How do we get past assumptions? For instance, I want to know how sensory information gets from outside the body to inside the body, but almost every post I find with a search engine assumes that there are five senses. It’s been known for a long time that there are MORE than five senses, there are MORE than the sense organs we can see (i.e. specialized cells that aren’t organs or that are deeply internal). What the sensory cells convert from light rays or surface textures, etc., do NOT go directly to the brain -- they are filtered and altered along the way -- even when it gets there the brain can only send the consciousness what the consciousness work platform will allow. That means fewer than ten concepts at one time (though they may be “chunked” complexes) and that a sense-perceived emergency can knock them all off the platform.
This is new information. Like the new info we’re collecting about the cosmos, the detailed and verifiable knowledge about our own bodies is changing everything so much that when I try to respond to “questions” on the website ideas.aeon.co, the inquiries seem useless to me and probably any answer I gave would be unintelligible to them. Some people complain that they can’t follow my blog posts as it is.
A person is like a flame.
I no longer see a person as a unified entity, but as a process that is constantly changing, burning like a flame in a landscape also afire with energy, swapping combustions as predator eats prey, or kindling new fires by giving birth, blooming, forming alliances. It’s sounds so very poetic, but it is a whole new culture coming out of science. The old questions about which is better, science or religion, are simply from another older era that defined human experience in terms of institutions and psychological systems that just don’t fit anymore.
A delinquent trespassing offensive aggressive boy has to be understood in terms of forces both among human beings and throughout his ecology -- climate, economy, genome, epigenome, penetrating codes in the form of viruses and bacterias, ideaforms in the individuals around him. This new way of thinking is such a sweeping difference that there is often a shortage of vocabulary. And yet -- far from being abstract -- we can see on sensitive instruments the results of trauma, falling in love, making choices. All cells are only molecules charged with electrochemical potentials, leaving a signal on the flow patterns of oxygen. And cells are all there is, so much as to almost be unmanageable without metaphors of relationship.
Bad boy
This is not Newton’s mechanics. This is music among us. Before it can be organized into a transmissible form (the organization being to some degree dictated BY the form -- is it image, sound, print, voice or some other code?) there must be an originator, a person who can “compose” the form, and a receiver who can decode it. That is, though I’m using music as a metaphor here, music itself is a code that constantly identifies players and hearers. Consider the body of “literature” that is rock music. The lyrics (wailing and non-word shouts count as lyrics -- any sound from a human throat) and all the other dimensions (beat, violence, loudness, repeated chords) are all part of something that goes to the gut of the intended audience and fills them with emotion. The codes of feelings are the ones that transmit best. Incoherence is part of the language. Even numbness is the meaningful blank page that separates the print.
Evolution proceeds by filling the space that it can find, where it can thrive and enrich survival of living beings. If we interpret bad boys as a danger to the rest of us, we will kill them, if only indirectly by depriving them. If we listen to their music, see their growing bodies for what they are (the grace of their growing, the energy of their movement) we’ll make space. As it is, they find their growth in drugs, gangs, and vandalism -- destroying themselves. Offending us.
Potential.
We are told that our complex brains are not completely formed to the maximum until the person is twenty years old. Many bad boys don’t live that long, so how can they bring human potential to bear on their own potentials? The populations of whole nations have shorter and shorter lifespans because of alcoholism, pollution, squalor, famine, lack of shelter or support. But comfort and preoccupation can also shut down the developmental arc of the mind before it gets to the point where it can take the person to full use of his or her senses.
Everything in creation is an interaction. If narwhales, frogs, or soil micro-organisms go missing, there are holes punched and they will remain, accumulating, accusing. But new vocabulary is arriving and cries out to be recognized. If mirror cells that can perceive the thoughts of other humans are destroyed before those who have evolved them can learn their use, it will take the whole planet in a different direction. But how many people even know there is such a thing as a “mirror cell,” much less can manage empathy? It’s not one of the five senses that have been so hammered into our preconceptions. Does anyone ask ideas.aeon.co how best they can develop their mirror cells?
They ask, “How can secular people benefit from prayer?” but without defining “secular” or “prayer.” In a world where the more sophisticated define religion in “secular” (whatever that means) or radically inclusive ways, what do we make of “prayer” which comes from a specifically Abrahamic context, a petition to a big being in the sky? Does such a question force us back into old categories that ought to be deconstructed by now, or does it press it forward into more helpful assumptions? (One cannot escape assumptions -- it’s the way the brain works. It’s “chunking.”) The answer one gives depends on the way one personally defines the terms.
The way one personally defines these words depends upon their life experiences Take this place on the boundary of the Blackfeet rez where lives are drawn from pretty much the same landscape and occupations. On the white Belgian side, people know that prayer is to God and know several traditional prayers they find comforting, though they can no longer recite them in Belgian. On the Blackfeet side, among the more traditional, prayer might look a lot more like smudging with sweetgrass. Some can still pray in Blackfeet. I cannot know what they said before first contact. I suspect it was far more focused on survival.
The inner swirl
We can still ask bad boys what they pray for and how they pray. I know of some in Paris who attended mass regularly until the priest asked them not to come, not because he accused them of being insincere but because he claimed they scared other worshippers. So the question could be, “Should the priest have excluded them?” or it could be “Should the priest have counseled those who were afraid?” Or should it be “Why would people in a sanctuary still fear those who are Other?” Even, “What is it about Abrahamic theology that makes people fearful?” Or “Why do bad boys love to attend mass?” Or "How did this guy get to be a priest?"
And now we have to turn to Joe LeDoux and the “Amygdaloids” for an analysis of fear, which turns out to be complex, some of it entirely dark and limbic, and some of it just a failure to ask the right questions. You won’t get the answers from this vid, but maybe you could read the books.
http://www.ted.com/talks/david_eagleman_can_we_create_new_senses_for_humans?utm_source=newsletter_daily&utm_campaign=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_content=image__2015-03-18
No comments:
Post a Comment