Common sense is popularly considered as the infallible guide
to life, the universe and everything; but this is emphatically not so. The
human animal is a creature that is in a type of conflict with itself that leads
it to believe many contradictory things. This conflict is sometimes referred to
as a moral conflict – ‘the things I want to do I don’t do, and the things I
don’t want to do I do’ – and accounted for in terms of friction between social
pressures and individual freedom. It is clear that what is of benefit to the
individual is not necessarily of benefit to the collective. But it seems odd to
suppose that the human animal would invent and go on inventing something –
culture, society – that is in conflict with and even militates against its
essential nature, unless there is an impulse to do so that determines behaviour
in ways that are not strictly ‘selfish’ for want of a better word. But then,
the conflict is not only moral, it is also intellectual. Guilt – and some would
call it ‘existential guilt’ – is a feature of our species, but so is the intellectual
need of members of successive generations to call into question what the
previous generation believed. So rather than trying to find cultural factors or
genetic factors supposedly responsible for this conflict, it is much more
reasonable to speculate that the dissonances we experience as a species are
rather down to a much more primordial tension that is inherent in our own
nature. I am going to stick my neck out and call this:
the conflict between the
brain and the mind.
It is not very fashionable to postulate a distinction
between brain and mind, no more fashionable, indeed, than the distinction
between body and soul. The ‘brain-mind problem’, so-called, is solved by those
seeking scientific respectability by the simple expedient of denying the
existence of the mind, or calling it a mere ‘epiphenomenon’ of the brain –
something like the hum of an electric motor. I have no need of scientific
respectability and care not a fig for fashion, so I’m going to argue for what strikes me as the
clearest explanation for the essential conflict at the heart of human mental
activity and declare that it’s down to the (creative) tension between the brain,
and the mind that uses it. We could call this the conflict between the self and
its brain. The materialistic objections to taking the mind seriously have
evaporated as physics has developed: we simply do not understand what we mean
by ‘matter’ any more. There are clearly levels of reality beyond the material
and there is no point in asserting that mind cannot be considered a reality in
its own right and studied phenomenologically. This is the line to be taken here.
We shall assume not only that mind is distinct from brain but that mind is the
more basic phenomenon and that mind makes use of brain for its expression. The
mind, on this view, is a more capacious concept than that of the brain and the
phenomenology of the mind is correspondingly more complex than that of the
brain. For physicalism, brain event a and
the ‘corresponding’ mind event a’ are one and the same. But there is no particularly good reason for this apart from a correlation that we do not
understand. Brain event a may give
rise to mind event a’; but equally,
mind event a may give rise to brain
event a’. Brain event a may exist without any mind event at
all; but equally mind event a might
exist without any brain event at all. Mind events might thus be prior to and
more complex than brain events. If this view has any merit at, it becomes
possible to see how the brain might be a source of limitation on the mind and how
the mind might be a possible means of transcendence of the brain. The brain may
merely focus the mind; and the mind may well expand the brain.
The brain, we are
told, is an engine tinkered together by the long peregrinations of our
evolutionary past including those of the evolutionary past of all of our non-human forebears. This brain, in common with every other organ of every other
creature, has been sculpted by all the dramas, tragedies, adventures,
catastrophes and accomplishments of our long evolutionary history; and, in
common with brains of other creatures, it is an impressively effective but
sometimes unruly agent. But if we were no more than the sum total of the
operations of our brain thus evolved, we would be creatures without conflict,
like our non-human cousins, whose brains allow them to live in the same manner
generation after generation without inner discord. Far from being impelled to
live life in a certain way and no other, we (modern) humans find it impossible
to live like our parents. We announce to ourselves that there is no essentially
human life at all and that we are whatever we decide to make ourselves into. We
imagine we are completely free to do this, even though, at the same time, we
may hold the doctrine of total behavioural determinism by the brain.
