The Unfinished Animal

Here is the next subsection, which is probably more transitional than substantive, although I always try to at least make such passages amusing. Perhaps good enough for blogging, but I don’t know if it meets the standards of a book. Then again, since we are the unfinished — which is to say, transitional — animal, perhaps we can say that in the Cosmos it is transitions all the way down — and up:

So, the helpless baby is indeed the fulcrum of human development, a portal through which the Anthropos emerges. This vertical birth canal is a necessary condition, or condition without which we couldn’t be here enjoying – supposing you are enjoying it – this mind-to-mind transmission. Even the most detailed neuroscientific account can only illuminate the objective factors that permit subjectivity, while remaining silent on the nature of subjectivity itself -- much as how natural selection can help to explain the evolution of life but not its origins or essential nature.

Mind, brain, and relationships represent their own irreducible trinity, in that you can’t have one without the others. An isolated brain is just the hardware, while an enclosed self devoid of intersubjectivity isn’t really a self at all.

In The Brain: The Story of You, Eagleman – whom I did not intend to suggest is wrong about everything – writes of how “At birth we are helpless. We spend about a year unable to walk, about two more before we can articulate full thoughts, and many more years unable to fend for ourselves. We are totally dependent on those around us for our survival.”

No offense to my son, but is there anything more functionally useless than a baby, especially under the precarious conditions in which we evolved? 

Children are our future. Unless we stop them now!

And not just useless, but a great burden to even keep alive: “Dolphins, for instance, are born swimming; giraffes learn to stand within hours; a baby zebra can run within forty-five minutes of birth. Across the animal kingdom, our cousins are strikingly independent soon after they’re born.”

How did the Anthropos escape the circle of instinct, of neurologically imprinted and preordained patterns of behavior? Nor can other animals survive outside the narrow niche to which they are adapted, which is why we don’t see polar bears in North Hollywood or kangaroos in ‘Nam. “In contrast, humans are able to thrive in many different environments, from the frozen tundra to the high mountains to bustling urban centers.”

How? All because “the human brain is born remarkably unfinished”: “Instead of arriving with everything wired up -- let’s call it ‘hardwired’ -- a human brain allows itself to be shaped by the details of life experience. This leads to long periods of helplessness as the young brain slowly molds to its environment. It’s ‘livewired.’”

Very free-spirited.

And even then, the brain isn’t just molded to its external environment. Rather -- and this is key -- it must be adapted to other minds, which is to say, the “interior environment” of intersubjectivity. Infants raised without this intimate connection to other subjects are left with permanent fragilities and emotional problems, because certain experiences must occur when the infant brain is so open and unformed. Still, this intersubjective environment goes only to the necessary conditions of the human subject. What is its sufficient condition, the condition with which humanness is possible? Is subjectivity reducible to anything less than itself? Is it even conceivable that a material object -- a three pound slab of meat called the brain -- could conjure subjectivity?

The so-called hard problem.

Yes, but perhaps the problem is only hard because some people just don’t like the solution, which has to do with the ontological priority of relational interiority. Philosopher Hans Jonas, in The Phenomenon of Life, wrote of how early man tended to “mentalize” everything, whereas modern man defaults in the opposite direction, “objectivizing” everything: for the former the Cosmos is a crystallization of transcendent spirit, while for the latter spirit is an illusory side effect of immanent matter.

Jonas suggests that “When man first began to interpret the nature of things -- and this he did when he began to be man -- life was to him everywhere, and being the same as being alive.” Thus, “Animism was the widespread expression of this stage.... Soul flooded the whole of existence and encountered itself in all things. Bare matter -- that is, truly inanimate, ‘dead’ matter, was yet to be discovered -- as indeed its concept, so familiar to us, is anything but obvious.”

Is it really so obvious that things are not in some attenuated sense “alive,” or imbued with a kind of life? I suspect this is partly a matter of left-brain capture of the right (much more on which below), in that it is through the RH that we are in touch with the holistic and organismic nature of a Nature that speaks to us of its transcendent life, truth, and beauty, for in the words of Dávila, Things do not have feeling, but there is feeling in many things.

Indeed, the objects surrounding us are not mute at all, but incredibly chatty. In his identically titled The Phenomenon of Life, the architect Christopher Alexander – whom we met in Book I – speaks of our “loss of the ability and desire to discern aliveness” in things. In his view, what we call “aliveness” is again a primordial category of everything, not only of biological life. Moreover, this aliveness exists on a spectrum, such that things – and people – can be more or less alive. If we turn the Cosmos back right side up, then we might honestly say that Feelings are attributes of the object, as are sensations. This is another way of affirming that our recognition of beauty, for example, is an adequation, not just an opinion. Or that some things are literally interesting, others objectively boring and tedious. Everybody knows this, but they pretend it’s not objectively knowable.

