Something of an Explanation

by Christopher Luna

What follows is a set of email correspondence between a friend and I, spurred by her reading of one of my previous posts, A Cautionary Note.

Her letter:

I have been thinking a bit on your thoughts about the non-unity of consciousness.  First of all, characteristically of me, I have been recalling the history of a similar notion in philosophy.  Curiously enough, it’s an old idea – Plato divides the soul into three parts in the Republic (corresponding to the parts of the ideal city), and Aristotle follows him in the De Anima (but I think he might have five parts). Plato’s division can be seen as the basis for Freud’s tripart division (features of which he has also taken from Nietzsche).

Most interesting for me is the continual need, almost compulsion to resolve the obvious differentiation and strife under the command of a rational faculty. For Plato this is where justice lies in the city and in the soul – that the right person (or part) rules. It is not that appetites, or spirit cannot rule, but the soul is corrupted when they do.  For Freud, the unity is invested, it seems more in the ‘spirited’ part – the superego is more akin to Plato’s rational faculty. For Aristotle, it is precisely ‘logos’ which is the differentiae – the attribute which defines us, or distinguishes our species from other similar ones. We are meant to be rationally ‘one’ because it is the essence of what we truly are (our form and our telos, or end).

Only Nietzsche really gives any thought to the possibility that the rational part of us might be just one among many.
The question I still have is, how is it that we still consider an individual consciousness to be ‘one’?  I’m remembering Kant’s rather enigmatic  discussion of the “transcendental unity of apperception” – which is the way in which all my perceptions are perceived by me to be mine.  And, even more interesting: how is it that these perceptions are united as “mine”? He answers – “Imagination”.  Hmmmm….

So my question to you is – what kind of inquiry/description are you making? Are you interested in the psychological aspects? ontological? phenomenological? cognitive?

And my response:
I have to start off by addressing your question about the “type” of inquiry I hope to make.  As it is characteristic of you to consider the history of a question, it is characteristic of me to be suspicious of these types.  I must confess that although I have read and reread the definition of “ontology,” it’s not a word whose meaning really sticks in my head.  In order to write this, I again consulted some definitions. Let me see if I can get this.  Ontology is a study of the existence of things?  In this case, to what extent do these other beings or entities within the mind exist?  Is there some hierarchy of their existence?

I guess I don’t know enough about ontology– either its history or its current conception– to know how much I’m interested in an ontological approach.  I mean, is the hierarchical nature of ontological investigation a hierarchy of existence (i.e., this thing can be said to have “more” or “greater” or “truer” existence than this other thing), or is it a rather separate hierarchy of value (this thing is somehow “better” or “more important” or “more powerful” than that thing)?  Ultimately, I chafe at the use of the word ontology.  Perhaps it’s because I don’t read Greek, and consequently such a word has meaning only to a select and very small group of people who read and speak the language(s) that I am familiar with.  I would prefer to speak and write more plainly.

If either of my conceptions of the hierarchical component of ontology are correct, I have somewhat less interest in what might be called an ontological approach.  I mean, a hierarchy of existence seems, on the one hand, quite absurd– and on the other hand, quite interesting.  On the one hand, it seems impossible that something should be on a scale of existence; on the other hand, if such a scale exists it is largely a matter of perspective, and a thing’s existence would be a value that shifted delightfully based on rather unstable conditions– capricious conditions one might almost say, including the mood of the observer, the observer’s knowledge, the observer’s empathy, and the observer’s values.

If instead, the hierarchical component of ontology is one of value or worth, the sheer fact that a sort of meta-valuation would totally shift one’s ontology makes an ontological hierarchy seem one of dubious worth without great qualifications.  Depending on the extent to which one was a sort of utilitarian, or a religious person, or however a person evaluated worth, one’s ontological hierarchy would again totally shift.  And there’s something so ironclad about that word, “ontology” and the way people toss it around.  I suppose ontology could just be accepted as a profoundly shifting method of inquiry that was not meant to act as some sort of foundation upon which to build teetering towers of philosophy, but I don’t know if that’s how it’s viewed.  Is it?

