Big Dada

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light

And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.”

Genesis

Consider the story of Genesis, partially excerpted above. Before the birth of conscious narrative and its frameworks of agreed upon meaning to enable complex human interactions, we existed in an animal state of consciousness, similar to our dreams. There we were, and it made sense to no one but ourselves. There were animals, but there were no agreed upon meanings of animals, or species of animals. There were no oceans or land masses before there could be maps, or the idea of maps. Perhaps Genesis is not just a literalist meaning of origins of the world, but the origins of consciousness. The light of illumination is symbolic meaning, and from that our world made sense to our selves and, more importantly, the same sense among ourselves.

One of the themes I have been grappling with here is deconstructing and reconstructing narrative consciousness. By narrative consciousness, I mean the cognitive tools we use to understand the world, from the atomic symbol of an individual word, to language, all the way up to frameworks of philosophical, religious and scientific meaning.

What makes this difficult is that it is, in some sense, a view from above consciousness using the tools of conscious thought to describe what is seen. It must be like what a fish trying to describe water would experience. To use the frameworks of consciousness to dissect consciousness can quickly turn an intended meaning in on itself. (ironic note: as that last sentence demonstrates.)

When we are young, we begin learning basic symbols of meaning from our parents; words. As we age and expand our vocabulary, we begin using these building blocks to construct symbolical meaning to explain our world beyond simple descriptors. The leaps from crying when hungry, to asking for food, to knowing names of specific foods, to believing in social constructs like human rights, such as the right to be free from hunger, or theories of economics and nutritional science are significant.

Having mastered the simplest foundational pieces of our conscious mind, we begin to take them for granted. They are the only lens through which the world makes sense. In fact, to say that something makes sense is only to say that a set of symbols is configured correctly, meaning predictably, according to a particular symbolical framework.

We take things for granted to such a degree that it becomes baffling to encounter people who do not and have not learned to make sense of the world in the same patterns that we do. The gulf in understanding is often memorable, an indigenous jungle dweller who presented with the straight edges of buildings, or of the depth of unimpeded view to the horizon, is disoriented, frightened and confused. In one instance, researchers tried to convey meaning to locals using a video presentation. They made the video and showed it to a village. In the video, a man spoke to them and explained some information. If he had stood in front of them and spoke, they would have understood his meaning. They did not understand anything about the video, demonstrated afterwards in their baffled consternation as to what they just saw.

We don’t have to go the jungle to understand that. Consider the contrived and confusing structure of a modern television program. A typical program has a number of characters who, in thought and action, only vaguely resemble people we know. They interact in ways that are bizarre as compared to our real lives. And their experiences are nothing short of surreal, what we call plot, which is a particular structure of story telling that has only a tenuous relation to our lives where there is no beginning, rising action, climax, and resolution;there are just changing circumstances and events, some more directly related than others, and the end. Visually, TV shows are disorienting and not at all how we see the world. Many TV shows have strange sounds of a crowd laughing emanating from an unseen source that may or may not correspond to something funny that we can see, depending on how badly written the show is. The narrative structure is unbelievable as compared to the experiences of our own lives and to compound matters, it is periodically interrupted by a bizarre succession of even weirder videos that are completely unrelated to the show; commercials. The complexity of watching television requires layers of constructed meaning.

Consciousness is an ordered filter that we apply to the miasma of the experiences and mental phenomena of imagery that we encounter every day. This filter's primary purpose is to keep all of us tuned into the same channel, or same range of channels. A collection of people all making sense of the real world in wildly divergent ways using randomly generated filters would be incapable of communicating or working together. At night, when we sleep, we lose this filter and dream. Our dreams often have meaning to us, but do not make any sense if we try to understand or explain them by filtering them through our conscious mind. I have often awoken from a dream that makes no sense if I try to explain it, but I am left with the queer feeling that it made perfect sense to me; it just didn’t make sense to my conscious mind. Many of us know what is meant when someone says, you know how in a dream when nothing makes sense, but it does?

Education in any vocation is the process of developing our conscious filter by adding frameworks. Legal training, for instance, helps us to understand events through the prism of a particular construction of thinking that touches upon morality, ethics, and rules - all of which are branches of narrative meaning in their own right. In law, much is determined or understood by what has come before it; precedence. As we add these tool kits to our inventory of consciousness, the way we look at and understand the world is permanently altered. The same exact set of circumstances before and after training takes on different meaning to us. Education is largely a process of learning about how others before us have made sense of the world, and after having acquired that knowledge, we made different sense of the world based largely on that knowledge. In that context, it is strange that we still consider our thoughts ours. (And another sentence turning in on itself, not fully conveying what is meant.)

We can trace the evolution of any number of cognitive frameworks far back into time. Countless individuals have added, modified and expanded upon them to give us things like morality, ethics, science and so on. One wonders how far back we could go in the precedence of conscious narrative until we ran out of precedents, back to the construction of language itself and the symbols of words. What precedence did they rely upon? What was that experience of being human like then absent the filter of narrative meaning? With an existing structure, it is an easy enough matter to add to it or explore what is standing once it is seen. The truly difficult task is to build one in the first place, and the men and women who stand out in history are those who did so or appear to have; Aristotle, Plato, Newton, Einstein, Darwin. Even in those cases, however, they had a number of existing frameworks that served as the scaffolding for theirs. Newton explained that he stood on the shoulders of giants. Aristotle and Plato stand out as titans of philosophy, but surely some form of philosophical thought existed before them. Language is itself a philosophy.

