Thoughts and Questions on Being Human

Finale: who we are, where we are, and where we are headed

A Summing Up       With grace and calm, but decidedly                                                       (Con grazia e tranquillamente; deciso)

I have tried several times to write this Finale in the same way that I wrote the most recent postings, but no matter how I went about it, it did not feel right to me. So let me take another approach.

Being Positive  

An interesting thing happened to me last year as I was writing the paper that prompted me to start this blog.  When I got to the point about those of us who are negative or pessimistic (which, at the time, probably included me), I began a line of reasoning about where those pessimistic views might have come from, and whether they were justified.

I eventually convinced myself that since we were given no promises when we were born about what our lives would be like, any conclusions or preconceptions on our part as to what they should be like, are not facts, or givens, but are expressions of what we want them to be, or to have been.  In short, they are not an objective reality, but are our (natural) subjective wishes or preferences. “Wishful thinking” would be another way of saying that.  So maybe life is just life, and the problem is how we react to it.

But why be positive, given the way that life actually is for most of us, and not negative, or simply neutral?  The only answers I have for those questions are that it seems to me to be abundantly clear that negative tends to only breed more of the same, and neutral, though it may be a defense against unhappiness, also cuts against happiness, as well; and, in addition, it also tends to promote or foster a lack of concern about what happens to other people—and if everyone were that way, where would that leave things?  Trying for positive at least helps us believe that we are making an effort to make the best of a situation that we didn’t ask for, and may, through the self-fulfilling-prophecies effect, actually bring about some positives.  That way of ours of creating new realities is part of being human.  However, I’m not trying to convince you how you should be; I’m only trying to explain why I’ve opted to speak to the positive. 

Two Wolves

There is what is said to be an American Indian story, though it may be apocryphal, about a father who tells his son that there are inside of him two wolves that will always be fighting for dominance, a good wolf and a bad wolf.  How you live your life, or what happens to you in this life, he continues, depends on which one wins out.  When the son asks which one will win, the father replies, “The one you feed.”

Or, as Muso Kokushi, who lived from 1275 to 1351, wrote:

It is a characteristic tendency of human beings to indulge in emotions such as happiness, grief, or anger in response to present conditions, failing to balance these feelings with the awareness that present conditions are results of past causes. It is illogical to face the present only as an object of enjoyment or tolerance, neglecting to use it as the oppor tunity to create the future.

I can’t improve on that; that, to me, is quintessentially “human”.

The Two Wolves, in Society

As for the two wolves, since so much of what we witness in society is a reflection of the many natural differences that we see among ourselves (see the posting on our Selves, in case you missed it), this same metaphor of the two wolves fighting for dominance might also be applied to society.

With that in mind, here is something that someone named Gensei (1623-1668) wrote:

What a pain, these people with so much wisdom!

Even the Buddhas have trouble converting them.

They keep the sutra pages turning

But never turn their mind;

Ten thousand volumes cram their bookshelves,

All for nothing!

They've sunk into the pit of fame and profit;

Day and night [they are] a prey to disquiet and fear.

Their hearts in the end care nothing for sincerity,

But moment to moment plot some clever scheme.

 

I probably don't need to tell you that this can be applied to a lot of people in general (and I suspect that that was what Gensei was trying to say, in any case).  In particular, I believe that if we look at things at arms’ length, it might be easier to see that what we witness in society and the world today (the “where we are” part of the story) is partly a result of some of the “problematic” aspects of human nature that we have been covering in this blog, but it is in no small part also a result of those who have taken the good ideas about governance, and law, and morality, that humans have developed, and the good ideas about economics that have been developed, and subverted them for their own purposes or benefit. Or, in the case, for example, of those whose “ankles have been turned” the other way, so that they just can’t move forward, they have just ignored them. 

I remember, too, that Adam Smith remarked several times in The Wealth of Nations that wherever you find two or more businessmen together, you are sure to find collusion.  Of course, he was wrong about the “Invisible Hand,” so he may also have been wrong about that.

In the words of Gensei, “They've sunk into the pit of fame and profit;
day and night [they are] a prey to disquiet and fear.
Their hearts in the end care nothing for sincerity, but moment to moment plot some clever scheme.” These might be seen as some of the “bad wolves” of society.  These are the wolves that should not be fed. 

Please don’t get me wrong.  I am not claiming or suggesting that being positive and “feeding your good wolf” will necessarily turn things around.  Even Aristotle could already see that there was not much that could be done to stop people who were in a position to do so from exercising control over other people’s lives whenever and however they wanted to, and we certainly see examples of that today.  However, vigilance and preparedness have always been the lot of living things that had any desire to stay alive and well, not hiding away in wishful thinking.  It is honest work to try to put good ideas, ideas that benefit all of us (including those who will only be alive in the future), into practice.

Who We Are, Where We Are, and Where We Are Headed

“Who we are”, which has been the topic of most of my previous postings, has both a very broad context (all of the possibilities inherent in the human genome) and very individualized answers, which are the particular, and partial, aspects of the total range of human expression that are expressed individually in us.

In addition to these, and complementing them, who we are also has a very important social component: we are a social animal, meaning that we could not become human without the presence of other people, and of a society, and we could not have become who we are in particular, or do the things that we do, without our interaction with others, without their cooperation, and without social institutions and organizations.

What we tend to lose sight of is that these organizations and institutions—society—do not exist as ends in themselves, but are what we ourselves have created to develop, maintain, and advance our own lives, not the other way around.  I apologize for repeating the obvious here, but perhaps we tend to lose sight of it because it is so obvious.

 

In terms of where we are, we are all, of course, on a particular planet in a particular solar system in a particular galaxy.  However, in a more meaningful sense, more and more of us are enmeshed in local, national and global economic and political dynamics that, due to a combination of the complexity of these systems, some of the problematic aspects of our natures (our “love-hate” relationship with others, and wanting more than we need, or being hard to satisfy, just to name a few), and the bad intentions of the kinds of people that Gensei might have been writing about, are and will continue to be problematic. 

It is, in particular, a salient fact about the “modern” economy that its success, such as it is has been, has been based in large part on excess.  I have to believe that we are smart enough to be able to develop economic systems that are sustainable (excess, by definition, is not sustainable), and more fair, but there are those in society (the other wolves?) who would not benefit as much by these kinds of economic systems as they have from the existing ones, and so I cannot venture to predict whether or when such a system or systems might ever be put into place.   

The evolution of “better” humans

As far as possible evolutionary improvements are concerned, we know that evolution has no direction as such, so “where we are” can’t be defined or described in terms of where we are on a line of evolution towards “better” humans.

For us, though, that really is no problem, because even if our evolution did have some “higher” point that we were on a path towards, it would take far too long to come about, so we who are alive now would still be left to our own devices to make do with what we are like and what we can do with it.  That would put us, in other words, in approximately the same situation that all of the thousands of generations of “modern” humans that have ever been on Earth have faced.  While it may appear that some segments of some generations have led fortunate lives, no generation as a whole has had it easy. 

In any case, our “plasticity”, the range of improvement that is within our reach through experience, insight, and active learning and application, or resolve, is very much greater than any improvements that we might see from a directional evolution over a period even as short as a thousand years.

 

However. Even so, I don’t think that there is any doubt that as far as “where we are” is concerned, we are indeed in a “hard place”:  resource and extreme weather problems, economic problems, overpopulation, ideological and other conflicts, you name it.  To repeat, however, this is probably no harder than the situations that most other generations of humans have faced—in one respect, though, we may be in the slightly better situation, in that we have the benefit of (potentially) being able to learn from previous generations’ experiences and learning, particularly those of the last five or six generations.  Plus which, we now have much better access to knowledge in general. So, theoretically, we might effectively be in a better position to cope with our futures.  Nevertheless, one way of looking at “where we are headed” is that we are headed for some stern tests of what we know, what we can learn from our predecessors’ insights, and looking more carefully at what has happened in the past.

What “We” are we talking about?

As for where we are headed, while it is certain that the human species will someday not exist, if only because the Earth will not exist, or will not be able to support any life, for us today, there probably is no “we” that applies to everyone living on Earth right now (other than being expressions of the same genome); there are in fact many human futures. 

At the same time, neither is the number of human futures the same as the number of people alive on Earth; we know this because we know that there really is no such thing as a stand-alone individual human being.  Although we are irreducible biological entities (no one else can live our lives for us), we are very much interconnected with other people, and so “where we are headed” also applies in a human sense not just to what may seem to be the individual paths of our own lives, but more generally, and more consequentially, to the paths that intersect and complement with (or conflict with) increasingly wider circles of other people; it is mostly within these circles, and within our particular societal situations, that we make our ways. The important thing is to not remain fixed, but to keep widening the circles of our reference; it appears, for one thing, that the narrower our circles of reference, and the longer we remain fixed within them, the more “enemies” we seem to have.

A more tangible answer to where we are headed, then, is that each of us is in a lifelong transition towards more or less clearly articulated goals or endpoints, within particular social networks and punctuated or anchored by more or less stable resting points that we take as normality (or “normalcy”, as it seems to be called these days).  That’s where “life” is; that is the point that we are at in our interconnected individual histories, and also where we are headed.  Everything else might just be window dressing. 

 

Concluding Remarks

 The last thought that I would like to leave you with is one that I first mentioned in passing some postings ago, and that is that it is not so much what we do as how we do it that separates us from most other animals. 

We are here, and we are alive, and, someday, we’re not going to be alive—about that there is no question. The same can also be said for the human race: it exists now, but, someday, it won’t, whether because of an asteroid strike, or the sun dying, or some other cause.  Life, we know, is contingent and conditional, through and through.  The conclusion I draw, however, is that what we do with our lives is quite likely unrelated to what might happen to the human race, except perhaps in a reverse direction: it is what we do with our lives and the lives we are connected with while we are alive that matters for us and for the people we live with, and how we do that will have an effect in some way, for better or worse, on what becomes of the human race.

We are not here alone, and who we are is indelibly the result of that fact: we are the product of our nurturing by other people and our interactions with each other once we get out into the world.  We could not be what and who we are (which, if you will recall, is only a partial expression of whatever it is that human nature is) if we were truly alone.

