We are collectively poised to discover the reality of the objective psyche. And at the same time we could not be further away from that discovery—two ends of a circle almost touching! So near and yet so far. To get an idea of how close we are collectively to this momentous discovery, we must understand something about the real world in which we all live (i.e.collectively).
This real world is the world that silently involves us on a daily basis through the use of available equipment, our engagement in variety of cultural practices and our collective concerns, prior to any reflections or theorizing about any of it:
We dwell in the equipment, practices, and concerns in the real world without noticing them or trying to spell them out, or indeed, without noticing the world itself … This is the way of being common to our most general system of equipment and practices [i.e. our world] and to any of its subregions.[1]
This is the sense of the world that James Gleick explores when he turns to the informing background of all of it:
We can see now that information is what our world runs on: the blood and the fuel, the vital principle. It pervades the sciences from top to bottom, transforming every branch of knowledge.[2]
Evolutionary psychologist, Richard Dawkins, amplifies this insight:
What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a ‘ spark of life’. It is information, words, instructions . . . If you want to understand life, don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes. Think about information technology. The cells of an organism are nodes in a richly interwoven communications network, transmitting and receiving, coding and decoding. Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment.
Fred Dretske, a philosopher of mind and knowledge, wrote in 1981:
In the beginning there was information. The word came later. The transition was achieved by the development of organisms with the capacity for selectively exploiting this information in order to survive and perpetuate their kind.
Gleick adds that information itself, surviving and perpetuating its kind and selectively exploiting organisms achieved the transition. This informational world has redefined us within it.
It was bad enough to say that a person is merely a gene’s way of making more genes. Now humans are to be considered as vehicles for the propagation of memes, too. No one likes to be called a puppet. Dennett summed up the problem this way: “I don’t know about you, but I am not initially attracted by the idea of my brain as a sort of dung heap in which the larvae of other people’s ideas renew themselves, before sending out copies of themselves in an informational diaspora. . . . Who’s in charge, according to this vision—we or our memes?”
When scientists raise the question of the origin of this informationally determined world we inhabit— i.e. how this world come into existence—they now answer unambiguously: information has formed our world—all of it, everything in it!
I was shocked to read this revealing passage about the nature of information:
Most of the biosphere cannot see the infosphere; it is invisible, a parallel. The universe humming with ghostly inhabitants. But they are not ghosts to us—not anymore. We humans, alone among the earth’s organic creatures, live in both worlds at once. It is as though, having long coexisted with the unseen, we have begun to develop the needed extrasensory perception.
And this:
Information is inevitably physical. Whether a bit is a mark on a stone tablet or a hole in a punched card or a particle with spin up or down, it could not exist without some embodiment.
“An invisible reality”! “Existing only as some embodiment”! “We alone live in both worlds at once”! “We have begun to develop the extrasensory perception to apperceive this reality”!
With just a slight shift in perspective, how could we not be referring to the reality of the objective psyche coming to consciousness? And yet, at the same time, it seems impossible that we could be referring to the objective psyche. Science insists that information, that strange being responsible for all the physical forms of our world today is itself “inevitably physical” i.e. a positive reality, a thing like all other things. This indefatigable materialist prejudice insists on its position, going so far as to declare that music must also be a physical reality,like information, even though in the following argument Gleick seems to steer us towards the real possibility of recognizing a negative reality, which music surely is, as is the objective psyche:
Where, then, is any particular gene—say, the gene for long legs in humans? This is a little like asking where is Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in E minor. Is it in the original handwritten score? The printed sheet music? Any one performance—or perhaps the sum of all performances, historical and potential, real and imagined? The quavers and crotchets inked on paper are not the music. Music is not a series of pressure waves sounding through the air; nor grooves etched in vinyl or pits burned in CDs; nor even the neuronal symphonies stirred up in the brain of the listener. The music is the information. Likewise, the base pairs of DNA are not genes. They encode genes. Genes themselves are made of bits [of information].
Science thus comes so close to sensing negative reality but then veers away in fright, back to its intractable materialistic conception of “positive reality only!”. Even though information shares the same phenomenological description of music or the psyche, it just cannot be allowed to be the same kind of reality, i.e. negative reality. Science simply cannot abide that possibility since science has thrown out all those “superstitions” that once constituted a real knowledge of invisible negative realities, i.e. the metaphysical world.
As we can see above, science comes perilously close to being confronted with the necessity of a conception of negative reality—a reality that can only be, as “embodied” in some thing of the world, giving that thing a form in the very act of embodiment—this being the very definition of the objective psyche. But, once at the threshold of such a truly earth-shaking insight, science retreats into its materialist prejudice and we once again couldn’t be further away from the truth that is trying to break into consciousness: the psyche is real, a negative reality, and is the power “behind or within” all the forms of the real world.
Artists know of this reality. Leonard Cohen was once asked where his poetry came from. He said, “I don’t know but if I did I would go there more often.” In other words, the psyche is “nowhere” yet very real as the source of poetic speech, or any other artistic form. This is an artist’s affirmation of negative reality so vehemently denied by science at precisely the moment when it could be collectively affirmed.
We have arrived at a moment in our collective consciousness when the reality of the psyche could be affirmed by the generality and brought into resonance with new cultural practices and concerns, maybe even turning us away from the looming catastrophe, the dreadful consequence of a collective materialistic prejudice towards being . This momentous discovery could be a watershed moment, re-orienting us to the greater Being we all yearn to connect with, a Being with an “inner”, a consciousness that may still, perhaps, deign to speak to us, even given all our attempts to silence Her.
Instead, we turn away in fear! A near-miss and as they say, a miss is as good as a mile.
[1] Paraphrasing Hubert Dreyfus
[2] Gleick, James. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.
