The Sundance Cable Channel ran an interesting documentary called The Gift. It dealt with the AIDS fostered phenomena of men who tested negative for the disease wishing to become HIV positive so that, according to some of the testimony in the documentary, they no longer have to worry about catching the disease. People that make an effort to become HIV positive are now referred to in the gay community as bugchasers and those who are willing to infect HIV negative men, men who are HIV positive and willing to openly have sex with HIV negative men, are called gift givers. Gift givers can advertise their status by having a tattoo of the biohazard symbol displayed in appropriate areas (as can HIV positive men who simply want to warn others of their status).
Having attended an all-male preparatory school in the fifties, I was familiar with homosexuality. Being an English major in college brought me into contact with a wider group. Nothing, however, prepared me for what I encountered in Mexico when I was nineteen. I went to Mexico City, where the girls were beautiful, and Acapulco, where the girls, for the most part tourists, were both beautiful and rich. During the van trip down to Acapulco (no air to Acapulco then) I was with a voluble and humorous guy in his mid-twenties and newlyweds in the early twenties.
Arriving in Acapulco, which had a single high-rise hotel at the time, I took a room at a flavorful hotel just above the afternoon beach, one of only two beaches at the time. The next day it was beer and beach time and because there were so few tourists at the time, I quickly ran into the married couple. As the afternoon passed, they seemed surprised that I was chasing every girl on the beach. I finally had to ask why. They replied that they thought I was the boyfriend of the voluble guy on the van trip down.
At that moment, that same guy came up and asked me to go to a party that evening. He said there would be plenty of good-looking guys there. I politely declined, telling him I preferred girls. He shrugged and said too bad, and that was that. There followed a small education by the couple into the nature and extent of what was then referred to as the homosexual community. While it might well have been underground in the United States, if for no other reason than the multitude of laws (that seemed to someone like me who was heading for law school to be basically unenforceable), it was definitely a fixture on the international scene, and even though underground in the United States, a force in our culture as well.
While my basic interest since my earliest memory had been the nature of what made objects fall, I had also, in my teens, developed an interest in how it was that we could think in the first place. I had read Freud, and while I could accept his various creations as rough explanations for emotional factors, he never bothered to address the real question of what the mind is and how it operates, the questions we probed in last week's column, why did the mind evolve and how did it evolve to carry out the functions for which it evolved.
I didn't know what the connection between the emotions and the evolved mind was at the time, or even if there was a connection, but it seemed to me that a minority who were emotionally driven by the evolved mind in a way that was basically different from the emotions that drove the rest of society would be faced with a constant dilemma, not of their choosing, but one that because it dealt with one of the two basic functions, sex, would become a dominant concern in their thinking.
To put the issue in context, the fifties hosted the coming to maturity of the advertising industry. The advertising industry lured people to products by making the products a part of the person's emotions. With sex being a basic emotion, sex and advertising were merging to sell the products of the emerging consumer society. How would someone whose mental pictures of sex, whose recall operation simply didn't involve heterosexuality, respond as the media expanded and became universal and was based on mental pictures, recall, confined to heterosexuality?
The question homosexuality raised for me was basically one that pointed the way to the operation of the mind. We compare experience to reality and when they match, we feel comfortable. However, when a person's experience is limited to same gender sex and reality is made up of married people, of single couples getting together and breaking up, of sexual innuendo between and among different genders, when reality is saturated with heterosexuality, then a homosexual's recall, based on his or her experience, is going to constantly clash with reality.
Under the emerging picture of the mind that I was producing out of attempting to answer the question, why did the mind evolve and how does it operate to carry out its evolved purpose, I began to see that it would probably become pretty unbearable for someone with same sex drives to live in the meretricious society produced by expanding prosperity. Sexuality aside, it began to dawn on me the emotional content of the mind might well produce such a drawback to rational thought, that we all might well have difficulty living with actual reality.
In short, the gay dilemma, that a basic element of recall opposes consensus reality might well be a microcosm for the human dilemma, that we are incapable of a rational analysis of physical reality and therefore we will never be able to conform our technology to actual physical reality and as a result, we will live and die on the surface of this planet, never being capable of extending our reach to the universe and the survival that reach will provide.
In the last column, Finding the Mind, we saw that the mind operated by comparing experience with reality. Because we have to act positively in reality, we have to form a positive picture of ourselves acting. Once we have such a picture, a picture that opposes actual reality, we can quickly make our recall a reality, we picture ourselves crossing the street, we look both ways, find the road clear, and we quickly conform our muscles to the picture of ourselves crossing the street and we cross the street.
