by Linda Dove
January 23, 2022
Good morning. I’m going to talk common sense today! But I’ll disappoint you if you think I’m preaching revolution against the Brits as did Tom Paine in his 1776 pamphlet entitled Common Sense.
No, my focus this morning is on everyday sense-making, one of our three HUU tenets, as you know. [#1 Know Thyself-Temple at Delphi] I’ve always been interested in how we humans make sense of ourselves, each other, our world, and the cosmos, and how we come to our truths, questions pondered, of course, by philosophers and spiritual teachers all through the ages.
First, let me confess I’m in love with the proposition that Consciousness is the Cosmos becoming aware of itself and I’m trying to live my life inside the poetry of those words. But I’m not talking directly about all-pervading consciousness as Dave Pruett did so elegantly last Sunday. I do, though, build on a similar perspective.
As Dave mentioned, extreme materialists assert that matter is the stuff of the universe and they dismiss non-material consciousness. That’s a big issue in itself for another time. But others do offer insights on the biology and physiology of our awareness, recently much helped by functional MRI imaging. Antonio Damasio, an influential neurobiologist, says our sense-making is entirely embodied.
Briefly, my nervous system and my five senses send signals to my brain. My brain translates them into feelings of pain or pleasure and alerts me to what I need to avoid or go for. In this way, my feelings help maintain my body in homeostasis, healthy balance. [2. Shakespeare] My brain converts the basic pleasure or pain to feelings of well-being or suffering and to refined emotions—joy, love, grief, say, or anger, envy, hatred. My brain translates all these feelings into what these biologists call mental images, visual, auditory and so on. And my feeling of being aware is also, they say, composed of mental images; basically abstractions of experiences, re-presentations. My sad feeling in my body becomes a mental image.
I’m not a natural scientist like some of you, but as a lay student I find this approach convincing—up to a point. It leaves some big questions hanging, though. I have time to mention one or two.
First, it doesn’t fully explain how my thoughts are like a series of slides from a camera. When I meditate I can be aware of my thoughts as they flow by—narrating, appraising, remembering, criticizing, anticipating, planning. So is my mind also a mental image, a container that holds my other emotional and thinking images? And who is the “I” who is aware of them? This gets me into the age-old puzzle of endless regression, “How do I know I’m aware? Because I’m aware that I’m aware. And how do I know that? Well, I’m aware that I’m aware that I’m aware …and so on, ad infinitum.
Second, their thesis is: no body, no consciousness. My awareness is limited to my body. I have the feeling my images belong to me and they’re the reality I own; my reality is totally subjective. Same for you. But doesn’t this go back to the old dispute about Plato’s prisoners in a cave who can see only shadows, abstractions of themselves and the world outside?
Thirdly, these folk contend that nervous systems, senses and brains are essential for being aware. They say other simpler life-forms are merely sensate; a bacterium, say, senses what’s out there that can help or harm it, such as food or predators, and it takes instinctive action, but it isn’t conscious of its actions. How do they know this? And other science contradicts it, showing that simple cells, even slime moulds, let alone trees and plants, have some kind of consciousness; they act with purpose, remember and so learn from trial and error, communicate and cooperate, anticipate the future and so plan ahead. And many humans have damaged brains, or brain regions anesthetized, or they lack brains but are still aware. In one case, a man had only a millimeters-thin stretch of brain and his skull was full of fluid but he operated in the world reasonably well and was a brilliant mathematician. (Near-death and out-of-body experiences would also be relevant here if we had time).
So, absence of nervous systems and brains isn’t critical to consciousness as materialists contend. This leaves open the possibility that awareness can extend beyond feeling bodies. [3. Dickinson] And, anyway, we’re handicapped in studying the brain’s consciousness because the only tool we possess to study our brains’ consciousness is our conscious brains!
There’s lots more to this, of course, but let’s turn to other neuroscience which looks closely at how our awareness operates. [4. Goethe] I owe a lot on this to Iain McGilchrist, a true polymath. Early on he was a literature and philosophy professor, then a practicing psychiatrist, and a research neurologist. He argues that Consciousness with a capital C is transcendent but consciousness while we’re alive is permitted and shaped by the brain in our bodies.
