Hello there! I am a social philosopher, scholar, and author. Welcome to my social justice blog. I hope you enjoy, and please leave me engaging comments, and link me to your own blogs and publications. Cheers! :)
Psychedelics are ancient social and spiritual enhancers. They are socially expedient when combined with rituals which serve a function of creating egalitarian bonding between people who ingest or smoke them. I have argued with empirical and academic ethnographic evidence for this thesis around the social bonding between groups of people for my Honours thesis. Based on scholarly feedback of my anthropology Honours I have a book, further elaborating on this topic with more careful structure and synthesis, you can find at:
With carefully contrived rituals, usually by a shaman ritual ‘architect’ leader, they also bind partaking individuals with neuro-theological experiences. These also serve a function of enhancing biophilia in a spiritual way or realm. These socio-brain-esoteric practices and praxes inform ancient theological ways of being in the world, and constitute a strong and enduring archetype of socially crafted psychotropic use. An umbrella term for the commonalities of a series of social and entheogen practices, pioneered and widely undertaken in the ‘hunter-gatherer period’, may be termed Psychotropic Shamanism. Dr. Michael Winkelman, the U.S. anthropologist and author who has academic specialisation based around neuro-theological research synthesis, has dubbed these psychedelic entheogens and their ancient use in social ritual as psychointegrators: see Winkelman 2001, Psychointegrators: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Therapeutic Effects of Hallucinogens, Complementary health practice review, Vol. 6(3), pp. 219-231. Please see https://michaelwinkelman.com/ for further resources on shamanism and some related scholarly fields. I bought his book Shamanism: A Biopsychosocial Paradigm of Consciousness and Healing. I find it to be a rich information source and synthesis on shamanism – and believe it is a topic we must acquaint ourselves with in order to understand our evolved and evolving psychology as humans.
The question of particularly residual neurotoxicity of the plethora of different kinds of psychedelics is a widely and hotly debated topic by many diverse socially and vocational commentators and experts. At the least, psychedelics and other entheogens temporarily exhaust the brain through the eliciting of a highly stimulated conscious waking state. Some allege that marijuana, for instance, may cause residual neuroinflammation, particularly in individuals so genetically disposed. It seems clear that all drugs which elicit an intense altered state of consciousness cause some kind of damage to the brain, which may or may not heal through periods of sobriety; it is clear that many people will not develop a severe mental handicap from use, whilst a small minority will develop serious mental health conditions from particularly protracted use. Currently, it would seem wise to abstain or desist from their use, whilst patiently awaiting the advent of safer synthetic psychedelics substances, better knowledge of the effects of the range of psychedelics on neural functioning, careful, sophisticated and nuanced genetic screening of people potentially more biologically vulnerable and predisposed to neural and/or neurochemical damage, and biomedical advances in correcting any residual damage done by ingestion or inhalation of these substances. I will delve, now, into the latter of these scientific advances in biomedicine and neuroscience.
Soon, I allege that, and sincerely hope, we will be able to correct any damage done to the brain from use of psychedelics through nanotech neuroprosthetic interventions, dispersing into intersecting neural networks. These nanobots could be built at the molecular level in advances in nanotechnology. This could be facilitated through a non-invasive injection of neuro-adhesive nanobots into the cerebral spinal fluid which subsequently migrate to brain tissue. This adding of miniature devices to neural networks, via cerebral spinal fluid, is in contrast to more mechanical based brain implantations and augmentation through surgical means such as chips and electrodes; this circumvents brain surgery which is more risk and complication laden. Dr. Saniotis and Professor Henneberg have intellectually pioneered a design through sketching a model inspired by endomyccorhizae (an ancient fungal-plant root symbiosis) called endomyccorhizae ligand interface or ELI (after a female nickname) for short.
ELI would operate from a decentralized and de-localized digitally instructed nano-bots, linking in with and connecting neurons through its artificially designed tendrils. This is in contrast to the extant more linearly-commanded chips or electrodes. Currently existing medical neural surgical implantations are theoretically opposed to the dispersal into networks proposed by ELI. For feasibility of this novel model, further detailed and comprehensive neural mind-mapping as to the differing and myriad functionalities of neural networks may be a requisite.
A podcast interview by David Olney and Tim Whiffen of the academic and intellectual powerhouse dynamic duo hailed from the University of Adelaide’s Medical School Dr. Arthur Saniotis and Professor Maciej Henneberg is linked in below. In dialogue, they flesh out the intricacies of their (mind) prototype of ELI. Medical applications and enhancement of brain are objectives of this scientific model and thesis. If you are socially and scientifically attentive, I am sure you will enjoy this fabulous podcast!
As briefly signposted above, another avenue integrally worthy of our time and investment, alongside augmenting nano and biotech healing methods canvased above, is eliciting psychedelic or entheogen peak experiences through new synthetic substances which are, at the molecular and chemical levels, designed to be safer, without the neurotoxicity for all kinds of genetically, socially and environmentally – and the overlapping of these three factors – diverse brains.
