Consciousness
On human nature - Part 2
04/09/08 17:48 Filed in: Human Nature | Philosophy
There’s been a healthy debate raging down in the comments section of my earlier posts that has been getting fiery and passionate. All sorts of things have been rearing their heads down there from behavioural genetics to biopsychology, philosophical dualism, moral dichotomies, nihilism, post-modernism and debates about the nature of the question itself.
We’ve been going all over the place!
One argument went that the manifestation, complexity and multiplicity of human differences suggests that there can be no basis for suggesting any universal, underlying trait of goodness within human nature.
The word “goodness” has been a very emotive term! The word did not have to be “goodness”. It could have been several words like a “desire for a better life”. I preferred those words, since it’s easier to describe what underlying traits might represent “a better life” (for us all) than it is to say what goodness is.
The problem I had with this idea was that if I accepted it, I would slide into some black hole of moral nihilism, and I don’t want to go there, nor does anyone else I have ever known.
What is even more frightening to me is that it’s exactly this nihilistic view of humankind that supports religions everywhere…that we are all "sinners" who need to be "saved" from ourselves.
I strongly identify with the view of life that Chomsky expounds: one where I might feel autonomy, freedom, and work with others in voluntary association and without oppression, which means without economic repression too.
How do you feel? Do you not want that? Would anyone who understood what it meant not want it too?
On the point of religions, I believe that humans at a certain stage of their development took parables of wisdom and turned them into religions. Why? Because they didn’t have TV and stories by word-of-mouth were the way they communicated wisdom. Why? Because they desired and craved the goodness or the better life these stories talked about. The stories are totally unbelievable, yet men and women wanted what they promised so badly they reified them as objects of worship. They still do.
Religions of one sort or another have covered our entire planet, even in the most primitive societies, where they have worshipped totems or the elements. I don’t want to get into religious debate here. But the underlying attraction of religion, I would argue, is humankind’s overwhelming desire for a better life. Thus, I believe that desire to be an innate trait of human nature common to many throughout the world, and not simply part of western culture.
More soon...
We’ve been going all over the place!
One argument went that the manifestation, complexity and multiplicity of human differences suggests that there can be no basis for suggesting any universal, underlying trait of goodness within human nature.
The word “goodness” has been a very emotive term! The word did not have to be “goodness”. It could have been several words like a “desire for a better life”. I preferred those words, since it’s easier to describe what underlying traits might represent “a better life” (for us all) than it is to say what goodness is.
The problem I had with this idea was that if I accepted it, I would slide into some black hole of moral nihilism, and I don’t want to go there, nor does anyone else I have ever known.
What is even more frightening to me is that it’s exactly this nihilistic view of humankind that supports religions everywhere…that we are all "sinners" who need to be "saved" from ourselves.
I strongly identify with the view of life that Chomsky expounds: one where I might feel autonomy, freedom, and work with others in voluntary association and without oppression, which means without economic repression too.
How do you feel? Do you not want that? Would anyone who understood what it meant not want it too?
On the point of religions, I believe that humans at a certain stage of their development took parables of wisdom and turned them into religions. Why? Because they didn’t have TV and stories by word-of-mouth were the way they communicated wisdom. Why? Because they desired and craved the goodness or the better life these stories talked about. The stories are totally unbelievable, yet men and women wanted what they promised so badly they reified them as objects of worship. They still do.
Religions of one sort or another have covered our entire planet, even in the most primitive societies, where they have worshipped totems or the elements. I don’t want to get into religious debate here. But the underlying attraction of religion, I would argue, is humankind’s overwhelming desire for a better life. Thus, I believe that desire to be an innate trait of human nature common to many throughout the world, and not simply part of western culture.
More soon...
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On human nature...
03/09/08 21:02 Filed in: Philosophy | Human Nature
I'm going to give my words a rest now. What follows are some extracts from an interview with Noam Chomsky on human nature, many of whose views I respect.
I like it, since it engages the debate on my last post, and provides a bridge between my ideas and those of Melinda whose views I also respect.
In the meantime, I'm going to put my thinking cap on and try and work out where I go from here!
This interview is Copyright © 2006 Noam Chomsky
QUESTION: You have argued that any stance one takes on political, economic, social or even personal issues is ultimately based on some conception of human nature. Why is this?
CHOMSKY: Any stance we take is based on some conception of what is good for people. This conception will tacitly presuppose a certain belief as to the constitution of human nature -- human needs and human potential. You might as well bring them out as clearly as possible so that they can be discussed.
QUESTION: According to your view of human nature, all human beings possess certain biological functions endowing them with common mental capacities. How do you defend this position against postmodernist critics who argue that there is no such thing as human nature, and that all attempts to define it are guilty of reading other cultures in the light of Western perceptions and values?
CHOMSKY: Not even the most extreme postmodernist can seriously argue that there is no such thing as human nature. They may argue that the exact properties of human nature are difficult to substantiate -- this is certainly correct. However, it is impossible to coherently argue that an intrinsic, universal human nature does not exist. This amounts to the belief that the next human zygote conceived might just as well develop into a worm or a crab as a human being. Postmodernists might limit their assertion to denying any effect of human nature on our mental make-up -- our values, our knowledge, our wants, etc. This also makes no sense. The postmodernist will argue that a child growing up in New York will develop a certain way of thinking, and if that child had grown up amongst Amazon tribespeople she would have developed a completely different way of thinking. This is true. But we must then ask how a child could develop these different consciousnesses. In whatever environment it finds itself, the child will mentally construct a rich and complex culture on the basis of the extremely scattered and limited phenomena it is exposed to. That consideration tells us (in advance of any detailed knowledge) that there must be an extraordinary directive and organisational component to the mind that is internal. We can begin to see human nature in terms of certain capacities to develop certain mental traits. I think we can go further than this and begin to discover universal aspects of these mental traits which are determined by human nature. I think we can find this in the area of morality. For example, not long ago I talked to people in Amazon tribes and I took it for granted that they have the same conception of vice and virtue as I do. It is only through sharing these values that we were able to interact -- talking about real problems such as being forced out of the jungle by the state authorities. I believe I was correct to assume this: we had no problem communicating although we were as remote as is possible culturally.
