What’s a topic or issue about which you’ve changed your mind?
The idea of changeless certainty about topics or issues is not an attractive one to me. Of course there need to be values that guide and limit the range of change in feelings, attitudes or thoughts about topics and give your own thinking some sense of integrity and principle but to stay the same regardless of a world that changes around you seems not only a deliberate limiting of one’s humanity but likely to exclude those things and people that don’t fit a limited prescription of what is good and acceptable in your mind.
Things change. The boundaries which define topics shift and reconfigure themselves. Topics find unexpected commonality because of new evidence and then become an interactive new topic in their alignments. A topic begins as you think about it or experience its phenomena to be more nuanced than expected.
And then there is what we call mind. That changes even without our agency in that change. Without invoking supposed mind-brain or mind-body dualities, which are anyway unfashionable in the philosophy of science now since we are all materialists of a kind now in the huge leap forward in neurosciences, we know that the material facilitating thought – both both the configuration of the hard brain and it’s patterns of synaptic interconnection change. And that change is interactive with mental products like thoughts.
What hope, or even desire, of stasis here. Let’s instead embrace change of mind for any other option we chose can only describe death of self or function in the mind- brain. Fixed ideas are usually defensive against change and that is common as a means of shoring up individual vulnerability. Fascist ideologies exploit such fixity and promote it, finding a common theme on which to blame the discomfort of the need to change, that common theme is often the marginalised, those defined in the cusps between things we want to consider stable like nation-states or sex/ gender.
It is no surprise that the recent Tory conference picked on migrants and trans people as scapegoat for the things perceived as problems in our present condition, asserting certainties that, in truth, are far from such but sound as if they are. These certainties arise from abstractions like the natural origin of borders and boundaries, the ‘truth,’ according to Rishi Sunak that ‘ men are men and women are women’.
Of course these truths lack substantive meaning. Their product of border and boundary control remains a difficult act of constant oppression of people who illustrate that borders are porous and concepts like nation and sex/gender fuzzy to say the least. Truth becomes a repetition of a word (men are men, for instance) that gets us nowhere for even words live in a space prone to shifts more huge than any we can conceive. And still people look to disambiguate them, as if they were the reality not the things we use them to describe to our best current knowledge, whilst that knowledge constantly grows and relabels its contents and their relationships.
So to name one topic or issue on which I have changed my mind would be itself hubristic. It is not in my power to stay mentally identical to what I always thought I was. It is in my caprice, selfish will or desired to resist truths but would Zi want that. Even the I who changes its mind, changes in those interactive processes. If it were not so there would be no personal development, or even adaptation. Of course we do have agency, but it is agency in the choice of options change throws up into our pathways forward not in staying forever the same.
With love
Steve
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