In summation, perhaps for your interest, I have written on, and argued for, the potentiality of a very partialand moderate legalisation and regulation of psychedelics for mature adults, but not for those with a history of mental health conditions, as I claim above, and particularly not those who have had (a) psychotic break/s, with a universal legal device of indemnity deployed discharging liability of manufacture and administering, and with the individual user legally adopting all risk of potentially ensuing and precipitated medical complication(s). In quoting that entry:
Potential neuro-toxicity and residual neuro-toxicity of entheogen psychotropics used for recreational altered states of consciousness is a concern. Some persons may be more susceptible to cognitive damage from entheogens than others. Furthermore biological brain immaturity may predispose entheogen consumers to more neural damage than in biologically matured brains. Thus, legalisation for 25 year old’s and older, combined with moderation or abstinence in consumption may be desirable. Consumers would take entheogens at their own risk, with abstinence the safest and most encouraged option, until we know more about the brain, and entheogen effects on the brain. I suggest that governmental legalisation, regulation and manufacture such that recreational drugs such as psychedelics are only legally available for mature adults at 25 years of age or older every five years as a minimum quota, will substantially minimize their risks to residual brain functioning, allowing for their beneficial properties to users in regards to tapping the unconscious mind with spiritually nourishing, entheogenic and shamanist religiosity, and/or enlightening (peak) experience(s) benefits accrued. Use of any entheogenic psychotropic substance would exhaust each five year quota. So, users may choose marijuana in for the first five years, peyote for the second, ayahuasca for the third for example, or just keeping with the one drug for each five year period, from the 25 years of age legal cushioning restriction. Minimalist and careful consumption in this way, circumvents a lot of their risks to brain health. It is well worth the endeavour of designing synthetic entheogens that could be provenly safe for use in the future. Legalisation promotes individual responsibility re entheogen consumption for mature adults.1
Appiganesi, R and Zarate, O 2007, Introducing Freud: A Graphic Guide, Icon Books Ltd, London.
Bagot, K and Chang, A 2018, ‘Marijuana and Psychosis: Policy Implications for Treatment Providers’, Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, vol. 57, no. 8, pp. 613-614.
Malone, D, Hill, M and Rubino, T 2010, ‘Adolescent cannabis use and psychosis: epidemiology and neurodevelopmental modes’, British Journal of Pharmacology, vol. 160, no. 3.
Winkelman, M 2001, Psychointegrators: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Therapeutic Effects of Hallucinogens, Complementary health practice review, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 219-231.
Winkelman, M 2010, Shamanism: A Biopsychosocial Paradigm of Consciousness and Healing, Praeger, Santa Barbara.
My structural activist standpoint is somewhere in between a deep ecologist (in the vein of deep green resistance in relation to food production and relative fossil fuel desistance) with definitive acknowledgement of the limitation in the carrying capacity of the earth informing non-statist populationist politics at the level of the individual citizen’s discretion; and an eco-minded technocratic libertarian industrial socialist – small state socialism with private property. I believe that an enlightened political mass movement is the only way forward to achieve an authentic post-capitalist order and mode of production.
I believe in some level of equitable industrial global inter-connectivity, such as the internet, transportation technologies, and the metals and resources needed to create equitably socially and politically distributed, and environmentally friendly, services and goods. These can be powered by renewable energy technologies such as solar and wind power. Renewables require mining and often displace and kill wildlife (see https://henrywilloughbyssocialjusticeblog.com/2021/01/27/green-energy-technologies-and-mitigating-human-inter-species-violence/).
However, a non-expansionist economic (and in some ways more minimally industrial) socialist global political system would greatly reduce harm to the environment supporting sentient life (animals, humans, and some invertebrates who/that qualify as sentient).
I believe we need to drastically reduce human population, which is currently far and above the earth’s carrying capacity, wherein we use agricultural surplus and agricultural overshoot from unsustainable monocropping using fossil fuel fertilizers to feed the population. (There is also the shameful failing, within this system, to feed geopolitically impoverished people in the Third World, even though we currently produce more than enough food, due to the exclusionary politics of capitalism).
I am not a bourgeois environmental ‘populationist’ like Al Gore, Dick Smith and Bill Gates, who all believe we should reduce human population whilst retaining/rescuing the capitalist mode of production, not distribute wealth more equitably and equably, and not question their own enormous, inflated and excessive and (colonial) inequitable carbon footprints.
Instead, I believe we should reduce human population, alongside redistributing wealth in the global economy. This reduction must emanate from political consciousness-raising, and not statist population reduction methods.
My journey through different dietary practices has led me to adopting what I call “My Shellfish Pledge” to you (the reader), and to those friends and family members who know I’m ‘out of the closet’ with my consumption of mussels and oysters.
In this dietary philosophy I combine the sometimes-competing factors integral to diet such as ethics, nutrition, politics, and even take into account food taste. This is a short snapshot of a book-project I’m currently working on called Reflexive Foodism.
The ethical backbone of my choosing and shopping consumption and subsequent ingestion of shellfish, is that shellfish do not consciously experience pain due to their lack of a central nervous system (‘CNS’) and brain: they have no pain receptors in their flesh and no neural circuitry networks to compute pain response into a conscious subjectivity.
Nutritional reflexivity I find in the complete proteins, iron richness, a source of omega 3 fatty acids (however not as much as in oily fish), vitamins b6, b12 and E (and niacin also known as b3), the minerals copper, phosphorus, potassium, zinc and magnesium found in shellfish.
This makes shellfish a good nutritional substitute for other kinds of animal and other invertebrate meats and organs.
The taste factor may be raised if one is mono-consuming shellfish as a replacement for all other kinds of meat from sentient animals. Is it not limiting the cuisine palate of other tasty meats of sentient animal and invertebrates? Perhaps so, but with every dietary choice and consumption of shellfish as substitute for beef, lamb, pork, duck, chicken (etcetera), you choose to prolong the life of a sentient animal or vertebrate not leading to their premature death and in some cases circumventing and avoiding the painful slaughtering of a sentient pain-conscious animal or invertebrate; especially concerning is the acutely inhumane killing of fish (a fellow sentient vertebrate) which typically suffocate to death in a very painful way after being caught by humans, whether by fishing rod or net(s).
A quick note for vegans (re ethical and political dietary choices/practices): be aware of particularly monocropping big business agriculture which not only bully small farmers in the global food market but is premised on something called ‘biotic cleansing’. Agricultural biotic cleansing is where entire ecosystems and prairies, right down to the microorganisms needed for healthy soils, are wiped out in order to procure an unsustainable agricultural yield, (using industrial fertilizers) replete with cruelty to the web of sentient life it decimates, including the non-sentient ecosystems which form the bedrock upon which sentient life depends for survival. Whilst a vegan will not see dead flesh of an animal on their plate from cruel forms of human agriculture such as in large-scale monocropping, I would encourage them to choose more poly-cropped and local sources of plants, vegetables and fruits.
