MINDSETS

I understand a mindset to mean a set of interlocking beliefs that form a fundamental view of the world. It is the framework of deep assumptions of a universal nature against which we test new ideas and information.

The dominant mindset of this age is materialistic. At the most basic level is the unspoken conviction that reality is first and foremost physical, composed of molecules, atoms and whatever other sub-atomic particles are discovered by physicists. There may be an open mind about the possibility of there also existing that which is not physical but the non-physical does not pose a challenge to the physical in terms of a claim to ultimate reality.

It is in this ideological climate that questions about consciousness arise. Understandably, the first problem is to show that consciousness is even a problem, that it presents at the very least difficulties for the materialist world view. Indeed, it is not obvious to everyone what is meant by consciousness or that it is a subject worthy to be addressed at all. Isn’t everything we hitherto called consciousness explicable in terms of brains or behaviour?

Next, if it is accepted that consciousness is a difficulty within the materialist set of explanations, it is often not taken very seriously. It is seen as a temporary anomaly that will in due course, as science progresses, be assimilated within the greater system. Materialists see themselves as inhabitants of a great continent aware of a troublesome offshore island not quite within sight from the coast but for which plans are afoot to construct a bridge or at least an underground tunnel whereby it will be secured as part of the mainland.

And there may be a small number remaining who consider consciousness and the physical world as existing on an equal footing. And even a tiny minority who as regards the materialists take quite the opposite position. To them consciousness itself is the real, the given, the non-negotiable fact. For them the existence of physical objects independent of the mind presents the difficulty, the square peg in their universe of round holes.

Mindsets like habits and mountain ranges take a very long time to develop and once developed can endure. Changing mindsets like stopping smoking or the erosion of a mountain is very difficult and requires great patience. It is one thing to accept that your mindset may be open to challenge and even to appreciate that its justification is questionable but it is quite another to adopt a different mindset in the deep sense of replacing one fundamental framework with another.

After all for five hundred years we have known that the earth rotates around the sun but every day, to our senses and to our common-sense, quite the reverse seems true.