Even a rudimentary knowledge of the history of our species
should suggest to us, without invoking an immaterial self, that our mental
evolution seems to require at the very least some ability of the brain as a
system to modify itself, to stand outside of itself, as it were, and to
criticise its own functioning. It is as
if the software running on the computer, so to speak, were built so as to be
able to re-write itself on a regular basis. We seem as a species always to be
rubbing up against what our brains impel us to do and finding stratagems that
we think might be in some way better – or at least different. That doesn’t much
look like mechanistic determinism and perhaps the ballooning of self-conscious
awareness in our species is the irruption into what appears to us as material
nature of the universal non-material levels of reality. If we take the existence of the
human mind seriously – rather than trying to explain it away – then there is no
reason at all why mind should not be considered to be a universal feature of
realty. The emergence of this reality into the natural world in the form of
self-consciousness can no longer be assumed to be an impossibility, as it was
on the basis of now discredited conceptions of the material constitution of the
world. We don’t necessarily have to go into the realms of Hegelian speculation
concerning the absolute spirit and its emergence into consciousness in the
human being; but we can postulate that universal intelligence achieves
consciousness in the human individual thanks to the complexity of the brain, and that this brain, far from being a perfectly adequate instrument for the expression of this
universal intelligence acts as a restriction against which such intelligence
constantly struggles. This restriction is, it seems, vital to our creativity
and our ingenuity. It is in that sense that we suggest here that human beings
might be in conflict with themselves and that this conflict emerges most
visibly in that battle between our soaring imagination and our common sense.
This contradiction at the heart of our being should make us
reflect that while we might be determined by our brains, there is clearly something
else going on both in our individual consciousness and in the human species as a
whole. The conflict of which we speak is of the very essence of what we are and
is closely related to our restless drive towards accomplishment. It is
responsible for the fact that we have moved in a very short time – speaking in
evolutionary terms – from being no more than savannah-dwelling bipedal ape-like
creatures to being, in our own eyes, masters of the universe. Our volcanic
creativity, our use of language and mathematics, our technological
inventiveness, our political evolution, our poetry and religion – all of these
features of our history are connected to the central conflict of our being. So
what is the nature of this conflict? The suggestion here is that it is down to
a tussle within the human species between the swelling cerebral mass, as a survival-machine
produced by evolution, on the one hand, and the emergence into human
consciousness, on the other, of a level of reality that can only be described
as ‘intelligent mind’ and that may for all we know be as essential a feature of
the universe as matter. It may well be that the brains of mammals had to reach
a certain level of complexity before this became possible, but whatever the
case, there is a chasm between the human species and all other species that is
to some extent explained by the nature of the brain, but that is best explained
by the operation of the mind. We do not need to assume a dualistic structure to
reality, with inexplicable interactions between two apparently irreconcilable
realities, since current theories of physics do not exclude the operation of
the mental in the non-material world of the sub-atomic in ways that cannot be
explained by a purblind insistence upon the primacy of the three-dimensional
object.
If this thesis is true, then we have to assume that
brain-thinking and mind-thinking can be prised apart. Intuitively, this seems
possible. But the difference between brain thinking and mind thinking is perhaps
most clearly evident in the phenomenon of ‘common sense’. Human common sense is
demonstrably a brain function: it is the way we are impelled to think before we
start to reflect on our thinking, before we are even conscious of thinking. Common sense is what appears to humans to be obvious,
self-evident or completely reasonable. For example, there are many perceptual
conclusions that we draw about the world that are ‘obvious’ to us. It is
‘obvious’ to the common sense view that the universe is composed of
three-dimensional objects. It is ‘obvious’ that the world is flat. It is
‘obvious’ that the sun goes around – or at least over – the stationary world
from the east towards the west. It is ‘obvious’ that space has three dimensions
and time is infinitely linear. It is ‘obvious’ that the moon is the same size
as the sun, and so on. Additionally, there are many other common sense
conclusions that we draw that have a moral character and are more subtle. It is
‘obvious’ that I owe a greater duty of care and have a greater moral responsibility
towards my relatives than to non-relatives. It is ‘obvious’ that strangers are to be
treated with suspicion. It is obvious that potential sexual partners are in
themselves attractive. It is ‘obvious’ that aggression from you is to be met
with aggression from me. It is ‘obvious’ that I should strive to maximise my
sphere of influence, my power, my possessions. And so on. These ‘obvious’
matters are of relevance at the forefront of consciousness, but there are a host
of other less conscious to unconscious determinants – some of which emerge when
we discover perceptual illusions, for example – that nudge us towards conclusions that we
find self-evidently correct and that we refer to as ‘common sense’. It is only
when we begin to think about our thinking that these determinants become clear
to us, we become aware of the brain’s influence upon us, and we become able to
modify our behaviour or our knowledge in the light of our own freedom to
criticise our common sense. The growth of culture can almost be seen as our
transcendence of the brain as we become ever more skilled in criticising its
operation and our consequent liberation from our common sense.