QUESTION: Are you suggesting everyone agrees about the nature of vice and virtue?
CHOMSKY: In fact I think they probably have a very high measure of agreement. One strong bit of evidence for this is that everyone -- a Genghis Khan, Himmler, Bill Gates -- creates stories of themselves where they interpret their actions as working for the benefit of human beings. Even at the extreme levels of depravity, the Nazis did not boast that they wanted to kill Jews, but gave crazed justifications -- even that they were acting in 'self-defence'. It is very rare for people to justify their actions by saying 'I'm doing this to maximise my own benefit and I don't care what happens to anybody else'. That would be pathological.
QUESTION: Most people certainly try to offer moral justifications for what they do. But there is also enormous diversity in what they do, and defend as right to do.
CHOMSKY: And there is a lot of variation in people's size. Take a walk through a museum where they have the armour from medieval knights and just look at the size of them: you could barely put a child into that armour. We have the same genes today as people did then, but we are very different because there have been radical changes in diet. This is characteristic of every aspect of organic development. Hence we should not be in the least surprised to discover that it is also characteristic of our social nature, our moral positions and so on. We are biological creatures.
QUESTION: But I think you would agree that not all cultures are equally viable from the standpoint of promoting human fulfilment and wellbeing? Are you wanting to argue that your understanding of human nature can give us a kind of objective understanding of the conditions of human flourishing?
CHOMSKY: Now we're taking an essentialist position which the relativist would contradict. I'm not willing to go that far. We can develop a stronger conception of human nature through drawing on Enlightenment thinking on the issue. This has support from some of the sciences, but is mainly founded on a philosophical investigation into our hopes, intuition and experience, and an examination of history and cultural variety. There are needs for conditions which allow the flourishing of human capacities. Insights from the Enlightenment show us that people need to exist in free association with others -- not in isolation, and not in relations of domination. There is a need to replace social fetters with social bonds. Therefore any social structure that involves relations of domination -- whether it's the family, a trans-national corporation, gender relations -- has a very heavy burden of proof to bear. It must demonstrate that the benefits it provides outweigh the restrictions it imposes on human capacities. If it can't demonstrate its legitimacy, it should be dismantled.
QUESTION: Right. Can I ask you about your position on the possibility of ecological constraints on the realisation of human needs? Do you think -- even if there were the political will to achieve it -- that it might be impossible, for ecological reasons, to provide the necessary conditions for continued human flourishing?
CHOMSKY: Humans may well be a non-viable organism.
QUESTION: Do you think they are?
CHOMSKY: It's very likely. From an evolutionary point of view, higher intelligence seems to be maladaptive rather than adaptive. Biologically successful organisms have a rigid character and are well adapted to a certain environmental niche. If higher intelligence helped adaptation you would expect it to have arisen over and over again. However, it didn't. It arose in a single, not particularly successful organism, Homo Sapiens. And while the human population exploded, human societies developed in a way that has caused enormous damage to the environment. The human race could destroy itself and much organic life as a result.
QUESTION: Do you think that different social and economic circumstances either block or reinforce certain dispositions -- that, for example, whatever there might be in the way of a natural tendency towards selfish and aggressive behaviour is reinforced by the capitalist market society?
CHOMSKY: There's no doubt about it. Let's take Germany, for example. In the early 20th century Germany was the most advanced area of Western culture -- in music, the arts, science. In the passage of a few years, it entered the absolute depths of human history. Small changes in German society allowed people like Joseph Mengele to flourish rather than people like Einstein and Freud. The market is a radical experiment which violated fundamental human needs and capacities. You can see this in the violent struggles that were required to impose market conditions on people. In the United States, for example, about one sixth of the gross national product, over a trillion dollars per year, is devoted to marketing. Marketing is manipulation and deceit. It tries to turn people into something they aren't -- individuals focused solely on themselves, maximising their consumption of goods that they don't need.
QUESTION: Granted the truth of what you say about our distinctively human capacities for freedom and co-operative action, how come we are so open to that kind of manipulation and deceit? How come we remain both globally and locally so caught up in oppression?
CHOMSKY: It's a serious question. Why are we born free and end up enslaved?
QUESTION: Is there a case here for viewing social factors as more determinant than biological factors?
CHOMSKY: You can't say which factor is more decisive. They interact. Take the example of puberty: small changes in nutrition can modify the onset of puberty by a factor of two, or even terminate it altogether. Or the visual system: in a kitten you can destroy the neural basis for vision simply by not presenting pattern stimulation in the first couple of weeks of its life. However, does this mean that the environment is the decisive force? No. Puberty is a process which human beings undergo at a particular stage of maturation because that's the way they've been designed. You don't undergo puberty because of peer pressure. Likewise, human limbs will not develop into wings rather than arms or legs. The genetic component determines strict limits within which variation is possible. I believe the same is true of our social and mental development.
