In the previous chapter I referred to, and reproduced, a paper entitled 'Taking intuition on trust - the necessary first principle of truly radical philosophy', which was submitted to but rejected by the journal Metaphilosophy. Unwilling to let the matter end there I sent a copy of this paper to Kai Nielsen, to whose brilliant article in Metaphilosophy 'Can there be progress in philosophy' my effort was a direct response. That which motivated me in this direct approach to Nielsen was my conviction that individual thinkers should seek broad contact in order to begin the process of building agreement, and my belief that my book did present the holistic, critical, comprehensive social theory that he believes to be urgently needed.
After some weeks I received a brief reply from Nielsen : 'I have your manuscript. From a superficial skimming it looks interesting. But I have not read it with the care it no doubt deserves. You should understand that I get many, many manuscripts in one way or another. I can read only a fraction of them. But do try the journals to see if it can see the light'. To me, this could appear hilariously ridiculous were it not serious and really rather tragic. For once someone was far-seeing and courageous enough to state the human need for what is in effect humantruth,but neither he nor the journal that published him is prepared to take seriously, even to the extent of actually reading properly, any response claiming to know this humantruth. Their reasoning must be that only the disciplined thinking of prominent Philosophers is capable of discovering this truth, and it is known that none of them is anywhere near it, so Nielsen's question was raised without any answer being expected. Maybe he senses that the discipline of Philosophy, being confined to the conscious sphere, will neverdiscover humantruth.
I have no realisticcomplaint about this, or against any of the many other individuals, journals, newspapers and publishers whom I have approached but from whom I have received polite, sometimes curt refusals. Such individuals are contained within, and every journal etc. is an institution belonging to, some special narrowed discipline with its own busy preoccupations. These preoccupations preclude any outside thinking that is not confined to their own outlook and adopted bias. I have already given the discipline of Philosophy as an example. Let me give two further examples as follow.
Shortly after submitting my paper to Metaphilosophy I modified it slightly and sent it to Radical Philosophy, with the same negative response. I then decided to tackle two other major disciplines of thinking, science and mysticism. It seems to me strange that scientists, who do not normally claim that any thing is true unless it can be irrefutably proven, should allow that the decision as to what work they do and how far it shall go be largely dictated by a phenomenon which is neither an exact science nor has any truth about it which is irrefurable - competitive money-economics -(no irrefutable truth, that is, except the actual fact of its accepted existence). The journal New Scientist predictably displayed no interest in an article on these lines which I submitted, despite the fact that this subject is of vital importance to contemporary questions of energy, resources,pollution etc.
Next I approached The New Humanity, a journal which has gathered a following amongst those who feel that the achievement of a truly humane world is a matter of flowing with the good and gentle emotional desire for such a world. This following is united by this desire but otherwise consists of many different beliefs and opinions. Yet the journal has expressed the intention of making effective the movement it represents by entering the field of politics. Believing that agreement is vital, and that humantruth is the only possible basis of complete agreement, I submitted an article to The New Humanity making this point, also claiming that without a well-thought-out policy accepted by all its members the movement could not be effective in politics; that politics is not the way by which to achieve humantrue reform; and that just as agreement is vital to humantrue cooperation, intellation is necessary to agreement. This article was also rejected, also predictably, because to hold a following together on the basis of feeling rather than truth it is necessary constantly to reason according to the former rather than the latter.
At about this time I heard a talk given by Noam Chomsky. This was the third in a series, entitled 'Opinions' and presented by British Channel 4 television. He bravely exposed the devious self-interested exercise of United States influences in South America. Noam Chomsky is Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is described as one of the USA's leading dissidents. This unusual combination of qualifications encouraged me to write to him, particularly as he is also listed as a consulting editor of Metaphilosophy.
I mention these events to further illustrate the present convention that thinkers specialise; that individuals have the right to hold whatever belief or opinion they choose; that the nearest we can approach to agreement is some sort of attempted compromise consensus; that we are entitled and expected to construct and defend our separate personal realities, and, basic to all this, that out reality and our thinking be confined to the conscious arena. Although Chomsky's thinking is admirably much broader and more courageous than most (make no mistake, the conscious field of thought, becauseit is spurious and inconclusive, is, like the game of chess, extremely complex and impossible of resolution), his brief replies to my lengthy letters imply that he too is restricted by the rules of present convention.