Our brains and those of many other creatures are separated by the corpus callosum, a chain fence between the right and left hemispheres. And, as you know, the LH mainly controls the right side of our bodies and the RH the left. [5. LIST] This list compares the two hemispheres’ processing of their reality. Sarah will leave it up for a bit while I fill it out.As you know, a LH stroke can disable language and cause the person to deny that her right arm, say, belongs to her. A disabled RH can mean a joke falls flat, body language means nothing, or a house is drawn with the parts fragmented and muddled. The LH grasps things, manipulates them and categorizes them abstractly. The RH grasps meaning and non-verbal expression. The popular idea that the LH is logical and practical and the right is emotional and creative is just a start. The two sides have very different ways of attending to the world, different realities.
The RH attends to experience as a whole in context and it reasons inductively. Every experience is a unique, complex presence, a gestalt, full of possibilities, shifting, and interconnected with everything else. [6. Rita Dove] Wholes are different from the sum of the parts. It is empathetic and appreciates the implicit, metaphor, paradox, irony, symbolism, humor and beauty. When it sends the contents of its awareness across the corpus callosum the LH grasps them with deductive logic, breaks wholes into parts, focuses on details, and generalizes—it reduces a fridge to its door and ice-maker, etc.—and places it in the category, “kitchen appliance” or, say, “steel boxes.” Overall, the LH view is nearer to the materialists’ re-presented world—it re-presents things as maps.
One example from research will have to do to illustrate how different the hemispheres’ awareness is. Take the syllogism, A tiger is a feline, all felines are domesticated, therefore all tigers are domesticated. The RH says, “No, of course not!” “Why?” “Well, domesticated means they’re like my pet cat at home but tigers are wild.” The LH says, “Yes, it’s true, a tiger is domesticated.” “Why?” “Because that’s what this document says, of course.” The RH reasons from the presence of the world and creates meaning; the LH makes logical deductions, reduces, and re-presents.
I want to be clear that these two ways of being aware, experiencing ourselves and our world, are both essential. We need to be able to stand back, use logic, pay attention to detail, and grasp and manipulate things; and also to be present to our experience in the round and in depth—appreciate its complexity and beauty.
If we had time, lots more amazing experiments and case-studies would show how the dual aspects of our embodied awareness work.
In different historical eras one or the other hemisphere predominates—a popular topic these days. Since the 17th. Century in the West, and particularly since the industrial, bureaucratic, and digital revolutions, we’re in an era when the LH is powerful. Its sense-making starts from the bottom up; we take the discrete parts and put them together, rather than starting with the gestalt .[7. Blake] We live detached from the real world, building machines mechanically from parts, or in virtual reality on devices which digitize everything into ones and zeros. We pigeonhole people into categories without regard for context, for example, three-strikes-and-you’re-out-for-life as punishment for all drug users. We’re just numbers. And now we’re inventing robots based on metaphors of humans as machines. Let’s hope the engineers will give the robots RHs as well as left!
We worry too about our education systems. Schools often have fixed formulae for dealing with behavioral problems. They drive linear progression up the grades and through college in preparation for the job ladder. They focus on memorization of fixed data and analytic thinking that takes things apart at the expense of synthesizing things in context and multi-dimensionally. [8. Brooks] And they squeeze out music, painting, dance and other arts and sports that the RH delights in and which promote rounded thinking, empathy, and creativity.
Another extremely important issue. As I said, the brains in our bodies permit and shape our everyday sense-making and we all see things differently. That makes relationships challenging. But in life we’re aware of things. So our awareness is totally relational. I am aware of you and you of me. The relationship is in the non-material betweenness. And when you really pay attention to me, that energy changes me, and it changes you. Not unlike quantum particles that change into waves when they’re observed. This is where I see universal consciousness as transcending our bounded bodily awareness of x, y and z. Quantum physics tells us relationships, connections, transformations are qualities of consciousness. So, for me, there’s more to consciousness than that limited to our bodies. Our embodied awareness while we’re alive is a part of the cosmos, ever-evolving, ever becoming aware of itself.
So, finally, what are the implications for our sense-making as a UU congregation? It seems obvious common sense to me. [9. Marcus Aurelius] We must pay attention to all aspects of our world that are valuable to us because what we attend to we change and it changes us. We need to listen with attention to each other, to share personal experiences in depth, respect that sense-making comes from our different ways of becoming aware, and above all, to trust one another’s honesty in expressing our truths.
