verb: ensorcell; 3rd person present: ensorcells; past tense: ensorcelled; past participle: ensorcelled; gerund or present participle: ensorcelling; verb: ensorcel; 3rd person present: ensorcels; past tense: ensorceled; past participle: ensorceled; gerund or present participle: ensorceling
enchant; fascinate.”he was a child when the power of a mythic image first ensorcelled him”
Origin
mid 16th century: from Old French ensorceler, alteration of ensorcerer, from sorcier ‘sorcerer’.
Philosophy Incorporated Bernardo Kastrup and Tom Campbell discuss simulation theory , analytic idealism , consciousness , the mind body problem , meditation , information , quantum physics , the universe , evolution and more. Links to the authors books are below the timestamp. Timestamp : 1:13 ( Tom ) Introduction 19:12 ( Tom ) Do we live in a literal computer simulation ? 20:56 ( Bernardo ) Introduction 27:25 ( Tom ) On similarities between Tom and Bernardo’s work. 31:44 ( Bernardo ) Similarities between Tom and Bernardo’s work. 35:47 Does consciousness predate evolution ? How does consciousness evolve ? 37:36 ( Tom ) Differences between Bernardo and Tom. 42:00 ( Tom ) How does your model account for higher level mental functions ? 42:44 ( Tom ) How does the virtual reality evolve avatars ? Why does consciousness evolve ? 48:30 Are we all one mind ? 49:45 ( Bernardo ) If we are all one mind , why can’t we read each others thoughts ? 51:20 ( Tom ) Response to above. 58:07 ( Tom )How can we access the larger consciousness system ? 1:02:55 ( Bernardo ) Response to above. 1:10:27 ( Bernardo ) Can we merge with one another through psychedelics ? 1:11:18 ( Bernardo ) ” The nature of mind is to deceive itself. ” 1:13:14 ( Tom ) On skepticism 1:14:15 How to gain clarity of mind. 1:17:38 ( Bernardo ) Free will. 1:24:25 ( Tom ) Free will. 1:31:38 ( Tom ) The virtual reality is a top down system. 1:32:37 ( Bernardo ) Response to above. 1:33:22 ( Bernardo ) On the nature of time. 1:36:19 ( Tom ) On the nature of time. 1:38:19 ( Bernardo ) Response to above. 1:42:18 ( Bernardo ) Will idealism become mainstream metaphysics and science ? 1:49:03 ( Tom ) Will Idealism become mainstream metaphysics and science ? Works by Tom Campbell : My Big Toe : https://www.amazon.com/My-Big-TOE-Com… My Big Toe ( audiobook ) : https://www.audible.com/pd/My-Big-TOE… Works by Bernardo Kastrup : Science Ideated : https://www.amazon.com/Science-Ideate… The Idea Of The World : https://www.amazon.com/Idea-World-Mul… Why Materialism Is Baloney : https://www.amazon.com/Why-Materialis… Decoding Jung’s Metaphysics : https://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Jungs…
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove This video is a special release from the original Thinking Allowed series that ran on public television from 1986 until 2002. It was recorded in about 1996. Marcia Emery is author of Dr. Marcia Emery’s Intuition Workbook. Here she outlines a series of steps for activating the intuitive mind. These include framing the problem, centering, relaxing, receiving imagery, interpreting the imagery and taking action. She suggests that true intuitions are always accurate, and that various emotional factors can interfere with genuine intuitive wisdom. Now you can watch all of the programs from the original Thinking Allowed Video Collection, hosted by Jeffrey Mishlove. Subscribe to the new Streaming Channel (https://thinkingallowed.vhx.tv/) and watch more than 350 programs now, with more, previously unreleased titles added weekly. New!! Free month of the classic Thinking Allowed streaming channel for New Thinking Allowed subscribers only. Use code THINKFREELY.
Injury is impossible. And yet illusion makes illusion. If you can condemn, you can be injured. For you have believed that you can injure, and the right you have established for yourself can be now used against you, till you lay it down as valueless, unwanted and unreal. Then does illusion cease to have effects, and those it seemed to have will be undone. Then are you free, for freedom is your gift, and you can now receive the gift you gave.
Condemn and you are made a prisoner. Forgive and you are freed. Such is the law that rules perception. It is not a law that knowledge understands, for freedom is a part of knowledge. To condemn is thus impossible in truth. What seems to be its influence and its effects have not occurred at all. Yet must we deal with them a while as if they had. Illusion makes illusion. Except one. Forgiveness is illusion that is answer to the rest.
Forgiveness sweeps all other dreams away, and though it is itself a dream, it breeds no others. All illusions save this one must multiply a thousandfold. But this is where illusions end. Forgiveness is the end of dreams, because it is a dream of waking. It is not itself the truth. Yet does it point to where the truth must be, and gives direction with the certainty of God Himself. It is a dream in which the Son of God awakens to his Self and to his Father, knowing They are One.
Forgiveness is the only road that leads out of disaster, past all suffering, and finally away from death. How could there be another way, when this one is the plan of God Himself? And why would you oppose it, quarrel with it, seek to find a thousand ways in which it must be wrong; a thousand other possibilities?
Is it not wiser to be glad you hold the answer to your problems in your hand? Is it not more intelligent to thank the One Who gives salvation, and accept His gift with gratitude? And is it not a kindness to yourself to hear His Voice and learn the simple lessons He would teach, instead of trying to dismiss His words, and substitute your own in place of His?
His words will work. His words will save. His words contain all hope, all blessing and all joy that ever can be found upon this earth. His words are born in God, and come to you with Heaven’s love upon them. Those who hear His words have heard the song of Heaven. For these are the words in which all merge as one at last. And as this one will fade away, the Word of God will come to take its place, for it will be remembered then and loved.
This world has many seeming separate haunts where mercy has no meaning, and attack appears as justified. Yet all are one; a place where death is offered to God’s Son and to his Father. You may think They have accepted. But if you will look again upon the place where you beheld Their blood, you will perceive a miracle instead. How foolish to believe that They could die! How foolish to believe you can attack! How mad to think that you could be condemned, and that the holy Son of God can die!
The stillness of your Self remains unmoved, untouched by thoughts like these, and unaware of any condemnation which could need forgiveness. Dreams of any kind are strange and alien to the truth. And what but truth could have a Thought which builds a bridge to it that brings illusions to the other side?
Today we practice letting freedom come to make its home with you. The truth bestows these words upon your mind, that you may find the key to light and let the darkness end:
Only my condemnation injures me. Only my own forgiveness sets me free.
Do not forget today that there can be no form of suffering that fails to hide an unforgiving thought. Nor can there be a form of pain forgiveness cannot heal.