So, it’s my pledge to you, to eat shellfish as a substitute for other kinds of meats, as much as I can!
Thanks for reading, and I hope it will aid you in your quest for the best all-around diet!
PS please see my other blog post on (human) diet called/entitled ‘Omnivorism, Vegetarianism, Veganism’ for more information important to (human) diet and dietary practices! Cheers!
Firstly, it is incumbent for us to define class, race and then structural classism and structural racism. Class can be defined as shared characteristics of groups of people in relation economic and socio-economic cohorts between individuals. Race is an identification with others who share a lineage with more immediate human ancestors often tied to geographical location of these ancestors with their traditions, struggles and achievements ‘inherited’. Structural classism is the economic or socio-economic geopolitical reproduction and normalization of exploitation of groups of people or individuals as belonging to certain groups by way of shared socio-economic conditions. Structural racism is the reproduction and normalization of economic and socio-economic exploitation of entire groups of people or even entire nations predominantly and principally identifying with a particular race.
To be effectively against structural classism and structural racism one’s political views must be against reproducing the economic and socio-economic global inequalities – particularly acute inequalities and exploitation.
Being pro structural classism is far worse than making a classist comment or comments. Similarly, a racist slur is far less racist than reproducing racist structural economic exploitation through one’s political views. However, what is the most classist and racist is making classist and/or racist slurs and being politically complicit in reproducing structural classism and/or structural racism in one’s views.
Furthermore, poking fun at the rich is far less immoral than deriding economically poor people since these people are already victims of economic stigma, economic discrimination, and exploitation. This constitutes a double indignity such as the pejorative terms bogan, chav, hick, redneck or feral. ☹ However, like racial slurs the intended victims can co-opt and re-appropriate the meanings of these words as a point of pride and transgression, as one form of effective resistance to this double exploitation.
Against Rigid Marxist Economic Determinism and ‘Classlessness’ as a Never-Ending Humane Project
Marx conceived of a dichotomous conception of class as the bourgeoisie and the working class, and sometimes of the petit bourgeoisie in an attempt to forge a science of society in relation to capitalism and resultant communism as a resolution of contradiction in capitalist social relations. Borrowed from and re-synthesising Hegel’s dialectical historicism, Marx held that a communist end of history is the absolute material reality that can eventuate. Class tension and conflicts of interest based on class consciousness, for Marx, was teleologically derived, to actively change the world, as the metanarrative meaning of human existence, to make it more humane, as an immutable science of political dialectical progression, writing truth to power, as an impressive and influential striving for a self-fulfilling prophecy.
However, he omitted public sector employees who are not subjected to surplus value extraction of their labour, and the differentials in remuneration of workers who have acquired more specialised skills in the workforce and labour market. Furthermore, for self-employed people, whilst they turn a profit, it may be humane to conceive that they are a form of wage-labourers, de facto paying themselves a wage on a return for their labour, also carrying the risk of bankruptcy in failing to sufficiently reinvest capital and capture a marketshare in competition with big business, cartels and monopolies with vast resource and labour exploitation.
In socialist organising, we should not idolise Marx. Instead, we should embrace a number of socialist and social science thinkers, and broaden our conception of class and the contradictions of capitalism.
Whilst Marx’s dialectical materialism has a real explanatory power and utility in understanding society, we need to embrace many thinkers and acknowledge the need for new theorists and theories to understand and conceptualise the post-modern society with more nuance, as well as what classes there may be in a socialist society, with the view to continually elicit more substantive equal opportunity for all social agents. This is an ongoing revolution of and in libertarian socialism.
What holds true and is in contradiction with Marx’s economic determinism, which elects the proletariat as the only revolutionary force within capitalist society, is that the achievement of sophisticated socialist means of production is in every person’s broader and holistic self-interest.
The moralisation of classlessness is an ongoing and never-ending social justice project indeed not finished with the end of capitalism and achievement of socialism. This project prioritises and elicits the ongoing equalisation of need, ability and opportunity. Individual mastery is a condition of collective mastery!
Section 2
The Individual and Class Tendencies
Instead of electing the members of the industrial proletariat as the only genuine revolutionary force, we could posit class tendencies, not as an iron law of ‘class consciousness’, with the individual as the indivisible social unit, and as supreme and sacrosanct. Many petit-bourgeois people have tendencies toward socialist revolution, particularly if they are developed with political consciousness. This is particularly so with sole traders, who are not directly extracting surplus value from a worker or workers. Capitalist competition tends to have a counterrevolutionary force in the coercive impetus to compete to for profits and income, without economic egalitarianism; capitalism is a zero-sum game meaning that positive externalities from economic activity are diminished, which results in socio-political alienation.
Section 3
In Defense of Marx’s Class Analysis in Capitalism
The strength of a Marxist analysis of class is positioning a collective proletariat affinity for one another as a group and collective since they share the same relationship to the means of production – i.e. they sell their labour in return for a wage in the job market. This Marxist class affinity as revolutioanry power may usurp, at times, class power and solidarity based on income earned, wherein we should acknowledge that some workers earn much more than some small business owners, for example. Whatever the class analysis humanely fits a certain situation or better represents a social reality at hand, it will take a mass movement to achieve democratic socialism, whether by reform or revolution. I am personally for reform: I am happy to discuss over coffee.
