Descartes to Whitehead

Path

Baxter and I are prone to the idea that Descartes was a real hit with the ladies. He lived from March 1596 to the February of 1650. It was a transitional period for Europe and like all transitional periods there was war, religious strife, hell on earth, Galileo got into trouble with the inquisitions, it was all happening. At a young age Descartes became a mercenary for the Dutch Free State, he became a military engineer, he was a mathematician, a philosopher who inherited property which he sold and converted into bonds which allowed him to concentrate on his studies. He became an interesting chap who changed his name a lot, he lived in a pub with one of his girlfriends, had a child with someone's maid, he accused someone of plagiarizing his work and on it went. Meanwhile in mathematics he made the connection between algebra and geometry which was the precursor to Calculus. In philosophy, with his I think therefore I am, he introduced us all to the duality of the mind/body problem and when a number of Princesses read his books he became a must have in the Salons of Europe and Scandinavia.  Baxter's question is, "What did we think consciousness was  before Descartes?" Part of the answer can be surmised in two books by a Doctor of the Church, Saint Teresa of Avila.  The Way of Perfection written in 1583 and The Castle written in 1577, both written before Descartes was born. The Way of Perfection is all about how to pray, the object of the exercise being to develop a relationship with prayer that put you in a position to talk to God, which Teresa believed was through silence, no words required. The inspiration for The Castle came to Teresa through a vision from God himself. It was an account of exactly what happened when you died, the varies processes you went through and your meeting with the almighty, or in Teresa's case her husband, Jesus. In those days, outside of Europe, where the process of centralization was a long way from even beginning to think about running a course, places like Nova Scotia or Central Africa, the sun, the moon, the stars, the distant hills were  conscious. If you winked at them, they'd wink back. Then on February the fifteenth 1861, Alfred North Whitehead was born in a seaside town called Ramsgate in Kent, England, to a remarkably well adjusted family well cared for by cooks, nannies and maids, a family that included polo players, teachers, madrigals and vicars.  

Der Individuationsprozess.

Cat in a Grump

In 1916, Karl Jung wrote an essay, called The Structure of the Unconscious, in which he discussed his version of a collective unconscious. This collective unconscious wasn't a field, like a Higgs Field, it was inherited through the genes and was lodged in the mind, it was common to all people, it contained the building blocks of Jung's universal unconscious archetypes which contributed to the totality of a human mind, or what Jung called the Psyche. Jung's psyche and its outer world connection engages the idea of a constant interaction, interpreting and reinterpreting, a self regulation which attempts to produce a balance between the conscious, the unconscious mind and the Ego. The Ego is the raw experience of being in the world, or more gently, the Ego is your sense of self, the thing that says what about me. Also, and worth keeping in mind, the archetypes from the inherited unconscious self are sources of patterns for what Jung calls the Persona, the social mask we wear, the Shadow, our repressed side as well as the Anima and the Animus, or the female and the male side of our psyche. So there's a whole set of invisible things happening in our minds and when it comes to something like a field such as the Higgs Field, Jung sees an underlying layer, the Collective Unconscious, which doesn't encompass the universe, we inherit and share this layer with all other people, nowhere else. Life for us people, Jung argued, was a life long process of achieving a balanced integration of the personal and collective unconscious with that self centered jackass Jung called the Ego.  This process of integration Jung called Individuation, a word that comes directly from the Jung's book 'Der Individuationsprozess.' Got to love German Language. With us people, especially in the Western World, the idea of a consciousness that encompasses the universe as well as us people, can sometimes produce psychic upset which can lead to delusional as well as unfortunate behaviors. 