And everyone is pretty much in the same boat on that.  So the harder we try to maintain the fiction of our “pure” individuality, perhaps typically in opposition to or at the expense of other people who are trying to do the same thing, the more unsteady or aimless the “boat” becomes.  That would be one way that we could go to our graves.  That would be the way that blind evolution might lead us.  That’s one way to do it. 

Or, we could try to make life less difficult to each other (this, from George Eliot, in Middlemarch) while we are here.  Among other things, we could let each other tell our stories, and help each other complete those stories, which is very important for us.  That would be another way we could do it.  (There are, of course, other ways.) 

To close this blog, though, I wish you all (though perhaps not  the terminally selfish and proud in society) less difficult lives. 

Any questions?

 

Our Precocious and Problematic Minds - Part 4

 

Reason, Logic and Rationality: What in the world do they mean?

                         Broadly and expansively (Largo)

One would have thought that of all the words in the English language, the words thinking, logical, reason and rationality would have pretty clear meanings.  One would have thought so, that is.

I had originally planned to delve into thinking and knowing in this post, and even had a first sketch of the basic ideas, but I made the mistake of double-checking some of the basic definitions of the key words that kept cropping up, and ran into some problems.

Microsoft Word (Encarta) has these definitions:

Reason: (as a noun): an explanation or justification for something; a motive or cause for acting or thinking in a particular way; the power of being able to think in a logical and rational manner; a cause that explains a particular phenomenon; the ability to think clearly and coherently; the ability to think logically regarded as a basis for knowledge, as distinct from experience or emotions.

        (as a verb): to think logically or use rational faculties; to try to persuade or influence somebody by means of rational argument; to formulate or resolve something using rational means

Rational:  governed by, or showing evidence of, clear and sensible thinking and judgment, based on reason rather than emotion or prejudice; able to think clearly and sensibly, because the mind is not impaired by physical or mental condition, violent emotion, or prejudice; presented or understandable in terms that accord with reason and logic or with scientific knowledge and are not based on appeals to emotion or, prejudice; endowed with the ability to reason, as opposed to being governed solely by instinct and appetite.

Logical:  based on facts, clear rational thought, and sensible reasoning; able to think sensibly and come to a rational conclusion based on facts rather than emotion; relating to philosophical logic.

Think:

to use the mind to consider ideas and make judgments

to believe something or have something as an opinion

to imagine or understand something or the possibility of something

to bring something to mind

to focus the attention on something

to regard somebody with care or concern

to regard somebody or something in a specified way

to have something as a plan

to anticipate something happening

to be attentive or considerate enough to do something

to make a mental choice

to bring something to a particular condition using the mind

Thinking (as an adjective—as in a thinking animal): capable of using the mind to reason or reflect.

 

How “rational” is all this?

If reason is being able to “think logically and rationally” (as distinct from experience and emotions), and if logical is “based on facts, clear rational thought, and sensible reasoning,” or “able to think sensibly and come to a rational conclusion based on facts rather than emotion,” and rational is “governed by, or showing evidence of, clear and sensible thinking and judgment based on reason rather than emotion or prejudice,” and “endowed with the ability to reason, as opposed to being governed solely by instinct and appetite,” how do these all fit together?

We can see from the definitions that reason involves logic and rationality; logical involves facts, rational thought, and sensible reasoning; and rational involves ‘clear and sensible thinking’ that is based on reason rather than emotion, and that is in ‘accord with reason and logic or with scientific knowledge’. Is there a place we can start and follow around in a “logical” way so that everything falls into place?

This is how it looks, sketched out, with the arrows indicating which words are defined in terms of the other words: 

 

                   reason  ó  rational

     ô øõ÷ö ñ

                 logical   ï thinking

 

Out of the twelve possible interactions that there would be if each of these four words were defined in terms of the other three, ten are present. This is more than “circular”: this is a veritable labyrinth, perhaps not unlike a painting by Escher, and so as to the question as to whether we might be able to have these particular definitions fall into place in a clear and orderly way, the answer appears to be “No”.

Some proposed definitions

I propose the following definitions to “straighten” that chart out:

reason:

Our generalized capacity to critically examine  things or conditions with the intent of learning something, rather than to just take them as they are or at face value (including the meanings of words), or to just let things take their course without questioning them;

logical

One of the major criteria for good thinking, relating specifically to the sequencing and the ordering of components of analysis, events or conclusions such that subsequent steps or events flow from the antecedent steps in demonstrably or arguably understandable and or effective ways (in other words, that they are necessary and get the job done, whatever the job is); and

rational 

A predicate not for what we are, as an essence, but what we are capable of and sometimes are, to greater or lesser degrees.  It could be more specifically defined as a propensity to set aside our impatience to just get on with things, our reticence (for whatever reasons, including because we may be unsure of ourselves) to take the time and effort to figure out the smart thing to do, all (relevant) things considered, and whether to do it, and putting aside in particular our preference for quick or easy answers, or answers or decisions that we ourselves prefer, or the ones we have a personal stake in, and carry out the good thinking and analysis that it takes to make or come to a reasoned decision or a conclusion. 

Being rational might also include knowing when and how “rational” to be, or how to be rational in an irrational world.

In this proposed breviary, thinking is the key active component, and can be considered to be one of the specific mental actions or processes that we take in exercising our capacity to reason, and which, if we do so at least occasionally and effectively, might allow us to claim that we have earned the right to use the predicate rational about ourselves. 

Reason here, then, is the capacity, thinking is the means, logical is one of the criteria, and rational is a valid descriptor that we can apply to ourselves if we use our capacity to reason at all frequently and well.

Now the diagram looks like this:

 

             Reason

               ò

          Thinking   ð Rational

                        ñ

                          Logical

 

Thinking

Since thinking is the key component of our capacity to reason, or to use reason, I would like to explore it in more depth.

Good thinking, at its basis, requires having at least an interest, if not a passion, for the truth, which leads to taking care with words and meanings, and having respect for those who you are trying to convince about something.

Element 1: Taking care in the words that you use and how you use them.  (definitions)

Element 2: Taking care in the clarity and consistency of the meanings (of the statements) that you are invoking or imputing, (meanings)

Element 3: Taking care in how you construct your sentences and paragraphs and review how those fit together to relate a clear, coherent and plausible representation of what you are thinking (how the elements fit, or “work”, together, with the linkages established).  (how it all works).

Element 4: Taking care to remove or neutralize your ego-involvement, your possible narcissism and personal biases, and any residues of magical thinking that you may still have. [I (ego) removed]

Element 5:  Good analysis.  Examination of the origins and nature of the subject at hand, the dynamics and mechanisms involved in how it is manifested (how the components work together, and under what impetuses), assessing the contexts in which it applies or appears, the variation in the ways that it is manifested and the causes of the variation, what happens when initial conditions or new inputs change, and how susceptible it is to those changes, who or what groups of people are affected, what happens if a planned change or changes is/are introduced (including negative consequences), what happens if no change is introduced, what would be involved in introducing changes, the facility of making the change(s), and the costs, the benefits, the side effects, the expected longevity of the results, etc.  (analysis)

Element 6:  Consider other points of view, ideas, or theories on the subject. (other views)

Element 7:  Give consideration not only to evidence for what you are proposing, but also, and more particularly, evidence against what you are proposing.  (evidence for and against)

We don’t have the basics of good thinking about ideas and concepts, in particular (though the general ideas can also apply and be helpful in other areas of human activity), and we can’t really begin to call ourselves rational, until we know and practice  these elements (a mnemonic device I use is that we haven’t done good thinking until the reasoning cat, or the philosophical cat, has miaowed; I apologize for this, but it helps.)

 Beyond that, there are a number of other sophisticated techniques of good thinking (counterfactuals and other thought experiments, for example) that come in handy. 

Some Missteps

I can’t help but feel that we may not have been very “rational” in our use of the word rational, and in particular that we have been using it as an adjective for what we do, rather than as a predicate for what we are like. Possibly because there really has been no clear definition of it, but one that has been embedded in overlapping definitions with other, related, words, with a good deal of circularity, it has in common parlance unfortunately been hollowed out to signify almost any decision-making criterion or criteria that can be generally applied. 

“It’s the rational thing to do” is often heard.  As a consequence, what many people now seem to mean by rational has more to do with being pragmatic or practical, and which, in the “push” of life, or in a competitive business (or other) market, often reduces to being operationally expedient, with an emphasis on efficiency and cost reduction. It may be “smart”, and it may warrant the label rational if good thinking has gone into it, but my experience tells me that in most cases this has not really happened, and that, to the contrary, in many cases decisions go against what good thinking suggests as the thing to do; where that often shows up is that a decision may (appear to) have good immediate results but long-term negative ones.

The question for us as putatively “rational” beings would seem to be how much of this irrationality should be accepted as the best that can be done in a generally irrational (that is to say, unthinking) world.  Or do we value our capacity to reason and our abilities to think enough to keep holding these out as the standards that we should generally try to aspire to?

Emotions, Rationality, and the Human Condition

Going back to the Encarta definitions that I started this essay with, we can see phrases like:

 (for reason) “the ability to think logically regarded as a basis for knowledge, as distinct from experience or emotions”);

  (for rationality) “governed by, or showing evidence of, clear and sensible thinking and judgment, based on reason rather than emotion or prejudice,” and “presented or understandable in terms that accord with reason and logic or with scientific knowledge and are not based on appeals to emotion or, prejudice”);

  (for logical)  “able to think sensibly and come to a rational conclusion based on facts rather than emotion”

As someone who values the positive content of the Confucian idea of “human-heartedness”, or jen (sometimes written as ren), it also seems to me that in these standard definitions, there may have been an overly strong reaction to the deleterious effects that our emotions can have on our capacity to reason and to think critically.  To invoke an old saying, we may, however, have “thrown the baby out with the bath water.” 

Emotions can indeed “throw off” our critical thinking, but because our emotions are an integral part of what it means to be human, I feel that to not include our positive emotions in our thinking at all, to exclude even consideration of them, is to in effect de-humanize ourselves.

Positive emotions

One of the big problems in the definitions that we started with, you may have noticed, is that although they do not explicitly say so, what they would appear to be referring to are negative emotions; a second problem is that they do not identify the specific negative emotions that they may be referring to. 

Let’s try to shed some light on these problems.  In the first place, let us by no means leave out the positive passion for truth, which I would say qualifies as an emotion. Impartiality may not be an emotion, but I suspect that a commitment to it might be.  And it may not be a bad idea to retain at least a controlled enthusiasm, which may or may not be related to the passion for truth; without enthusiasm, we just might falter in carrying out the good thinking that (as I have maintained here) is the hallmark of being rational. 