Section 4
Commenting On Marx’s Materialism
Was Marx a monist materialist? I tend to be a more in–form-ed dualist1, with the immaterial will of power primacy eliciting a correlate change in materiality or to put it another way: the material form which encases and encloses the immaterial will of power which — the will — has primacy, and is causative. Turning Marx on his head, and returning Hegel back standing on his feet: the primacy and causative nature of immateriality is congruent with Hegel’s idealist2conception of dialectical movement towards an absolute freedom in a struggle for mutual recognition by agents. The idealist conception of immaterial will may be corroborated by the free will of agents causing changes to material forms, but I do not develop argumentation here thereon; instead, I have another blog entry with some theory and speculation on this matter, linked in here below as a footnote3.
Conclusion
Indeed, in agreement with Marx, workers’ control is the highest form human society can take. From there, endless improvements into social justice and social sophistication can occur and be realised. For example, once the direct democracy at all spatial levels — local, state, federal/national, regional, and international, with rank-and-file workers’ councils — as authentic democratic socialism, then we may move to a more resource based economy, not needing to rely on money, but keeping and developing a legal framework to regulate behaviour. This is to curtail particularly what might be the pledge to absolutist evil by individuals and/or groups, in a somewhat of a Manichean perspective, even if this — humane legal institutions — is just necessarily precautionary.
To paraphrase, Nietzsche says that if we had completely get rid of the devil inside ourselves, life wouldn’t be worth living!
We must channel innate evil instincts built into the human psyche, and its enjoyment of various types of power, into humane ends, dictated by the (do no) harm principle (Mill).
On this topic, my words may seem harsh and a little less diplomatic than usual, but they are fair and just, and congruent with commensurate social justice and social accountability, on this more-than-pressing, urgent topic. Too much is at stake if this persecution trajectory is allowed to continue. Appalling behaviours towards a persecuted whistleblower need to be impeached and reprimanded in the strongest terms to guard against the ongoing injustice and persecution faced by Julian Assange. This is no time for weak and hollow platitudes, but rather strong words which canvas the dire reality of the predicament at hand, are essential. There is too much at stake to let this injustice persist and worsen.
Firstly, what should we label Assange as? How can we be accurate with labels?:
Journalist? Probably a fair call, but conceding it’s quite radical in technique. Spy? Definitely a bogus allegation. Activist whistleblower? Absolutely.
Assange, a renegade journalist, leaked war crime documents, footage, files and information in the public interest, exposing neo-imperial and neo-colonial atrocities conducted by the Western invading and occupying forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.
He now faces extradition to the U.S. where he confronts a ridiculous jail sentence of 175 years for espionage.
This is ludicrous and exposes just how illogical – Assange is not a spy – and unjust – the U.S. and global ‘criminal (in)justice system’ is – war criminals are not reprimanded, nor held accountable in any way. Yet, Assange’s non-violent acts of computer hacking with the intent of exposing atrocities to the (global) public, attract the threat of a ridiculously inflated prison sentence. This is so even after Assange having been subject to political persecution since leaking the horrifying and despicable information and acts showing that the U.S. led empire has immense blood on its hands.
He deserves full exoneration and repatriation to Australia – his country of citizenship.
Australian politicians need to do more than give platitudes to facilitate his repatriation and protection in Australia. The appalling, disgusting and despicable lack of support for Assange, or indeed indictment of Assange by U.S., U.K. and Australia’s political leader(s) (such as Gillard’s indictment, in Assange’s very own native country) is nothing less than a cowardlybetrayal of justice, free speech, and the public interest. This is traitorous treachery by privileged political and judicial elites, who lack the backbone and rigorous moral fortitude that humanity so desperately requires. The just will not count them amongst their ranks: these ignoramus elites are rotten (to the very core)!!
If Assange is not a journalist, then he is definitely not a spy! His actions are more aligned with journalism than espionage! But the bully-boy U.S. led empire does not care for rigorous logic, only in restoring its juvenile status as a hypocritical arbiter in geopolitical relations, and (in)definitely attempting to set precedents that it is above the law for its criminal actions.
The alpha male, the alpha female, and the alpha non-binary, in the human species, are the least aggressive members of their respective gender. They do this by treating themselves well and treating all others equally as well – true altruism. They exhibit the most amount of care for the biological collective through philosophical praxis: their philosophy may facilitate and is geared towards the greatest continual genuine net increase in the positive aspects of sentience in the world (wellbeing, happiness, positive meaning, ecstasy, enchantment etc.), and a continual decrease in the net negative aspects of sentience in the world (suffering, loss, pain etc.). This is so in what they stand for, nowadays in technologically reified philosophical information and/or communication, but also in intersubjective oral/speaking communication (e.g. Indigenous people’s spoken philosophical information relay and communication).
To preface this important topic, and as provision of an informed and illuminating ongoing and scholarly accumulating dialogue, Dr. Saniotis provides us with an integral understanding, framework and scaffolding, for a dualism of the body [conceptually inclusive of the brain] with theoretical and practical utility, and ample explanatory power for this ambitious yet essential topic and inquiry:
Inspired by Cox’s model and understanding of the body, Saniotis asserts his positioning of a dualism localising the body “as an aspect which connects the material and immaterial elements of human beings.”1
It is upon this foregrounding that propels my dualism as the understanding and appreciation of the intimately interconnected dual realities of materiality and subjective experience, naturally with the locus site as the individual (‘body’ or ‘bodily form‘). There is the materiality of the individual form, and the immateriality of subjectivity embedded in the material form. To paraphrase, the locus site of immaterial subjective experience is the individual’s material form.
It follows then, surpassing reductionist crude materialism, that we can formulate, or discover in an unfolding, enchanted religious conceptions regarding the sacrosanctness of this dualism such as attribution of the subjective component as the soul itself.