Accept the one illusion which proclaims there is no condemnation in God’s Son, and Heaven is remembered instantly; the world forgotten, all its weird beliefs forgotten with it, as the face of Christ appears unveiled at last in this one dream. This is the gift the Holy Spirit holds for you from God your Father. Let today be celebrated both on earth and in your holy home as well. Be kind to Both, as you forgive the trespasses you thought Them guilty of, and see your innocence shining upon you from the face of Christ.
Now is there silence all around the world. Now is there stillness where before there was a frantic rush of thoughts that made no sense. Now is there tranquil light across the face of earth, made quiet in a dreamless sleep. And now the Word of God alone remains upon it. Only that can be perceived an instant longer. Then are symbols done, and everything you ever thought you made completely vanished from the mind that God forever knows to be His only Son.
There is no condemnation in him. He is perfect in his holiness. He needs no thoughts of mercy. Who could give him gifts when everything is his? And who could dream of offering forgiveness to the Son of Sinlessness Itself, so like to Him Whose Son he is, that to behold the Son is to perceive no more, and only know the Father? In this vision of the Son, so brief that not an instant stands between this single sight and timelessness itself, you see the vision of yourself, and then you disappear forever into God.
Today we come still nearer to the end of everything that yet would stand between this vision and our sight. And we are glad that we have come this far, and recognize that He Who brought us here will not forsake us now. For He would give to us the gift that God has given us through Him today. Now is the time for your deliverance. The time has come. The time has come today.
mai hua EN// whole movie on www.makemeaman.com For one hour only you are invited to join a men’s group. We are Jerry HYDE, London based therapist, and Mai HUA, Paris based film director, and this is our heartfelt contribution to change culture around masculinity. Please watch it with people you love, the discussions and the shared experience is as important as the movie in itself. With men chosen at random from Hyde’s 25 year group practice, the film explores universal themes such as sex, abuse, relationships and what it means to be a (hu)man in 21st century culture. Funny, tragic, poignant and above all deeply honest, each and every one of the participants is unguarded, raw and open in a way you may never have seen before. FR// film complet sur www.makemeaman.com Pour une heure seulement, vous êtes invité.e à rejoindre un cercle d’hommes. Nous sommes Jerry HYDE (thérapeute basé à Londres) et Mai HUA (réalisatrice basée à Paris) et ceci est notre contribution sur la question de la masculinité. A travers ces hommes, choisis dans les cercles de Jerry, parfois anciens de plus de 25 ans, le film explore des thèmes universels comme le sexe, la violence, les relations et ce qu’être un humain au 21e siècle veut dire. Drôle, tragique, poignant et surtout viscéralement honnête, chaque participant s’ouvre d’une manière brute, précieuse. Jamais vue. ” Phénoménal. Les hommes du film sont de tels trésors dans toutes leurs blessures, leur force, leur beauté.” SEBASTIAN JUNGER – nominé aux oscars, auteur de plusieurs best sellers The Perfect Storm, Restrepo, Tribe, Freedom
The infamous thought experiment, flawed as it is, does demonstrate one thing: physics alone can’t explain consciousnessPhoto by Angus Mordant/Bloomberg/Getty
In his book Until the End of Time (2020), the physicist Brian Greene sums up the standard physicalist view of reality: ‘Particles and fields. Physical laws and initial conditions. To the depth of reality we have so far plumbed, there is no evidence for anything else.’ This physicalist approach has a heck of a track record. For some 400 years – roughly from the time of Galileo – scientists have had great success in figuring out how the Universe works by breaking up big, messy problems into smaller ones that could be tackled quantitatively through physics, with the help of mathematics. But there’s always been one pesky outlier: the mind. The problem of consciousness resists the traditional approach of science.
To be clear, science has made great strides in studying the brain, and no one doubts that brains enable consciousness. Scientists such as Francis Crick (who died in 2004) and Christof Koch made great strides in pinpointing the neural correlates of consciousness – roughly, the task of figuring out what sorts of brain activity are associated with what sorts of conscious experience. What this work leaves unanswered, however, is why conscious experience occurs at all.
There is no universally agreed-upon definition of consciousness. Awareness, including self-awareness, comes close; experience perhaps comes slightly closer. When we look at a red apple, certain neural circuits in our brains fire – but something more than that also seems to happen: we experience the redness of the apple. As philosophers often put the question: why is it like something to be a being-with-a-brain? Why is it like something to see a red apple, to hear music, to touch the bark of a tree, and so on? This is what David Chalmers called the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness – the puzzle of how non-conscious matter, responding only to the laws of physics, gives rise to conscious experience (in contrast to the ‘easy problems’ of figuring out which sorts of brain activity are associated with which specific mental states). The existence of minds is the most serious affront to physicalism.
This is where the zombie – that is, the thought experiment known as the ‘philosopher’s zombie’ – comes in. The experiment features an imagined creature exactly like you or me, but with a crucial ingredient – consciousness – missing. Though versions of the argument go back many decades, its current version was stated most explicitly by Chalmers. In his bookThe Conscious Mind (1996), he invites the reader to consider his zombie twin, a creature who is ‘molecule for molecule identical to me’ but who ‘lacks conscious experience entirely’. Chalmers imagines the case where he’s ‘gazing out the window, experiencing some nice green sensations from seeing the trees outside, having pleasant taste experiences through munching on a chocolate bar, and feeling a dull aching sensation in my right shoulder.’ Then he imagines his zombie twin in the exact same environment. The zombie will look and even act the same as the real David Chalmers; indeed:
he will be awake, able to report the contents of his internal states, able to focus attention in various places, and so on. It is just that none of this functioning will be accompanied by any real conscious experience. There will be no phenomenal feel. There is nothing it is like to be a zombie.
Imagining the zombie is step one in the thought experiment. In step two, Chalmers argues that if you can conceive of the zombie, then zombies are possible. And finally, step three: if zombies are possible, then physics, by itself, isn’t up to the job of explaining minds. This last step is worth examining more closely. Physicalists argue that bits of matter, moving about in accordance with the laws of physics, explain everything, including the workings of the brain and, with it, the mind. Proponents of the zombie argument counter that this isn’t enough: they argue that we can have all of those bits of matter in motion, and yet not have consciousness. In short, we could have a creature that looks like one of us, with a brain that’s doing exactly what our brains are doing – and still this creature would lack conscious experience. And therefore physics, by itself, isn’t enough to account for minds. And so physicalism must be false.
The zombie argument has recently been taken up by Philp Goff, who explores it in his bookGalileo’s Error (2019). Once again, the issue isn’t whether zombies are actually walking among us, but rather, whether they could exist. Goff writes:
Nobody thinks that philosophical zombies exist, any more than they think flying pigs exist. But there is no contradiction in the idea of a zombie, and hence if our universe had been very different, perhaps if the laws of nature had been different, there could have been zombies roaming our planet.
In other words, it’s not just a question of what one can imagine; people can imagine all sorts of implausible things. As Goff put it to me during a recent Zoom call: ‘The question is, are they logically coherent, and ultimately, are they possible in this very broad sense of possibility.’
