In
previous articles, there has been considerable discussion of the notion of
surrogate immortality. This is a means
by which people deal with their mortality by leaving preserved imprints that
will go on existing long after they are dead.
Examples that have been given of such imprints are having a baby,
planting a tree, making a work of art, writing a book, creating a business,
achieving a record in sports as well as the smaller but not less important
intangible imprints of the memories that have been left among the people that
have come into contact with the deceased.
All these imprints deal with the sensory and/or cognitive aspects of our
fields of experience. A baby, a tree, and
a work of art are all sensory phenomena.
Actually, a baby starts out as a sensory phenomenon, but quickly, as its
mind develops, becomes a cognitive phenomenon as it interacts with the people
around him. A sports record is a
cognitive phenomenon as a statistic, although it relates to a sensory
event. A book is a sensory object filled
with cognitive content, although illustrations and prints provide sensory
content in those books where they exist.
A business is based on a cognitive business plan and cognitive
strategies, but it frequently involves sensory products or services as well as
sensory interactions with people.
Memories of relationships are cognitive thoughts based on sensory
experiences.
There
has also been discussion of how the creation of the modern technological world
has been a larger means of creating an environment in which preserved human
imprints can remain better protected against the perishability that occurs in
nature. From this point of view, the
best way to fully preserve both directly and indirectly organic imprints is to
put them into technologically-created experiential vacuums where they can exist
outside of nature.
People
who have lived in preliterate societies are fully aware of the problems of
perishability that they encounter living in more natural environments. So they have developed other experiential
systems for dealing with problems of perishability. In his book The African Genius, Basil
Davidson talks about how people in Africa develop a greater sense of empowerment
in their perishable living environments by means of magic and frequently magic as
exercised in sorcery and witchcraft.
Sorcery is a force that is external to the person using it, a force that
he has to learn how to use. Witchcraft
is a force that resides within a person, a force that the witch can use
automatically, even unconsciously. This
is why witches don’t always know who they are and have to be pressured to
confess that they are witches. But there
is magic that can be used to defend oneself against the evil powers of sorcery
and witchcraft.
With
beliefs like this, nothing that occurs in human existence is explained by
chance. Any occurrence of misfortune is
explained by applied magic, and attempts are made to find the person who used
magic to create the misfortune.
Translated, this represents the flows of mysterious flowing blendable
continual stimuli to transform experiences and events in human life. They are nonmeasurable mental stimuli, but to
the preliterate tribespeople who believe in them, they give these tribespeople what
appear to be as strong a sense of psychological control and mastery over the
phenomena in their fields of experience as the people in modern technological
society obtain with their machines. It
is the means by which people who live in perishable traditional organic
environments, who are still immersed in the flowing blendable continual sensory
stimuli of these environments, obtain a psychological sense of power and
control over their living environments.
It does not matter that these tribespeople are not able to manoeuver
much, shift much, change much in objective physical terms when destructive
experiences and events occur in their fields of experience. What matters is that they have developed
mental systems that interpose them, the tribespeople, as active agents
generating explanations and solutions for situation, where the intersubjective
causal agency that they ascribe for what is happening is not obviously apparent
in the sensory world.
The
preliterate tribesperson with his magic, experiences himself or other human
beings as being in control over the happenings in his external environment much
like the modern technological person does in his environment. And the preliterate tribesperson experiences
this without having destroyed so much of his natural living environment.
Nevertheless,
there are some differences between the organic imprints left by preliterate
tribespeople and the organic imprints left by people in modern technological
society, and perhaps these differences can help to explain why some groups of
people evolved over time from more traditional preliterate societies to modern
technological societies.
The
imprints of magic occur primarily in the form of mental experiences that do not
lend themselves to verification in the external world. When a sorcerer puts a curse on a person, and
the person dies, does the person die because he has directly experienced the
effects of the curse or because he and the sorcerer participate in a collective
belief system wherein curses from sorcerers are supposed to have strong magical
powers that can cause people to die.
There is a blurriness here, a lot of flowing blendable continual mental
stimuli that make it hard to separate internalized mental experiences from
externalized physical events. As a
result, there is a blurriness to the imprints that appear to be preserved. There is a coherence to the flow of the
magical action, but there is not so much crisp definition. The magical action can be seen as an
intersubjective event that participants agree has occurred, but not as an
objective event that has actually occurred in the external world, where the definitions
of the action can be easily ascertained.
Furthermore,
without verifications of an intersubjective event in making an imprint, and
without strong definition of the imprint, it becomes much more difficult to
preserve the imprint with certainty.
When the imprint is primarily in minds, it becomes much easier to wipe
out or modify the imprint with the countervailing imprint of another person’s
magic that can wipe out or modify the original magic spell. The flowing blendable continual stimuli of
the defensive magic wipes out or modifies the flowing blendable continual
stimuli of the original spell.
There
is a blurriness to these magical imprints which leads some people to find other
fields of experience in which to be able to leave more crisp and, therefore,
more defined organic imprints.
Technology is a way of bringing the focus of imprint making from the
more blurry continual world of intersubjective mental experiences to the more
crisp discrete world of objective events. Technology deals with hard sensory
phenomena that can be touched and therefore verified in terms of their
existence. Furthermore, technological
imprints can be conceptually built upon one another. Whereas magic is conservative and does not
tend to lead to the development of new more effective modalities of magic,
technology is progressive in that one invention leads to the possibility for
another inventor to come up with the idea of either a significant modification
or else a completely new invention altogether.
The flow of technological thinking allows for the possibility for many
more people to leave crisp new imprints through technological development.
Furthermore,
the opportunity to leave crisp discrete imprints through technological
development acts to stimulate a greater defined consciousness. In other words, experiencing crisp discrete
imprints acts to stimulate our capacity to absorb other discrete phenomena,
wakes us up out of the more blurry continual consciousness associated with the
more blurry phenomena connected with nature as well as with magic, sorcery and
witchcraft. What we create, what we
surround ourselves with, both physically and mentally, subtly helps to create
who we become and who we are. And so
those preliterate tribespeople who, at some point in our faraway past, started
the slow trek through various stages of civilization until arriving at our
modern technological society, not only created increasingly crisp discrete
imprints as the technology evolved, but also an increasingly crisp discrete
consciousness of the world.
However,
this is still just one side of the story.
Gradually as technology has, as it were, covered over nature and natural
surfaces, there are fewer and fewer organic surfaces on which to make new
imprints. The technology has enabled us
to effectively preserve imprints from the past, but it is now gradually
impeding our capacity to leave significant new non-technological imprints. And as there are fewer and fewer organic
surfaces left and fewer and fewer organic phenomena and fewer and fewer blurry
flowing blendable continual stimuli left in living environments, our new
imprints may continue to be defined, but they suffer from so much definition
and so little coherence, they begin to fragment. And our consciousness, of course, fragments
as well from the lack of blurry flowing blendable continual stimuli that are
needed to stimulate more coherence in it.
So our journey in technological development has now taken us to the
opposite experiential problem from that experienced by those preliterate
tribespeople who started the long slow trek to technological development. But the one thing we can say is that we are
at a point where further technological development will not lead to
improvements in organic human imprints and improvements in human
consciousness. Quite the contrary!
© 2015 Laurence Mesirow
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