Thus, we are always forming pictures from recall that have us acting in ideal reality and we constantly have to check reality to ensure that it conforms to our recall. We wouldn't cross the street with our eyes closed because then we wouldn't be notified of unexpected oncoming cars. We are notified of the existence of changed reality because reality doesn't agree with the recall we are producing. Because we only have one detector, one structure in which to compare recall with reality, one mind, we can only form a single picture at anyone time.
Presented with two pictures, one from reality that doesn't agree with the one we are forming from recall, our mind stops, and the electricity operating it invades the subsystems. The subsystems don't know what's going on and the mixed messages shock our system into focusing on reality. Depending on the nature of the danger, we might break out in a sweat, our stomach might tighten, our muscles tense, or our mouth go dry, among other things.
In short, we don't want to experience this feeling in our body, so we take care to make sure we are safe in reality.
The problem with the way our mind operates, however, is that it is an objective place. It doesn't know what is disagreeing with what. It evolved to keep us safe as we moved through the environment. However, it's almost like evolution hadn't counted on our ability to store pictures of ourselves along with the pictures of reality we form. The rub to the system is that every single picture we form of reality from the time we are born until the time that we die contains a common element and that common element is a picture of ourselves in reality.
We are the center of all of our experiences.
As we form pictures of reality, therefore, we form a continuous picture of ourselves, and because that picture will remain the same when we change the realities we are forming, that picture of self has an existence independent of the stored reality. While all animate matter will form a picture of itself in the pictures of reality it forms, it seems that we are the only animate matter that has evolved to the point that we can keep a continuous enough thread of reality in our minds that the picture of ourselves emerges as independent from the physical reality we occupy.
Because this picture of ourselves has to be positive in order to act positively in physical reality, we are faced with a conundrum. Our minds can not distinguish what doesn't agree with what, but at all times our minds contain a positive picture of ourselves.
What is going to happen when someone disagrees with that positive picture?
We know in the animal kingdom that members of species sort themselves out according to systems of dominance with clashes over dominance occurring periodically. All animate matter has a positive picture of itself because all animate matter has to act positively in physical reality. Animate matter other than ourselves has evolved ways to cope with reality, although overpopulation with respect to resources seems to take the same sort of physical toil that our emotions take on us. With us, our ability to produce technology and the ancillary necessity of developing a language that can be used to pass that technology on to our descendents, is met with no clear ability to determine a hierarchical standing. We attempt to do so, and our history, a history of warfare over resources and subjugation, slavery and genocide illustrates our failure.
I use a simple test to illustrate the mind's inability to cope with the emotional factor that a clear picture of a positive self produces. If I'm standing at the checkout line and someone muscles in line in front of me, I have a reaction. The reaction I have will depend on how well I have learned to control my emotions, but the range of actions can extend to a simple shrug of the shoulders to an outright physical attack on the offending person.
The offending party, and offending is used specifically because the offending party is the provocateur, the offending party has produced a picture of myself that does not agree with the positive picture I normally have of myself. He has basically stated, "I'm privileged, I'm better than you, you are nothing!"
Because I can't form opposing pictures in my mind at the same time, my mind stops operating and I get the electrical jolt to my body that I might get almost falling off a cliff, although I interpret it differently. This electrical jolt causes pain. In addition, it is more painful than a simple slap in the face because a slap smarts and then stops hurting whereas I can relive the belittlement over and over, causing pain to myself every time that I do so.
When we feel pain, we look out at reality for the source of the pain so that we can strike back. When someone produces a mental conflict in our minds, it outrages us more than a simple slap because we have been dealt a blow that keeps on giving, that enrages us, and therefore causes us pain each and every time we recall the outrage. We can, with our long memories, go home and spend the night reliving the offense. We can use the pain to plot revenge, the thoughts of what we will do to the offending party relieving our pain.
It seems to me that this emotional result of an objective operation of the mind is perhaps a fatal defect, although I realize that it is more than apparent that others from different worlds have obviously overcome the defect. Velikovsky's thesis was that we had, sometime in our past, suffered such a catastrophe that we have been forever crippled. While I buy into that, given my own scenario of history, I could be wrong and the scientific consensus right, that we are alone in the universe or at least alone in the sense that no one will ever visit us and we will never visit anyone, in which case I would have to conclude that the defect is fatal, that this particular evolution of the universe is a failure.
But that would go against the positive picture I need to exist in reality, so I choose to assert the defect is not fatal, although from my point of view, it certainly seems so.