Fore-mostly, before delving into some natures of this above sacrosanctness in dualism(s), the concept of crude materialism may need a timely elaboration herein. Imperatively, Crossley posits that the ‘mental’ is not fully reducible to the ‘physical’2. Studying the ‘physical’ may give us insights into the ‘mental’ – or – subjectivity of an agent, but does not fully disclose its holistic properties. Thus, on some level, they are two separate distinctive realms and faculties, yet connected. Crude materialism thus erroneously asserts, in a reductionist manner, the full disclosure of the mental by the physical. For example, meaning and experience cannot be fully explained by the material-physical. E.g. a dopamine release in the brain to be explained fully, must match-up with an internalised state, of say, pleasure or happiness, relying on subjective consciousness. Thus, with the above evidence, we legitimately categorically in taxonomy and as descriptive of real-world phenomena, separate the faculties of immaterial, consciousness, mental from material, physical, body and brain. Having provided foundational evidence on this above, I turn again to Crossley, in regards to the inherent social implicating factor to our experiences as human agents, who also makes a twofold clever, nuanced disclosure of his positioning and argumentation he subsequently substantiates:
“[P]hysical and mental descriptions belong to two distinct discursive registers which cannot be mapped neatly on to one another. Underlying this, however, is a deeper argument that the mental and social life human agents is a whole which is greater than the sum of its atomised physical parts”3
The social aspect to our experience is paramount to internalised states and is inseverable in the holistic human nature of subjectivity; this is most often indelibly entangled with language and linguistic based cognition. Indeed, we learn language socially and intersubjectively. For example, we need an internalised, subjective conception of a physical phenomenon, based on intersubjective categorical, linguistic signifiers extraneous and exogenous, to be ‘matching-up’ to its physical action, that are learned through taxonomic reinforcements. Thus, we categorically in taxonomy separate the faculties of immaterial, consciousness, mental from material, physical, body and brain. In summing up this topic of the irreducibility of the ‘mental’ to the ‘physical’ quoting Durkheim is apt in the following paraphrasing:
“[R]epresentational life is not inherent in the intrinsic nature of nervous matter, since in part it exists by its own force and has its own particular manner of being”.4
Now, back to religious sacrosanctness of dualism(s), Christian conceptions of the soul seem to attach a metaphysical spirit-realm to human beings as a separate and perhaps unchanging entity – or representing the “true” person and as independent of the body, yet “requiring the substance of the body to make an individual”.5
Whilst I commend the conception that a soul, might for many people, be a linguistic conceptual reference to a perceived innermost part of someone’s being. However, a soul that could exist independent of the body may be, particularly to atheists, stretching our imagination6. In acknowledging the potential existence of an ethereal soul which can simultaneously attach to individual bio-materiality at conception, detaching the body at death and/or re-attaching to the body after death, and be a true representation of a person’s individual personality, to me, the body seems to be the site and condition of a maximum freedom, so long as the body enjoys political, social and health freedom.
Before scholarly proceeding I think it is apt to theorise around the imperative conception of the collective unconscious from which I will integrate after extensively defining its meaning and scope in human action. After, I will integrate its meaning and action into my theory of transcendental surplus power accruals7, inspired, partially, by the concept of production of surplus in economics, and surplus value extraction in Marxian analysis of the inner workings of, and latent to, the capitalist mode of production.
A surplus in economics can be used to denote an excess of any good or product beyond that which may be demanded in a local economy, or when the iterative production of any good or product is above a person, group or economy’s basic needs.
For Marx, “[s]urplus value is defined…as the difference between the value that living labor creates in production and value paid by the capitalist to the worker in the form of wages”8.
Let us work with four interrelated definitions of the collective conscious. let us examine these definitions more from lay perspectives to technical jargon-laden perspectives. Firstly, from the Oxford Dictionary Languages yielded from a simple Google search:
“([I]n Jungian psychology) the part of the unconscious mind which is derived from ancestral memory and experience and is common to all humankind, as distinct from the individual’s unconscious”9
Furthermore, on the collective unconscious, from the Introducing Jung book which is a digestible exposition of Jung’s work utilizing narratives embellished by drawings, it is (also) constituted by Jung’s psychological notions of archetypes10 and instincts11:
Archetypes are “innate, unconscious modes of understanding which regulate our perception itself”…and that these memories that call upon “a collective fund of archaic images and symbols”:12 Archetypes are:
“inherited, innate and a priori modes of perception, linked to the instincts, which regulate perception itself. The archetypes are primordial ideas, common to all mankind [womankind, non-binarykind], and they express only through archetypal images. They are charged with emotion and function autonomously from the unconscious”13
Further to this on Jungian archetypes:
“Jung believed that…archetypes are influenced by evolutionary pressures [my emphasis added] and manifest in the behaviors and experiences of individuals’ He first introduced the concept of primordial images, which he later referred to as archetypes, to explain this idea”14
Instincts are:
“impulses which carry out actions from necessity, and they have a biological quality, similar to the homing instinct in birds. Instincts determine our actions.”15
On both archetypes and instincts:
“instincts determine our actions, so the archetypes determine our mode of apprehension. Both instincts and archetypes are collective because they are concerned with universal, inherited contents beyond the personal and the individual and they correlate with each other”16
From the International Association of Analytical Psychology:
“The collective unconscious is a part of the psyche17 which can be negatively distinguished from the personal unconscious by the fact that it does not, like the latter, owe its existence to personal experience and consequently is not a personal acquisition”18
From my social sciences dictionary:
“The psychologist Carl Gustav JUNG distinguished between the personal unconscious, formed through the repression of the impulses, experiences, and wishes of daily life, and the collective unconscious of deep-seated, inherited personality structures—in Jung’s view a kind of “racial memory”—that reproduced age-old life patterns and forms of behavior. For Jung, the collective unconscious is composed of archetypes—basic situational, behavioral, and imaginative elements that provide the continuity of human existence. These are represented in condensed form, he argued, in mythology and religion”19
Having briefly foregrounded The rise of the attaching, detachable, and re-attachable soul, as differing from a soul solely dependent on a material figuration, i.e. the body, might be traceable to the religious formulations, particularly, in Islam and Christianity; evolutionary pressures within the collective unconscious (Jung) through the actions and praxis of faith and prayer, may have been producing a surplus-power directed to, and manifesting in, a rise of the attaching, detachable and re-attachable souls as ethereal beings with an intra-coded individual personality blueprint of consciousness, with one capacity thereof to exist and live without the body. To clarify, this is a human religious invention and innovation through intelligently deploying faith, belief, prayer, holy reification, law and morality divination, and compassion, all with their ensuing surplus-power properties to manifest – through latent evolutionary pressures in the collective unconscious and personal subconsciousness – this kind of ethereal – attaching, detachable, and re-attachable – soul-consciousness.
