Jump to Introduction & Chronology
Jump back to Previous: Faust - XII. "F. As Developer"
This is either an obvious choice of a book to squeeze in here or an even stranger choice than usual. I'm really not sure which. This next book begins with a summary of Western and then Eastern thought -- much of this you will recognize from one or another, or even several, of the books I've already blogged. I think Darling does a good job of reviewing all this and of drawing some logical conclusions. At least that's my recollection from reading this the first time quite a while back. We'll see if I feel the same way this time through.
Between the time I wrote the above and now (when I'm finally publishing this), there's been a change in the plan. Starting with my post 123., I will be blogging not just Zen Physics but also a second book, The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. Two fairly contemporary works of non-fiction. Something of a change of pace for me. I added the second book because the two are so complementary (at least in my mind). These books seem to feed off each other and to tie in with much of what I've blogged in the past. That they are also a welcome review of my university philosophy education, is an added bonus (again, for me).
by David Darling - HarperCollins - c1996
Introduction
p xi It may happen in five minutes or in fifty years, but at some point you will die. There is no escaping it. And then what? Will it be the end? Is death a void, a nothingness that goes on forever? Or is it merely a phase transition -- the start of a new kind of existence, beyond our old bodies and brains? This is the ultimate question a human being can ask: the question of his or her own destiny.
p xiii Two main conclusions will be presented [in this book], both of which are remarkable and both of which, were it not for the force of evidence supporting them, might seem entirely beyond belief. The first is that a form of reincarnation is logically inescapable. There must be life after death. And there must, moreover, be a continuity of consciousness, so that no sooner have you died in this life than you begin again in some other. The second and even more significant conclusion is that far from giving rise to consciousness, the brain actually restricts it. Mind, it will become clear, is a fundamental and all-pervasive property of the universe.
Part 1.
You and Other Stories
Chapter 1. Our Greatest Fear
p 4 [There’s an account of what happens to the body after death here that Hans Castorp (or at least Thomas Mann) would have loved but I find less interesting.]
p 9 The basic materialist view of death, now widely held by scientists and layfolk alike, seems, on the face of it, bleak beyond despair. “We” -- our minds -- appear to be nothing more than outgrowths of our living brains, so that inevitably we must expire at the moment our neural support structures collapse. Death, from this perspective, amounts to a total, permanent cessation of consciousness and feeling -- the end of the individual... it is hardly surprising that, in an increasingly secular society, the fear of death -- of losing everything, including ourselves -- has become so deep and widespread. Yet exactly what are we afraid of?
Epicurus pointed out the irrationality of fearing the end of consciousness in his Letter to Menoeceus:
Become accustomed to the belief that death is nothing to us. For all good and evil consists in sensation, but death is deprivation of sensation. And therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not because it takes away the craving for immortality. For there is nothing terrible in life for the man who has truly comprehended that there is nothing terrible in not living.
...
p 10 Ironically, one of the possibilities we tend to dread the most -- that death represents a one-way trip to oblivion -- turns out to be something we need have no fear of at all. Socrates even enjoined us to look forward to it. In his Apology he explained:
Death is one of two things. Either it is an annihilation, and the dead have no consciousness of anything, or . . . it is really a change -- a migration of the soul from this place to another. Now if there is no consciousness but only a dreamless sleep, death must be a marvelous gain . . . because the whole of time . . . can be regarded as no more than a single night.
Chapter 2. The Soul is Dead, Long Live the Self
p 15 It would be immensely reassuring... if a theory like that of the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes were to be scientifically vindicated. Descartes believed strongly in the separate existence of the body and the soul. And he went so far as to identify the seat of the soul as the pineal gland, a neurological structure he chose because it was both centrally located and the only bit of the brain he could find that was not duplicated in the two cerebral hemispheres. The tiny pineal gland, in Descartes’s view, served as the meeting place, or interface, between the material brain and the immaterial soul, which he equated with the mind or ego.
p 16 ...the problems for any seat-of-the-soul hypothesis start as soon as we focus on the exact means by which the brain and the soul might interact. The brain is demonstrably built of ordinary matter, whereas the soul is presumed to consist of something else entirely -- “mind stuff,” or res cogitans, as Descartes called it. Crucially, the soul is held to be not merely tenuous, with an elusive nature similar to that of photons (light quanta) or neutrinos (particles capable of passing straight through the Earth without being absorbed), but actually nonphysical. In its very conception the soul stands outside the normal scheme of physics. And so, from the outset, we are at a loss to understand how it could possibly influence or be influenced by material objects, including the brain.
By the same token, the soul could not be expected to leave any trace on a detector or measuring device... The fact is, the soul as it is normally presented is not a phenomenon open to scientific investigation. Nor is there any logic in claiming, on the one hand, that the soul is nonphysical or supernatural and, on the other, that it can have physical effects...