Common sense is clearly very fallible and may be dangerous once we adopt
lifestyles more complex than those of hunter-gatherers. What was obvious to our
ancestors served them well; but as we move away from the earth-bound, low
velocity lives they led, we think about our thinking in a way that demonstrates
our ability to think beyond the strictures of our brains. What is obvious now is
that human civilization has taken the species beyond the sort of response to
our environment that we observe in non-human animals, that all of these matters
that are ‘obvious’ to our common sense view of the world are in fact far from
obvious at all and are in other frames of reference mistaken. Modern physics
has substantially destroyed our common sense perceptions of the world around us
and centuries of moral and political evolution of our societies have extensively
modified our common sense moral perceptions, too, since many of them were
unjustifiably discriminatory. So although we still ‘know’ certain things of a
perceptual and moral character – and know them with greater certainty the less
aware we are – we may now have to accept
on the basis of rational argument that we don’t know them at all, that they
arose out of mere brain ‘prejudice’ and that we are indeed mistaken.
The world
is not flat. Space is not three-dimensional. The world is not composed of
three-dimensional objects, my family is not inherently more deserving than strangers,
aggression is not obviously best met by aggression or vengeance, sexual
attraction is a trick of the brain and it is not self-evidently true that I
should always seek to maximise my own advantage. These things are ‘false’; and
the fact that generations of human beings have thought otherwise does not
change that.
So what is going on? What is going on is that our brains
deliver to us a perceptual interpretation of the world along with certain patterns
of thought and patterns of behaviour, on the one hand, that were useful to our
survival as animals among animals, and our minds, with increasing awareness,
find these perceptions and patterns of thought to be inadequate, on the other.
This conflict is of our very essence and the view taken here is that it
indicates the split in our being between mind-thinking, on the one hand, that
is free to criticise and modify its mode of expression, and brain-thinking, on the other that
is not. Brain-thinking is the hard wired bit of our mental economy. Brain-thinking will always impel us to pursue those types of behaviour
that the brain has evolved to equip us for. We will behave like the elk with
its enormous antlers and continue to use our adaptations in ways that lead to
the development of even more effective versions of these assets. But like the
elk, we will discover that these adaptations can be a handicap. Then, in
contrast to the elk, our imagination will reveal to us where our advantage has turned
into a hinderance and allow us to resist the promptings of our brain and its
common sense. Our imagination will suggest to us ways in which we may liberate
ourselves from the determinations of our brain. It is this creative
transcendence of our innate thinking, we suggest, that is the indication of an
intelligence at work in us that is not explained by the functioning of our
brain alone.
Now while this intelligence may not have an evolved physical organ of
expression in each individual human being, it does have an organ of expression
in the totality of cultural institutions of the human species. It is this
cultural organ – what Popper calls ‘World 3’ and what we have called ‘midworld’
– that permits the expression of universal intelligence through the human
species as a whole and through the individual where this individual is, in
turn, cultivated.
Clearly, our common sense reactions to the world are those
reactions that evolution has programmed into our brains as a result of our
struggle for survival. So our common sense is down to the unreconstructed
activity of our brains that operates unopposed in the absence of education and
continues with considerable power even where education has brought it to
consciousness. It seems clear that brain-thinking does not require
consciousness at all. In common sense it is, as it were, as though we were
following the ordinary gradient of brain-activity. In common sense we
experience the mechanisms of our brains acting according to their own
structure. In our common sense conclusions, insofar as these enter our critical
awareness, we ‘catch our brains at it’ and are able with increasing mental
distance to criticise these conclusions. We ‘catch our brains at it’ in all
sorts of situations where we may think that we are acting on reflection but
where in fact our brains are thinking and acting autonomously. This is certainly
the case in the affective aspects of our lives, in our sexual activity, in our
motivation to find food, in our need to maximise the sphere of our power and
influence and so on. But it is also the case in our perceptual interpretation
of our immediate environment, in our locomotion, our judgement of space and time,
our conclusions as to the suitability of a certain type of movement within a
certain terrain and so on.
