I am only one...

What is Mind?

Statement of the question:  How are we to make sense of "mind" --- that is to say, awareness, intelligence.  Is mind separate from body?  Is it evolved from some non-aware state, and if so, how did it ever get started?   

Or if it is separate from body, where does it come from?  and --- the big question grappled with by most religions and innumerable  folk tales and supernatural stories --- what happens to it when the body dies?

Logic, and the best working hypotheses I'd been able to develop about other aspects of life and being, told me that mind, awareness, is probably a physical quality rather than something else entirely.   And yet mind feels --- I feel --- quite different.  I can look at my hand typing away on this keyboard, admire the flexible way it moves and the many tasks it can handle, with no problem believing that it's a thing which evolved gradually from simpler forms, requiring no special explanation.   My eye likewise --- I see no problem in its gradual development from slightly sensitized cells to greater and greater sophistication. 

But awareness --- this "place," this Self, from which I look out, observe, and think about all else --- can that be explained in physiological terms?  can it be said to reside in the body --- in the brain?  Intuitively, it seems separate even from the brain.  Is intuition reliable on this?

I have a sense that I'm not the only analytically-minded person who's left this question off to the side, answered tentatively, but with a question mark remaining.  The biggest challenge to an evolutionary explanation was the question of how it would get started, what would be the evolutionary advantage?  It's easy to explain the survival benefit of complex reasoning (though in the end some of our less felicitous human ideas may do us right out of existence), but the complex stuff wouldn't have sprung into existence in full-force.  What is the mind-equivalent of the pre-visual patch of cells that were faintly phototropic?

Well, now I think I've got it.  My new hypothesis is that self-awareness comes before thinking, with the corollary that thinking is an elaboration of awareness.

The only drawback (and it doesn't bother me at all, though it will irritate those who want a huge gap between Homo sapiens and the "lower" animals) is that it goes waaaay back.

Picture the primordial pond and the multicellular creatures eating one another, and being eaten.  In the harsh environment promoting mutations, and the rapid turnover of generations speeding promulgation of the advantageous oddities, the beginnings of sight and scent arrive not long after self-propulsion.

If every now and then one of those small conglomerations of cells has a mutation that lets it differentiate what is itself from what is not itself, think of the advantage!  It can hide itself from a predator; or it can hide and pounce on its unsuspecting prey.  Not hard to believe that it, and its progeny and its variations, would tend to thrive.

Take that and 600 million years of development, and it's not astounding to have a self-aware thinking animal that can consider everything from space travel to genetic engineering to theology.  It wasn't inevitable; if it hadn't happened to happen we wouldn't be here to think about how amazing it is.  But here we are.

Yep.  I relinquish the idea that my mind is some different thing, outside natural explanation.  It's a little disappointing, but not too much so.   (Paul said "All this, just because we could hide!")

Speaking of mortality

Aging, sickness, and the possibility of death are issues I've thought about more and more  --- not surprising, since I and many of my friends are now in our 60s or beyond, and death has become an immediate fact or a near possibility for lots of folks I know and love.  When we were all younger, thinking about death seemed morbid.  But at my stage of life, it no longer seems morbid in the sense of life-denying or obsessive.  In fact, once we come to terms with the fact that life isn't going to last forever, we're motivated to spend our hours doing what feels meaningful. 

Beyond that sort of "Seize the day" philosophy, I've looked for a way of understanding life and death.  What follows is based on thought and theory, but the ideas led me to imagery which makes the end of life a much less disturbing prospect.   (For me, this understanding built gradually.  For Paul, who's far more intuitive than I am, it came as a profound image in a dream, and the logic came afterward.  I'm grateful to him for the galaxy-forming image.)

The whole of our universe --- including each of us --- is made up of the same physical elements:  oxygen and hydrogen in great quantities, with a lot of other elements.   We are  not really altogether distinguishable from the rest of the universe chemically.   The living beings and objects and even the air around us is made up largely of the same elements we're made of.   When I think of it that way, it becomes a little hard to picture what separates me out from all the rest.  In a quite literal sense, I really am one with the universe.

