If
you track from this blog to my website and its other, associated blogs, you'll find me
theorising about the mechanics of human consciousness. The website and blogs were inspired by and focus, primarily, on the subject of human change - on how people can best manage changes in their life (or, indeed, help other people make changes).
Crucial to this is an understanding of human consciousness - theorising about how it operates is vital to any realistic appraisal of how we manage change. If you want to change your life, you have to change your thinking patterns - you have to interrogate and challenge your perspective, your beliefs and values, your understanding of 'self', the roles you play, the habits you've developed. And you have to do this objectively in order to find motivation, energy, optimism, direction, consolation, comfort, compassion, support, or whatever is essential to change your particular situation.
When I looked at consciousness, questioning how it could be explained, how it could have emerged, how it worked, I began to speculate that it had to be described in terms of 'narratives', and in a differentiation between 'data' and 'information', and that became an essential tool in trying to identify the best means to manage change.
If you want to bring about change in your life, you have to change your thinking, have to adopt a mindset of change in which you question and deconstruct your 'narratives' … and this has nothing to do with the bullshit and myths of 'positive thinking' or 'laws of attraction' spouted by so many self-improvement authors and self-appointed, self-publicising 'gurus'.
You have to review your 'narratives' – have to interrogate your thinking, identifying the ideas, beliefs and meanings which can help trap you in an unsatisfactory situation, replacing these with dynamic 'narratives' which drive change and enable you to manage that change. This is much more complex than any simplistic notion of 'positive thinking', or that great, seductive myth, 'the law of attraction'. 'Law'?
Many people find life unfilliing, find themselves trapped in unhappy and abusive situations not because of any particular inadequacy or failing on their part, but because of their social situation. Grief for loss is not something to be escaped through 'self-empowerment' - it's a logical emotional response to pain.
Poverty is not a matter of personal inadequacy - it's caused by the polarisation of wealth and power into the hands of a few ... who then insist they've earned it and that the poor are simply inadequate and lack the will or ability to compete on what is decidedly not a level playing field.
Being bullied at work is not something people invite - it's caused by managers and employers and 'colleagues' who lack any respect for others and are consumed by their own inadequacies, self-interests and power games ... and it's trite to suggest that moving to another job could solve the problem.
The self-help publishing genre is a lucrative market, one which largely monopolises our access to information on change. It religiously avoids any mention of politics or active enagement in trade union activity. The bulk of the market is given over to patronising advice suggesting that your dreams can come true by following a few simple steps.
And it's a lucrative market because there are millions of dissatisfied, disillusioned punters out there who want a quick fix, a simple solution, who have become habituated to the marketing of hedonism and a consumer lifestyle - the world needs radical change, but the punters have been conditioned to being only interested in themselves and the ready purchase of an off-the-peg solution to their particular problems.
My interest in change does not focus on middle class angst about under-achievement or the pursuit of 'dreams'. My interest in change embraces political change, global change, diversion from criminal activity, ending abuse of drugs and alcohol, coping with stress and anxiety, depression, confronting suicidal tendencies, challenging macho and sexist attitudes and institutions, dragging the world into a caring, compassionate and educated 21st century mindset ... the whole gamut of 'change'.
And that's why I found it crucial to theorise about consciousness rather than simply produce a critique of the self-help genre, positive thinking, or so-called 'law' of attraction.
[The law of attraction myth proposes that to ensure positive things happen in your life, all you have to do is think positive thoughts. Positives attract positives in this fantasy. Negative thinking, conversely, attracts negative influences into your life. It's simplistic, the legacy of some crack-pot ideas promulgated by 'New Thought' thinkers in the late-19th century. There is not one shred of scientific evidence for it, there's not one shred of credibility in it, and anyone making an intelligent, educated appraisal of the arguments will quickly recognise its fatal flaws. But that's the subject of future blogs.]
Change is not something you achieve by smiling, feigning optimism, reciting positive mantras ('affirmations'), or visualising yourself achieving your dreams. Change is something which you have to manage, something to which you give dynamic direction. As anyone who has tried to give up smoking, withdraw from a pathological drink or alcohol habit, lose weight, or cope with loss or rejection can tell you, changing your thinking and your behaviour is far from easy. It involves energy and pro-active effort, often at a time when you're feeling exhausted and drained. It takes times, it can be cruelly stressful. It's easy to be seduced by glitsy literature or flash websites promising you 'easy steps' and a painless experience.
Nevertheless, much of the self-help genre - from quick-fix diets to positive thinking advice - continues to promote the idea that change can be achieved by following a few simple rules, and owes its success to the fact that people want an easy solution to their problems ... they don't want to be told they'll have to work at it. And that, in part, is down to the nature of our consumer society - surely happiness can be bought, surely there's a 'magic bullet cure' for unhappiness or lack of fulfilment? Sorry ... .
Want to change your life? Then start thinking about the real world you inhabit. Develop a political and sociological awareness of what is happening in your world and how it affects you. Understand how human consciousness works. Understand your own thought processes, values and beliefs. Look behind and beyond the politicians' sound-bites, the corporate management of the media, and the censorship of science and of alternative viewpoints.
Be critical of yourself, be compassionate with yourself, work with others for collective change ... but begin by unpicking the dysfunctional narratives which cause you to repeat pathological or problematic behaviours, and recognise just how many of those narratives have been learned from the political and media Establishment. Disillusionment and dissatisfaction with your life is rarely a wholly personal, individual matter caused by your own failings or inadequacies. You will make mistakes in life, you have to hold yourself accountable for them, but much of what fucks you up is the by-product of a world in which the gap betwee rich and poor, powerful and powerless, is ever widening.