To my mind, the Descartes formulation that the duality of the body and soul (where the soul is subjective experience itself) also does work and has intellectual torque: where “the soul [is] equivalent to the mind”.20 Supplementing Descartes is the mirroring and congruent dualist understanding of the Abrahamic religions viewing humans as “bimorphic, composed of matter and spirit”21.
Please see the self-taught polymath prophet-like sensation Paul Chek’s metaphorical, ontological and inductive formulations in understanding of the soul, which are congruent with and extensional to my philosophising in relation to the soul:2223
In this universe at least, I am convinced of a determinist24 materialist primacy: i.e. that a change in the material form will elicit a congruent change in the individual’s subjectivity, in the pre-determined, yet perpetually unfolding, chain of cause and effect. The embodied immaterial will may direct a change in materiality, but it is only when the materiality has been changed, that a different consciousness is effected. This is probably a deeply personal and subjective ideology, but I hope it gives the reader a valid perspectival insight. It is not just a truth, but also a mind technology for excavating truth and meaning. Further to this, to consciously and intently change the matter, in order to positively bring about a congruous type of subjectivity, lends us more predictive power over first and second nature. First nature can be understood as representing “that historical epoch that preceded the development of humanity’s transformative powers”25. Contrastingly, second nature can be denoted as “the characteristically human sociocultural world”26.
On this, taking into consideration flux of individuals’ subjectivities as an inherent law of the natural world, how would an orthodox Christian explain the ongoing changes in subjectivity against an alleged static soul as the spiritual ‘DNA’ or ‘fingerprint’ (identifier) of a person? How would they reconcile their views on free-will, in which a person must freely choose to serve God as the master of existence, in the face of the scientific evidence of deterministic cause and effect? Would sinners (all people) who have not achieved redemption be so blamed when they are not freely choosing their destinies?
In this vein, not dissimilar, and with notional parallelism, in quoting Saniotis, “[a]n interesting aspect of Judaism is that the soul’s existence is not dependent on the body, since it existed in eternity with God”27 as a putative foundational tenet thereof. Prima facie, this may seem to fall into the above intellectual trap of modernity’s penchant for non-corporeal, disembodied philosophising. I would like to make a pertinent distinction: the ethereal, disembodied soul is a human creation, not God’s, insofar as humans may have putatively forged God – not so much a creator as such, but as a moral arbiter. Thus, a free will of any given individual, in a parallel universe, may partly feed into our deterministic universe, connected through the collective unconscious, wherein the freely chosen personality can coalesce into a consciousness with the chosen-essence of that individual as ethereal-being. On some of these themes, see:
Herein, I have challenged the orthodox Christian, Judaic and Islamic positions on attaching, detaching and re-attaching of an ethereal soul in primacy as God’s creation, when it is likely at the least that human religious action has culminated in both God and ethereal souls. Broadly speaking, I give primacy to humanity as authoring the spirit realm, not a preceding omnipotent deity. I have also sought to (post)modernise the Cartesian model proffered by Descartes, as outlined above. However, for most individuals, I would contest Descartes’ notion that the material could exist without a corresponding mind/subjectivity28; perhaps it could be the case that some small number of material individuals, could be or have been, subjected to a banishment of the soul and thus be a mere automaton. Given the religious praxis of many peoples, it could well be true that ethereal beings exist and have a consciousness without a material body: an ethereal consciousness. Whilst materialism and immaterialism are fundamentally different from each other, it is only the mind that could exist independent of the body, and not vice versa, unless we posit the existence of soulless material individuals. Furthermore, as a general rule, matter without some kind of corresponding awareness, may not or very minimally exist, in our universe. I would like to invoke and adapt Berry’s synthesis:
“[T]he universe is a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects”29
Atoms, if we consider them material individuals consisting of electrons, a nucleus and enclosing space within the electron orbit, and according to Berry’s law of subjectivity quoted above, may have some kind of very ‘primitive’ awareness.
Mind-experimentally, casting aside the notions of the attaching, detaching and re-attaching soul(s), I do embrace a kind of soft monism, which acknowledges the inseparability of materiality and subjective consciousness.
I am especially interested in taking agency, through ongoing engaged study, over material changes, as it relates to morality and social justice. Through better insights into materiality and in making conscious choices in making changes to material forms, we take an agency over subjective experience, carefully altruistically manipulating the material form, to achieve higher consciousness, and continually maximising the temporal net positive aspects of sentience through the enactment of new, continually better and more sophisticated inalienable individual and collective rights (neo-utilitarianism). Or to use the Hegelian term, the conception of the unfurling of (greater) freedom, but not necessarily ever achieving an absolute freedom.
Furthermore, the Descartes’ dualist model postulates the mutually interactive nature of the body and mind, wherein “each distinct substance [acts] on the other”.30
In this universe, at least, I would contest the idea that subjectivity as the soul has some agency in affecting the material form in which it is embedded. In the face of deterministic cause and effect, wherein transformations of or changes in materiality are solely responsible for changes to subjectivity in a congruence, there is the primacy of materialism or “materialist-centric” in evolution of individuals and their relations to space and energy; individuals can themselves enclose space as co-constituents along with matter. This is a case in point, at least, and leaves much for further scholarly investigation, enquiry, and elaboration.