There might be a sense in which I am taking a phenomenological approach, although that’s another word I shy from because of its specificity and the impediment to clear communication that it presents across disciplines.  Wikipedia describes phenomenology as a modified “first person” investigation of the consciousness, “studying phenomena not as they appear to ‘my’ consciousness, but as they appear to any consciousness whatsoever.”  You must understand that there are a great deal of philosophers and philosophies with which I am not familiar.  My reading in this matter runs roughly: Plato, some primary Taoist, Buddhist and Hindu texts, the tiniest bit of Aristotle, the Bible, some Christian thinkers like Origen and Augustine, then skipping to Descartes, followed by Nietzsche, some passing familiarity with Hume, Locke, Bacon, Voltaire, Rousseau, a great deal of Milton and a fair amount of Blake and Shelley, C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, and finally skipping a great deal of time to run up against modern analytical philosophers of mind like Dennett.  So, I am largely unaware of the development of things like phenomenology, which seems to concern Husserl, Heidegger, and some French thinkers?  I don’t know very much about factions within early modern and contemporary philosophy, and mostly I draw my lines between certain philosophers which have inspired me, and certain religious thinkers that have inspired me.  I’m sure I’ve thought about the questions that phenomenology is meant to address, but I’m not altogether sure what phenomenology was, or turned into, or is now.  I’m also not entirely sure how useful a foray it would be for me, but perhaps you could let me know what you think about it.

Let’s see if I can answer, then.  I am interested in a first-person account, because all our accounts are necessarily first-person accounts.  Even as we attempt to make sense of interviews, or more simplistic accounts of other people, we do so via a powerful cognitive modeling of other minds– and although this modeling may widen our perspective, we are still limited to our perspective on other perspectives, colored greatly by the accumulated experience, judgments and uniqueness of biology that contribute to the structure of our minds.  An “objective” account is really just a perspective that we have learned, and is perhaps less useful or enlightening than other perspectives because of it’s self-contradictory nature.  It is a perspective which seeks to disguise itself as something else, something impersonal and aloof.

For that reason, it doesn’t seem possible to make an account as it would appear to “any consciousness whatsoever,” especially since I’m arguing in no small part for a multiplicity of consciousness.  Indeed, it may be useful to clarify some of the terms.  Consciousness seems to me more of a verb– an activity of the soul, rather than a thing or a noun.  Souls can be conscious to varying degrees, but I’m not sure at all any longer that the consciousness is some kind of entity that floats around the mind, shining a light here and there.  Consciousness might be a kind of awareness, brought to the forefront of the collective mind, while some souls maintain their awareness in the darkness.

Souls seems a better term than “personalities” or “entities” or even “models” to me.  Souls are the sort of “organs of thought” that we build (or that build themselves), each with their own awareness, their own drives, their own motivations and their own interface with the mind and the body.

I know that’s not very specific, but that’s because I’m still working these things out, and it’s not developed enough yet.  It’s still hard to express, but maybe it’s important to know that when I’m talking about the consciousness, I’m not talking about an entity or a noun sort of thing that exists in the mind.  Thinking of it that way might be part of the problem, and I’m not sure how much of a part of phenomenology it is to think of the consciousness as an entity.

As to the question of whether it’s psychological or cognitive, once again, I don’t know how useful it is to say it’s one or the other.  Psychology and cognitive science are sciences.  They are formal observations, and systems and theories based on those formal observations.  Those formal observations should inform philosophy, but they are necessarily narrow.  Science is very good at picking a very small problem, and wearing away at it.  It’s very good at describing observation, but it seems to me that it’s not as good at drawing large-scale ethical, personal, social or cultural ramifications from those observations.  It is intimately concerned with the nitty-gritty, and even the largest scientific theories stumble when it comes to their ramifications; take the evolution / God debate, for example.  Evolution has fascinating, deep, profound ramifications to humans both personally, culturally, and socially.  But the rhetoric around evolution is often banal– ideas of God are dismissed, or explained away, and most of the rhetoric seems to be about explaining how an idea of God came about, and how to make a cohesive system of fairly vanilla Western morality without using God as a lynchpin.  Wasn’t Nietzsche dismayed that atheism and the death of God was having so small a cultural impact?  Most secular humanists only seem concerned with finding a way to show that they are “good” in a sense that has been highly influenced by religious thought on morality, without the benefit of a God– scientists make excellent observations, but they often scratch only the most meager surface when it comes to some kind of non-technical application of their observations.