QUESTION: Your ultimate political goal is anarchistic, the erosion of state institutions and any form of authoritarian control. But you have also recognised the need to defend some forms of state regulation as protection against a wholly unregulated market. Can you say more on how you view this two-edged process of possible political transformation?
CHOMSKY: I'm not in favour of people being in cages. On the other hand I think people ought to be in cages if there's a sabre-toothed tiger wandering around outside and if they go out of the cage the sabre-toothed tiger will kill them. So sometimes there's a justification for cages. That doesn't mean cages are good things. State power is a good example of a necessary cage. There are sabre-toothed tigers outside; they are called trans-national corporations which are among the most tyrannical totalitarian institutions that human society has devised. And there is a cage, namely the state, which to some extent is under popular control. The cage is protecting people from predatory tyrannies so there is a temporary need to maintain the cage, and even to extend the cage.
QUESTION: How do you see the relationship between work and free time in a more liberated society?
CHOMSKY: Polls in the US, Germany and elsewhere have shown that people value free time over material goods. Therefore, there are major propaganda efforts to reverse this. One reason over a trillion dollars a year is spent on marketing in the USA is to try to undermine our natural tendency to want free, liberated time.
I like it, since it engages the debate on my last post, and provides a bridge between my ideas and those of Melinda whose views I also respect.
In the meantime, I'm going to put my thinking cap on and try and work out where I go from here!
This interview is Copyright © 2006 Noam Chomsky
QUESTION: You have argued that any stance one takes on political, economic, social or even personal issues is ultimately based on some conception of human nature. Why is this?
CHOMSKY: Any stance we take is based on some conception of what is good for people. This conception will tacitly presuppose a certain belief as to the constitution of human nature -- human needs and human potential. You might as well bring them out as clearly as possible so that they can be discussed.
QUESTION: According to your view of human nature, all human beings possess certain biological functions endowing them with common mental capacities. How do you defend this position against postmodernist critics who argue that there is no such thing as human nature, and that all attempts to define it are guilty of reading other cultures in the light of Western perceptions and values?
CHOMSKY: Not even the most extreme postmodernist can seriously argue that there is no such thing as human nature. They may argue that the exact properties of human nature are difficult to substantiate -- this is certainly correct. However, it is impossible to coherently argue that an intrinsic, universal human nature does not exist. This amounts to the belief that the next human zygote conceived might just as well develop into a worm or a crab as a human being. Postmodernists might limit their assertion to denying any effect of human nature on our mental make-up -- our values, our knowledge, our wants, etc. This also makes no sense. The postmodernist will argue that a child growing up in New York will develop a certain way of thinking, and if that child had grown up amongst Amazon tribespeople she would have developed a completely different way of thinking. This is true. But we must then ask how a child could develop these different consciousnesses. In whatever environment it finds itself, the child will mentally construct a rich and complex culture on the basis of the extremely scattered and limited phenomena it is exposed to. That consideration tells us (in advance of any detailed knowledge) that there must be an extraordinary directive and organisational component to the mind that is internal. We can begin to see human nature in terms of certain capacities to develop certain mental traits. I think we can go further than this and begin to discover universal aspects of these mental traits which are determined by human nature. I think we can find this in the area of morality. For example, not long ago I talked to people in Amazon tribes and I took it for granted that they have the same conception of vice and virtue as I do. It is only through sharing these values that we were able to interact -- talking about real problems such as being forced out of the jungle by the state authorities. I believe I was correct to assume this: we had no problem communicating although we were as remote as is possible culturally.
QUESTION: Are you suggesting everyone agrees about the nature of vice and virtue?
CHOMSKY: In fact I think they probably have a very high measure of agreement. One strong bit of evidence for this is that everyone -- a Genghis Khan, Himmler, Bill Gates -- creates stories of themselves where they interpret their actions as working for the benefit of human beings. Even at the extreme levels of depravity, the Nazis did not boast that they wanted to kill Jews, but gave crazed justifications -- even that they were acting in 'self-defence'. It is very rare for people to justify their actions by saying 'I'm doing this to maximise my own benefit and I don't care what happens to anybody else'. That would be pathological.
QUESTION: Most people certainly try to offer moral justifications for what they do. But there is also enormous diversity in what they do, and defend as right to do.
CHOMSKY: And there is a lot of variation in people's size. Take a walk through a museum where they have the armour from medieval knights and just look at the size of them: you could barely put a child into that armour. We have the same genes today as people did then, but we are very different because there have been radical changes in diet. This is characteristic of every aspect of organic development. Hence we should not be in the least surprised to discover that it is also characteristic of our social nature, our moral positions and so on. We are biological creatures.
QUESTION: But I think you would agree that not all cultures are equally viable from the standpoint of promoting human fulfilment and wellbeing? Are you wanting to argue that your understanding of human nature can give us a kind of objective understanding of the conditions of human flourishing?
CHOMSKY: Now we're taking an essentialist position which the relativist would contradict. I'm not willing to go that far. We can develop a stronger conception of human nature through drawing on Enlightenment thinking on the issue. This has support from some of the sciences, but is mainly founded on a philosophical investigation into our hopes, intuition and experience, and an examination of history and cultural variety. There are needs for conditions which allow the flourishing of human capacities. Insights from the Enlightenment show us that people need to exist in free association with others -- not in isolation, and not in relations of domination. There is a need to replace social fetters with social bonds. Therefore any social structure that involves relations of domination -- whether it's the family, a trans-national corporation, gender relations -- has a very heavy burden of proof to bear. It must demonstrate that the benefits it provides outweigh the restrictions it imposes on human capacities. If it can't demonstrate its legitimacy, it should be dismantled.
