Br7 Critical Comment on Views Expressed by Steven Pinker
The views expressed by acknowledged experts, whether they lead or follow the common views, should not be accepted in a spirit of hopeless resignation, but require to be challenged.
A selection from the well publicised views of Steven Pinker, Neuropsychologist, and answering comments
1. Pinker :'Any investigator must embrace and reconcile such disciplines as chemistry, biology, psychology, personality disorders, artificial intelligence and human behaviour.'
Comment : Better than embracing these specialist disciplines (which, being prescriptive, restrict the freedom and independence of pure whole reason,) excepting in a general way, he or she would do much better to submit all questions and problems to the postconscious mind (see below) and wait for its eventual true conclusions in answer.
2. Pinker : 'We will never resolve the great philosophical questions such as why we are here.'
Comment : (See 5 and 7 below). We are here to fulfil, in our values and behaviour, the end-result of evolution - higher intellect, or the postconscious mind as I call it, by the discovery and realisation of human truth, i.e. that which is in every respect true rather than false. This discovery is well within our compass.
3. Pinker's cerebral trinity : 'The brain is firstly an information processor, secondly the product of evolution over thousands of years, thirdly compartmentalised, so that different chunks carry out specific tasks.'
Comment : This is the conscious view which cannot be right because it ignores our chief faculty, the postconscious, for the conscious is a lesser faculty which cannot comprehend the meaning of the whole mind because it is dominated by the wilful self and cannot perform the function of our postconscious - humantruth. The human conscious self should not dominate, but subject itself to, the whole mind. The brain facilitates the mind but the mind transcends the brain. Motor functions of the brain are direct results of millions of years of evolution, but consciousness was the beginning of mind, and the advent of the postconscious, the completion of mind, made humans potentially the result of evolution rather than part of its process. I look on the following as the stages of cerebral evolution - (a) decisions made by instinct, (b) Consciousness - decisions also made by the wilful self informed by conscious thought applied to instinct - this is our present stage. (c) intellectual Supraconsciousness - the conscious self submits to the guidance of the postconscious, whose function is truth.
4. Pinker : 'Free will is a fictional construction but it has applications in the world as we know it. Our behaviour has the appearance of being motivated by free will, but the 'decisions' we make are actually the results of biology.'
Comment : To begin with, animal will was inseparable from instinct which no doubt was the result of biology evolving it as a guide to survival. The will developed along with consciousness, giving a very limited 'freedom' to make decisions on the basis of experience and conditioning, between fight and flight for example.
The human race sprang from a mutation, giving us an added mind - the postconscious, which seeks truth through free and independent pure reason but which, apart from giving us language and conscience, has not been accepted as our true guide. Our civilised thinking, our decisions and actions have been confined to the conscious sphere, which is incapable of truth, even though enhanced by that mutation.
With the advance of civilisation the will appeared to be much more free because there were many more choices, but it was mostly freedom to choose which way to conform to the norm - which variant of instinctive drive or inhibition to choose, but without freedom to reject the norm and make entirely new choices.
The next potential stage of human evolution is supraconsciousness, in which all of us shall have complete freedom to behave as we will yet still have no real freedom, for in basic practical matters we shall all behave in the same way - according to our agreed will - because we shall all be guided by our postconscious minds whose function is one and the same humantruth.
5. Pinker : 'Here is one enigma which we shall never solve. Philosophy is a riddle to which there is no answer, and our attempt to rationalise the world is merely a by-product of the brain's capacity to process information. Our brains force us to see the world in a certain way, and we find it hard to shut them down. We can't help but worry about these problems, but we will never answer them.'
Comment : Taking the word philosophy to mean 'love of truth', which must also imply 'pursuit of truth', the academic version of Philosophy (with a capital P) is a riddle because its disciplined thinking has been confined to the conscious mind in which wilful ego dominates so that many different part-truths are accepted as true. The capacity of the whole human brain (in particular the postconscious) to process information, if given pure freedom and independence, can only result in truth. Philosophical riddles are by-products of irresponsible conscious self-willed interference with the otherwise naturally true course of the whole mind's information processing, notably by shutting out the human brain's chief faculty, the postconscious. And who are we, if not a product of the brain? Of course we can answer the world's problems, through conscious acceptance of the true conclusions reached by postconscious reasoning, rather than require the impossible as we presently do when we insist on proof by conscious evidence and argument. The postconscious is impenetrable by any outside influence, interference or examination, as it must be in order to perform its function of truth. It is ridiculous that the lesser conscious mind, which is incapable of truth and therefore cannot judge it, should demand this proof. We can question all we like but only when open to our postconscious may we know truly, and then we must accept its knowing.
6. Pinker : 'There is still the leftover nugget called consciousness that we can't explain.'
Comment : Consciousness can be explained as the shifting focal point (self) of the conscious mind's thinking as it observes the body's actions and its own connected or disconnected thought but also, in the human case alone, as awareness, potential or actual, of the superior understanding of the postconscious and of the moral conclusions it passes to our consciousness and the guidance it can give us, on all things, if we will but pay attention. .
7. Pinker : 'The big philosophical questions will never be answered by us because our brains are not capable of solving them. And I don't seek for an explanation because we can understand the human brain without it.'
Comment : But it is the conscious that is not capable of solving those questions. Again, how does one identify this 'we' which, you claim, shall understand the human brain yet not the philosophical questions which only that brain can have invented (albeit the lesser conscious part of the brain). Essentially we are the human brain, though we don't acknowledge it. We are especially our chief faculty, the postconscious, which is fully capable of explaining everything. We may need to know how the lower motor functions of the brain work in connection with the body for medical purposes. But we - as our conscious self, the focal point of human being - cannot and do not need to understand and are not able fruitfully to investigate how the much more complex postconscious thinks. We only need to identify with the postconscious, to know that what it tells us is true (for truth has to be its function), to rely on it, and to recognise that such knowing carries a human responsibility to realise truth in the world, or beyond. If we were to contact and peacefully co-exist with equally intelligent people belonging to other planets, supraconsciousness would have to be our common link.
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:
CURRENT : 7. Comment Pinker :
REMAINING : 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 : 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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