Steve_Bamlett_blog

Why do you blog?

If I stuck with Descartes in the foundational belief that ‘I think therefore I am’, life might be easier because, after all, there is a remarkably low threshold for evidence of having thought or even for continuing to ‘think’ in a continuum of supposed inner activity. But thought as a label encompasses so many kinds of mental activity, not all of it is easy to claim as pure in its categorisation. It was possibly thus for Descartes too though he wrote much to evidence that he was doing that thought. However, no one praises now the thought that the pineal gland in the brain was the cusp between what is human and what is divine in human beings, and that goes for many thoughts of Descartes in a world where we need to remember ‘Descartes Error ‘.

That phrase is from the title of the revolutionary book by neuroscientist and philosopher, Antonio Damascio ( Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain https://amzn.eu/d/eKjalyd). Damascio showed that far from being definitive, thought or cognition was far from a means of proving human ontology and that we just are more complex than philosophy alone had ever contemplated. From this point, we need more than thought to be evident to assume the existence of self. I think it rather than Sartre’s notion that ‘existence precedes essence’ (from Existentialism is Humanism) showed that we can’t arrive at a summation of self through internal processes alone, of whatever kind.

But I think the best offshoot of the neuroscientific revolution was not directed at Descartes but the model of the brain assumed by behaviourism. Of course to them anything inside the head, let alone any presumption of a mind, was a ‘black box’ but that idea fell further than Satan from heaven in the advent and advances of neuroimaging. Moreover, it was clear that though Freud could not be said from neuroscientific evidence to be correct, he was nearer to the dynamic and multiple model of the mind than the assumptions of the model of the mind in classic behaviourism (associationism) and Skinner’s operant version. There certainly were unconscious processes in thinking, feeling, acting, sensing, and well, just being.

Another victim of this revolution, though most sub-academics fail to register it (still believing the dust gathering on old degrees is the only proof they need of their worth), was the system of binaries (like arts and sciences) and singular disciplines with impermeable boundaries that was the academic system, still dependent on oversimple physical and mental distinctions and the belief that asking questions within a paradigm of assumptions called a discipline was enough to determine that ‘research’ was being done.

It became harder too in the digital revolution to pretend that some academic tasks were much more than simply mechanical searches that machines could now do much better. For a time ‘experts systems’ (the name for high level programming languages then) seemed to be making superior claims to not only quantity but quality of information and its processing done by them compared to human beings. But that again was based on oversimple ideas of how brains worked in analogy with a ‘computer’s complex (but not that complex) reflexive and reiterative networks of association.

Brains are, let’s say it again, yet more complex than that and do not, as Einstein did not, give up on systems we dub the systems of affect and assertion. Academics became wary of just condemning digital culture, even the then (but not now) easy target of Wikipedia. And the blog takes off in this culture as a means not only of self assertive publishing but also inquiry. Now, who, the university boffins will ask, will validate the worth of any blog? They don’t have a great track record on this themselves, by the way, as errors in academic assessment are easier to see and much more common to claim for them than some standard of ‘objectivity’.

To blog is to record how thinking, sensing, feeling and action might work together. It is to create an experimental projection of an assertion of self. Of course validation occurs in this process but it is, in most part, still based in accidents related to how human interest in the views of others who don’t have other social validation (such as a relevant job role or ‘qualifications’) is fostered, maintained and developed. These processes I would assert have more to do with the world of operation of big data algorithms than of science, else how would we explain the ‘popularity’ of Elon Musk. But I blog to test out myself and if this becomes sometimes a testing of self that occurs within my own mind ONLY, so be it. Of course feedback is always welcome, even of a ‘negative’ kind, provided it is also human kind. For, after all, haven’t queens of all sorts always relied on ‘ the Kindness of Strangers’. Blanche du Bois rather than Tennessee Williams is of course my life long model, at least at that moment when they cosy her into an asylum. The reference is, of course, to A Streetcar Named Desire.

Love

Steve