QUESTION: Right. Can I ask you about your position on the possibility of ecological constraints on the realisation of human needs? Do you think -- even if there were the political will to achieve it -- that it might be impossible, for ecological reasons, to provide the necessary conditions for continued human flourishing?
CHOMSKY: Humans may well be a non-viable organism.
QUESTION: Do you think they are?
CHOMSKY: It's very likely. From an evolutionary point of view, higher intelligence seems to be maladaptive rather than adaptive. Biologically successful organisms have a rigid character and are well adapted to a certain environmental niche. If higher intelligence helped adaptation you would expect it to have arisen over and over again. However, it didn't. It arose in a single, not particularly successful organism, Homo Sapiens. And while the human population exploded, human societies developed in a way that has caused enormous damage to the environment. The human race could destroy itself and much organic life as a result.
QUESTION: Do you think that different social and economic circumstances either block or reinforce certain dispositions -- that, for example, whatever there might be in the way of a natural tendency towards selfish and aggressive behaviour is reinforced by the capitalist market society?
CHOMSKY: There's no doubt about it. Let's take Germany, for example. In the early 20th century Germany was the most advanced area of Western culture -- in music, the arts, science. In the passage of a few years, it entered the absolute depths of human history. Small changes in German society allowed people like Joseph Mengele to flourish rather than people like Einstein and Freud. The market is a radical experiment which violated fundamental human needs and capacities. You can see this in the violent struggles that were required to impose market conditions on people. In the United States, for example, about one sixth of the gross national product, over a trillion dollars per year, is devoted to marketing. Marketing is manipulation and deceit. It tries to turn people into something they aren't -- individuals focused solely on themselves, maximising their consumption of goods that they don't need.
QUESTION: Granted the truth of what you say about our distinctively human capacities for freedom and co-operative action, how come we are so open to that kind of manipulation and deceit? How come we remain both globally and locally so caught up in oppression?
CHOMSKY: It's a serious question. Why are we born free and end up enslaved?
QUESTION: Is there a case here for viewing social factors as more determinant than biological factors?
CHOMSKY: You can't say which factor is more decisive. They interact. Take the example of puberty: small changes in nutrition can modify the onset of puberty by a factor of two, or even terminate it altogether. Or the visual system: in a kitten you can destroy the neural basis for vision simply by not presenting pattern stimulation in the first couple of weeks of its life. However, does this mean that the environment is the decisive force? No. Puberty is a process which human beings undergo at a particular stage of maturation because that's the way they've been designed. You don't undergo puberty because of peer pressure. Likewise, human limbs will not develop into wings rather than arms or legs. The genetic component determines strict limits within which variation is possible. I believe the same is true of our social and mental development.
QUESTION: Your ultimate political goal is anarchistic, the erosion of state institutions and any form of authoritarian control. But you have also recognised the need to defend some forms of state regulation as protection against a wholly unregulated market. Can you say more on how you view this two-edged process of possible political transformation?
CHOMSKY: I'm not in favour of people being in cages. On the other hand I think people ought to be in cages if there's a sabre-toothed tiger wandering around outside and if they go out of the cage the sabre-toothed tiger will kill them. So sometimes there's a justification for cages. That doesn't mean cages are good things. State power is a good example of a necessary cage. There are sabre-toothed tigers outside; they are called trans-national corporations which are among the most tyrannical totalitarian institutions that human society has devised. And there is a cage, namely the state, which to some extent is under popular control. The cage is protecting people from predatory tyrannies so there is a temporary need to maintain the cage, and even to extend the cage.
QUESTION: How do you see the relationship between work and free time in a more liberated society?
CHOMSKY: Polls in the US, Germany and elsewhere have shown that people value free time over material goods. Therefore, there are major propaganda efforts to reverse this. One reason over a trillion dollars a year is spent on marketing in the USA is to try to undermine our natural tendency to want free, liberated time.
Does human nature exist?
01/09/08 20:35 Filed in: Philosophy | Human Nature
I’m through with writing social critiques right now. I’m done with determinism too, saying that we are all such weak injured souls because this or that power elite causes us to be so.
I’ve been thinking about change: What we would need to do in order to make the world a better place to live in.
In looking at social and political philosophy there is one question on which all this stuff seems to hinge. I’m not entirely sure that I believe the question in a way, but it’s about the state of human nature itself and what of us is innately human.
So what is human nature? Do humans seek autonomy, freedom and is their nature predisposed towards moral good, an innate desire for a better world or is that some philosopher’s intellectual desire? There are many theories of human nature that appear so ethnocentrically and culturally biased that I would dismiss them out of hand.
Inevitably theories of human nature tend to be predicated on individualist ideas coming from a liberal tradition. I’m not sure if they go anywhere, nor do right or left political views. The left takes us towards the authoritarian state more often than not and these days, the right veers towards laissez faire capitalism that is laissez faire so long as they control it. Free market competition produces winners and losers, and often the winners are the same and there are an awful lot of losers out there. The further left or right one seems to go, the more likely one is to end up with totalitarianism.
But my question is about people. Is there really such a thing as human nature, OR do we live within a consciousness that contains moral values that change and shift as our collective consciousness develops? Development can be disjointed, fractured by revolution and not conform to any Darwinist evolutionary notion. Consciousness may sustain badness as well as good, but I believe that the underlying desire of consciousness is towards social improvement fuelled by humankind’s desire to survive and little more. Survival, like hunger, is a strong natural instinct.
The marketing guys, the media, advertising, and the world of politics know all about consciousness. Their aim is frequently to manipulate it to their own ends or those of their controlling shareholders.
