Thank you for this excellent if profoundly depressing exposition. I have just read The Palestine Laboratory, Antony Loewenstein, and it is proof of all that you argued: the drive for domination is irrepressible and will destroy us all, sooner or later. Carolyn Quadrio
This was a pleasure to read for its conceptually lateral, forceful, determined, dominating but still coherent attempt to make sense of the world. Below I submit some provisional reflections…
1. The premise of ‘biology’ making us think and intend to act in a particular, deterministic way, implies that biology is prior to consciousness, before consciousness, something Other that makes consciousness what it is, but we are still talking only about ideas that consciousness conceives of, we are still within the realm of thought that we cannot possibly escape from. So if biology is identifiable for us then it is a property of our minds, an idea, a common thought inherent to how we rationalise our own existence. It then follows that we can reduce the irrationality/determinism of our behaviour to an inconsistency of our self-conception as ‘beings in a world’. If this is right then the determinism of biology is at some level contingent, not deterministic without a choice to submit to it.
2. Our instinct for domination may be interpreted as an attempt to control ourselves, via the proxy of others, reflexively. We want to control our world (Genesis: Dominion) because it is our collective creation that contextualises our identity as agents, and its inconsistencies undermine the integrity of our own being. At this point we can try to dominate the world in a wrong way and become even more fragmented, more antagonistic, more irrational, or we can dominate it in a way that is more consistent, that is not defined by conflict with other agents but by mutual understanding that makes us more integrated, so that the reflexive relations with other beings of the same kind are no longer a source of anxiety but an engine of meaning, of common sense.
3. “The need to be in control through prohibiting behaviour is based in a need to defend against anxiety in oneself, and to control anxiety. In the way in which we design organisations, and the ideas we bring to their functioning, it is the authority based in anxiety model that is most evident.” (Bain 2006)
Re Pt 1: Yes, biology precedes consciousness; without some form of physical mechanism, there is no mind. That is set out in the Natual Dualism: the biocognitive model. We only escape from the realm of thought with death; my model says that when the brain ceases to function, then that mind ceases and cannot be recreated. The biocog model does not allow life after death or telepathy, etc. We certainly do have free will, that follows from seeing the mind as an informational state.
2. Cooperation not domination is the ideal but it is a voice in the wilderness at present.
3. Don't entirely agree, there are plenty of people who want to dominate who have never been anxious in their lives. When it does happen, they are profoundly shocked and unable to recover their (naive, juvenile) confidence and fall in a heap, which we call PTSD.
I mostly agree. At point 1, I have one small concern, which is pedantic even if essential for deep analysis (but not necessary in most practical contexts). It does not follow from “without some form of physical mechanism, there is no mind” that “biology precedes consciousness”. There are two logically consistent possibilities that satisfy the former without implying the latter: 1) physical (causal) mechanism is coextensive or mutually dependent with consciousness, since we can never experience anything or identify anything without consciousness; 2) some individually ‘external’ physical mechanism is a logically necessary idea, internal to consciousness as a (social) multiplicity, without implying that consciousness is possible without being part of a multiplicity.
This is admittedly a tangent, and I am not sure whether it is practically relevant to your model, so feel free to ignore.
Thank you for this excellent if profoundly depressing exposition. I have just read The Palestine Laboratory, Antony Loewenstein, and it is proof of all that you argued: the drive for domination is irrepressible and will destroy us all, sooner or later. Carolyn Quadrio
This was a pleasure to read for its conceptually lateral, forceful, determined, dominating but still coherent attempt to make sense of the world. Below I submit some provisional reflections…
1. The premise of ‘biology’ making us think and intend to act in a particular, deterministic way, implies that biology is prior to consciousness, before consciousness, something Other that makes consciousness what it is, but we are still talking only about ideas that consciousness conceives of, we are still within the realm of thought that we cannot possibly escape from. So if biology is identifiable for us then it is a property of our minds, an idea, a common thought inherent to how we rationalise our own existence. It then follows that we can reduce the irrationality/determinism of our behaviour to an inconsistency of our self-conception as ‘beings in a world’. If this is right then the determinism of biology is at some level contingent, not deterministic without a choice to submit to it.
2. Our instinct for domination may be interpreted as an attempt to control ourselves, via the proxy of others, reflexively. We want to control our world (Genesis: Dominion) because it is our collective creation that contextualises our identity as agents, and its inconsistencies undermine the integrity of our own being. At this point we can try to dominate the world in a wrong way and become even more fragmented, more antagonistic, more irrational, or we can dominate it in a way that is more consistent, that is not defined by conflict with other agents but by mutual understanding that makes us more integrated, so that the reflexive relations with other beings of the same kind are no longer a source of anxiety but an engine of meaning, of common sense.
3. “The need to be in control through prohibiting behaviour is based in a need to defend against anxiety in oneself, and to control anxiety. In the way in which we design organisations, and the ideas we bring to their functioning, it is the authority based in anxiety model that is most evident.” (Bain 2006)
Re Pt 1: Yes, biology precedes consciousness; without some form of physical mechanism, there is no mind. That is set out in the Natual Dualism: the biocognitive model. We only escape from the realm of thought with death; my model says that when the brain ceases to function, then that mind ceases and cannot be recreated. The biocog model does not allow life after death or telepathy, etc. We certainly do have free will, that follows from seeing the mind as an informational state.
2. Cooperation not domination is the ideal but it is a voice in the wilderness at present.
3. Don't entirely agree, there are plenty of people who want to dominate who have never been anxious in their lives. When it does happen, they are profoundly shocked and unable to recover their (naive, juvenile) confidence and fall in a heap, which we call PTSD.
With thanks, sorry about the delay answering.
I mostly agree. At point 1, I have one small concern, which is pedantic even if essential for deep analysis (but not necessary in most practical contexts). It does not follow from “without some form of physical mechanism, there is no mind” that “biology precedes consciousness”. There are two logically consistent possibilities that satisfy the former without implying the latter: 1) physical (causal) mechanism is coextensive or mutually dependent with consciousness, since we can never experience anything or identify anything without consciousness; 2) some individually ‘external’ physical mechanism is a logically necessary idea, internal to consciousness as a (social) multiplicity, without implying that consciousness is possible without being part of a multiplicity.
This is admittedly a tangent, and I am not sure whether it is practically relevant to your model, so feel free to ignore.