Mind and Cosmos by Nagel

Commentary, Part Three, involving fantasyland, quantum mind, and Keats

PART THREE

Fantasyland

Would it be harsh to characterize the pre-E-NS as a fantasy? A fantasyland very much like the former Moon and the very long ago Earth, except for the cities, is quoted from Clute and Grant's The Encyclopedia of Fantasy : "A typical fantasyland will display - often initially by means of a prefatory map - a selection, sometimes very full, from a more or less fixed list of landscape ingredients that includes the following features : a continent (or two), one or more inland seas, and an ocean (or two), archipelagos, mountains, isolated islands, fjords, steppes, pastures, deserts, forests ... and a realm of ice, edifices and cities, usually ancient, sometimes abandoned."

Harsher still could it be to characterize E-NS as a fantasyland? The post-E-NS that can be drawn from the above diversionary concern for selenography is that E-NS, Darwin, Darwinism, any "synthesis" that attempts to save the appearances and what not do not escape the consequences of arrogant partisanship because they were once favored. In short, reality comes and goes, it is blurred and distinct. Mind persists, endures.

Mind is dependent on memory. Memory is not a faculty but a collection of processes. This collection can be lost. At least a significant portion can be lost as happened to Henry Molaison who became a professional experimental subject. The experiments were about memory and his is a distinctly odd case with his odd parents, no sufficient accounting for his seizures was undertaken but an irresponsible surgical intervention removed a part of his brain associated, as it turned out, with memory. He was studied for a long time and, once dead, his brain was sliced 2,401 times so that he could be remain a study subject.

It was a shameful business, a shameful science. But then shame isn't authentic these days. What is authentic could be real. What is real is a very big concern these days. Our present day science is real. Memory is real but Mind is alien. Our physics and biology lack acceptance of Mind. Both sciences go after memory to enable it to be fitted into their preconceptions. Each of the two sciences is heavily dependent on its use of time.

The physicists can proceed from process to process by process. To get from process to process they use time "t" of their equations. Of course, they must use mathematics. The biologists start with structure and need to get from structure to structure. Their use of "evolution" has been so trivialized that it has become superfluous as in the evolution pertaining to how to bake a cake. It means "change" in all its aspects. They use "natural selection" as the crux of evolution. It too involves time. No equations are necessary. No time "t" is involved, rather by induction they get millions and millions of years placed at their disposal.

Nevertheless, if the biologists ape the reductionism (and science must be served and descend to the molecular level) then natural selection's efficacy (among other things) is lost. Kimura and his compatriot showed that either natural selection and Darwinistic evolution don't work at the molecular level or they don't work, period. Physicists themselves have attempted to push reductionism into the quantum realm and have failed. No process there for them, only mathematics. The problem is that the time "t" they use is Newtonian or, at best, hyperNewtonian (relativity) and there is no time "t" in the quantum world. Absolute folly would ensue if the biologists tried to get natural selection workable at the quantum level.

Quantum Mind and Keats

Unfortunately, the quirks and the "common sense" of Mind are of the quantum level. With true mental "evolution", one could inherit Minds and add to them. But death intervenes, that particular Mind is cut off and a new one, somewhere starts up and does not replace the previous one. We are all irreplaceable. There is no process for death. There is no process for birth. Not for us, at least. We never know the start or the finish. In between, many hope for an adequate preparation for death. We can do nothing to prepare for birth. We can only prepare for death through living, that is, having regulation, having meaning. This meaning, being caught up in what is too much to grasp, derives from morals. They apply to life as process. Ultimately, this process is inscrutable, beyond reason, lacks reason. It becomes "God's will” involving hope, faith and heaven, hell. There is no part of science that can connect with this.

Science operates on current evidence. There is no evidence for religion. This is to say there are no scientific explanations for the realm of the involuntary, which is a surprisingly large realm. Scientists get along on journalistic procedures asking what, where, when, and how. They leave out who and why. Actually, they are quite good about ignoring the "who" but they slip up occasionally, but with more latter day frequency, about the "why?" They have no prayer of getting close to the accounting for the involuntary. They mistakenly think they have it well in hand or let others think that they do.

In reality, only something like Christianity has that prayer of a chance of getting at it. For Christianity there is no structure to be concerned with unless it is everything, the Universe. There is only process and á la Berkeley that process is thought. We are in the mind of God or the process is God or God is process. Humankind once sailed along with God as the wind. Now we are becalmed, dead in the water.

Scientists have no explanation of the involuntaries including, of course, thought. They do maintain that thought is composed of brain circuits and so is Mind. They have "explained" memory, for example, but that is the how, not the why. Ask not the why and your are free - and stupid. Thus, you avoid the burden of self-consciousness and reasoning and questing and greatness. The best they can do is a representation of Mind, a stand-in, but that isn't "it".