(I'll explore the idea of 'narratives' in due course - for the moment, recognise that I want to escape any notion of 'negative' thinking or behaviours, I want you, instead, to conceive of them as being 'dysfunctional' or 'problematic' - 'dysfunctional' or 'problematic', not 'negative'. In the context of change, simply describing something as 'negative' is pretty much meaningless. If you want to change your thinking patterns and your behaviours, you have to understand why specific ones are 'dysfunctional' or 'problematic', where and how you learned them, ... and precisely why it is they cause you the problems you wish to eradicate or the pathological / unsatisfactory lifestyle you wish to transform.)
So, let's finally get round to exploring how I explain consciousness and what I mean by 'narratives'? Well, my analysis takes a narrative rather than an essay form. What I'm trying to do here is produce a 'stream of consciousness' on the subject of how language, in the form of 'narratives', shapes our thinking. I'm not trying to write a learned piece of science or social science, but rather to run through my own set of narratives which explain to me ... or go some way towards explaining to me ... how 'consciousness' works, how it might have come into being, and how this can be used to effect change.
Until our ancestors - early 'humans' or homanids - created language, our primary sense was visual. We could see our world, could experience our environment in sensory terms ... sight, sound, touch, smell, taste. We could sense that we had physical boundaries - there was a world out there, beyond our being, and we were agents acting within it.
We could see the world as a moving picture show, hear it as an audio-visual surround-sound, smell it, feel ourselves touching it and being touched by wind and rain. We had a sensory 'narrative' experience of our world as a continuity, as a global experience - it told us stories about what was happening and what we were experiencing purely in terms of our senses. We could perceive theats, feel pleasure, act a non-speaking role ... but we had no way of explaining it or interpretting it to ourselves, let alone anyone else.
Try to imagine you have no language. You can see things, can hear them, smell them, etc., but you have no words to describe or name them. You can recognise what a pig is, you can differentiate it from a lion or a duck or a tree. You recall what it looks like, how it sounds, how it smells, how it moves ... maybe what it tastes like ... how you might go about hunting and killing it.
You might be able to communicate with fellow hunters - and you could recognise them as different from you but as sharing similarities - by going "oink, oink" and acting out its movements and pointing, but you have no language: there is no constant monologue (or is it a dialogue?) going on in your head, you can't 'talk' to others, though you may have some hand signs and facial expressions you can share with them ... and can probably laugh, can grunt in displeasure, can signal emotions with specific noises, looks and gestures.
You can do things and understand why - you have intent. You can react, you can respond, you can initiate action. But you live in the present. You can recall the past - as learned experience. You can conceive of future activity - otherwise you'd do nothing, there wouldn't be any point. But you have no understanding of time, cannot articulate past, present or future.
Day begins ... day ends ... and then there's another one. You might notice that the moon follows a pattern, you can experience seasonal change, you have no idea of the 'lunar month', 'year' or cycles of time, no way of describing them to yourself other than an intuitive appreciation that spring follows winter. You effectively live and act in the 'now' as someone experiencing the world as it happens, sometimes passively, sometimes actively.
You can point to yourself, you can point to other homanids, but you have no language to describe yourself to yourself, no language to explore your feelings or express ideas or recall memories. It's only when we develop increasingly sophisticated language that we can start to name ourselves, give ourselves an identity, create a conscious self-awareness and active consciousness. Language doesn't just give us the ability to communicate with others - its most significant role is in empowering us to communicate with ourselves, to think ourselves into the role of an expressive, self-conscious individual.
Language is our sixth sense, and, at some stage, it supplanted vision as our primary human sense. It gives us the ability not just to recognise an object visually, but to name it, to classify it, to shape an understanding of its significance to ourselves and to others. It gives us the ability to move from the concrete to the abstract - from simply naming things (pig, horse, lion) to dealing with concepts and generalisations (animals, predators) and non-animate things (weather, seasons, strength).
Language initially enabled us simply to name things and people. Is having nouns enough to trigger consciousness? We establish within our group a sound which means 'tree', another which means 'stream'. Maybe we give ourselves names of objects - 'man tree', 'man river' (think of Native American naming systems). Simply having access to a limited number of nouns doesn't allow us to think, merely to visualise. It's only when language becomes sufficiently complex to create abstractions that we can start that internal monologue / dialogue which is the mark of consciousness. (Current thinking says this happened around 100,000 years ago, maybe even more recently than that.)
Language is the key to consciousness - it enables us to represent ourselves to ourselves, to trigger that inner monologue / dialogue through which we explain, interpret, understand, and create a dynamic identity of 'self' in which we discuss with ourselves our actions and intentions and feelings. It allows us to internalise the external world as something more than a continuity (or discontinuity) of sensory experiences, to make it 'real' in the sense that we can replay it and interpret it in our minds, not simply experience it as it is happening.
Remember, the brain evolved from very basic abilities to sense light, sound, etc. As the eye and ear evolved, the brain synchronised sensory experiences until we have the sort of surround-sound, moving picture show, sensory experience we can all recognise. Deluged by sensory data, the brain had to focus on what was critical - so, while our senses are all constantly active, we attend only to what is significant, what is changing, what is unusual. We sift and reject the data, we edit out and absorb information.
Language was built on this brain mechanism. We learn language not as a rigid set of definitions, but as dynamic, moving-meaning shows - we think in 'narratives' ... not rigid definitions, but flexible, expanding, interlocking concepts which relate to sensory experience, emotion, memory, and a practical (but not necessarily accurate) understanding of out world and of our 'selfs'.
Think of words as data - we don't need all of them all the time, they'll remain in our subconscious until needed (well, the ones we know at any rate). We select specific narratives to give us the information in any given situation - narratives which explain our understanding and determine our behaviour.
Paralleling the moving audio-visual sensory show, we now have a moving language narrative to amplify its meaning, to qualify what we view as information, as significant ... and to give narrative meaning to our sense of self. The evolution of language gives us a growing ability to extend meaning to the world around us ... and meaning to the world within us, central to which is our creation of 'self'.
