(Questions or issues? Search finds relevant arguments.)
In much of what follows I argue for an outrageous proposition: neither you nor I are entities wandering the world in bodies we possess and control. Instead, like thunderstorms, trees, and stones …, we are among events that persist for seconds, hours, years or centuries.
Such events may have identifiable centres but they always lack well-defined edges. All that can be said is that they emerge out of, then collapse into, whatever is going on.
Persisting long enough to be identifiable is what being means when we have persons and creatures in mind. This is what existing means when we have electrons, stones, houses (and Higgs Bosons) … in view.
Let me suggest something more immediately useful. Talk of objects, entities and events is only possible among mutually-concerned beings. No matter how many worlds exist, no matter how many conscious beings inhabit these worlds, ideas about entities, objects and events will only occur if awarenesses are communicated in beneficial ways.
If I shout: “Watch out for the car!” and this prevents you from being run over, you are likely to conclude that you and I exist in an actual, shared world.
This fiction drives how we understand ourselves, one another and what is going on. In other words, if we do not live in robust communities, we cannot really imagine what we have been referring to as The World.
If this is true, the increasingly inequitable, increasingly isolated world writhing into existence before our eyes should give us pause. After ten thousand years of progress and development, human beings risk collapsing into moral and rational oblivion.
****
I am Vernon Molloy, an occasionally self-aware person.
I became identifiable August 22, 1942.
This is usually referred to as being born.
My fortune is that I was judiciously encouraged. My family and community (comprised of similarly named events) had enough resources that they could afford children, but not so much that children were prevented from prospering.
Armed with images of foetuses floating in amniotic sacs, pro-lifers insist that human beings commence nine months earlier than birthdays suggest.
The interesting question thus becomes: why stop there? Why is every person not foreshadowed when their respective parents met … or were imagined and conceived a generation earlier … and so on, ad infinitum?
The point is that conversations about ‘conception days’, ‘birthdays’, ‘death days’ … attempt to parcel up proceedings that have neither beginnings nor endings.
****
After a few decades of immortality fantasies, I started ‘doing stuff’ to retain my ‘entity status’: bicycle, run, eat well, drink more than I should, bicycle, do push ups …. So far, so good … although the equilibrium between catabolism and anabolism - between building up and tearing down - feels increasingly precarious.
When not muttering to myself or importuning strangers, I operate a tree farm near Belleville, Ontario. This has something to do with having been raised on the same farm when the principal crop involved children; and with having read Henry Thoreau’s Walden in high school.
(For an audio of Walden chapter 1: http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/gutenberg/2/6/2/8/26289/ogg/26289-01.ogg. If this whets your interest: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26289/26289-index.html )
For such reasons, and an inexhaustible curiosity about what is going on, my life has been seized with philosophical issues. As well, the need to survive (and perhaps prosper!) has been encouraging me to question some of the notions underpinning political, economic and intellectual proceedings.
Along the way, I realized that the most dangerous of these claims is that human beings possess Divinely Ordained free will – that we are souls or persons inhabiting bodies.
Ironically, the secular alternative is proving equally worrisome. The idea that human beings represent an extraordinary evolutionary achievement appears to sanction even more facile claims of entitlement. In other words, whether ‘ Divinely Ordained’ or ‘ordained divinely’, the notion that human beings are special helps explain why we are convening the biggest destruction of life since a comet eliminated the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
Not surprisingly – there are no safe places on sinking ships - our own well-being is equally threatened. Global warming, environmental contamination and resource-depletion crises are already causing misery and turmoil. These issues are usually traced to population growth, industrialization or moral decay. The truth is simpler:
- Centralized economies require endless growth to avoid collapse.
- Endless growth is impossible in a finite world.
- If even some of us lived in self-reliant communities, spontaneous efficiencies would reduce environmental burdens.
- In such communities, ‘progress and development’ would focus upon preserving rather than exploiting local resources.
- The resulting devices, systems and attitudes would assist ‘emerging populations’ far better than the antics of multinationals and the politics of globalization.
In the meantime, the only ‘good news’ we hear is bad news for most of us. Increasingly efficient machines and systems mean that wealth is flowing to fewer and fewer owners, to military and corporate adventures, and to entertainments designed to distract the rest of us from our predicament.
Every new technology, every improvement in institutional and manufacturing efficiency …, means that products and services can be produced with fewer people earning a living wage.