At first, this seems like a powerful argument. If you believe that zombies could exist, you’re forced to accept the possibility that matter-in-motion can’t explain everything. In particular, the thing we hold most dear – our actual experience of the world – is missing. And so physicalism falters.
Even those who aren’t swayed by the zombie argument acknowledge its intellectual allure. ‘It’s elegant because it’s a very simple argument,’ says Keith Frankish, a philosopher with appointments at the University of Sheffield and the University of Crete. ‘It seems like you can get to a really big conclusion – a big radical conclusion – from a couple of fairly straightforward and attractive premises. That’s the dream of philosophers – to have these revolutionary arguments on the basis of premises that you can ascertain just in your armchair, just by thinking about it … If that isn’t seductive, I don’t know what is.’
As one begins to dissect the zombie argument, however, problems arise. To begin with, are zombies in fact logically possible? If the zombie is our exact physical duplicate, one might argue, then it will be conscious by necessity. To turn it around: it may be impossible for a being to have all the physical properties that a regular person has, and yet lack consciousness. Frankish draws a comparison with a television set. He asks if we can imagine a machine with all the electronic processes that occur in a (working) television set taking place, and yet with no picture appearing on the screen. Many of us would say no: if all of those things happen, the screen lights up as a matter of course; no extra ingredient is required.
Turning back to consciousness, Frankish adds: ‘I think if you really could understand everything the brain is doing – its 80 billion neurons, interconnected in goodness knows how many billions of ways, supporting an unimaginably wide range of sensitivities and reactions, including sensitivities to its own activity … If you could really imagine that in detail, then you wouldn’t feel that something was left out.’ (At the very least, this objection highlights how careful we have to be when we say that we ‘conceive’ of something. Can any of us really conceive of 80 billion of anything?)
Clearly, a great deal rests on the issue of ‘conceivability’. Sean Carroll, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology who weighed in on the zombie issue in a recent paper, gives an example from mathematics: ‘If you went back 10,000 years and explained to someone what a prime number is, and asked: “Is it conceivable to you that there’s a largest prime number?” Well, they might say “yes”; as far as they can conceive, there could be a largest prime number. And then you can explain to them, no, there’s a very simple mathematical proof that there can’t be a largest prime number. And they go: “Oh, I was wrong – it’s not conceivable.”’
It’s asking us to picture a bird that walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, and yet is not a duck
In a similar vein, geometers long imagined that it might be possible to ‘square the circle’, a task that was eventually shown (in 1882) to be impossible. The philosopher Massimo Pigliucci, reflecting on how once-conceivable things often get demoted to the realm of the inconceivable, has written that ‘conceivability establishes nothing’. At the end of the day, Carroll finds the idea of conceivability too fuzzy to do what philosophers want it to do. ‘I think that conceivability is just a misplaced concept to use in arguments like this,’ he says, ‘because it is leveraging fuzziness to reach sweeping conclusions far beyond what is warranted by one’s state of knowledge.’
A closely related issue is the problem of accepting the zombie thought experiment’s premises at face value. We’re told that the zombie is just like us, and yet lacks consciousness. Let’s put this into practice: we meet a creature that looks and behaves just like a human, but a philosopher assures us that it’s actually a zombie. What would we make of their claim? Rebecca Hanrahan, a philosopher at Whitman College in Washington State, argues that in such a situation we would not, in fact, accept the claim that the creature lacked consciousness. ‘If I go to another world and see a creature that looks like me and acts like me, then I’m going to have to conclude that it also has the same phenomenological sensations that I do,’ she says. In other words, the first premise of the zombie thought experiment never gets off the ground: Chalmers asks us to accept a human duplicate who lacks consciousness as though this is a straightforward request – but it is not. To put it somewhat crudely, it’s asking us to picture a bird that walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, and yet is not a duck.
The zombie argument seems to belong to a class of arguments that Daniel Dennett calls ‘intuition pumps’. These are arguments – typically thought experiments – that lead the reader toward a certain appealing but not necessarily warranted conclusion. (Problems involving the mind and the brain seem to spawn more than their fair share of these problematic thought experiments; a well-known example is John Searle’s ‘Chinese Room’ argument against the possibility of explaining the mind in terms of information-processing; Dennett has shown convincingly where the argument falters.) In the case of the zombie argument, it’s suggested that we can easily picture a creature that has all the outward attributes of a normal, thinking human being, yet is one that lacks consciousness. But it turns out that conceiving of such a creature is no mean feat.
Another problem centres on what consciousness actually does. As a philosopher would put it, what causal role does it play? Does it cause matter to move about? Or to put it another way: does consciousness impact behaviour? By Chalmers’s account, the zombie is supposed to behave exactly like us – even though we have conscious experiences and the zombie doesn’t. The implication seems to be that conscious experiences play no causal role in the world. But in that case, why even postulate its existence? The usual response is that consciousness is something we immediately experience; we can’t be wrong when we claim to be conscious. But when we reach for a glass of water, aren’t we doing so because of the conscious experience of being thirsty? If we are, then consciousness does, in fact, seem to impact behaviour; and if we aren’t, then consciousness seems to be nothing more than what philosophers call an epiphenomenon, a kind of secondary phenomenon. As Hanrahan puts it, consciousness would be like the humming sound that your computer makes – it’s always there when the computer is on, but it has no bearing on what the machine is actually computing.
Carroll’s objections to the zombie argument focus on precisely this point. ‘The zombie concept is only coherent if you think that none of our conscious experiences have any influence whatsoever on our behaviour,’ he says. Goff disputes this point; in Galileo’s Error, he argues that there is ‘no contradiction in the idea that something with the same physical nature [as a human being] could lack an inner subjective life’ [Goff’s italics] and that ‘there is no inconsistency or incoherence in the idea of a zombie.’
Zombies are either inveterate liars or, at a minimum, they’re extremely confused about their condition
The difficulty comes to a head when we look at the things we say about our conscious experiences. If I’m sad, I’ll say that I’m sad – but the zombie, in the same situation, would also say it’s sad (if it didn’t, we’d spot it due to this difference in behaviour). For Carroll, this stretches the argument to its breaking point. ‘If someone says “I’m sad”, and you say “Describe to me your sadness” – well, if you believe in the possibility of zombies, and the conceivability of zombies, then that experience of sadness can’t actually be influencing or informing what you say about your sadness,’ says Carroll. ‘And whatever you think about consciousness, that’s not consciousness as I understand it. When I’m sad or when I’m seeing red or when I’m feeling hot, that influences how I talk and move and behave in the world.’
