Why are we conscious of having a mind?

As we go through life, our mind and body seem separate from each other, to exist independently. We could list endless examples of it here but there is no need to; we're all familiar with the feeling and most of us take it for granted to the end. Especially then, perhaps.

Psychologists and neuroscientists and philosophers of course do not. They wonder what consciousness is, who ‘I’ am, what 'the mind' is that experiences the outside world, and an inner world, as ‘me’. They’re hard at it more than ever these days and will never stop.

I’m not a neuroscientist, a certificated psychologist and not, I rather hope, a philosopher, which sounds a stuffy thing to be. But I have an answer for me myself that may network with you yourself - if we've connected so far.

Remember when you were a child? How the world was exactly like it seemed - real? You didn’t know about the difference between reality and perception and so never had any illusions. Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy visited. Even now, it is warm summer teatime in the garden with the fresh green smell of someone mowing the grass, and Mum and Dad and your sister there, with you always.

“We do not know the substance of things, we have no idea of them,” wrote Isaac Newton, around the time grown-ups were starting to enquire in earnest about such matters - to reason scientifically. As children, we didn’t know philosophers and thinkers had spotted, perhaps always known, the world could not be just as we see, hear, touch, taste and smell it: in other words, fully understood through our senses. It didn’t occur to us in childhood that we were part of what the world was and, as part of it, must partly create it*. As adults, the evidence is there, as plain as it could be, in everyone conceiving the world and themselves within it differently.

The question today is to what extent we create reality. That can lead, for the perverse, to whether there is reality and us in it at all, when a myriad of virtual worlds is now ‘fact’.

But at least how we create the world and us in it seems to have become clear: we couldn’t do it without our bodies.  Without our bodies, there is no world. As we build cities and plan to visit other planets, real or imaginary, our bodies, when aroused, declare us in love; our face flushes when we’re flattered or angry; tears flow when we're sad; in danger, we find our legs quick to run away; our arms and hands move to write something serious down, or pick up a cup.

Our bodies, with our brains as control centre, grapple with the world as part of the world. Like the child knows its body is everything, we can know the idea that ‘I think, therefore I am’ is not everything. Our body is our actions, our perceptions, beliefs, hopes and dreams, our understanding and what makes up what we call our consciousness. Me. You. Everybody.

     *In philosophical terms, we did not know about Kant's separation of subject and object.                            

                            My wonderful sister Barbara left her world and ours last night    

                                                                           

                                 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

 

Why do people always disagree with one another?

The question arose whenever my articles were published on a particular website. I won't name the site, that's not my point.

I just didn't get many comments and readers almost always rejected comments I made on other articles, often with abuse. I remember vividly one of the more polite objections to something I had written: 'You sound as if you think everyone should have the vote.'

As the penny slowly dropped, I made a serious attempt to use democracy as a test case, to talk it through with readers who all insisted they believed in free speech. I tried hard to get to the bottom of what they meant by 'democracy', what it included, and the way it worked. I never got answers, only dismissals of every answer I gave, every point I tried to discuss. In defeat, I fell back on Mark Twain's advice: 'Never argue with a fool; onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.' Eventually I gave up.

But whatever my stubborn friends may have done, I went on thinking. I came to see they were not fools, that what was foolish was to suppose they were. They were not, in fact, even 'wrong'. And finally I realised the difference between us wasn't just a difference of opinion, or different politics with the usual get out that they had a 'right' to their view and I a 'right' to mine. The difference was we were different people and we had a different moral outlook.

Obvious enough - but in taking that for granted, we know and forget. We tell others this 'stands to reason' and that is 'common sense', as if reason and common sense must come to the same conclusion. We accuse a partisan media of not being 'objective', party politicians of not telling 'the truth'. In a 'real' democracy bad things like that wouldn't happen, people wouldn't have other loyalties. In a 'real' democracy everyone would know what was sensible and do it. 

Disbelieving them, we believe every word we say. Every problem has an easy solution, there's a Right and a Wrong always. It is the way we are. 

This is no counsel of despair. It is the challenge.

