Br12 INTERPRETING REALITY
The word reality is a bone of contention. Its dictionary meaning is 'pertinent to that which actually exists or is present', and is taken to imply permanence. Humanity in general regards its reality as inevitable, unchangeable - almost as sacrosanct. It may change in detail, but fundamentally it remains the same.
An unchanging feature of our reality is an old principle. This says that, like it or not, right or wrong, it is our duty to accept the existing reality, adjust to it and earn a living by it. It lays down that our chief responsibility is to ourselves and our own families, before anything else. It says that our guide must be self-interest - that this is what makes the world go round - and only when our responsibilities to our own kith and kin have been met in full can we be justified in lending a helping hand to others.
This is a mightily strong principle, confirmed by the present fact that if you do not look after your own interests, and those of your dependents, nobody else will. True, in prosperous nations a safety-net is provided by the state to prevent anyone becoming totally destitute, but those who do not toe the realistic line are condemned to poverty. This might be reasonable in the case of the lazy and irresponsible, but what about those who will not conform to reality because they object to it on moral grounds, and want to change it?
Although most of us go along with it, I think everyone must agree that our reality is far from ideal, so why do we accept it? Because of that strong principle which makes self-interested acceptance our chief responsibility. And why not? - what is the objection? The objection is that this is not right for the intelligent human race - it is the wrong reality.
So what is it with this WRONG REALITY and what would be right for us? Convention views this as a crackpot question - reality is reality, and that's it. Yet the answer to the question shall arise from any intelligence which has not been bound hand and foot by convention; from a free mind. However, convention does not acknowledge the thinking of free minds on the grounds that such minds do not carry the authority of reality. But only free minds can discover human truth, and it is for individuals to free their own minds if that truth is to be discovered and realised. What is it, the truth about reality?
This existing reality is wrong for us because it is founded on instinct. Instinct is a set of instructions provided, for the sake of survival, to animals which can't really think. Instinct is not a suitable guide for the human species because of our enormous power of thought, or reason. Our guide should be our chief faculty, intellect. However difficult it may appear to be, if we are to make the change to a HUMANLY TRUE REALITY we must go against convention, and only the combined effort of free but united individuals can do it.
I have a theory concerning the origins of our race which does not depend on established realistic evidence and argument but on the free 'knowing' of what I call the postconscious mind (an explanation of which is to follow). If you will refer this theory to your own postconscious, perhaps by way of conscience, I believe you will agree with it.
The human race resulted from a single mutation in a female ancestor. This took the form of a hugely enlarged conscious faculty which would enable humans to improve their survival-prospects by replacing instinct with reason as chief guide to their behaviour. However, to the first humans this thinking faculty appeared to hinder rather than help them because it raised as many questions and problems as it answered and solved. What they really wanted was immediate power to assert themselves in a hostile environment; a sort of weapon with which to establish the supremacy of their species.
What the early humans did, which certainly established their supremacy in the natural world but which was to condemn the human species to a violently disunited, contradictory future, was to divide into two their hugely extended conscious faculty. This division gave them a much enlarged conscious mind with enormous thinking capacity, but only on one level and under the direction of self-interest subject to the drives of instinct. This made humans the most effective, but most destructive of all creatures in the animal world. Whilst superficially we are an advanced and enlightened race represented by our universities, concert halls, art galleries and cathedrals, fundamentally we are sophisticated animals subject to the pecking order and genocide, representing self-indulgence, shuffling off our responsibilities onto the money economy and political compromise.
The second part of the divided human mind is the postconscious. This is a large faculty of free and independent pure reasoning on five levels beyond the first-level reasoning of the conscious mind. The function of this faculty - the only possible function - is truth. But from the outset the postconscious was closed to consciousness, so although it should have been our guide and mentor it has had nothing directly to do with human 'progress', only an indirect effect by way of the still small voice of conscience, a voice which we take freedom either to heed or ignore.
So our reality is made up of two things - fact and concept. The facts of reality have been piled up one on top of another ever since we emerged as a species. Applying conscious intelligence to the drives of instinct we have built a competitive money-economy which influences or governs our every activity. In parts of the world we have developed into consumer societies devoted to working for the appetites and emotions of instinct and the interests of applied intelligence. Other parts of the world are neglected and deprived, just as nature deprives those at the bottom of the pecking order. Overall we are dedicated to pressing on with that 'progress' which desecrates nature and ruins its ecosystem, and to maintaining and periodically using armies and weapons of both personal and mass destruction, at the same time as our conscience, as it helplessly witnesses these things, recoils in horror.
Our concept of reality is that which exists - never mind whether it should or should not exist. As a consequence our attitude is that it is adult to accept reality - to knuckle under and make your way in it, putting your personal interests first. This may be understandable but it is not intelligent, for it stands directly in the path of true human progress. It puts pure reasoning in a bad light, seeing it not as the vital duty of human intelligence to follow truth but as pointless abstract thinking which can have no effect excepting to harm the Machine-prospects of the thinker and his dependents.
All this is dominated by a human conviction that we are incapable of reliable cooperation - that whatever good intention we might have there shall always be others in opposition. But we all have postconscious minds, all the same faculty with the same function - truth. Once this is admitted we can no longer ignore our postconscious minds, which means we must now hold to human truth. There is no good reason why we should continue holding to falseness and why we should not transfer allegiance to absolute truth, truth which our postconscious is capable of conveying to every one of us.
The difference between the reality we now have and the ideal is this. Our present reality represents the whole range of our conscious/instinctive potential from the worst to the best extremes. The facts of our reality having been developed in this way, we now accept that we are compelled to call up this whole range of behaviour in order to adapt successfully to the situation.
In the ideal human reality we would represent, first and foremost, the humantruth as shown to us by our postconscious minds. As a consequence we would insist on our reality being changed accordingly. Resulting from a humanly true reality, our actual social structure and behaviour would fully support our humanly true thinking which would, in turn, fully endorse our physical reality.
The problem is - how do we start? The catastrophe theory points the way. While continuing with our existing reality (on sufferance) we think, and exchange views about the humanly true alternative until our thinking becomes so powerfully true that we suddenly, unitedly change our minds and immediately co-operate in rebuilding our society according to the new convictions of our fulfilled intelligence. It can happen.
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 :
CURRENT :12. Interpreting Reality :
REMAINING : 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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