121. MARY MIDGLEY

British philosopher Mary Midgley wrote Science and Poetry, from which I will include excerpts in this post. My focus is on what she had to say about consciousness. In addition to Science and Poetry, Midgley wrote The Myths We Live By. Later in this post I will include excerpts from that book as well.

Midgley finds that consciousness is the scene of all phenomena and that consciousness “contains complex patterns such as emotions, efforts, conflicts, desires — aspects of our active participation in what goes on around us.”

“This link between consciousness, effort and thought is a key point that has been badly overlooked in the flood of recent literature on the subject. Although some of our complex actions (say, in driving or playing the piano) are indeed more or less unconscious in the sense of being inattentive, the effort by which we devise and choose those particular actions — rather than others — in the first place is not.”

“A misleading idea that constantly intrudes here is the picture of the neurons as forcing the thought. They no more force it than a plant’s genes force the plant to grow. The brain supplies part of the means of thought just as the genes supply part of the means for the plant’s growth — a part which, incidentally, has been considerably exaggerated during recent decades. It is the agent as a whole that acts.”

“Descartes’ world-view did, of course, produce many triumphs. But it produced them largely by dividing things — mind from body, reason from feeling, and the human race from the rest of the physical universe. It produced a huge harvest of local knowledge about many of the provinces. But it has made it very hard for people even to contemplate putting the parts together.”

The following are excerpts from The Myths We Live By:

“The kind of individualism that treats people, and indeed other organisms, as essentially separate, competitive entities, ignoring the fact that competition can’t get going at all without an enormous amount of cooperation to make it possible, has been the dominant ideology of the last few decades.”

“The basic idea of integral transformative practice (ITP) is simple: the more aspects of our being that we simultaneously exercise, the more likely that transformation will occur. In other words, ITP attempts to be as ‘all-level, all-quadrant’ as possible. The more you do so, the more likely you will transform to the next higher wave.”

“Relating the mental and physical world is something most physicists avoid, but if physics claims to be a universal discipline, then it must eventually incorporate a description of consciousness.”

Q: Is your consciousness the organizing principle of your life?