But the most treacherous operations of our brains in the exercise
of common sense are found in our chains of reasoning based upon common sense
premises and then extrapolated to frame a general principle. For example, we may reason that since our immediate environment seems
full of three-dimensional objects and nothing else is detectable by means of
our senses, then there is nothing else in the universe. We may reason that
since we can get to the top of a tree by means of a ladder, the use of a much
longer ladder will get us to the moon. We may argue that since the world is
clearly composed of three-dimensional objects, thought just has to be a
three-dimensional object. We extrapolate all the time on the basis of common-sense premises and then discover subsequently that such extrapolations are
illegitimate. Only after much trial and error do we finally reassess and
possibly abandon our common sense conclusions. It is for this reason that the
confident empiricist should temper confidence and hasty judgement with caution
and perhaps a little imagination. Empiricism is common sense elevated to the level of the absolute and even common sense should tell the empiricist that thinking like a human being is not necessarily any more absolutely valid than thinking like a tadpole. (The comparison comes from Socrates.)
It is clear that as a species we have always been engaged
upon a long process of modifying or abandoning patterns of thought that were
given to us a priori, as it were, by
the structure of our brains. We have as a species gone beyond the dictates of
our brains in all manner of ways, both perceptual and moral. But we have also
gone beyond our brains in our tendency to call into question and abandon our
own extrapolations from common sense. What, for example, could be less
commonsensical than the discoveries of quantum theory? Or how could an
evolutionarily determined brain come up with the ideas of the Big Bang, black
holes or other exotic states of matter far beyond the scope of any creature’s
experience? So the question is: how does this process of ‘going beyond the
brain’ come about? How do we ‘catch our brains at it’, catch ourselves thinking
according to wobbly brain-supported assumptions, spot the fallacy and correct it? Animals
cannot go beyond their brains. They are stuck with their brains and compelled
to follow what they dictate. The elk has to carry on with its competitive
behaviour that led to the disproportionate growth of its antlers and thus
perhaps damage its future prospects, particularly if it gets stuck in a thicket
while fleeing from wolves. The poor elk is stuck with that fate. We are
apparently the only species that habitually criticises its own evolutionarily
determined patterns of thought and modifies them where they appear to come into
conflict with an expanded conception of reality. How do we do this?
The answer that occurs most insistently is that the human
self-conscious mind is somehow ‘outside’ of or ‘beyond’ the brain and able to
modify its activity from this outside vantage-point. Of course such a
conclusion will draw howls of rage and ferocious opposition from all sorts of
quarters, not least from the materialists and behaviourists. But the simple
riposte to their arguments will often be that their ferocious opposition is
more often than not based upon common sense and that they are not therefore
going to win the argument by simply asserting what the brain compels them to
assert. The empiricist dogma, that only what is experienced by the senses is
known, is patently false. There is no longer any point or any justification in
the assertion that what cannot be experienced by the bodily senses has no
reality. Since that is so, we are entirely justified in following our own
intuitions about our minds where rationally they take us. The empiricists will
assure us that thoughts of God or transcendent minds are merely the
brain-determined craving that our species has for coherent stories about
and coherent meanings to our environment. But the view here is that empiricism
is brain-determined common sense and probably misguided. Stories of gods and
universal meanings arise because of our access to universal intelligence and
not from the structures that our brains have evolved in the course of their
evolution.
