Dudley, I read The Mother of All Minds over the past week or so. Obviously it struck many chords with me. I share many of your observations and perhaps have experienced some similar experiences. I am not so sure about the evolutionary aspect of Mind, however. I often feel that there are competing operating systems in the world running in parallel. Some people are simply programmed using an entirely different language and logic. The really interesting thing of course is the ability to reprogram, upgrade or switch, if the desire is there and the tools are made available. So choice becomes the operative word.

“I choose to change” was once described to me by a clinical psychologist as the most critical statement that a person can make (my sister is manic depressive bipolar and I was working with her to try and change self-destructive behaviour). This is a powerful statement and has echoes of Nietzsche—another section that resonated with me in your book.

I have replied to this independently spirited individual privately. First, to thank him for taking the time to read my book. Secondly, to encourage him to read it again, this time aware of just how much his own “operating system” may have filtered what he gleaned from the book on its first reading. A gentleman and a serious scholar, he agreed to do so.

He and I are in agreement, I do believe, that “there are competing operating systems [of mind] in the world running in parallel.” I wrote about such systems repeatedly in The Mother of All Minds. But if these systems aren’t evolutionary in their development, then it is my suspicion that they stand in repudiation of evolutionary theory, which is going to be upsetting to many scientists (including, I think, my U.K. correspondent, who has a Ph.D. in biology, once he thinks it through).

If those of us who believe we see plentiful evidence of mind taking a Darwinian “descent with modification” path are right (including one of my mentors, the late Clare Graves, who bequeathed us a powerful model of evolving levels of human existence), then that is hopeful news. But not, as the world demonstrates minute by minute, news as hopeful as, well, as we would hope. Because the number of the planet’s citizens whose minds have grown increasingly more—how shall we say it?—at home with complexity, diversity and possibility appears to be greatly overshadowed by the number whose minds are stuck.

How else do you explain, for example, the rising popularity of the savage sport of so-called “mixed martial arts”? In a lengthy article Sunday, a Los Angeles Times reporter described how “a spectacle melding ancient fighting tactics with those of a bar brawl” is poised to go mainstream as a new American economic and culture force.

The roots of the “sport” are traced to a Victorville, CA, seafood restaurant owner’s practice in the early 1990s of closing his establishment at 10 p.m. and then going at his employees and remaining patrons. He told the Times reporter: “I beat the hell out of them.” The resulting activity is also called “human cockfighting,” “extreme fighting,” “cage fighting,” and “ultimate fighting.” Fueled by promoters and pay-per-view (usually $39.95 per fight) cable television, the Times article reports, this brutal melange is about to be exported to Canada, Mexico and Europe as America’s latest contribution to the world entertainment industry.

It is further evidence that the mind is its own worst enemy and obstacle to its own evolution that mixed martial arts is already being blamed for thousands of America’s teenagers mimicking such fights in backyards and parking lots and then posting videos of their mayhem on YouTube. One of its aficionados calls no-holds-barred and no-rules-enforced fighting “the sport for these times.” Blood, says the LA Times writer, is the new black.

If so (and who can argue with the new sport’s success?), then times are grim. And, of course, they are grim. The world is awash in violence caused by minds calibrated to make poor choices. No fight happens without someone making a bad choice. No war happens without someone—usually, a lot of someones—making bad choices. No sport this gratuitously brutal takes root and flowers unless large numbers of humans are making bad choices. No one celebrates and/or augments the gratuitous pain and injury of another if they have developed a mind capable of making good choices.

Yes, I think the evidence is good at this point that the mind evolves. I read the evidence as suggesting that it generally evolves in predictable, increasingly understood stages.

But I don’t see most minds alive today evolving at nearly the speeds needed to equip their users with good choice-making skills. And I don’t see enough minds evolving to the extent that we can hope to avoid more 9/11s. More Iraqs. More Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. More Darfurs. More drive-by shootings. More made-for-YouTube backyard human cock fights. Or the runaway growth and popularity of a sporting event that brags about its savagery and tendency to make boxing look tame.

