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Why Physical Perception?
If world-perception comprises a controlled, limited access to a spiritual world unbounded by space and time, we are justified in asking why it is that minds bother with incarnation at all; for if they are able to grasp or see concepts in that same immaterial world without the physical brain’s help, could the mind not do the same for other perceptions? Doubtless it could, and does; but this would of necessity be a different experience from that which a physical-sensory orientation yields. Perception without such orientation could potentially reveal all of what can meet us through the senses, without the constraints of time or space. Rather than perceiving more this way, we should expect less if the mind has no means of restricting what is potentially available to it. Without the focus provided by the sense organs, and without the feeling of being situated in a body, we would expect consciousness to be lost along with all sense of self and subjectivity. Our subjectivity arises not so much through the content that we perceive positively, but by virtue of our shutting out all else: by virtue of that to which we remain closed. A being that is unable to limit its perceptions, or for which perceptions are arise without the ordering framework of time and space, could never develop an ego, i.e., a sense of subjectivity.
Dreams and Dreamless Sleep
According to Vedantic philosophy, dreamless sleep is a (re)absorption in Brahman, in a state beyond the distinction of being and non-being where subjectivity is precluded by the removal of those limitations that characterize normal waking consciousness. We are led to the same conclusion through objective idealism. Falling asleep may be characterized firstly as the mind’s disengagement from its habitual neuronal-sensory orientation, thus eliminating the possibility of fully conscious perception during sleep. Under these conditions, neurons may (and do) still fire/open, but without the requisite pressure (i.e., attention) from the mind’s side, perception does not occur.
Figure 7. Mind and brain during sleep
On the other hand, the mind may receive impressions from the spiritual world in ways different from both conception and perception. Because such impressions are not received by a mind conscious of itself as subject, however, these impressions cannot be retained and are lost to the conscious mind upon waking. Mind in a diffuse state becomes part of the universal Mind and carries with it none of the awareness (or, as Vedic science would have it, none of the illusion) of itself as a subject in a world of objects. Again, this latter condition is only possible for a mind limited by physical involvement.[8]
I kind of perception accompanies dreams, too. Like any other impression reaching the mind, dreams must, according to objective idealism, real and spiritual in origin, for the mind can experience nothing that is not. But we have to do, once again, with a diffuse state of mind in which consciousness is unable to manifest as it does when one is awake. Still, there is an intermediate sense of subjectivity during dream experiences that arises from their similarity to experiences in a body limited by time and space. I would suggest that consciousness is dimmed in dreams in proportion to the dream-world’s conformity to the waking world’s laws and limitations.
The Brain: More Than a Conglomeration of Gates?
Thus far I have not accounted for any of the higher-level processing that occurs in the brain; I have dealt with those parts of the brain involved with direct perception only. On the other hand, I have suggested that concepts are perceived directly by the mind, which nevertheless involves imaginative representations that depend on the brain. It is fairly clear from brain research, however, that perceptions are organized by neural networks into patterns, and also that areas of the brain (such as the speech centres) correspond with what we might deem conceptual input. The existence of these structures has led many to believe that concepts are actually stored in the brain.
The evidence presented by cases of brain damage would suggest otherwise, however. Such cases are often marked at first by memory or capacity loss corresponding to an area of physical damage, but after a time other areas may take over and the memories and/or capacities return without the regrowth of the damaged material. It appears that what is happening here is that the mind has established, and becomes dependent on, neural gates through which it always sees certain ideal representations of a concept that, in a way, come to stand for that concept. (Such dependency furthermore accounts for stereotyped thinking that works not so much with real concepts as with these rigid, typical representations). Because the actual concept remains omnipresent, however, the possibility always remains that it will be conceived anew and incarnated in a similar representation.
What I have sketched out here as objective idealism will, I would hope, be entertained as an elaboration of Rudolf Steiner’s objective idealism. That some ideas in this essay may be at odds with one or another of Steiner’s does not concern me, however. This has been a mere essay in the sense of an attempt to explain perception and conception from a (revolutionary) perspective: to credit with validity the naive person’s attribution of reality to a world perceived (apparently) without mediation.
Least the reader forget what has prompted such an essay, let us review the simple facts that recommend, at the very least, an attempt to validate the naive perspective. First, we must acknowledge the fact that we experience our perceptions as unmediated. We do not perceive particles and waves; we perceive qualia such as colours, tones, tastes, etc. When I taste coffee, I get no sense of the “shapes” of molecules that interlock with the shapes of receptor sites on my tongue or in the taste centre of my brain. It makes no difference, either, if I have spent ten years studying the physiology of the gustatory organs and I “know” that this taste “is” just the interaction of certain molecular shapes and corresponding receptors in the sense organs. I still taste coffee; I experience a particular quality, and this is experienced as direct. Other philosophical approaches to perception try to ignore or side-step experience by telling us that one experience “is” another (e.g. the taste of coffee “is” the perception of a diagrams in a textbook, or the conception of interlocking shapes). I have tried to put experience first, since it offers a starting point that we know intimately.
As I have shown, this approach need not require us to be naive with respect to the various perceptual errors and illusions to which we fall prey. Rather, these are, as I have suggested, explicable as artifacts of the process whereby perceptions are incorrectly matched with conceptions by cognitive processes that are fallible owing to the ignorance endemic to our sense-limited existence. But it is this very state of limitation that makes it possible for us to achieve a sense of identity, a subjectivity, and, possibly, a free will.[9]
It should be pointed out that a number of natural phenomena inexplicable for a materialist philosophy become readily explicable through objective-idealist conceptions of mind. For example, the well-documented phenomena classified as NDEs (Near Death Experiences) become somewhat more comprehensible if we suppose that the mind can function and even perceive without the help of a functioning physical brain. The uncanny organization of beehives and termite colonies, too, seem explicable only when we propose a mind that interacts with a number of discrete physical brains simultaneously; one might add to this the schooling behaviour of fish and flocking in migratory birds, both of which appear to require the coordination of a mind that transcends any physical individual.
The experiences of clairvoyants, like those of people experiencing NDEs, remain astounding from this point of view, but they become comprehensible both in terms of what clairvoyants see and why real clairvoyance is rare. As van Peursen puts it,
a clairvoyant who registers everything at once can no longer focus on one particular datum, so that his clairvoyance dissolves in a medley of confused images. The borderline comes where orientation ceases to be possible and the “I” threatens to merge into consciousless and directionless impersonality. In other words, these [spiritual] phenomena cannot be identified unless some measure of selectivity is brought into play.[10]
Clairvoyance and extraphysical consciousness is nonetheless possible insofar as some means of focus, analogous to physical senses, develops in a subtle or purely spiritual body with immaterial sense organs.11 The reason the vast majority of us are unable to perceive without the physical is that such organs remain rudimentary in us. Neither can we become conscious of our immortality (i.e., the mind’s essential, unlimited character), since our experience of selfhood arose from and remains closely bound up with the limitations of our mortal, physical existence.
We are thus led to a conclusion similar to those reached by Bergson, Scheler, and others, and summarized by C.A. van Peursen, namely that mind as we know it, and hence the feeling of identity, is made possible only through “bodiliness” and its limitations. Yet mind is entirely spiritual, just as the body is ultimately spiritual. As Berkeley made so clear, all perception implies the activity of mind, and it is absurd to forever refer our concrete perceptions to some “material” substratum that lurks beneath them.
by Robert Zimmer
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