That Chomsky replied to me at all does him credit, for it is usual for specialists to communicate only with other specialists, preferably in the same field. They are generally too preoccupied to bother with thinking which comes from outside their particular field because they are unable to believe that it can possibly have any true relevance. His first reply was generous in thinking that my article contained a great deal of insight and plausibility, but he added 'The contents are speculative, that is, not grounded in evidence and argument, apart from our intuitions about ourselves and the world in which we live. By and large, your intuitions conform to my own, and I am no better to ground them than you are'. I responded to the effect that the aim of my article (ie the gist of my previous Chapter 49) was to show that fundamental moral truth comes from the common human unconscious postconscious and cannotbe grounded in evidence and argument which is not only limited to consciousness but can also be challenged and contradicted by other contentions which can also be grounded in conscious evidence and argument.
Chomsky's reply to this was : 'But in that case, there seems little point in discussing it, since discussion is limited to the arena of evidence and argument.' He also stated : 'We agree that the contents of your article are speculative.......'.
However this correspondence between Noam Chomsky and myself turns out, the impasse it had reached demonstrates the basic obstacle in the way of humanity completing its intellectual mutation and thus fulfilling itself. It is the same obstacle which has so far barred acceptance of the humantrue philosophy, and this book which espouses that philosophy. This obstacle consists mainly of a general refusal to recognise that the true essence of human being is the full product of the interactions between the neurons of the brain serving the mind in general; that most of these neurons, and consequently their interactions, are situated in the postconscious, and are consequently both free and independent and unconscious;and that, in order truly to agree, we need to entrust ourselves and our world to a common, humantrue awareness given to us by our millions of individual postconscious minds which essentially work as one.
There is, indeed, little point in discussing anythingif that discussion is to be limited to the conscious arena of evidence and argument. Such has been all of our worldly discussion to date, and look at the result. I am well aware of the view that our first priority should be to tackle the real problems of the here and now, but we can't do it unless and until we are humantruly aware. Our present society represents a continual hopeless struggle to cure the symptoms of the automatic disease and failure to tackle its causes. The one objective of discussion ought to be the stimulation of intellation, and the function of intellation is, and can only be, truth and true agreement. The progress and completion of that mutation that made us homo sapiens, and the consequence of our possible fulfilment of it, as the one intellectual species and therefore the only fully responsible species on this Earth, is demonstrated by the following Figures 13a, 13b, and 13c :
In Figure 13a our humanityis represented by the conscious sphere and its foundation in instinct, but also by our moral awareness intuited from our postconscious mind by way of conscience. Our realityis represented by the conscious arena and the instinctive drives, and is generally supported and empowered by conscious will. The free and independent postconscious, the true representative of humanity and its potential reality, is largely ignored. Consequently our mental activity is almost entirely confined by the conscious arena and dominated by the Machine. Normal individuals (dotO) think accordingly and their 'truth' is that which is grounded in the facts of this limited reality and in the limited arguments of conscious reason. All the present thinking disciplines, such as Philosophy, science and politics, and all the controlling institutions such as money-economics, law, and government, are similarly limited but in separate fields so that they disagree and conflict. In the minds of all individuals (dotO) the arguments of existing reality are never resolved because they lack the true resources of the postconscious, the major part of the mind. Therefore individuals (dotO) can not agree, for agreement depends upon recognition of the common humantruth which in turn depends upon supraconscious understanding.
In Figure 13b many individuals of the type (+O) have appeared. These are individuals who have insisted that their own lesser conscious minds take on trust the findings of their superior postconscious minds. These individuals (+O) are thus supraconscious : guided by their postconscious minds. Their humantrue arguments are rejected by the traditional norm of restricted thinking because they are not grounded in, but go contrary to itsevidence and argument. Yet the norm is losing ground because its automatic arguments are false, whereas an open mind cannot deny the common body of humantruth to which fully supraconscious reason must lead.
In Figure 13c supraconsciousness has won the day and a humantrue reality has been established. The great majority of individuals are (+O) . It would have been by their agreement that a new reality was introduced and by their responsible cooperation that it is now sustained. This humantrue reality became inevitable once the majority of individuals were (+O) because it was unthinkable to them that they should continue under the domination of the false Machine, or that they should do other than ensure that their world would be made to accord with their true values.