Again, Goff sees the situation differently. After a prolonged back-and-forth with Carroll on a recent episode of the Mind Chat podcast, hosted by Goff and Frankish, Goff Tweeted: ‘The same software can be run on different hardware, it obviously doesn’t follow that the hardware doesn’t do anything … Likewise, the thesis that human behavioural functions could be realised in non-conscious zombie stuff doesn’t entail that human consciousness doesn’t do anything.’ Carroll replied in a blog post, arguing that, sure, the same computer program can be run on different machines (this is what philosophers refer to as ‘substrate independence’) – but he notes that the substrate doesn’t affect the outcome of the calculations. Analogously, he writes, those who want ‘to differentiate between the software of reality running on physical vs mental hardware cannot claim that consciousness gets any credit at all for our behaviour in the world.’
However one frames the relationship between minds, brains and bodies, there seems to be no getting around the problematic nature of the descriptions zombies give of themselves: they’re either inveterate liars – they insist they’re enjoying the taste of a delicious apple even though, by the terms of the thought experiment, they’re experiencing nothing at all – or, at a minimum, they’re extremely confused about their condition. And if the zombie is confused about what it is or is not experiencing, perhaps we are too. In fact, with just a little effort, one can enlist the zombies in support of physicalism: however sincerely we might say ‘But I know I’m conscious; I feel it; I cannot be wrong about this,’ we must bear in mind that the zombie would utter the exact same words in the same situation.
Does this mean that consciousness is merely an illusion? Frankish believes it is; he describes conscious experience as ‘a fiction written by our brains in order to help us track the impact that the world makes on us’. Carroll, in his bookThe Big Picture (2016), takes a slightly different tack; he writes that consciousness is real ‘in exactly the same way as fluids and chairs and universities and legal codes are real – in the sense that they play an essential role in a successful description of a certain part of the natural world, within a certain domain of applicability’. Goff, in contrast, defends a view known as panpsychism – roughly, the idea that everything in the world has mental qualities, or, as he put it (along with two co-authors) in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ‘mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world’.
Physicalists who aren’t swayed by the zombie argument are left pondering the question we began with: how, in a purely physical world, do minds arise? In Until the End of Time, Greene – as ardent a physicalist as they come – writes that the existence of minds represents ‘a critical gap in the scientific narrative … We lack a conclusive account of how consciousness manifests a private world of sights and sounds and sensations.’
Centuries from now (decades if we’re lucky), people will no longer speak of the hard problem as a great mystery
A step in the right direction, at least for thinkers such as Frankish, is to view consciousness not as a thing but as a process. Consciousness is something ‘that a very complex kind of organism does’, he says. He cites Dennett, who has pointed out that the cells in your brain are not fundamentally different from the cells in a big blob of yeast. ‘There’s no real difference between them,’ says Frankish; brains don’t contain some extra, special ingredient. ‘It’s just that the cells of a human brain are connected up in a very, very special way, compared to the cells in the bowl of yeast. And it’s what those cells are doing that makes the brain conscious.’
Carroll holds a broadly similar view. As he put it recently in an episode of his Mindscape podcast: ‘I think the world is made of stuff, obeying the laws of physics, and that’s basically it. Except when that stuff comes together to form complicated things, like human beings, there can be new, emergent phenomena that arise, and consciousness is one of those.’ Like Dennett and many others in the physicalist camp, Carroll believes the hard problem will eventually fade away – that is, centuries from now (decades if we’re lucky), people will no longer speak of it as a great mystery. Eventually, we’ll have learned enough about the workings of brains and their billions of neurons, says Carroll, that we’ll just say ‘Well, this is what happens when people have conscious experiences’ – adding: ‘And then the whole problem will just kind of go away.’
While the zombie argument, and the philosophical problems raised by it, may seem like mere pie-in-the-sky exercises that keep philosophers (and a few scientists) up at night, they tie into questions that have real-world consequences. Thinking about zombies forces us to think about how we deal with beings whose status as conscious entities is unclear – such as animals, for example, and foetuses, or some future versions of robots or artificial intelligences.
We all seem to agree that human beings are conscious, but how widespread is consciousness in the animal kingdom? ‘Is my dog conscious? Absolutely,’ says William Seager, a philosopher at the University of Toronto. ‘What about my parakeet? I think so. A rat? Probably. What about a snake, or a spider? Spiders act – they seem to want things. They form plans, they hunt, they seem to like to eat things, and they avoid situations that are dangerous. Are they conscious?’
The question is even thornier when we get to octopuses, which have a far more distributed neural structure than mammals. Since we don’t know exactly what generates consciousness, we struggle to determine who or what has it. Insects, for example, ‘are way simpler than us’, says Seager. ‘But that’s not fair; just because they’re simpler doesn’t mean they’re unconscious. So we have a kind of real-world zombie issue when we think about where consciousness cuts out, or where it turns on.’ Parallel questions inevitably come up when considering human development. At conception, a human embryo ‘is definitely not conscious, and at birth it’s definitely conscious’, says Seager. ‘Somewhere in the middle, consciousness turns on. We don’t really understand how that works. Again, we don’t know what it is about the brain that generates consciousness. So we have these conundrums.’
The zombie argument provokes for the same reason that the larger puzzle of consciousness provokes: it forces us to confront problems that stymied everyone from the ancient Greeks to Descartes and Galileo. Even the most hardened of the hardcore physicalists admit that the puzzle of consciousness is, well, puzzling. The zombie argument, flawed as it is, deserves credit for helping to bring difficult questions into sharp relief, even if it’s not the knock-down argument against physicalism that its proponents imagine it to be.
A ‘human brain/cloud interface’ will give people instant access to vast knowledge and computing power via thought alone, predict experts
Date: April 12, 2019 (sciencedaily.com)
Source: Frontiers
Summary: Researchers predict that exponential progress in nanotechnology, nanomedicine, artificial intelligence, and computation will lead this century to the development of a ‘human brain/cloud interface’ (B/CI), that connects neurons and synapses in the brain to vast cloud-computing networks in real time.
Imagine a future technology that would provide instant access to the world’s knowledge and artificial intelligence, simply by thinking about a specific topic or question. Communications, education, work, and the world as we know it would be transformed.
Writing in Frontiers in Neuroscience, an international collaboration led by researchers at UC Berkeley and the US Institute for Molecular Manufacturing predicts that exponential progress in nanotechnology, nanomedicine, AI, and computation will lead this century to the development of a “Human Brain/Cloud Interface” (B/CI), that connects neurons and synapses in the brain to vast cloud-computing networks in real time.
Nanobots on the brain
The B/CI concept was initially proposed by futurist-author-inventor Ray Kurzweil, who suggested that neural nanorobots — brainchild of Robert Freitas, Jr., senior author of the research — could be used to connect the neocortex of the human brain to a “synthetic neocortex” in the cloud. Our wrinkled neocortex is the newest, smartest, ‘conscious’ part of the brain.
Freitas’ proposed neural nanorobots would provide direct, real-time monitoring and control of signals to and from brain cells.