The resulting collapse of the demand side of the supply:demand equation is already destabilizing economies. This only makes sense if the wealthy are moving to a different economic model. (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/9382745.stm)
This should not come as a surprise. Since the wealthy now own everything, there is little need to organize production and consumption activities with a view to to extracting further profit. Instead, wealthy self-interest now requires expanding the proportion of human beings on $2.00 a day lifestyles from its present fifty per cent to something like eighty per cent.
****
To glimpse an alternative to this bleak prospect, the rest of us need to think about ourselves in a new way. Persons do not exist because Divine Creation, evolution or harnessing fire to cook food yielded creatures with big brains.
In The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-Cameral mind, Julian Jaynes proposed that self-awareness occurs if and only if genetic endowments combine with cultural resources – something he thinks first occurred between the times the Greek poet Homer penned The Iliad and The Odyssey.
However and whenever it happened, an important threshold was crossed. Although beings just like you and I have existed for at least 250,000 years, self-aware persons only recently became reliable possibilities.
We need to figure out what brought this about. We need to keep on doing it.
Backlander projects are my contribution. They are based on a way of thinking introduced by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus (circa 500 B.C.) and developed in Alfred North Whitehead’s 1927 Gifford Lectures. Briefly, the world is an event, not a container stuffed with things undergoing change.
Within this context, consciousness ebbs and flows within the ‘local events’ sometimes known as persons.
Linking rich consciousness with a fragile balance of cultural activities, community life and self-sufficiency underscores the importance of getting ‘things’ right.
All Rights Reserved.
just a thought ,but if we slowly remove the subliminal messages we are drowning in every where we look “YOU NEED THIS PRODUCT, This life Style , This unrelenting torrent of instant fix drugs etc. Lets do what the Germans did in the 50′s. T.V.Commercials were limited to one time slot of 10 minutes per hour on one channel only. Lets ban money for 3 days per month , During these 3 days tax free barter in manditory , gradually increase the number of days per month.
just an observation . By the way article is well done.
How are you Vern. I like your writing. Maybe we can get together one day for coffee. Spend lot of time going to the YMCA in Trenton for swimming and Sauna. We even could meet there as you like the Sauna and I can go swimming. Please let me know or give me a call. Home 613-962-5030 Cell 613-848-5930
Hi Vernon,
Your name was passed on to mme by B Dollan. For your records I to am a landloard with tenant issues and would like to have acces and nominate individuals. My email address kotela@sympatico.ca. Thanks in advance.
Alex
How refreshing to read what I suppose might be called `real’ thinking, as opposed to the magical thinking that possesses most of us – and not the other way around.
Being born the same year as you, I would agree that the `War Babies’ might be the last to know what a `normal’ human being might be like. I would define `normal’ in this sense as being a member of the human species who understands that our `mission’ is to protect and maintain our species, as it is with all species. I often used this cohort in my work when I wanted to model requirements for future generations, particularly the aging Boomers.
I think, though, that coming from what sounds to me like a traditional farming family has been a blessing. Being out in the real world of living and growing (or not) gives one perspective. Living in neat rows of houses in a concrete world with gardens that are manufactured or in pods that give one no opportunity to experience Earth provides, instead, a sense of the world and living that is severely circumscribed and prone to developing a view that we are somehow `in control’.
Humans have always lived on the edge of the abyss, it seems to me. We certainly are the edge of one now.
Thank you for this website. We need thinkers.
If you really start to think about, it must be the vegetarians and vegans that are running this world into the ground. And if it is not them, they must be running a close second. Think of all the prairies that have disappeared, turned into waste lands, the rainforests turned into soybean and corn fields. Wherever you see the ‘amber waves of grain’, you must think of the destruction, the havoc this has wreaked. And Monsanto and Cargill are only too eager to perpetuate this nightmare. Even our own institutions are aiding and abetting by promoting the “healthy” diets heavily favouring carbohydrate based products and thus creating generation upon generation of diabetics, heart and cancer patients., and a whole array of other diseases and health problems.
But then….do we not have to sustain ourselves with this carb based toxic brew in order to have enough to survive on for all of us? Could we , could our world, survive on an animal based (not industrially farmed) diet? I don’t think so and there you have it. We can shoot the crap all we want, we’re on a float shooting for the rapids. You can steer a bit one way, or you can try to delay by dragging your feet through the water, you can throw momma overboard and drag her beyond the float to slow it down. In the end you” hit the rapids and whatever you did, it was all for naught. So why not just keep on shooting the crap and keep on partying until it is all over. By the way you’ll have lot more fun with steaks than tofu.