This is because there are things in reality that do not create recall. These are the forces that cause movement in our existence. Objects fall, planets rotate and orbit, light and electricity travel, and there is nothing in reality about the nature of the forces that cause the motion that can be put in our recall. As a result, we have to manufacture recall that will allow us to live with those realities without feeling the pain that not having recall to compare with reality would produce.
Thus, religions make up creation stories that explain where we came from, why we are here and why we act the way that we do. Empirical science, in the guise of adhering to reality, does the same thing even though its basic precepts are givens just as the basic precepts of any religion are givens, and givens have to be accepted as consensus reality for everyone to avoid the pain of not knowing.
These consensus beliefs become the very bedrock of the positive picture of ourselves that we carry around with us so that we can act in reality. As they have nothing to do with reality, they are manufactured recall, they are at our very core. When someone opposes them, they are opposing the positive picture of reality we need to exist, they are opposing our very essence, and the pain is intense.
Opposition to basic beliefs, the assumptions upon which our concept of self rests, produces religious wars and a monolithic empirical science that has to stamp out opposition at all costs because to oppose it is to cause such severe pain that retaliation is the only way to seek relief. People who have spent their lives rote learning the categorizations that result from empirical beliefs, who earn their living as a result of those rote beliefs, and who view their standing in the community as resting on belonging to a respected institution that professes to explain origins and the secrets of nature, both physical and human, are no different from the revered religious leaders in feudal times who were the arbiter of reality. When someone questions the received wisdom, the concept of self held by empirical believers is brought into conflict with someone saying they are not what they believe themselves to be, people with all the answers. The conflict of a positive picture of self with a picture of self as wrong, as professing non-answers, as something less than the honored concept of self held by the practitioner, produces a mental slap that is worse than a physical slap. It is a slap that keeps on slapping as long as the possibility of error on the part of the person with the positive image exists. There are only two ways to get rid of the possibility, discredit the person proposing the contradictory position or take the feudal approach, burn them in the public square.
Which brings us back to the Gift and the microcosm of the gay community, and its minority concept of self, a concept of self unasked for but there nonetheless and in sufficient numbers to carve out a significant percentage of the overall community. I had for many years understood the gay dilemma, and had recognized it as a microcosm of the human dilemma. I just hadn't realized how deeply ingrained it was embedded in the concept of self that gay people hold of themselves, and by analogy, how deeply ingrained empirical science is embedded in everyone's concept of self.
This realization came during the closing moments of The Gift. The documentary centered around a group of gay men, many HIV positive, who were attempting to come up with some way to discourage bugchasing. It began to emerge that the bugchasers were not really driven by the "peace of mind" becoming HIV positive would result in, a peace that resulted from no longer having to worry about catching it. Young gay men actually felt like outsiders in a community where HIV affected so many. This is a microcosm of the microcosm. The concept of self is so driven to belong, when HIV becomes belonging, they are driven to destruction because they feel like outsiders and they once again want to belong.
Used to having recall and reality not match, and driven to obtain acceptance and thus some relief from the pain of the failure to match, the concept of self is driven to destruction simply to relieve itself of the conflict resulting from not being like the reality that has become a part of gay life. At the end of the movie, one of the bugchasers was shown setting up an HIV negative support group, yes, an HIV negative support group so that young HIV negative gay men could talk their conflicts out without endangering their lives by bugchasing.
That is, indeed, having something ingrained into the very core of our concept of self and in the macrocosm that is empirical science, even though Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions concludes that the adoption of new concepts has to await the replacement of generations, with respect to the empirical project, there apparently will be no generational replacement. The empirical narrative is so deeply ingrained in our being, is so much a part of the concept of self we all carry, is so interwoven into our consensus understanding of reality, that it can never be cracked.
Which raises the question, why try?
I guess attempting the impossible is ingrained in my concept of self. I started out in life attempting to come up with a coherent and physically consistent concept of the attractive force. By the time I was in college, I figured it was an impossible task, but one worth the effort, something to do, if you will. When I did come up with something that was conceptually feasible in reality, I tried to check it in reality but soon learned the futility of that course. I then thought to use the same tools I used to construct a mechanism that explained why objects fall to explain other movements, rotation and orbiting, and after that, light, electricity and magnetism, and after that, the mind, and if they were all consistent, then it was as much proof as I was ever going to get, indeed, perhaps as much proof as can be obtained.
Each was an impossible task, and each eventually came up consistent with all the others.
With no other challenge, putting even the tiniest chip in the foundation of our ignorance is an insurmountable challenge, but one that I'll never accomplish, which, I guess, is just where I want to be.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com