(Loosely speaking, this is the thematic sequel to Kill The Beast )
If you’ve taken any college-level psychology or have simply paid any attention to the movements inside pop-academia and University Scholarism, you might have noticed, like myself, that the industry catch-all nominally termed “Science” is now officially banding together to tackle what has been, to date, its largest and most difficult problem.
Glibly coined “consciousness”, the loosely constructed and highly debated notion of self-awareness has been somewhat of a compromising situation among mainstream scientific enterprise and its adherence to Descartes maxim concerning the observer (the ego) and that which is observed; generally, the material world or all that exists outside of the ego.
The proverbial “fly in the ointment”, one might say, is that, given a heretofore purely mechanistic explanation of the universe and the Natural World, what is a seemingly spiritual entity (the conscious being) deliberating, independently, between and among the various causalities and finalities of the material world is simply too compromising to be allowed into the Scientific Canon.
Indeed, “consciousness” as an independent agency has been something of a loose cannon for orthodox Science since at least the 19th century and the Industrial Revolution.
Generally, psychology tackles the conundrum of human agency by separating and isolating the ego, essentially diminishing the pre-modern notion of a soul by materializing it and placing it somewhere inside the brain. The “self”, I was told in college, could very well be located somewhere among the lobes of the cerebral cortex.
Going a step further, theoretical physicists are now positing that consciousness is a state of matter, not unlike a solid, liquid, or gas. “Perceptronium”, a biological but maybe not, condition, says the Manhattan Institute of Technology, is a state of matter residing in human brains that has its atoms so arranged as to give rise to the illusion of subjectivity.
Another step further (or back), depending on your outlook, is the growing consensus among certain sects of neuroscience which posit that we owe our “consciousness” to the remnants of an ancient virus that infected four-limbed mammals some 400 million years ago.
Regardless, of its particular expression, the common theme among the many competing hypotheses is that consciousness, like other illusory subjectivities among the Natural World, is made of material and is essentially incidental and even accidental (as the New York Times coined: “The Mind Messing with the Mind“) (article).
None-too-subtle allusions to our sense of subjectivity being a “virus” are, by my take, evidence for a growing angst against existence itself and the growing popularity of the notion that “personhood”, as understood by pre-modern knowledge, is an essentially superstitious and unscientific construct; an enemy to scientific advancement, progress for the sake of progress, and conquest for the sake of knowledge.
If the Ancients were right in supposing that one IS his “self” and not a product of his “self”, then the cogwheels and levers of scientific industry, so we are told, begin to become unhinged and Descartes’s maxim is, itself, put under the microscope. The scientist regains control over his experiments. The human being is elevated, once again, to a position above his inquiry.
Yet, independent inquiry and autonomous experimentation are both supremely unsexy ideas in this Brave New World being engineered for us. If existence is, what Plato called, a First Principle, then the current-day obsession with consciousness as something more than a byproduct, is something of a non sequitur; a fool’s gold for the overly-educated.
Nevertheless, the debate rages on.
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The following concepts, previously invaluable and natural evolutions of human History, are, by my take, casualties of the various conjectures concerning our “selves” and the abandonment of personhood as the central construct of Science.
The First Casualty: Intelligence
The word volition can be etymologically traced to a Medieval Latin noun (of action), which, from its first-person perspective, simply states: “I wish.” For later audiences, it has come to represent the mental power of deliberation, or, in linguistics, a concept that distinguishes whether or not the subject or agent of a given proposition intended something.
One of the more obvious reasons for promoting consciousness as an entity, separate from personhood, is that it absolves the heavy weight and responsibility of choice. If our consciousness is, essentially, an accident of evolution and something we possess (like genes and brain cells), then morality (or the moral instinct) is simply a mirage; a byproduct of an unorganized and unintentional convergence.
It would seem only natural, then, that some of the more incongruent concepts championed in post-personhood science are artificial intelligence, machine learning, and, ultimately public education.
As “artificial intelligence” strikes fewer and fewer people as a contradiction in terms, what comes to pass is the continual widening of the chasm between the psyche (soul) and ourselves.
Indeed, it is not uncommon to hear people, nowadays, insult an opposing argument or contending viewpoint as “below” their IQ. Put more simply, an alarming amount of people are now convinced that intelligence is a state of matter and their “IQ” a symptom of their condition. Thus, a competing hypothesis or counter-argument is to be filtered outright by a system that is independent of their volition. (what is left of it)
Intelligence, then, in post-personhood science, is something of a foregone conclusion. For every instruction there is an output. For every output there was a preceding instruction. Deliberation from a center (personhood) becomes wishful thinking. Intelligence as strength-of-will is usurped by intelligence as increase-in-number. Thirteen is better than seven. Thursday is better than Wednesday. “Problems”, as the American commercial complex is so fond of discussing, are generated by the needs of the multitude at the expense of the individual. What is required of future societies are the kinds of IQs to match the complexities of these newly engineered “needs”.
