—and of intellectual, spiritual (and now outer) space—have been traditionally masculine enterprises. The world men created is hardly ideal in a normative sense, as the best possible world. In its shadow, women continue to embody the sustainable values traditionally considered humane and civic. These values now stand against the rapacity of an economic and technological warrior elite, who run the global society of mobile capital and a world arms industry on our behalf.

Historically, masculinity has often manifested as males acting out genetically-determined macho impulses or collective rebellion against nature. This is highly ironic, given the masculine ideals of conscious initiative and individual self-possession. The very essence of the solar, yang energy is supposed to be benignly proactive and protective. If we have not witnessed a world defined by women, neither have we seen one produced by a positive masculinity: one not defined against women, the body, and the Earth, nor one that is not controlled by oligarchs, technocrats, and power-crazed madmen. Surely a new type of advocate and protector is needed, a new vision of masculinity more in balance with the feminine.

Apart from male and female bodies, a feminine principle constitutes a vast untapped resource to nurture a livable human future. The repression of this principle is not a phase modern society has outlived, but is its very foundation, which has served to keep men in their place along with women. Male and female alike have been seduced by the masculine ethos as currently defined, by concepts and values (such as progress, power, success, consumerism) that are against common sense and the common good. Women have relative equality and safety in the modern Western world at the risk of being co-opted within male power systems, which they may embrace for the same rewards that men do.

The feminine is a worldview that has gone underground in the patriarchal era. While recessive, it remains everywhere potential. It is a sensibility, a mode of thinking, feeling, being, perceiving, acting—or not acting. It is as easily eclipsed by the masculine as silence is by shouting. Unless we consciously intend otherwise, it will always be dominated by men who are ruthlessly good at imposing their will, just as nature will continue to be overrun by technology, the passive by the aggressive. While the feminine is not better or worse than the masculine, there is an intrinsic imbalance between them because of their utterly different natures.

Apart from changing sexual and social identities, masculine and feminine are forces within the human psyche. Individuals participate in the dialogue between these forces, by communicating and cooperating with each across gender lines (or by obliterating such lines). Yet, there remains the task of an alchemical synthesis of masculine and feminine within the individual— and also, most urgently now, within society. Men must refuse the conventional attractions of money, power, sex, and violence, to become more original in their definitions of masculinity and success. Women must channel the feminine principle, as well as feminism, as a vision for the future. Neither sex must be a caricature of gender.

The ultimate defense of the dominated is to refuse to participate in the games defined by the dominant, and to be clear about the games worth playing. Rather than rush to a new frontier in space, or to some cutting edge of technology, we could pause to establish social equilibrium. “Growth” could slow, not only to regain equilibrium, but also because it is not what it seems; for, the promise of an expanding economy lies always in creating future wealth rather than redistribution now. Similarly, gratuitous novelty in technology (such as we see now in AI) masks ancient social problems which the technology could be used to solve, were it properly motivated. Perhaps the right motivation can only come through an integration of yin and yang.

Your Logic Or Your Life

Bits and Pieces,

How do we know what goes on inside the body? Medical science proposes ways to know. While diagnostic tests have a scientific basis, however, their evaluation often depends on judgment calls and statistical probability. The only way to have true certainty is to actually create either the condition that is desired or the condition that is feared. This follows from a general principle whose implications are little recognized: that the only certain knowledge is of humanly defined systems. This is why the truths of mathematics are abiding while scientific theories about nature are provisional. I suspect it is the basis of religious faith. It is certainly the basis of digital computation, where a state is simply yes or no.

Western medicine does not pretend to create a state of health, which could never be absolutely verified in any case. The problem of induction is that one cannot prove generalizations like “all crows are black” (whereas it only takes one crow of another color to disprove the claim). Similarly, if health cannot be verified, it can at least be disproven. This is the inevitable logic of diagnosis, which does not look for health but for disease. If you undergo a biopsy, for example, a “clean bill of health” is not a realistic outcome to expect. If the test fails to indicate suspicious tissue, it may be repeated until it does, or lead to other tests. The way to diagnostic certainty, therefore, is to find the disease that is feared. The outcome that best satisfies diagnosis is bad news, because it leads to further action. The diagnostic interventions themselves may be harmful, and the procedures to follow have their own risks.

The body is a “black box,” in the sense that, without disturbing its integrity, we observe only what goes into it and what comes out. Medical science proposes to observe what goes on inside as well, through x-rays, magnetic resonance images, biopsy, laparoscopy, or literally opening it in surgery. It is worthwhile to distinguish these technologies, for they may vary greatly in their effects upon the state of the tissues investigated. A varying price is paid for the view.

Knowledge is never free of consequence, and never free of interpretation. Modern x-rays may be relatively harmless, but they are not quite the same as direct inspection in ordinary light. Doctors may feel around inside you or look around with some device, which may entail little risk to your health. The consequences of biopsy, on the other hand, could be riskier. What the doctor recommends will be a matter of interpretation and guesswork as well as of what is objectively there. Your prognosis, as well as your diagnosis, may rely on statistics—that is, on average outcomes for other people. Those are probabilities, not certainties. Yet, the patient must come to a definite decision. Even with expert opinion, we hold our lives in our own hands.