Perspectival madness

A riff less political

There is a specific perspectival madness when it comes to psyche and consciousness. As recently as 2024 Kuhn listed more than 500 theories of consciousness, all converging, conflicting and contradicting each other, from the resonable to the more absurd. Like when famous physicist Roger Penrose mused that consciousness emerges when the wave-function breaks down. Which is just a fancy new wording for the ancient belief that Shiva himself created the universe.

All these buzzing and blooming theories can´t be true at the same time - thats a given. What lies at the root of this debacle is the seldom mentioned fact that psychology itself barely touches on, showing itself equally unept as Mainstream-Media to look at it´s own engine-room: Description becomes prescription. Whatever we think we observe of psyche, psyche - like the metaphorical butterfly who represents it in myth - adapts and metamorphs into that very description. That´s the autopoiesis of psyche and consciousness - that is, her way of auto-create herself in time by way of creating fleeting 'internal realities'.

"In the province of the mind what one believes to be true, either is true or becomes true within certain limits."- that was the credo of Neurophysician John C. Lilly, one of the four Guerellia Ontologists of the late 70ties. (Leary, Wilson and McKenna being the other ones). In not so fancy words: Whatever you hold to be true within the realm of the psyche, psyche itself will find ways to proove that it´s true.

"Whatever the Thinker thinks,", Robert Anton Wilson did let us know, "the Prover will prove".

There is no other reason why every proponent of a new theory of mind, consciousness and psyche is it´s biggest believer. Oh, and they do believe!

Which means we are being thrown in a form of perspectival madness within psyche. Every perspective is functionally true (to some extent), none is theoretically absolute. (Yes, I do believe in this).

Now, you could say that this is a distant and philosophical problem, only interesting for armchair-idiots with no stakes in living dangerously in a bed full of limber beasts. But just look at the recent Smith/Murray debate on JRE. Murray defintely had point when asking: "You have never been there?" His sentiment wouldn´t have been contentious if the topic hadn´t been Gaza, but lets say Europe, and the apperently widely held believe of some Americans that they are in any shape or form culturally superior to 'Pooropa' - while a single 2 week visit easily would show that the opposite is true. You have to be there to really understand. Same goes for Gaza. Advantage Murray.

But then, Smith never was a journalist. He is a comedian, whose archetypal function is to unveil cultural taboo. So he was absolutely right in doing what he did. As was Murray, the journalist, whose archetypal function was to sort things out. As was Rogan to organize this debate - something the Mainstream-Media could never do: A real debate? Yikes! As was every clear formulated viewpoint from the X or Facebook-Community. Who, then, was really right? Well, the educated idiot Malcom Gladwell certainly not, thats for sure.

In a recent talk with Andrew Sweeny we discussed whether religion can offer some soothing balm in escaping this - lets call it - philosophical postmodern madhouse. One certainly can exit this dilemma by entering religion, a move that Sloterdijk already diagnosed a couple of years ago when he said that “a spectre is haunting the Western world – the spectre of religion”.

Philosophy itself hasn´t really come up with a good "solution". We believed in some grand narratives, stopped to believe in them for a while (in a form of performative contradiction, because not believing also needs a grand narrative), only to come either back to an evolutionary grand narrative, epistemes, bubbles or just #becomechristian, a solution that I simply call retarded. (Because there has been a very - very - specific reason why we developed a cultural immune-system against Christianity - called Aufklärung and secularism - and moved on. We can´t just go on and pretend that didn´t happen.)

To claim that a meta-perspective is in some shape or form superior to any other given perspective is just equally a cop-out - philosophically speaking. Because every perspective is composed of other perspectives, all the way up and down. Like turtles. So, for example, you have the point, line, square, cube, 'cubing' (cube in time) ... all indicating different perspectives, composed of other perspectives (except the point). Where do you put the lever? Now, one can add an arbitrary value-judgement somewhere along these scales and say, this view on a cube is a higher or better perspective that this view on square, but that misses the point. Every persperctive is 'in-itself', which means inherently functional. … We had, as a comparison, the longstanding believe that some animals are higher developend than others, a missinterpretation of Darwins dictum of the ‘survival of the fittest’ (yes, we also did the social-darwinism-thing where we applied this idea to people). Indeed, every organism is perfectly adapted to its niche, or it dies. It is 'in-itself', functional. Which means in our case, every perspective, even the meta-perspective, is in practise 'just' and after all a perspective (composed of other perspectives). The two dimensional perspective is equally perfect and functional than the three or fourdimensional perspective.

Or in other words: You can´t have two perspectives at the same time. You are bound to one point, one flag, one lever, one moment in time, eschewing all the other possible perspectives while pretending the chosen is the correct one.

As I said, a perspectival madhouse. What lies beneath in the engine-room of the psyche is the temporal necessity to create a perspective per moment; it´s not your value judgement that compells you to a certain point of view; it´s the autopoiesis of psyche itself.

Where does that leave us?

It´s important to understand that there never will be an absolute valid theory of mind, consciousness of psyche. As famous systems-theorist Heinz von Foerster once said, there are decidable and undecidable questions. Decidable are those which are definited by its rules andd contexts. Like 2+2= 4. Undecidable questions or big questions on the other side can never be really answered. Questions of the type: What is the meaning of life? What is consciousness? What is love, what is will? What was before the Big Bang? How does society really work, and what is ultimately for its benefit?

But one nevertheless has to act responsibily in context of these big questions and search to the best of our abilities for answers we will never have. Which means: Don´t sell out! You have to act in a way that signals that you are aware of the perspectival madness in which you still partake, although you want to escape it (though you never will - no one will). The function of these answers to the big questions you provide serve only the autopoiesis of psyche and culture itself, namely to maintain its autopoietic workings by creating fleeting and passing realities. They do not solve anything, they do not explain anything, they provide nothing except the problem of time and the continuation of the autopoiesis. It´s the game we play.