Watch a stream flowing over pebbles.  Here and there the water is caught into a whorl that spins for awhile in a motion that seems separate from the rest of the stream.  One of these whorls may be momentary, or it may move along with the stream and last for quite some time.   But eventually it melts back into the stream as a whole.

Look at smoke rising from a fire and you'll see something very similar.  A "bit" of the smoke is caught into a swirl which may move and rise and spin for some time, and then it's absorbed back into the motion of the whole.   

Watch a waterfall that's big enough for the water droplets to disperse as they fall, and you'll see that same thing again.

All those things have become my images of life and death.   A life is the whorl in the waterstream or the rising smoke, the momentary pattern in the falling mist of the waterfall.  Dynamic, even beautiful, but certainly not something that will last forever.   Also:  not something that is ever really separate from the whole, and when it ceases it is not gone, it is simply reabsorbed to become part of the whole.

I'd read many years ago that the cells or elements of our bodies aren't the same ones all through our lives; the molecules come and go, exchanged with the atmosphere around us, and over a period of months, there's no individual cell left of the body we started with.

What this says to me is that in an even more specific sense, we are never separate from the universe we are a part of.   I am a part of the ocean, the trees, the wind --- and some part of me has been, and will be again, a part of everything I see around me. 

Death is a name for the time when the elements that are (temporarily) me are reabsorbed back into the universe and stop being replaced.   The particular elements that were part of me at any given moment, including the moment of death, have all been elsewhere, and elsewhere is where "I" will be --- dispersed, a part of the smoke, the tree, the waterfall, the atmosphere.

I find that image satisfying, comforting, exciting.

That doesn't mean I'm tired of my life.   In fact, acknowledging my temporary status makes me more ready to know a range of experiences, and to treasure perceptions of many kinds --- certainly more ready to see the wonder and rarity of momentary beauty, this warm sunshine on my knee right now, the whoosh of a gust of wind through the trees, the glitter of light on a strand of spiderweb moving in a lighter breeze.  In the wide span of the universe, what an absorbing coincidence each moment is!

There are a couple of important pieces to this issue which I haven't fully worked out.  One is philosophical, and has to do with consciousness, the mind:  what is it, and how does it relate to the body?   I've read some treatises but so far none I've come to own.

The other is pragmatic and cultural, and has to do with body image:   why do we (especially "Western" cultures) so despise a body which is aging, being drawn by gravity, getting ready to rejoin the universe --- and can we change our minds (whatever they are!) and stop seeing those body changes as bad.   That's another post.

Listen to Great-great-great-great-great Grandmother..

A story on SFGate this morning tells of a Paris typesetter, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, who invented a way to make a visible record of sounds in 1860 (17 years before Edison's first recording).  Scott apparently had no expectation that the sounds could ever be recreated from his picture; his writings indicate just an expectation that they could be read as a visible representation of sound. 

But now Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory physicists have converted that image back into the voice of the young woman who sang a few words of a song all that time ago.   It's believed to be the oldest recording of a human voice, and we can listen to it right now --- a slightly scratchy recording (well duh) but quite recognizable and individual.

http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/1860-Scott-Au-Clair-de-la-Lune.mp3

Listening to this is for me an exceptional experience of time travel, a sense of immediacy of contact with a person I might be passing as she absent-mindedly sang to herself while sorting clothes.   A fold in time.

Imagine a civilized conversation

As I've watched the Democratic candidates this season, the campaign and the debates, I've often felt frustrated. We have been lucky enough to have many good choices of candidates, people who know much, have thought much, and who have ideas and inspiration for solving problems.  Yet these intelligent and knowledgeable leaders are asked by the system to skip from one subject to another with little logic, to score points on each other as if they're in a high school debate contest --- to play "Gotcha" over trivialities.

