Blog Archives

On Vision & Being Human 10 - On Darwinism

18/4/2015

Having now examined the manifest properties and problems of visionary experience in the 21st century, we now proceed to the second major section of this essay: a lengthy excursion into the Darwinist origins of some of our fundamental human traits. Only with this expanded purview can we come to a new understanding of why visionary and religious experiences are so important, and so fundamental, to human cultures everywhere, and we may also at length discover why such visions are always experienced in terms of ‘Other’. If we are to move away from both literalist and dismissive views of these phenomena, to one in which the expectation of hidden realities and sacred beings emerges naturally from the ancestral conditions of the human being, we are required to look at ourselves in a completely different way. Darwinism represents such a new way, linking such apparently disparate and independent behaviours and experiences as vision, religion, language and ritual into a wider human whole.

The evolutionary theory which has come to be known as Darwinism is in many ways an elegantly simple thesis of profound transformative power. Dennett considered evolution to represent a kind of universal acid, an imaginary substance which dissolved anything it came into contact with and so could not be contained. In the same way, he said that Darwinism:

“...eats through every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionised worldview, with most of the old landmarks still visible, but transformed in fundamental ways.”

0 Comments

On Vision & Being Human 9 - Speculations on Consciousness as an Emergent Order

2/4/2015

4 Comments

Here we arrive at a great mystery, the nature of consciousness, a question mark which looms so large in human understanding that it may as well be white noise, and like any constantly-shifting mercurial image, what we see when we gaze into this white noise is often a reflection of what we already believe rather than any ‘true nature’. My own speculations on consciousness here should therefore be taken as just that – speculations – but they raise some important themes, most notably that of emergence, and again the idea that what we perceive, even about ourselves, may be more about useful evolved illusions than reality.

This is the last chapter in the 'introductory phase' of the essay, before a lengthy excursion into Darwinism and symbolic cognition is embarked upon. It should be noted that at several points here, reference is made to a newer draft of chapter 7 than that posted on this blog, in which objective reality is modelled as an emergent, ‘computational’ feature arising from quantum interactions. Douglas Hofstadter’s concept of the Strange Loop is also here obliquely referenced, and will be a future line of enquiry for development of some of these ideas.

While symbolic cognition is a crucial part of our perceptual architecture and of key relevance to visionary experience, we cannot begin to consider it before we come to some understanding of what we mean by consciousness. The nature of consciousness represents a major problem for modern thought: despite the vast number of definitions of the phenomenon – ranging from a sentience or alertness of mind, to a sense of self as separated from the world, and even as an immanent presence centred upon the brain – it remains confined to a paradoxical situation in which everyone experiences it but its true fundamental properties appear liquid and difficult to pin down. A relevant factor here is whether it is even relevant to consider consciousness as a 'thing' – as has been thought for many centuries – or as a 'process', or indeed as neither.