Summary
Stephen B. Waters
- Richard Mitchell -- We are in deep trouble.
- Julian Jaynes -- Our history has a clue to a way out: We think differently than previously we had thought. Consciousness--a sense of self and the spatialization of time--is an acquired trait.
- Douglas Hofstadter -- Tools are available to refine our processes of thought.
- Using these tools there is wisdom to be sifted from the great thinkers of the past who also addressed the simple daily problems of living.
- We can create a stable process with built-in self-correction to understand where we are and to plan for the future.
- That ethical systems are constructed by man for his own best interest.
- That a useful ethical system can be constructed that applies over the entire range of society--individuals, small groups, states, and nations.
- That if we are in deep trouble, there is reason for optimism.
- The grace of which we are capable lies in our humanity, not in our gods; in our will to be human. We shoulder the responsibility for our lives. We have now the tools to do so. We are in a race against ourselves.
December 9, 1981
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The more we bend the strength of nature to our personal will the more we must depend on our own good will and not nature to protect ourselves from violation. An iron bolt used to protect us from intruders; a strong box used to protect our wealth. No more.
Carl Sagan's Cosmos has shown us that violence against thought can succeed (Eristothanes 2200 years ago.) We are at the mercy of the thoughts of ourselves and others.
This is why it is in my own best interest to talk to you today. This is why it is in your best interest to listen and to understand. If at any time you fail to see how what I have to say affects you, interrupt me.
You are a particular group--Readers. That sets you apart from others. But you deal every day with non-readers; with people who simply don't seem to have any common sense. Sometimes even we fail to show common sense.
Common sense may just turn out to be able to be taught. Well..., not taught -- nobody teaches anybody anything worth knowing. But we may be able to set people up so that it can be caught. therin lies the salvation of your future and mine.
--- There are pivotal times when experience lets us ssynthesize a more useful form of thinking; where inconsistancies, conflicts, mis-directions like rumples in a blanket can be shaken flat again for a time.
That the blanket is rumpled is richard Mitchell's warning. Examples abound:
- Multiple Eskimo words for "snow" have discrete meanings while multiple ghetto English synonyms do not.
- Advertising
- "Third World" unity is mythological
- Words lose their meaning -- Communist (the epithet in "Manchurian Candidate"), Christian, Moslem, patriot, liberal, conservative.
- Nixon's press secretary, Ron Zeigler's acknowledgement that "the previous statements are inoperative." The statement is not a euphemism, it is an immorality.
- Copious bureaucratic verbiage.
the value of Mitchell's book, Less than Words can Say, is to remind ourselves that the integrity of language is essential to clear thought; that all thought is not well-formed; and that we do a rotten job teaching language and its clearrr, precise use.
Ignorance of the essential nature of language imperils our immediate future.
The ordinary stupidity of mankind can be cured or at least severely mitigated.... Intelligence is, after all, not so much an innate propensity as an invention... Inteligence can be understood as a learned system for distinguishing between things that seem similar and discovering the similarities in things that seem different. Stupidity is the lack of such a system. We can teach intelligence to the stupid just as easily as we can straighten crooked teeth, but we have to DO it. It doesn't just happen. (Mitchell Pp. 213-214)... Just to know a language is not enough any more than being able to wiggle your fingers is enough to make you a pianist.... The aim of education is to make those rudimentary skills into the medium of thought....(Mitchell Pp 214-215)
There is literacy and there is literacy. The ability to do some reading and to do some writing is a kind of literacy, to be sure, but it is the kind of literacy that might have been attained three thousand years before the invention of discursive prose and the birth of formal reasoning.(Mitchell Pp 215)
The proper business of writing is to stay put on the page so that we can look at it later. Writing... freezes the work of the mind into a permanent and public form. It is the mind and memory of mankind in such a form that we can pass it around to one another and even hand it to our unimaginably remore descendants. (Mitchell Pg. 39).