The empiricists can not have it all their own way: if thoughts of
God are just aberrations of the brain, then so are thoughts of universal
scientific explanation. For us it is a blind alley to explain any aspect of the
extraordinary effects of human creativity by pointing to this or that bit of the
brain. Our creativity and the imaginative flights of fancy that are at the
heart of our cultural accomplishments, are more intelligently seen as the
emergence into human consciousness – admittedly still in primitive and often
distorted form – of the universal intelligence that generates the cosmos. Moreover, this notion of universal intelligence gives us a sheet anchor to our minds when the business of criticising our brains and our common sense calls into question our cherished assumptions. The empiricists, who must equally criticise common-sense assumptions, have no compass thereafter to guide them on what has to be a trackless mental sea. That is why the empiricists are sometimes so ferocious and why they insist on the exclusive and absolute value of empiricism. The alternative seems to them to be pure irrationality. We at least are able see rationality as universally valid because it is rooted in universal intelligence.
Our creativity arises in our minds and not in our brains. We
know all sorts of things that run counter to common sense and that nevertheless
turn out to be truer than the conclusions of common sense. To take a simple
example: whereas Euclidean geometry was regarded for many centuries as
corresponding to the essential nature of reality, non-Euclidean geometries
dreamt up out of sheer mathematical exuberance
by Gauss, Riemann, Lobachevski and others turned out to correspond much
more precisely to our expanding conception of reality and facilitated the development
of Einstein’s theories of Special and General Relativity as a result. Euclidean
geometry is based on the ‘obvious’ properties of three-dimensional space,
delivered to us to by our brains. And yet we have the ability to think up, in
purely abstract ways, exotic properties of a world we have not experienced but
suspect may just be possible. That such properties later turn out to be
applicable to new features of the material world unsuspected by our common
sense is nothing short of miraculous. The fundamental issue here is that of
human creativity. We get beyond our brains by means of our creative thinking
and we do it with such consistent success that to claim this merely as one part
of the brain talking to another simply fails to convince. The prophets of
naturalism, materialism and determinism will all claim that creativity is
simply brain activity turbocharged by feedback loops created by language or by
cultural pressure. Where it is not so determined, they believe, creativity is
largely accidental. But both language and culture are themselves the results of human creativity over
generations and therefore cannot be called upon to explain creativity. As for
the ‘accident’ theory, in which creativity arises out of random brain-activity,
this is a declaration of ignorance and mere desperation – the scientific
equivalent of the unconvincing ‘god-of-the-gaps’.
Determinism, brain-determinism simply does not work as an account
for human creativity. The easiest and clearest way to account for the manner in
which humanity has consistently and massively altered the functioning of its
own thought, transcended its common sense, is to suppose that the mind is a
broader, larger and more complex phenomenon than the brain and that it is the
action of the mind upon the brain that drives it to transcend its own
limitations while continuing, in many respects, to be tied to them. There is
clearly a two-way process going on: the brain becomes ever more practised in
its functioning as a result of experience; but this conceivably allows the mind
enhanced scope. The mind can be presumed to be far more complex than the brain, just as all possible, but as yet unknown, mathematics is more complex than existing
mathematics. Such complexity could not of course be squared with the notion of
mind as an ‘emergent’ property of the brain, for emergence, though permitting
interactionism, leaves the mind less, and not more, complex than the brain it
uses and from which it supposedly emerges. The only reasonably respectable
conception of mental reality that could allow the mind to be more complex than
the brain is that of panpsychism, according to which mind is a property of the
universe at large and as such predates the emergence of any brain, human or
otherwise. And indeed a conception of the universe that includes intelligent
mind as one of its fundamental properties is not inherently difficult to accept
any more. It is only difficult to accept is if one is ideologically committed
to one or other – or all – of the various eliminative theories that since the
eighteenth century have striven to exclude mind from the universe, first in the
form of a deity and then in any form at all, including that of a human mind.
