Br11 A Free Thinker's View of PHILOSOPHY
If philosophy is the love of truth, then philosophers must pursue truth in order to discover that which they are to love. It follows that they must also seek to realise truth in the world - to make truth the foundation of human life.
Truth is all-embracing. To divide it into compartments; metaphysics; epistemology; logic; philosophy of mind; ethics; aesthetics, political philosophy and so on does not assist but confuses the search. Instead of bringing all to relatively simple conclusion it diffuses reason into many culs de sac.
It is similarly unhelpful to own something called philosophy as a property, recognising it as a subject and practicing it as a special mental activity or discipline. It is fruitless to maintain philosophy as an esoteric department of thought devoted to truth, when it is more like a game whose arbitrary rules of engagement with the questions and problems of our troubled world ensure that no fundamentally true answers or solutions may be found. We should place the blame for our troubles where it belongs - in the amoral roots of our society - in our failure to allow our minds to complete and fulfil themselves and then to guide us truly - and in the way we consequently manipulate and falsify our thinking.
Philosophy should embrace truth. Truth is the end result of utter correlation of reason, and true reason is the ultimate function of the fulfilled mind. So should the mind confuse itself by studying the intellectual contortions of Philosophy (academic - with a capital P)? Surely not. It should rather allow pure reason to follow the road to truth, at the end of which lies not argument but agreement.
At Socrates trial, in far-off ancient Greece, it is clear that neither his supporters nor those who eventually condemned him to death had completed their thinking and arrived at truth. This is shown by the fact that they so wordily debated and disagreed, otherwise they must have reached agreement. They could not know truth because they were not supraconscious, but they attempted to establish truth by applying the alternative but false conscious principle, which was to become a Philosophical rule, that if a proposition is to be taken as true it must be supported by evidence and argument. This rule eliminates the reasoned truth inherent in propositions that cannot be supported in this way, truths which are evident to the postconscious but not to the conscious mind. Truth was also obscured by the unwritten rule, applied then and now, that both sides in a debate prefer those proofs which best suit their particular evidence and argument.
A custom which confuses Philosophy is that modern practitioners of the discipline, in order to be recognised as such, must study all the recognised but incomplete arguments, ancient and modern, and include them in the basis of their understanding. As a result, within themselves they fail to reach true conclusions, and amongst themselves they fail to agree. In this light we might see that the conscious thinking in Socrates time, the subsequent dependently developed thinking, and the modern discipline of Philosophy, are all ill-founded and therefore a hindrance rather than a help to the discovery of truth.
Whilst truth is arrived at by free and independent reason, modern Philosophical debate does not allow itself to reject the historical discipline of academic Philosophy and start from scratch, but is largely a matter of choosing from amongst that discipline's existing arguments. That no argument then prevails is good reason to assume that none is true but that the persons involved do not perceive this. Even if one out of two arguments were perfectly true and the other false but those individuals sitting in judgment were not unanimous behind truth but divided between the two arguments, it is probable that none could perceive the truth either, but had made an uncomprehendingly wilful choice. All arguments in a debate are given and taken seriously and, after weighing the evidence, participants are obliged or expected to make a wilful choice. This is a big factor in the confusion of Philosophy whose rule of proof disallows purely reasoned truth, making it look like inspired guesswork. In the confusion, there being no agreed truth against which to judge, if debate is to continue all arguments and choices have to be allowed. Consequently, Philosophers are forced into permanent uncertainty, or into taking sides.
There is a strong case for any thinker setting out to discover truth that he or she should ignore history. There is surely more than enough actuality to occupy our minds, and actuality is, after all, the consequence, or an updated version of history which, together with our inward and outward reaction to it, forms our reality. It is this reality which we need to study and assess. History justifies it because history spawned it, but truly reasoned morality must surely recognise that our existing version of reality is false. I am not suggesting that we cannot benefit from the study of the ancient times and characters but that the same lessons are to be learned more readily, thoroughly, and appropriately from contemporary life. After all, we don't really know what it was like to live and think in those ancient times, as we may do in our own.
