Splitters and clumpers

Which are you?

I was thinking about this as I was walking through London and looking at people's faces. There comes a point when you realise that there seems to be a finite number of types of faces. You'll see a woman, longish nose, weak jaw, slightly protuberant teeth, blond hair, and you think, "I've seen that face so many times before!"

That made me think about how we might split our friends and clump, perhaps, those with whom we are less familiar, maybe Korean people.

We clump other species. Or breeds of dog. We can clump "trees" or "oaks" or "Turkey oaks".

Knowing some other species well leads us to split into individuals, or split even more finely - so fox is fox, but dog can be labrador to dalmatian. Of course, that's not a fair analogy. Maybe we see "geese" and we see songbirds as robin, blackbird, wren?

But there's a point at which splitting becomes pathological. Our inclination in the West is to split into atoms and particles, to determine everything by its parts. To give precedence to parts. We want to find that which cannot be split.

And then there's the reverse inclination: to see all as whole. We're all humans/animals/earth-beings/consciousness.

I am inclined to want a Golden Mean. Iain McGilchrist would say we need both, though the holism takes precedence.

The part I am now reading (54%) is about consciousness. And he does think that all is a field of consciousness, and matter arises where a constraint internal to consciousness causes a vortex and here matter has some staying power.

That's kind of like what Freya Mathews says in her Ecological Self book, though I think the field may be spacetime or something.

What I wonder is what's conscious in the consciousness that does not cohere in a vortex of being... or becoming? IMcG does say that consciousness is conscious of something, and he says that it is through these vortexes that the consciousness can become self-conscious. So what about all the non-vortexed consciousness? Is that unconscious consciousness?

Gay would say that it is non-violence. I'd say, look at a volcano. I mean, you can say that's not violent if you like, but try being in Pompeii.

I understand the problem of consciousness emerging from complexity: I see that's just hand-waving as a way to say it comes into existence de novo. I understand way Cartesian dualism is rubbish. But I guess what I really think is that I don't care. Or that it doesn't matter. And that more and more theories about it are kind of solipsistic. Is a tree conscious? I don't care. It lives. Things can be good or bad for it. Does it have experience? I don't know and I don't know why we care so much. Why can't we love it and want what's good for it without it being like us AT ALL????