Language is how we make sense of our thoughts. It's how consciousness evolves. As we developed an increasingly sophisticated range of words, we could communicate with others and, in doing so, recognise similarities and differences between us. It opened the door to a self-expressive sense of individuality and uniqueness, to seeing ourselves as "I", "me", not just someone who had a name, but someone who had a unique, personal set of experiences and emotions which set them apart from others.
Prior to language, you had a sensory repertoire. Without being able to express the idea as words, you could sense "hungry, food good". Your taste buds had their own set of narratives - they could differentiate the taste of salmon and pig and berries and nuts and fruit. It was like a soap opera, where you know the characters and their background stories - so your taste buds and brain combined to give you a sensory description of how apples taste, how they feel, what they look like, smell like, how they sound when you bite into them.
The simple process of biting into an apple or other fruit combined five sensory experiences - like the characters in a soap opera interacting. They are discrete sensory experiences, yet they combine into one physical experience - an experience you can remember and one you can anticipate.
This is why I describe consciousness as involving 'narratives'. The senses combine to deliver one complete, satisfying story. No one sense alone can describe the eating of an apple, you can't fully appreciate the experience of eating that apple without all five combining in a whole. Five sensory 'narratives' coallesce as a single experiential 'narrative'.
The brain does this in other ways. Our sight is processed in different areas of the brain and these processes are synchronised to give us a single conscious experience. It processes the 'narratives' for colour, for shape, for movement, etc., and integrates them into one moving picture show. The other senses equally combine other sensory dimensions into one, then the brain combines the senses into one experience of the world. There are narratives within narratives - discrete areas of the brain processing relatively limited data inputs (colour, bitterness and sweetness, tone and pitch, sharp and cold, etc.) and making sense of them as the complete narrative of 'now'.
Narratives stack like Russian dolls. Imagine you want to buy a table. You have several catalogues before you showing pictures of hundreds of different tables. You understand the narrative - you know what a 'table' is. Ultimately it's a functional, raised flat surface. You know how it's used - people sit at one to eat meals, put vases on them, hold meetings around them, work on them, etc. You'd recognise a table as a table regardless whether it was made of wood or metal or glass or plastic, regardless whether it had three legs or twenty, etc., etc., etc. You know what constitutes a table. You have in your mind a narrative of 'table'.
Just as there are stacking tables, so our narrative for table extends beyond a simple dictionary definition to include a stack of other associated narratives - I've mentioned a few above (flat surface, legs, meals, meetings, etc.). You could list hundreds of other narratives which relate to or describe the qualities and functions of a table ... or which act as portals to memories about tables and your personal experiences. 'Narratives' are not simply a definition, they explain, expand, inter-relate, combine concrete and abstract, include physical examples and memories, linking them, in turn, to other narratives. Any one narrative locks into and provides the key to a range of other narratives.
That's what's going on in your head. It's not that every object or concept is given its own, unique pigeon hole for the definition. No, they are narratives, they tell stories, they access stories. It's like liquids flowing together, it's like an ensemble of character actors in a soap ... they interrelate, they interact, but, while they can follow a script, they can also, like a jazz trumpeter, improvise on a theme. Narratives are fluid, foever changing, impossible to define. You could never express everything you know about 'tables' ... there would always be another memory, another quality, another association ... which would open up another memory, another association, another narrative. Narratives are portals to meaning, significance and memory, not pigeon holes for definitions.
This is what we take with us into the world of language. Language and consciousness evolve - they build on what has gone before - they don't trigger a new type of brain, they stimulate (via the hit-and-miss mechanism of evolution) better use of and enhanced areas of the brain relevant to language, understanding and vocalisation. It's not designed or planned, it builds incrementally on what's gone before. The foundations are laid without any idea what will eventually build on top of them - as the storeys mount and become more elaborate, so do the narratives which inhabit them.
The primitive brain assembled the ability to combine discrete brain processes and distinct sensory narratives into one, seamless experiential narrative, and this provided the methodology for the emergence of consciousness and the narratives of the mind.
It's commonplace to think that our human ancestors came up with fantastic explanations for natural events - sunrise, thunder, death - attributing these to supernatural forces like gods or spirits. But the first words were equally fantastic - the naming of people and places and things, the invention of 'doing' words (verbs) to describe actions, in the present, but also in the past or in the future. Adjectives and adverbs to give quality to objects and actions - red and green, fast and slow, sharp and blunt. Each of these represented a discovery ... a recognition that we could range across colour, could make qualitative assessments of speed or texture, could interpret time and recall the past or visualise the future.
There's a magical power to naming. Even if the first speakers, the first 'namers', could employ only concrete terms, not abstract ones, the giving of a name to an object or actioncreates a new bond with it, a new relationship. It's the root of mysticism, of a 'spiritual' sense, translating something 'real' into an expanding narrative.
A pig is a pig. Once you have a name for it, it becomes something more than an object, it acquires meaning and significance beyond its physical existence. The pig is transfered from a physical world into a mental one, and once we had language sophisticated enough, that mental world could imagine not just real pigs, but flying pigs, unicorns, angels, gods, etc. The world within the imagination is vastly huger than the world before the eyes. Language narratives enabled us to create whole universes within ourselves.
Words become painted with memory. They become shorthand entries to short stories and complete novels. Each word can unlock a narrative account of meaning - we don't talk 'dictionary', we talk experience and comprehension and imagination. We plunder memories of things learned and things experienced. We construct plots, make sense of facts and ideas, put them into context - give them settings, atmosphere, devise elaborate, intimate understandings and associations. Each time we access a narrative, we subtly change it, add another episode to its story.
But consider the first use of words (and it would be words, not 'language'), the realisation that we could make unique patterns of sound, probably supplanting hand movements and gestures, to name, then to classify, to describe, to explain, to interpret. Imagine the creative revolution of language acquisition!
