Social Consciousness: thoughts from colour
Colour is a wonderful thing. There are so many colours that we share and colour can invoke in us strong reaction. The Ganzfeld effect and phenomena like it show us how important our senses are; they show the importance of variety and the power that the mind has of imposing variety when it’s not there.
In not unrelated fashion the artist Yves Klein’s monochromatic paintings represent an idea that shows us directly the problem that colour poses for us socially. For Klein his Blue was ‘a Blue in itself ‘ (from Tate Modern). Here are two distinctly different approaches to colour, the world and the mind. In the Ganzfeld Effect the absence of variety in the colour field produces hallucinations; phenomena that we whisk away with no status to reality, but with Yves Klein colour is said to be knowable ‘in itself’ as if there were a self for the colour to have apart from our perception of it.
These approaches to colour are related, but they are contrary. In the first colour is important for the brain’s acquiescence of the world. It is with colours firm grip that objects are seen and composed; colour in that sense is indistinguishable from objects in the mind, they are a property of them. In the other colour is an object unto itself, independent of the mind and a part of reality.
An exploding array of colour
Somewhere in between are qualia, but even qualia are restricted to individuals, and we share senses in a social context. The social part of our worldadds a further complexity to colour. For us sense goes beyond stimulus and response; senses are communicated into the environment and when what we communicate is accepted, reciprocated and seen to be understood they are given the status of a phenomena; they embody an aspect of the world to be further explained but, as in the case of colour, also to be appreciated and shared.
And here is the problem, we don’t really have any way of knowing that the qualities given to colours are shared. Even if we all pointed at Klein Blue and said “Klein Blue” what evidence would there be that the blue you experience is the same as the blue that I experience, do we experience blue together? There are so many answers to this question that the orthodox approach is impatience.
However, not so long ago we weren’t quite so impatient with the question, it was only when it became obvious that answering the question with any certainty was both unlikely and wouldn’t lead to any practical advances in the sciences that people became impatient, the issue became ‘absurd’ ad nauseam. But there is far much more that is absurd and meaningful and therefore significant and worth understanding. What is truly absurd is not the search for meaning, nor the search for understanding but the relegation of questions to the fringes of our minds because we can’t find the practical import. That import will always resurface, just as the philosophy of mind has seen recently. It is less that the importance of phenomenology has come into the light and more that theorists and scientists are at the point of inserting machines into the social sphere; machine consciousness, machines reading minds and artificial intelligence are all on the cusp of possibility and without understanding the quality and nature of experience or how it is shared.
Furthermore in the social sphere the ideas that shape our minds are being shaped and identity given to them; memes are being used to explain ideas and how they are spread. But just like Klein identified his blue with the closest approximation to blue in itself we are ready identify technology with minds without understanding the shared and reciprocal nature of those minds or the place of the reciprocity and the identity of what is being shared in the world in and of itself. That is, we are ready to implicitly agree that something is being shared, but not exactly what is or the status that we give to it.
What we do know is that we don’t know what certainty we have that the world we share is shared. When it is shared, or we believe it is there is a moment of fantasy for us as individuals. Resonance is the essence of art, if not with us en-mass, then with the cultural possibilities of the time. Collective consciousness as posed by Emile Durkheim, the ideas of Hegel and others are now resurfacing through materialism and physicalism but without the same confidence, and for a single reason, because third person science is still incompatible with first person description.
What we have are systematic explanations based on statistical methods which are, by their very nature, required to render first person accounts incomplete. This same disparity is the disparity that is embedded in our ability to identify one experience with the other and that was the failing of phenemenology in the 20th century also.
As far as reality and science is concerned the dictum that expresses the orthodox attitude is that it is by experiences that we know false experiences from genuine experiences of the world. As far as individuals are concerned it is through language that we find expression in the world and ideas that we share. But as far as truth is concerned there is not an answer yet that can be taken to be certain in and of itself and so the nature and degree to which we share each others world is open and worthy of not just debate but thinking. For me understanding collective consciousness is a genuine possibility, that involves not just placing it in the world, but placing it in relation to all the phenomena that we understand. Most importantly however, it involves reconciling the disparities between third person accounts of the brain and first person accounts of experience. In the meantime the practical solution is to enjoy the colours that we find, to share them and ensure that there is as much variety in our lives as possible.
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