Tag: prayer

Antonio Damasio – Self Comes to Mind

“We hypothesized that compassion for physical pain, being an evolutionarily older brain response, it’s clearly present in several nonhuman species – should be processed faster by the brain than compassion for the mental pain, something that requires the more complicated processing of a less immediately obvious predicament and that is likely to involve a wide compass of knowledge.”

“All the above strategies, I submit, began to evolve long before there was consciousness, just as soon as enough images were being made, perhaps as soon as real minds first bloomed. The vast unconscious probably has been part of the business of organizing life for a long, long time, and the curious thing is that it is still with us, as the great subterranean under our limited conscious existence.”

“The spiritual is a particular state of the organism, a delicate combination of certain body configurations and certain mental configurations. Sustaining such states depends on a wealth of thoughts about the condition of the self and the condition of other selves, about past and future, about both concrete and abstract conceptions of nature.” Looking for Spinoza

“Engaging in introspection turns out to be a translation, within the mind, of a process that complex brains have been engaged in for a long time in evolution: talking to themselves, both literally and in the language of neuron activity.”

“Needless to say, they do not really know what they are doing, let alone why. But they do what they do because of their exceedingly simple brains, without any mind to speak of and even less proper consciousness, use signals from the environment to engage one kin of behavior or the other.”

“Knowing as opposed to being and doing, was a critical break. The diference between life regulation before consciousness and after consciousness simply has to do with automation versus deliberation.”

“The ongoing of the digital revolution, the globalization of cultural information, and the coming of the age of empathy are pressures likely to lead to structural modifications of mind and self, by which I mean modifications of the very brain processes that shape the mind and self. Revolutionary arguments of the world.”

“How remarkably hybrid and flexible our mental lives are.”

Aldous Huxley, Foreword to Brave New World, second edition, circa 1947

In the meantime, however, it seems worth while at least to mention the most serious defect in the story, which is this. The Savage is offered only two alternatives, an insane life in Utopia, or the life of a primitive in an Indian village, a life more human in some respects, but in others hardly less queer and abnormal.

Today I feel no wish to demonstrate that sanity is impossible. If I were now to rewrite the book, I would offer the Savage a third alternative. Between the utopian and the primitive horns of his dilemma would lie the possibility of sanity — a possibility already actualized, to some extent, in a community of exiles and refugees from the Brave New World, living within the borders of the Reservation. In this community economics would be decentralist and Henry-Georgian, politics Kropotkinesque cooperative. Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not (as at present and still more so in the Brave New World) as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them. Religion would be the conscious and intelligent pursuit of man’s Final End, the unitive knowledge of the immanent Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahman. And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of Higher Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principle — the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: “How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man’s Final End?”

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