49 The FLAW IN OUR ACCEPTED, PHILOSOPHICAL MODE OF THOUGHT
During the original process of finally writing, typing, and editing this book, I made a new discovery which revealed a flaw in our accepted, Philosophical mode of thought. This discovery could be a means of human awareness breaking through, because it clearly demonstrates that the Philosophical mode of argument - the same mode that we employ in all Machine affairs - is distorted thinking of the conscious mind, incapable of finding humantruth. I made this discovery the chief subject of a paper entitled 'Taking intuition (meaning insight of unconscious origin, or internal knowing) on trust - the necessary first principle of truly radical philosophy', which was rejected by Metaphilosophy, an American journal which purports to be interested in such things. The appropriate parts of this paper are as follow.
In a paper entitled 'Can there be progress in philosophy?', (Metaphilosophy January 1987), Kai Neilsen suggested that established Philosophy (which I give a capital P) was redundant, and that we should return to the original concept of philosophy (with a small p) - 'the attempt to see things in a comprehensive way in an attempt to make sense of our lives.' Neilsen suggests that humanity urgently needs 'a holistic critical theory - a theory which sees, displays and explains how things hang together in a comprehensive way - which is in an integrated way a descriptive-explanatory social theory, an interpretive theory and is, as well, a normative critique.' In my own paper I agreed that this is what we need, and put forward this book you are reading as just such an attempt. To begin an explanation of my discovery, and to relate it to Philosophy, let me return to the matter of the formation of human character, already discussed in Chapter 12 and elsewhere.
Imagine the overall human higher mind as consisting of two spheres. Figure 12 below shows one sphere as small, representing the conscious and containing, say, for argument's sake, 100 dots. The other sphere is large, representing the postconscious and containing 500 dots. The total of 600 dots is taken to represent optimum human knowledge. If all these dots, ie items of knowledge, were interconnected in every conceivable way, by every correlation of reason, the resultant awareness would be true, as far as that is possible taking into account the limitations of our knowledge. Although limited knowledge rules out awareness of whole universal truth, conclusions that were arrived at by exhaustive correlation of everything known about our world would constitute humantruth. If these 600 fully-correlated dots were optimum human understanding and were it shared by all, then this would be our humantruth and all would be agreed.
Suppose, however, that the dots in the small sphere were numbered from 1 to 100. Now suppose that the larger sphere is divided into two parts - a lesser part, which is commonly utilised by consciousness, and also contains 100 dots, numbered 101 to 200. The greater part, the postconscious, containing 400 dots, is independent of consciousness - ie unconscious. Imagine that one individual makes a preferred construction of thought (preferred because it suits his or her situation) of dots numbered 1 to 25 and 101 to 125, marked + in Figure 12. This construction would be the intellectual basis of that individual's character (this is to ignore that part of character determined by genetically inherited and learned emotional personality and temperament). Dots 26 to 100 and 126 to 200, representing knowledge which this individual recognises as part of the automatic reality but as being outside his or her preferred construction, would be interpreted according to that preferred construction's mode of thought. The remaining dots 201 to 600, unconsciously working to build a true construction of thought and trying to bring its influence to bear in the form of intuition, or conscience, is normally suppressed or ignored. Where the free postconscious succeeds in making itself felt, this is put down as wishful yearning, not to be taken seriously. The individual's mind is thus founded, then continually added to by thoughts aligned with its prevailing prejudice. In this way her or his necessarily biased and incomplete opinions and beliefs are formed. This biased mind is what the individual thinks with and acts upon. Within the limits of this falsely founded world no better external guide is made available for us to follow, better by virtue of being truly founded.
Now suppose that there are three other distinct individuals, with three extremely different constructions of thought, one consisting of dots 26-50 and 126-150, the second of dots 51-75 and 151-175, and the third of dots76-100 and 176-200. We now have four separate individuals who have no evident intellectual characteristic in common, who in no way think alike about anything, and each of whose self-assertions threaten the other three so that all appear justified in forming themselves into groups and opposing, and defending themselves against, the rest. Of course, characters are never so sharply distinct. Their thoughts and opinions overlap and intermingle, and there are many more than 600 dots in the two spheres. But I think this example shows how the Machine's diverse interests and compulsions cause the majority of individuals to construct and defend their different and conflicting characters, beliefs and opinions.
We already know that humans are represented solely by their biological brains, which contain three minds - the instinctive/preconscious, conscious, and postconscious. The postconscious is the unique mutation which has given us true intellectual potential. And the postconscious must be unconscious to the conscious self, with a language faculty intervening, for two reasons. Firstly, it is quite obvious that the postconscious - the neocortex of ten thousand million neurons on six levels - does not reason in language terms and so needs a clearing house in which its conclusions are converted into language and conveyed to the conscious. Secondly, there is a limit to the handling capacity of the conscious mind, almost continually bombarded, as it is, with information that has to be processed and acted upon rapidly and accurately. Consciousness is already protected from certain unnecessary interference by the fact that most motor functions are relegated to subconscious involuntary causation. It needs similar protection from the much more complex, lightning-fact processes of postconscious reasoning - that of unconsciousness of these processes (excepting for their concise conclusions), for if they were admitted to consciousness they would swamp it entirely and confuse it utterly.