Jen

The above paragraphs had to do with the positive role that positive emotions may play in good thinking, in the form of the states of mind of the analysts and others involved in decision-making. 

However, there is yet another aspect that appears to be often left out of analyses and reasoning, and that is one that is encapsulated, for me, by jen, or “human-heartedness”. If we are doing the good thinking that needs to be done about decisions that affect real human beings, and this good thinking needs to include being aware of the human context or contexts that are involved, the question is how could an analyst adequately “know”, much less understand, these things unless he or she were looking at them with a “human heart”? 

(It may also be instructive or illustrative to go back to the Encarta definition of think and see that one of the definitions is “to regard somebody with care or concern,” and another is “to be attentive or considerate enough to do something”.  It appears that there already are some elements of “human-heartedness” in our common uses of the word think.) 

“Rational” decision-making and Utility

In this context, I believe that it needs to be recognized that the invocation of “principles” or value- or positive emotion-free (or jen-free) decision criteria may be one of the principal means by which those of us who have no particular interest in other human beings as human beings, but see them primarily as means to their own personal ends, can do so in the name of being “rational”, and leave it at that.

A good example of this is how the British Utilitarian principle of “the greatest good of the greatest number” failed.  What that principle failed to take into consideration was that there are minimum conditions that have to be met for an infant to become a human being, and also minimum emotional bonds for a community to be a functioning community; a human principle would seem to require that a priority first be given to ensuring that those minimum conditions are met, and then (and only then) maximizing the “greatest good for the greatest number.”

The utilitarian principle seems to have been, in effect, more of a calculus of disinterest than anything else. Indifference may not be an emotion (more like an absence of emotion), but it is definitely not a positive emotion, and can, in appearing to legitimize a decision that has harmful consequences, allow harm to be done with no remorse or regret.  In any case, it is not in a variant, much less an acceptable variant, of impartiality.

Empathy, on the other hand, would appear to be a positive aspect of jen.  Though it may not be an emotion as such, it is nevertheless necessary to gain a good understanding of the human contexts of decisions, and should not on principle be excluded from our good thinking. (We generally tend to think of sympathy as the emotion that may or may not be associated with empathy, and it can probably have both positive and negative influences on decision-making, and so great care needs to be taken in invoking it, to be sure that it is indeed a factor that should be included.)

Even though any one value- or jen-free decision criterion may not make much of an impact, taking all such decisions together, they can have a great impact on the quality of life of many humans.

It might be argued by some that considerations like these are exactly the kinds of considerations that good “rational” decision-making needs to exclude.  However, the principled use of “human” value-free principles or decision-criteria also fails on a epistemological basis.

These kinds of principles and decision criteria are first (and only) human creations, and therefore are as mortally contingent as (almost) everything else that we conceive or do or make (the pyramids may be an exception), and it is a fatal epistemological error to subordinate ourselves to them in treating them as absolutes or “received truths.”  Using them as guides is one thing, but to subordinate ourselves to them is quite another; even the United States Constitution had to be quickly amended to include the factors discussed here, and has of course been amended a number of times since.

To subordinate ourselves to abstract principles of our own creation without further thought would be approximately the equivalent of our creating an artificially intelligent robot and then worshipping it as our God.  By now, we should be far too aware of the problematics of the human mind to come to the conclusion that any abstract principle is The Truth; to do so can only be the result of bad or incomplete thinking, and therefore irrational.

 

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

As I mentioned at the outset, I had also wanted to discuss the idea of knowing, or what we know and how we know it, but this was sidetracked by my discovery of the tangle of definitions surrounding some of the other key terms. I encourage you, however, to visit the website shown below, as I found it to contain a good, concise overview of knowledge and knowing. 

I encourage you in particular, in case you are not already familiar with it, to read and think about the differences between “knowing” and “understanding”.  “Knowing” seems to tend to be more about individual facts or pieces of information that are either used in particular situations or recited on social occasions, but “understanding” has much broader, fuller, and dynamic connotations that imply an ability to do something on the basis of the understanding.  “Knowing” yourself or someone else is in my view actually more like “understanding.”

 http://www.scribd.com/doc/14554355/Knowledge-Types-Revised - document_activity

 

Our Precocious and Problematic Minds: Part 3 - Our Selves

 

Our Partial, Divided, and Shifting (but real) Selves    

          -    Like a song, gracefully (cantabile, grazioso)      

Alas, the poor maligned Self!  We are told by some scientists that the self is a mirage and doesn’t exist, and Buddhists are said to say that there is no self.  On the other hand, however, some famous philosophers have told us that the greatest knowledge lies in knowing ourselves, and parents are forever telling their children to control themselves! 

In just what realm are we here?  Are we to take the self as being, as we did with “God”, a human concept that does not necessarily refer to anything real, but that in being referred to and related to, becomes in a human sense “real” as we try to maintain stability in the chaos of events and stimuli surrounding us?  Or do we really have a self?

It doesn’t make things easier to say that depending on just what we mean by the word exist, we might say that the answer to all of these questions might be ‘Yes’.  ‘Yes’, for a neuroscientist looking at nerve cells and what have you in the brain under high-powered microscopes, it is hard to find a “thing” to call a self in the brain. Before we take such an assertion at face value, however, the (perhaps not so obvious) questions to ask of that scientist are: “Who, or what, exactly, is making that declaration that there is no self?", and "Who or what are they trying to convince, or to educate, with that assertion?"

‘Yes’, for a Buddhist, because for a good Buddhist, the self does not have “independent origination”, but is instead embedded in the many forces that it is part of and interacts with in the process of, as they put it, arising from multiple and mutual causation, and is therefore not something free-standing in and of itself; it is not one of Aristotle’s substances, some pure residual essence that can stand alone.

      Nevertheless, the person who we call Buddha seriously believed in the self—why else would he dedicate his life to enlightening it?  If it is not the self that would do the searching and learning and the gaining of insights, and then convert that into peace of mind and having compassion for other living things, including other people, then it would have to be the same thing that we refer to as the self, but under a different name.

In that sense, I believe that the philosophers who tell us that the greatest knowledge is knowledge of ourselves are also right.  Finally, parents are also right, because left to themselves, our untutored and uneducated selves, like our untutored minds, tend to be narrow and self-preoccupied.  

One answer as to what the self is, then, is that it is what is aware of the individuality of the particular body that it is responsible for overseeing and give positive direction to.  I don’t know about you, but that sounds just a little, what?, dry?  Some years ago, I wrote to a friend who was a skeptic in these matters that ‘the self is what knows what it is going to be doing tomorrow.’  He did not respond to that, so I am not sure what he thought about it, but he usually lets me know if he disagrees with something I’ve written or said. 

In any case, it was not long before I amended that definition by saying that ‘the self is what knows what it will be doing tomorrow, and who, if anyone, it will be doing it with.’ Now, as I write this, I would expand that further to say that ‘the self is what knows what it will be doing tomorrow, and with whom, and is also what formulates a general path, or plan, for how to live its life, with and around other people, and can make adjustments or modifications to that plan.’

Others might say that the self is what recognizes itself in a mirror, and have no real problems in assigning or attributing selves to elephants and porpoises.  If the hologram of Princess Leah, in Star Wars, had suddenly stopped reciting its message, looked around, and said something like “Oh, I don’t like this dress,” or “What a strange ship you have,” it would be because it had suddenly acquired a self.

 Our partial selves

However.  However, even if we agree that the self exists, that does not necessarily mean, given how prone we are to paint much more grand pictures of ourselves than is actually the case, that our conception of it is at all that accurate or useful.  In fact, not a few thinkers have observed that our untutored conceptions of ourselves are not a small part or source of our biggest problems.  That many of us tend to think of humans, or at least those humans who are like us in some way,  as being “exceptional” just by being who we are, “right out of the box”, as it were, is a case in point. 

(There is an interesting feature of human nature that has been discovered time and time again in surveys of various kinds, and that is that respondents have a tendency to rank themselves, or the people who they are around the most, or where they live or work, higher, on the average, than they do other people or communities in general.  “I think Mankind is rotten,” you can almost hear them say, “but I and the people I am around are basically OK.”  That is one sense of “partial” that is true of us—that we are “partial” to our own selves and people we are familiar with.

 Our selves, though, are also partial in another way, and that is that no individual can be a complete manifestations of all of the possibilities inherent in the human genome; each of us is the product of a random or accidental combination of some of those possibilities.  Even if it were theoretically possible for a zygote to represent all of the possibilities inherent in our genome, I for one can only begin to imagine what it would look like if it were to survive.

Although they are only partial expressions of human variety, our untutored selves nonetheless have a very strong tendency to think of themselves as complete, if not ideal, and to generally look down on anyone who is different as being incomplete, or inferior, or perhaps not even human.  (Some others, as we well know, however, go in the other direction and see themselves as being very limited, quite imperfect, and as having little if any value. Those of us who have the most pride about our selves love to take advantage of these people.)

Science, it is to be hoped, can perhaps find a way to help us get past these tendencies, and, in particular, the “imprinting” that happens to us with respect to the cultures and beliefs that we are raised in, and the resulting fear, dislike, vilification, and hatred, of those who happen to be from different cultures, or have different beliefs.

Our manifested selves

One place to start is to relegate to the bin perhaps marked “Not in this life”, on its having no basis in fact, the idea that there is an ideal personality, or that a person has one “true” self that only needs to be discovered and allowed to come out: we are not born with a functioning, pre-fabricated, self, and there are a number of sets of habits and traits that a person can become comfortable enough with to be able to declare with conviction that ‘now I have found my true self!’  

    “The perfect,” as an Italian proverb has it (and repeated by Voltaire and General George Patton in slightly different words), “is the enemy of the good.”  How many times have you not been satisfied with “good enough”, tried to improve on something that was “perfectly” acceptable and serviceable, and ended up “ruining a good thing”?  As for our Selves, preconceptions of perfection may even be harmful or damaging.  Improvement is one thing, perfection quite another.  (As for Italian proverbs, there is another that goes “She who is born beautiful is not born poor,” revealing, pithily, another enduring aspect of human nature.  You can learn a lot from proverbs.)