“These devices would navigate the human vasculature, cross the blood-brain barrier, and precisely autoposition themselves among, or even within brain cells,” explains Freitas. “They would then wirelessly transmit encoded information to and from a cloud-based supercomputer network for real-time brain-state monitoring and data extraction.”
The internet of thoughts
This cortex in the cloud would allow “Matrix”-style downloading of information to the brain, the group claims.
“A human B/CI system mediated by neuralnanorobotics could empower individuals with instantaneous access to all cumulative human knowledge available in the cloud, while significantly improving human learning capacities and intelligence,” says lead author Dr. Nuno Martins.
B/CI technology might also allow us to create a future “global superbrain” that would connect networks of individual human brains and AIs to enable collective thought.
“While not yet particularly sophisticated, an experimental human ‘BrainNet’ system has already been tested, enabling thought-driven information exchange via the cloud between individual brains,” explains Martins. “It used electrical signals recorded through the skull of ‘senders’ and magnetic stimulation through the skull of ‘receivers,’ allowing for performing cooperative tasks.
“With the advance of neuralnanorobotics, we envisage the future creation of ‘superbrains’ that can harness the thoughts and thinking power of any number of humans and machines in real time. This shared cognition could revolutionize democracy, enhance empathy, and ultimately unite culturally diverse groups into a truly global society.”
When can we connect?
According to the group’s estimates, even existing supercomputers have processing speeds capable of handling the necessary volumes of neural data for B/CI — and they’re getting faster, fast.
Rather, transferring neural data to and from supercomputers in the cloud is likely to be the ultimate bottleneck in B/CI development.
“This challenge includes not only finding the bandwidth for global data transmission,” cautions Martins, “but also, how to enable data exchange with neurons via tiny devices embedded deep in the brain.”
One solution proposed by the authors is the use of ‘magnetoelectric nanoparticles’ to effectively amplify communication between neurons and the cloud.
“These nanoparticles have been used already in living mice to couple external magnetic fields to neuronal electric fields — that is, to detect and locally amplify these magnetic signals and so allow them to alter the electrical activity of neurons,” explains Martins. “This could work in reverse, too: electrical signals produced by neurons and nanorobots could be amplified via magnetoelectric nanoparticles, to allow their detection outside of the skull.”
Getting these nanoparticles — and nanorobots — safely into the brain via the circulation, would be perhaps the greatest challenge of all in B/CI.
“A detailed analysis of the biodistribution and biocompatibility of nanoparticles is required before they can be considered for human development. Nevertheless, with these and other promising technologies for B/CI developing at an ever-increasing rate, an ‘internet of thoughts’ could become a reality before the turn of the century,” Martins concludes.
The dropout was not just a hippy-trippy hedonist but a paranoid soul, who feared brainwashing and societal controlWoodstock, New York, 1967. Photo by Elliot Erwitt/Magnum
Charlie Williams is a postdoctoral research fellow on the Wellcome Trust-funded Pathologies of Solitude project at Queen Mary, University of London.
In November 1967, Robin Farquharson ‘dropped out’. After losing his job as a computer programmer along with the flat he’d been renting, he decided to forgo the dwindling funds in his bank account and live on London’s streets. In his short memoir Drop Out! (1968), Farquharson recounted his homeless wanderings and loose associations with London’s underground scene, moving from all-night cafés to ‘psychedelic’ nightclubs; he described being robbed and beaten in the street, and his first experience of LSD. At 37, Farquharson felt too old to be a hippy, nonetheless he saw his disaffiliation within the context of a wider movement towards social and personal liberation, inspired by Timothy Leary’s injunction to ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’: words he interpreted as a call to ‘rid yourself of responsibility, quit the rat-race. Don’t obey society’s paralysing conventions … Step out of the trap.’
Timothy Leary addresses the National Student Association Congress, 17 August 1967. Photo by Bettmann/Getty
The year 1967 marked a high point in this history. That was when San Francisco played host to the ‘Summer of Love’, when thousands of young hippies descended on its Haight-Ashbury district, drawn to its carnivalesque atmosphere, psychedelic hedonism and alternative living. According to Leary, places like the Haight offered a redemptive starting point for ‘everyone that’s caught inside a television set of props, and made of actors’. In London, the major countercultural event that summer was the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation at the Roundhouse in Camden. For two weeks in July 1967, thinkers and activists including R D Laing, Gregory Bateson, Stokely Carmichael and Herbert Marcuse (women speakers were notably absent) gathered to debate new ways forward. Though a more overtly political event than the Summer of Love, the idea that psychological liberation was a prerequisite of political change was a central theme. ‘[W]e are taught, and coerced, to see things through a filter of politically arrived at and socially sanctioned lies,’ said one announcement prior to the event. ‘The entire world as we “know” it must be demystified.’
Though differing in style and scope, both events emphasised dropping out as hinged on a particular set of anxieties about modernity and its threat to the liberal mind. In The Making of a Counter Culture (1969), the academic Theodore Roszak had celebrated this crucial point of resistance against what he called ‘the technocracy’, a regime of governance that sought to rationalise and control all aspects of society, including its citizens. His concerns were not idiosyncratic; Roszak’s worldview drew on other critics of technocratic modernity, including Leary, Marcuse, C Wright Mills, Paul Goodman, Norman O Brown, Alan Watts and Jacques Ellul. All manifested what Roszak regarded as a healthy suspicion of the power structures of Western democracy that, according to Marcuse, had become totalitarian in everything but name. The dropouts embodied in the writings and adventures of Farquharson, Jack Kerouac, and Ken Kesey offered a potential antidote. To drop out in this sense was to strive for internal freedom through processes of ‘deconditioning’ or ‘unbrainwashing’ and imagine a type of self that could not be controlled or contained.
Cultural historians argue that the postwar period was marked by an acute set of anxieties – what Timothy Melley in Empire of Conspiracy (2000) labels ‘agency panic’ – about the potential for large institutions, states and technologies to control the arena of the personal self. Such concerns, already heightened by the rise of totalitarianism in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, were boosted by the appearance of new forms of mass media and mass culture, the growth of the covert security state, and rampant globalisation. But fears of mind manipulation were also driven by the growing influence of the psychological sciences and the belief that the next major frontier in science – the mind and brain – would soon be unlocked.
Addressing the American Psychological Association in 1955, the physicist J Robert Oppenheimer warned his audience that every acquisition of psychological knowledge opens up the ‘most terrifying prospects of controlling what people do and how they think and how they behave and how they feel.’ His comments came in the wake of the Korean War, when reports of prisoners of war (POWs) collaborating with the communist enemy raised widespread alarm about the role of psychology in warfare. In one case, several captured US airmen publicly confessed to committing crimes of bacteriological warfare in North Korea. Some commentators claimed they had been the victims of powerful techniques of psychological manipulation, known as ‘brainwashing’, suspicions that appeared to be confirmed by further scandals in Chinese prison camps. After the war, 21 Americans even chose to live in communist China rather than be repatriated.