Let me attempt to illustrate the complexity of the postconscious mind's processes, which carry out its reasoning. Imagine how the mind might reduce the many complications of one deeply significant problem to a conclusively true solution by the only possible means - exhaustive correlation:
LEVELS
The complexity of these processes, going on in the depths of the independent postconscious, strikes a contrast with the calculations of the conscious mind and the utilised part of the postconscious which characterise the general thinking of a human society harnessed to the automaton. With automated thinking the true conclusions of the independent postconscious, instead of being embraced by the self as its proper mentor and guide, are denied by the existing self and replaced, on the instructions and urges of conscious will, by the Machine and associated influences contained within the conscious sphere. Our society claims to be highly intelligent, and to have advanced its thinking to elevated levels. There is no question of individual human high intelligence, but our mental activities have been so restricted and manipulated as to fall far short of the fulfilment of our intellectual potential.
For its high-level thinking, hopeful humanity used to look to its philosophers but they, failing to find humantruth through conscious argument and overlooking the postconscious as the source of humantruth, also formed yet another institution of the Machine, that of Philosophy, now long-established, with its own rules and codes, its own principles, and its gravely recorded history. Philosophers, too, have fallen in with the normal acquiescence - the general admission that the Machine, though it is not acceptable to our finer senses of true morality, is our actual and overwhelmingly existing reality which must be accepted and over which our true morality can never prevail. So Philosophy has become partly a forum for debating automatic issues with a view to orienting them a degree or two towards human interests, and away from automatic interests, but its main preoccupation is not the outcome of the debate but the actual rotary mechanism of its own brand of logical argument, with no real hope or intention of total humantrue reform.
Like other academic institutions, Philosophy has been made a subject of study. Part of its discipline (the whole of which constitutes Philosophy's conscious restriction and manipulation of thinking so that it, too, fails to fulfil the intellect's potential) is that all its current thinking must defer, or at least refer, to the works of the great Philosophers of history. Philosophy's already-established learning has to be assimilated by students and forms a major part of their growing mind-structure. The conscious mind has to take account of written arguments which represent the incomplete and contradictory conscious thinking of past minds, thinking which present postconscious minds will not take in because it does not make true sense. Were that thinking complete it must be unmistakably true, making the subject of Philosophy redundant. In any case truth, or humantruth, is the province of the postconscious mind, the self-evidently true product of intellation. It is beyond the conscious mind to comprehend and too infinitely complex to be captured in writing. The conclusions of postconscious minds, past and present, are not accepted or even considered by Philosophers because such conclusions are buried in unconsciousness and cannot be so presented, in writing and with the required evidence and proofs, as to be utterly and convincingly comprehended by the conscious mind. Such unsupported conclusions, commonly known as intuition and thought to be guesswork, were referred to by Kant, it seems, as vulgar assertions. It is quite evident that this intuition is much more deeply reasoned than conscious thought, but the latter is commonly preferred because its logic can be consciously followed and proven, as in mathematics for example. As a result, to a large degree students' minds come to think by means of Philosophy's discipline and obligatory learning, rendering them unable to stand apart and judge truly. Studious thinking evidently comes to depend on that learned construction of the utilised postconscious without the free and independent postconscious being given the opportunity of addressing it critically. This commonly prevents individuals from becoming aware that to take this opportunity is vital to true understanding. It might even blind them to the fact that such an opportunity actually exists. So learning Philosophy, and any other formally instituted subject, is like running an obstacle course which the conscious mind, with the aid of the utilised postconscious, negotiates by contrived thinking.
The arguments of past Philosophers are kept alive partly because they can not be refuted, partly because they are recognised as the permanent property of the persons, dead or living, to whom they first occurred. 'Doing' Philosophy can become a struggle to discover some new and irrefutable argument to which one's ownname will be forever attached. But thought should be free of ownership. The value of a true conclusion should not accrue to its originator. Such a conclusion should be valued according to its place in the true construction of all other minds, minds which will make it part of the common humantruth that will unite them, the discoverer's name forgotten. This is not to suggest that in the future we should devalue past thinkers who reached true conclusions, but should recognise that their contribution was only part of the common responsibility to discover and realise humantruth, and that humantrue understanding is everybody's right.
