A The Mind
A.1. Models.
People of the past have thought of the human mind in many ways and located it in different places in the body such as the chest or the liver or in the fluid cavities of the brain and spinal cord. I follow a more modern trend however and treat the mind as being a thing of some sort, but not a substance, and locate it in the brain. By “not a substance” I mean not some kind of ray or fluid or vapour that can glow, or flow or waft about apart from the body. An example of the kind of idea I wish to avoid is of the sort I once saw in a vampire movie. The evil creature could turn itself into a sinister looking vapour and gain entry to a room by oozing itself through the keyhole. Inside the room it could reconstitute itself and do devilish things to its victim, (which for some reason always seemed to be a beautiful maiden). This sort of idea, besides requiring a “suspension of disbelief”, requires an assumption that a mind can in some way exist separately from a body and can move, fly or flow apart from the body. Well, no matter how thrilling the possibilities of such ideas may seem, it is my opinion that all the evidence coming from modern research points clearly to human minds being the result of the activity of human brains. To put it succinctly, your mind is what your brain does. The human mind can, in fact, be treated as a model of the universe. Your mind is your model of the universe – everything as seen from your point of view. My mind is my model of the universe. What this means is that everything in your universe is represented by a pattern of some sort which is stored in your brain such that there is a one to one relationship between each thing in your world and its corresponding pattern. (We will deal a little later with just what these patterns are.) Furthermore the connections perceived between the things of your world are represented by corresponding inter-connections between the respective patterns in your brain.
A.2.Constructs.
Another way of putting this general idea is to consider your mind as being your description of your world. This use of the word description is perhaps a bit wider than its normal usage but as we discuss it later the good sense of it will, I hope, become apparent. Calling the mind a model of the universe is useful because it lets us come to grips with various streams of modern psychology . Calling the mind a description of the world is useful because it lets us come to grips with society and culture . What these two view points have in common is the understanding that our models and descriptions of the world are made up of parts which we could call “parts” or “pieces” or “elements” or whatever. Here I use the word “construct” and use it to mean “a set of rules or procedures for dealing with a particular thing in the natural or human worlds.” As we go on I believe this choice of words will make sense. In chapter two there is a discussion of what “things” are but here the ordinary wide use of the word thing is intended. A construct so defined includes the naming of something and the attached grammatical usages. It also includes all the mental and physical skills involved in dealing with the thing in question. The vast majority of constructs are learned from family, friends, school and work, in other words they are acquired from other members of a person’s society. Some constructs are developed by (or at least in) the individual and may remain with that person for her life, dying with the individual. They may, on the other hand, be passed on to other people through word and deed – which is the source of new culture of course. If we use the word culture in the sense of “everything which we learn from others” (which I think is quite reasonable) then it can be seen that the culture of a particular society (or sub-group or class) is the set of constructs which are held in common by the members of that group of people. It is worth adding here that most of us are not conscious of all the constructs which constitute our minds because:
a some of them were acquired very early on in life and form part of an unquestioned foundation upon which many others have been built; and
b some do not fit in with what we prefer to acknowledge in ourselves so we ignore their existence or pretend they are not really ours. Such things can still affect our perceptions and behavour however. We will look at this in detail later under the heading of “unconscious projection”. Examples of this sort of thing are the various kinds of prejudices we exhibit when we point to the faults of persons of other ethnic groups, or the other gender and say things like: “…isn’t that typical of ………….. !” Unkind terms for this feature of our make-up include bigotry or hypocrisy
(“but …… I’m not really like that! Am I?”) It is fairly certain also that each one of us possesses – or is possessed by – something like constructs which are genetically inherited that is, they are “hard wired” into the circuitry of the brain in some way. This can be a controversial question and therefore interesting, so we shall return to it later.
A.3.Culture Shock: Our Future.
Culture shock is what a person experiences when she (or he) moves to a place where people’s actions are guided by a set of constructs she does not possess; a different culture. This experience is difficult and stressful at the best of times but can be utterly devastating for three main reasons:
Firstly the person does not know what to do, or how to behave;
Secondly she is isolated by not speaking the language; and
Thirdly because personal relationships (which are constructs, right?) are dislocated. Even where the language differences are only variations of dialect and the conceptual differences are seemingly minor differences of local geography, politics and life style – such as those experienced by Australians going to Britain or Britons coming to Australia, the shock to the system is still very real. Thus it is that British migrants in Australia have been caricatured as “Whingeing Poms”, because Australians do not understand the emotional upheaval which causes the negative reactions to “Australia” and excessive nostalgia for UK. The tendency for Australians in London to keep together is likewise a product of culture shock.
