This is something of a sister to the recent mammoth post - but it's not as brutal a read.
***
The clouds look blue. Or are they grey? Where does blue end and grey begin? Even if you adjudicated in terms of the frequencies of light, there is no exact demarcation. And as for language, how can words pin down an infinite gradation?
Every time I use a word – blue, grey, love, bird – that word is defined in my mind by the totality of my experience. So my ‘bird’ is a small brown job. My generic bird. The thing my mind conjures up to align with those sounds. If you were brought up in Madagascar or the Galapagos, what would your generic bird be? Russians have different words for what an English speaker refer to as light blue and dark blue. They are not, to a native Russian speaker, shades of the same colour: they are different. Some languages have just red and black – hence Homer’s wine-dark sea. No word for azure, cerulean or turquoise. Did Homer see the sea in a glass of grape-juice? Could I ever see my Rioja as sea? If I told him my names, could he see my colours or would they remain a graduation between red and black with arbitrary patches perhaps granted a possible, unconvincing label?
On the radio one day, a discussion about love. No one knew what anyone meant. You could hear them, speaking across each other as though it were a multi-lingual debate. Shared definitions eluded them. His love is her passion, your friendship is my agape. Who chooses what love means? Is it like ice-cream, with so many flavours, all equally distinct, or like a scale, with no specific points marked off by a hopefully exacting statistician? Is it like the face of El Capitan, with various routes, some criss-crossing, all attaining the same peak? Or do we all climb different mountains and decide our own scale of steps to a personal summit?
If I let go of all thought, all sensation, all feeling and mood, if I experience consciousness as a pure state of enlightened awareness, do I feel the same as the Dalai Lama feels? Or is my light inevitably of a unique frequency? A fingerprint of neural correlates, even when stripped bare? Each bat’s state remains resolutely its own.
Your thoughts and reasoning, your determined logic, as you proceed from inference to understanding seems insane to me. But no, I say, how can you say this means that? To you, it’s obvious, inevitable; to me it is utterly without rationale. You are a mystery to me and your certainty is daunting. Yet if I can move backwards, through the suppositions bred from experience and accumulated knowledge, I might see where some absence of presence of detail led to that change of direction, to the path which takes you to conviction and me to incomprehension. Perhaps, if I could fill the lacuna, we’d both come to the same conclusion –but is that altered evidence a paragraph or a lifetime away? Like the branches of a tree we might have evolved our rationality into two distinct species from that shared ancestor a million years ago.
***
I've been wondering for a while if that thing we call consciousness can be pure. Imagine that you could, as I posited above, remove layer by layer the various experiences: thoughts, emotions, underlying moods, proprioception, smell, visual stimuli and so on. What would you reach were you able to strip it all back? I imagine a river, that is my consciousness through time, flavoured by my past and my physiological state, carrying the flotsam and jetsam of thoughts and memories, sensory experiences and mood states. Without all that stuff, though, would my consciousness still be mine? Would it be pure H2O or would it, like a homeopathic solution, carry the memory of my individuality? Is it possible to be aware, to be alive, and not to be located in some kind of subjectivity? Even for a cat watching a mouse? A spider spinning a web?
***
Raymond Tallis says that the more knowledge is objective, the more it is emptied of phenomenology. E = mc2 is very different to 'know' than is the taste of chocolate ice cream. Knowledge - like that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066 - is shared in a vast number of minds, as well as on paper and digitally. But the knowledge that my head aches now is confined to one mind. I can tell you that I have a headache, but my knowledge of it is incomparably different to what you now know. Even if I tell you that 'I had a headache yesterday', that information cannot be taken in by your mind in the same way that it exists in mine. Yet 2+2=4 is much the same to both of us.
Somehow, to take up Tallis's statement, the more we engage with knowledge of the workings of the universe, the less we are engaged in being in the world. This is the open wound between logos and mythos that the likes of Jordan Peterson and John Vervaeke seek to heal. The impulse is understandable. Significant numbers of people feel that the advance of knowledge has eradicated the wonder of existence. They feel that the vastness of the universe makes us small, insignificant and meaningless. They feel that being no longer centre of the solar system, or of God's plan, or indeed of anything much is cause for existential despair. And then we die. And there is no heaven for us and no hell in which our enemies will be punished and so, what is the damn point?
Life, for conscious rational beings, the apex of known creation, should not be this unfair! We should be acknowledged by a divine mind... or something!... at the very least! Otherwise, it's all so bleak, so dark, so pointless.
And it should not be so confusing and complex and random. It should be explicable. We have these great brains, so we should be able to make sense of it all, work it all out. And then control it. Because uncertainty is frightening and the world is chaotic.
So Peterson sensibly says, 'Start by tidying your room.'
I actually think that's pretty good advice. Bear responsibility for yourself, first, then take on the world.
That's fine.
Where I fall away from all this is the prior claim: that more knowledge decreases wonder. And the related concept: that it should all make sense.
The mythos world offered a lot of knowledge - all the wisdom encapsulated in songlines, say; all the thousands of Hindu gods - but however much 'knowledge' of the mythical sort was manifested in stories and song, the wonder remained in the phenomenological world. Look, they 'knew' why lighting happened: Zeus's anger, say. Did that explanation stop the splitting of the skies being awe-inspiring? No. And it is just as awe-inspiring now that we know that it's the result of a spark caused by negatively and positively charged particles in clouds. Knowledge does not reduce my wonder. Why is it more amazing that Zeus caused it than that there is electricity in particles and in clouds?
As for making sense, surely one has to have extreme hubris to consider that the vastness of the universe 'should' be translatable to neuronal mapping within my two litre capacity skull. Christ, I don't understand why you feel the way you do, so why should I understand why something came from nothing at the dawn of time? Which may be another myth for my age - and is just as magical and curiosity raising - if not more so - than the answers supplied by mythologies.
Tallis says that understanding (a process - hence the suffix -ing) is driven by the gap between what is 'out there' and what sense we can so far make of it. To reach the apogee of sense-making is to be static. That is not possible. We kid ourselves if we think we know it all. It's a childish desire, a childish delusion.
Uncertainty will always be there. Chaos is always at the edge of what is known - and there is always an edge to what is known. There be dragons, yes, you can look at it like that. But that is the horizon that inspires us to move onwards, to grow, to stay moving until will die.
Don't accept the tidy answers of mythos; but don't believe either that we can fully inhabit logos.
Were we to escape the parameters of our limitations as finite, embodied, subjective beings, we would not be gods, we would be equations.
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