It's not the best way for us to learn from them about the complexities and difficult choices of the world situation we face.   It's not the best way for us to get a sense of who the candidates are and how they might face the task of being president and negotiating with other leaders.   And it's alienating to see them dredge up points against each other, often weak points spun into weak weapons.

Picture this:  what if we got together and forcefully told our party and our candidates that we don't want them to fight each other in the primaries --- we don't want debates with gotcha points scored --- instead we would like to watch an active and civilized discussion among all our candidates, with enough time on each topic to give some real weight to the complicated issues.

It would be a chance to really watch what they know, and to learn from them.  It would be a chance to see how they thought about the issues; how they listened to information presented; how they dealt with disagreement.   I  think a half-hour to an hour in that kind of format would be of far more use in learning --- not only which candidate we want to support --- but what questions we want to ask them, and what positions we want to encourage them to to take.

Maybe they'd be tempted to play it safe, stick to their talking points, not engage in real conversation.  But if one candidate made it real and the others posed, there could be a payoff for the one who spoke from the mind and heart.

A radical thought, perhaps.   I like it.

Many issues to choose from

In tackling the problems facing our world right now, there's plenty of work to go around, and the efforts are not harmed by some specialization.  If I am talking about gender issues and you are focussed on racial bias --- or if I am talking about education and you are talking about environment --- we are not enemies.  There are enough of us to work on many fronts at once; there are enough fronts to keep all of us busy.  We can cooperate; we can each work on the issue that most stirs our energy at the moment; we can still understand that we are allies in making things better.

If we begin to fight each other over which is the single most important problem, we are wasting energy that could be used to address various problems.  We are also helping those who don't want to acknowledge the problems and don't want to see them solved.

Two very common arguments that serve the purpose of not solving problems are these:

(1)  If the person trying to address the issue is a member of the community (or nation) where the problem exists, the line is "How can you be so disloyal as to attack and criticize your own people."  If the person trying to help is not from the same community/nation, the line is "You are an outsider, you don't belong here, what business is it of yours, why don't you go work on what's wrong in your own home."

(2)  Regardless of whether the problem-solvers are local or not, the line is "How can you even talk about [this problem] when you haven't said anything about [some other problem]." 

Variations of these two arguments show up repeatedly.  They are virtually always distractions from the attempt to solve the problem, though often those who use them aren't consciously aware of that intention.   A good answer may be to describe the solution we're trying to achieve and ask, "Can you agree that it would be better if we achieved this change?  if it would be better, why fight over who helps to make it better?  why say that some other unrelated problem has to be solved before we can work on this one?"

We are neither first nor last

As I've grown up and grown older, I've gradually realized that I had greatly underestimated the generations that went before me, and had believed too much in the speeches in my youth that said our generation was the one that experienced the world in an unprecedented way and could make unprecedented changes. 

I think now that those speakers were trying to inspire us, to give us energy to step out and take action, and in that they succeeded --- for a time.  Many of us set out to change our country, change the world, make things better for all time.  (And many of us stuck to that commitment and are still making the effort in many different ways.)

But too many, I think, believed the exhortations as promises --- promises that we would bring about justice for all, would eradicate poverty and hunger, would end war, would transform our government into a fully effective, fully responsive instrument to maintain all those changes and see to the upkeep on a peaceful world (so then we could go play).  Our efforts made great gains, in civil rights, in ending the Vietnam war, in improving health and social conditions.  Then new problems arose, government continued to work imperfectly, and improved communications brought home to us all that had not been positively transformed.

And many of us felt betrayed and let down.  Too many of us became cynical and hopeless, gave up not just on the idea that our generation would fix it all for all time --- but on the idea that it could ever get better at all.

Over the years, as I've read more history, biographies, first person accounts of past events, I've increasingly realized that my generation really wasn't especially unusual.   We were young; we were hopeful; we meant well, and we had energy that could be dedicated to great causes.   We also had a wry skepticism about old truths, a willingness to cast away convention and be forthright about sex, relationships, all the old rules that took far too much energy from activism and joy and the full experience of life.

