Today, another guest essay by Cal Roeker of a trip to the hills of Kentucky (under Essays).
A new book that I cracked open (or rather, lit up on my Kindle Fire) at the cabin and now continue, and will continue for a few weeks more, as it is very dense and over 800 pages long: Irreducible Mind, by Kelly, Kelly, et. al. Hard to start, as the first of its long pages introduce us to the science of psychology and the view of the mind and brain/mind problem that arose with Descartes and continue to this day, but it gets better. The points being made come from Fred Meyers, a turn of the century psychologist and friend/associate of William James, genius extraordinaire of his day. Meyers, it turns out, was a genius as well, but was so far removed from the mainstream at that time of hardened scientific materialism that he was dropped long ago from serious consideration. In light of the new physics and new empirical data, we learn that this view of him is changing, at least with some in the field, and that the changes infringing on the mainstream are momentous.
To put what I have so far read in a nutshell, we find that an idea, becoming popular again, was championed by Meyers; that is, that the brain is NOT the source of mind (or consciousness) but rather a filter that specifies just what we will be conscious of in our time and culture. He pictures it something like this: the information that is consciousness emanates from a source (so far not specified, but we understand) as a form of pure light (or at least what we can best represent it as) containing ALL, but undifferentiated. Living beings emerge with specific filters (brains, ganglia, nervous systems) that are formed by the environmental needs of the organism; that is, the filters exist to dovetail with the needs of the organism, focusing mostly on what is needed for that organism to survive. This we could say is a "prism" effect, where only a small amount of the total spectrum of light is usually perceivable. But the total is "out there" and, for most of us, accessible, at least in larger part, under certain circumstances. This will be further elaborated as the book moves on, but already what is noted is that a distraction, or suspension of the normal waking consciousness is what generally allows this greater information to avoid the filter. That is to say, such things as rhythmic drumming, meditation and prayer (as well as abnormalities in the brain due to birth or injury) help take down the filters to allow much, much more information to pass. Thus we get telepathy, mystical insight, telekinesis, and - most important to Myers - the ability (perhaps) to communicate with the dead.
This later point was pivotal to Myers; it was, we are told, his primary goal in research. So if the mind transcends the brain (and body), therefore, after-life experience can exist. The rest of the book attempts to show in a very rigorous way that Myers' essential ideas were correct. We are more than our brains or bodies.
To the layman, this may seem ho-hum; but to the psychologist, this is the all important question: the ramifications for both experimental models and for human potential (as well as for human mental pathologies) are enormous. We will get into proofs of these ideas, as well as the potentials, over the next week. Before hand, I have a few things I would like to note. For one, we are back to our meditation/spiritual model, where a great totality can be recognized by suspending ordinary perceptions and internal chatter. The "great totality," of course, has been named "God" or "the Absolute" by the religious. We find once again that fringe, or cutting-edge science (take your pick) always leads back to here (this is why this blog finds this stuff of such interest, besides the simple fascination with the strange).
For another, we have to look at the "brain" in a different way than mentioned so far: that is, we must understand that the perception of brain itself is filtered, or artificially structured. Without a clear perception of everything, we cannot know the brain, and thus cannot make final judgement on its functions. For the rigorous empirical scientist, this makes a sort of curious Catch 22 (which Myers recognized in his own way by demanding that no theory or approach should exclude others if anomalies to the present theories arise. Thus we can continue to "evolve" on the perception of the brain itself). It also, for me, puts everything back into the mystical perception that generally drives my meta-view of existence: that is, that we, that all, is "metaphor" as Joseph Campbell put it; but by this I mean something even more, for Campbell couldn't get himself to quite say it: that we are all not only "metaphor" in some artistic sense, but are living symbols of God, 'its' bits and pieces frozen in segments of time. The argument about the brain at this level becomes literally immaterial. As shards of God, we are also holographs of this ALL, and ultimately transcend what we perceive as our physical nature. The metaphor most commonly used is that we are drops in an infinite sea - but that has the sense that we are lost at death, smothered by infinity. I do not believe this any more than I believe that our childhood is smothered by our adulthood - rather, there is an addition, and what we lose at first we gain and then some in the end (a classical vision of the enlightened man as the child who has become thoroughly self-aware).