Allen Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), declared that the communist enemy was waging a new form of ‘brain warfare’, seeking to ‘condition the mind so that it no longer reacts on a free will or rational basis but responds to impulses implanted from outside.’ A panel of military psychiatrists charged with investigating the conduct of Korean War POWs later dismissed the more sensational claims about brainwashing, calling for ‘more sober analyses’ of POW behaviour; nonetheless, throughout the 1950s brainwashing had become a point of fascination for the military and intelligence community, who helped fund both covert and overt research into methods of psychological indoctrination.
It also became an important cultural motif, featuring in numerous literary and cinematic productions, including John Frankenheimer’s film The Manchurian Candidate (1962). Frankenheimer’s semiparodic take on the subject showed how loyal POWs serving in North Korea might be turned into political assassins. But it also captured other concerns about psychological manipulation from the 1950s: a fearmongering McCarthyite senator, ever-present television media, political propaganda, and a domineering mother, played by Angela Lansbury. The latter tapped into ‘momism’, a misogynist panic arguing that young American boys were emasculated victims of psychological pressures placed on them by their mothers. Themes of brainwashing also surfaced in various writings about the role of psychologists in corporate America. In his bestselling exposé of ‘depth’ psychology in the advertising industry, The Hidden Persuaders (1957), Vance Packard described the large-scale efforts ‘being made, often with impressive success, to channel our unthinking habits, our purchasing decisions, and our thought processes by the use of insights gleaned from psychiatry and the social sciences’.
Dropping out was a way of safeguarding this inviolable private life
Suspicions about brainwashing were also a hallmark of countercultural writings. ‘The stupendous machinery surrounding us conditions our “thoughts, feelings and apparent sensory impressions,” and reinforces our mental slavery,’ wrote Allen Ginsberg in 1967. Faced with such an assault, he suggested the best minds should drop out and jolt ‘the soft machine of the brain out of its conditioned hypnosis’. In doing so, they turned to the work of artists and writers, but also psychologists such as Leary and ‘anti-psychiatrists’ such as Laing, whose writings stood as explicit counterpoints to the aims and objectives of mainstream psychology and an antidote to a vision of selfhood that is predetermined or susceptible to psychological manipulation.
What does a mind free from such control look like? This question preoccupied writers and thinkers across the political spectrum, not least Hannah Arendt. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), she described the emergence of a new form of power in the 20th century, employing mass media, bureaucracy and psychological techniques to control every aspect of social and economic behaviour. But totalitarianism’s architecture of control could be effective only if its subjects operated solely in mechanistic terms, as a series of conditioned reflexes, denying any role to cognition, interiority and an unconscious mind. For Arendt, this was a false vision: human beings possess natural capacities for the free exercise of reason that must be protected by safeguarding what the ancients called the private sphere, retaining space and time for solitary contemplation. Here, the mind converses with itself (an idea borrowed from the Stoics) in an uninhibited dialogue of thought. This solitary inner life was for Arendt the source of political reason and ethics, but also an indeterminate space that could not be controlled from without.
Dropping out was a way of safeguarding this inviolable private life; a theme that was frequently explored in totalitarian fiction. In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), a couple seeking refuge from the surveillance state live among the ‘proles’ on the fringes of society. Orwell was already known for his sympathetic portrayal of poverty and homelessness in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). But against the spectre of totalitarianism, the poorest classes are depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four as the last refuges of unviolated interiority, known in Oceania’s newspeak as ‘Ownlife’.
For Orwell, a free interiority is tied closely to truth and reason – the ‘freedom to say that two plus two make four’ – but it was another totalitarian classic from the era, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940), that would celebrate disconnect as a route to an expanded and indeterminate inner life. Held captive in a solitary cell in Soviet Russia, Koestler’s protagonist Rubashov, a former political commissar, discovers a hitherto suppressed internal realm, a complex region of spiritual and emotional life that gives rise to an ‘oceanic sense’. Rubashov experiences his ‘personality dissolved as a grain of salt in the sea; but at the same time the infinite sea seemed to be contained in the grain of salt’. Koestler drew on his time as a prisoner of Franco during the Spanish Civil War and, in various memoirs, claimed that it was his experience of the oceanic that prompted him to quit the Communist Party in 1938. As he would argue in Darkness at Noon, the knowledge of the self as infinite and indeterminate disrupts both the logic and the project of totalitarian control, and illustrates the individual as essentially free.
In 1961, Leary invited Koestler to Harvard University to experience the hallucinogenic effects of psilocybin (popularly known as magic mushrooms). Koestler was one of a long list of intellectuals, artists and writers, including Kerouac, Ginsberg and Willem de Kooning, who Leary hoped would respond enthusiastically to the drug. ‘Remember your enlightenments in the Franco Prison?’ Leary wrote to Koestler. ‘Very similar to what we are producing.’ Koestler was unenthusiastic. Insofar as his psilocybin trip resembled any form of inner enlightenment, he compared it to seeing the view from a summit without having climbed the mountain. Leary was unperturbed. At Harvard, he was steadily building a platform to proclaim the psychedelic experience as a tool of psychic liberation, demonstrating the limitless possibilities of mind in a world that increasingly tried to constrain it.
Prior to joining Harvard, Leary had made a name for himself as an expert in personality testing and theory, combining numerous metrics to develop a model of personality based on people’s situational behavioural strategies. Personality testing was booming in academia as well as in industry, with tests such as the Myers-Briggs, using introspective questionnaires to determine different personality ‘types’, being widely adopted in recruitment and management. But by the end of the 1950s, critics of the personality test grew more vocal, claiming it was a tool for the technocratic age, an unacceptable invasion of privacy and a means of policing nonconformity. William Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956), about the standardisation of the American workplace and its worker, implored readers to cheat on personality tests. An organisation could ask for labour in exchange for the worker’s salary, wrote Whyte, ‘but it should not ask for his psyche as well.’
During a mid-life crisis and facing wavering faith in his research, Leary’s first psilocybin trip on a visit to Mexico in 1960 was a revelation, offering an experience of selfhood that conventional personality diagnostics seemed unable to account for. Returning to Harvard, he set about reinventing his research under the auspices of the Harvard Psilocybin Project. The project’s board included Aldous Huxley, whom Leary had contacted after reading The Doors of Perception (1954), perhaps the most important postwar text on the psychedelic experience. Here Huxley proposed a theory, developed with the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, that drugs such as mescaline remove vestigial filters on the brain, widening perception and allowing users to transcend the limits of everyday consciousness. Huxley was best known for pointing to the perils of behavioural control in a technoscientific future in his novel Brave New World (1932). Yet, during the 1950s, he also went through his own conversion, as Nicolas Langlitz puts it in Neuropsychedelia (2012), ‘from cynical British intellectual to committed Californian mystic’. For Huxley and Osmond, ‘psychedelic’ drugs such as mescaline, psilocybin and LSD offered potential liberation from a brave new world of mind-manipulating technologies. As Osmond wrote to Huxley in 1957: ‘expand the psyche or become slaves of the machine’.