Ignorance of the essential nature of language–in the fact that it is essential for thought–jeopardizes our future. Mitchell talked about his students saying, "Many of my students seem unable to express themselves in any language whatsoever. They aren’t utterly mute, of course. They can say something about the weather. And give instructions about how to get to the post office. They are able to recite numerous slogans, especially from television commercials, and the lyrics of popular songs and recent–very recent–political campaigns. They are able to read traffic signs and many billboards and even some newspapers. They can claim certain emotions with regard to various teams and even individual athletes whose names they often know. They can spin more or less predictable reveries about the past, or the future, either in very simple concrete terms or in sentimental banalities or both. But they cannot pursue a process. They cannot say why evidence leads to a conclusion. They cannot find examples for analogies. They have never even heard of analogies. People in that condition don’t think of themselves as being in that condition because they don’t THINK of themselves. They honestly don’t think at all."Everyone who has succeeded in learning a foreign language hass come to 'think' in that language.... Now it seems that there are millions of Americans who can't even think in English. How is it with them? Do they plan, or do they merely fantasize? Do they solve problems or do they merely rummage around for a suitable slogan? Are they the people Socrates had in mind in thinking about the unexamined life that wasn't worth living? Can they examine life? People in that condition don't think of themselves as being in that condition becasue they don't think of themselves--they don't think at all. (Mitchell Pg. 157)'Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.'. . . When we give it some thought, we can discover (and this time the 'discovery' is real) the power of that mind and the power of language in the meticulous choice of the words 'full', 'ready,' and 'exact.' That's exact language and the expression of an exact thought. The words tell us not only that a well-read man is 'full' but that an ill-read man is 'empty.' (Mitchell Pg. 93)The significance of Julian Jaynes The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind and Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, and Bach is that we may be approaching a new watershed of societal thought. Previous watersheds:
- Nomadic-->Agrarian transition
- Invention of the draught horse driven plow
- Invention of numbers and their use in geometry and trigonometry
- Development of writing
- Invention of moveable type
- The first industrial revolution--specialization of function and power
- The second industrial revolution--robotics.
Now--New understanding of consciousness andthe symbolism to better manage it and explain it.
- That it is not a native human trait
- That it has evolved over the past 10,000 years
- That it is a skill that might be able to be taught like riding a bicycle
- That people are conscious to =various degrees
Impact of Jaynes' book:
- Some people will not be able to deal with it (because it suggests a plausible human origin for religions).
- Those who are on the threshold to grasp "The Way will realize their fundemental job in life is:
- To see things the way they are.
- To be a decent and honorable as they can.
- And, in the process of that to help others be decent and comfortable as well.
Jaynes' Thesis is that:
- The 10,000 year record of drawings, archeological records and writing represents an evolution in the manner of thinking much different than that of today.
- People used to hear compelling familiar voices within their head (much as schizophrenics hear today) that came from one side of the brain to the other, especially in times of stress.
- Even after leaders died, their voices continued to direct others.
- That as subjective consciousness developed with the advent of writing and community, the voices died out--much to the dismay of people who have been appealing to the lost gods ever since.
An analogy is that developing consciousness is like changing programs on a computer. It is a modification of the process of thinking, not a case of havingto install new equipment. It can occur almost instantly.
Robert Heilbroner: As you master logic, it masters you.
Hofstadter's book helps to refine a new symbolism for looking at consciousness and thoughtfulness.
Once you can see a problem; once you can specify a problem, then you can attempt to resolve it.
Confucius did not have the symbols for teaching his thought processes to his contemporaries.
The physics of the brain. there are trillions of neurons in the brain--all interconnected. A neuron may have as many as 200,000 entry points involved in determining the neuron's next action. A single neuron may have several destinations. It becomes they. A neuron my fire up to a thousnad times a second.
Hofstadter's belief is that the explanation of the "emergent" phenomena in our brains--for instance: ideas, hopes, images, analogies, and finally consciousness and free will--are based on kind of a Strange Loop: an interaction between levels in which the top level reaches back towards the bottom level and influences it, while at the same time being itself determined by the bottom level. In other words, a self-reinforcing "resonance" between different levels.
"The self comes into being at the moment it has the power to reflect itself."
Define recursion with monk analogy or telephone.
As Roger Sperry, a neurophysicist, said:
To put it very simply it comes down to the issue of who pushes whom around in the population of causal forces that occupy the cranium. There are forces within forces within forces as in no other cubic half-foot of universe that we know. Near the apex of this command system in the brain we find ideas. In the brain model proposed here, the causal potency of an idea or an ideal becomes just as real as that of a molecule, a cell or a nerve impulse. Ideas cause ideas and help new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and thanks to global communications, in far distant foreign brains.It isan herent property of intelligence that it can jump out of the task which it is performing, and survey what it has done. (Just because it can, doesn't mean it will. Sometimes it needs a little prompting.)
Now let's stand back from our own task and see what we have done: If Jaynes is right, we have knocked the pins out from under most religions which are the foundations of our special fabric. If Hofstadter is right, we have plausibly explained thought without resorting to the supernatural and knocked the pins out from under any so-called eternal truths and with them the underpinnings for all decency.
Fortunately we are left with enough tools to build a process of thoughtfulness that can support us and the societies we choose to create.
And, besides, if you look around us you can see that our social fabric isn't holding well at all. My generation is casting desperately about for some semblance of order.
What evidence:
ountry, right or wrong." The only people we have seen we can trust is ourselves. And it turns out that we can't even be sure about that. After all, experience has shown each of us that sometimes we think ourselves right not because we are right, but merely because we think ourselves right.
- Nixon tells us "I am not a crook".