But we shall see what marvels and truths this book (hopefully) reveals over the next few weeks. FK
A new book that I cracked open (or rather, lit up on my Kindle Fire) at the cabin and now continue, and will continue for a few weeks more, as it is very dense and over 800 pages long: Irreducible Mind, by Kelly, Kelly, et. al. Hard to start, as the first of its long pages introduce us to the science of psychology and the view of the mind and brain/mind problem that arose with Descartes and continue to this day, but it gets better. The points being made come from Fred Meyers, a turn of the century psychologist and friend/associate of William James, genius extraordinaire of his day. Meyers, it turns out, was a genius as well, but was so far removed from the mainstream at that time of hardened scientific materialism that he was dropped long ago from serious consideration. In light of the new physics and new empirical data, we learn that this view of him is changing, at least with some in the field, and that the changes infringing on the mainstream are momentous.
To put what I have so far read in a nutshell, we find that an idea, becoming popular again, was championed by Meyers; that is, that the brain is NOT the source of mind (or consciousness) but rather a filter that specifies just what we will be conscious of in our time and culture. He pictures it something like this: the information that is consciousness emanates from a source (so far not specified, but we understand) as a form of pure light (or at least what we can best represent it as) containing ALL, but undifferentiated. Living beings emerge with specific filters (brains, ganglia, nervous systems) that are formed by the environmental needs of the organism; that is, the filters exist to dovetail with the needs of the organism, focusing mostly on what is needed for that organism to survive. This we could say is a "prism" effect, where only a small amount of the total spectrum of light is usually perceivable. But the total is "out there" and, for most of us, accessible, at least in larger part, under certain circumstances. This will be further elaborated as the book moves on, but already what is noted is that a distraction, or suspension of the normal waking consciousness is what generally allows this greater information to avoid the filter. That is to say, such things as rhythmic drumming, meditation and prayer (as well as abnormalities in the brain due to birth or injury) help take down the filters to allow much, much more information to pass. Thus we get telepathy, mystical insight, telekinesis, and - most important to Myers - the ability (perhaps) to communicate with the dead.
This later point was pivotal to Myers; it was, we are told, his primary goal in research. So if the mind transcends the brain (and body), therefore, after-life experience can exist. The rest of the book attempts to show in a very rigorous way that Myers' essential ideas were correct. We are more than our brains or bodies.
To the layman, this may seem ho-hum; but to the psychologist, this is the all important question: the ramifications for both experimental models and for human potential (as well as for human mental pathologies) are enormous. We will get into proofs of these ideas, as well as the potentials, over the next week. Before hand, I have a few things I would like to note. For one, we are back to our meditation/spiritual model, where a great totality can be recognized by suspending ordinary perceptions and internal chatter. The "great totality," of course, has been named "God" or "the Absolute" by the religious. We find once again that fringe, or cutting-edge science (take your pick) always leads back to here (this is why this blog finds this stuff of such interest, besides the simple fascination with the strange).
For another, we have to look at the "brain" in a different way than mentioned so far: that is, we must understand that the perception of brain itself is filtered, or artificially structured. Without a clear perception of everything, we cannot know the brain, and thus cannot make final judgement on its functions. For the rigorous empirical scientist, this makes a sort of curious Catch 22 (which Myers recognized in his own way by demanding that no theory or approach should exclude others if anomalies to the present theories arise. Thus we can continue to "evolve" on the perception of the brain itself). It also, for me, puts everything back into the mystical perception that generally drives my meta-view of existence: that is, that we, that all, is "metaphor" as Joseph Campbell put it; but by this I mean something even more, for Campbell couldn't get himself to quite say it: that we are all not only "metaphor" in some artistic sense, but are living symbols of God, 'its' bits and pieces frozen in segments of time. The argument about the brain at this level becomes literally immaterial. As shards of God, we are also holographs of this ALL, and ultimately transcend what we perceive as our physical nature. The metaphor most commonly used is that we are drops in an infinite sea - but that has the sense that we are lost at death, smothered by infinity. I do not believe this any more than I believe that our childhood is smothered by our adulthood - rather, there is an addition, and what we lose at first we gain and then some in the end (a classical vision of the enlightened man as the child who has become thoroughly self-aware).
But we shall see what marvels and truths this book (hopefully) reveals over the next few weeks. FK
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