The critical element in our present situation is self-will. A conscious mind cannot possibly discover truth when it houses a self which must choose from that mind's incomplete and variously conflicting thoughts influenced, as they are, by instinct, emotion, previous conditioning and the pressures of present reality. Humans in general accept that their thinking must be confined to the conscious sphere because this is the reality in which they live and they want to keep ahead of the game. Philosophers take the same view because the same conscious sphere contains the problems which they are addressing. Nevertheless, humans do recognise permanently true moral values. Where do these moral values come from?
Recognition of whole humantruth requires a very powerful, entirely free and independent mind. Such a mind does exist, in all of us. It is called the postconscious to distinguish it from the conscious mind which contains the self-will. The postconscious is well aware of our reality but is not directly involved. When it was closed off from consciousness (as we shall see) with the idea of preventing it from interfering with our instinctive reality, the barrier then erected also closed off conscious interference in the other direction. This meant that the postconscious was and is free to fulfil its function - truth. But it is not free to impose that truth on consciousness. The postconscious is not recognised in the world. It is largely ignored, by Philosophy and humanity in general, excepting for its one direct link with consciousness - the still small voice of conscience.
Why did the jurors at Socrates' 'trial' disagree with him and each other, and why do Philosophers continue to disagree? They were not fools, and neither are we, so why don't we recognise truth and reach agreement? I suggest three answers, but first let me present a new concept of the human mind.
It now seems that our most immediate ancestor, living perhaps 150,000 years ago, was a hominid whose brain approached ours in size. It appears to me that the human species resulted from one of those hominids undergoing a brain mutation by which our conscious capacity was hugely and suddenly increased, not so much in size as in quality. The potential of this mutation was to allow humans to rise above the involuntary controls of instinct which became less applicable as intelligence advanced, and replace it with the voluntary and responsible choices of intelligence, or its advanced form - intellect.
Had the potential of this mutation been realised, we would now belong to a benign and co-operative human race living in harmony with Earth nature. That our reality is otherwise is because we ourselves prevented our minds from forming in that benign and reasonable way.
I am given to believe that this advanced mind, built in to the first human, incorporated six hierarchical levels, giving it an enormous increase in power and capacity of thought but with a great deal of reasoning to do before it could be truly effective. However, the existing conscious mind was intent upon immediately acquiring new and more effective ways of surviving and prospering in the world with which it was already familiar. As far as limited consciousness could see in those early days, far from being helpful the apparent wanderings of the newly advanced mind seemed to weaken resolve and actually to threaten survival prospects. For these reasons I believe that the significant new extension was split into two, a large addition to the conscious (confined to the first level of reason), which we harnessed to our instinctive use, and the new postconscious (incorporating 5 further levels of reason), which we closed off and left to its own devices.
As a result the human species was endowed with a much increased conscious capacity of mind which gave us the great benefit of language, resulting in our developing mathematics, the many sciences, technology, also music and other arts (perhaps already practiced by our hominid ancestors), and all the wisdom of which the conscious mind is capable, but not whole truth by which our reality would have been made morally good. In that it incorporated only the first level of reasoning, the conscious did not give us the ability to reason to ultimate truth. But utter reason is necessary if instinctive controls are to be replaced successfully by the voluntarily agreed and applied human truths. Instead of that, the conscious mind's lesser reason gave us the power and obligation to pursue the instinctive drives, free of ordinary inhibition, to tremendous and terrible effect. That ability to reason to the ultimate truth resided with the postconscious mind, now virtually closed away from consciousness.
That the postconscious mind, our chief faculty incorporating the five upper levels of reasoning, should not be allowed to represent us but be shut away from our conscious reality was, and is, a human disaster. However, the human postconscious can and does reason independently and, in an attempt to bring us to our true 'senses', makes us aware of its basic moral conclusions by way of that 'side door' in the brain, conscience, which we are free either to obey or ignore. That is where our moral values come from.
This brings me back to the three answers to the question - 'why do Philosophers, and most of the rest of us, continue to disagree?'
Firstly, human reality presently exists and has always existed in the conscious sphere, and the limited capacity of the conscious mind alone does not allow us to reach wholly true conclusions which are the essential essence of agreement.