It would take many, many generations to elaborate a sophisticated language with an extensive vocabulary and consistent syntactical and grammatical rules, but, once those first sounds had been institutionalised as conveying meaning - 'man', 'woman', 'tree', 'snake' ... whatever - the genie was out of the bottle and could never be put back. Language was the first human revolution, and the greatest revolution we, as a species, have ever experienced.
Now, I used the phrase "many generations", not "thousands of years" to emphasise that language is a generational acquisition - it is both generated by and handed down by generation after generation. I'm almost convinced that the first words were devised by women - and that's not a sexist joke, it's a reflection on the fact that women often have better language skills than men. They've also had, almost universally, more responsibility for child care - they exchange noises with children, and possibly encouraged children to name things (and that's pure speculation).
There would have been a growing portfolio of words developed by generation after generation, handed down, refined, extended. Our ancestors didn't suddenly realise that language had utility, sit around at a weekend symposium inventing a whole dictionary and thesaurus of words, then wake up on Monday morning speaking French or Swahili.
A new word here and there, a few more, until the process achieved self-sustaining growth as individuals named new things ... then understood that actions could be named ... that qualities could be named (green, ripe, fast). Words shared between people, words thought in the head, gradually eclipsing the monopoly of sensory experience.
As language evolved, so did consciousness. As we found ways to express ourselves, we started to think in language, but using the same physical methodology in the brain, replacing the silent moving pictures with dialogue - it's like watching a DVD with the commentary switched on, only subjectively.
Language was midwife to the mind. The brain existed as a physical fact. It processed senses. Once language achieved a certain level of sophistication, it propelled us into the first 'singularity'. 'Singularity' is a term popular in science, and in science fiction, which describes the moment when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence ... when machines learn to think for themselves and to reproduce themselves.
I'm arguing that we've already experienced a 'singularity' - that moment when the intelligence of the brain, handling sensory 'narratives' (vision, smell, touch, taste, sound, etc.), was superceded by the intelligence of the mind ... processing language 'narratives'. Just as humans may create artificial intelligence which overtakes them, so the absorption of language by the brain led to the creation of 'mind', and the mind's explosive use of language made it the primary organ of intelligence. The mind overtook the brain.
The mind may be the processor of language narratives ... it is also created by language narratives. "I think therefore I am." Once we think in language, not sensory experience, we are able to construct a picture of self, are able to create a mind within the brain. Before language, the brain delivered sensory images of an external world which we witnessed and in which we participated. After language, we inhabited an internal world of which we were author, not witness.
Before language, there was no way of identifying yourself as "I" or "me" or of creating any sophisticated self-understanding. The more sophisticated the language develops, the more sophisticated our mind becomes ... the more distinct it becomes from the 'primitive' processes within the brain. As language developed, we acquired authorship of our minds ... and began to write our own 'self'-narratives.
It's as if the first absorption of language by the brain was in the form of a rudimentary computer which had to be laboriously programmed in Basic, one keystroke at a time ... capable at best of elementary tasks. But, generation by generation, the programming expanded geometrically, until we developed a mind which functions with the sophistication of an Internet ... until it could handle complex narratives and not simple binary code. The mind graduated from routine, mechanistic processes to the first singularity ... the point where the mind outstripped the brain in its ability to interpret the world, via language.
Before language, we dealt in the concrete. We perceived the external world internally - the world happened inside our heads, in our brains, was understood through our senses. A tree was a tree - we had no name for it, but we could recognise one. Language enabled us to perceive and understand the world in terms of abstractions - we could start conceiving of a tree as a source of wood, of fruit, of bark, of shelter, etc. Language gave us access to a range of narratives which didn't simply describe trees, but the uses which could be made of them. Language opened the way to invention.
Both the human brain and the human mind - if it's possible to distinguish them as separate entities - make sense of things. We fill in the gaps. We give order and explanation to experience. Sight is processed in different parts of the brain - yet the experience of 'seeing' is synchronised into one seamless, moving picture show. We complete the jigsaw, we colour in the picture - if we see a man's head looking over a wall, we know that there is a body beneath it. We make rational assumptions ... and this means that we can jump to conclusions, can make the wrong inferences as well as the right ones.
We seek the relevant. We notice the unusual. It's movement or sudden change which catches our attention. Most of what we experience in the course of a day is of little significance - the strangers we pass in the street, the parked cars, the buildings, the birdsong, etc., etc. We pass through a sensory deluge of data, ignoring it. Data we can leave to the subconscious ... to the mental filing clerks who process the bits and pieces of daily experience which seem unimportant at the time.
We attend to information, and I'll remind you of the data-processing saying, "data has cost, information has value". We don't waste time and energy on the expensive processing of data - it either gets filed or forgotten (you can remember that you walked down a certain street today, you're unlikely to remember what cars or people passed you, or how many birds flew overhead although they may have impinged on some peripheral area of your vision).
We plunder information for its value - it's what causes us to make decisions, to take actions. You don't notice cars on the street until you decide to cross the road - when you do, the presence of a car ceases to be data, it now becomes information, for appreciating the speed and presence of that car is now vital if you are to cross safely. We are consciously aware of 'information' - it's a scarce resource which we pick out in the spotlight of conscious awareness, lifting it from the background of 'data'.
And we make mistakes. We miss things. We misinterpret things. We delude and misinform ourselves. We can be biased in our definition of 'information', rejecting as 'data' anything which contradicts or challenges our beliefs or assumptions. But there's a logic to how we separate data and information - it's not random. Our understanding of the world is not confined to immediate experience - our lives and our actions are based on what we've been taught, what we've learned, on what we understand, on the meaning and significance we give to things, ideas, people, actions, sensory experiences, etc. Narratives can be based as much on ignorance as on knowledge.
Now, I'll abruptly stop here - always leave them wanting more. What I need to get into is a discussion of the politics of narratives and their social context, and that's something I'll do in the next blog.