But such things are knowable because of the intersubjectivity of a human self that is forged in infancy. This same intersubjectivity is what allows us to discern the life in things, not to mention the light; or to see what is beyond sight, hear what is beyond sound, touch what is beyond the surface, etc. If we couldn’t do these things, we would scarcely be deserving of the title human. Rather, we would be confined to surfaces only, with no intuition of interesting and fruitful problems, and it should be self-evident that if there were no problems there would be no solutions. Science begins with the recognition of promising problems — or of problems that promise solutions, even when the problems are embedded in matter. Nevertheless, There are individuals who treat the universe with professorial smugness, or like a lunatic treats an idiot.

Near as I can tell you’re throwin’ rocks, but one can’t help noticing that you folks are also the irrational animal, the only ones capable of reason but who nevertheless think and behave in ways contrary to it. To put it mildly.

Dr. Zaius from Planet of the Apes agrees: “From the evidence, I believe [human] wisdom must walk hand and hand with his idiocy. His emotions must rule his brain. He must be a warlike creature who gives battle to everything around him, even himself.”

We touched on this problem in Book I, in that the cosmotheandric imperative, or Prime Directive, is to fully become who we already are in potential, one of these potentials being the attainment of Reason in the fullest sense of the word. To paraphrase Miles Davis, it takes a lot of practice to sound like yourself. Likewise, unlike hypothetical angelic intelligences, it takes awhile for us to become — or to start becoming, rather — ourselves. We are surely the only animal that can transcend ourselves, which we do even in knowing ourselves via self-consciousness.

Prepositions again.

Yes, relational links, for to be conscious of oneself means that the relationality of things applies even to our own interior. This verticality implies that we live in a two-way telovator, so we can both transcend and fall beneath ourselves. There can be no possibility of success without the possibility of failure to achieve it, even if failure can put us in the position of being lower than the lowest animal, for example, treating objects like women, and vice versa. It is not just a figure of speech to say that Hitler was infinitely worse than his dog Blondi.

Nazis. Nothing ever changes.

Yes, the all-too-human easily becomes the less-than-human, and for this reason only engagement with the supra-human renders us properly human. Metaphysics itself is a freewheeling conversation about things superior to the Anthropos, in the absence of which we couldn’t even be the Anthropos. If this isn’t yet fully clear, I can only promise to shed more obscurity on the subject as we proceed.

∞

The larger point of my story is this: that intelligence is one thing, communion and communication another. Even free speech itself would be meaningless in the absence of the freedom and willingness to listen and respond, or in short, to converse on a level playing field about truths that surpass both parties. It has been noted by wiser fellas than myself that the whole Western tradition is one Great and Endless Conversation, which makes it more of a dynamic partnership than a dry, onesided lecture.

But how is this two-way exploration of truth possible? In the West we call it the Logos, which connotes three terms, a rational subject, an intelligible object, and the connective tissue between mind, world, and other folks. So, there is a single rational-relational principle that makes reality a trialogue at the edge of the subjective horizon instead of a monologue in the void. The latter might be the unbridled expression of, say, Yoko Ono, but shrieking isn’t communication or conversation without our second and third terms. Even inanimate things express their intelligibility to us, but you can’t exactly talk back to them.

Perhaps that’s one reason why I am here.

Yes, supposing you take part in the conversation and don’t just vanish into wordless wonder behind the smoke rings of your spliff.

I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening.

With regard to being reasonable, we must add an important Gödelean qualifier, in that we must deploy horizontal reason without imagining we can be limited thereby. Rather, the Anthropos is again the transcendent animal, if only because we elude any limited definition of what we are, but also because we are capable of transcendence as such in freely knowing what otherwise merely is. Thus, He who adopts a system stops perceiving the truths that are within his reach. If our hypothetical Theos is Infinitude full stop, then we are potentially infinite, in the sense that there is nothing we cannot potentially know, given enough time. However, the clock always runs out before we can know it all — except for those timeless truths we cannot fail to know discussed in Book I, including our twelve cosmotheandric axioms.

Gödel even thought that our infinite potential pointed to an afterlife, because first of all, he was deeply skeptical of the idea that the brain could have come about via natural selection. In fact, he considered it disprovable that a mechanical process could result in a brain, and more to the point, “what sense would there be in creating a being (man), which has such a wide realm of possibilities for its own development and for relationships to others, and then not allowing it to realize even a thousandth of those [possibilities]?” That would be as stupid as a contractor “laying, with the greatest effort and expense, the foundations for a house, and then letting it all go to seed again.”

Sounds like you don’t have much experience with contractors.