A universe in which intelligent mind is a fundamental
property may well strike us humans as against common sense and thus as
inconceivable, but it is not more against common sense than quantum theory and
its inconceivability is a result of the limitations of common sense anyway –
limits that we transcend with great regularity. So inconceivability and common
sense are no objections to a theory of universal intelligent mind. Moreover, it
is not as inconceivable as all that, since we know from our most intimate
experience, and against common sense, what is implied by the word ‘mind’ and we
have direct experience of the interaction between mind and the material systems
that make up our bodies. Extrapolating from our own mental experience to the
universe at large is now more justified than extrapolations to the universe at
large of human common-sense intuitions concerning matter. We do not need,
moreover, some unsatisfactory dualistic theory to make the idea of universal
mind comprehensible to ourselves. The world of physical matter is quite complex
enough to include in it mind-like levels of reality. The old idea that matter
had to mean three-dimensional objects has gone forever. Matter is now
understood much more in terms of energy fields than in terms of
three-dimensional objects. There is, therefore, no reason at all, why
intelligent mind should not be an energic feature of the entire universe just
as intelligent mind is a feature of the human being. The world of
three-dimensional objects arises out of a level of reality in which there are
no three-dimensional objects and that level could conceivably be not one, but a
multiplicity of levels, - let’s say a hierarchy of ever more subtle fields
– on one or more of which mind could
operate.
So the distinction between brain-thinking and mind-thinking
is by no means a wild or fantastical idea. The brain is only a
three-dimensional object in terms of our common sense and in terms of the
capacities of the sensory-cognitive apparatus bequeathed to us by evolution, and
we are learning to be ever more critical of all of this. It is not reasonable
to claim, as dyed-in-the-wool materialists do, that thoughts are objects. It
is, however, perfectly reasonable to believe that thoughts are what we think
they are – i.e. thoughts – and to suppose that the history of human culture has
been a progressive liberation of the mind and of human consciousness from the
limitations of the brain. If we had been stuck with our brain and nothing more,
we would arguably be still living in the manner of our hominid ancestors. The
explosive development of human culture and human consciousness is well
accounted for in the speculative theory that the increasingly complex brain
produced by evolution permitted the emergence into human consciousness of the
universal mental levels of reality. If what we understand as the ‘matter’ of
the universe is more a creation of our sensory-cognitive apparatus than
objective reality, and if this material character of the macroscopic world
arises out of a distinctly non-material substrate, then our brains, too, can be
understood as arising out of a non-material substrate, an energy field or
something analogous. Such conceptions are entirely within the bounds of modern
physical possibility. Mental activity will thus always correlate to observable
brain activity, since the two – the mental dimension and the physical – are
aspects of a single reality that in turn is part of the intelligent, mentally
active universe. But correlation is not the same as causation; and it is no
more reasonable to say that the empirically observable electro-chemical
activity of the brain causes the
thoughts than it is to say that the thoughts cause the electro-chemical activity.
Common sense has to be taken with a large pinch of salt. The
brain imposes all manner of mental habits upon us that we do well not to trust,
when it is a question of understanding reality. Reality has to be our guide, not fashionable theory. And whatever else we may know or not know, we know that our minds are real. Much of scientific advance has involved
overturning common sense notions and there is no reason to suppose that this
will not continue as science becomes deeper and investigates ever deeper levels
and wider vistas of phenomena. Science is still too closely linked to common sense. The philosophy of naturalism and its related
ideologies of determinism and materialism arose from a too uncritical reliance
on common sense and therefore on the natural gradient of the brain. Science,
when it comes of age, will take us ever further from our brains and ever deeper
into the mental reality that we are only just beginning to appreciate. But we may have to take mental reality more seriously first. Technology
is taking us ever further from the limitations of our bodies and there is no
reason to suppose that science will not do the same for that bit of our bodies
we call the brain.
Materialism is dead. Determinism is dead. And there is now
no longer any reason to cling to the ideology of naturalism. The mind is the
most difficult entity for science in its present form to understand, precisely
because science is still too dependent on common sense. The self-conscious mind is
even more difficult to understand. Science will have to grow up and evolve new
methods for dealing with the immaterial. But this is not something to fear; nor
is it something radically alien, since art has been dealing with it for centuries.
On the contrary, a liberated science holds out the possibility of vastly
enhanced understanding and vastly expanded vistas of reality. If such
intellectual developments eventually rehabilitate the idea of a deity, then so
be it. The idea of a God is only to be feared if it is shackled to the common
sense of the human brain and all the primitive obsessions that arose from it,
its tribalism, its territoriality, its xenophobia, its naïve
three-dimensionalism and all the rest. The modern atheists rely entirely on
their common sense to deliver their truth. The truth is that the brain has
never delivered any more than a convenient, survival-related truth. The search
for truth is an activity of the mind and that mind, once honestly considered,
leads inevitably to the thought of a universal intelligence.