Well, what a surprise when I read what the creative youth of the 1920s had to say at their time --- or of the 1910s, or the 1890s, or the 1850s.  The language was a little different, but the ideas and emotions and sense of uniqueness were very familiar.

Now I think that it's important to acknowledge the efforts and the similarities of those who went before --- to learn from them, to honor them, and importantly, to know that progress has come in waves, in tides, with setbacks between.  We need to take the long view.   Achieving human justice is an evolutionary process, and not achieved in one step.  Look back a century, two centuries, eight --- and we can see that for most people, things are better.  The temporarily receding wave, the step back, is not a final loss; the opportunity  for progress arises again and again. 

I think of what I was taught in First Aid class about the Heimlich maneuver:  make each thrust with the expectation that this will be the one that succeeds.  And then, if it didn't, take a moment to position yourself, and make the next with the expectation that it will be the one that succeeds.  (Unlike First Aid, in social activism it's also ok to take a break before we're exhausted, so we're able to return to the task fresh!) 

What does your job cost you?

Last post, I proposed that democracy isn't a place, where we can say we have arrived and now reside comfortably.  Rather it is a tool which we must use regularly and thoughtfully if it is to do us any good.   It follows that being an effective citizen in a democracy is time-consuming.

It's hard --- in recent decades  increasingly hard --- to avoid letting our amusements, our jobs, and the vital concerns of parenting, friends, and family, take up all of our attention and efforts, leaving nothing for the demands of being active participants in the running of the system.  If we let this happen, we run the risk that the fabric in which we (and our children, families, friends, and jobs) exist will be shaped by others to their benefit, not ours.

And this has happened.  Over the past 50 years, America has lost its fairly flat distribution of wealth and very large and reasonably secure middle class.  [On this subject I highly recommend Kevin Phillips' book Wealth and Democracy.]  Increasingly, the middle class has lost power and security, while the wealthy control a larger and larger percentage of all income, with the extremely rich prospering even more.  Most of the middle class households that have more or less held their own, have done so by becoming two-income households. 

America's vaunted "increased productivity" has come in large part at the cost of leisure time and parenting time among the middle and working classes.   Many parents refused to cut back on parenting; as women moved into the workplace, men took a more active part in parenting, and in some ways both have benefitted in depth of experience.  But a prospering middle-class family with two working parents is relatively little better off than an equivalent family was in the past with one working parents; more gadgets, but probably less security.  The intensity and pace of work life have increased greatly.  The sucking sound we hear may be the energy level of working people going into their jobs.  The economic benefits have gone to the top echelons of wealth.

That transfer of wealth has been noticed, at least to some degree.   Few seem to be noticing what goes along with it:  less time and energy for ordinary people to pay close attention to what's going on in governing, or to do much about what they do notice.  More power as well as more wealth for those at the top.

Improving conditions for workers is not only an issue of fairness.  Balancing the highly unequal distribution of income is not only a matter of economic justice.  Both would make it more possible for ordinary people to use the tool Democracy more effectively. 

Democracy isn't a place

A few years back, I bought a Shopmaster from a friend who was moving.  It's an amazing piece of shop equipment; it has a lathe, a drill press, a bandsaw, and much more, all incorporated into one elegant piece of machinery with no end of attachments and adjustable parts.  Lee had done great things with it, and I was full of visions of the wonderful furniture I was going to build.

Time has passed, and the damn thing sits down there in the middle of the workshop, gathering extension cords and various odds & ends draped across it.  It has not built us anything; its instruction manual sits in a drawer and hasn't imparted even a glimmering of how it all works.

So who's fault is that?   Even if I were able to deceive myself, you know perfectly well.  A tool, even the most amazing and versatile tool, does not run itself, does not plan the projects and gather the materials and produce the results.   If I'm not prepared to study it, stick with it, and regularly put in a lot of time working with it, it is foolish to think it's going to do things for me all by itself.

Democracy is a tool.

