The Premise (Full Version)
From May 2010
Because it resonates so strongly with our personal experience, the “mind-body” problem has been a mainstay of philosophy for thousands of years. We feel our capacity to think as somehow separate from our bodies. We seem to exercise free will and most people believe that our conscious mind will last long after our bodies have been reduced to dust.
In the 20th century, however, most philosophers and psychologists have become proponents of physicalism; roughly, that what we experience as “mind” arises from chemical reactions in our brains. I agree with them, but this explanation does not help to bridge the gap between what we believe and what we experience. Why do we do things that we know are harmful for us? What do we mean when we say we should “follow our hearts”?
The essays on this site are generally in the style of, meaning they use my fundamental beliefs about the world to interpret common aspects of our lives. The founding principle of this site is that we experience and react to the world in two ways: through our “evolutionary” minds and through “pure consciousness” [1]
The evolutionary mind experiences the world based on rules and principles developed over millions of years of natural and sexual selection (the two parts of Darwin’s theory of evolution). Our tendencies to listen to authority, reciprocate when someone helps us, or feel fear of the unknown are manifestations of our early history. The initial interpretation of sensory data and most of our innate tendencies live there. Our evolutionary mind motivates our efforts to pass our genes down to another generation and is the predominant force over our desire for food, exercise, victory in competition and sex. Evolutionary impulses are essentially mental shortcuts that enhanced our possibility of survival.
Like any rule of thumb, however, our evolutionary impulses don’t apply in all situations. As a result, humans who were able to override their mental shortcuts when appropriate had a better chance of survival, and over time this led to the growth of our brains, and in particular the pre-frontal and/or cerebral cortex.
The cerebral cortex is the source of our predictive ability and lets us anticipate outcomes,thereby allowing us to better model reality. Improved mental models more accurately reveal state of the world and have led to increased human survival rates.
Hopefully this example will clarify how “pure consciousness” in our cerebral cortex can help us better understand reality. Pure consciousness sits above the evolutionary mind and can interpret its initial findings on our sensory data. For example, when faced with an optical illusion, the mind can understand the error with which our eyes present us and determine the “true nature” of what we are seeing. If we were being attacked by a grey animal in the shadows, this ability would allow us to better aim or weapon to defend ourselves and increase our chance of survival.
Insert optical illusion pic
Natural and sexual selection chose larger brains, and this self-reinforcing relationship between brain growth and survival led to the outsized melons we have today. Eventually our brains became strong enough to override our natural impulses which allowed us to pursue goals beyond those evolutionary prerogatives. This opened up humanity to life goals beyond reproduction - most clearly seen in the uniquely human pursuit of transcendence.
The most obvious example of this is the vow of celibacy taken by religious devotees across all cultures – transcendence pursued at the expense the survival of one’s genes. This ability to override our evolved apparatus is what makes us uniquely human. Not surprisingly, pure consciousness generally deals with more abstract thoughts and concepts,
Most situations, however, engage both parts of the mind. Looking at our understanding of beauty helps illustrate this point. Part of our sense of beauty is based on our evolutionary view of the world (This is treated at length in Dennis Dutton’s “The Art Instinct”). The classic example is humankind’s general appreciation of pastoral views from shaded hilltops. Our Paleolithic ancestors were safe from predators in these locations, so those who appreciated the view had more offspring than their brethren who enjoyed traipsing through the exposed savannas. Over millions of years, appreciation of these landscapes became ingrained in our genes.
Pure consciousness, however, appreciates a very different kind of beauty. The purest example here is the elegant simplicity of certain mathematical proofs (the Pythagorean Theorem is one example:
(For more info on this topic, check out Mathematical Beauty on Wikipedia ). Pure consciousness appreciates the elegance of things, power coupled with simplicity. While its much more difficult to determine why we appreciate such things – I put forth that they put us in touch with forces greater than ourselves and simultaneously present us with our insignificance and importance as active forces in the universe (How this helps us reach transcendence, I’ll deal with in greater detail here.
Most (and arguably all) experiences with beauty are a combination of our evolutionary and transcendent viewpoints. Landscape painting evokes our innate appreciation of certain landscapes while also exposing the artists’ interpretation of the scene. The artist’s filter places us one-step removed from reality, allowing us to see the scene outside of the context of our evolutionary mindset and reveal the “true nature” of what we are seeing. It is by revealing reality without evolutionary blinders on that the landscape becomes transcendent and appeals to our pure minds
I’ll deal with this concept and the nature of beauty in general in much more detail in another essay, but I hope this gives a quick, reasonably clear explanation of how understanding how our experience is filtered through the lenses of “mind” and “body”.
Viewing our actions as motivated by evolutionary and trans-evolutionary ends helps bridge the mind-body gap allows us to find a middle path between these two forces. Further, it allows analysis of our experience and emotions on a more pragmatic level. I believe looking at the world in this way allowing us to understand our reactions and act more effectively with a fuller understanding of why and how we should do things. As such, the main focus of the essays on this site is to help untangle the various thoughts and motivations that arise when we work, fall in love, or have seven too many beers on Friday night.
Notes:
1 Much like Aristotle’s view of “Opinions and Appetites”
2 For simplicity, I’ll often use the short-hand “mind” and “body” for pure consciousness and evolutionary impulses respectively