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             Subject:   Why dissociate?              Date: 08/12/96 04:52 PM

Admitting to 'companionship in consciousness'

With all the elegant conversations here about language and human consciousness, something troubles me. Why is physical existence so troublesome to our species that we spend a good deal of our time trying to abjectly dissociate ourselves from it?

Whether it's through meditative states of "pure being; no thought", or "out of body experiences", or "release from the flesh in the hereafter", or "implicate order", or plainly just categorizing ourselves as "a little higher than the animals and lower than the angels" ... this last act being the mode that most consciousness researchers are contaminated by ... , cognitive humans who ponder "existence" are ultimately *intimidated* by it!    

Why *is* that?

Any behaviorist worth her/his salt will explain to you that, whether in natural habitat or controlled-study environments, other animals display reactive behaviors that other researchers typically struggle to aver are only associated with humans because we think "linguistically" instead of  "instinctively".

(Understand, please, that these remarks are coming from a man who fervently believes in the ideas of Benj Whorf(1938,1956), who championed the concept that "ideas" ... in whatever form ... are environmental factors, which we respond to as readily as music and food and climate and predators.)

Scott's(1996) reference to Hebb(1980) is a clear example. We don't have to know "what" those monkey's were explicitly *conscious of* or not in order to recognize that we share a reactive capacity with them: that new atypical experiences are troubling, unless and until impacts and "meanings" can be internally integrated and coped with. Human consciousness includes
the ability to integrate more complexly many possible ramifications and impacts of events/conditions. Monkeys may not have that capacity. Not because they don't have the language to label events, but merely because they don't have the neural structure that permits gut reactions beyond:    "whole being (like self)...normal/good/active/safe" versus "broken being (like self) ... not usual/not active(responsive to self)/strange(possibly danger)/not state or behavior ever experienced/...not safe".

Now, there may or may not be ideate "language'" involved, but it doesn't matter. What matters is that the experiencing conscious reactive monkey's *body* used its evolved biological self-"language" of hormone rushes and concomitant muscle tightening and heightened anxiety state to prepare it to deal with life. Why is that so strange for most of us to accept? Why
should consciousness be limited to symbolic cognition? Every animal is *conscious*. It must be. No being can *survive* otherwise. And you can take that statement as far as you want (or your ego can handle).

During the Tucson II conference I ran from building to building trying to hear as many presentations as possible. (In case anyone didn't appreciate it, T-II was one of the most intellectually exciting events ever *assembled*! If there was ever a time that I wanted to *be* a quantum state, it was those 6 days. To be in all super-position places at once would have been marvelous!!!) One afternoon as I ran across the courtyard outside the Holiday Inn's Starlight Room, I saw D.Reiss being interviewed by Canada's "Discovery" program. I stayed to listen, and was flabbergasted when Reiss would not commit to the interviewer's persistent question, "Are dolphins conscious?".   

You could tell from most of the casual replies to other questions that she obviously personally felt that "of course" Dolphins are conscious, yet for the public at large, a TV audience which might feel threatened by the idea that animals "think and feel", she had no choice, but to be expressively cautious. Maybe her funding would be jeopardized if she came right out and said something like, 'look, we're all animals here, humans are not that special, of course they're conscious'. She couldn't do it.

The moment saddened me.

As scientific and high minded as we are, we just can't cope with "what" we are ... physical beings enacting all the potential and reality of our physical presence. We split subjectivity from objectivity, form from function, space from time, place from motion, Ideal from Real, thought from emotion, life from death. We struggle, struggle, struggle, to *not be* what we *are*! Why? Why is that? Is the image we see in the conscious mirror that horrific? Are we reacting like Hebb's monkeys, wildly frantic at the dissociation we perceive? We may not be that far removed from our biological cousins, that we can't help but react to being less than "whole and complete" with wild mental machinations that help us avoid the disaster by seeking mantric and heavenly peace again ... whole, unperturbed, safe.

Fight or flight in another guise. Seeking to engage new knowledge and cope with it while at the same time wanting a safe mental econiche unthreatened by any new knowledge. And caught in the quantum super-position of having to act both ways at the same time.

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