Br17 THE MIND AND PHILOSOPHY
A given meaning of philosophy is 'love of truth'. Academic Philosophers recognise several subdivisions of their subject, one of which is 'mind'. The term 'philosophy of mind' seems strange when one considers that it involves the mind thinking about the mind. It is necessary to distinguish between the mind and philosophy. Which mind is which? What assurance have we that one mind is wiser than the other? Where does the self come in? The term 'philosophy of mind' implies that to Philosophise is not to love truth but to play the game of forever skirting round truth at a safe distance.
There are differences of opinion as to how the mind works. Some say that it is matter reacting with itself, others that the mind transcends the matter of which the brain is composed. Both views are valid, as far as they go, for the mind is flesh, blood and electro-chemical reactions, just as a jumbo jet is a collection of metal and plastic parts plus fuel combustion, but in both cases the sum is other than its parts. It is usual to say that the sum is greater than its parts, but the word 'greater' is hardly appropriate in view of the generally unworthy uses to which minds, and machines, are presently put.
If we consider the purpose of the mind, we must start with the purpose of the physical brain of which the mind is the rational development. From the earliest times the brain has served the body in the interests of survival. When a hominid brain mutated and produced the human species, the increased capacity and complexity of the neocortex gave humanity the ability fully to contemplate itself as well as the outside world. This increase in brain capacity was potentially the ultimate conscious mind. The purpose of the new human conscious was also to serve the body, but to serve it better that the previous main tool of this purpose - instinct.
If it is accepted that the object of this enhanced conscious mind was to replace the comparatively crude tool of instinct with a superior tool, and thus improve human survival prospects, it must also be accepted that this conscious mind had to have optimum reasoning-power, ie the maximum possible numbers of neurons, axons, dendrites, synapses etc. If humans were to go against tried and tested instinct and adopt new strategies, they must be able to foresee all possible risks, calculate sound tactics and take all precautions. The vastly extended human conscious mind could be expected to achieve this objective.
However, it was the consequentially huge reasoning-power of this new mind that defeated its own object. So many avenues of possible thought were opened up that the self - the focul-point of the conscious mind that makes choices and decisions - became confused. So the self reverted to the security of instinct, viewing the new mind-mutation in total as a hindrance rather than a help because it caused indecision which endangered survival. Nevertheless the instinctive self put part of the mutation to its own use by embracing as much of the new brain-extension as it could both bring under control and apply to the improved effectiveness of its old-established instincts, overriding some inconvenient inhibitions and enhancing the competitive drives.
The rest of the human brain extension, its major part, whilst fully aware of all that was going on was closed off from direct contact with consciousness, ensuring that it could not interfere with, and thus continue to confuse, the conscious mind and self. But by the same token the self was unable to interfere with or influence this separate extension, which I call the postconscious. As a result of such freedom and independence the postconscious enjoyed conditions vital to its full development. It became a fully informed faculty of pure and unadulterated reason, therefore dedicated to the only possible objective of such a faculty - the discovery and realisation of truth.
It is important to realise that the self, the Id, has no place in the postconscious mind. The potential of all postconscious's is one and the same truth, regardless of person. It is equally important to make the associated realisation that the conscious mind alone, if only because it contains the dominant wilful self, is incapable of truth and so cannot be relied upon. It must not be forgotten, of course, that the conscious self embraces emotion, but feeling should enrich, not direct human life. That we have relied on the conscious mind is the cause of the present unhappy chaos in our world. If human society is to fulfil its true potential, then supraconsciousness - a state of conscious submission to the guidance of the postconscious - is essential.
After the newly extended conscious mind had been formed and had taken over human being, the banned postconscious mind reasoned independently, encouraged to varying degrees by selves who continually raised weighty questions which their conscious minds could not answer. The postconscious contrived to skirt the barrier between itself and the conscious, forming a small channel, or conscience along which it passed its chief, simple conclusions, messages which are the source of our moral awareness, .
DIAG
1A. PRESENT ARRANGEMENT OF THE HUMAN MIND - WITH CONSCIOUS
PREDOMINANT AND POSTCONSCIOUS EXCLUDED APART FROM CONSCIENCE
The conscience generally takes a back seat among the influences exerting themselves on the conscious self and mind. Its moral messages, though founded in truth, are not mandatory, their acceptance a voluntary matter. The true reasoning behind it is unconscious - not available to consciousness. So the conscience is weak by comparison with the other influences on consciousness which are part and parcel of an amoral world reality, a reality which the self takes, or imagines, to be inescapable. These influences are dominated by the competitive drives of instinct, and include all the concepts, principles, practices and institutions that comprise our present reality, which I call the Machine. Among these institutions is the money economy which supplants the real interests of humanity with its own; politics which wends the crooked way of compromise between these different interests; education which ignores root truth in its anxiety to have us conform to false reality in body and mind; government and law which attempts to bring order out of the resultant chaos. The rationalisation of our Machine-reality does not reside in true reason but in the conscious mind applied to instinct.