The simple fact is that our brains, and, therefore, our minds and our selves, are not unitary in nature, but are built up on different layers and types of “centers” of different evolutionary “ages” and performing different functions, with a multitude of connections with each other and with the body—which, as we know, has daily (“circadian”) and other cycles. 

It is only the Self that pulls it all together, with approximately half of its particular characteristics, according to psychologists, the result of its functioning on a give-and-take basis in actual life, in interaction with other selves, as it is experienced.  That is its function—not to be some fixed or static entity, but to perform its functions in the dynamic immediacy of life, in the daily rhythms and events and demands of that life.  Knowledge of self does not come in “bullets”, or packets, but in the complex understanding of what causes what, what feels comfortable or “right”, and what works and can be relied on.

Our “Divided” Selves

In previous postings, I have discussed or mentioned four “divides” among people: optimist vs. pessimist, “Eastern” vs. “Western”, male / female, and, now, strong / weak (or perhaps self-importance / self-effacement) self-concepts (“strong” and “weak” here are only meant as labels, not evaluations, for the record).

There other such “divides”, over which we seem to have little control (not necessarily no control, just little control) that psychologists have identified as “basic” personality types:

Extraversion / Introversion

Agreeableness / Antagonism

Conscientiousness / Unreliability

Emotional Stability / Neuroticism

Openness to Experience / Closed to Experience

Other “divides” that we might be able to identify might include (some of these may be particular manifestations of the ones above):

    o    Awareness vs. Unawareness (or obliviousness)

    o    Active or purposeful vs. Passive (“drifting”, “bobbing”) approach to life

    o    “Freedom” as biological willfulness vs. Freedom as considered  choice (action vs. thought, to some degree)

    o    Acceptance of one’s life vs. Disappointment or anger

    o    This-wordly vs. Other-worldly

    o    Acceptance of others vs. Differentiation from others

    o    Gregarious vs. Loner

    o    Power vs. Accommodation or cooperation in dealing with others

    o    Need for instrumental (accomplishment) vs. Affective (or symbolic?) personal validation

    o    Functional vs. Embellished life style

    o    Orderliness or structure vs. Sense of freedom or spontaneity 

    o    Peripheral vs. Integral sense of belonging in society

    o    Seeing money as an end in itself vs. Money as a means

    o    Family (or kin) orientation vs. Wider social orientation

    o    “Hard line” vs. Compassion or understanding with others

    o     Emphasis on following rules vs. Emphasis on considered judgment in various situations

    o     “Performance mask” vs. “Real me” in social situations

    o     Time orientation: Past- or future-oriented vs. Present-oriented

    o      Fixed status vs. Continuing validation

    o     “Story”-oriented vs. Descriptive- or fact-oriented

    o      “Platonist” vs. “Aristotelian” (Abstract ideas or principles vs. Actual experience and insights)

    o       Either-Or thinking vs. Perspectival thinking (looking from different perspectives)

(There is an interesting etymological finding having to do with the verb “to be” that may be related to several of the above divides, and which I may bring up again in a later posting: The present tense forms am and is of our verb “to be” are seen as derived from the Proto Indo-European root, “es”, while the past tense forms were and was are seen as derived from another root, wes, meaning “to stay, dwell, pass the night,” but also with a derivative meaning of “to be”.  The first clearly has a more active sense, and the second a more passive, more "permanent", sense.  What I take away from this is that these two tenses—and senses—are apparently not from the same psychological origins.  Another “divide”?)

There is, as I stated ealier, no “perfect” or ideal personality; the best we can try for is to understand ourselves, try to be balanced and consistent to some degree, and try to understand what “those other” selves are like.  Most if not all of them, we will probably find out, did not ask or plan to be the way they are, either. Much of the everyday life that some writers wax sentimental over from their youth, I feel, may have to do with a practice of having forbearance for the ways that others selves are manifested—provided, of course, that there is no harm done, and that there is reciprocity.

 The list given here is by no means meant to be exhaustive or “scientific”, and some divides on the list may even fall out or fold in with others, on closer inspection and analysis, but I hope that they are at least suggestive and fairly representative of what you may have seen in life. Two points to get across are simply that our selves are manifested in the way we live our own lives and the way we interact with others, and, for the most part, they are all functional or can be made to be functional to some acceptable degree. If someone has a pretty good idea of where they fall out on the 30-some “divides” listed above, and if they have a good idea of how they are seen by other people in their lives, that would seem to be a good start towards “knowing” oneself.

 Our Shifting Selves

On top of these kinds of natural tendencies of ours, there are also different “modes”, and different moods, that we might be in, often in the course of a day.  The “modes” that we might be in include an “instrumental”, or getting-the-job-done, mode; a learning mode; a casual interaction mode, a vacation mode, a restorative mode (perhaps including what some, including me, might call a spiritual mode, the taking of personal quiet time to restore one’s sense of inner peace or harmony), a “taking charge” mode, a “being entertained” mode, and, I am sure, any number of others that we might list.

About these “moods”, I am quite sure that I can’t tell you much that you don’t already know, including the insight that the different preferences we have for different kinds of music at different times are indicators of how many different “moods” we might have or be in.  And we can’t overlook normal circadian rhythms, either.  (Or have I already said that?)

Some writers, both of fiction and nonfiction, speak of the natural occurrence of sub-personalities.  (My first experience of this was in reading Dostoyevsky’s The Adolescent.)

The “Beleguered” Self

As if all of the above were not enough, our Selves are perhaps more under attack today than ever before.  If my generation of adolescents complained bitterly that we didn’t have enough options, or enough freedom, or anything exciting to do, with lots of people telling us what to do and not to do, or how to live our lives, now it is far different: very possibly too much stimulation, too many options, too many possibilities for “specialization”—perhaps  just plain too much. 

In the midst of this plethora of possibilities, we can still speak, paradoxically enough, of the isolation of the Self. There are some who may gnash their teeth and lament that we are losing our values, or losing our place in the world, but I gnash my teeth and lament that we may be losing our Selves. 

 The one ray of hope that I have comes from the fact that in addition to the  organizations that have labored for many years, some even a century or more, to help people who have reached, or are on the verge of reaching, “the bottom”, there is in Psychology, long since labeled as a “dismal” science, a growing study of what is called Positive Psychology, oriented to helping individuals “grow” stronger and more mature Selves, proactively, and not just when they run into serious problems.  This doesn’t come any too soon, in my estimation.

The Moral Self

After all is said and done, the moral self is the self that   acknowledges the equal basic standing of other selves (their ontological reality and equality), and acts accordingly—including, and this is part of that, protecting one’s own equal status.  We are all, all of us, “I”s from our own point of view, and we are all “You”s from others’ points of view.    

 

 

Our Precocious and Problematic Minds - Part 2

Our untutored Minds                     (Vivace)         

[I would like to apologize “up front” for my not being up to par the last several days, and for leaving what follows a little unpolished. - In a sense, though, this may be serendipitous, because what I want to lead up to today is just how hard we have to work at making our minds work in the ways that we tend to think that they were “made” to work.]

In a future posting, I want to explore further an idea that has already come up several times, and that has to do with how there are aspects of our selves that are, or tend to be, of an either/or nature—such as for example, being optimistic or pessimistic (and there are others that it may be very instructive to go over). 

Today, though, I would like to note that the idea that there is an ideal personality, and the idea that someone should be, or needs to be, consistent and predictable all the time, have no basis in fact, and have no basis in our healthy (by which I mean the state of being able to carry out our day-to-day activities and pursue our longer-term projects in a positive and progressive, or at least maintaining, way, with relatively few and relatively minor dis-eases) functioning as individuals. 

For today, let us note that these prescriptions (and many of our other prescriptions about life as well), and the idea that they are real and valid, are born primarily from our untutored minds.

Left to themselves, our untutored minds are very self-centered and narcissistic (as you would expect from our evolutionary path, which saw us engaged in a biological realm that reflected a long history of development in a “hunter-prey” environment [we might speak in terms of an evolutionary “arms race”], on top of shifting or hard climatic and terrain environments).  Being vulnerable for as long as we are vulnerable when we are young, and taking as long as it takes for us to “grow up”, we have to be a center of attention for those who nurture us, and, well, we kind of like that.  Until we’re adolescents, at least.

For life to progress in the kind of environments that we evolved in, especially conscious life, the inner drives and habits, including a sense of personal capacity and ability, that would be needed in order to survive would have to have been quite strong—if I am faced with a situation that is dangerous, but one that I must face, I had better be armed with a pretty firm sense of self and confidence (even if possibly misplaced) in my abilities to handle the situation, or at least make a good try at it.  Whether this is where Ego got its start, I can’t really say, but I can certainly see how it would had to have led to its strengthening.

So those are two things (possibly different aspects of one) about our untutored minds: Ego and narcissism, or a possibly (or probably, as it turns out in most cases) exaggerated sense of my abilities and importance, and love of myself and what pertains to me.   

Another important factor is the very large amount of energy required for our brains to process all of the incoming stimuli, maintain our bodies and selves, and move them along; they (our brains) are serious “energy hogs”.  And it is not just the use of energy, but also the frustrations and uncertainties that always arise, which can be psychologically daunting and wearing.  Consequently, our minds are also prone to making quick, categorical assessments based on perhaps just a few salient (and often irrelevant, as in superstitious thinking) observable characteristics or features—or, in many cases, based on predispositions and preconceptions, typically those that others have taught us, or we have learned from them.

So, in addition to being egocentric and narcissistic, our minds are also prone to wanting things to be simple, homogeneous (everything in a class is like everything else in that class, with “class” meaning just about anything, up to and including all humans), whole or coherent, harmonious (everything “plays nicely” with each other), persisting (the way things are will remain that way) or regular, and, to the extent possible, enjoyable, pleasant, or “nice”. 

These all go towards reducing anxiety and work by the brain.

Nor can we overlook our minds’ liking to “play”, to be stimulated and to enjoy functioning to no particular instrumental end related to survival or maintenance.  Given a choice, it is to be playing that our minds more and more would rather be doing than almost anything else, and this only reinforces all of the tendencies noted just above (simplicity, homogeneity, etc.).  I am fairly confident that you are able to recognize societal developments that leave our minds with more and more time and energy to play. 

And I suspect that I do not need to describe in detail how susceptible our brains--and therefore our minds--are to chemical imbalances and “addictions” of various kinds.