If most of us ignore it most of the time, expecting it to work by itself to produce what we want, we really shouldn't  be surprised at getting little or nothing.  In fact, considering how little time and attention most of us put in --- a little tv watching or reading at election time, a little excited griping every now and then when one of the things that's going wrong happens to catch our attention --- it's really amazing that we're getting as much out of it as we are.

How many of us have run for office?   How many of us have even put in serious time working on a campaign?  How thoroughly do we study the details of the issues of the day, locally and regionally and nationally and internationally?   How often do we even go so far as to write a letter or telephone our representatives to express our opinions?   Maybe we do vote --- after other people have selected the candidates for us to choose from.

Figuratively, most of us are leaving Democracy down in the workshop unused, dusty and buried in junk --- and then feeling outraged if somebody else finds a way to use it to get what they want.

[coming up next --- a few thoughts on why we're so "lazy"]

I am only one

I've titled this blog "I am only one..."   You probably remember some version of the full quotation:   

    I am only one, but still I am one.  I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and      
    because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something I can do.

It's a beautiful but often perilous world and it seems to be an especially perilous time.  This blog is [a part of] the something I can do.

I can write; I can formulate ideas that are not merely partisan or "equal and opposite" reactions to what somebody else said; I read widely and think about what I read.  I am not infallible and there is much that I do not know, but I will acknowledge that and write what seems to be worth saying.  You the readers can decide if it seems to be worth reading.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Incidentally, a quick web search found two versions and two attributions for the "I am only one"  quotation.  I've used the one attributed to Helen Keller (1880 - 1964), which I like a little better than the one attributed to Edward Everett Hale (1822 - 1909).   If he said it, it does seem quite likely he said it first.   His version has a "should" in it, probably appropriate to his time, but I shy away from the word as generally unappetizing to the generations I've known well.

If I were rewriting the quotation today, my own version would go like this:

    I am only one, and yet I am one.  I cannot do everything, and yet I can do something.  I will   
    not let the fact that I can't do everything stop me from doing the something I can do.

On Blogging

[A "reprint" of an old post from June 23, 2000]

Little wonder that those bloggers who love writing have been struggling with the issue of the quality of writing in blogs. The blog is a new form of writing - new for the writer, new for the reader. From the writer's point of view, it is read upside down. From the reader's point of view, it is written upside down.

Think of the blog as a piece of literature. In the form in which it will be read, the writer begins with the end of the story (which will eventually disappear) and works toward the beginning of the story, which will never be reached unless the blog is abandoned.

One can imagine constructing a novel which would have this form (even to the disappearing ending?!), but it is hard to imagine writing it in that order - as the blog format demands one do. The narrative thread must be entirely conceived of before starting, with no chance for it to change and develop as the writer writes - or else the narrative thread is an independent and changing force, which gives the work a disconnected tone which will be unsettling to the reader accustomed to traditional literature which has a beginning, middle, and end.

This can be solved by treating the blog simply as short-short story; a series of unrelated mini-essays, or as snippets of conversation. The entries may be polished, but there will be little or no continuity from one to another, no development, and so there will be little depth to the writing.

But I'm thinking as a writer when I say that, a writer accustomed to being in control of my product. The blog as a form of literature is interactive - the reader has the choice of where to go, when to pursue or ignore links, and so the reader is in control of the product. Of course, readers have always been free to skip around in the book, or set it aside, or read alternate pages from dozens of books at once - but most readers of books don't do so. Most readers of blogs do.

Still thinking as a traditional writer in control of the product, there are intriguing metaphors in the blog. As in life, one encounters the most recent version of the individual, and (more readily than in life) has the opportunity to probe for the past versions which led up to this finished and changing product. As a novel, blogs (I realize one should think of the plural, not the singular) would be a mystery, or a psychological study.

So - consider a new novel form: written with links, so that the reader chooses the order in which to read. Every reading a new version of the story. The writer still in charge of the content, and challenged to create an entirely new form of narrative line, adaptable to being approached from many sides by the reader. Is somebody already doing this?)