It is completely obvious that we are limited beings with a
limited conception of reality who are still struggling with the straightjacket
of the brain upon our thought. The question is whether we are definitively
imprisoned within those limits or whether there is a way for us to transcend
them. I have tried to argue that though our brains are determined,
evolutionarily circumscribed structures, our minds give us access to levels of
reality that are not merely material, and therefore we may legitimately
hypothesise that we do have mental access to levels of reality from which our
brains exclude us. Thus the interaction between mind and
brain on the historical level has led to an expansion of our capacities in all
areas, because we rightly suspect that more is going on in the universe than
our brains give us cause to believe. Below the sub-atomic level of reality, we
have no indication from our brains of anything at all: reality shades off into
a mysterious fog or foam of energy. There is no reason, however, why the
hierarchical levels of reality to which we do have access – macroscopic
objects, microscopic objects, atoms, sub-atomic particles etc. – should not be
supported by any number of additional structured levels beyond the sub-atomic,
as David Bohm suspected.
The structure beyond the levels of the sub-atomic
would provide ample accommodation for the presence and operation of any number
of entities that are unknown to us from our sensory experience of the world but
that might be grasped to some extent by us on the basis of our own experience
of the mental. We perceive the world in a particular way; and empiricists will
assert boldly and with breezy optimism that there is nothing else to reality other
than what we experience in that way. That they are mistaken in this is clear not
only from non-scientific culture but also from the progress made by particle
physics. They can also clearly be seen to be mistaken from the simple
observation that they have no account to give and therefore no understanding to
offer of the phenomenon of mind unless they reduce it to a thing. Their account
of mind is an eliminative one: they can only deal with mind by denying its
existence because there is no sensory access to it. They can only study mind by murdering it first. Less ideological thinkers,
however, see clearly that as limited beings, limited by the capacities of our
brains, we are right to suspect that more is going on in the world than we can
understand by empirical means.
The hunch that members of the human species have
always had that something is going on in reality beyond what we perceive, is a
legitimate ground for speculation concerning structures in reality that are not
given to the experience vouchsafed to us by our brains. The easiest conclusion
to draw is that our mental access to levels of reality beyond the physical is
an avenue of communication between those levels and ourselves. It may well be
after all that we have a connection with what has traditionally be called ‘the
divine’ through our mental experience. After all, we can postulate that our
bodies are in causal contact with all the other matter in the universe, so why
should we not suppose that our minds are similarly in contact with a universal
mental reality? It is for this reason that one does well to take the
deliverances of the brain cum grano salis
and to allow the hunches of the mind concerning the complexity of reality to
provide a very much expanded conception of the world than that of the merely
empirical.
Common sense is thinking according to the limitations of the
brain. Poets, prophets, philosophers and imaginative scientists have always
suspected that there is more to the world than meets the eye – and brain – and indeed followed strong hunches as to what
that ‘more’ might be. There is no reason why we should bow to the bullying dogmatism
of the empiricists when the world patently is so much more wonderful than they
allow and becomes yet more so with every new discovery that expands our consciousness. Expansion
of consciousness and spirituality are related concepts. If spirituality means
anything at all, then it involves some aspect of humanity that is not tied to
the empirically observable brain. The brain dies and decomposes - that is the
universal lot of evolved creatures. That much we do know. If any spirituality
that may be achieved simply died with the brain, it would be a waste of time to
pursue and accumulate it. All the religious traditions of the world suggest
that spiritual growth involves progressive departure from those patterns of
behaviour that seem to be programmed into the brain of the species.
Spirituality is a matter of increased individuation – or perhaps it should be
‘dividuation’ – and a diminution of those features of the personality that are
merely human. It is a departure from the attitude to the world governed by
common sense. We are no longer justified in dismissing the fact that humanity
has always suspected the mind and body to be separable with the former
providing the locus and focus of onward growth. There is no reason to assume, except
on merely common sense grounds, that the death of the body annihilates the
gains made by the mind. Such a possibility is entirely compatible with our
present understanding of the world and of the information that structures it.