In other words, in terms of “seeing the invisible”, I believe that it is important for us to see that our minds are not built to be “rational”, per se, but to process, integrate, smooth, and economize, while keeping the body (its body, some philosophers or thinkers like to say about the mind) alive and functioning. 

It seems to me that to be rational is to try to train the mind to go beyond its intrinsic desires for simplicity, homogeneity, wholeness, harmony, regularity, persistence, and pleasure, or “nice”ness, its narcissism, and its tendency towards fictitious linkages (superstitions), all of which work against seeing what is really at work in a given situation and figuring out how to best cope with it, improve it, or fix it,  under the circumstances. That’s all.  Piece of cake.  But, like the good cakes we remember, it took someone a lot of work and practice to make it seem like something that they “just threw together”.  Thinking well is a lot like that.  But that is another subject.

 

Our Precocious and Problematic Minds: Part 1

 

God                          (Eroico, andante moderato) 

Before I move into this still somewhat sensitive subject, I would like to go back several sessions, to when I described the human body as “a sack of soft tissues and water, with a calcified skeletal interior framework and copious numbers of filaments and conduits, with other kinds of fluids, and nerve signals, in motion or action at all times, taking in, shall we say trillions?, of stimuli from its internal and external environments.”

 For this combination of ingredients to have developed the capacity to encapsulate stimuli and networks of synapses into the kernels of compact and extended meanings and significations that they have for us in the form of words, concepts, and ideas was, literally, “something new under the sun”. 

It is so second-nature to us, however, that we very easily lose sight of the fact that these words and concepts and ideas are, first of all, our products, that is, they are human products, and, secondly, that they are the specific products of our physical brains (it is the process of producing those products, and becoming aware of them, that may well constitute the transition from brain to mind).

 “God” is one of those products of the human brain/mind. While perhaps originally the outgrowth of the personification of the forces, or the vital energy, that could be felt or sensed throughout what we now label as Nature, this has largely been abstracted into the meanings and associations that we are familiar with today.  

As an abstraction or a concept, or a story character, "God" exists just as any other story character, any mythological being, or any idea or abstract concept, “exists” for us.  Even though these may not represent “proper” things (to use a proper English expression) that actually physically exist outside of our minds, such concepts of ideas can, as we well know, nevertheless have very real consequences in how we relate to them, in how we use them, and how we relate to each other about them.  In that sense, “God” is as real, as, for example, the character of Pierre in War and Peace.

      (I appreciate that many of our words do in fact stand for “things” that exist outside of us, and have an existence independent of us [unless we made them, of course], but I will only quibble here that in those cases, the words in question are names more than they are ideas or concepts or story characters, although, as I suggested above, we do often imbue them with forces and powers, in effect personifying them, and thus also making them into story characters.)

The concept or the character of “God”, too, is one that different people relate to in very different ways.  One particular difference that is problematic for us is that there is a natural tendency for some, perhaps most of us, at some time or another, to take the character or the concept as a name of something that actually exists out there in the world in the same kind of way that rocks and lizards exist.  Other people, we know, do not take it that way, and therein lies a potent source, or fount, of some of the most troublesome problems that have been witnessed over the millennia.  These seem unlikely to go away any time soon. 

 “But…”

“But,” a believer might ask, “how can you ever be certain that God is only a story character, or an idea, or a concept?  Is it not possible that God represents something that we humans, or at least the very great majority of us, are not constituted to perceive and recognize [perhaps like dark matter, or dark energy?]?”

 Actually, given the way that our minds function, we might not be able to prove beyond any doubt that such a proposition has no merit.  We can, however, provide simple observations and arguments that might help put it in perspective.  

1.  The huge preponderance of factual knowledge and understanding that we humans have gained fits well within a cause and effect understanding of our existence and the universe, and of their stepwise evolution from the smallest “particles” to life and galaxies as we know them. 

     To turn one’s back on all of that knowledge, and in effect pin one’s hopes on a conceptual possibility of a possibility (our chance of winning the lottery, given that we have bought a legal ticket, is an actual possibility, albeit a very slender one, but not being able to definitively close the door on a hypothesized situation does not confer any actual possibility of that situation occurring, only that the conceiving of its possibility cannot be ruled out), possibly born of “wouldn’t it be nice if” thinking, is, if one is charitable about it (which we really should be, in most cases), to be still thinking as children think; those who are not so charitable might declare that it is quite out of touch with reality, and go on to question their sanity. 

      One safe way out for believers would be to simply acknowledge that claims and beliefs do not constitute evidence that can be used to argue their case, nor confer actual possibility, and let that issue lie, but privately maintain a belief that, in the end, all will become clear. 

 2.  Even if there could be a disembodied being that otherwise has a mind (and don’t forget that our minds are a function of our having the physical brains that we have) and could somehow insinuate itself into the cause-and-effect nature of our existence, it would be so categorically different from any being that humans have ever had manifest cognizance of, or a relationships with, that there would seem to be no way for these two types of beings to interact with each other. 

      We can perhaps see no better evidence of that failure of interaction than to remind ourselves of just how much mayhem has been caused by the simple matter of our not being able to reach agreement among ourselves about the nature of that other kind of being, and what, if anything, it expects or demands from us (or, perhaps more to the point, which of us it gives preference to).  Given that disruption and mayhem, if it did exist, it would be better for us if it did not: we would be much better off going about the business that we know about, which is living our lives as we experience them.

3. There are giveaway clues that we are dealing with a story character, and not something as real as rocks and lizards – for example, gender: what possible need could a disembodied being that is one-of-a-kind (so it is said), have for gender?  As we understand gender, that would imply that at some time, there were at least two predecessors of this being (and how many more before them, one would wonder), and that there would also presumably be a complementary counterpart that “God” could join with to produce offspring.  Or, if there were only one such being, and if it were immaterial, how and why would it be jealous of what other “gods” this paltry cause-and-effect being called a Human might believe in?

 

However, it seems to me that for most of us who seem to believe, or at least say that they believe, in the actual existence of God, this specific belief is not itself as important as the attributes and powers that God is supposed (pronounced suPOSED) to have.  These are given the potency they need by being associated with an actual being, in spite of the arguments against that possibility. 

 

The power of “God”

Be all of that as it may, no matter what we believe to be or not be the case about “God”, there can be no denying, judging by the things that are done “in God’s name”, that it is a very powerful concept, perhaps one of the most potent concepts that we humans have conceived. 

As a human product, and as touching the very core of what we experience and wonder about—and fear—as living beings that happen to be conscious (too conscious or aware for our own good, some would say), what we put into this concept of “God” and what we get out of it and do with it, reveals a great deal about us.

What would be the human needs and desires that it fulfills and manifests? 

[z]  There is, of course, the awe that many of us feel about the enormity and the manifest beauty (setting aside for the moment that it is our minds that create that sense of beauty) of what we often experience around us. 

 [z]   Going back to the discussion of several weeks ago, about the sheer number and the fluidity of interactions that we, as complex living beings, have with our ever-changing environments, and captured in the phrase “dynamic immediacy”, one might say, poetically, at least, that we are, for most of our lives, in what might be called a veritable storm of stimuli and motives and emotions.  Different ones of us, through no fault of our own, are differentially prepared to deal with this “storm”.

        One very important power of the concept of “God” as we have developed it, appears to be to help us weather this storm of life.  A very good example of this is that of Saint Augustine, who wrote, in his Confessions:

       "Yet they [men] strive to comprehend things eternal, whilst their hearts fluttered between the motions of things past and to come, and is still unstable.  Who should hold it, and fix it, that it be settled a while. …. Who should hold the heart of man, that it may stand still…"[1]

        For Saint Augustine, then, “God” was the calm, or the calming force, in the storm of Being. 

[z]  In a similar light, “God” is also a potent creation for helping us subordinate our unruly desires and actions, of representing our submission to something larger and more stable than ourselves. This is by no means a trivial matter. Unfortunately, our history with this aspect of the concept of “God” shows us that what many of the self-selected representatives or adherents of this concept of “God” most want is to use the concept as a means for initiating others into submission to them, or to a group of people like themselves.  

[z]  In our minds’ “original” states, before experience and education and shaping, they are very self-centered and narcissistic. (How could it be otherwise?) For many of us, this does not change all that much during the courses of our lives, and “God” comes to represent all of the greatness and power that we, the mortal and limited beings that we are, want to be (or think we are) or to have; we identify with this larger being, one that fills us out to what we feel we want to be or should be.  In our minds, we become “God”.  When we stand and sing the words “How great thou art, how great thou art,” how many of us are not really singing that hymn to ourselves? 

        One of the very potent attributes of “God”, then, is as this larger identity, this larger source of will and power, that we can call forth.  (The derivation of the English word “god”, in fact, is from an original sense of being “possessed” by some force or being.)  The everyday question that arises is how those who invoke this potency of identifying (or actually embodying) the qualities of “God”, relate to the rest of us—is it still as someone who is here on the same terms as other people, or as obvious superiors?  (How many of us have not worked for someone who “thought they were God”, and acted accordingly?)

        It is one thing to call on an inner force that we capture by the word “God”, and quite another to then treat everyone else as obvious inferiors, or, perhaps worse, as insignificant, or as not human at all.

[z]   Related to the above is the fear that we often experience in life, perhaps first personified by a punishing or commanding father or father figure, associated with people who obviously were stronger and more willful than we were, and there was no question but that this was an unchangeable reality. In these circumstances, “God” may not represent who or what we want to be like, or to be, but, rather, represents that powerful, yet (possibly) benevolent being that can protect us, that we can look to for peace and comfort, and who we are on a personal, if not first-name, basis with.  In this otherwise impersonal world, we are at least special for some being or force, and maybe it will protect us, “smite” our enemies, or “cut us a break”. 

        Here, too, the further question is how we then treat others around us: do we treat them as if they are still basically the same as we are, or, perhaps because they do not use the words or practice the rituals that we do, do we treat them with disdain, or indifference, or even hatred, for not being “saved”, or “chosen”, as we obviously are? 

[z]  “God” can also represent, or yield a vision of a hideaway, a sequestered, peaceful garden of our own, perhaps to be shared with one or a few select people, doing what comes naturally.

