“Our ordinary consciousness,” wrote William James in his pioneering work on transcendental experience, “is one special kind of consciousness, while all about it, separated by a film of history, lie possible forms of consciousness entirely different…
We all experience altered states of consciousness all the time, without the aid of mind-altering substances. When blood sugar drops due to hunger, a completely different mood takes hold. Under the monthly storm of hormones, almost a completely different person can emerge. Every night we experience the edges of consciousness as we enter the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep. Every day we engage in various delusions and willful blindness to maintain our visibility, keep our imperfect relationships strong, and protect our deepest hopes from the terrifying levels of reality.
Given consciousness gives the truth for what it is, and since this same consciousness is in danger of misunderstanding the truth, it is not surprising that we easily fall into delusions that seem attractive and internal – from conspiracy theories to irrational obsessions to hallucinations. And yet evolution must have a reason for making us susceptible to such deviations from the way of thinking – maybe our unstructured views of reality work for us, maybe they save us; perhaps Virginia Woolf was right when she wrote that “deception is the most important and necessary of all things.”
That's what the poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) describes in a beautiful passage from his classic. Hallucinations (public library):
Humans share a lot with other animals – the basic needs of food and drink or sleep, for example – but there are additional psychological and emotional needs and desires that may be different from us. Living day by day is not enough for people; we need to jump, move, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see general patterns in our lives. We need hope, a sense of the future. And we need freedom (or at least the illusion of freedom) to go beyond ourselves, whether through telescopes and microscopes and our ever-increasing technology or attitudes that allow us to travel to other worlds, to go beyond our surroundings. We need a team like this just as much as we need to be involved in our lives… moving things that make our awareness of time and death easier to bear. We seek a vacation from our inner and outer limits, an intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and importance of the world we live in.
Complete with the logic of willful blindness, then revisit Oliver Sacks on consciousness, artificial intelligence, and our search for meaning, the healing power of nature, and the building blocks of humanity.
