Unmaking Sense

Episode 4.34: The emergence of consciousness is an automatic consequence of evolutionary biology.

People often seem to think that consciousness is so remarkable that it requires some additional explanation over and above the evolution of the physiology and neurophysiology upon which supervenes. It doesn’t. Consciousness emerges automatically and the non-conscious processes that feed it from having a particular kind of body-with-a-brain. And that’s all there is to it.

Episode 4.33: Do collective nouns encourage discrimination and prejudice?

Whenever we use a collective noun like “the French“ we are lumping together tens of millions of people into a single group as if they have shared characteristics. This is prima facie discriminatory and we should stop doing it if we really care about racism because only when we individualise our references can they be justifiable.

Episode 4.32: Conservatism of all kinds insists on backwards compatibility, even to ancient texts.

Any prevailing culture holds the whip hand over anything that is new by dictating what is to be regarded as “normal”. It is therefore in a position to suppress anything new that appears to be abnormal in the name of backwards compatibility. Extreme examples insist that we continue to live in deference to texts, creeds, writings, “scriptures” that are thousands of years old and systems of belief and practice that have evolved from them. Anything new threatens these ideological monopolies and those with vested interests in them. Attitudes to the status of women, LGBT and transgender issues are coloured by this reverence for the past and the assumption that humankind has lost its Paradise rather than being on a journey that works towards, defines and creates it by becoming ever more tolerant and inclusive and so more diverse.

Episode 4.31: Newness in ideas, music, art, religion, challenges the finality of prevailing states.

Totalitarian regimes - but it’s also true of liberal western democracies - that think that they have enacted the revolution to ends all revolutions are naturally antipathetic to anything that suggests that there is still more to be done; and in particular to new music, art, any kind of thinking that suggests that their solution - their revolution - is not final.

Episode 4.30: Ideas are the Music of the Mind.

Ideas are like music because they are not necessarily true or false, just worth playing with, listening to, hearing, thinking about regardless of what they seem at first to mean or however much they challenge our existing assumptions. Sometimes they challenge and clash like discordant music, but that’s fine: we should allow them nevertheless to speak to us. Contrast the notion of “degenerate” art in totalitarian régimes, that rejects the new as “counter-revolutionary” because it threatens, and suggests the work has not yet been fully done and finished (as no work ever is), and so perhaps that the current self-styled leaders may not have had the last word.

Episode 4.29: Determinism again and Does Nature Make Jumps?

There is an old saw “natura non facit saltum”, nature does not make jumps. But nature does: the Omicron covid variant arose from a jump occasioned by 43 nucleotides being mistranscribed during replication. Something new emerged that was only explicable in terms of its predecessors once we invoke and add this random element of error. Neither explicable in total nor predictable beforehand, so what exactly is it that determinism claims?

Episode 4.28: Self-esteem and Self-respect in relation to intrinsic and extrinsic authority.

Self-esteem can be regarded as the way we see ourselves when we measure ourselves by other people’s standards, and self respect how we see ourselves when we measure ourselves by our own standards. So the two are intimately connected to the difference between extrinsic authority and intrinsic authority.

Episode 4.27: Integrity as the personal harmony between who we are and what we do, say and think.

While there is a gap between who we are and how we spend our lives in work and leisure, we have to rely on compensating rewards for happiness. They usually neither compensate nor reward, so we need to build a better world where more of us can enjoy such personal integrity and harmony. Only then can we resonate effectively to the joys of every present experience.

Episode 4.26: Motivation: the educational importance of intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivation.

Extrinsic motivation - carrots and sticks, persuasion and coercion, adopting other people’s ambitions for us - cannot deliver either the inspiration for lifelong learning or the capacity to enjoy the experience of today through resonance. We need instead to develop intrinsic, internally-sourced motivation that can last a lifetime by helping young people discover their interests and gifts as the things that drive effective passionate engagement.

Episode 4.25: Examples of Protection Rackets from other sources.

Homer’s Lotus Eaters, institutional religions, novels like The Brothers Karamazov, and films like The Matrix all supply other examples of Protection Rackets.