Chaos breeds Conflict

Deep Stories: Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Journey into Trump Country "For many of Louisiana Tea Partiers, "Democrat" wasn’t a bad word when they were growing up but it is now. The well-known sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild went to the heart of Trump Country to find out why." A fascinating article on a recently published book:  Strangers in Their Own Land, that helps explain the Trump phenomenon. https://www.thenation.com/article/deep-stories/

To revisit 'The Silence of Animals' (2013),  is to renew respect for Gray's approach to the big dilemmas.    But what does he say about 'mind',  you may ask? " The myth that human beings can use their minds to lift themselves out of the natural world...has been renewed (from Socratic and Platonic mystical philosophy) in a garbled version of the language of evolution." Gray cites myth and illusion as metaphors for the human condition - the second section of the book quotes Freud acknowledging that his theories were grounded in "our mythological theory of instincts", and that the death instinct (the internal force that seeks to undermine individual achievement and health, and that finally defeats every life) may be a myth. He also offers a version of dualism, echoing Freud's inner conflict and Eros/Thanatos models to decry the possibility of any real improvement in how humanity interacts with the natural world.  Why impossible ?   Because human...

Following on from the last post, some thoughts about non-thinking or anti-thinking. The danger is to ascribe this, non-thinking, to Trump alone. In line with this blog, we are trying to understand how what seems like a regressive state of being is actually a group phenomenon. Hans Thorner, one of the early commentators on the work of the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, wrote: "...side by side with the desire for knowledge, there is the resistance to knowledge. Getting to know inevitably brings the individual into contact with objects that arouse displeasure. Hence tolerance to pain and displeasure is a precondition for the ability to think." So the problem here in group terms is to define what are the objects that provoke to the extent that there is a retreat from knowledge.

We have thought about Trump and talked endlessly about the Trump phenomenon. What does it mean?  We are well aware of the links to Le Pen and Farage and no doubt others who represent a somewhat extreme right wing position. In many of our conversations we have struggled to make sense of the politics of these demagogues. We found the following useful: http://www.vox.com/2016/9/29/12930730/mark-lilla-revolution-donald-trump-radical-islam-europe Also this. The title says it all, 'Trump's Theater of Cruelty': https://itself.wordpress.com/2016/10/10/trumps-theater-of-cruelty/ And yet, something is missing. There is something 'cruelly' solipsistic' about these individuals, notwithstanding their appeal to a certain electorate. So the issue is how to relate this solipsism to the group. There are two rather different referents to the meaning of enlightenment. It can denote a move to individualism, and all that that signifies, such as the sovereignty of the consumer. It ca...

“Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it.” Ray Kurzweil. But does it? Heidegger thought so. For him the awareness of death is transformative, and in that awareness the individual is truly authentic. What though is it that gives meaning? What does the signifier 'death' signify? Nothingness, the void, finitude, ashes? How does consciousness of nothingness or finitude change anything? How does some sense of our mortality intensify the time remaining? And is this sense and intensity driven by death or life? That's to wonder if the quote above has it the wrong way round. It is not that death gives meaning to life but that an individual in life projects into death something of enormous significance. That is, a self created significance, symbolised by the fear of dying.

“Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it.” Ray Kurzweil Does it though?

So, what is wrong with death? https://aeon.co/essays/we-might-agree-that-death-is-bad-but-why-exactly?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=e1a4a67899-Weekly_Newsletter_22_April_20164_22_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-e1a4a67899-68754401

The brain has become everyone's subject, perhaps because evidence for an afterlife or a godlike creator stubbornly refuses to reveal itself.  (and perhaps Psychoanalysis is another god that failed ) The human brain is now thought to contain the answers we have failed to find elsewhere. Neuroscience will explain our emotional responses as well as our problem solving abilities and our indefatigable curiosity.    Purpose, however, may remain the domain of philosophy. Eagelman emphasises the unconscious functioning which determines most of our actions and decisions, and acknowledges Freud's insight that much of behaviour is a product of unseen mental processes. The concept of extended mind, whereby external stimuli and exchanges with other minds enables broader conceptualising capacity and creativity that an isolated human could not achieve, may in turn be extended by AI into some new more complex form of mind. One can choose to greet this news with optimism, as heralding a leap fo...

  Reading this book, I found myself feeling comfortable, not with the repeated emphasis on inevitable death ( I still don't understand how death makes sense of life, rather than simply ending it ) but with Psychoanalysis as a scientific experiment, using mythology as its analogy, which attempted to comprehend the processes in what is beyond conscious self awareness. As Darwin found evidence for his theory of natural selection, Freud sought evidence for the power of the unknown in each person. Psychoanalysis is a valiant attempt, diminished by its institutionalisation, and likely to be subsumed by neuroscience, but it retains its poetic imagery and pathway to mysteries.

  The brain has become everyone's subject, perhaps because evidence for an afterlife or a godlike creator stubbornly refuses to reveal itself.  (and perhaps Psychoanalysis is another god that failed ) The human brain is now thought to contain the answers we have failed to find elsewhere. Neuroscience will explain our emotional responses as well as our problem solving abilities and our indefatigablecuriosity.    Purpose, however, may remain the domain of philosophy. Eagelman emphasises the unconscious functioning which determines most of our actions and decisions, and acknowledges Freud's insight that much of behaviour is a product of unseen mental processes. The concept of extended mind, whereby external stimuli and exchanges with other minds enables broader conceptualising capacity and creativity that an isolated human could not achieve, may in turn be extended by AI into some new more complex form of mind. One can choose to greet this news with optimism, as heralding a leap f...

Three books that are related and overlap thematically, and of great interest to our blog. http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/477918/capture-a-unified-theory-on-mental-health/ "Capture is how our attention focuses on how one stimuli rather than the thousands of others that are bombarding us."   "'Closure' proposes that we regard the world as open and it is we who close it through our stories." "Human thought is laid out in a continuous spectrum. Every human mind is a spectrum; evert human mind possesses a broad continuous range of different ways in which to think. The way in which a person happens to be thinking at any given moment depends on a characteristic I'll call "mental focus.""