The psychedelic experience was, for Leary, a fast-track to ‘jailbreaking the mind’
In ‘How to Change Behaviour’ (1962), Leary set out a vision for psilocybin therapy as a way of countering the rigid modalities of behaviour, or culturally determined ‘games’ that societies imposed. According to Leary and his colleagues, psilocybin allowed its users to experience consciousness as a multitudinous set of possibilities. He later wrote:
The first step is the realisation that there is more: that man’s brain, his 13-billion-celled computer, is capable of limitless new dimensions of awareness and knowledge. In short, that man does not use his head.
In 1962, Leary and several colleagues would establish the International Federation for Internal Freedom, which claimed in its manifesto:
We are aware that cultural structures (however libertarian their purpose) inevitably produce roles, rules, rituals, values, words and strategies which end in external control of internal freedom. This is the danger we seek to avoid.
Leary had entered Harvard trying to understand, map and diagnose the roles, rituals and values that shape interpersonal behaviour; he left arguing for the need to embrace a more complicated vision of selfhood that could not be contained in a series of personality types. The psychedelic experience was a fast-track to ‘jailbreaking the mind’ in a world where, he said, ‘objective science, automation, machine-like conformity, and political thought control’ threaten the survival of the individual.
In the 1960s, the beat writer Alexander Trocchi invited Leary to join Project Sigma, an underground network of activists, dedicated to cultural revolution. Trocchi saw Leary and his ‘group of mad doctors’ as the US counterpart to another ‘group of mad doctors’ he knew in London, ‘centred around a man called Laing’. It was by no means the first or last time that the Scottish psychiatrist would be compared with Leary. Both men emerged from establishment professions in academia and medicine to achieve the kind of countercultural celebrity usually reserved for writers, musicians and actors. Both acquired cultish followings and built careers on a call to liberate the mind in a world where social conditioning and manipulation were said to be pervasive. While Leary’s ‘jail break’ was tied closely to the psychedelic experience, Laing’s politics of the mind involved rewriting the medical rulebook to embrace the kinds of experiences pathologised by conventional psychiatry. Laing’s colleague David Cooper named this movement ‘anti-psychiatry’ to reflect their commitment to radical innovation in the field of mental health.
R D Laing (right) attends a discussion on the legalisation of marijuana in London in 1967. Photo by Stan Meagher/Express/Getty
Laing entered psychiatry in the 1950s during a period of innovation and optimism about the potential for treating patients suffering chronic mental illness. Some of these innovations were psychosocial, involving experiments with group and community therapy – techniques that would influence much of the work later done under the banner of ‘anti-psychiatry’. But the 1950s also saw widespread uptake of ‘new’ methods of physical treatment first developed in the interwar years, such as insulin coma therapy, drug treatments, lobotomy and ECT. Enthusiasts claimed these techniques were bringing about a revolution in psychiatry that would see all mental pathologies treated like any other condition – with medical intervention at outpatient-style hospital wards. Their critics argued that these physical treatments were damaging and coercive, sedating and pacifying patients instead of healing them. One of the most vocal proponents of physical therapies, the psychiatrist William Sargant, had guilelessly compared his own techniques to ‘brain-washing’. In his 1985 autobiography, Laing paints a grim picture of his earliest experiences as a psychiatrist, writing:
I was beginning to suspect that insulin and electric shocks, not to mention lobotomy and the whole environment of a psychiatric unit, were ways of destroying people and driving people crazy if they were not so before, and crazier if they were.
Laing made his first major intervention into psychiatric discourse with The Divided Self (1960), a book that promised to make ‘madness, and the process of going mad, comprehensible’. Drawing on insights from existential philosophy and contemporary psychoanalysis, he portrayed the withdrawn and isolated states of his schizoid patients as a response to what they perceived as a threatening and bewildering interpersonal environment. A ‘schizophrenic may say that he is made of glass’, Laing wrote, ‘of such transparency and fragility that a look directed at him splinters him to bits and penetrates straight through him’.
On Laing’s model, those individuals that society labelled ‘normal’ were most alienated from inner authenticity
The first edition of The Divided Self received a polite reception, with reviewers commending Laing’s demand for a more humane approach to psychiatry and his vivid portrayal of schizophrenic lives. But in the far more widely read paperback edition of 1965, Laing included a short foreword gesturing to a more radical agenda:
Psychiatry could be, and some psychiatrists are, on the side of transcendence, of genuine freedom, and of true human growth. But psychiatry can so easily be a technique of brainwashing, of inducing behaviour that is adjusted.
This ‘normal’ ‘adjusted’ state, he suggests ‘is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities … a false self to adapt to false realities.’ He goes on to evoke Marcuse’s countercultural classic One-Dimensional Man (1964), writing that:
Among one-dimensional men, it is not surprising that someone with an insistent experience of other dimensions, that he cannot entirely deny or forget, will run the risk either of being destroyed by the others, or of betraying what he knows.
In this short preface, Laing resituated The Divided Self within the more radical ideas of British anti-psychiatry and its international influences, including the work of Erving Goffman, Michel Foucault and Thomas Szasz. As the psychologist Daniel Burston points out in The Wing of Madness (1996), Laing gives little reason, in the first edition of TheDivided Self, for readers to think that normal adjustment or ‘ontological security’ is undesirable, especially when compared with the ‘torment and loneliness’ of the schizoid position. But, soon after, Laing shifted his position, referring to normality more pejoratively as an adjustment to a system of capitalist excess and social injustice. On this model, those individuals that society labelled ‘normal’ were most alienated from inner authenticity. Connecting with the minds and lives of schizophrenic patients, the anti-psychiatrists suggested, offered a potential pathway to liberation. Schizophrenics, Laing wrote in The Politics of Experience (1967), are brilliantly ‘adept at making themselves unremittingly incomprehensible’, and it was precisely this unintelligibility that made the schizophrenic mind a model of psychic resistance in an over-controlling world.
In 1965, Laing and several colleagues established a therapeutic community at Kingsley Hall in East London. The community was anti-hierarchical, without formal roles, and with every member of the community paying rent – although its chief architects undoubtedly held considerable sway over the running of things. During their five-year tenure, Kingsley Hall received numerous guests, seeking therapy or wanting to experience its alternative lifestyle and politics. As the therapist Joseph Berke wrote in 1971:
They came because friends lived there or because they liked community life, or heard that Kingsley Hall was a ‘groovy scene’, or to demonstrate their wares at the poetry readings, film shows, music and dance recitals, and art exhibitions which took place in the big hall downstairs.