The question of human nature has dogged philosophical, social and political thought forever, but what do you believe? Does it really exist?
I’ve been thinking about change: What we would need to do in order to make the world a better place to live in.
In looking at social and political philosophy there is one question on which all this stuff seems to hinge. I’m not entirely sure that I believe the question in a way, but it’s about the state of human nature itself and what of us is innately human.
So what is human nature? Do humans seek autonomy, freedom and is their nature predisposed towards moral good, an innate desire for a better world or is that some philosopher’s intellectual desire? There are many theories of human nature that appear so ethnocentrically and culturally biased that I would dismiss them out of hand.
Inevitably theories of human nature tend to be predicated on individualist ideas coming from a liberal tradition. I’m not sure if they go anywhere, nor do right or left political views. The left takes us towards the authoritarian state more often than not and these days, the right veers towards laissez faire capitalism that is laissez faire so long as they control it. Free market competition produces winners and losers, and often the winners are the same and there are an awful lot of losers out there. The further left or right one seems to go, the more likely one is to end up with totalitarianism.
But my question is about people. Is there really such a thing as human nature, OR do we live within a consciousness that contains moral values that change and shift as our collective consciousness develops? Development can be disjointed, fractured by revolution and not conform to any Darwinist evolutionary notion. Consciousness may sustain badness as well as good, but I believe that the underlying desire of consciousness is towards social improvement fuelled by humankind’s desire to survive and little more. Survival, like hunger, is a strong natural instinct.
The marketing guys, the media, advertising, and the world of politics know all about consciousness. Their aim is frequently to manipulate it to their own ends or those of their controlling shareholders.
The question of human nature has dogged philosophical, social and political thought forever, but what do you believe? Does it really exist?
Back to the future, part 2 - On consciousness, unconsciousness and intuition
07/05/08 07:47 Filed in: Future | Consciousness
Time varies according to one's perception of it and how one is perceiving it.
It bends, warps, slows down and speeds up.
I remember being involved in a motorcycle accident a long time ago. A car pulled out in front of me when I was travelling at about 40 miles per hour. It was just feet away, I had no time to think, no time to apply the brakes. My motorcycle struck the car square on between the front and rear doors, and I was sent flying through the air. My body continued to travel at the same speed as the bike through the air. Perhaps it was two or three seconds in time, perhaps it was less than that before I came crashing to the ground. In whatever brief time it was, I saw whole passages of my life – it felt like minutes of film footage. I was totally conscious of what was happening too, and seemed to have time to prepare myself to land in a way that caused me the least physical damage. My mind would have just shut down and probably done denial of the event had it been in control. But it wasn't anymore. I believe that what happened is that my intuition had taken over completely, it created my time, and its perceptions saved my life. Hitting the ground at 40 mph is not something I would recommend. It really hurts! But intuitively I landed in a way that did me the least physical damage.
I was very fortunate. I had some very bad bruises, grazed knees, and I had chipped a tiny piece of bone from one of my knees. After the shock, I stood up much to the amazement of two policemen whose car had been travelling too close behind me and had collided with a lamp-post at the roadside to avoid hitting the car that blocked their way.
So here in my flight through the air was a sense of not only time slowing down, but also of time almost stopping; of my intuition showing me that my life was valuable in its moments of my life's reflections and having "time" to prepare myself to land.
Some sportsmen, I have heard said and Lungold also makes this point, see their games whether soccer or basketball in slow motion as they fly over the ground at high speed. This is also how intuition works. Our mind has its cycling time a little like a camera operating slowly. Our intuition varies perceptions of time to suit our consciousness and intent.
On the mind: It's said to operate at approximately twenty four frames per second. It is worth noting that one twenty fourth of a second is too slow to take a photograph with a camera without some artificial support, like a tripod. Handholding a camera using that speed would usually cause camera shake and distort the image. That is how slow it is and how slow our mind works at its fastest.
In part 1 of this piece, I felt that I was not really clear about the importance of consciousness, that it is consciousness, both individually and collectively that upholds our social worlds.
It is shifts in consciousness, not technology, consumption, money markets or any aspect of our physical environment or social, political and economic systems that causes change. Back in 1962, when Kuhn wrote about "paradigm shifts", he talked about scientific revolutions occurring when a body of beliefs, what we are calling consciousness, could no longer uphold the reality they created.
There are conflicting realities in science too that co-exist, and one may embrace one or the other or synthesise or combine them in a new form of consciousness.
It is consciousness that governs our perceptions of the world that in turn creates our realities. How and what we perceive is our reality, to that extent a philosopher might say that truth is relative. I am not that sure that discussions of absolute or relative truth are that helpful in a world that is governed by consciousness and our perceptions of that world.
Consciousness also produces ideologies that uphold the status quo. Ideo is from the Greek word meaning ideas and logos to the systematic organisation of ideas and doctrines. What is really fascinating are the many different ways we have chosen to translate logos to suit the context. Logos is translated in the bible to mean the 'word of god'; it also gives us the word logic meaning rational or scientific reasoning, so even an ideology has different realities. They are man-made and upheld by our consciousness. They are often contradictory and conflicting.
Being conscious of consciousness frees us to perceive and feel deeper within ourselves and within our world. It gives us the power to question our knowing and where it comes from.
Consciousness is very powerful and empowering. There are many in the world who would wish us to be neither conscious or intuitive, since both states of being liberate us into the freedom by which we might see their realities for what they are. Turn on your TV and tune into Fox. They have a reality in which I would rather not believe. But the media bombards us with ideas about reality, the urge to consume and to uphold repugnant values. Perhaps it's the reason I don't enjoy much TV. Its mental and feelings blancmange; bland tasteless food for the mind that keeps us in a state of unconsciousness where we exist and survive and do not live at all.