 

All of this does say a lot about us.  As far as what we do with the concept of “God” is concerned, and whether this has more good or more bad effects, my judgment is that at a “local” level, at the level of the individual or small groups of people who have actually come to believe what they believe (as opposed to having been brought up being told what to believe, but even there, to some degree), the positive effects might well outweigh the harmful ones. 

However, at levels higher than small more or less “organic” or closely-knit groups, there is no doubt in my mind that history clearly reveals that there have been far more harmful than beneficial effects over our history.  This is yet another example, it would seem, of our having outgrown the conditions that most of our evolution took place in, but we are still groping for concepts to help us make sense of the scale of things that we now live in.  At this scale, “God” might be seen as an anachronism, but since it fulfills so many functions and needs, it would be hard to replace.

Some positive aspects

For many, it would appear, “God” is the putting of a familiar, and generally (but not always) beneficent face on the sometimes frightening array of events going on around them, and which are out of their direct control.  For probably not a small number of these believers, their belief allows them to go forward in the face of all that fear and uncertainty, instead of hiding away from it by various means.  This is what I would see as an example of a “local” benefit.

There are, in addition, some other-regarding aspects of “God” that could make it very positively powerful today, not the least of which being captured by the expression “We are all God’s children”, by which we would appear to be calling for more acceptance and goodwill towards the other people who we share this earth with.  However, I do not need to tell you how seldom or to what a limited extent this really works—but I would ask you to search your knowledge and imagination and ask yourself what the world would be like without this weak-sounding homily or metaphor.  Is there anything that has as much force in this direction?  [Music, perhaps?]

I also believe that there is some real and positive power in the expression “So help me God”, particularly when it is used to invoke what we consider to be our highest and most selfless aspirations for how we would like to comport ourselves in difficult, or public, situations (obviously, this does not necessarily apply to all of the Congress of the United States,  but that, at least, can change).

In Summation

“God” is a very real, and very powerful, human concept, combining in one word our potent fears, our desires to understand everything, and for orderliness and control, awe, and our untutored narcissism and egos, and one that history shows to have generally had far more negative than positive effects at other than the “local” level. That, however, is not the fault of the concept, which is, as has been noted, a human concept, but the fault of those who hold the concept most dear, or use it for other purposes. 

When we talk about “God”, are we not perhaps also talking about Ego, and are the positive powers that reside in the concept not simply the result of our educating and controlling our egos?

Questions

In the course of writing the above, I posed a number of questions, which, admittedly, may have appeared to have been rhetorical in nature. 

However, they were not.  I would really like to hear the answers that some of you might give or suggest to those questions.

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[1] The Confessions of Saint Augustine: Chatto & Windus edition, 1921; translated by Edward Bouverie Pusey.  See http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext02/tcosa10.txt for full text.

 

Our amazing bodies (and sex!) - Conclusion

 

Dynamic Immediacy    Energetic, passionate (energico, appassionato)

Last week, I made note of the fact that our basic bodies, and the life force that infuses them, have in effect been in development for more than half a billion years.

So what else is new, you might be wondering. 

For the refinements that we see today to have survived for so long, with life-and-death always as a subtext, their evolution must have entailed the development of some pretty sturdy (in the sense of strong, and reliable) energy distribution and release (in the form of work) networks, and some pretty formidable staying power.  If you have ever had to put an opossum or a raccoon out of its misery without the use of a gun or a knife, or even a piece of rope, you almost certainly were surprised at how fiercely strong the life force that resides in mammals is.  The fact that an accident can stop it instantly does not change that.

However, being strong was only part of what we evolved to be (and we are not as strong as we think we are—we are much less strong than chimps, for example).  If you have ever noted our human characteristics of impatience, or of tension mounting as the moment of a planned action approaches, or our reticence to take the time to think a situation through before we act on it—or the incessant feeling that we should be doing something—these are also in no small part the result of this same long, evolutionarily successful, history. 

What I had hoped to evoke or convey last week was that due to the complexity and the constantly shifting and changing nature of our environments (including our social environment), we have also very much evolved to be able to quickly “size up” dynamic and complex, and often dangerous, situations and react to them accordingly.

Call that feature of human nature one of “dynamic immediacy”, if you like; to me, it is a very basic and important truth about us that is so omnipresent that we often overlook it.  When a child or an adolescent (or, for that matter, even adults) complains that they are “bored”, it is not so much that they have nothing to do, but that that they have nothing to do, or might be allowed to do, that exhilarates or stimulates them, challenges them, the way that our bodies and minds need to be challenged to feel alive.

The Past out of Place

And if you have ever asked yourself why we still do things that seem so obviously counter to our “best interests”, what has happened is that the characteristics of ours that have been under discussion evolved in environments that were quite different from those that most of us live our lives in today.   Yet, even though our circumstances have changed, we are still saddled with these characteristics, whose “staying power” is very great; and, even if evolution were able to move in the direction of slowly “dialing” them back, that would take far more time than we could possibly have to work with.

It is this reservoir of strength and history that lies behind everything we do; it is always in motion, even when we are “resting”, and it colors, as it inevitably must, everything we do. 

The Weaker Future

At the same time, we do have our conscious minds, which give us, to some extent, at least, awareness, and also that important capacity, imagination. And where there is awareness and imagination, there is always the possibility of learning from experience and conceiving of ways to temper our archaic tendencies and plan for a future different from the Present that we are experiencing. 

However, our minds are prone to the delusion that thinking about something is as meaningful as actually doing it. And, aside from that, given a choice, most of us would prefer to keep on following our natural tendencies, because we don’t have to think very much about what we are doing, and, in that way, feel that we are “free”. 

But, as you might already be ahead of me in figuring out, that kind of freedom is precisely what has gotten us into so many of the problems we see now, and it is only through the more difficult work of really being free, the work of figuring out what choices or possibilities we have and deciding between them, that we might be able to thumb our noses at evolution.

“Feeling” free is not the same as being free, which entails having the ability to choose some status or action other than the ones coerced on us, whether coerced by other people or by our biology and evolution.  

Sex  (How can we talk about biology and vital energy without talking about sex?)

If you ever wondered why our sex drive is so strong, this is why: it had to be  - or, let me re-phrase it this way: if it had not been as strong as it is, and if we had not evolved an “always ON” sex drive and receptivity, we might not be sitting here writing or reading this.

I recently read that at one time in our history, according to several writers, environmental conditions were such that possibly only several thousands of surviving humans made their way to the southern tip of Africa, there to be saved by an abundance of shallow-water fish and shellfish fed by a confluence of rich ocean currents, then to explode out of Africa when living conditions became more favorable.  If our sex drive were even several percent less strong, would we have made it?

Of course, our problem today is quite the reverse: far too many of us.  But the underlying strength of our biological heritage can be seen not only in the existence of that problem, but also in every denial that it is a problem, and every resistance to doing anything to reduce population growth; that innate drive is a difficult one to control, and it is to that passion, as Hume only partly erroneously pointed out, that our minds are slave to.  Just look at how much of what we do and think about have to do with sex.

So, far from being simply part of the “givens” of human life, this life force, this built-in pressure to have sex, to procreate, to want and to care for children, is, if we wish to try to order our future on more human terms than evolution possibly could, is the continuously gushing well that we have to learn how to control better.

The “human” side of sex

For all of that, sex can also tells us a lot about being human. Although we humans spend a very great deal of time thinking about sex, dressing for sex, and telling stories to get more sex,  the way we go about sex, or what we call it when we do it, is manifested in many ways, some of which are more “animal”, and some more “human”.

In particular, no small numbers of us engage in sex with the specific intention of not adding to the world’s population, or of only adding to it when we can commit to the task of raising a human being, instead of simply “having a baby”.  In other words, freeing themselves from the coercion of biology and evolution, and from the coercion of social pressure or ego.

That is the product of awareness and understanding.  And self-control.

Then there is the more emotive side of sex that reveals how we are different from most other animals, and that is seen when there is a sharing of sex with another person, with an emphasis on the intimate nature of sexual intercourse, apart from the possible physiological effect of impregnation. This may be what we mean when we call sex “making love”.

What marks us as different as humans, then, is not only what we do or are able to do, but also how we do what we do.

Back to China

We started this section with the Chinese (and Indo-European, and sub-Saharan African) concepts of vital energy, or qi, and I close it out now with Confucius, who wrote:

The [morally] noble man guards himself against three things. When he is young, his xue-qi [literally, blood and breath] has not yet stabilized, so he guards himself against sexual passion.

When he reaches his prime, his xue-qi is not easily subdued, so he guards himself against combativeness.

When he reaches old age, his xue-qi is already depleted, so he guards himself against acquisitiveness.

             Analects: 16:7

In this light, it seems to me that a large part of what we label “civilization”, or “being civilized”, has to do with countering or ameliorating the often harmful or injurious effects of our “old” tendencies.   

 

Our Amazing Bodies - Part 2

Vital Energy        - with vigor and spirit (con brio)

It hardly seems worth mentioning that all humans share the same basic bodies; however, from there, the idea that there are still some differences among the large groups of humans has not entirely been put to rest.  As one example of that, it is still thought an oddity that the Chinese have the concept of qi pronounced chee) as a central part of its classic philosophy, while no other major philosophical tradition really has anything quite like it. 

 I would like to present some evidence to the contrary.

(Qi)

As can be read in the Wikipedia entry, Chinese conceptions of qi date from the earliest records of their philosophy (5th century BC).  Although the literal translation of qi (also chi or ch'i) is air, breath, or gas, corresponding to the ancient Indian concept of Prana, in Chinese philosophy, qi  is an active principle forming part of any living thing, and is frequently translated as "lifeforce" or “energy flow”. 

But is classic Chinese philosophy the only place that it assumes that level of importance?

Indo-Europeans

Over a period covering much of the 20^th century, etymologists constructed what is known to many simply as PIE – standing for the 640 or so Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root words that are hypothesized to have formed the core of a common language from which most of the non-Semitic languages from India to northwest Europe may have developed--one of which, of course, is English. 