The happiness of any living creature is the satisfaction it derives from fulfilling its every faculty - its nature. The human race as a whole is not happy because it does not fulfil its chief faculty, its postconscious mind. That it fell short of this ideal in the beginning is understandable, but that it still falls far short, though the ideal is well within its compass, is quite unjustifiable. It is the nature of an optimum thinking faculty, and therefore of the human race, to discover and realise truth, not to fill a destructive, largely instinctive roll.
Why is it that the many great minds which have struggled for centuries to answer and solve the fundamental human questions and problems have not succeeded? Because they have attempted to do so with their will-empowered selves confined to worldly reality and using - using, mark you - the conscious mind. Within the confines of that reality they have worked wonders of logic and technology, but fall short of the objective which their professed love of truth ought rightly to embrace because they believe that their struggle has to take place in this, the false conscious arena. They have consistently eschewed the source of truth, the postconscious mind, regarding its messages as unfounded intuition because those messages contradict our present overwhelming reality and their origin is concealed. Instead of accepting the promptings of conscience as pointers to a humanly true reality, our recognised thinkers have insisted upon the principle that if a proposition is to be held true it must be proven by evidence and argument, ie evidence and argument inadequately conceived by the conscious mind. Early in the year 2000 they have not yet become aware of the existence of the postconscious. Consequently they do not recognise that truth is the province of the postconscious, a mind which is sealed off from conscious intrusion (but fully open to all information). Neither do they understand that truth, since its source is the postconscious mind, cannot be proven by the conscious mind in the way they require. The postconscious can communicate constructively with the conscious but the process has to be unconscious, and the conscious self must be fully committed to it. Conscience is an example of this communication.
I deduce that postconscious thought is a hierarchical process rising through six levels of the neocortex (the existence of these levels is suggested by Popper & Eccles' illustrations in The Self and its Brain, Springer International 1977, pp 235/240,) with conclusions at level one becoming super-conclusions at level two and eventually reaching truth at level six. This truth is hard to sustain in the light of false reality which views it as 'pie in the sky', but existing human reality appears clearly insane to postconscious eyes and, periodically, even to conscious eyes.
Conscious thought, on the other hand, is confined to one level at which it can be controlled by self-will. As a consequence the conscious mind, having the enormous scope provided by innumerable potential linear and lateral connections, can think almost infinitely but cannot proceed by the same process of elimination as is followed by the postconscious whereby masses of fact and reason are laid away under the heading of their essential truth, and thinking proceeds in all directions, making all conceivable connections and amassing such essential truths until they too come to be condensed into a conclusion and the process repeated.
The laterally linear character of conscious thought explains why, in this Machine-reality, we specialise and persevere with practices which make no sense, or worse. It is the reason for our many contradictory convictions, faiths, beliefs and opinions which are justified by the fact of self-adoption and loyal preference rather than true reason. It also explains the nature of academic Philosophy whose practice involves an endless proliferation of thought on one level mapped out and guarded by predetermined rules. One such rule has already been mentioned - 'to be regarded as true a proposal must be proven by (conscious) evidence and argument'. Here are two other Philosophical rules that arise from failure to recognise the postconscious mind - 'there is no such thing that qualifies indubitably as 'the true path of reason', and 'we need established (conscious) ways of thinking to be able to distinguish (1) a discovery from a fabrication and (2) a discovery of truth from a discovery of falsehood'. These rules have the opposite, falsifying effect to that claimed for them by Philosophy, in that they keep individuals' noses hard up against the grindstone of Philosophical discipline and consequently turn them away from their postconscious which is the true path of reason and which has its own true ways of thinking.
Truth is the set of ultimate conclusions, principles and qualities that remain undeniable after utterly exhaustive postconscious pure reasoning. Truth is deniable by the conscious mind, however, where self-will has the power to determine and decide its version of truth. That version of truth is upheld by incomplete facts and arguments marshalled in its support and would be rendered false by contradictory true facts and arguments were they not unknown to the conscious, and not omitted by it. Such omissions are not deliberate, of course, but result from the restrictive conscious rules already mentioned, and from the fact that the conscious mind is adapted to applying thought to self-chosen objectives, not to following postconscious thinking wherever it leads towards truth.
It is the restrictive nature of conscious thinking that necessitates the breakdown of Philosophy into several disciplines - epistemology, metaphysics, ethics etc. As a simple illustration attempting to describe a complex process, it might be said that the volume of academic Philosophical thinking takes the shape of an inverted pyramid, increasing endlessly upwards and outwards beyond the scope of any conscious mind wholly to comprehend. Postconscious thinking on the other hand, would take the normal pyramid shape, starting from massed information at its base, upwardly reducing this to essentials by way of pure reason condensing and clarifying it until, at the summit, truth is reached.
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:11. Free Thinker View : 12. Reality : 13. Understanding Consciousness : 14. Bottom Line :15. Brain-Mind Relations: 16. Open Letter to Philosophers :
CURRENT :17. The Mind and Philosophy :
REMAINING : 18. Self Twixt 2 Minds 19. The Holographic Dimension 20.Transhumanism Transcended 21.Mind, Will and Self
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