Being a Higgs Boson

Oxalis Triangularis

Let's talk to ourselves about the Higgs Field and the Higgs Boson. What are they? The Higgs Field is everywhere. It permeates all of space, which would be the entire universe. The Higgs Boson is a particle that gambols around the Higgs Field causing the field to ripple. When innocent little free particles, unencumbered and  travelling at the speed of light encounter the Higgs ripple they slow down, and by doing so they gather mass, and that's it, they're doomed. So, if you and I were young, free particles heading south for the grape harvest or whatever, the Higgs Boson is like a hot chick or a billionaire on a bar stool. We slow down to give them a sniff, and as a result of temptation we stop being free particles. The point about the Higgs Boson is this: it's not just some idle after hours moment in the back room, the ripple the Higgs Boson makes in the Higgs Field is observable and has been observed. In 2013, a year after the Higgs phenomena was observed, Higgs and Englert were recognized for a contribution they'd made to physics almost fifty years early in 1964 when they first proposed the existence of the Higgs Field and the Higgs Boson. Mathematicians and physicists, including Max Plank (died 1947), Erwin Schrödinger (died 1961), David Bohm (died 1992) and Roger Penrose (94 years old) have all cast their genius into the suggestion that consciousness is, in one way or another, as ubiquitous as the Higgs Field. Whether by consciousness they mean the raw experience of being alive, the Hard Problem, remains uncertain.

What Might it be Like to be a Bat?

 

Sassafras

Of the theories addressing consciousness an American student of nonviolence called Michael Nagler proposed that consciousness,  Chalmers' Hard Problem, didn't come from inside each one of us, it came from outside us and we tuned into it. In Michael's view consciousness is very much the primary presence in the universe. A substrate, a fundamental layer. So for Micheal the call is for a new story, a rewriting of our understanding that incorporates a universal that includes the stars and planets, everything, we all share.  Another chap, a man called Thomas Nagel, like Chalmers agreed that the Hard Problem was well outside the realm of science, and if it was a shared substrate of some sort it would still remain subject to the gap between subjective and objective. Thomas asked us to imagine what it might be like to be a bat. Here we can understand the objective science, we might imagine the world of a bat, but we'd never share the subjective experience of being a bat. And for that matter, although I might want to, I can never experience being you.

Definitions of Consciousness

Here we go

One of the finer points about being in the final lap there's no need to tread lightly on subjects such as the Definition of Consciousness. A simple definition goes something like: "Aware of self and one's surroundings." Pretty much a Being in Time and Place. There's an Australian who addresses consciousness by considering a definition of consciousness in terms of two problems. Easy Problems and The Hard Problem. The Easy Problems can theoretically be solved by using science. These Easy Problems include functional aspects and how they work, such as being able to react to the environment, an exploration of  cognitive systems, ability to control behavior. You know, simple stuff that so many of us struggle with. The Hard Problem is an explanation for the subjective experience of, for example, eating a hard boiled egg, or deciding to acquire a red beaky cap. Our Australian suggests there is no scientific answer to the Hard Problem. 

The Inadequacy of Rapture as an Ending

A rendering of a black hole in the Magellanic Cloud

You can think of it as a shadow cast by the subconscious over consciousness or as the shadow cast by the conscious over subconsciousness. Either way we all die, either way there's a polarity or a duality and either way consciousness requires a borrowed understanding and a shared definition. A man called Robert Lawrence Kuhn, not that nice man Thomas 'paradigm' Kuhn, but Robert 'I'm fabulous' Kuhn who amongst other things is an Investment Banker, a television personality and an expert on China, concluded that a world taxonomy of consciousness would have to include nearly three hundred theories of consciousness. The majority of those theories suggest a duality. Why bother? I'll tell you. Jung, in a very Immanuel 'let's not bother to prove this' Kantian way, decided we people shared a collective unconsciousness out of which it was possible to extract archetypes. As a result Jung was able to see a polarity between the conscious and subconscious, and out of this polarity he was able to usefully address neurosis, which I, without any evidence, suspect Jung preferred to think of as hysteria. Strictly speaking a monist theory of consciousness would be obliged to posit a universal consciousness, that would include plants, galaxies, the universe, everything. A monist theory would consider the end of the universe as the completion of the whole and the return to unity. So, as it stands, the big bang was our moment of birth, then when the universe reaches a limit to expansion, gravity pulls us back to our beginning and we end in the belly of a massive black hole. As a dying man I'm coming to the end of my ability to tolerate living in a shadow and I'm pretty damn sure my subconscious is too which is basically why neither of us gives a hoot for straight lines any longer. 