Putin's war of unintended consequences

War, along with all its horrors, brings change, much of it unforeseen, and Putin's war in Ukraine has already shown it is going to be no exception, assuming the world escapes a nuclear finale, which we must assume.

Away from the battleground, negotiations between Ukraine and Russia and efforts at mediation are continuous, with contradictory reports on their progress; these may or may not produce an outcome short term. Death and destruction are not stopping meanwhile, but a clear victory for Russia, with imposed terms, is unlikely now. The speculations here consider the international aftermath. 

In the Europe heartland, the Versailles Declaration March 10/11 by twenty seven heads of state and government that the EU intends to look to its collective defence, counter cyber warfare and become autonomous in food and energy, recalls Churchill and Roosevelt announcing the Atlantic Charter, which set out the Anglo-American vision for the world after WWII.

This is Europe eighty years on, warning "Russia and its accomplice Belarus" that their war marks "a tectonic shift in European history" and condemning it unmistakably as one. The affirmation that "Ukraine belongs to our European family" has the ring of a distant knell for Mr Putin. He has brought forward the unity he started the war to break up.

Across the wider world, the greatest alliance the world has seen, NATO, has been spurred to renew its purpose and energy, restoring the leadership of the US, Putin's implacable adversary, that had been compromised under President Trump. Essentially isolated, under harsh sanctions, Russia is reduced to a declining secondary power. 

The Cold War may resume temporarily and conceal this, but Russia's descent to pariah state, weakened economically and exposed militarily, is possible: the Sick Man of Europe in the 21st Century as the Ottoman Empire was Sick Man in the 19th. As an audition for the role, Putin led his country into an old-fashioned war he could not win. China, the modernising, coming world power, with no vital interests in Europe, can hardly be anxious to take part in the Kremlin's blunder.

Nor is it unduly optimistic to see liberal democracy making a comeback after a period in the doldrums. Authoritarianism is terribly revealed not only as brutal and barren, but a potential death threat to all. The millions of Ukrainians fleeing the fighting are spreading their idea of freedom to lands where millions more work for the same end. Here is what Putin's war is finally about: the ongoing struggle between two cultures, one inexorably advancing through weight of democratic numbers, the other ever more widely viewed as left behind by history.

If Russia is so sidelined, America may see a future in courting China, the only remaining equal, to impose a steadying Pax Sino-Americana. It would involve rejecting Trumpism, maybe muted trumpeting in future of the delights of democracy, and a balanced deal in the South China Sea, but necessity has led to diplomacy managing greater demands. What, after all, does Trump's national machismo have to offer when his alter ego Putin failed at that game, besides inviting the same terrifying possibility of nuclear extinction?

There was a time when speculation could see Russia and America getting together by the 21st century to resist the growing might of China. Putin has seen off that delusion. But what powerful leader would follow the Russian autocrat into a future he mapped out now?

 

Ukraine: beginning of the end for Vladimir Putin?

The dawn of the nuclear age saw the parallel understanding that war between the superpowers is henceforth ruled out. US policy towards the USSR from President Truman on became 'containment' not confrontation. The USSR reciprocated, notably at Cuba, demonstrating the Cold War in action. There could of course be small proxy 'conventional' wars, but a nuclear war was not to happen and did not.

It is reasonable to assume years on Putin calculated this situation could be turned to advantage. He would have known the US and NATO could not and would not fight for Ukraine and all he had to do was move in as fellow Russians. His miscalculation is Ukraine does not see things that way and Ukraine is not Korea or Cuba or Georgia. The country cannot play proxy: it is part of Europe and seeking to join NATO and the EU.

Nevertheless, NATO cannot intervene directly to aid Ukraine for fear of a war between nuclear powers; it looks as if Putin's thinking is right and his plan must succeed.

But, ironically, the same logic also works against him: as there is no one to defeat him, so there is no way he can win. Russia can languish, without a victory and settlement, as an international pariah, stuck with policing a large hostile country. To what end? The restoration of the Russian Empire? For how long? At what cost?

Mr Putin must be banking on the world moving on after a fait accompli and it is true 'normal relations' have a way of returning in time: outlawing a state becomes impossible for the international community to sustain indefinitely. 