This is also basically similar to what is experienced whenever a significant change happens in or to a society. Thus the wars, class “struggles”, plagues, economic revolutions and mass migrations that human kind is heir to, all produce unhappiness and distress (to say the least) for most of those who suffer them. The refugees and “economic migrants” produced by these catastrophes always have an uphill battle because they have to learn a whole new description and way of the world. (There are, of course, individuals who manage to exploit such situations to gain power and wealth but they are usually a minority.) Smaller changes have similar but lesser effects, for example starting school, leaving school, getting married (after the initial bliss that is), moving house, changing jobs or having one’s job changed by new technology and so forth. An accelerated rate of changes of this kind appears to be a major feature of our future existence on this planet. Whilst societies and cultures of the past were never really static but were always evolving over time, the pace of change was usually slow especially in rural areas. Because of this most people thought that the world was fixed and unchanging, aside from the regular progression of the seasons and generations.
Now it is different. All over the world people are subject to ideas and influences from “foreign” cultures, from science, and from the ever more pervasive spread of Capitalism. This is no more glaringly obvious than in the developing polorisation between Islamic communities of Africa and Asia on one hand and the “West” meaning USA in particular on the other.How we as individuals and communities react to the increasing pace of change can have far reaching effects on our quality of existence and in many cases our very survival. In my opinion the keys to coping with a changing world lie in acquiring the right knowledge and in maintaining the right attitude to life – as it was written long ago: “My people perish through lack of knowledge.” Our task is to find the things of real value amongst the ever increasing stream of new ideas we are faced with, adapt them to our needs and reject the rest.
B. The Description of the World.
B.1. Structure of the World.
The constructs which constitute our minds provide the structure for the world we humans live in. This statement is true in two ways – subjective and objective. On this page I am dealing mainly with the subjective which is what some philosophers call the “phenomenal world”. [It is true also however that the constructs which constitute our minds control how we work on and change the objective, external world around us – what those same philosophers call the “noumenal world”]. I am not saying that the world is without form or self consistency if there are no humans to observe it – a view held by some academic philosophers which I find alienating, disempowering and just plain wrong, but rather that we perceive the world through and as the constructs which the brain has created.
Take for example our constructions of time. With our days, months and years and our hours, minutes and seconds we divide and conquer (or at least partly domesticate) the wild and seamless flow of changes occurring around and within us. Our ancestors, through observation of the changes of day and night, annual seasons and the phases of the moon etc, long ago worked out methods of keeping track of and predicting such daily and seasonal changes. They have handed down to us a calendar of days, weeks, months and years which everyone must learn and depend on if they which to contribute to society. The ancestors also made divisions of the daylight – darkness cycle into hours, minutes and seconds which we now keep track of using little machines called clocks and watches. These constructs of time allow us to coordinate our social and economic activities. Without them appointments could not be kept or contracts fulfilled. Without them our memories would be hard or impossible to verify. We rely so heavily on our constructs of time (in combination with concepts of money, economics, work-skills etc) that they are normally perceived as part of the world. Another way to put this is to say we project our time onto nature and society and act as if calendar and clock time is part of the substance of the world “out there”. Thus we say : “It’s four o’clock” with the same kind of assurance as we say:
“It’s raining”. If it is not four o’clock someone will respond with :
“No it isn’t! It’s half past four!” (or whatever) with the same dogmatic self confidence as they would say:
“No, it’s not raining. It’s stopped now!” ( Meaning “…..Are you blind or something?”)
But everything exists now, only now. One way to check on the strength of your time constructs is to meditate for a while on the realisation that everything exists now, not tomorrow, not yesterday. The past and the future exist only in our minds. They are, if you like, figments of our personal and collective imagination. With our planning and our dreams we create the future and with our memories (our personal history) we recreate the past yet all this always takes place in the eternal now. If you think about it, what I am saying is self evident but look how far we are taken away from the now of life by ambitions, fears and habits of thought. There are two sides to this situation.
Without our constructs of time we would be trapped in the here and now like plants and the other animals; human social life would be all but impossible because most of the rest of our culture rests upon these concepts of time.
Our memories however, are created in “the present” and the quality of our memories depends on the quality of life experienced in the present. Does this sound contradictory? It is certainly paradoxical.
But do we not each have a duty to ourself to store up good memories for our old age? These can only come from good experiences in the present! And we really have to be in the present to experience it, not “in the past” and not “in the future”.
B.2.Explanations of the World.