Remember, I'm not trying to write a learned academic document here - these are notes, maybe even preliminary notes to get myself focused and to get other people thinking and questioning. I'm offering a narrative of narratives and change, not a dictionary definition.
Crucial to this is an understanding of human consciousness - theorising about how it operates is vital to any realistic appraisal of how we manage change. If you want to change your life, you have to change your thinking patterns - you have to interrogate and challenge your perspective, your beliefs and values, your understanding of 'self', the roles you play, the habits you've developed. And you have to do this objectively in order to find motivation, energy, optimism, direction, consolation, comfort, compassion, support, or whatever is essential to change your particular situation.
When I looked at consciousness, questioning how it could be explained, how it could have emerged, how it worked, I began to speculate that it had to be described in terms of 'narratives', and in a differentiation between 'data' and 'information', and that became an essential tool in trying to identify the best means to manage change.
If you want to bring about change in your life, you have to change your thinking, have to adopt a mindset of change in which you question and deconstruct your 'narratives' … and this has nothing to do with the bullshit and myths of 'positive thinking' or 'laws of attraction' spouted by so many self-improvement authors and self-appointed, self-publicising 'gurus'.
You have to review your 'narratives' – have to interrogate your thinking, identifying the ideas, beliefs and meanings which can help trap you in an unsatisfactory situation, replacing these with dynamic 'narratives' which drive change and enable you to manage that change. This is much more complex than any simplistic notion of 'positive thinking', or that great, seductive myth, 'the law of attraction'. 'Law'?
Many people find life unfilliing, find themselves trapped in unhappy and abusive situations not because of any particular inadequacy or failing on their part, but because of their social situation. Grief for loss is not something to be escaped through 'self-empowerment' - it's a logical emotional response to pain.
Poverty is not a matter of personal inadequacy - it's caused by the polarisation of wealth and power into the hands of a few ... who then insist they've earned it and that the poor are simply inadequate and lack the will or ability to compete on what is decidedly not a level playing field.
Being bullied at work is not something people invite - it's caused by managers and employers and 'colleagues' who lack any respect for others and are consumed by their own inadequacies, self-interests and power games ... and it's trite to suggest that moving to another job could solve the problem.
The self-help publishing genre is a lucrative market, one which largely monopolises our access to information on change. It religiously avoids any mention of politics or active enagement in trade union activity. The bulk of the market is given over to patronising advice suggesting that your dreams can come true by following a few simple steps.
And it's a lucrative market because there are millions of dissatisfied, disillusioned punters out there who want a quick fix, a simple solution, who have become habituated to the marketing of hedonism and a consumer lifestyle - the world needs radical change, but the punters have been conditioned to being only interested in themselves and the ready purchase of an off-the-peg solution to their particular problems.
My interest in change does not focus on middle class angst about under-achievement or the pursuit of 'dreams'. My interest in change embraces political change, global change, diversion from criminal activity, ending abuse of drugs and alcohol, coping with stress and anxiety, depression, confronting suicidal tendencies, challenging macho and sexist attitudes and institutions, dragging the world into a caring, compassionate and educated 21st century mindset ... the whole gamut of 'change'.
And that's why I found it crucial to theorise about consciousness rather than simply produce a critique of the self-help genre, positive thinking, or so-called 'law' of attraction.
[The law of attraction myth proposes that to ensure positive things happen in your life, all you have to do is think positive thoughts. Positives attract positives in this fantasy. Negative thinking, conversely, attracts negative influences into your life. It's simplistic, the legacy of some crack-pot ideas promulgated by 'New Thought' thinkers in the late-19th century. There is not one shred of scientific evidence for it, there's not one shred of credibility in it, and anyone making an intelligent, educated appraisal of the arguments will quickly recognise its fatal flaws. But that's the subject of future blogs.]
Change is not something you achieve by smiling, feigning optimism, reciting positive mantras ('affirmations'), or visualising yourself achieving your dreams. Change is something which you have to manage, something to which you give dynamic direction. As anyone who has tried to give up smoking, withdraw from a pathological drink or alcohol habit, lose weight, or cope with loss or rejection can tell you, changing your thinking and your behaviour is far from easy. It involves energy and pro-active effort, often at a time when you're feeling exhausted and drained. It takes times, it can be cruelly stressful. It's easy to be seduced by glitsy literature or flash websites promising you 'easy steps' and a painless experience.
Nevertheless, much of the self-help genre - from quick-fix diets to positive thinking advice - continues to promote the idea that change can be achieved by following a few simple rules, and owes its success to the fact that people want an easy solution to their problems ... they don't want to be told they'll have to work at it. And that, in part, is down to the nature of our consumer society - surely happiness can be bought, surely there's a 'magic bullet cure' for unhappiness or lack of fulfilment? Sorry ... .
Want to change your life? Then start thinking about the real world you inhabit. Develop a political and sociological awareness of what is happening in your world and how it affects you. Understand how human consciousness works. Understand your own thought processes, values and beliefs. Look behind and beyond the politicians' sound-bites, the corporate management of the media, and the censorship of science and of alternative viewpoints.
Be critical of yourself, be compassionate with yourself, work with others for collective change ... but begin by unpicking the dysfunctional narratives which cause you to repeat pathological or problematic behaviours, and recognise just how many of those narratives have been learned from the political and media Establishment. Disillusionment and dissatisfaction with your life is rarely a wholly personal, individual matter caused by your own failings or inadequacies. You will make mistakes in life, you have to hold yourself accountable for them, but much of what fucks you up is the by-product of a world in which the gap betwee rich and poor, powerful and powerless, is ever widening.
(I'll explore the idea of 'narratives' in due course - for the moment, recognise that I want to escape any notion of 'negative' thinking or behaviours, I want you, instead, to conceive of them as being 'dysfunctional' or 'problematic' - 'dysfunctional' or 'problematic', not 'negative'. In the context of change, simply describing something as 'negative' is pretty much meaningless. If you want to change your thinking patterns and your behaviours, you have to understand why specific ones are 'dysfunctional' or 'problematic', where and how you learned them, ... and precisely why it is they cause you the problems you wish to eradicate or the pathological / unsatisfactory lifestyle you wish to transform.)