But I want to talk about the unconscious here too for a moment. The unconscious is the last resort of the mind. I don't trust mind. I recognise it serves my sense of survival well and I would not be without it, but that is as far as it goes. The unconscious is that place where we push down all the muck, slime, hurt, pain, anger and all those other things that are too difficult for us to face and to look at about ourselves. It's the stuff that we repress in our unconscious that frequently comes back to bite us. We project these "shadow" parts of ourselves onto others often to justify doing hurt and violence towards them. It's these dark parts of our unconscious that we turn outwards to do hate, violence, racism and prejudice, or else we turn it inwards to do addictions, depression, suicides and other crippling behaviour.
One last point about consciousness, unconsciousness and control: Here's a question. How much media coverage have you seen of ordinary Iraqi families doing the things that ordinary people do – of laughing, crying, kissing, hugging, caressing, mourning, feeling sad or frightened, sometimes happy, enjoying meals together, going about their normal daily work, joking and having fun? Have you seen any? Anything at all?
I have every cause to believe that Iraqis are normal people too, just like the rest of us. So what do they show us then? Images of violence and hatred, our dark shadow projection onto them. Keeping us in a state of unconsciousness is what justifies our going and bombing the shit out of them. So where were the weapons of mass destruction (WMD)? Where are the national ties to terrorist groups like Al Qaeda? There may be terrorists there, at least US Marine General Conway tells me they are there. But how many terrorists are living in the USA? How many mindless murders take place there each and every week? How many Columbine High School massacres will it take before we learn? And Oh! I forgot that naughty man, Saddam, spirited the WMD away by magic. He waved his wand and abracadabra, alacazam, they were gone. Oh yeah! As I might say to Marine General Conway, "Tell that one to the marines!"
Enough of that. Just a final word on intuition: Intuition might be thought so powerful that over the centuries, people holding power have discouraged us from, even killed us, for believing in it. I don't think it's that scary myself and it's never done me any harm, only the opposite. David Beckham, the footballer, does it very well too.
Powerful people know about intuition very well; after all it is their own intuition that keeps them in power. But intuition contradicts our rational scientific thinking, it is knowing without proof and it's not the same as religion either. Lungold talks about women, witchcraft, intuition and the inquisition. During the inquisition and beyond, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of women were put to death for so-called witchcraft. To be a witch was to have a "heretical" belief either good or bad that could not be substantiated by rational proof. That's intuition. I'm not sure about the heresy either. The Catholic Church was probably the biggest murderer of women in the inquisition. Of course, the only heretical belief one was allowed to hold was that proselytised by the Catholic Church itself. I have every reason to believe that the Church has rewritten its particular story to suit its own purposes too. A knowledge of basic Greek and the bible shows how much we have distorted that story.
There are many things I have written about here that might inflame anger amongst some people. I don't believe that being conscious or intuitive is harmful. I do believe that it might carry with it the choice of profound emotions that I talk about elsewhere here: Emotions like forgiveness, understanding, forbearance and compassion.
Consciousness and intuition have nothing to do with hate. Hate has everything to do with remaining in the dark place of unconsciousness.
It bends, warps, slows down and speeds up.
I remember being involved in a motorcycle accident a long time ago. A car pulled out in front of me when I was travelling at about 40 miles per hour. It was just feet away, I had no time to think, no time to apply the brakes. My motorcycle struck the car square on between the front and rear doors, and I was sent flying through the air. My body continued to travel at the same speed as the bike through the air. Perhaps it was two or three seconds in time, perhaps it was less than that before I came crashing to the ground. In whatever brief time it was, I saw whole passages of my life – it felt like minutes of film footage. I was totally conscious of what was happening too, and seemed to have time to prepare myself to land in a way that caused me the least physical damage. My mind would have just shut down and probably done denial of the event had it been in control. But it wasn't anymore. I believe that what happened is that my intuition had taken over completely, it created my time, and its perceptions saved my life. Hitting the ground at 40 mph is not something I would recommend. It really hurts! But intuitively I landed in a way that did me the least physical damage.
I was very fortunate. I had some very bad bruises, grazed knees, and I had chipped a tiny piece of bone from one of my knees. After the shock, I stood up much to the amazement of two policemen whose car had been travelling too close behind me and had collided with a lamp-post at the roadside to avoid hitting the car that blocked their way.
So here in my flight through the air was a sense of not only time slowing down, but also of time almost stopping; of my intuition showing me that my life was valuable in its moments of my life's reflections and having "time" to prepare myself to land.
Some sportsmen, I have heard said and Lungold also makes this point, see their games whether soccer or basketball in slow motion as they fly over the ground at high speed. This is also how intuition works. Our mind has its cycling time a little like a camera operating slowly. Our intuition varies perceptions of time to suit our consciousness and intent.
On the mind: It's said to operate at approximately twenty four frames per second. It is worth noting that one twenty fourth of a second is too slow to take a photograph with a camera without some artificial support, like a tripod. Handholding a camera using that speed would usually cause camera shake and distort the image. That is how slow it is and how slow our mind works at its fastest.
In part 1 of this piece, I felt that I was not really clear about the importance of consciousness, that it is consciousness, both individually and collectively that upholds our social worlds.
It is shifts in consciousness, not technology, consumption, money markets or any aspect of our physical environment or social, political and economic systems that causes change. Back in 1962, when Kuhn wrote about "paradigm shifts", he talked about scientific revolutions occurring when a body of beliefs, what we are calling consciousness, could no longer uphold the reality they created.
