We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot - Little GiddingI have been writing for a long time about the concept of "supermind" and the "dragon". Groups of humans - armies, governments - have a life of their own and thrive at the expense of the humans that oppose them - even their own members. These groups steal our identity and prevent us from thinking for ourselves. It's all true, of course, but what is new is the total acceptance of the situation. Comfort almost. This is the human condition. Our "minds" function as part of a whole. It may be a mistake to "analyze" - to break things down into pieces, but indulge me for a moment while I describe things that make up our "minds" that are usually regarded as something happening between our ears.
- The brain, especially considered as part of the body (Damasio). The function of the brain is primarily to support the organism - the efforts of that organism to thrive.
- "Reality" - what "scientists" observe and explore. Quantum mechanics has taught us to think of "reality" as a set of shared observations and models - strictly speaking, that is what we "know". Actual "reality" (apart from what we can measure) always seems to be just out of reach.
- "Society" - from birth, we are knit into a human milieu. We parse reality in words we learn as children, we grasp and learn tools that reflect hundreds of thousands of years of invention and ingenuity.
It is not wise to separate these three except for the purposes of discussion. The brain is "hard-wired" into the body and the body is a real thing - an object in reality. We cannot speak of any of this or learn the simplest task of existence without drawing on what we are told and shown by the people around us.
In short, our minds are not "our own", nor does it make much sense to insist that we "think for ourselves". Our minds are constrained by what they are - or, if you want, the fact that they are embedded in reality in a certain manner - a manner that is inescapable.
So what is new (and perhaps an echo of thoughts I have had for half a century) is to see all this at once. This leads to experiences that are somehow kissed with new insight. For example, I see scenes of happy congregations hugging and greeting each other in a new way. I would normally harrumph in the background about how silly their beliefs are and shake my head at how amazing it is that so many people can all be so deluded about the core nature of reality. But now I see this as a whole and don't separate what is supposedly going in between the ears of the believer. What is going on is happening to everyone in the room and has roots that go back centuries. The "mind" at work is what I used to call "supermind", but what I have been missing is that the individual experience of mind is just what goes on in our own minds. We are mostly unaware that we are not "thinking" our own thoughts, not being motivated by our own motives, not intending what we individually intend. The process works so smoothly and so naturally that we know as little about it as do bees in a hive.
This perspective puts an end to the "supermind" blog. It is an error to think of mind and supermind separately, just as the behavior of bees makes no sense without reference to the "goals and intentions" of the hive. This insight also marks a new direction for this blog, which started out trying to find a rational, skeptical way forward in a sea of myth and misdirection. In a way, I see the name of this blog (The Christian Skeptic) as a theme to which I must now return, knowing that we are all in a state of tension between our "heritage" and what comes next. Skeptics, like Christians, don't "think for themselves".
Of course there are many, many layers involved in this process. You can go on splitting and analyzing to your heart's content. For example, in "Behave", Sapolsky analyzes our reasons for doing what we do, going up the ladder of detail from the way nerves move our limbs to the way society tells us what is "right" and "wrong'. If nothing else, Sapolsky ties human behavior into the physical structure of the brain - everything from the chemistry of enzymes to the modular structure of brain "systems". The brain is a thing - an object in reality.
Sapolsky reluctantly concludes that there is no place for "free will" in his analysis. Perhaps that is because he, like others, is stuck with the image of the "self" as being some kind of puppet master between the ears of the individual. The truth is that the borders of "self" are extremely fuzzy, both in time and space. What happens in our heads is the result of an astronomically complex calculation whose inputs go back to the swamps when life first emerged - a point that structures Damasio's story of who we are - the
Strange Order of Things. We have motives -
feelings - that Damasio sees at the very root of being and Sapolsky confirms are rooted in biology - the term "computation" for this process is misleading. We are not computers.