My reason for adding these last chapters of Further Illumination is a growing awareness that the first step in the human transition - from 13a to 13b, and thence to the most difficult step of all, to 13c, - is to acknowledge the actual significant existence (without concrete proof) of the independent postconscious mind; that the postconscious is the true basis of our identity and the source of our unity. As soon as we understand this we must also immediately recognise that our present conscious orientation is false. We shall then have begun the vital humantrue transition.
That which prevents our taking this first transitional step is the fact that our thinking, together with the actual affairs and concepts of our present wrong reality, are locked into the conscious arena and supported by conscious will. Our thinking is restricted to that which can be conveyed in language, and language is normally confined in scope to the facts, concepts, and limited reasoning of the conscious sphere. This is why our philosophical notion of truth is that it must be capable of being grounded in that which is materially evident or that which can be argued in language. This notion is presently almost entirely false because our existing world is false. In any case our understanding of truth might never be complete, even in a humantrue reality, because part of the whole truth, about the far universe and beyond, may never be available to us.
The problem of human reluctance to take this first transitional step to supraconsciousness, because our thinking is presently so firmly founded in and confined to relatively simple consciousness, is characterised by my correspondence with Noam Chomsky and other recognised thinkers. Their Philosophical discipline gives them an outlook, based on consciously-contrived thinking, which, in the case of other thinkers, precludes all the written extraneous thinking of non-members of 'the club' to the point of refusing to read it properly. In the case of Chomsky, he did read the article I had sent to him, but his discipline of mind (which is vital to the accurate effectiveness of his courageous dissent from American foreign policy) would not allow him to submit his conscious self to the vastly superior but unconscious awareness of his own postconscious, ie to that which he describes as his intuitionsto which my intuitions conformed (and which, in fact, provide the moral compulsion underlying his dissent). His discipline of mind held him to that Philosophical (inferior conscious) law that a proposition is true only if it can be grounded in evidence and argument. This seems to indicate that many of us, like Chomsky, are already fundamentally cognisant of humantruth but that our conscious awareness of this cognisance is held back on the wrong side of a knife-edge of recognition, on the right side of which lies the path of intellation and humantrue evolution. Humanity will not cross that knife-edged divide because intuition is thought to be unreliable. Intuition is judged unreliable because it cannot be accurately analysed and understood, according to existing factual evidence and conscious argument, in order to fit the existing concepts and facts of actual reality and thus to be controllable by some form of a authority. But the reverse is true, as demonstrated by our existing false reality despite all its restrictive laws and control regulations. Our reality is profoundly unworthy of our intuition, for the latter arises from intellect whose ultimate function is truth, and whose aim, a humantrue society, is our rightly desired destiny. And intuition, realised by supraconsciously responsible individuals, is the only reliable guide for the human race.
I am extremely sorry that in order to make this point I have had to criticise Noam Chomsky whom I admire. But the important thing is to get the world right and, whilst practically the whole human race has got it wrong, Chomsky is one of the most likely people to lead it the right way.
The case for supraconsciousness can be demonstrated by a simple mathematical comparison. The fact that intellect depends upon an electro-chemical system of signalling should not be thought detrimental, by those who prefer mysterious or spiritual explanations of the human self, any more than that a flower is a purely practical reproductive mechanism should detract from its beauty. To realise truth is the ultimate function of intellect, and we know that the neocortex consists of numerous neurons, axons, dendrites and synapses. We may suppose, by way of illustration, that the advance to truth requires, say, one million correlations to produce one interim true conclusion (see Chapter 49 table). By comparison the conscious faculty is limited in scope to, say, 350,000 correlations as the basis of its conclusions. That is why the truth cannot be arrived at by conscious evidence and argument - that plus the fact that while the postconscious is free and independent, the conscious is subject to manipulation by the wilful self. As a result of humanity's restriction to the conscious arena we are frequently concerned, for example, with criminal court proceedings. These proceedings are a matter of trying to determine a very limited truth - whether the accused is guilty or innocent as charged - according to narrowly relevant, conflicting evidence and argument. The independent postconscious, on the other hand, would dismiss the proceedings, and the concept of crime and punishment underlying them, as irrelevant to humantruth. In a similar way, the game of chess can be truly justified only according to its rules, and can be played well only by persons whose thinking is geared to the aims and rules of chess. Even though the postconscious might tolerantly recognise chess as a mere game, it could not play that game well because it could not allow itself to be subjected to any discipline other than truth. It has to be recognised that existing reality is made up of separate institutions, each with its limited aims, laws and rules, which, with our connivance, limit and utilise our minds much in the same way as the game of chess.