The Gods and Politics

Both Prometheus and Dionysus were very fond of us mortals. Prometheus gave us fire, the internet, social media, podcasts, television and the atom bomb. Dionysus gave us hedonistic excess, sex, drugs, rock and roll, all those good things as well as Hollywood. Had Rome been defeated and sacked following the Battle of Alesia in 52 BC we'd still be quarreling about whether Bel, Brigid, Aed or Grannus gave us the atom bomb, and whether Braciaca, Dea, Sucellius or Maeve gave us the Twelve Step Program.

The last refuge of a scoundrel

 I suspect a vanity plate on the crown of a beaky hat does rather pander to the Me denominator. Were I so inclined Samuel Johnson's epigram would tempt me. But on a red beaky cap it might be entirely superfluous.

Hat wear and aneurysms

I've not seen Baxter or his slightly smaller associate, the prickly Ivan Ivanovitch, who I think is most definitely a beaky cap aneurysm with the personality of a Saltwater Crocodile who wears his beaky cap backwards. Baxter, a congenial Hippo of an aneurysm, wears a pork pie hat and he's proud of it. The question: what's Ivan trying to hide.

Beaky Hats and The Authentic

 Grant for a moment that experience precedes essence. Go ahead, risk your eternal soul and embrace the word poesy, it meant let it be, from the Greek for Creative which morphed into the English for Posey, which are hospital bed restraints, and the word Posy, a rural flower arrangement as well as an early version for the modern word Poetry. The secret is to permit the idea to become manifest by Being in the World, a Dasein. The Beaky Cap, like the piccadill, could follow a long tradition. In the same way that a piccadill collar gave it's name to Piccadilly Circus in London England. Beaky Cap could one day be the name of a prophylactic in Down Town Washington DC.

The Beaky Cap Nightmare

 I've never trusted them. For the fortunate few who might not know what they are, I see them as statements for the mildly retarded. Time to stand up against them

Promethean Gap

 Prometheus pissed off Zeus because Prometheus liked us people in the same way that some people like dogs or kittens. He gave us fire and a lot of encouragement. Zeus, like so many godlike entities, wasn't that fond of us. He had a basic belief that we were dangerous, best not to encourage us, better to beat the crap out of us occasionally. The Promethean Gap was an idea explored in a book by Gunther Anders, Hannah Arendt's first husband, called The Outdatedness of Human Beings, or the Antiqueness of Human Beings. It was an understanding of how dwarfed and insufficient, how inadequate we'd become by the gap between us and technology. 

Spectacle

 OK Kens and Barbies the makeup is showing. I can't do pictures, I can't affect the course, direction and patterns within the ox-like thought processes absorbing our regional thinkers, but I can risk a confrontation with masked men and a trip to a holding center were the law will not apply, by remembering one or other member of The Situationist International. How might I do this? I am tempted to offer tribute to those quarreling and yet more worthy men and women of the International by forcing a spectacle at the next Second Thursday in the Month meeting. How might I do this? I could stand on a table undress suggestively to a recording of the Screen Gemz rendering of their song Doot Doot at the Hamburg Reeperbahn Festivalor or was it a very late night at Astra-Stube in 1980 something or 1978. As I stand there displayed naked in the fully air-conditioned and windowless meeting hall, and as the last Doot ranges around the room I will declare "Ecce Homo" as a salute to Nietzsche and a tribute to the honesty of both Jesus and Faust. Of course I'd need help to get onto the table and a two hundred thousand word handout to carefully explain my purpose in a poetic rather than rational form