In Damasio's account, to live is to thrive, which means that living things don't just "try" to continue their existence, the "try" to push themselves further into the future (persist). They reproduce, grow and grab all the resources they can to do it. In corporate turns (which Damasio hates), living things don't just break even, they make a profit. Damasio walks right up to considering human groups to be alive in their own right (since they satisfy his criteria for being alive), but balks at the conclusion since human groups overlap. For some reason, he feels that a single organism can't be part of two superorganisms at once. There is no particular reason for this criterion, which seems to emerge out of the blue - unconnected to any of his other arguments. In any case, as pointed out by one very early reader of the "Dragon" blog, it's mainly a matter of terminology. What is important is to recognize the actual relationship between the individual human and society, whether you call society "alive" or not.
Strangely, Damasio is quite willing to consider a beehive as alive (and even conscious) in its own right. His arguments for this are convincing and I really don't see why they would not apply to human society, which is quite happy to "brainwash" its citizens so that they throw their lives away for the sake of their country or even corporate profits - profits that they themselves never see.
But the trick is to see that
we are all brainwashed all the time. Otherwise, we could not speak, find our way around or feed ourselves. This is who we are, what we are.
Great sections of our brains are devoted to fitting our individual existence into the group. We have "speech centers" in the (normally) left brain devoted to generating and understanding speech. We have forebrain modules that are constantly doing "social" calculations to determine what is the socially appropriate thing to do (Sapolsky). On a more subtle level, our brains seem to work in such a way as to parse the world in terms of "objects" and "events" that lend themselves to verbal communication. In other words, "language" is deeply embedded in the way our brains actually work - an insight spelled out in great detail in "
Surfaces and Essences" - Hofstadter.
What is often overlooked is the fact that all this functions according to the laws of physics, chemistry, and geometry. We are embedded in a real world. It is commonplace to remark that we only see part of what is "out there". What is overlooked is that what we do see is actually "out there". One image I have in my head is the way our brains are packed into a finite volume but fold the surface to maximize the amount of cortical area. One imagines that we would have had big, spherical brains except that they would be unwieldy. It's just the way I see geometry placing constraints on what and how we think - who we are.
Along these lines, I see "society" and culture as a way of escaping constraints that we inherited from millennia of evolution - the "design concept" of individual organisms, reproduction and all that. Human societies "thrive" by a new mechanism - one involving "information" breaking free of its DNA shackles to exist out in the open as the blood and bones of human society.
Key to this insight is the analogy between DNA - the "program" that determines the physical shape and behavior of an organism - with "Information", the physical, real-world "tools" that society uses to thrive. In the latter category are not just what is usually seen as "information" (books and computer files etc) but the physical creations of society, like telescopes, automobiles and language itself. When you sit behind the wheel of a car, you are being absorbed into the skills and thought processes of tens of thousands of people who invented everything from the dash ornaments to the theory of internal combustion. This is an insight that goes back to "
Zen and The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance", a book I read when it came out (1974). The book is not about Zen or Motorcycle Maintenance, but I did take away the idea that a motorcycle is an
idea cast in metal. I come back to the same place and know the place for the first time ...
It is worth noting that I come back to this idea having absorbed many of the key ideas of Zen. I'd say "motorcycle" actually
extends Zen in an exciting way. Perhaps Pirsig, like the rest of us, knew more about Zen than we thought at the time. Specifically, the insights here vastly expand what we think of as "mind", "attention" and "consciousness". These are the central concerns of Zen. There is no particular reason why those who follow the path of self-discovery should be stuck with the metaphors created thousands of years ago.
Back in 1974, I would frequently point out that a man with an ax is as different from a man without an ax as a zebra is from a horse. Our tools accelerate evolution in a new way. But back then I didn't quite grasp that the tool exists in its own "space" - the supermind - that is using the man as much as the man uses the ax.
So it is that today, in 2018, I have the unusual comfort of having a big insight that has been bubbling up from below for half a century. It makes sense.
But now what?