To return to my correspondence with Noam Chomsky and to his refusal to take intuition seriously by limiting himself to the rule of evidence and argument. Chomsky is doing what all his predecessors did, and this is the reason why he and they, in their writings if not in their private minds, have fallen short of truth. For instance, in an interview published in Radical Philosophy of Autumn 1989 he admits that he doesn't understand how children at the peak of language growth can learn approximately twelve substantive words per day. He sees it as extremely hard to understand how the child can suddenly pick up a word, and the complexity of even its basic meaning, in one shot. But this is not hard to understand when one accepts the concept of the postconscious mind, most of whose neurons and interconnections are, apparently, present and in working order by the age of two years. It is clear to me that the unconscious postconscious, stimulated by the child's determination to fulfil its need of all kinds of communication, compounds the significant meanings of words and eventually presents them to consciousness, complete with many of their interconnections with other words and with conscious reality.
I imagine that the actual formation of meanings into words is carried out in young children by that which will later be reduced to the utilised postconscious, in conjunction with a small conscious faculty that gradually increases in size. It seems to me that, in early childhood, the boundaries of conscious self-awareness are more narrow, and the area of unconscious mental activity is larger, to enable this language-learning to go on 'behind the scenes' at a time when our need for conscious awareness is at its least. As this learning process progresses the frontier of consciousness will be brought forward to the extent of adult self-awareness at the same time as the limits of the utilised postconscious are established -Figure 14a:
The earlier child-self is situated in consciousness, between its internal postconscious (together with the teaching area utilised by the postconscious) and the external world. The function of the postconscious is truth, as we know. In the beginning the postconscious is learning, and this represents the child's growing intellect. At the same time the conscious is learning how to react to the world outside, instinctively at first but then according to circumstances, to the evident need to relate to and survive in those circumstances, and to the interaction between itself and its postconscious. When the learning process begins, consciousness is limited and the self is open to postconscious teaching according to truth. The self begins by depending upon the postconscious to show it how to deal with, and communicate with, its actual reality. In a humantrue world this would be a straightforward matter of internal truth growing until it agreed with external truth. The child mind sets out with true intent, concentrating on the accurate learning, and honest usage, of language. But this process is very soon adulterated by the falseness of external reality. The postconscious may be misinformed, or denied information, so that it cannot learn, and so cannot teach, truth. The conscious self, having mastered such skill and accuracy in the use of language as the postconscious has had opportunity to learn and teach, having a certain conscious thinking capacity, and being faced with a false reality that demands competitive conformity for survival satisfaction, almost invariably chooses to turn its back on its own fundamental humantrue morality and throw in its lot with the Machine. At this point the independent postconscious puts up a barrier beyond which it will not allow the conscious will to extend its domination, and from behind which it attempts to exert true influence on the conscious self. On its side the conscious self reinforces this barrier to keep out that influence in its own assumed automatic interests.
The normal human self is given over to, or taken over by, the conscious sphere of thinking within the conscious arena of activity and under the Machine's domination. This is the crux of the human dilemma: that we and our world are not represented by our highest (postconscious) faculty. I have already shown, earlier in this chapter, that we may achieve a humantrue world through supraconsciousness, and that this necessitates the stimulation of intellation. But how are we to begin this process of breaking through to our own postconscious minds, when practically all of us are presently harnessed to the Machine and locked into its competitive money-economic reality?
The conscious self's relationship with its own postconscious is one thing, and that between postconscious minds is another, but the two things are interdependent, of course. The human situation may be represented by the mental relationship between one individual and another. It is also the relationship between all individuals and that which factually is, and which they conceive to be, their reality. To continue click here