Читать книгу Noises from the Darkroom: The Science and Mystery of the Mind - Guy Claxton - Страница 16

The pickle in which humankind currently finds (and loses) itself is due to the mind, and the mind is due to evolution. The conscious human mind cannot be understood just by looking at the way it is now. It is the tip of a vast evolutionary iceberg that has taken millions of years to form. As in all evolution, the later builds on the earlier; it can modify what went before, but it can never replace it. We have become so preoccupied with consciousness that we have forgotten the unconscious bulk below the surface. Minds are merely the software of the intricate biocomputers we call brains. And brains are the central organizing systems, the communications rooms, of high-tech bodily communities that have multiple goals and needs, and which live in environments that afford almost limitless opportunities. And all this is in aid of smart, tenacious, replicating molecules, who have it in their nature to persist and to breed. The abilities to solve crossword puzzles, to bungee-jump, and to have rows with our children are recent curiosities, balanced precariously atop a tower of earlier discoveries and developments.

Already, in this very first paragraph, I have slipped into using the most widely used metaphor for the brain-mind – the computer. And while in the most general sense ‘computing’ is what the brain-mind does, the analogy can be terribly misleading. Computers have no intrinsic goals. The programs that tell the machinery what to do, and what to ‘want’ to do, arise not from an evolutionary source, but from the mind of the programmer. In the case of we human beings, however, the brain and its mind developed over millennia as tools for helping bodies, and the genes that designed them, to survive. Bodies are made of a kind of stuff that needs to keep trading, in a whole variety of different ways, with the world around it, if it is to persist. Computers can be left switched off for years and (all being well) will leap into action again, as if no time had passed at all, when they are next turned on.

Human beings and other animals grow and evolve. Computers get redesigned, sometimes from scratch. People need to eat to live. No computer has yet been discovered taking a bite out of its desk. There has been a film called The Cars that Ate Paris, but not yet one called The Laptops that Ate IBM. You can understand everything important about a computer by looking at it ‘now’. You can understand very little about the human mind without investigating how it came to be. Computers can be built out of a variety of different materials, and they may end up doing very similar kinds of things. The operation of brains and minds is entirely dependent on the stuff of which they are made, and the worlds they and their ancestors grew up in.

Yet the conscious mind’s view of itself downplays its evolutionary history, and its unconscious substratum, shamelessly. Part of the problem with the human brain-mind is that it has come to see itself as a kind of computer – without embodiment, without any history other than its own experience, without ecology. It has even come to identify only with what comes up on the screen of consciousness, and to ignore its own circuit boards and microchips. To straighten the mind out, it is necessary to remind it of its relationship to its brain, its body, its world and its ‘unconscious’. That is where we have to start.