Looking at it in a general way, slightly more than one in twenty of these roots¹ have to do with birth, existence, life, vitality, growth, age, or death.  This should come as no surprise.  More specifically, there are six root words having to do with “vital force”, strength, or vigor, as seen below (the symbol ⇒  signifies “leading to” present-day English words):

aiw  – vital force, life, long life, eternity ⇒ no, never, ever,

          every, medieval, age, eternal

ner  –  “man”, with a basic sense of ‘vigorous, vital, strong’

           ⇒ (the prefix) andro-

wal  – to be strong  ⇒  valiant, valid, valor, value,

          avail, prevail, wield, convalesce

weg  – to be strong, be lively  ⇒  wake, watch, wait,

           bivouac, vigil, vigor, velocity

wei∂ – vital force  ⇒  vim, violate, violent [∂ has a sound

           like the “o”s in “confront”]

yeu  – vital force, youthful vigor ⇒  youth, young,

          junior, rejuvenate, juvenile

Anyone with any familiarity with the Age of Chivalry in the West surely has a feel for the extent to which these core definitions came to permeate Western culture, and certainly our major interests in sports, particularly contact sports, guns, and military matters (not to mention, fitness) are more contemporary signs.  Nor should we lose sight of the central place that force plays in our physical sciences.

 Sub-Saharan Africa

In 1945, there appeared a French translation of a work on Bantu philosophy by Father Placide Tempels, who had lived with one group of Bantu for some time. In the book, he states that for the Bantu, the “supreme valu[e] is life, force, to live strongly, or vital force.”²  He goes on to say that the Bantu “speak, act, live as if…beings were forces” (p. 51), that for them, force is a necessary element in being and inseparable from it. 

 Although Father Tempels’ work  has been criticized for extending to all Bantus the observations made from a study of only one group of them, a 1973 work by John Mbiti on African religions and philosophies also cited the work of one J. Jahn, who was noted as having ‘covered a great part of Africa’, and who made observations similar to those originally made by Father Tempels. (My notes for this, by the way, are from a Spanish translation of Mbiti’s work by José Carlos Rodriguez, titled Entre Dios y el Tiempo [Between God and Time].)

According to Mbiti, Jahn had written that the African groups he studied spoke of muntu, which applied to beings that were constituted by force with intelligence [Muntu was the title of Jahn’s book, and it was also an important concept in Father Tempels’ work]); Kintu (forces not acting on their own [such as plants and animals]; Hantu (time and space); and Kuntu (modalities like beauty and laughter).  Moreover, Jahn also pointed out that all four of these words go back to the same pure root ntu, or universal force).

What the above somewhat abbreviated exposition suggests to me is that the importance of vital energy as such is not a Chinese, or an Indian, or a “Western” or “African” realization and conceptualization, but a completely human realization and conceptualization.  How could it be otherwise? 

Your Assignment for next week (should you choose to accept it, of course):

Today’s post, as it developed, was quite a bit longer than the above.  At first, I was disconcerted about that, but now I see that splitting it into two postings may be a good thing, as the second part, which I will post next week, follows from this first part, and is not simply a further elaboration of it, and so in one sense might be distracting.

Your assignment for next week is to simply think about what it means for us to have the biology that we have, and, further, about the virtually worldwide importance of the idea of vital energy, and how these relate to present conditions that we see (or not see) around us--and to our future.  

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[1] From “Indo-European Roots,” beginning at page 1584 in The American Heritage College Dictionary, Third Edition, Houghton Mifflin Company, NY, 1993.

[2] From the English translation by Rev. Colin King, M.A., Bantu Philosophy, published by Presence Africaine in Paris, 1959; p.44.

 

Our Amazing Bodies: Part 1

Our dynamic self-equilibrating bodies     Lightly, a little lively (Leggiero; allegretto)         

It is easy to overlook just how remarkable our bodies are, either because we just take them for granted, or because we have become so used to things going wrong with them, or their not meeting our (perhaps unrealistic) expectations of what we think they should be like, or that we just can’t quite get them to do what we want them to do.  It might be better for us when and if science and technology make cyborgs out of us (and that seems to be the secret dream of almost anyone working in the technology side of health care).

To gain a different perspective on this, think about the size of photons (not very large, at all), and of atoms and molecules (slightly larger, but still pretty small), and then about single-celled life forms, which are still small, but we have all at least seen some of them under everyday microscopes. 

Now think about the relationships that even a single-celled organism has with its environment, and how many things can happen that would result in its decline or death, and raise that by a good many powers of 10 to get to the complexity of the human body and our behavior, and the number and complexity of our relationships with our environment(s). Keeping in mind how complex our bodes and our behavior are, try to imagine what has to go on in our brains just to remain alive and at rest, and how much more is involved in deciding to set our bodies in motion in given ways and to manage that motion, and all the while taking in sense stimuli relating to our external and internal environments.

If you think that our bodies are not fine-tuned, or not capable of being fine-tuned, think of what has to take place, say, in the brain of a falcon, once it has seen a pigeon (or whatever) and to then intercept that pigeon’s flight path, plus evasive maneuvers, at speeds of 70 miles an hour or more, and to not only make the intercept, but also to not spin out of control after the impact. 

We are from that same tradition. How much different is that from what millions of us do in an given week, punching a small white ball on trajectories towards only somewhat larger holes in the ground, or what somewhat fewer of us do in operating rooms. 

Let me offer you one more perspective.  Suppose that in order to use your computer, you had to write your own instructions for everything you wanted to do with it, and you had to do it in “machine language”, meaning that you had to write an instruction turning every “gate” (and there would be very many of them in a modern computer) either “on” or “off”.  This might take a little while. 

Now imagine having to consciously tell every muscle in your body that needed to be told whether to contract or relax, or do nothing, in order to keep yourself stable, cooled, heated, oxygenated, defended against foreign bodies, and what have you, and every synapse to fire or not fire.  I don’t think that you would not have much time left over to do the things that you would rather be doing.

What our bodies do without this conscious intervention is the result of the most exquisitely detailed refinements of some half a billion years or more of the evolution of complex life forms, with our vision perhaps being the most exquisite of all, being able make discriminations down to the photon level.

 While I enjoy company this weekend, just think about what it takes for a sack (of varying shape and size) of soft tissues and water, with a calcified skeletal interior framework and copious numbers of filaments and conduits, with other kinds of fluids, and nerve signals, in motion or action at all times, taking in, shall we say trillions?, of stimuli from its internal and external environments, to work at all. (On a 2500 calorie diet, our average heat output has been calculated to be about that of a 100 watt light bulb.)  And this all grew from very small physical particles (in reality, “bound” energy) and more or less “free” energy.  How amazing is that?  Take a few moments during some quiet time this weekend and think about our bodies in this light.  

Also, please don’t complain to me about how many hours of practice it takes to play the Moonlight Sonata as well as you (or someone else) would like for it to be played; these more or less consciously willed (I am not going to call them “free” will, because that is a misnomer fraught with all kinds of difficulties and misunderstandings) acts of ours are what truly separate us from most other life forms.

 This is all I have for this week.  My filaments and conduits and fluids (and synapses) are demanding some down time.  Have a good weekend!   

 

What Science Can and Cannot do for Us

 

The Marvel that is Science              Very serious (molto gravi)

 I was soon going to be writing about what science can and cannot do for us, anyhow, and with Dr. Perez’s most recent comment fresh in mind, this seemed like a good time and place to cover it.  {I am sorry that it goes on for so long, but I just kept finding what I thought were important and relevant things to say, so please bear with me to the end.}

First, let’s cover the marvel, for us humans, that the scientific method is.  It is certainly one of our collective high points.  Our brains did not evolve to provide us with words that exactly correspond with what we see and experience around us, or inside of us, and that we can then communicate clearly to other people.  If it were only that simple.

Instead, we are faced with an exceedingly complex and variable external environment, with many significances in common for us as groups and as individuals, but also many different ones.  And to complicate matters, we also experience very much the same level of complexity in our internal environments, which are even more variable than most of the external environment (although similar, in some ways, to the weather), and which, although our own internal environment has many general, or generic, similarities with those of other people, are very individualized and idiosyncratic, very much our own. 

 Truth and “Delivered Messages”

 The main problems for us as beings having to be in tune with our environments are, and always have been, how to “know” what is going on in the two environments, how to relate the two to each other, how to articulate and communicate that knowledge (or those knowledges) to other people, and how, as groups, to establish concordances among and between the different individual knowledges and perspectives. 

 Fortunately, after centuries of development, we do have well-defined procedures for ascertaining or discovering certain kinds of facts that can be communicated clearly to other people, with these procedures known collectively as the scientific method. For an organism made up of the kinds of substances and materials that we are composed of to develop and refine such a set of procedures, and to continue to hold to them in the face of strong emotional objections from many quarters, is a phenomenon that it is hard to find the best and most encompassing adjectives for, so I will just settle here for amazing. 

 However, and unfortunately, this methodology can’t really be applied to another type of what is also often referred to as “knowledge,” and which has a primarily personal basis, consisting principally of a feeling that some expression or statement, or state or status, is “true”. 

In Russian, this differentiation might be captured by the difference between pravda, which means “truth”, and izvestiya, which translated literally means “delivered messages”, but which is today usually translated as “news”.  There is a saying in Russia, “Pravda nyet izvestiya, izvestiya nyet pravda” – “truth is not news, news is not truth”.  It strikes me that many of us probably have a sense of what “truth” that saying contains. 

 Science and Religion

What the scientific method has done for us, to restate what I said just a few moments ago, is the arduously difficult task of turning at least some of the sense impressions from our environment into words that are clear as to what they mean or point to, and relating them to each other to produce the certainties that we know as facts. 

 Several of the main cultural traditions of the world today, however, have a particular problem with the “delivered messages” of religion (and other sectors of society, as well) and the truths that they claim to possess and embody.

What religion (and propaganda, and to some extent,  advertising, including political advertising) have given us are “delivered messages” that we may either already have, or develop, strong internal “resonances” with, primarily on an emotional level, but also with some abstract meanings relating to our self-concepts (which are not without their emotional aspects).

However, the only certainties that we can have about these messages are personal certainties, if only the certainty that we had better say that we believe such-and-such, if we want to stay in the good graces of certain people important in our lives.  Consequently, these kinds of “truth” cannot really be communicated from one person to another without a great deal of distortion or loss of information in the process, and we have to settle for the surface appearance of sharing, including declarations of belief and the performance of prescribed rituals. In many contexts, mostly local, these suffice, but, in many others, they lead to violence.