There are conflicting realities in science too that co-exist, and one may embrace one or the other or synthesise or combine them in a new form of consciousness.
It is consciousness that governs our perceptions of the world that in turn creates our realities. How and what we perceive is our reality, to that extent a philosopher might say that truth is relative. I am not that sure that discussions of absolute or relative truth are that helpful in a world that is governed by consciousness and our perceptions of that world.
Consciousness also produces ideologies that uphold the status quo. Ideo is from the Greek word meaning ideas and logos to the systematic organisation of ideas and doctrines. What is really fascinating are the many different ways we have chosen to translate logos to suit the context. Logos is translated in the bible to mean the 'word of god'; it also gives us the word logic meaning rational or scientific reasoning, so even an ideology has different realities. They are man-made and upheld by our consciousness. They are often contradictory and conflicting.
Being conscious of consciousness frees us to perceive and feel deeper within ourselves and within our world. It gives us the power to question our knowing and where it comes from.
Consciousness is very powerful and empowering. There are many in the world who would wish us to be neither conscious or intuitive, since both states of being liberate us into the freedom by which we might see their realities for what they are. Turn on your TV and tune into Fox. They have a reality in which I would rather not believe. But the media bombards us with ideas about reality, the urge to consume and to uphold repugnant values. Perhaps it's the reason I don't enjoy much TV. Its mental and feelings blancmange; bland tasteless food for the mind that keeps us in a state of unconsciousness where we exist and survive and do not live at all.
But I want to talk about the unconscious here too for a moment. The unconscious is the last resort of the mind. I don't trust mind. I recognise it serves my sense of survival well and I would not be without it, but that is as far as it goes. The unconscious is that place where we push down all the muck, slime, hurt, pain, anger and all those other things that are too difficult for us to face and to look at about ourselves. It's the stuff that we repress in our unconscious that frequently comes back to bite us. We project these "shadow" parts of ourselves onto others often to justify doing hurt and violence towards them. It's these dark parts of our unconscious that we turn outwards to do hate, violence, racism and prejudice, or else we turn it inwards to do addictions, depression, suicides and other crippling behaviour.
One last point about consciousness, unconsciousness and control: Here's a question. How much media coverage have you seen of ordinary Iraqi families doing the things that ordinary people do – of laughing, crying, kissing, hugging, caressing, mourning, feeling sad or frightened, sometimes happy, enjoying meals together, going about their normal daily work, joking and having fun? Have you seen any? Anything at all?
Enough of that. Just a final word on intuition: Intuition might be thought so powerful that over the centuries, people holding power have discouraged us from, even killed us, for believing in it. I don't think it's that scary myself and it's never done me any harm, only the opposite. David Beckham, the footballer, does it very well too.
Powerful people know about intuition very well; after all it is their own intuition that keeps them in power. But intuition contradicts our rational scientific thinking, it is knowing without proof and it's not the same as religion either. Lungold talks about women, witchcraft, intuition and the inquisition. During the inquisition and beyond, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of women were put to death for so-called witchcraft. To be a witch was to have a "heretical" belief either good or bad that could not be substantiated by rational proof. That's intuition. I'm not sure about the heresy either. The Catholic Church was probably the biggest murderer of women in the inquisition. Of course, the only heretical belief one was allowed to hold was that proselytised by the Catholic Church itself. I have every reason to believe that the Church has rewritten its particular story to suit its own purposes too. A knowledge of basic Greek and the bible shows how much we have distorted that story.
There are many things I have written about here that might inflame anger amongst some people. I don't believe that being conscious or intuitive is harmful. I do believe that it might carry with it the choice of profound emotions that I talk about elsewhere here: Emotions like forgiveness, understanding, forbearance and compassion.
Consciousness and intuition have nothing to do with hate. Hate has everything to do with remaining in the dark place of unconsciousness.
Back to the Future, part 1 - Where is it?
07/05/08 07:44 Filed in: Future
Two things recently inspired me to write this blog. The first was a work project that I had undertaken recently; the second was a video by the late Ian Xel Lungold on the Mayan calendar that I watched recently with great fascination.
The Mayan calendar, that can be interpreted in hindsight to have portended many of the great events and changes in our history, runs out in 2012. Many have interpreted this to be something of a watershed, a turning point for mankind; a time of some massive and fundamental changes in the world. Not the end of the world by any means, but perhaps the beginning of some different sort of world. I can believe that and feel some optimism about it too. I hope…
Economists predict that very soon the world's manufacturing capacity will outstrip its ability of consumption. Simply put that means soon we will be able to make more than we need or can ever hope to use. So what happens then? What happens to our economic, social and political systems that are already beginning to creak under the strain of change? What happens to stock exchanges and money? If you have a career in the financial services industry and are looking to change, now might be a good time to consider that move.
The speed of technology change has accelerated beyond belief. I started my career in computing long ago. What took years at the outset of my career can now happen in minutes, even seconds. At the beginning of this piece I talked about a recent work project of mine. Without wishing to mention my client's name, it was one of the world's largest mobile phone manufacturers. This company now launches a new mobile phone handset at the rate of one a month. Yes, one new mobile phone each and every month. What this means is that they have decided that the life of an average mobile phone to be just a year; from product launch to obsolescence in a year! They don't even call some of them mobile phones anymore; they are "multi-media communications computers!" Even my own phone takes photographs, keeps a calendar, has an MP3 player…what else…? Oh yes! Then there's an FM radio in it as well. But predominantly I use it to make phone calls and send text messages. It's well-made, well-designed and reliable so why would I wish to change it in a year? I have kept my last couple of mobile phones for a good few years and see no reason to consume more for consumption's sake.
