Past tense of consciousness

Stanislav Grof, Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research, Sunny Albany, 2000

Stanislav Grof is a big naive. In a monist and materialist world, he seems convinced that the consciousness exists.

In the history of philosophy, consciousness was defined as the thing that makes us aware. For Descartes – the most authorized voice in the field – conscoiusness is immaterial and has no particular place inside the body; for the rationalist philoopher, it is the fundamental entity that makes possible the appearance of the awareness about the two innate ideas – God and the self.

I won’t spare my time refuting this notion (that Gilbert Ryle called the doctrine of “the ghost in the machine”, where the machine is of course the body, and the ghost, you guessed, the consciousness); anyways, the cartesian thesis has nothing to do with Grof’s ideas.

For Stanislaf Grof, the consciousness is not innate, but aquired. It actually is a sequel of our interactions with other individuals; according to this description, the consciousness is just like a sexually transmitted disease. Once aquired, the consciousness starts laying eggs, which generate the feelings. These feelings prevent us from being sociopaths or serial killers.

For Stanislav Grof, the psychology of the future is an exact science: a genealogy of the feelings.

But, it must be said, that Grofs began his reasoning with the undemonstrated premise that the psycholofy exists. On the contrary, the private language argument and the problem of mental states, clearly show us that psychology as a science is impossible. In reality, the psychology of the future is nonexistent; or it’s a genre d’écriture, just like the historical novel, the X-rated literature or the arithmetics.

Consciousness: past and future

What I definetily understood from Grof’s book is that we say we have consciousness in the sense we say we have head lice. Hopefully I’ll soon return to this matter, with an article named no more and no less then “Do bottles have a consciousness?”.