As well as providing structure for our human world our constructs can also explain the origins of things, the way the things of our world come into being. They “account” for the world.
Every culture has its Creation Story or Stories which perform the fundamental task of locating the society, and hence the individual, in the great scheme of things – the “BIG PICTURE”.
The origins of Time, Space, Earth, the Reason For It All, the nature of the human being and values are spelled out in greater or lesser detail in these stories which may be radically different from culture to culture. The understanding and acceptance by members of the culture of the various aspects of the creation story will be different of course, depending primarily on the age and maturity of the particular individual but also on her social status and the extent to which she has been initiated into whatever higher degrees of interpretation and explanation there are available.
One of my main aims here is to discover how the modern, scientific account of the origins of things can be assimilated into the life of an individual so as to significantly improve the quality of her existence.
Why? Because the scientific creation story is inextricably tied into the application of scientific method in many areas of life (medicine, child care, education, environmental and resource development policy, food technology and so forth). If the implicit values are not analysed, drawn out and appropriated by those who must live with the results (us!), then domination, colonisation and marginalisation may be the unwanted outcomes.
I hate the big words but what it means is the technocrats will enslave us all (themselves included!) because “they know best” what is good for us!
B.3. Power and the Description of the World.
How does that happen? Through the power of the word! If we are not vigilant and critical then we are swayed by the mood and words of those around us. We fall prey to pressure from peer groups, with whom we want so much to belong, and from political animals in general. As the psychologist Dorothy Roe puts it: “Power is the ability to get others to accept your description of the world.”
People often know how to use a word in a sentence and in a particular social scene and may assume therefore that they really know what the word means. Relevant examples of this are “Capitalism” and “Communism”. It is a sad fact that use of either or these words in general conversation in Australia can give a forceful push to someone else’s “button”. She (or more likely he in this context I think) will feel impelled to hold forth on the evils of which ever it is that she or he does not like. This seems to demonstrate, when it occurs, that the person whose button has been pushed has not properly examined the concept in question but has learned only to react to the sound of the word on the basis of a particular emotion. I think we all do this more often than any of us would like to admit. If you doubt this, spend a little time considering what various words mean to you personally. For examples: Aborigines, Abortion, Asians, Blacks, “Bludgers”, Environmentalist, Evolution, God, Homosexual, Jesus, Politicians, Salvation, Single-Mother, Taxation, Women’s Libber.
This type of behaviour originates in situations where agreement or “belief” in something is a prerequisite to social acceptance. Under various kinds of dictatorship and tribal or patriarchal authority, agreement with prescribed descriptions of the world may be compulsory even though the individuals concerned may know that they do not understand the concepts involved or know that the concepts are false, senseless or morally reprehensible. Examples are racism, anti-semitism, “Marxism-Leninism-Mao Ze Dong Thought” and other dogmas of state or religious power. It seems to be an unfortunate fact of life that large numbers of families work like this even now and that all societies appear to have been like this throughout most of their history. Thus it has come about that vast numbers of us on this planet have learned to live with personal hypocrisy and a lack of self knowledge.
(An interesting angle on this though is Michael Gazzaniga’s idea of the confabulator: an area of the brain which specializes in the invention of explanations.)
The point at issue is that traditional constructions of the world are bundled and fit together because all the various constructs have evolved together. The society survived because its constructs were sufficiently attuned to the world its members inhabited. For most people, most of the time, the description of the world was perceived as seamless – in other words it is/was not perceived as a description at all but just experienced as “the world”; “the way things are”. Just as the growth of a child into a mature adult in a culture is a long process, so also is the adoption of and adaptation to a new culture by an immigrant.
The advent and expansion of the scientific world view (in combination with Capitalism in its various forms) has created a major confrontation for all people on this planet. (The rise of aggressive religious fundamentalism is a symptom of this confrontation.)
The BIG QUESTION for individuals and societies everywhere is:
How do we appropriate the obvious power of science and its products without being overwhelmed and demoralised by the loss of significant cultural roots? I say that this cannot be achieved without taking as the guiding principle my formula of “CDES”, that is Compassion, Democracy, Ethics and Scientific Method. In a sense I am putting this forward as a substitute for religion. To the “G/god Botherers” of the world this will appear as just more secular humanism, and that is what it is, but I believe that emphasis on these particular themes is what the world needs now. All traditional religions and customs are lacking, most particularly by not incorporating and being adapted to the achievments of scientific method because of course they evolved in a pre-scientific universe but they all also seem to fall short in the other areas too.
Optimistic realism 