Secondly, the conscious mind is not free and independent but subject to instinctive self-interests and emotions which, together with external worldly pressures, strongly influence the conscious will as it makes our decisions and chooses our opinions.
Thirdly, our thinking being confined to the conscious mind we prefer its logic which mistrusts the intuitions associated with conscience, labelling them groundless because they cannot be proven by conscious evidence and argument, all unaware that these intuitive assertions are proven to the hilt by utter but unseen reason inside the postconscious.
The postconscious mind does have the capacity to discover truth and the basic conclusions of its conscience are valid, but it must remain closed to interference from the conscious otherwise it would lose its vital freedom and independence. In order entirely to fulfil our capacity to discover and realise truth, our conscious mind and the wilful self within it must submit to our postconscious, at which point the self shall become supraconscious. Socrates had to battle with strong prejudice and superstition, notwithstanding the enlightenments of his day. He seems to have been silenced because the citizens of Athens feared the unacknowledged truths he voiced, clinging instead to the seemingly secure prejudices of existing reality. For the same reason wise protest has been silenced ever since, by means of false argument, or force, or indifference.
In our present reality, the practice of studying a particular isolated subject is a matter of the conscious mind determining, by decision of the self, to limit its thinking to that certain subject's relative truth because it cannot, or more accurately will not, correlate this with every other subject and arrive at absolute truth. In a similar way education is a matter of the self being taught, and instructing its conscious mind, what to think and how to think it. Our existing learned disciplines, with their competitive examinations, demand this.
In my view, just as the discovery and realisation of truth is the objective of philosophy (with a small p) so should it be the objective of academic Philosophy (with a capital P). We have been on the road to that objective far too long, treating the journey, rather than the road's end, as the important thing. A significant point is being made here. We have convinced ourselves that the truth is beyond us - that we are stuck in the existing conscious sphere and can never get out - but we have no really good reason for this view.
Humanity, though gifted with intellect, has not achieved true fulfilment. Why? Because our true fulfilment can not come from where we seek it, from the study of written Philosophy, because that philosophy - and practically all human thought - has arisen from the conscious mind whose sphere contains our present false reality. Philosophers genuinely believe this to be the right and proper battlefield for their mental struggles because they know the need for truth and believe it can be established here, where propositions can be held up to scrutiny and proven or disproven by evidence and argument. But for all their skilful searching, painstaking pondering and brilliant arguing, thinkers have not found here what they still seek because the conscious mind on which they depend is incapable of truth, and contaminated by false reality besides, as already pointed out. On the other hand that free and independent faculty of optimum reasoning capacity whose function is truth, the postconscious, is held at arm's length, its intuitions treated with suspicion or disdain. So Philosophy, and humanity, remains groping in the dark, fighting a battle it cannot win. Yet human truth, and all that it naturally means, is available to us through opening our minds and becoming supraconscious. Eventually, at level six of postconscious thinking the point shall be reached where everything is related to everything else - a state of absolute truth, when all human minds shall be connected in agreement.
People can get out of the existing conscious sphere and make humantruth their reality. Philosophers can at last rely on the postconscious truly to guide their thinking, and need no longer be held back by respect for the faultily reasoned arguments of the past. With supraconsciousness we shall find truth, and thereby the optimum means of human happiness. We may then abandon the separate academic discipline of Philosophy, recognising that it was this discipline's rules, inappropriately devised, which had for so long defeated the best efforts of leading human minds to find truth by confining them to a field where it was not to be found - the conscious sphere of restricted reason.
List of Branch articles. in no particular reading sequence:
PREVIOUS :1. The Nature and State of the Human Race: 2 : Truth - No-Go Area : 3. Facing Yourself: 4. Explaining the Mind : 5. Moral Mind : 6. Great Men: 7. Comment Pinker : 8. The Way We Think : 9. Sanity for Humanity : 10. Evolution of Mind :
CURRENT : 11. Free Thinker View :
REMAINING :12. Reality : 13. Understanding Consciousness : 14. Bottom Line 15. Brain-Mind Relations: 16. Open Letter to Philosophers : 17. The Mind and Philosophy : 18. Self Twixt 2 Minds: 19. The Holographic Dimension:20. Transhumanism Transcended: 21. Mind, Will and Self
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