And that goes too for how we address our world’s deep divisions. I’m saying nothing new, but we need to acknowledge our different ways of processing what we think we know about ourselves and the world and try to come to shared understandings. We need to appreciate that we are not beings but becomings. In this way we wouldadvance Teilhard de Chardin’s evolutionary vision. [10. Stevens] Remember? He saw mankind playing a pivotal, co-creative part in the cosmos. He wrote: man is discovering that he’s nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself.
I’m fully behind Teilhard’s plea that we make the right choices. Of course, the way we’re behaving in the 21st. Century in the face of existential disaster makes me depressed and weepy because we seem to be making all the wrong choices. And I’m aware that what I’ve just said is obviously my RH having an emotional upset. May my LH detach me a bit from directly experiencing my grief, let alone drowning myself in it!
There are many more aspects to all this. Mystic spiritual traditions, Christian immortality beliefs, Freudian and Jungian psychologies, quantum physics—just to start. And I’ve left so many loose ends that I trust you’ll have plenty of your own rich, “mental images” to share during our community dialogue.
Thank you and namaste.
Quotes for Common Sense, Linda Dove. In order of placement in my talk.
1. Temple of the Oracle at Delphi
Know Thyself.
2. Antonio in The Merchant of Venice: William Shakespeare
In sooth I know not why I am so sad,
It wearies me, you say it wearies you;
But how I caught it, found it, came by it,
What stuff ‘tis made of, whereof it is born,
I am to learn.
3. Emily Dickinson
The brain is wider than the sky,
For put them side by side,
The one the other will include
>With ease, and you beside. . . .
The brain is just the weight of God,
For, lift them, pound for pound,
And they will differ, if they do,
As syllable from sound.
4. Scientific Studies: J.W von Goethe
. . . Every act of looking turns into observation, every act of observation turns into reflection, every act of reflection into the making of associations; thus, it is evident that we theorise every time we look carefully at the world. . . .
5. Processing by the Left and Right hemispheres compared.
LH sees experiences re-presented, as abstractions,
maps, theories.
RH sees things as they come
into presence, and pre-conceptually.
LH grasps detail, the discrete, the fragments,
the local, the surface.
RH sees the whole
picture, the gestalt, including its context and meanings.
LH prefers the familiar, narrows its experiences
down to certainties.
RH open to novel experiences
as possibilities.
LH prefers black/white, either/or decisions.
RH accepts ambiguities, open to both/and.
LH certain, right; lacks insight into its
limitations, optimistic.
RH circumspect,
exploratory, devil’s advocate; realistic, pessimistic.
LH enjoys certainty and fixity.
RH
enjoys change and flow.
LH prefers the inanimate, e.g. machines,
tools, things.
RH prefers the animate, e.g.
facial expressions, music.
LH groups narratives elements into similar
episodes e.g. all the times it’s snowing.
RH
reconstructs narrative for human meaning and recognizes symbolism.
LH categorizes by a particular feature.
RH categorizes by unique exemplars or family
resemblances.
LH recognizes generalities.
RH
recognizes uniqueness.
LH focuses on parts and constructs the whole
from the parts, e.g. machines.
RH embodied processing of the gestalt, e.g.
reads body language and emotion.
LH uses analysis, rich vocabulary and complex
syntax.
RH minimal language but discerns the meaning
of utterances in context—prosody, tone, inflection, musicality.
LH appreciates drum beats, rhythms.
RH appreciates Mozart’s Adagio in B Minor
as a whole.
LH formal logic.
RH empathetic, emotionally expressive.
6. History: Rita Dove
Everything’s a metaphor, some wise
guy said, and his woman nodded wisely.
Why was this such a discovery
to him? . . .
7. The Everlasting Gospel: William Blake
This Life’s dim Windows of the Soul
Distorts the Heavens from Soul to Soul
And leads you to believe a lie
When you see with, not thro’ the Eye. . . .
8. Gwendolyn Brooks
I write about what I see, what interests me, and I’m seeing new things. . . . I know about textbooks but I’m not concerned about them during the act of poetry-writing.
9. Meditations: Marcus Aurelius Book VIII
He who does not know what the world is does not know where he is….Hasten to examine your own ruling faculty and that of the universe and that of your neighbor: Your own that you may make it just, and that of the universe that you may remember of what you are a part; and that of your neighbor . . .that you may consider his ruling faculty is akin to yours.
10. Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself: Wallace Stevens
At the earliest ending of winter
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he’d heard it,
A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind. . . .
That scrawny cry—it was
A chorister whose “c” preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its colossal rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new Knowledge of reality.