The First Week

An explanation of how we came to meet at CY O'Connor in Canningvale (CYinCV)

A couple of us had met for two weeks running.

Week Three we agreed to throw this open to people that were interested with a carefully worded statement:

I’ve been finding that people are craving conversations on a deeper level about ‘bigger things’. 

The last couple of weeks Jonathon Toynbee and Adrian Do Santos-Alvarado have been meeting up. It’s been interesting to say the least. We wanted to throw this open to anyone that’s interested.

Please understand that this is not a ‘catch up’. The conversation is pretty focused. At the moment we’re rambling on about consciousness however that won’t necessarily be the topic tonight. We tend to go where the conversation goes.

This is for everyone that ever went... ‘how come Blah Blah Blah?!?’ 

Tonight: Sunday 29th (but we’ll be doing this each Sunday)

8pm until 9pm

CY O’Connor’s upstairs.

A small bunch turned up. Eight people I think. 

Here are two summaries of what happened: a short version for people who want to get on with their lives. A longer version for people who were curious about some of the ideas behind the conversation. 

Here’s the short version:

Someone asked a question about the balance between out ‘drives’ and our ‘civilized’ minds.

We talked about Id, Ego and Superego. How we have these ‘animal’ drives and that culture tempers that.

Someone then asked the question, in terms of Free Will – what if someone had a tumor, and did terrible things as a result of the tumor. It could hardly be their fault if they had a tumor interfering with their self control. Where does God fit in here? Is God therefore responsible for the person’s behaviour?

Someone explained that God is not answerable for what God does.

Another person challenged that notion, wondering how they (the person who said ‘God is not answerable to anyone’ could justify that belief. The person said they could not explain or justify their belief. They just believed in Jesus Christ. They explained that they never offered up the fact that they believed in Jesus because they didn’t want to be seen as a ‘hey I’m a Christian, and I have the answers’, kind of person. They believed in God. They believed in Jesus. That was it. 

Then he kind of copped it at that point.

Someone else asked, ‘ So, what about Tsunamis? You’re okay with God just wiping out a bunch of people, because that’s what God does?’

There was some discussion about all this, about the problem of evil in the world and the difficulty in reconciling this with a God that is supposedly good, that is supposedly powerful and supposedly all knowing. 

We ended the evening with a thought experiment about how lions go about perfecting the business of being a lion and without tectonic plates there's no life on this planet. (so tsunamis are a bit of a side effect of living on the planet)

Here's the long version:
So week two ended with someone presenting a thought experiment. If there had been an apocalyptic event, we were all starving and there was cooked chicken on the table – enough to feed just one person - that instinct, the thing that drives us, would come out. It would be a mess.

I think his point is that the civilized mind holds back the our ‘animal instincts’ only to the extent that circumstances allow for it.

What we really are comes out in a crisis.

So we opened Week Three by getting Mr Apocalypse to redress his thought experiment and then I offered my response. I referred to Freud and his ideas about the Id, Ego and Superego. I then prefaced my answer with an apology for referring to Freud – but I did find his idea about consciousness helpful. I’m sure a practicing Psychologist, Psychiatrist or Neuroscientist would find referring to Freud as quaint (and possibly horrifying) however I offered up my observation as to why I brought Freud into it:

Freud (again, I can't apologise enough for how much I'm going to butcher this) explained that the Id was like our raw desire. It was like an unreasoning child and it wanted what it wanted and that was about it. I take this to mean our raw carnal desire, our appetites that can ultimately be destructive. 

Our ego is easier to understand once we have Super-ego under our belt.

Super-Ego is what I take to be culture. It mandates how we are to act, what is right and what is wrong. Ingrained into our conscious life. 

The Ego mediates between the two. It experiences the desires of the Id but knows if must not give in, lest we experience punishment from wider society. The ego is informed by the Super-ego and knows right from wrong.

Here's a link to explain it if you want to get a better understanding:

https://www.simplypsychology.org/psyche.html

So I think what was being asked was how conscious/unconscious life works as well as how our desires are managed. 

In my response I couldn't help but segue into why I found Freud interesting, and it really doesn't involve Freud that much. It involves two other people - one being Freud's university lecturer, Franz Brentano and the other his fellow student, Edmund Husserl. 

 Edmund Husserl’s  works gave rise to the phenomenological movement, which inspired much of what is now called “continental philosophy”. In various ways he influenced existentialism, hermeneutics and French philosophy: Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricoeur, Alexandre Koyré, Jan Patocka, and Edith Stein, among many others.

http://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2015/08/a-brief-survey-of-the-school-of-brentano-and-its-impact.html

Brentano presents a systematic investigation into what he perceives to be the strongest arguments in favour of the existence of unconscious ideas. …this analysis … provided Freud with a template for a coherent account of the unconscious. Brentano’s discussion is detailed in his seminal early text Psychology From an Empirical Standpoint (1874) which was published the very year that Freud began to attend his lectures in philosophy at the University of Vienna. 

http://www.psychoanalytischeperspectieven.be/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Cohen.pdf

So, you can see why this is a nightmare to write. 

This takes us up until a person considered all this and then asked the question:

So what about a person that has a brain tumor and does terrible things as a result. He raised a point about determinism, largely; to what extent are we free to choose and to what extent are we bound by unseen laws and neurological predispositions? 

Someone then clarified what he meant by Predetermined: it was clarified that it referred to free will. 

The thought of now attempting to explain Hard Determinism and Soft Determinism is starting to feel like quite a slog. 

This got us talking about the nature of the universe and the seeming contradiction of the human mind. Why would the ENTIRE universe be dictated by cause and effect and yet, the human mind is not. For if we are to have free will then our decision must be 'uncaused'. If we consider a tree, we don't think for a minute that the tree makes a decision. We know that before a tree comes into being it is a seed. That seed is 'programmed' to grow once certain requirements are met. Now once we come to more sophisticated organisms, ones that are conscious there is a line that seems to be drawn. If we consider how animals have awareness, have a reaction to their environment - whether that be seeking food or fleeing danger then there is neurological pathways fueled by neuro-electro chemicals that fire off in the brain, relayed down the spine and into the extended neuro-system to cause the animal to react. 

Now, what about thinking. What about awareness. What about when we humans think about what it means to be 'me'.

Is that merely neurons.

If it is then we can trace every decision back to a cause and to claim we have free will might be misleading. 

Now there's two major thinkers on the Hard Problem of Consciousness. They are both atheists. Daniel Dennett thinks that consciousness is an illusion, that it is merely an enormous series of what I have just described that creates the 'feeling' of being. The other thinker is David Chalmers who thinks we need to radically rethink Consciousness as a fundamental element of the universe like Gravity. Then

You can watch Daniel Dennett here

You can watch Chalmers explain here:

Then the question arose: So, if someone has a tumour and does terrible things, and free will is not a thing, then God has some explaining to do. 

You can go back to the 'short version' at the top of the blog to see what happened there. 

I'm thinking that the 5th of November meeting (meeting #2) will explain the last comment of the 'short version'.