But, I suppose I should say that technical scientists have this difficulty; because there’s a sense in which I am hoping for a very scientific inquiry.  Let’s say psychology and cognitive science from the inside out, rather than from the outside in– and certainly such an inquiry would be foolish not to apply observations of psychology and cognitive science from the outside in to its insights.  But, necessarily, such an inquiry would have to be interdisciplinary, or perhaps even antidisciplinary.  These disciplines are themselves methods of thought– one establishes some rules about how to inquire, what sort of things should be believed, and how much they should be believed, and one establishes a framework for communication, and a particular expectation for the framework of results.  I’m talking about, in part, something that stands above all these frameworks and rules.  These frameworks and rule themselves comprise methods or skills of thought– in essence, they become their own souls, or thought-organs, that can be employed in analysis of all kinds of phenomenon, and gain their own voices.  They must have a sort of internal exclusiveness of their vision.  It is no good having a mathematical soul that abandons math in favor of poetic beauty capriciously.  A mathematical soul is useful precisely in its ability to understand even poetry mathematically.  To the mathematical soul, mathematical explanations are the best explanations.  Perhaps to the psychological soul, psychological explanations are the best explanations; and to the ontological soul, ontological explanations are the best explanations, and so on.

In part, I’m talking about the community that arises from the interaction of these various souls, and we are capable of representing this community, and all kinds of social relationships within this community, in a wide variety of ways.  I think that Freud, Plato, and Aristotle conception that the rational part of us is sort of “bound” for control in some way may be more of a cultural phenomenon than a truth of the human mind.  All three were very rational, logo-centered men living in societies that placed a great deal of value on rational thinking.  It is little wonder that they should conceive of the reason as the King.  But even in modern western populations, we find plenty of people for whom reason is not King, is more of a half-developed little voice; even more who probably have vast misconceptions about what reason is, and whose reason is certainly present, but by no means very strong, very skilled, or often in control.  Isn’t this what Nietzsche and Blake are talking about with a potential tyranny of Reason?  Plato and Aristotle and Freud think that reason should be in control, in the former cases, and observe that reason often is in control in the latter case– which doesn’t mean that control is the duty or function or even necessarily an attribute of reason.

Indeed, even the most rational men and women are often ruled by emotions, intuitions, which may in some cases be different systems in the mind that are, to some degree, hard-wired (like our anxiety responses), but are also different “higher-level” systems, or souls.  Many an otherwise rational person turns off their reason when they encounter a problem that has profound meaning to another soul within them.  Again, the secular humanist and theologian might be good examples.  Many secular humanists have a “bone to pick” with religion.  They aren’t incidentally secular.  Their secularity is something that they declare.  They feel all kinds of things about it: pride, a sense of injustice, often anger at what they consider unjustified belief, and, in many cases, a profound sense of an optimistic human destiny in which religion no longer plays a role.  When this soul is in command, the secular humanist will act surly, will often listen less to what anyone has to say about God, will remain aloof and confident without rational evaluation.  It is less that they calmly, rationally evaluate what a religious or even a literary critic has to say, than that they respond to it viscerally.

So too with the theologian.  Theologians are often people with exceptional rationality.  They have a profound command of logic, and many of the systematic tools with which they build analytic conceptions of God, ethics and social systems.  What did Nietzsche say of the southern, the Roman faith?  That it was almost a continual suicide of reason.  That, at the moment of belief at the center of hyper-rational Christian mind, where nothing can be rationally justified, there is a cyclical denial of reason.

In both cases, there’s some level of denial.  The secular humanist, when accused of being “closed-minded” and being unable to evaluate conceptions of God that may challenge their preconceptions, often claims that their denial of God is wholly rational, and often with some annoyance.  It is disturbing to them to think that their behavior towards an idea might be so heavily influenced by a soul or part of them that is particularly arational– that is moved profoundly by hope, anger, and even a sense of betrayal (for how many secular humanists were either Christians at one point, or feel as though they are persecuted by Christians?).  They may acknowledge all those feelings, but they always say that they are “rationally justified,” as though their rationality and their logic were responsible for the feelings.

When the theologian is confronted with the irrationality of his faith, he will also attempt to justify it rationally– and usually with less bitterness.  He will often claim that there is a great deal that is paradoxical in life, or that the fundamentals of belief in almost anything are often outside the realm of pure reason.