So, let's finally get round to exploring how I explain consciousness and what I mean by 'narratives'? Well, my analysis takes a narrative rather than an essay form. What I'm trying to do here is produce a 'stream of consciousness' on the subject of how language, in the form of 'narratives', shapes our thinking. I'm not trying to write a learned piece of science or social science, but rather to run through my own set of narratives which explain to me ... or go some way towards explaining to me ... how 'consciousness' works, how it might have come into being, and how this can be used to effect change.
Until our ancestors - early 'humans' or homanids - created language, our primary sense was visual. We could see our world, could experience our environment in sensory terms ... sight, sound, touch, smell, taste. We could sense that we had physical boundaries - there was a world out there, beyond our being, and we were agents acting within it.
We could see the world as a moving picture show, hear it as an audio-visual surround-sound, smell it, feel ourselves touching it and being touched by wind and rain. We had a sensory 'narrative' experience of our world as a continuity, as a global experience - it told us stories about what was happening and what we were experiencing purely in terms of our senses. We could perceive theats, feel pleasure, act a non-speaking role ... but we had no way of explaining it or interpretting it to ourselves, let alone anyone else.
Try to imagine you have no language. You can see things, can hear them, smell them, etc., but you have no words to describe or name them. You can recognise what a pig is, you can differentiate it from a lion or a duck or a tree. You recall what it looks like, how it sounds, how it smells, how it moves ... maybe what it tastes like ... how you might go about hunting and killing it.
You might be able to communicate with fellow hunters - and you could recognise them as different from you but as sharing similarities - by going "oink, oink" and acting out its movements and pointing, but you have no language: there is no constant monologue (or is it a dialogue?) going on in your head, you can't 'talk' to others, though you may have some hand signs and facial expressions you can share with them ... and can probably laugh, can grunt in displeasure, can signal emotions with specific noises, looks and gestures.
You can do things and understand why - you have intent. You can react, you can respond, you can initiate action. But you live in the present. You can recall the past - as learned experience. You can conceive of future activity - otherwise you'd do nothing, there wouldn't be any point. But you have no understanding of time, cannot articulate past, present or future.
Day begins ... day ends ... and then there's another one. You might notice that the moon follows a pattern, you can experience seasonal change, you have no idea of the 'lunar month', 'year' or cycles of time, no way of describing them to yourself other than an intuitive appreciation that spring follows winter. You effectively live and act in the 'now' as someone experiencing the world as it happens, sometimes passively, sometimes actively.
You can point to yourself, you can point to other homanids, but you have no language to describe yourself to yourself, no language to explore your feelings or express ideas or recall memories. It's only when we develop increasingly sophisticated language that we can start to name ourselves, give ourselves an identity, create a conscious self-awareness and active consciousness. Language doesn't just give us the ability to communicate with others - its most significant role is in empowering us to communicate with ourselves, to think ourselves into the role of an expressive, self-conscious individual.
Language is our sixth sense, and, at some stage, it supplanted vision as our primary human sense. It gives us the ability not just to recognise an object visually, but to name it, to classify it, to shape an understanding of its significance to ourselves and to others. It gives us the ability to move from the concrete to the abstract - from simply naming things (pig, horse, lion) to dealing with concepts and generalisations (animals, predators) and non-animate things (weather, seasons, strength).
Language initially enabled us simply to name things and people. Is having nouns enough to trigger consciousness? We establish within our group a sound which means 'tree', another which means 'stream'. Maybe we give ourselves names of objects - 'man tree', 'man river' (think of Native American naming systems). Simply having access to a limited number of nouns doesn't allow us to think, merely to visualise. It's only when language becomes sufficiently complex to create abstractions that we can start that internal monologue / dialogue which is the mark of consciousness. (Current thinking says this happened around 100,000 years ago, maybe even more recently than that.)
Language is the key to consciousness - it enables us to represent ourselves to ourselves, to trigger that inner monologue / dialogue through which we explain, interpret, understand, and create a dynamic identity of 'self' in which we discuss with ourselves our actions and intentions and feelings. It allows us to internalise the external world as something more than a continuity (or discontinuity) of sensory experiences, to make it 'real' in the sense that we can replay it and interpret it in our minds, not simply experience it as it is happening.
Remember, the brain evolved from very basic abilities to sense light, sound, etc. As the eye and ear evolved, the brain synchronised sensory experiences until we have the sort of surround-sound, moving picture show, sensory experience we can all recognise. Deluged by sensory data, the brain had to focus on what was critical - so, while our senses are all constantly active, we attend only to what is significant, what is changing, what is unusual. We sift and reject the data, we edit out and absorb information.
Language was built on this brain mechanism. We learn language not as a rigid set of definitions, but as dynamic, moving-meaning shows - we think in 'narratives' ... not rigid definitions, but flexible, expanding, interlocking concepts which relate to sensory experience, emotion, memory, and a practical (but not necessarily accurate) understanding of out world and of our 'selfs'.
Think of words as data - we don't need all of them all the time, they'll remain in our subconscious until needed (well, the ones we know at any rate). We select specific narratives to give us the information in any given situation - narratives which explain our understanding and determine our behaviour.
Paralleling the moving audio-visual sensory show, we now have a moving language narrative to amplify its meaning, to qualify what we view as information, as significant ... and to give narrative meaning to our sense of self. The evolution of language gives us a growing ability to extend meaning to the world around us ... and meaning to the world within us, central to which is our creation of 'self'.
Language is how we make sense of our thoughts. It's how consciousness evolves. As we developed an increasingly sophisticated range of words, we could communicate with others and, in doing so, recognise similarities and differences between us. It opened the door to a self-expressive sense of individuality and uniqueness, to seeing ourselves as "I", "me", not just someone who had a name, but someone who had a unique, personal set of experiences and emotions which set them apart from others.
