A new and mystical friend shared an article with me the other day, Collective Intelligence Will Outsmart You, published on the website House of Beautiful Business — the Network for the Life-Centered Economy.
The article was an interview with a brilliant young neuroscientist and neuropsychologist, Hannah Critchlow. I will definitely have to stay tuned into this network, as well as take a little further note on the work of Ms. Critchlow, however my first reading of the article did, as you will see, get off on a certain foot.
What follows are the slightly edited notes I took in real time as I dropped into the article last Tuesday afternoon.… I do hope you will forgive the ranting, sputtering energy of frustration that bleeds through in a few places.
“Taking notes as I read… ;-)
In the second paragraph of the introduction I stumble immediately over the "hard problem of consciousness…"
I find This an absurdist argument that blithely ignores the objective facts of a rational observation. If one were to inquire with real sincerity this question would not be, "how does the brain give rise to consciousness," but rather the obvious — how does consciousness give rise to the brain.
Quite simply put, if we are striving for a sincere and empiric scientific inquiry, we must — prior to any measurement — understand the nature of our instrument. Objects of observation will, after all appear very differently depending on the tools we employ to derive information about them. A microscope, a scale, or a telescope, for example will each tell a very different story about the subject of our investigation.
The instrument we use first to investigate the phenomenal world is consciousness itself. Brains, bodies, selves, even the idea of consciousness itself are all second-order objects revealed through that primary lens.
Implicit in any materialist based "scientific" approach is the always unstated and unfounded first principle:
"If we assume our awareness is an artifact of what we observe,
and not the other way around, then…"
While this approach allows us to chip stone, make arrowheads, work wheels, tend fire, design and fly rockets to the moon, perform successful brain surgery, scroll Facebook, and toxify every raindrop, this only proves its function as a useful tool, not a sound approach to a truly natural intelligence and integrated science, let alone a foundation for knowledge.
This is, I believe, what my friend Larry Emerson is referring to when he describes "denatured methodologies." When we observe the external artifacts of these approaches in cultural terms, the Pseudoscientific Materialist Absurdist Approach produces massively destructive (extractive) conditions and often warring cultures. Meanwhile, in numerous (often more indigenous) cultural contexts, the objective approach seems to produce profoundly peaceful and pleasant coexistent and harmonic expressions (nonetheless subject to the vicissitudes of life, but not so nearly offensive to the whole of it.)
Ironically, there is also literally millennia of data (mostly available) on the subject from the latter point of investigation.
(Incidentally, the latter cultures (not individuals) are also not so nearly terrified of death — a fear which has led the former cultures to sacrifice nearly anything, self worth, relationality, and wonder not the least of all, in efforts to fend off the perceived enemy, not only from mortal experience, but even its discussion in “polite society.”
Of course this inevitable force comes back with a ferocity and nearly every modern child entering puberty does so having witnessed literally thousands of horrific murders and deaths.)
I'm sure I digress, but I just needed to get the off my chest as it came right out of the gate in the first line of the second paragraph. Suspending my incredulity and reading on. ;-)
Getting right into the interview and genes for ideology and the like, I'm intrigued by that but hope we can view them with a wide enough lens — my contention would be that those broad variations have to do with the genetic diversity exploring evolutionary pathways and the natural unfolding of those predisposed inquiry will lead in tens of thousands or millions of years (should this species managed to stick around) to actual speciation.
Coming up for me is the idea of a species evolving the capacity to self reflect. Bands and tribes have done so very successfully, I'm thinking in particular of the longevity of certain cultures. Empires have failed, almost conclusively, and nationstates are not exactly offering me much confidence in their capacities as useful structures for long term evolutionary development.
I do wonder about a species though…
I find myself taking the meta-view of all of this science. It seems to me that we have, in our Western minds, grappled with evolution and all its various artifactual contents to better understand this manifest "objective" world.
The tension, as I see it, that we are coming up against is that we have been doing so in an effort to separate ourselves from an objective “out there” world in order to better “control it.” I imagine this is a natural expression of defense against harm and death, as well as attempting to increase general survivability — see utility versus knowledge, above. In contrast, we might cultivate a loving understanding which would seek not to dominate, but to harmonize with these incredible natural forces.
I'm reminded of a quote, something to the effect of… "when I was a child, I played with childish things…" If I remember correctly, the larger context was about truly embracing love.
Meanwhile, the scientific insights about the way ideas are both protected and propagated through the species are quite fascinating!
And then the very next paragraph the initial object/consciousness confusion again rears its head… "… So, we are starting to uncover the way that we form relationships, and why we are driven to do it in particular ways."
This "why" focus that we hear so often from late toddlers, "why about everything!" Again and again why! ;-) This why seeks something stable and empirical, something we can grasp and wield as a tool and, too often, a weapon. (I do not seek to dispel “why,” only to soften rigid definitional edges.)
What if we built our knowledge, not so much like bricks in a castle (built of course on the sand of our understanding of perception), but more in recognition of underlying continuity in an always flowing and changing evolutionary dynamic.
Rather than "starting to uncover why," as some static objectivity, perhaps we can begin to gaze through the lens of "deepening our appreciation of the ways, in a dynamic evolutionary continuity and therefore the emerging vitality and thresholds of risk to which we can be responsive in real time."
Our preference for constructing objectivity, which keeps us alive as we seek food, avoid predation, mate and rear offspring cuts the other way when we follow its siren song into the presumption of a fundamental, stable, and religiously rule-based ontological stability.
To my understanding, no such practical evidence exists to support such an ontology, and quite virtually everything to the contrary suggests change is the only constant. (Of course when we observe this paradox semantically, we can even gain further insight into the subtle fundamental ephemerallity of meaning… A subject which, to my mind, takes us back to the original inquiry into consciousness itself as the first interesting object.)
Love is easy to find in the mind of any individual, but a little more difficult to parse out when inspecting a machine gun, tank, or rocketship… (It is there, when you look. ;-)
This last bit was provoked by the statement about bringing people together with a similar kind of intelligence level to create a more accurate representation of reality than individuals working alone.
Not so much that they create a more accurate representation of reality, but rather by the actual virtue of statistics, they create a collectively more functional reality more likely to propagate the group then could be accomplished by a single member of the species working alone.
Tyson Yunkaporta speaks to this in his work on "Right Story, Wrong Story." In particular he talks about the necessity of Story (note the correlation to consciousness and the subjectivity of being a natural part of something larger in contrast to some fairytales about fact and an observable objectivity,) to be subject to not only collective review, but likely even generational consideration before admittance to cannon.)
So clearly, the Western colonial science is in on this matter, "we create much greater intelligence together, then we do alone." I wonder how quickly we will see the elephant in the room, that that means going as a species alone is a foolish endeavor for long-term viability and well-being.
Like children, we need to wake up, access our new collective intelligence and commune with our floral and faunal (and even geologic) brothers and sisters. We need to learn the language, not just of our own imaginal mumblings, but the language spoken indigenously by our family at large.
To go further with this, in a personal sense, this is why it is so important for me to find a way to work generatively in collaboration with others, rather than simply continuing to incubate my own musings about the nature of life, the universe, and everything, and most particularly our place in it just now at this precipitous point in the human evolutionary journey.
Don't even get me started on IQ… ;-)
Kabir, I'm not sure this qualifies as a rant. Perhaps a vigorous wide ranging response is a better description? As always I enjoy your thinking and clarity. However, in this piece, it would help if you quoted more from the interview that lit the fuse.