While the theologian is right that the fundamentals of belief are outside the realm of pure reasons, they have their own awkward conflict in the superiority that they attempt to give to reason in all things.  It is as though this understanding of the human mind is carefully bracketed off to some fundamental question of faith in God, and then quarantined.  It is viewed almost as a phenomenon of existence, but not a phenomenon of the mind.  The mind, many theologians continue to believe, is still a primarily rational thing.  Thus, they even attempt to find logical justification for their irrationality: “faith is an arational, paradoxical belief; rationality and reason don’t always hold in nature; paradox appears in nature; that which is paradoxical and arational can still be true and natural; therefore, a paradoxical, arational belief can still be true.”  It’s a rational line of thought used to justify an arational belief, again, as though the rationality lead them to the arational belief.

What’s interesting about these cases is that both of them might tend to demonstrate Plato, Aristotle, and Freud’s conviction that the logos is the King of the mind.  But, in truth, it only demonstrates that there are people for whom it is important that the logos is the King of the mind.  This insistence, this conviction, often leads to what I am increasingly aware of as a sort of abusive relationship, and a problematically abusive relationship, within one’s mind.

I would like to make a distinction here between violence and abuse.  There are many types of violence, and I think that violence between the souls in one’s mind is essential for growth.  But perhaps here we might again take some insight from Nietzsche.  When Nietzsche talks about war, he tells us that war should be conducted out of some level of respect.  When we fight that which we do not respect, it is difficult even to call our foe an enemy.  When our foe is beneath us, our relationship is more akin to the man who hunts a tiger because it has begun to venture out of the jungle, and has killed men.  One does not consider the tiger his equal, no matter how dangerous.  The tiger is an animal, and must be “put down.”  An enemy is someone that challenges us, and that we cannot easily refute.

In those who think of reason as King, they conceive often of intuition, emotion, and imagination as “lesser beings;” and falsely, from any standard.  Intuition, emotion, imagination have powerful things to say about the human condition.  They play a role in our lives that, even from a cold utilitarian perspective, no rational faculty could fulfill.  Expressions of art and poetry with meaning that eludes rational explanation still communicate, and often communicate thoughts, ideas, and perspectives so profoundly and deeply that it is only after a great deal of reflection that we can communicate those thoughts, ideas and perspectives rationally.  But even if we never should communicate them rationally, they have moved us, changed us, and affected our lives irrevocably.

So that relationship between logic and some of the other souls in the mind can be abusive when the logical or rational perspective dismisses those other perspectives, or sees little value in the insights of those perspectives.  Like it not, those other perspectives will rise up, and profoundly influence behavior, belief and thought.  But when the rational perspective thinks itself King, it will attempt to dismiss, and disassociate conclusions that it cannot justify on its own terms, and this is not only profoundly limiting, but it also gives rise to misplaced shame and a lessening of self-worth.  We become ashamed when we act out of passion– it seems awkward.  We become ashamed or embarrassed when we are moved to believe a thing and can give no rational explanation for it.

This is problematic on a number of fronts.  There are advocates for reason as King that would even acknowledge a great deal of this, but would claim that reason is still the most powerful faculty that we have, and that despite our minds which operate in arational and irrational ways at times, reason deserves to be King, and we function better in our environment and grow more readily when reason is King.  But even this is false.  Rational methodology sees no methodology in the process of imagination and inspiration.  It seems like some capricious, or magical process– images are suddenly and viscerally imbued with meaning and emotion long before any explanation can be given for the possible connection.  Sometimes we may be inspired to totally opposite ideals, and sometimes we are moved in ways that seem or are rationally contradictory.  Thus, the rational soul sees the intuitive, imaginative soul as, in some sense, dangerous, and unable to evaluate the consequences of its thoughts and beliefs.  But these faculties have their own way of evaluating their beliefs and behaviors.

Further explanation of how these faculties evaluate beliefs and behaviors is something I’ll save for another email.  But I am confident of my ability to explain it to some degree.  It’s enough to say that it can be problematic for these faculties to think of themselves as King and demean the reason, just as it is problematic for the reason to do so; and it’s fascinating when a person has two souls, one coldly logical, the other passionately imaginative, both of which demean the other.  They often act as two totally different people, with totally different narratives of the same events, denying that the other has any part in the whole.  ”I only acted that way because I was depressed and angry.  It’s not who I am,” or, “I don’t care any more about all those reasons!  I love that person!”  Often, they feel some guilt or shame when either side is in control.