A very significant difference, then, between science and religion is that while we humans often, and quite readily, do real physical and murderous battle over “delivered messages”, we seldom go to war over facts (instead, we just use—or quote—them, or ignore them). Were it not for the involvement of scientists in the “arts” of warfare, I might even have been able to say that part of what science gives us is peace. 

 What science cannot do

 However, there is something very basic, something very important, that science cannot do for us.  If you take all of the facts that Dr. Perez gave us about humans, and add to that list all of the other facts of that nature that science has come up with – if you take all of that information and add it together – if you do all of that, you still would not have captured a whole, functioning human being.

Science looks at things from the outside, looking in, and is concerned with observable regularities that are verified by repetition, and prediction, and, ultimately, control to the point of being able to manipulate or modify at will (that’s when you really know what you are talking about), and so it has to work with can be perceived by our own senses or by instruments. Plus which, it typically must break the subject at hand into smaller and smaller parts in order to get a clear enough picture of what variables are involved and to control them.

Consequently, it necessarily leaves out a good deal about us that it can’t say much about. Like poetry, just to name one.

 The View from Inside

 In particular, science, looking from the outside in, cannot tell us what it is like to be alive, to be human.  That has to come from inside us. It cannot put together all of its singular facts and breathe into them the life of dynamic immediacy, the integration and resolution of the large number of often conflicting and usually only partially sketched out motivations, intentions, perceptions and understandings that go into doing the things that humans who are alive do.  By the time that science analyzes some aspect of the dynamic process we call life and comes up with a result, the “game” has moved a considerable distance “downfield”, or has morphed into something a little different.

Moreover, since science is paradigmatically value-free, it does not have access to one of the salient features of being human, that of having values. (Not that having values is necessarily always a good thing, or that it cannot be problematic in itself, but it does shape us and what we do in ways that science has denied itself access to, often, and this is particularly important for the future, in ways that might be better for almost all of us.) 

Perhaps in part for this reason, science also has a hard time with bad intentions; having to be value free (or, from another point of view, individual scientists not being comfortable enough to make such distinctions, for personal reasons), it pretty much treats evil as a natural occurrence and does not concern itself with reducing its presence among humans.

 For these reasons, science cannot find, much less describe, that which holds these complex, multi-faceted, dynamic and conscious individual beings “together” and  moves them forward in a more-or-less integrated fashion, the self.  Consequently, it cannot do much to help these selves “grow” and become more positively human.

 For that, we need the insights of the likes of teachers and biographers and therapists, novelists, ministers, and coaches, and anthropologists, insights informed by an appreciation and interest in the whole, functioning, individual human being engaged in life, more than a little hands-on experience, and an appreciation for the truth (more like pravda, not izvestiya). (We probably should also add  grandparents to the above list; and possibly also parents, but part of human nature seems to be that we aren’t really ready to be parents until our children start having theirs. That's part of what experience does for us.)

 We need not just knowledge, but also, more particularly, an understanding from personal experience of what it means to be human, along with insights into how to develop our positive capacities and to become more fully human. Science, if left to its sparse predictive paradigm, might end up reducing us, instead, to essentially the same status that religions leave us with, except that instead of asking us to just accept “God’s will”, as religion does, it will ask us to accept that we have no real wills of our own, that we are merely the accretion of all of the cause-and-effect facts that it has been able to find out about us, leaving no room for a self to educate itself and perhaps have better intentions. Not all scientists share this view, but those who do not share it appear to be in the minority.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

 What I have written here is neither new nor particularly radical (unless we mean by that “getting to the root of the matter”); Alexander Pope wrote the following words 280 years ago, in 1731, in his Moral Essays:

 

         Our depths, who fathoms, or our shallows finds,

          Quick whirls, and shifting eddies of our minds?

         On human actions reason though you can,

         It may be reason, but it is not the man:        

         His principle of action once explore,

         That instant ’tis his principle no more.

         Like following life through creatures you dissect,

         You lose it in the moment you detect.

 

In short, yes, absolutely, we need science, and we could certainly do with fewer “delivered messages”, which I hope that science, along with the good sense and wisdom of those of us with educated wills and selves, will continue to reveal to be very limited in their scope in their positive effects, and very broad in scope in their negative effects, and therefore very problematic for a human future. However, we do not need science to try to tell us what human nature is, or what it should be.  That’s for us as whole, functioning human beings to fathom (with the help of science, to be sure), and to live with.  

 

Who we are: An Overview

 

What do we mean by “We”?   - slowly and evenly, repeating for                           clarity as needed (lento assai e legato; ritornello) 

What I would like to do here is to avoid using any of the common expressions of unity that we sometimes hear, such as “common bonds that make us one,” or “whatever affects one of us affects us all,” or other similar expressions of sentiment. Instead, I would like to try to list some of the basic descriptors (the technical term would be predicates) that pretty much apply to us all, wherever we are, and whoever we are.

(I don’t deny that there may be some organic unity, only that this idea is so overused that it would, in my opinion, end up obscuring, through the sentiments or emotions that it might evoke, more than it revealed.)

So then:  Who are we?

1. We like to enjoy being alive.  (But we also like to be               frightened by monsters.)

2. We are the centers of the actions of complex, dynamic             biological systems that are indissolubly linked to their               environments. 

3. We had no choice in the matter of our being born, and             nothing to say about when it happened, who our parents           were, or what culture or cultures they were part of.

4. We are all only random, and partial, expressions of the             human genome, random mixes of two particular sets of             chromosomes. Each of us is, accordingly, a manifestation of only some of the possible expressions of the human genome; we are all, in that sense, partial.

    No given expression of the random mix of the human genome is privileged; it just is. The only thing we know for sure is that some mixes represent combinations that cannot continue natural development in the womb, and are naturally aborted.

5. We are mortal, with all of the limitations that come with         that, including that we will someday stop living. 

6. It takes time, longer than most of us realize, to become a being that can interact symbolically, physically, and emotionally with others in a functional and mutual way; to become human. The fact of a live birth does not by itself produce a human being. Nurturing, support, education, and experience are needed for that.

7. To be human means that we have (at least) three basic aspects of our nature: we are biological entities, we are conscious (we have minds), and we are social; a body alone, a mind alone, and being alone (having no social interactions in our development) can’t produce a human being.

8. There are many different ways of being human, many           combinations of the biological, the mental, and the social, and many different combinations of the specific attributes of each of those three sets (biological, mental, social) that can be expressed, even within any given individual at different times—even in the course of one day.

9. In spite of the above (4 & 8, in particular), we are "partial"   in another way - partial to ourselves the way we are; we have a strong innate tendency to think that we are “complete” or even ideal, and to disparage others who are not as we are. Just think of what “men” and “women” have to say about each other, to take only one example. 

10. As biological entities, we have the presumed right to do what it takes to stay alive; as entities with conscious minds, we have the presumed right to express the individually specific qualities and abilities of our minds (to “be ourselves”); as social entities,we have a basic (“ontological”) equality with all others, and they with us.  [See at end for a basis for this assertion.]

     The fact of our basic or ontological equality means that the presumed rights that have been mentioned are relative, and not absolute, since we have to honor other's equal rights in the exercise of our own presumptive rights.  Our presumed rights are also subject to the balance of these presumed rights (and any other rights that  are formally established by individual societies or cultures) and the continued development and maintenance of a social environment in which offspring can become functioning human beings with that basic equality with each other.

11. Human excesses or insufficiencies, including insufficiencies of knowledge and understanding, along with a strong innate and need to act, and to exert power or special prerogatives over other people, in particular, will always make the attainment of such a social environment problematic.  Climate change, overpopulation, and resource depletion will add to that.

12. In addition to our presumed rights, humans everywhere want to be somebody, to grow, to connect, and to prosper, and to make things (especially finely detailed things); we like beautiful things and new things, especially children, and we like to put on shows and to tell stories, including shows and stories about who we are,what we have done, and what we are going to do (or who we are going to be).

13. We insist on being “I”s and on distinguishing ourselves from other “I”s, and resist being pinned down or put down; at the same time, we also evidence the need for larger identities (name, clan, club, nation, state, school, work, religious           belief, sports team, military, etc.).

14. We are consigned by the nature of physical reality and by the specifics of our biology and our minds to always be seeking certainty, and, almost above all else, in many cases, peace of mind.  And to act as if, or to claim, that we have found certainty.

      Although being able to organize and to plan ahead are two of the distinguishing features of being human, our lives are also full of the accidental, the incidental, and the uncertain. And mistakes - and, perhaps very important for the future, recovery from them.

15. Music, and art, and literature, and compassion.

These are the main things that my experience, my observation, and my reading tell me that “we” have in common.  This, to me, is who we are. 

 What have I missed?  

  Oh, yes … sex.  What else?   

*** 

[The assertion of our ontological equality, in the tenth statement, follows from statements 3, 4, 6, and 8, and from two additional facts.  One of these is that evolution is “blind”, ‘leading’ only where differential survival due to variations in characteristics and changes in environment takes different groups, or where there is some physical (as in physics) or chemical optimum involved.

The second is that the phrase “survival of the fittest”, as it applies to evolution, does not really mean what it is often thought to mean, with the word "fit" taking on connotations that we humans, who, unlike other animals, can consciously set out to become more "fit", give to it.  While it is true that specimens that are not functionally healthy enough to live and reproduce young will not have their genes passed on, dying (or being killed) before they are able to do so probably only means that they were not naturally "fit" enough to survive to that point, not that those who do survive are among the "fittest"; statistically speaking, most reproduction is by specimens in the middle two standard deviations of the applicable normal curves, not in the two "tails".

The phrase "survival of the fittest" is probably most useful in referring to the differential survival of specimens that best fit a particular environment, whether it is an existing or a new or changed environment, including niches within an existing environment.  The history of evolution on earth is rich with examples where smaller, slower, or more fragile specimens, though perhaps less "fit" as seen through human eyes, actually better fit some specific environment and become the basis for a new subspecies or species. 

 In evolution, survival and successful reproduction are the prime ingredients, and it doesn’t matter what the characteristics of the survivors are.  Because we could not be able to tell beforehand which characteristic of characteristics might lead to differential survival, we cannot speak of one or another characteristic as being “privileged”.

I therefore conclude that we are all equal with respect to the randomness of genetic inheritance, in having had no say or control over any of the facts of our births, and in the lack of “privilege” associated with particular inheritable characteristics.  In laymen’s words, we are all here “on the same terms”.]