The Vegetarians and Vegans are a relief to the overburdened food system that struggles to support the meat consumption of the ‘developed’ world. The rainforests being demolished to grow soy and corn are being sacrificed to provide feed for the factories of production-line animals being raised in an artificial and suffering based way to provide cheap meat to indulge this fraction of the world’s population. Those that live in the developing world where meat consumption is much less have a significantly smaller footprint.
Tofu is only a small aspect of a meatless diet. You have to be more adept at cooking, however, to enjoy a healthy vegetarian/vegan diet. The solution to our large footprint could be to open these killing fields (abatoirs) to the public. That yummy steak might become repulsive if this happened.
For those who cannot give up meat, perhaps they could pay more (the artificially low price of meat is due to the unacceptable way animals are raised) to buy meat from animals that have been raised in a more natural way. That is: free-ranging, humane, free of steroids to make them grow abnormally fast, free of antibiotics to keep them from getting sick in the disgusting conditions of confined animal feed operations.
Consequently, people would consume less meat thereby reducing their footprint. They would live healthier and longer as well as greatly reduce their impact on our healthcare system. Less suffering everywhere. Win-win.
Maybe we need to look at ourselves as a resource. Or as a virus.
We WILL eventually exhaust the resources available and then cease to exist.
This is inevitable. So lets just carry on and the sooner WE are gone the better off other species will be.
Lose-win
Unfortunately, this is more likely to end our rampage on the planet. Common sense is too inconvenient. Still, we owe it to the next generations to pull our heads out of the sand and stop being oblivious to what matters.
We can argue the details of many issues to our hearts content. We are the problem…if we can convince 2 people to have only one child and slowly reduce the population we’ll have a chance to realize less, perhaps is more.
Your opening synopsis sounds a bit like Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. I do however agree with your statement that suggests “If we lived in smaller, more self-reliant communities……..”. Unfortunately, the fly in the ointment is that Globalization has taken us to far down the “I gotta have it now” road, for any viable alternative to have even a glimmer of hope.
As always you make compelling and thought provoking arguments, I just don’t believe that they are in practice, possible.
P.S. Mike makes a scary yet bona fide comment.
Certainly Heisenberg had an important insight when he demonstrated that it is impossible to know both the exact position and the exact momentum or velocity of a sub atomic particle. Part of his argument turns on the problem that observing a particle can only happen by bouncing a photon of light (or some other particle) and measuring the result. The problem is that this bouncing affects the object being measured and it remains impossible to know what was going on before the measuring occurred.
The uncertainty difficulty is compounded when quantum uncertainty is added to the mix, because then the act of measuring must be seen as collapsing the probability wave packet into a particular outcome and so one never knows what the measurement would have yielded had a different probability been collapsed.
What I think Heisenberg brings to the event model is an ironic realization that his clarifying work would not have been necessary had we not fallen into the conceit and confusion of fashioning events into images and then started asking where and when these images occurred and how fast they are travelling. I suggest that images do not have velocity or momentum. Images of velocity or momentum are second order fantasies constructed on top of, or derived from, original images.
Much the same can be said of quantum theory. It is not the case that quantum theory is an inexplicable twist at the very heart of matter. Matter, substances, elements, things, entities … are images distilled from inexorably proceeding events.
Finally, as regards your ‘no glimmer of hope’ prognosis, it has been my experience that people are optimistic or pessimistic about such matters based on first-hand experience. If an individual has not given up, has a personal history of pushing back, … then they are likely to have a more optimistic sense of possibility than if they had lived their lives as either subjugated victims or more or less willing accomplices.
Let me point out the irony of such a posture. It leaves open the possibility that the world could be full of cynical idealists, each willing to spring into action as soon as one or a few of their acquaintances gave them reason to believe they would not be acting alone!
Why not lead off? What do you have to lose? This would be way better than just being able to say “I told you so!”
Good point, although I don’t consider myself a pessimist, more of a realist would be closer to the heart of the matter. It’s been close to 40 years now since you first put forth your strategies for a better and more sustainable planet; ie “Five Acre Neighbours” & “The Matrix” and though we’ve had many animated discussions on the subject I have always been a supporter of your theories. I have also practiced what you preached (to an almost exhaustive level). The problems I have experienced trying to live within this model are simply this. I help build a house, yet build mine alone, I lend my back to friends, then end up in the hospital after no-one shows up to help with the docks, I rally the troops against an injustice, then stand alone at a village council meeting. The apathy of the population is at best staggering. As for myself, I still do what I can, when I can, but for the most part I feel beat down and slowly being forced into line with the rest of the sheep. Sad, Sad, Sad.
P.S. Your understanding of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle far exceeds mine and your comments as always enlighten. As for quantum theory……. well….. maybe later.
Cheers Old friend