When a mind studies Philosophy, absorbing consciously-managed thoughts expressed in language, particularly those conveyed by Philosophy's own specialised language, it is denying to its intellect the very much deeper and broader unconscious insight of the postconscious mind. For example, dualism and reductionism are Philosophical terms expressing differences of view which consciously-managed thinking can not reconcile (otherwise Philosophy would have no need of these distinctive terms). The resolution of these differences, by way of supraconsciousness, lies in the truth which, being true, does not recognise these terms as meaningful - cannot understand them because they denote failure to fully understand. The discipline of Philosophy accepts the irreconcilable differences between the concepts of dualism and reductionism because it accepts the limitations of conscious thinking which can neither dismiss nor irrefutably establish either concept. Both these concepts cannot be true. No postconscious could acknowledge any concept that is not true, nor allow that two concepts, one of which must be false, should co-exist. And if a concept is undoubtedly known to be absolutely true by one conscious mind, it must be true for all conscious minds. If a mind supraconsciously knows truly, even though it cannot describe the basis of its knowing, it also knows that the concepts of dualism and reductionism are not helpful and should not be taken seriously, for they are not necessary pathways to truth so much as different expressions of the same (conscious) mode of thought which precludes the discovery of truth.
The instituted academic discipline of Philosophy has set itself the huge and impossible task of understanding everything by relying on consciousness rather than supraconsciousness. That the task is impossible is indicated by the fact that Philosophers cannot even agree on first principles. It is this misuse of the mental process that has given intellect a bad name. It is common for the conscious self to contradict the truths known by its own postconscious. Failing to understand that the postconscious is a magnificent, ultimate thinking organism, and that the shortcomings of the human mental process lie not in the postconscious but in our conscious refusal to submit to it, the Machine is developing ultra-intelligent machines, or UIM's. If UIM's are perfected, in a world that remains automated, they will be in the same position as the postconscious. If we are allowed to listen to them it shall be because they have been preconditioned with conscious programming. If UIM's are allowed absolute freedom and independence, so that they both understand and insist upon truth, the Machine will not allow that they be listened to. Brain science is destined to reach the same position that Philosophy is trying to reach in that, should it come to comprehend the entire complex mechanism of the human brain, that which it seeks to know will still escape it, for this is the province of our own postconscious, necessarily unconscious to us but reaching our conscious minds by way of personal internal postconscious 'knowing', our only source of true understanding.
So human society, including Philosophy, exists on the conscious level where all accepted thought, all acknowledged debate, and all communication is confined to that which can be conveyed in language, written or spoken. Although our true minds occupy the higher postconscious level, Philosophical argument and all automatic thinking is under conscious control which prevents it reaching out to embrace this postconscious level. And yet, paradoxically, the discipline of Philosophy accepts automatic reality - the Machine - because it is a discipline dedicated to evident truth. Philosophy confines itself to conscious thinking by pre-determining the meansof discovering truth - that only demonstrably irrefutable evidence and argument is to be recognised as true,argument that must be expressed in language in order to be demonstrable to others. This, fundamentally, is the flaw in our accepted, Philosophical mode of thought. It means that the facts of automatic reality - the basic fabric of the Machine as the framework of world society - must be accepted because they are presently irrefutably factual. It also means that such argument may forever pursue endless possibilities, because no moral proposition can ever be proven true at the conscious level, only at the postconscious level. Consciousness may 'know' such a truth, but only by accepting the postconscious's certainty (founded in unconsciousness) that it is true. Any consciously-reasoned opinion or belief can be upheld (though without postconscious foundation), even though it cannot be irrefutably proven, because similar reason cannot disprove it either. Given these circumstances, Philosophers might well feel that all they can do is tackle the monumental and impossible task entrusted to them by their institution. The Philosophical kind of thinking, though it ransacks the conscious reasoning capacity of some brilliant individuals to a mind-boggling extent, nevertheless goes round in circles from one incomplete part-truth to another.
To record the reasoning-processes of the postconscious, were this somehow possible, would be to write a huge number of volumes, of staggering complexity, which we could not possibly consciously understand. A super-computer, or UIM, might actually do the job one day, but we could not understand that either. The only way of being sure that mental processes we can not consciously follow are nevertheless known to be true is to have them take place unconsciously in our own postconscious minds. We have to recognise our true intuitive assertions because these are the conclusive truths that only the unconscious postconscious can verify. We have nothing to rely on but each individual's honesty of mind, whereby common patterns of postconsciously true reason aggregate to voluntary recognition of humantruth in common. The child mind, which is capable of substantially, and largely independently, mastering language in a mere three years, is also capable of discerning the essential elements of humantruth. For the next ten or fifteen years of the child's life the Machine proceeds to undermine, neutralise, abuse, and obscure this true perception. This has been the way since human civilisation began, so that the historical standards of rationality and objectivity are false guides. Ahistorical standards exist in the truths of the postconscious, truths which automated humanity loses through the conditioning of education and experience, generation after generation, but can rediscover by intellating. The principle of equality is an example of an ahistorical standard that we postconsciously know to be humantrue but which the Machine has consistently rejected throughout our history. This principle, and humantruth as a whole, can be opposed by myriads of arguments, for it is always possible to find conscious reasons for disagreement, but the dogged questioning, listening and re-questioning of the intellation process will eventually reveal the undoubted truths of the postconscious.
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