Prior to language, you had a sensory repertoire. Without being able to express the idea as words, you could sense "hungry, food good". Your taste buds had their own set of narratives - they could differentiate the taste of salmon and pig and berries and nuts and fruit. It was like a soap opera, where you know the characters and their background stories - so your taste buds and brain combined to give you a sensory description of how apples taste, how they feel, what they look like, smell like, how they sound when you bite into them.
The simple process of biting into an apple or other fruit combined five sensory experiences - like the characters in a soap opera interacting. They are discrete sensory experiences, yet they combine into one physical experience - an experience you can remember and one you can anticipate.
This is why I describe consciousness as involving 'narratives'. The senses combine to deliver one complete, satisfying story. No one sense alone can describe the eating of an apple, you can't fully appreciate the experience of eating that apple without all five combining in a whole. Five sensory 'narratives' coallesce as a single experiential 'narrative'.
The brain does this in other ways. Our sight is processed in different areas of the brain and these processes are synchronised to give us a single conscious experience. It processes the 'narratives' for colour, for shape, for movement, etc., and integrates them into one moving picture show. The other senses equally combine other sensory dimensions into one, then the brain combines the senses into one experience of the world. There are narratives within narratives - discrete areas of the brain processing relatively limited data inputs (colour, bitterness and sweetness, tone and pitch, sharp and cold, etc.) and making sense of them as the complete narrative of 'now'.
Narratives stack like Russian dolls. Imagine you want to buy a table. You have several catalogues before you showing pictures of hundreds of different tables. You understand the narrative - you know what a 'table' is. Ultimately it's a functional, raised flat surface. You know how it's used - people sit at one to eat meals, put vases on them, hold meetings around them, work on them, etc. You'd recognise a table as a table regardless whether it was made of wood or metal or glass or plastic, regardless whether it had three legs or twenty, etc., etc., etc. You know what constitutes a table. You have in your mind a narrative of 'table'.
Just as there are stacking tables, so our narrative for table extends beyond a simple dictionary definition to include a stack of other associated narratives - I've mentioned a few above (flat surface, legs, meals, meetings, etc.). You could list hundreds of other narratives which relate to or describe the qualities and functions of a table ... or which act as portals to memories about tables and your personal experiences. 'Narratives' are not simply a definition, they explain, expand, inter-relate, combine concrete and abstract, include physical examples and memories, linking them, in turn, to other narratives. Any one narrative locks into and provides the key to a range of other narratives.
That's what's going on in your head. It's not that every object or concept is given its own, unique pigeon hole for the definition. No, they are narratives, they tell stories, they access stories. It's like liquids flowing together, it's like an ensemble of character actors in a soap ... they interrelate, they interact, but, while they can follow a script, they can also, like a jazz trumpeter, improvise on a theme. Narratives are fluid, foever changing, impossible to define. You could never express everything you know about 'tables' ... there would always be another memory, another quality, another association ... which would open up another memory, another association, another narrative. Narratives are portals to meaning, significance and memory, not pigeon holes for definitions.
This is what we take with us into the world of language. Language and consciousness evolve - they build on what has gone before - they don't trigger a new type of brain, they stimulate (via the hit-and-miss mechanism of evolution) better use of and enhanced areas of the brain relevant to language, understanding and vocalisation. It's not designed or planned, it builds incrementally on what's gone before. The foundations are laid without any idea what will eventually build on top of them - as the storeys mount and become more elaborate, so do the narratives which inhabit them.
The primitive brain assembled the ability to combine discrete brain processes and distinct sensory narratives into one, seamless experiential narrative, and this provided the methodology for the emergence of consciousness and the narratives of the mind.
It's commonplace to think that our human ancestors came up with fantastic explanations for natural events - sunrise, thunder, death - attributing these to supernatural forces like gods or spirits. But the first words were equally fantastic - the naming of people and places and things, the invention of 'doing' words (verbs) to describe actions, in the present, but also in the past or in the future. Adjectives and adverbs to give quality to objects and actions - red and green, fast and slow, sharp and blunt. Each of these represented a discovery ... a recognition that we could range across colour, could make qualitative assessments of speed or texture, could interpret time and recall the past or visualise the future.
There's a magical power to naming. Even if the first speakers, the first 'namers', could employ only concrete terms, not abstract ones, the giving of a name to an object or actioncreates a new bond with it, a new relationship. It's the root of mysticism, of a 'spiritual' sense, translating something 'real' into an expanding narrative.
A pig is a pig. Once you have a name for it, it becomes something more than an object, it acquires meaning and significance beyond its physical existence. The pig is transfered from a physical world into a mental one, and once we had language sophisticated enough, that mental world could imagine not just real pigs, but flying pigs, unicorns, angels, gods, etc. The world within the imagination is vastly huger than the world before the eyes. Language narratives enabled us to create whole universes within ourselves.
Words become painted with memory. They become shorthand entries to short stories and complete novels. Each word can unlock a narrative account of meaning - we don't talk 'dictionary', we talk experience and comprehension and imagination. We plunder memories of things learned and things experienced. We construct plots, make sense of facts and ideas, put them into context - give them settings, atmosphere, devise elaborate, intimate understandings and associations. Each time we access a narrative, we subtly change it, add another episode to its story.
But consider the first use of words (and it would be words, not 'language'), the realisation that we could make unique patterns of sound, probably supplanting hand movements and gestures, to name, then to classify, to describe, to explain, to interpret. Imagine the creative revolution of language acquisition!
It would take many, many generations to elaborate a sophisticated language with an extensive vocabulary and consistent syntactical and grammatical rules, but, once those first sounds had been institutionalised as conveying meaning - 'man', 'woman', 'tree', 'snake' ... whatever - the genie was out of the bottle and could never be put back. Language was the first human revolution, and the greatest revolution we, as a species, have ever experienced.