In 2,000 years, in its best moments, the human mind has evolved to the point where it has taken an almost universal stand against slavery, outlawed racism as an unseemly and unacceptable social attitude, steadily increased its questioning of war as a rational approach to problem-solving, activated sensibilities within itself to identify with the pain of most any pain-experiencing creature, questioned the global consequences of its own actions and routinely come to examine about what is desirable for the greater good of the greater number for the most foreseeable future possible.

Also in 2,000 years, the minds you often rub elbows, eyeballs or electrons with on the street, in the workplace, on the Internet, on the TV or computer or game console screen, maybe even at the dinner table, have evolved no farther that the gladiator’s fighting pit.

My valued reader in the U.K and I are fully in agreement on this point: the way upward on the mind’s evolutionary journey is a willful one. You go higher by making good choices. Providing humans with supportive environmental encouragement and critical thinking skills for making good choices can work wonders in speeding the evolution of a single mind. But can it ever be done so as to get a critical mass of human minds to the point where the celebration of violence is automatically viewed as the atavistic and inane “choice” of partially and poorly formed personalities and mentalities?

We do seem to have a long way to go, and few really good ideas as yet on how to get there. One small step that any of us can take to encourage further evolution of the human mind in an evolving number of humans is act to choke off the feed stocks of violence. You and I can help do it with our vote. We can do it with how we spend our dollars. We can do it by how we spend our time. We can do it with what we allow to be aired on our TV or computer screens. We can do it with our musical selections. We can do it with the toys and games and other entertainment we choose for our children and grandchildren. There are many ways to do it. But violence is so pervasive and so elemental in today’s money-is-the-guiding-ethic global market economy and thoughtlessness-is-the-preferred-state-of-mind entertainment environment that we have to choose not to augment violence or it will sneak right past us.

Read Scott Gold’s Los Angeles Times article here [may require registration]: Knockout marketing

For more information about my book, go here: The Mother of All Minds

Today, you can learn much more about phenomenology than I could tell you by checking with Encyclopædia Britannica. EB describes the genre as “a 20th-century philosophical movement, the primary objective of which is the direct investigation and description of phenomena as consciously experienced, without theories about their causal explanation and as free as possible from unexamined preconceptions and presuppositions.”

Intuitively, I like the ring of that. Sounds right down to earth, phenomenology does. Understands, it would appear, that there is that pesky brain interlocking and interceding and intervening and interfering with our understanding of phenomena. Or at least I suppose the phenomenologist first posits a brain before she or he posits a consciousness, although I don’t really know that. It’s probably much over my head and beyond my ken. In fact, our graduate school friend told me as much one day when I sought to question him about what he was an expert in—said it was much too complicated to try to explain. At that point his wife hurried to agree that this was the case. So that’s where we left it.

The taste of that conversation has endured all these years, and it is a bad taste. From that point forward, I’ve been skeptical of philosophy and philosophers. Not to the extent that Edward Abbey, the author of The Monkey Wrench Gang, was. Abbey intended to be a professor of philosopher but two weeks of wrestling with symbolic logic in graduate school at Yale ended those hopes. He would later write a friend, “When I hear the word ‘phenomenology,’ I reach for my revolver.”

I’ve gone a different route. I seldom spot a book on philosophy that I don’t open. Often, I acquire the book for our online bookstore after thumbing through it and reading for a while. Not infrequently I get a perverse pleasure out of seeing how quickly the philosophical mind can induce numbness in my own. For example, the other day I spotted a copy of the late Jean E. Hampton’s The Authority of Reason. Dr. Hampton set a new record. She required only 25 words to do me in. “Although this book seeks to show that the naturalists are wrong to criticize the normativity in moral theory, nonetheless in Part I, I shall be…” she wrote. That did it. If you want to know what happened in Part I, you’ll have to buy her book. I was already moving on.