Intellectual challenging contender candidates and rivalries of the creed of determinism can consist of quantum indeterminacy; incompleteness theorem; the infinite indivisibility of matter; and ontological incompleteness31. Firstly, quantum indeterminacy32 should not be conflated with a quantum indeterminism33 . Cause and effect determinism of the universe we inhabit as a thesis, is not challenged by indeterminacy: indeterminacy posits and encloses merely that knowledge is relative to an individual, the individual agent as experimentor affects the experiment, and we can only ever have a partialist understanding of the world we live in. Furthermore, the putative infinite nature of matter in its indivisibility, may coincide and coexist quite happily within and through a strict lawfulness in cause and effect, even if we cannot comprehend the chains of cause and effect in its entirety. The ontological incompleteness idea need not be contrarian to determinism but rather is a law within determinism, bolstering and buttressing determinism, and working in a side-ways fashion at times, to acknowledge the evolutionary phenomenon of emergence – cause and effect chains have selected for bio-evolutionary emergence, seeking more complex and more self-aware forms, to subjectively relieve incompleteness. This seems a teleology of nature, with its occurrence a result of determinism cause and effect.
To Descartes’ mind, the intermediary between the mind and body, in humans, was a prime function of the pineal gland. The pineal gland was probably chosen by Descartes (as a physician), in this way, due to his knowledge of its primal location residing just above the brain-stem as a part of the brain.34 If this holds true, or is a partial truth, this function is existing contemporaneously with the other evolved functional mechanism, as secreting melatonin linking to the circadian rhythm process(es), assisting in homeostasis.
To make an intelligent (reflexive) change in the material world is to elicit subsequent (yet synchronous) positive subjective experience. Changing the material world for the better is predicated on changing material configurations and interrelationships in the economy as well as in our human relationships to animals: a change in materiality is a concurrent change in consciousness. Thus, materialist science and philosophy is the study and theorising of objective material phenomena and ultimately to implement desired change in materiality, always for eliciting more humane and enjoyable subjective consciousness of individuals who/which are sentient.
We could even go a step further, whilst not compulsory, but to allege that subjectivity is an epiphenomenon35 of material forms. We can also envisage multiple or all material forms as they are organised and patterned together in configurations or interrelationships. These interactions are governed by the law of cause and effect, in a perpetual flux.
These discourses on the primacy of materiality reality may enhance our agency to deploy reflexivity in making positive changes to our world, whether they be social, political, economic or scientific.
Related to understanding co-causing material changes, Marx made a social science, a pillar of which was to conceive of society as materialist with the driving force of change being that of class conflict.
Without denying the utility of understanding material realities and how they should change, at times, as is humane, spiritual and enchanting, we can say there are immaterial aspects to human beings, that resist quantifiability.
Switching between materialist and immaterialist theory requires we pay attention to the nuance of theory and discourse to construct different kinds of knowledges, deploying the most humane theory in a given context.
In this world, sentient individuals have a partialist (not absolutist) consciousness, which means their subjectivity / souls are ontologically incomplete (Žižek), and consequently they seek more complex and higher forms as a way to mitigate or continually partially alleviate soul-incompleteness alienation. This may seem, prima facie, at least on some level, incongruent and/or clashing with the implicit Christian notion of the soul as complete, probably especially so if they receive redemption for their sins.
What do orthodox Christians and Descartes have in common?
One area in which I disagree with both, is positioning the soul as something which is human-centric and an exclusive privilege of human beings. The fact that we evolved from primates means, to my way of thinking, that the soul pre-dated our taxonomic categorisation of homosapien as a species. Furthermore, Descartes seemed to have missed the reality that “[n]early all vertebrate species posses a pineal gland”36, which is at odds with his ‘finding’ of souls only belonging to humans. I believe that anything with a subjective consciousness has a soul: or better formulated, subjective consciousness across a whole plethora of species, with or without pineal glands, have souls because they have subjective experience! Moreover, in reiteration, subjectivity is the soul. The intermediary between materiality and the soul, is not the pineal gland (which may enhance or expedite certain kinds of consciousness), but is rather a condition of materiality itself. Perhaps non-human creatures may be governed by reincarnation without yet accruing attachable, detachable, and/or re-attachable souls.
To summarise, I would like to introduce my elucidating concept of In-Form-ism. Again, this is, at the least, a valid perspective that has, begets and generates a truth. This ideological philosophy attempts at nothing less than uniting the individual (material) form with and encasing the immaterial Will of Power37 / subjectivity / soul. Further to this philosophical machination is in allowing us to see how materiality of the individual form informs us of the subjectivity of any individual under examination. I use this word informing in two ways that I allege are not necessarily mutually exclusive:
In studying an individual’s material form, it allows us, not as a totality, to partially excavate and bring to consciousness aspects to that individual’s subjective experience; and
The ideological positioning of that subjectivity as residing in the form.
To sum up, for a religious and spiritual formulation, we have the The Holy Function of the Divine In-form-ed Subject.
Thanks for reading!
Post Script Addendum:
A critical engagement with Nietzsche’s expansive meta-theoretical explanatory edifice of human and animal behaviour, and perhaps for all of existence—Will to Power, will be the subject of another enquiring blog post. But briefly hereafter are some interesting definitions and/or formulations thereon. The Will to Power:
1. as a “psychological principle of…behaviour that every being seeks to extend its sphere of action and influence: to consolidate itself”38;
2. “[a]s a limited thesis about the motivation of certain actions”39;
3. “[a]s a grand metaphysical thesis about the workings of the universe”40
Bibliography
Berry, T and Swimme, B 1992, The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era–a Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos, HarperSanFrancisco, https://thomasberry.org/quotes/
Robinson, D and Garratt, C 2010, Introducing Descartes. A Graphic Guide, Icon Books Ltd, London.