But the risk meanwhile is enormous for leaders who break ranks, whether sanctions against their country work or do not work. Pressure builds for a quick victory and end that is, from the logic of the present situation, impossible. So it is for Russia now. Mr Putin has already lost by starting a war he does not have the power to finish.

Is Ukraine showing War is past its sell-by date?

An excerpt from an essay by Yuval Noah Harari, historian, philosopher and author

At the heart of the Ukraine crisis lies a fundamental question about the nature of history and the nature of humanity: is change possible? One school of thought firmly denies the possibility of change. It argues that the world is a jungle, that the strong prey upon the weak and the only thing preventing one country from wolfing down another is military force.

Another school of thought argues that the so-called law of the jungle isn’t a natural law at all. Humans made it, and humans can change it. Contrary to popular misconceptions, the first clear evidence for organised warfare appears in the archaeological record only 13,000 years ago. Even after that date there have been many periods devoid of war. 

Unlike gravity, war isn’t a fundamental force of nature. Its intensity and existence depend on underlying technological, economic and cultural factors. As these factors change, so does war.

Bertrand Russell, Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare (1959)

I have never been a complete pacifist and have at no time maintained that all who wage war are to be condemned. I have held the view, which I should have thought was that of common sense, that some wars have been justified and others not. What makes the peculiarity of the present situation is that, if a nuclear war should break out, the belligerents on either side and the neutrals would be all, equally, defeated. This is a new situation and means that war cannot still be used as an instrument of policy. It is true that the threat of war can still be used, but only by a lunatic. Unfortunately, some people are lunatics."

My response to a correspondent arguing Russia's case* 

Sir -

Your correspondent Themba Sono either misses the point or cannot be serious (“The Problem in Ukraine”). It is 2022, not 1922. And it is Russia that looks prepared to invade an independent European country at this point, not America or NATO an independent Russia.

Arguing who is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in the present situation won’t settle the difficulties both sides face but stoke and inflame them. While we continue to think in obsolete terms - that is, of states ultimately having war as a legitimate course of action - we’ll never be at the end of deadly conflict in, most deadly of all, a nuclear age.

Nationalists and ideologues on both sides should be exercising maximum discretion, urging one course and one course only at this time: that war is no longer an option for governments and that diplomacy must deal with this crisis and secure the peace of the world.

*Sunday Times South Africa, February 13

 

Have we got a 'right' not to be vaccinated?

It is no surprise so many of us find the whole Covid thing totally bewildering. We never had to worry before whether we had a 'right' or not. We took any jab available to protect us, or didn't take it. Simple.

Now freedom-lovers everywhere are resisting governments, liberal and illiberal, when they talk about or introduce dreaded vaccination mandates. Yet others concerned for our rights point to the injustice of vaccine shortages. Everyone has the 'right' to be vaccinated. The implication is everyone should be.

Can there be a right to do something and a right not to do the same thing at the same time? Yes, is the answer. We are all individuals; we all have human rights. But in this, oddly, the rights bit is not the problem. The problem is the human bit.

Human beings are not individuals. Or at least not individuals alone. That is overlooked, if not forgotten, amid the hubbub of human rights rhetoric.

You can believe that dogs or birds are social animals but not individuals. But you can't believe the opposite about human beings. Human beings are individuals and also social animals. That's the stumbling block.

And the trouble with this stumbling block is there's no way round or over it. It's not as if we are all totally independent individuals except on Fridays and Saturdays when we become social. We are interdependent every day of the week, when we ask our partners where the car keys are, go to the dentist, borrow the neighbour's sugar, catch the early bus. 

These are trivial instances of mutual dependence and cooperation, among countless trivial others, but the same spirit extends to the big things. Like rescuers turning out for days to save a single cave explorer or swimmer lost at sea; like the ideas we support, which political party we vote for. An individual right is involved everywhere always; so, equally, is a general obligation.

Perhaps all the talk of our unlimited 'rights' is nothing more than politicians' talk to get us onside? Libertarians who feel there is no such thing as 'the people', ideologues who believe there is no one and nothing but the masses. Has Covid changed any of this? Is that what it may help to do over time - change things?

Take the jab: it's a contemporary slogan. Why? Who's got the right to ask that?