It all starts somewhere - with thought. Some of thought is involuntary thereafter like the fleeting memory of perception. The perceived can be put to use by Mind. As it does so it has no accounting for itself. This "it" does not have Beginning or End known to itself. Before we are "we" we were nothing. Before "me" there was no "me". After "me" there is no "me". This is obvious enough though some have thought, some Minds, were templates in place for us and then we came along. Also, as for after "me", there has been thought to be "soul" or somesuch. Though they know for sure that we once were not they can't for sure say we will be nothing again. The involuntary was, so to speak, before we came, it, as an entity, has various features that propel us along. Then death. The last of the involuntary? There is a peculiar reasoning, not logic, that thinks of the involuntary as a before and an after. How can we know? How can we, if it is involuntary? They assert that the brain dies and so the Mind dies. Does the Mind die? The brain is involuntary. Is the Mind involuntary? Is it not first to last independent of the brain?

The brain has structure but the Mind does not. Mind is process. Structure partakes of stasis. The ultimate stasis from a survivor's standpoint is death. Most don't want that and we can't experience it anyway. We can adopt Keats’ attempt to see and hear, to sense stasis and paradoxically be more alive. But that isn't the stasis we want. We want to get on with it - the doing, process. Doing something that doesn't repeat and is constantly pleasurable. We are pushed along. Memory does the pushing. The memory of memory is the arrow of time. Thought, as circuits in the brain, aren't flowing in the direction of the arrow. They aren't flowing electrons. They are electrons in transition, altered states. Neuroscientists, for their satisfactory "explanation" need to use quanta and then their circuits will go to hell. On the contrary, explanatory power lies in restraint, in not getting too cocky.

But those cocky biologists after Darwin’s time seized the millions and millions of years for their use, furthering their interest in E-NS. Right there, at the very beginning of E-NS others had it right in that the others were criticizing the biologists for using induction. The biologists couldn’t proceed without it. They didn’t have and still don’t have, the rates of evolution, of natural selection. The clocks aren’t there for timing going from structure A to structure B, or for any other structure. What’s the rate? But that would be for a process. What could carry along A to B? How much time would be needed for A to B to C to D and so on? Add them, does it equal "today"? Is, was, there enough time? Perhaps it would add up to too much time? Concurrent rates could supply the necessary specifics?

There is no natural selection of natural selection, no acceleration, like v as velocity and time “t" and have it "t"d again. You do not process from A to B, from fossil A to fossil B. It isn’t A then B. No time course is known to account for such. It is B after A. One implies, one supposes. In truth, one presupposes. One induces what is necessary. You have "it", the structures in hand, then you begin.

Gödel knew the "inside" of a system of ideas can’t explain it’s "outside", where it goes, traversing in the world of ideas, thought, Mind. In other words, origin(s). Multi-universes? A mix of chemicals for which the secret is in the boil? There would have to be a secret, the obvious was eliminated long ago. So the secret is still with us, has always been with us. We do not perceive the secret, we do not reason to it, and we only ask "why"? We don’t perceive other minds, nor any Mind.

Turn away from being highly conscious and try becoming a bear or a billiard ball, á la Keats, whose Negative Capability entailed giving up on identity for the sake of meaning. This didn’t mean a falling into a vacuum, not an action-filled stasis. The effort was to overcome the brevity of process. The sheer doing of whatever in process was to end stasis, or boredom. But, at the last, it would come out to be equated with structure. Personally, but also professionally, memories could become so tightly blended, solidified into structure and process could not flow. Mind would begin to fill with structure. A systematic structure of one’s own making leads nowhere.

Try to escape the self-made box and get back into the flow. Try imagination to establish an ideal, but the ideal is dead on arrival as is the future. Only perception, the fleeting memory asymptotically approaching the present garnered by memory, acted on by Mind, can have the objective of the battle of imagination to be the best one can make of the true past, for oneself and for others. Give up on certitude, a lesser knowledge is better than none. Structure can be pushed too much as symbol, a lock-in, a lock down and a lockout -. striving to empower ourselves, using facts (such as they are) added to the involuntary with the aid of memory. The Mind can do this and make of life an art of meaning and so have a restricted attitude, but this process does not pertain to Mind itself.

Reality is grounded in the involuntaries. The best we can do is not to escape reality, but to fabricate them too, counter them, imitate them, as you choose, or preferably, make an involuntary more powerful and surmount them. Philosophers like Apollonius of Keats’ Lamia can be restricted to reductive uses of Mind. There are then only pieces taken out of play, out of process, and into structure or into a limited flow of process. The original, the more complex, is Mind. Unknown it is and will always be so.

Reality can be said to be outside Mind, a game of chase, avoiding it, actually. Or try to come to terms with it. Be Mindful, harmonize reality to the greatest extent. Or, lastly, like Darwin and others, bend reality to fit desire. It is the unadmitted romanticism of Darwinism.