Rosewarne, S 1997, ‘Marxism, the second contradiction, and socialist ecology’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 99-120.
Saniotis, A 2012, ‘Attaining Transcendence: Transhumanism, the Body, and the Abrahamic Religions’, The Body and Religion: Modern Science and the Construction of Religious Meaning, Special edition volume. Ed.s David Cave and Rebecca Sachs Norris, Brill, pp. 155-167.
Solomon, R 2000, ‘Nietzsche—Perspectivism and the Will to Power’, in Great Minds of the Western Intellectual TraditionCourse Guidebook, 3rd edn, The Great Courses, The Teaching Company, pp. 256-259.
Strydom, P 2021, ‘First and Second Nature’, Cross-Fertilizing Roots and Routes, Springer Nature Link, London, pp. 39-59.
Thibaut, F March 2018, ‘The mind-body Cartesian dualism and psychiatry’, Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, Vol. 20, No. 1.
Saniotis, A 2012, ‘Attaining Transcendence: Transhumanism, the Body, and the Abrahamic Religions’, The Body and Religion: Modern Science and the Construction of Religious Meaning, Special edition volume. Ed.s David Cave and Rebecca Sachs Norris, Brill, p. 155. ↩︎
See Crossley, N 2001, ‘All in the brain? A popular false start’ [chapter 3], The Social Body: Habit, Identity and Desire, Sage, London, p. 22. ↩︎
This is related to Žižek’s notion of ‘the potential excess existing within reality’, see Kul-Want, C and Piero, 2011, Introducing Žižek: A Graphic Guide, Icon Books Ltd, London, p. 117. ↩︎
By the term psyche, Jung means “the whole of our being, conscious and unconscious”, Hyde, M and McGuinness M 2008, ‘Little Dictionary’, Introducing Jung: A Graphic Guide, Icon Books Ltd, London, p. 76 ↩︎
Saniotis, A 2012, ‘Attaining Transcendence: Transhumanism, the Body, and the Abrahamic Religions’, The Body and Religion: Modern Science and the Construction of Religious Meaning, Special edition volume. Ed.s David Cave and Rebecca Sachs Norris, Brill, p. 158. ↩︎
Determinism as conceptualised as the lawful, uninterrupted, chain of cause and effect. ↩︎
Rosewarne, S 1997, ‘Marxism, the second contradiction, and socialist ecology’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Vol. 8, No. 2, p. 115. ↩︎
Strydom, P 2021, ‘First and Second Nature’, Cross-Fertilizing Roots and Routes, Springer Nature Link, London, p. 39. ↩︎
Saniotis, A 2012, ‘Attaining Transcendence: Transhumanism, the Body, and the Abrahamic Religions’, The Body and Religion: Modern Science and the Construction of Religious Meaning, Special edition volume. Ed.s David Cave and Rebecca Sachs Norris, Brill, p. 159. ↩︎
See Thibaut, F March 2018, ‘The mind-body Cartesian dualism and psychiatry’, Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, Vol. 20, No. 1, p. 3. ↩︎
Žižek threads together his concept of the incompleteness in both being and the material world from quantum physics, namely from Heisenberg and Bohr who apparently “insist that…incompleteness of our knowledge of quantum reality points to a strange incompleteness of quantum reality”, see Kul-Want, C and Piero, 2011, Introducing Žižek: A Graphic Guide, Icon Books Ltd, London, p. 169. Note that Žižek finds a scope for freedom in the unfinished and unfinish-able aspects to reality, see p. 172. ↩︎
In tutoring, Dr. Saniotis made an adaptation of Nietzsche’s Will to Power acknowledging that with the Will of Power is not a power-quest as something to be attained in the future, but is inherently already embodied within the subject. Integral to both contexts, I argue, that maximisation of power is an inherent property thereto. Also, I have added an extra layer to intra-theorising ‘Will of Power’, as reflective of cause and effect determinism, as conforming to our deterministic universe, not something as chosen or “freely willed”. I acknowledge that free choices in indeterminate universes may be influencing our deterministic universe, perhaps through chosen personality essences in a preceding universe or universes, and/or the inter-universal collective unconscious. ↩︎
Gane, L and Piero, 2008, Introducing Nietzsche: A Graphic Guide, Icon Books Ltd, London, p. 85. ↩︎
Solomon, R 2000, ‘Nietzsche—Perspectivism and the Will to Power’, in Great Minds of the Western Intellectual TraditionCourse Guidebook, 3rd edn, The Great Courses, The Teaching Company, pp. 258. ↩︎
I argue that the male consciousness in humans is quasi-psychotic in the social exchange processes as compared with and due to interaction with the female consciousness.
The female brain processes symbolic social meaning faster and more immediately than in males. This may be due to the larger and more active anterior cingulate gyrus in the female brain as compared with the male brain (see Saniotis and Henneberg 2016, p. 130).
This may give them (females and women) greater empathic virtue(s).
Contrastingly, the male only processes symbolic social meaning at the level of, and registered in, the unconscious/subconscious. It – social symbolic meaning(s) – only rises to conscious awareness through the ensuant reflection of the symbolic meaning of the referential social interaction subsequent to (after) the temporal referential social exchange(s), ifat all.
Philosophy, and its sub-branches as the mother of the sciences, is a great tool in dissection and deconstructing social symbolic meaning to assist males to keep pace with the streamlined female brain.
It appears that ‘the slow (male) brained’ philosophy that the female human is the weaker sex, is a poor observer of the emotional intelligence, and often cunning in empathic and social cognition of ‘the opposite sex’!
Bibliography
Henneberg, M and Saniotis, A 2016, The Dynamic Human, Bentham Science Publishers, Sharjah.
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