But speed of change has accelerated beyond our conception of what was possible just a few years back, and it is accelerating exponentially all the time. Our knowledge, belief, economic and manufacturing systems are moving at a speed far faster than our social and political systems can keep pace. It's no small wonder that our social structures are beginning to creak and that our political systems seem to be holding on by a thread. It's no romantic illusion either. If you don't believe it then go make yourself a very strong cup of coffee and wake up!
What implications does this have for us ordinary mortals? Do you remember that idea about having a career? I am reminded of a couple of conversations recently one with a law and psychology graduate friend turned farmer, now turned national training expert, and the guy who moved me into my home, the removal guy was an Oxford-educated, ex stockbroker. Then there's me, I call myself a management consultant to cover a variety of sins! So what am I? Well, I'm a change, transformation and transition specialist, a programme director, a turnaround person, an expert in information technology and telecommunications, a venture capital appraiser, a psychologist, an ex-chairman of a large mental health project, an ex-chief executive of a software company, a general manager, a communications specialist, a facilitator, a strategic planner and a strategic marketing expert…and sometimes a writer…done a bit of broadcasting, some futures consulting…Okay so how many was that? More than ten for sure! Get the picture?
There are no single careers anymore. Every single knowledge-based discipline with which mankind is involved is moving at the speed of light or else it's moving fast towards obsolescence, like my mobile phone and that's just six months old now!
Take another example…a safe profession; let's be a doctor, a physician. That's an interesting trade, one that I might suggest controversially is more regulated and controlled by the economic interests of the pharmaceutical industry than the social needs of mankind. It's those guys who currently dictate the speed of medical developments and progress, but even that world is about to be busted apart. We have the genome now, a map of our physical bodily universe – a means of understanding our physical condition and potentially the knowledge to be able to cure its ills, we have the means to manufacture chromosomes, and last year it was announced that a scientist had manufactured a living organism synthetically in a laboratory (Guardian newspaper, 6 September 2007). So what will a doctor's profession be in future? If a doctor is to keep pace with developments in medicine and our world of physical knowledge then it is conceivable that she might have to undergo continuous training and education for her entire working life. Or else she might choose to just carry on writing those prescriptions that keep the pharmaceutical industry plump and happy. Somehow I doubt that will happen.
Our world is changing. It's getting better too. As Lungold points out we are transcending an age of ethics in corporate responsibility: one where the bad guys are being weeded out and held to account. I'll just run a quick internet search on recent corporate scandals and see who we can come up with. The list on Wikipedia, mainly for those qualifying as prize-winners in "imaginary arithmetic", include Enron, Barings Bank, Merrill Lynch, AIG, WorldCom, Kmart and there's even a couple of very big pharmaceutical companies in there too. It's a long list now. But I simply want to make the point that businesses who dishonestly exploit their customers or their shareholders for their own financial benefit or power interests are going to fail in a world where ethics, social and personal responsibility are coming to be recognised as universal values. It's not before time and I'll say more about time itself here too.
Some people may find this speed of change frightening; certainly it is awe-inspiring. It's no wonder that we feel that change is running past us; that we feel we can't keep up with it any more.
Lungold talks about this very well, about the limitations of mind. He says rightly that the mind is man's survival equipment. It works slowly and it's like a pattern recognition engine detecting similarities and differences to build a picture of our world. It does construct knowledge as pictures too, pictures taking the form of all our senses: sight, sound, taste, smell and physical experience. It works at about the speed of twenty-four frames per second, that means we can take twenty-four decisions a second in a world where billions of decisions are being taken each and every second. Lungold cleverly points out that the mind is limited in speed and easily deceived, that the guys who do special effects in the movies already know this well. I believe Lungold was on the right track.
So what do we use instead? Lungold and I believe the same thing here and it's called intuition. Intuition is our own sense of the world, and repository of inner personal knowledge, it's our ability to sense and know immediately without reasoning. It's what the very best sportsmen know and use all the time. Just think of David Beckham playing soccer, do you think that he's using his mind like "click-decide, click-decide, click-decide"? No, he has very high speed intuition and that combined with his enormous and well coordinated physical abilities makes him one of the greatest footballers there is; the same goes for great, basketball players and lots of other sportsmen too. I'll write more later about intuition and my current sense of it later. Important questions for me are how one gets in touch and stays in touch with intuition. I'm working on it and I am already very intuitive!
So what's going to happen and why 2012? Frankly, I don't know. I'm not a futurist or a soothsayer. I'm not that sure about 2012 either, but big change will happen and happen soon enough. It will be to coin that overused phrase and now hackneyed cliché, first used by Thomas Kuhn to describe the revolutions that occurred in the world of science, a massive paradigm shift in our entire world. (Brother, can you spare me a paradigm?) It will be an entire shift, not an evolution, but a revolution in our consciousness. It may be a whole series of shifts, who can tell? But one thing is for sure, this post-industrial world we inhabit will go through some big changes and it will be soon and it will be fast.
Time as a universal accurate concept itself took hold then because it was what was used to control and regulate the workforce. Perhaps in a post-industrial age, our concept of time may change. The best I would hope for is that time will be used no longer to oppress our daily existence, but perhaps it might embrace those Mayan concepts too in a new and better world.
NB The video "The Mayan Calendar comes North parts 1 and 2" presented by the late Ian Xel Lungold is available to view for free on Google.