Instead, one could have souls that respect their war with each other– that valued each other, even in their conflicts.  One’s rational soul could acknowledge the power, the potency, the vitality and possibilities unlocked by an almost rambling inspiration or imagination– while the imagination could respect the rational faculty’s capability to make sense of things, and to apply insights gained from a systematic analysis of a particular experience to other experiences.

But, I must qualify everything that I have just said.  I have been talking about “the imagination” and “the rational faculty,” but the souls in our mind aren’t so easily divided.  Indeed, I would say again that rationality and imagination are actions– things that a soul might be more or less skilled with.  But a great deal of what I said might be better expressed thusly: “the soul which knows itself to be highly rational and values rationality devalues the soul which is much more skilled at imagination or intuitive perceptions.”  In fact, many of the secular humanists have a host of very different rational souls– some of which live in perfect concord in the mind.  One might be a sort of mathematician, who loves to represent various notions in terms of statistics, while another might see various systems in terms of their “self-organizing” properties, as in A-Life.  These souls might chat together often, interact closely and work closely enough with one another that one might mistake them for a single soul with a single drive to think “rationally”– when what really happens is a discourse between these two highly rational souls.  They really speak to one another in the mind, hold good-natured debates, and learn from one another.

It’s easy for such souls to get along, even to disagree respectfully, given our present conceptions about the mind.  We might think of them as a single entity, a sort of faculty of another single entity, our consciousness.  It poses little problem, because they do not have contempt for one another, and have no need to disassociate themselves from a larger unity.  And maybe this is beginning to get to your other question, how it is that we still consider a mind to have a “single consciousness,” or in the language I’ve been using, a single soul.

And I suppose, where I’m coming to, we don’t.  The unity isn’t on that level.  We are a unity, and that unity is important– in the sense that we have “one body,” and that that body has undergone physical changes because of self-reflection, thought, and perceptions of the environment over the course of a lifetime (not to mention whatever genetic differences we begin with).  But that unity is only one slice of unity.  In a very real sense, our mind can hold many souls, and these souls can migrate.  We can make copies of our souls in other minds by having conversations, by making works of art, and even across great distances of time and space, by writing books.  These souls migrate from one body to another, and enter new internal social communities, where they interact, are changed by the new experiences of the body, and can even be “given back” to their originator, changed, to be somewhat incorporated into the originator.

This is what is, ultimately, interesting to me.  What kinds of internal social systems do not reduce the violence between souls, but make that violence a sort that is conducive to productive growth and refinement?  What kinds of external social systems allow for the migration of souls between people more readily and with less anxiety, without making us wide open to “virulent” souls?

These questions are important to me in no small part because I do entertain an A-Life perspective on some things– the notion that life, and life on various “orders of complexity,” are really just strange, self-organizing systems.  I believe that life can exist and change through any system that is capable of storing information.  DNA is one of those systems: a chemical method for the storage of information that can be modified and passed on.  And it’s the way we traditionally think of evolution.  But part of the power of A-Life in its ability to solve complex mathematical problems over a short period of time is that it runs through generations so quickly.  Where DNA-based life must run through generations that last more than a decade, an ideological form of life– the life of ideas, and possible human perspectives, and beliefs– could have many generations over the course of a single human’s lifetime– and could still be communicated in its “evolved” state to other humans before the death of the first.

The potential here seems staggering.  And certainly it’s something has been going on “naturally” (read: without conscious reflection or intervention) for some time.  But social changes deliberately employed could heavily modify the conditions for this kind of life, this kind of ideological “breeding” in and across minds.  There’s even a sort of “rising” that happens.  As awareness is no longer a thing simply passed from one soul to another, but humans become aware of the various souls, and aware of the awareness being passed, this might be called a “higher” and more capable awareness– because this awareness is able to regulate something for which there is no conscious regulation in a person who is not aware of these things.  The mind is flexible.  As this awareness of awareness becomes incorporated into the mind, what new awarenesses could be unlocked?

This all seems so truncated to me, and it’s something of a whirlwind tour of what’s been on my mind, but there it is.  Make what sense of it you can, and let me know what you think.

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