If Berke’s account is anything to go by, those visitors were certainly treated to a spectacle – long drawn-out dinners, where one might be seated next to Sean Connery or Francis Huxley, listening to Laing holding court on philosophy and psychology.
The psychopolitical narrative linked the schizophrenic experience with the psychedelic
Kingsley Hall also played host to a serious therapeutic project, inspired in part by Bateson’s description of psychosis as ‘a voyage of discovery’ from which the psychotic returns ‘with insights different from those of the inhabitants who never embarked on such a voyage.’ Instead of the mental hospital, Laing wrote:
[W]e need a place where people who have travelled further and, consequently, may be more lost than psychiatrists and other sane people, can find their way further into inner space and time, and back again … Psychiatrically, this would appear as ex-patients helping future patients to go mad.
The story of one Kingsley Hall resident, Mary Barnes, appeared to vindicate this approach. Her therapeutic journey involved ‘going down’ into a state of infantile regression, where, with the help of her therapist – the aforementioned Berke – and the wider community, she occupied an artificial womb, fed from a bottle, and painted with her faeces. Her regression was described as a necessary precursor to her reintegration, after which she took on a role as caregiver within the community and went on to be a successful artist.
Though her case was widely celebrated by Kingsley Hall’s advocates, critics regarded it as an exception. Ultimately, the Kingsley Hall project was short lived. Many residents found life there difficult, and few, including Laing, stayed for extended periods. Though the community had been set up with the ambition of removing chemical and physical restraint, there were incidents of violence and physical coercion. One of the more disturbing moments in their coauthored biography Mary Barnes:Two Accounts of a Journey Through Madness (1971) is Berke’s description of punching Barnes and making her nose bleed during a moment of frustration. Laing’s son Adrian claimed it was almost impossible to stay sane at Kingsley Hall and that living there sent his father into a state of ‘drunken, wild madness’. In The British Anti-Psychiatrists (2017), the historian Oisín Wall writes that many residents felt under pressure to act mad, or in Laing’s words have a ‘dishonest flip-out’.
Under looming financial pressure, and infighting among its founding members, the community disbanded in 1970 and the building was left to disrepair. The key figures behind Kingsley Hall moved in different directions, some returning to more conventional psychiatry, while others pivoted towards the counterculture and political activism. Though many legacies of the anti-psychiatric movement live on, the psychopolitical narrative that linked the schizophrenic experience with the psychedelic and situated both within the post-war struggle for the mind was largely forgotten.
By the end of the decade, the politics that had formed the far-out element of anti-psychiatry and the psychedelic movement were shifting. The apparent apathy of dropping out and doing one’s thing was seen by factions of the New Left as a hedonistic distraction from targeted activism, while Kingsley Hall represented the folly of trying to contain individual liberation, political revolution and mental health reform under one roof and one endeavour. The utopian ideals that underpinned the Summer of Love in San Francisco exposed a similar naivety. By the autumn of 1967, the Haight had become a haven for young runaways and addicts, and sexual exploitation was rife. It seemed a stark reminder of the warnings Erich Fromm posed in Escape from Freedom (1941), when he argued that liberation expressed only in negative terms was futile without a positive social and psychic structure. In Bomb Culture (1968), the activist Jeff Nuttall wrote:
[T]he West Coast hippies were utterly parasitic, not other, not alternative, not truly a community, in that their whole self-maintenance relied on the excess material in the overmaterialistic culture they purported to despise.
Both Leary and Laing built their public profiles and their departures from medical and academic orthodoxy on a call to liberate the mind. In doing so, they drew on a series of postwar anxieties about mind control and the existential threat that Cold War psychology and late modernity was said to pose to the liberal self. Dropping out in its simplest form meant preserving interiority through disaffiliation from the wider culture, but the psychedelic vision of the dropout went further, arguing that, since threats to the mind were so pervasive and all-consuming, freedom required pushing the boundaries of consciousness to embrace alterity and preserve the mind’s enigmatic status in the century of the human sciences.
The fear is that the digital age has not liberated us but exposed us
By the end of the 1960s, the postwar fascination with mind control and psychic liberation was waning. Despite great advances in psychological and psychiatric research, the mind and brain continued to be an enigma, and many postwar fears about brainwashing were looked back on as sensational, even paranoid. On the other hand, as the intellectual landscape of philosophy and sociology drifted into the postmodern, the idea that agency and culture was ‘conditioned’, ‘situated’ or ‘constructed’ largely came to be taken for granted.
And yet we appear to have arrived full circle. Today, many of the debates about behavioural control in the age of big data echo Cold War-era anxieties about brainwashing, reprising the Marcusian nightmare of insidious manipulation and repression in the ‘technological society’. In Byung-Chul Han’s bookPsychopolitics (2017), the philosopher warns of the sophisticated use of targeted online content, enabling ‘influence to take place on a pre-reflexive level’. On our current trajectory, writes Han, ‘freedom will prove to have been merely an interlude.’ The fear is that the digital age has not liberated us but exposed us, by offering up our private lives to machine-learning algorithms able to process the masses of personal and behavioural data often unwittingly disclosed daily.
In a world of influencers and digital entrepreneurs, it’s not easy to imagine the resurgence of a culture engendered through disconnect and disaffiliation, but concerns over the threat of online targeting, polarisation and big data have inspired recent polemics about the need to rediscover solitude and disconnect. In Psychopolitics, Han muses on the philosophical figure of the ‘idiot’ who resists neoliberalism’s order of ‘total communication and total surveillance’ by veiling themselves in noncommunicative silence: ‘By nature, the idiot is unallied, un-networked, and uninformed.’ Han often portrays himself in the guise of this modern-day heretic, surrounding himself with analogue objects and nurturing the garden that he says connects him to ‘earth’s otherness’.
Jenny Odell’s bookHow to Do Nothing (2019) provides more of a practical guide for resisting the lure of the attention economy by reconnecting with our lived environment and exercising alternative practices of attention and volition. Alternatively, hobbyist communities known as self-hosters argue that resisting surveillance capitalism does not necessarily require disconnecting but, instead, reclaiming the architecture of the internet and running services on hardware owned by individuals and collectives, as opposed to the monopolies of big tech. In such examples, the legacies of the 1960s dropout and its politics of disconnect are alive and well, romanticising lives lived against the grain of a digitised existence. But they also push back against the psychedelic, indeterminate vision of the dropout I’ve explored. Perhaps because machine learning puts into question the nature of human spontaneity and the limits of behavioural unpredictability, its critics are inspired to reprise debates about privacy and those parts of the self that should remain hidden.
To read more about altered states and the history of psychiatry, visit Psyche, a digital magazine from Aeon that illuminates the human condition through psychology, philosophy and the arts.
