[extropy-chat] book: Paddling my Own Canoe by Sutherland

[Hal Finney]

Amara writes about:
> _Paddling my Own Canoe_ by Audrey Sutherland
> Paperback: 144 pages
> http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0824806999/
>
> The book is about a woman (Sutherland) who first started
> making solo journeys to a particular inaccessible beach in
> Moloka'i in 1958.
> ...
> "And why did I always come alone to Moloka'i?"

Sutherland's description of the effects of being alone and isolated,
miles from any other human being, for days or weeks at a time suggests
that it can be a mind-altering experience, almost like taking drugs:

> Alone, you are more aware of surroundings, wary as an animal
> to danger, limp and relaxed when the sun, the brown earth, or
> the deep grass say, "Rest now."
> ...
> I stood once in midstream, balanced on a rock. A scarlet leaf
> fluttered, spiraled down. I watched it, became a wind-blown
> leaf, swayed, fell into the water with a giant human splash,
> then soddenly crawled out, laughing uproariously.

Here's what I think.  We grow up amid a culture and a language.  We are
immersed in it and it becomes part of our minds.  It's strange, but a
fundamental part of what we think of as being human comes from outside
of us.  It is language and lessons and ways of thinking about the world.
These are as much a part of us and as much a part of being humans as
our limbs and senses and organs.

Imagine a human baby who is somehow raised without any of this.  He lives
in a natural environment which is so benign that he is able to survive.
It may be a challenging and interesting world, one to test and stimulate
his mind and body.  But he never hears a human word and never sees a
human being.

This person, when grown, would not really be a human being as we think
of one.  He would have no language, other than perhaps some rudimentary
mental patterns he might construct himself.  He would not be able to
think about abstractions and reason with logic the way we can.  He would,
in truth, be deeply crippled, and mentally damaged.

Humans have evolved to live with linguistic input.  We can't develop
properly without it.  To some extent I think we can see our consciousness
as an interloper or parasite or symbiote which lives in the brain.
Language takes root in our minds, but our minds are like the fertile
ground, and language is a seed planted by others.  The brain supplies
the raw materials, but language is what organizes and patterns them to
create a human mind.

And this goes on beyond the developmental stage.  We are constantly
swimming through a sea of language.  We are engulfed in it, the constant
give and take, the exchange, the flow of words.  I think this helps to
maintain the stability of our human consciousness.

Now imagine a person who loses this connection to the flow.  They go
off, as Sutherland did, and live for weeks by themself.  What happens?
Well, people will have different experiences.  Some probably keep
the language flow going internally on their own, it's very stable for
them, and they keep talking and talking to themselves the whole time.
But others will find that being cut off from the flow of language will
change their mentality.  The feedback is no longer present.  The plant
of language in their mind begins to wither.

This, I think, is what people like Sutherland describe when they talk
about the impact of being alone and experiencing the silence.  Their mind
changes.  And they like it, or at least they find the novelty of the
experience attractive.

I think this is part of what urges people to experiment with drugs,
the feeling of an alteration to mentality.  People take stimulants, and
they take depressants, and both change how their minds work, and both
are attractive even though the effects are opposite, because it's the
change people are craving, the novelty.  If our minds were always like
they are after smoking pot, and there were a drug we could take to make
our minds like they are for us normally, people would seek out that drug.
This seeking after novelty I think is also one of the reasons that those
who change their minds by solitude find it rewarding.

The key question, then, is whether going out alone and altering your
mind in this way is actually a valuable experience.  Are you gaining a
useful insight?  Or is this simply a new drug?

Our minds are adapted to live in a human society built on language.
Depriving them of that flow produces altered responses.  I can't help
seeing it as analogous to depriving the body of oxygen, which can
also produce strange mental states (which some people do seek out -
I knew several kids in elementary school who used to intentionally
make themselves pass out, by a strange pattern of breathing and chest
pressure).  If you go out into the wilderness for days or weeks, and
your mind changes, are you really gaining insight into your true nature?
Or are you merely experiencing how your mind reacts without the supporting
flow of linguistic information that it needs to retain its stability?

I think of language as a somewhat precarious passenger we carry in our
minds, yet a crucially important partner which truly makes us what we are
(in fact we might even say that we are language more than brain).  It's
not suprising that taking away the flow of information destabilizes our
internal language.  And in my view, that means it destabilizes our self.

If I go out and spend weeks alone, and I change, I become more like an
animal as Sutherland describes:

> Alone, you are more aware of surroundings, wary as an animal
> to danger, limp and relaxed when the sun, the brown earth, or
> the deep grass say, "Rest now." Alone you stand at night,
> alert, poised, hearing through ears and open mouth and
> fingertips. Alone, you do not worry whether someone else is
> tired or hungry or needing. You push yourself hard or quit for
> the day, reveling in the luxury of solitude. And being
> unconcerned with human needs, you become as a fish, a boulder,
> a tree- a part of the world around you.

Is that the real me?  Or is the busy, thoughtful, analytical, linguistic
mind the real me?

I don't know that there is an a priori reason to say that one or the
other is the true self, but I certainly would not jump to the conclusion
that the language-suppressed version is real, and the busy, language- and
society-oriented version is some kind of artifact.  As I said at first,
it is the insertion of language and culture into a rather unformed brain
which makes us human.  Like it or not, language is what our thoughts are
made of.  Turning away from that is turning away from our humanity.

Hal