The Setting
I write this report, first thing after showering and dressing, eating with honey-toast and drinking coffee, to the computer with the Word document, to record the thoughts in the semi-dream state, an hour or so before. The occasions of the extraordinary phenomenological recall often come as a result of coming out of a drug-induced state. In this case, it is a drug commonly called, Shiraz; taken the night before sleep. At 3.00 a.m., a dose of Panadol was taken, as a method to resolve the pain in the aftermath of alcohol consumption. I realise that that although there is a correlation between alcohol consumption and creative thinking, it is also true that alcohol is a poison.
That a Phenomenological Examination shows that the Brain-Mind is not operating metaphorically as a computer software.
There are full dream states and the conditions of a full dream state is that the dream can never be recalled afterwards. Semi-dream states are the conditions where there is a dream-type awareness in which the Brain-Mind commands a recall, the possibility of a phenomenological account afterwards.
Thus, this particular semi-dream state was the thought of two items integrated into the Brain-Mind scope as I lay in the bed, between sleep and the desire to arise. The primary thought was the nature of conservativism. That thought was unique to me as a scholar of ideology. The second, meta-reflective thought, still of a semi-dream state, was that the conservative dispositional state of the Brain-Mind demonstrates that the Brain-Mind does not operate as metaphorically to the computer software. The Brain-Mind can said to ‘compute’ but there is also something phenomenological more in what is happening in human thought. The conservative dispositional state in a human being shows the impossibility of preserving the ‘record’ or ‘coding’ of the Brain-Mind in the transition from full or semi dream states into full consciousness. Even as I write this account, I know that the account is not as I had thought in the semi-dream state. I recall as in the reference of Saint Paul’s claim of the opaquely looking glass.
Computer records can be destroyed but that is a fully conscious action (normatively). Normally, computer software records or coding are sustainable. The full and semi dream state, human thoughts, are normatively not sustainable. If I did not record this phenomenological event via a computer software, I will forget its occurrence and no one else would know. In this case, the computer software is an extension of the human consciousness, but is not human consciousness itself. Metaphorically, we can say that human consciousness is ‘the hand of God’, as computers are an extension of human hands.
Conclusion: the Brian-Mind does not operate as a metaphorical computer software. We think of this metaphor, but the fallacy is a reverse conclusion. The computer software is in our Brain-Mind image, of the positivist’s (modernist) scientism fallacy, and not the other way around.
Conservativism
The primary thought of conservatism I had was that I had an outlook within the semi-dream state, but there was a second outlook in a full conscious state which I would come to, when I arise from my bed, and write the account down. It has now come to pass. In the semi-dream state, the thought was of the conservative disposition itself; a desire to conserve. In full consciousness, the thought is the opposite; the impossibility of conserving the thought. Here is the “back-foot” of conservatism, it can never preserve the record as it was before (the past). It must eventually defer to time’s progress. This is not a linear fallacy. The claim works also in a networked schema. A firing of a brain pathway cannot go in more than one direction at a time (at least in the level of human perception). If the firing secondly, a ‘fires’ back and forth, it does so in the change of the neurological states. The poor conservative fool has to learn to embrace change. But the ideological problem for conservativism is a ‘blindness’ to the immediacy of change that the conservative seeks to resist. It is metaphorically, a claim of the Borg. “Borg” can refer to two distinct things: a social media trend involving a large, personalized alcoholic drink, or a fictional collective of cybernetic humanoids from the Star Trek universe.
In the Star Trek version, the Borg claim is “We are the Borg, you will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.” This is what the Brain-Mind of the conservative fears. The good news is that we do not accept Borg ideology. Borg ideology, as with conservativism, is a more complex sets of changes. It can be resisted, but as with the opaquely looking glass, we need to, as conservatives (all), to resist our own conservative reaction to not creatively engage immediate change. This is what Jean-Luc Picard did when he designated as ‘Locutus of Borg’. He took the ‘pharmakon’. The pharmakon, defined as both cure and poison, refers to the technical objects through which we open ourselves to new futures, and thereby create the spirit that makes us human.
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Neville Buch
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