I find myself considering the origins of consciousness as we understand it. How far the leaps must have been from the symbols of words, to the complex webs of meaning in language, to the first school of thought, the curriculum of narrative we have available to us today. It has an analog to the evolution of biology. The evolutionary development of various species seems compelling enough once the complexity of life is in place, but how did the first spark of life get lit?

It is up this river of meaning I believe the religious thinkers of the past travelled up, seeking the fountain source. Humans are good at using existing ideas in combination to generate ideas that seem unique on their own, re-contextualizing frameworks or ideas leads to new insights. But as far back as we can see in history, there were existing ideas to build upon and combine, so how did the first one come about if there were no existing cognitive tools laying about to fashion it out of? And, once the first came into being, how did one fashion the next if there were not two to combine? Granted, the origins of conscious are likely far more complex than this, I am being reductive to illustrate a point about religious faith. The religious have it that there was a divine source for all these complexities of meaning and life if you travel back to their simplest origins. I don’t know about that, but it is compelling, and we have no compelling counter explanation on that point. The assumption of history is that something always came before, but that can only go so far before one encounters an origin. That insight and question should not get lost in the warbling over everything else that one can find offense in religious cant and history.

The concept of self is just that, a concept, nothing more, nothing less. It is a construction of narrative meaning that takes place within a web of similar constructs. It is, as the rest of it, ultimately arbitrary. As arbitrary as saying murder is wrong. No, murder is murder. We can, for the sake of having decent relations, agree to pretend that it is objectively wrong and it becomes so, but there is no law of the universe making this true. Any nature documentary makes this clear. From the concept of self, we determine that our thoughts and beliefs are our own. But again, those thoughts and beliefs are constructs, and they are mostly constructed from the thoughts and beliefs of the ideas we have studied. Yes, we choose which we find compelling enough to adopt as part of our conscious filter, or which parts to accept, which to reject, but they are not solely ours; we are just borrowing them for the time that we are here. They are, ultimately, arbitrary webs of agreed upon assumptions, such as murder being wrong. That does not make them meaningless; the only reason they exist is to define meaning. The characterizations of arbitrary or Platonic, physical or corporeal, secular or divine, subjective or objective are all decoupled from whether they are valid. That they are arbitrary and social constructs does not render them meaningless, it just means we are free to define and order them however we choose. Nihilism is only possible in a vacuum. A language only spoken by one person is gibberish. Social constructs are acted upon and out by individuals, but they are only meaningful in the context of interaction, or from the perspective of interactions between individuals, not from the individuals solely. Can an interaction have a perspective? Or a self-image? Does a self-image or a perspective have to have a physical body to house it? To have any, does it have to have a conscious? Again, I believe we have found the origins of religious insight. I also believe that the answers to these questions are independent of one another. I also believe that it follows from their decoupling that one does not have to believe in God to believe in the perspective of interaction, which is God's perspective if he exists.

I believe an interaction has a perspective and a self-image, it is what I call emergent phenomena, and it is also only this context in which any meaning exists, from the use of language through any philosophy or art. Science begins to break this down, in that the meaning of science uses the constructs of social meaning to build narrative meaning that does not need multiple humans to make sense. I don’t believe an interaction has to have a physical body or a conscious. Those are both necessary for an individual, and a conscious only makes sense as a filter of meaning from which to give an interaction a perspective. An individual is a shelter for conscious; we need a body with a mind. The religious places an unseen individual behind the perspective and image of an interaction in the belief that they are all co-dependent. I also believe that the religious perspective is most compelling on this point only if you travel back to the origins of conscious and narrative, as discussed above, but also not necessary.

Try to imagine relaxing, releasing, or deconstructing the mental constructs of self image, ego, all of that from which we assume exists or defines us (you can't see or detect any of them, nor will we ever. There is no self-image part of the brain, it is not like your left arm. This is the same criticism atheists have of God, so why assume self-image is objectively true? It is just a constructed meaning by which we place ourselves within the fabric of conscious narrative.) As impossible as it may seem to the modern mind, these constructs of self have only recently come into fashion as meaning within psychology. They are arbitrary affectations of narrative. Given that our filter of consciousness is almost wholly built from and formed by the conscious filters that we have studied in education or have learned from our parents, and they in turn from theirs, and on back, it is somewhat odd that our constructs of self image take such a predominant place in our minds’ eyes as the source of our opinions, ideas and beliefs. The thoughts and opinions we have, our beliefs, our reactions to events around us are all run through this filter of consciousness. Our self exists only to give voice to the results, like an actor reading the lines of a script, with the occasional ad lib thrown in.

Religious people are closer to a truth about humanity than the non-religious; they recognize the implicit truth that all meaning is constructed from the perspective and self-image of interactions rather than individuals. They and atheists make a mistake, in my view, in thinking that a perspective and self-image must also require a body and a mind outside of their own and therefore the lines they are speaking are their own. I am not saying that either side is right or wrong about the body, I am saying it is irrelevant. Whether God exists or not, his perspective remains. So the religious wait for a foreign body and mind outside of theirs to give them some new lines. I am not convinced there is a God that will feed me my lines and give me stage directions, but I do understand that I am already an actor, and that the lines that come to me are not from my self-image, I choose what to say and do, but my choices of what to say and do are almost wholly informed from my conscious narrative, and that, in turn, as we have seen, can hardly be called my own. All that is left for me is to pretend that the emergent perspective does have a conscious and it is a moral conscious, and I try to see things through this perspective rather than my own, and to give myself lines that he would give me from this perspective if he existed.

Big Dada

Sunday, August 28, 2011

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The origins and evolution of the conscious mind

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