The clothing of language

• Plato reckoned that information can be true when it is rationally related to the real reality that is out there (ie to the Platonic ideals).
• Lao Tzu reckoned that the reality that can be described is not the real reality. This is because language cannot do justice to reality.
• Mystics reckon that reality can be intuited when the mind is in a meditative state of non-egoic flow (ie when in a transcendental condition).

In ‘fact’ all beliefs, feelings and intuitions are mind made: and they are developed and sustained using language in a variety of sociocultural settings.

Culture is like mental clothing woven in words – the new born baby learns to wear it. It provides the nurture that complements their nature. But in this case there is no going back. We are social animals that cannot return to being culturally naked.

BUT there is globalisation - and cultures collide. There are many ways to be human. And many more  people are becoming acquaint with a range of options in the nature v nurture debate.

Intellectually honest people can no longer be zealous xenophobes. There may still be them and us but there are expanding horizons which can lead to a state of ‘no boundaries’ (ref Ken Wilber). There is no demonic propaganda but rather thoughtful discussion leading to win/win agreements among like minded souls.

SO – the emperor of global thought (ie public opinion) is fashion conscious and has a wardrobe full of cultural clothes which more or less suitably address the human condition as expressed in a planetary game of Chinese whispers replete with cumulative errors.

BUT we now have Chinese whispers on the internet. There is thus an irrevocable, bottom up groundswell of a new hegemony where ‘truth’ is spoken to elegant power.

AHA – a meme – ‘speaking truth to debunk the hegemony of elegant but elitist power’.  

wasting time

To avoid wasting time I should do something. But some things are more worthy than others. And there are both intra and intercultural examples.

I spend a lot of time thinking rather than doing. This is an old routine. As a teacher I would do a literature search, then design and present a lesson plan. And the old habits are still with me in retirement.

But these days things are done differently. Students have easy access to information via the internet so finding content is not a problem. But on popular topics the student can be overwhelmed by the amount and reliability of data.

In my youth and amongst my ancestors there was what E H Waddington called COWDUNG (conventional wisdom of the dominant groups). But modern freethinkers embrace cultural pluralism which deals not with truth but rather with the best working hypothesis given the evidence presently available.

Intellectually honest modern people accept uncertainty and doubt. Their minds are not closed. They are unlikely to be zealots. If such people were to be the power brokers we might see an end to war.

The default mind

                                                                   
 Many new ideas are emerging about how and why the brain works. The ideas come mainly from neuroscience and various branches of psychology.

A key idea is that the brain has to ‘make sense’ of a huge amount of information coming in through the sense organs. [Note: there are more than 5 sense organs, and they sample limited ranges of stimuli eg the very small, visible range of the electro magnetic spectrum.]

There are changes to thinking about rationality and consciousness. The pattern is illustrated in the following matrix:

		Location of thinking/feeling
		Conscious	Unconscious
Type of thinking/feeling	Rational	1	3
	Irrational (emotive)	2	4

In the West there was the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment. These paved the way for the high value put on individualised, conscious rationality (1) which was understood as the ‘scientific’ mode of thinking.

Also in the West there was Sigmund Freud whose thinking was influential in its time but is now seen as flawed. The idea was that the wild, unconscious id (4) occupied the main parts of the brain and swamped the civilised, rational ego (1).

Modern thinking suggests that the majority of the brain functions are managed by the unconscious (3&4) and that the role of the rational and irrational conscious (1&2) is quite limited. The two parts of the brain are concerned not with ‘truth’ but rather with empirical effectiveness. The heavy thinking is managed by the unconscious and is passed to the conscious after the fact. This raises the issue of the function of self-consciousness – the I, me and mine conundrum.

The unconscious churns sensory inputs and relates them to more or less matching materials from memory banks so as to generate fast reactions and slower responses. This is an enormous and forever ongoing process. It is the work of the default mind – maybe!