Thus, human beings, devoid of the act of becoming (personhood), exist in a state of need; their volition being entirely too fragile for the job at hand. As our computers need power, bandwidth, and computational capacity, so the human who possesses his “self” somewhere in his cerebral cortex is helpless to wish any better for himself. He is ripe and ready for what comes next.
The second causality: Education
Education, absent of human volition, is exactly that; indoctrination. Publicly-oriented curriculums, aiming at generating a multitude of properly calibrated IQs, will teach its students to draw the shortest line between two points yet fail to mention whether the exercise itself is worthy of the pupil’s attention. A polar opposite of its classical counterpart, modern education does not seek independent minds but a uniform and lockstep groupthink. (Modern “problems” don’t solve themselves).
Government schooling, like the Manhattan Institute of Technology’s research on consciousness, aims at generating perceptronium; consciousness as a state of matter. The virus that made us “self-aware” might as well be put to proper use.
While classical or pre-modern education suggested that many intact persons converged together to will the present into existence (History), current-day public education must intentionally alleviate the Historical figure of his illusory “self”, and, in so doing, suggest that all History is happenchance; no less incidental then then the accidental evolution of the self.
Providence, the Invisible Hand, or even the tragic element are all disposed of in exchange for blind and mechanistic egoism; devoid of volition, passion, and desire.
Thus, what was previously understood as Tragedy and Drama (Shakespeare’s World as The Stage) fractures into seemingly endless individual parts; selves and egos helplessly clamoring for the higher ground and the advantageous position; selves preserving selves.
The last causality: Culture
Given the disparities between post-modernism and the classical tradition, one may suppose that figures like Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and Herman Melville owed their literary and intellectual prowess, if at least implicitly, to the notion that the study of consciousness, so fashionable to the modern mind, is something of a fool’s errand.
One gets the sense, while immersed in the classical world, that the vastness of the imagery and universality of the symbolism is almost entirely dependent on and, in fact, complimentary to a human psychology and theory of intelligence that places volition above computation and the human condition above the condition of being human (the mind messing with the mind).
To human intelligence, the moral instinct is also the aesthetic instinct. We do not possess ourselves in the same fashion that we do not experience our consciousness. A conscious being studying consciousness has put himself into an impossible bind. What results from such a study should be suspect to the intelligent mind. As Dostoevsky once went on record to remark; “It takes more than intelligence to act intelligently”. .
It would seem as though the postmodern obsession with consciousness as an independent entity is telling of a stagnation in culture and a stifling decadence among the Scholars. Self-importance seems to have usurped the virtue of self-possession. Melville’s Moby Dick, in some sense, a cautionary tale on the futility of the overreach of egoism is almost incomprehensible now that personhood has been abandoned for consciousness and human volition absolved through self-regard.
Self-aggrandizement, when wholly subsumed, is an effective end to the creative impulse (Art). In exchange for the universalism and unifying theme of classic literature, self-obsession has bred an environment in which the “human condition” is, in fact, a disjointed and fractured conglomerate of undifferentiated egos.
Individuation is abandoned for uniformity. Unable or unwilling to suffer through their condition, modern scientists alleviate the weight of identity by informing the populace that there never was such a thing. Your suffering is just an illusion. The shame you feel is simply the product of accidental chemical collisions. Be mindful! Be cognizant! Suppress the impostor of personality!
The Post-Modern Idiot
As self-obsessed scientists and the groveling populace that subsidize their endeavors further study the art of self-defeat, while pursuing the abolition of human volition, it is interesting (and humorous) to note that, what we are told regarding intelligence and IQ, is full of purposeful misdirection.
The idiot or archetypal dunce, so we are told, is somewhere mulling over his flat-earth theories while propagating climate-science denial. He is, of course, an enemy of the “facts” and hates “evidence” to his core! He is, no doubt, under-educated and steadfastly right-wing in his sensibilities. Why, I’d wager, he could barely pronounce “perceptronium” !
All this, however, is deliberate obfuscation. Post-personhood Science, fueled, in no small part, by the social doctrines and Progressivism in general, must mask and re-brand the obscene largess that gave rise to words like perceptronium . Progress for the sake of progress is the brain-child of thinking for the sake of thinking. A straw-man must be formed.
Shakespeare was himself; and so, we have Hamlet. The Manhattan Institute for Technology is a conglomerate of “selves”, and thus we have perceptronium. Yet, could it be that our minds are messing with our minds? Is the answer to end all questioning as final as it is seems to be? Is my sense of moral and intellectual repugnance simply a mirage?
Strangely enough, I don’t come down too hard on that question. My aesthetic instincts may simply be a product of my illusory self. My self may, in fact, be a fanciful construct; a ridiculous notion that, once it dawned upon me, gave rise to this silly idea that I could employ my judgement before the “facts” or that I could deliberate before “information.”
Yet, a potentially more illusory notion coincided with this; this vain misgiving I have..
See; I don’t want to be stupid. At least, if I’ve come down on the wrong side of the matter, I can safely say that I never spent very long slicing my existence into innumerable conjectures. I created. I did. I became. In simpler terms; with open arms, I readily receive and embrace my right to be wrong. I may aspire to be inaccurate; if I so choose.