- Churches cling to dogma that to each of us is palpably untrue (Copernicus, Galileo, and (yet today) Darwin.
- The Iranian hostage crisis pit one concept of right against another.
- Our social programs are in disarray.
- Kadhafi shows international affairs are in disarray.
- "Apocalypse Now" distilled the serious questions of the Vietnam War beyond "My
Do we become catatonic? Irrational? Hedonistic? Do we give in to chaos?
Unfortunately, most attempts are erely at reviving old, failed orders.
We need to establish a syustem that will:
- Resolve longstanding paradoxes:
- If life is sacred, how can I kill in war?
- How do I resolve the abortion question?
- Why is violence unacceptable?
- Individual vs. societal rights.
- Help me discern what I can trust.
- Allow for correction.
- Give stability, balance and direction.
let's do it briefly and with the tools at hand:
We can discern a handful of simple wisdoms by which to guide our process of thoughtfulness. Like boulders in a river, they will direct the flow.
A sense of time -- You, as a individual here and now, are as now as people in the past were as now to themselves or as people in the future will be to themselves.
That is a perspective of looking at things that many people today do not enjoy. it is a consciousness they could learn. They little appreciate thatthe things they do today affect the now of the future. If you leave this light on now, I must expend effort in the future to turn it off. It is a developed appreciation ofthe ramifications of what one does.
For me time roars by.
In early America, education of the youth was in the hands of old members of the family who could no longer labor in the fields. This may have encouraged their sense of time.
A sense of death -- some day I will be as close to death as this meeting is close to being over.
each person's fundamental purpose is to negotiate life with a minimum of pain. Beyond that. . . to help others do the same in the hope that they will return the favor.
If I trip on a stone in the path, I feel obliged to try to remove it or mark it so that others won't have to trip over it as I did. See? A relativist justification that works. No absolute truths required.
Because I have been mistaken in the past, I may be mistaken now or in the future. There is the possibility that I might be wrong--Kant.
yes there is the possibility that we made a mistake and it is up to us to see that it never happens again. We don't feel badly about having made a mistake but we feel badly if we make the same one again.
It is not the same thing as apologizing.
Page Smith lists some foolish and laughable things we have done. We are not alone in that. It is very serious, yet we cannot change the way we were, only learn from it. (Iran, black oppression) We cannot be held a hostage to history.
The process of re-evaluation must be preserved and encouraged. We must be willing to learn from anyone and everyone.
As a corollary, there can be no unthinkable thought. There may be actions that are undoable but that does not mean that they cannot be thought about.
Another corollary: Ideas stand apart from the individual who thinks them. I am uninterested in preserving my ideas at the expense of truth. It is more important to understand things as they really are. Too many people feel personally threatened when their ideas are challenged. People are so afraid of being wrong because they don't understand that it doesn't really amtter.
Seneca's Letters from a Stoic each included an important lesson from an opposing school of thought. There is always something of value--positive or negative--from an opponent's position.
- We might be wrong.
- We might consider our opponent's position to improve our own position or defence. the United States does a horrible job of that.
The previous interpretations of history show our interpretations have varied:
We may have bias today. This is a feedback situation, an exercise in dialectics, an example of GEB tangled loops.
- 1621 - God's will -- Pilgrim's Progress
- 1830 - Manifest Destiny -- The chosen people
- 1870 - Patrician -- Great men make history
- 1930 - Economic -- Charles Beard's Marxian view
- 1956 - Concensus -- The invisible hand
- 1970 - Chaos -- chance
There is value in another man's wisdom.
There is a boundary between fantasy and reality that must be understood. Insofar as one denies what is, one is posessed by what is not.
A lot of hero worship is blind. John Wayne war movie types. Heroes don't exist today in a real sense. They are fine fantasy, but people carry that into real life. They look for politicians that are perfect. The image becomes important--which is not the awy things are. The Pope must be infallible. Confucianism far outstripped the man himself. Who cares if they were not supermen? At least the things they had to say contributed useful thoughts, symbols, examples and aids to the ways we deal with ourselves and others.
A sense of otherness -- You are as you to you as I am to me. Every one lives as acutely as you do. When I damage someone else, it hurts as much as it would hurt me if someone damaged me.
The Confucian Golden Rule: Don't do to others what you would not have them do to you.
Phrased in the negative it is much more practical.
Balance -- The Confucian and Aristotelian golden Mean. The Greek concept of wholeness. Body builders have cultivated one-dimensionality to perfection. As Aristotle said: everyone should learn to play the flute... but nto too well.
Play -- The Greeks invented play. Appropriate play is tha balance between what must be (reality--what must be done) and what can be (fantasy-entertainment).
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Copyright 1998 by Stephen B. Waters. This page was last built on 11/25/98; 4:18:09 PM. sbwaters@rny.com At the moment I am using Macintosh OS to work on this website. |