October 28th, 2007 Fred McVittie
Spirituality and self-identification
We embrace ’spirituality’ (both religious and secular) because of our identification with levels of being which exceed our ability to literally understand them. We have the brains of hunter gatherers, tuned by evolution to match the survival needs of medium sized, sexually-reproducing, omnivorous mammals living in an Earth environment of 200,000 years ago. Our conscious cognition, miracle of software engineering which it undoubtedly is, is similarly matched to the demands of that environment and the nature of that body. Having conscious awareness is the great adaptive trick which we, uniquely in all likelihood, developed, and which gave us the advantages that allowed us to spread to successfully.
This is not to say, of course, that the contents of our cognition is limited to that of hunter gatherers. Obviously we can think about pretty much anything, but the mechanisms we use to carry out this thinking: the symbols and grammar of thinking, is largely unchanged. We think modern thoughts with stone-age brains.
One feature of cognition which manifests itself most prominently in consciousness is an awareness of self. Whatever else we might be thinking about it is usual that that thinking is oriented in relation to a self-concept. We not only are conscious of the environment and the sensory impact of that environment on our bodies, we also continually posit our own presence within that environment, even though we may not be aware of the fact. Wherever we go and whatever we do we take our selves along, the consistent figure in a changing landscape (or vice versa). There is a persistent and compelling ‘feeling of being’ at the centre of our experience that we refer to as a ’self’ and which we call ‘I’. The actual nature of this ‘Mind’s I’ as Dennett and Hofstadter called it is not easy to describe, as evidenced by the many descriptions of the I provided by psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and metaphysics. For most if us it is also experienced not having a single ontology, but as varying widely in scale, location, and consistency.
It seems likely that an early version of the I or self-concept, one which presumably is still available to us today, is one which is associated with and defined by the body and sensorimotor system. For the evolutionary narrative referred to above to make sense, then the adaptive success of a conscious embodied entity would require that such consciousness be initially of the body. The first contents of consciousness must have been of pain and pleasure, and the first self must have laughed and cried and probably little else.
Clearly we are not only conscious in this way now, and our identification with our bodies, whilst hugely significant, is not the whole story. Although the first self was built within the body and mapped onto that body seamlessly, the boundaries of the self no longer begin or end at the surface of the skin or within the confines of the senses. We routinely feel our selves to be ‘inside’ our bodies, looking out through our eyes and driving our limbs like children playing a video game. Sometimes this order is reversed and we feel our bodies are driving the I inside us and we are the unwilling passengers on the body’s careering path through the forests of desire and fear. Wherever we place the control, this dualism of ghost and machine has no basis in neurological fact but is nevertheless a human universal concept. We seem to be what Paul Bloom refers to as ‘natural born dualists’.
Conversely to this ‘inner I’ image, we often feel that our boundaries extend beyond their embodiment in an individual organism. The pain of others is often felt viscerally as our pain, particularly if that other is a close family member. When our team scores the winning goal we ourselves (sic) feel elevated by this triumph. When our country goes to war we (usually) experience it as personal, (and the extent that we do not is the extent to which our leaders have failed to steer our attachments in the direction of the desired conflict). Some individuals even claim to be able to identify with the entirety of the planetary ecosystem, experiencing damage to the Earth as a personal attack which may require an equally personal response, even if that response risks the safety of their own body. This would be an unthinkably contrary act if the old self, built by evolution for the better protection of the individual body, was all we had, but who can say, when pollution and climate change threaten the integrity of the planet, that such an expansive version of the self is wrong.
Whether one identifies one’s self with one’s body, with a smaller location within the body, or with an extended space, formation, or entity outside of the body, the mental tools that we use to conceive of this self remain the same as they have been since consciousness first emerged. As noted above, the basic symbols and grammar of though are those of the body and the senses; the body of a medium-sized mammal moving at medium speed. It is remarkable that with such clunky Newtonian tools we are able to conceive such elaborate and counter-intuitive versions of what a self can be. This is particularly true given that the rules and laws of the world our there with which we might identify often do not behave in ways we are used to.
In many cases, the physics of the world are radically different to the physics of the body, and therefore to the intuitive physics of thought. We may know that the universe is 11, 12, or 23 dimensional but we frame this knowledge in way which are remorselessly 3D. We may know that subatomic particles are ‘really’ probability functions with no specific and determinable location, yet we know this with a mind that is Aristotelean in its understanding of matter as stuff that exists at a single definite place and time.
When we identify ourselves with entities or phenomena which are beyond the ken of our embodiment, as we must when we extend our selves beyond the scale of, say, a mountain, or contract our selves inwards beyond the size of, say, a grain of sand, then that entity, that self, is operating outside the range of human physics and unsurprisingly feels a little weird. If we do attempt such a radical act of self enlargement or self diminution we may feel less solid in our certainties, less concrete in our understanding. We may feel that the world that we have become is less like the hard matter of material experience and more fluid, more flowing and penetrating and turbulent. We may even find that this evanescent feeling of being that I am is less firm than water even, that our self is melted into air and ether and has acquired the volatility of some rare and noble gas. At this point we may use the language of the ethereal to describe our self. Spreading and diffusing like oxygen on the moon, our self is everywhere infinitely expanded, infinitely thin and clear. At this point we have moved beyond gas and become, as mystics might say, spirit.
The phenomenological experience of being human allows, if not demands, that our awareness of our self is often applied to entities which are not simply embodied in the individual human organism. This ability to identify the self with ever larger and more encompassing areas of space and time has proved so interesting and entertaining that numerous practical methods have been developed for the encouragement of these ways of being. These traditionally include meditation, prayer etc, but also now may include technological and applied modern philosophical practices.
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