On as it turned out to W.B. Macomber’s The Anatomy of Disillusion; Martin Heidegger’s Notion of Truth. This time, unwilling to again risk the onset of numbness so quickly, instead of starting at the front of the book, I went to the back. And found myself reading about Nietzsche, not Heidegger. Macomber, himself a philosopher, has a nice style. I suspect I could have a conversation with him about phenomenology and not come away thinking I’m mentally deficient. He explained, for example, that Nietzsche prescribed not partial nihilism but “complete nihilism” as needed to purge Western society of the damage done to it by its history. “There is no curing cancer with Noxema,” writes Macomber. Now, I strongly suspect that this is one of the few instances in the history of philosophical writing that the word “Noxema” has appeared in a scholarly work, and perhaps the only time. And I just find that phenomenological!

What I’ve concluded after all these years and all these brief encounters with philosophical prose is that philosophers are actually incomplete or failed novelists. They can plot but they can’t entertain. They can write dialogue but only if it is themselves they are engaging in conversation. It is only once in a blue moon that any of the lot says anything of importance, and it is usually a century or two before anyone can look at history and tell how much damage the idea did.

Harboring such thoughts, you can imagine my glee at picking up the October 16 issue of Newsweek at the doctor’s office and finding a young Indiana philosopher trying to explain his career choice in an article plaintively titled, “I Think, Therefore I Am Misunderstood.”

Young Erik Wielenberg was disarmingly straightforward about what he does for a living: “What I do, in a nutshell, is this: I find a question or puzzle that interests me. I try to figure out a solution, usually reading what others have had to say about it along the way. If I come up with anything good, I write it down and see if anyone is interested in publishing it.”

Well, now. If that’s what a professional philosopher does, maybe I have something in common with such dudes after all. I’d like to think that someone such as I who is attentive to how the mind influences what questions or puzzles a philosopher chooses to work on, who he reads after once he’s selected one and how he goes about explaining what he thinks about it all is himself raising very important philosophical issues.

In fact, just the other day I was reading Abraham Kaplan’s The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science, and realized that he certainly understood that kinds of minds—and the choices they make—are all important to the philosophical inquiry. One type of philosopher, he argues, will look at a statement and ask, “What would the world be like if it were true?” A philosopher with another cast of mind will ask, “What would we have had to do to come to believe it?” Yet another will ask, “What would we do if we did believe it?”

All of which makes one of young Wielenberg’s closing observations make a great deal of sense. “Philosophy,” he said, “is an inefficient activity: much of it is useless.”

The saving grace is that there’s always another philosopher around to try and help make it less useless than it would otherwise be. You may find this hard to believe but I swear on the writings of Socrates that it’s true. A few moments after reading, with considerable puzzlement except for the Noxema thing, W.B. Macomber’s comments about Nietzsche and nihilism, I came across a book called What Nietzsche Really Said. I bought it in a heartbeat. Now, if only I had young Wielenberg to tell me what it means. It is, in finality, this endless circularity that both makes philosophy and philosophers attractive and repulsive to me.

There are many reasons to read philosophy, and one very good one not to bother reading very much of it. The anti-reason is that if you sample the writings of philosophers to any extent at all, especially from the past 300 or 400 years, you can’t help but suspect that knowledge among philosophers is simply getting broader, not deeper.

Read about the author of The Monkey Wrench Gang here: “Where have you gone, Edward Abbey?”

Order Jean Hampton’s book here: “The Authority of Reason”

Order W.B. Macomber’s book here: “The Anatomy of Disillusion: Martin Heidegger’s Notion of Truth ”

Order Abraham Kaplan’s book here: “ The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science ”

Order Robert C. Solomon’s and Kathleen M. Higgins’ book here: “ What Nietzsche Really Said ”

Read Erik Wielenberg’s Newsweek article (you’ll need to register): “ I Think, Therefore I Am Misunderstood ”