Now, I used the phrase "many generations", not "thousands of years" to emphasise that language is a generational acquisition - it is both generated by and handed down by generation after generation. I'm almost convinced that the first words were devised by women - and that's not a sexist joke, it's a reflection on the fact that women often have better language skills than men. They've also had, almost universally, more responsibility for child care - they exchange noises with children, and possibly encouraged children to name things (and that's pure speculation).
There would have been a growing portfolio of words developed by generation after generation, handed down, refined, extended. Our ancestors didn't suddenly realise that language had utility, sit around at a weekend symposium inventing a whole dictionary and thesaurus of words, then wake up on Monday morning speaking French or Swahili.
A new word here and there, a few more, until the process achieved self-sustaining growth as individuals named new things ... then understood that actions could be named ... that qualities could be named (green, ripe, fast). Words shared between people, words thought in the head, gradually eclipsing the monopoly of sensory experience.
As language evolved, so did consciousness. As we found ways to express ourselves, we started to think in language, but using the same physical methodology in the brain, replacing the silent moving pictures with dialogue - it's like watching a DVD with the commentary switched on, only subjectively.
Language was midwife to the mind. The brain existed as a physical fact. It processed senses. Once language achieved a certain level of sophistication, it propelled us into the first 'singularity'. 'Singularity' is a term popular in science, and in science fiction, which describes the moment when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence ... when machines learn to think for themselves and to reproduce themselves.
I'm arguing that we've already experienced a 'singularity' - that moment when the intelligence of the brain, handling sensory 'narratives' (vision, smell, touch, taste, sound, etc.), was superceded by the intelligence of the mind ... processing language 'narratives'. Just as humans may create artificial intelligence which overtakes them, so the absorption of language by the brain led to the creation of 'mind', and the mind's explosive use of language made it the primary organ of intelligence. The mind overtook the brain.
The mind may be the processor of language narratives ... it is also created by language narratives. "I think therefore I am." Once we think in language, not sensory experience, we are able to construct a picture of self, are able to create a mind within the brain. Before language, the brain delivered sensory images of an external world which we witnessed and in which we participated. After language, we inhabited an internal world of which we were author, not witness.
Before language, there was no way of identifying yourself as "I" or "me" or of creating any sophisticated self-understanding. The more sophisticated the language develops, the more sophisticated our mind becomes ... the more distinct it becomes from the 'primitive' processes within the brain. As language developed, we acquired authorship of our minds ... and began to write our own 'self'-narratives.
It's as if the first absorption of language by the brain was in the form of a rudimentary computer which had to be laboriously programmed in Basic, one keystroke at a time ... capable at best of elementary tasks. But, generation by generation, the programming expanded geometrically, until we developed a mind which functions with the sophistication of an Internet ... until it could handle complex narratives and not simple binary code. The mind graduated from routine, mechanistic processes to the first singularity ... the point where the mind outstripped the brain in its ability to interpret the world, via language.
Before language, we dealt in the concrete. We perceived the external world internally - the world happened inside our heads, in our brains, was understood through our senses. A tree was a tree - we had no name for it, but we could recognise one. Language enabled us to perceive and understand the world in terms of abstractions - we could start conceiving of a tree as a source of wood, of fruit, of bark, of shelter, etc. Language gave us access to a range of narratives which didn't simply describe trees, but the uses which could be made of them. Language opened the way to invention.
Both the human brain and the human mind - if it's possible to distinguish them as separate entities - make sense of things. We fill in the gaps. We give order and explanation to experience. Sight is processed in different parts of the brain - yet the experience of 'seeing' is synchronised into one seamless, moving picture show. We complete the jigsaw, we colour in the picture - if we see a man's head looking over a wall, we know that there is a body beneath it. We make rational assumptions ... and this means that we can jump to conclusions, can make the wrong inferences as well as the right ones.
We seek the relevant. We notice the unusual. It's movement or sudden change which catches our attention. Most of what we experience in the course of a day is of little significance - the strangers we pass in the street, the parked cars, the buildings, the birdsong, etc., etc. We pass through a sensory deluge of data, ignoring it. Data we can leave to the subconscious ... to the mental filing clerks who process the bits and pieces of daily experience which seem unimportant at the time.
We attend to information, and I'll remind you of the data-processing saying, "data has cost, information has value". We don't waste time and energy on the expensive processing of data - it either gets filed or forgotten (you can remember that you walked down a certain street today, you're unlikely to remember what cars or people passed you, or how many birds flew overhead although they may have impinged on some peripheral area of your vision).
We plunder information for its value - it's what causes us to make decisions, to take actions. You don't notice cars on the street until you decide to cross the road - when you do, the presence of a car ceases to be data, it now becomes information, for appreciating the speed and presence of that car is now vital if you are to cross safely. We are consciously aware of 'information' - it's a scarce resource which we pick out in the spotlight of conscious awareness, lifting it from the background of 'data'.
And we make mistakes. We miss things. We misinterpret things. We delude and misinform ourselves. We can be biased in our definition of 'information', rejecting as 'data' anything which contradicts or challenges our beliefs or assumptions. But there's a logic to how we separate data and information - it's not random. Our understanding of the world is not confined to immediate experience - our lives and our actions are based on what we've been taught, what we've learned, on what we understand, on the meaning and significance we give to things, ideas, people, actions, sensory experiences, etc. Narratives can be based as much on ignorance as on knowledge.
Now, I'll abruptly stop here - always leave them wanting more. What I need to get into is a discussion of the politics of narratives and their social context, and that's something I'll do in the next blog.
Remember, I'm not trying to write a learned academic document here - these are notes, maybe even preliminary notes to get myself focused and to get other people thinking and questioning. I'm offering a narrative of narratives and change, not a dictionary definition.