This reminds me of the invisible man problem. Since an invisible man’s eyes would not stop photons, he would be rendered blind.
It pains me to try to be “fair” to Descartes, but what is said here about mind is very close to what we could also say about “dark matter.” It would appear that the universe is full of a great deal of stuff we are only aware of because it has a gravitational effect on the fraction of the universal “stuff” we can see. Dark matter apparently has mass but is as invisible to us as is the soul.
p 17 We have a strong tendency to feel as if we are something extra beyond our bodies and brains -- that we are, in effect, an intelligent life force dwelling within an organic shell. This makes it easy to go along with the suggestion of dualists such as Descartes, that the mind is not just an upshot of the functioning of the brain but, on the contrary, is a deeper and further fact. In the dualist’s scheme, each of us has -- or is -- a “Cartesian ego” that inhabits the material brain. And from this position, in which the mind is held to be distinct from the living brain, it is a short (though not inevitable) step to the assertion that the mind is capable of an entirely independent existence, as a disembodied soul.
p 18 [Unfortunately,] It is a consensus fast approaching unanimity in scientific circles that “we” (ourselves) are not more than the consequences of our brains at work. In the modern view, we are mere epiphenomena or, more charitably perhaps, culminations, of the greatest concentration of orchestrated molecular activity in the known cosmos. And though it is true we don’t yet know exactly how the trick is done -- these are still frontier days in the brain sciences -- it is widely held to be only a matter of time before those who are teasing apart the circuitry of the human cortex lay bare the hidden props of the illusion. The situation is as brutally materialistic as that. There is not the slightest bit of credible evidence to suggest there is more to your self, to the feeling of being you, than a stunningly complex pattern of chemical and electrical activity among your neurons. No soul, no astral spirit, no ghost in the machine, no disembodied intelligence that can conveniently bail out when the brain finally crashes to its doom. If science is right, then you and I are just the transitory mental states of our brains.
We think of ourselves as being definite people, unique individuals. But, at birth, within the constraints of our genetic makeup, we are capable of becoming anyone. For the first year or two of life outside the womb, our brains are in the most pliable, impressionable, and receptive state they will ever be in. At the neural level this is apparent in the fact that we are all born with massively overwired brains that contain many more embryonic intercellular links than any one individual ever needs... the infant brain has, on average, about 50 percent more synaptic connections than has an adult brain... It is as if a wide selection of the potentialities of the human race, acquired over millions of years, are made available to each of us at birth.
This should remind you of Gerald Edelman in 104. “A New View of the Mind” Part 2.
...
p 20 With the rudiments of a belief system in place, the brain starts to interpret and evaluate everything that comes to its attention in terms of this resident catechism of received wisdom. Every sensation and perception, every incident and event, every word, gesture, and action of other people, is construed within the context of what the brain understands the world and itself to be like. Thus the brain steadily becomes more and more dogmatic, opinionated, and biased in its thinking. It tends to hold on to -- that is, to remember -- experiences that comply with and support its acquired worldview, while at the same time it tends to reject or deny anything that seems incongruous with its system of beliefs... And in this way the brain builds for itself an island of stability, a rock of predictability, in the midst of a vast ocean of potentially fatal chaos and inexplicable change.
We are inventions of our genes, our culture, our society, our particular upbringing, but oddly enough we’re not aware of being so utterly contrived. ...we tend greatly to underestimate the extent to which we ourselves are caught up, constrained, and molded by the paradigms imposed upon us. Our indoctrination begins at such an early age and is so all-pervasive that the rules and theories we acquire become hard-wired into our brains. In particular, the power of our closest caretakers to shape us is awesome... Subsequently, we fail to recognize that the beliefs about the world and about ourselves which we carry around with us like sacred relics are tentative, and possibly completely wrong...
p 21 ...Having encoded a particular model of reality, the brain, without “us” even realizing it, gives a spin to every sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch that enters through our senses. In fact, the conditioning begins even before the conscious brain goes into action. Evolution has furnished us with a range of sensory repression systems that save us from having to be aware of and thereby hopelessly overloaded and distracted by every minutia of our surroundings... the brain is able to deploy its attention, its executive power, where most needed by having the bulk of sensory input weeded out at a lower level.
Human vision, for instance, is an active process in which signals and perception are highly filtered, screened, and manipulated before they ever reach the higher centers of the cortex. [Autism would seem to be a failure of this screening system.] We may feel as if we are directly and immediately aware of whatever images fall upon our retinas, but we are mistaken. Most of the handling of data from our eyes takes place at a subconscious level through a variety of largely independent specialized subsystems. And, strange though it may seem, some of the visual subsystems in our brains produce an output that “we” cannot see. They contribute to brain function and even to our awareness of the world, but no amount of introspection can make us aware of the subsystems themselves. One of the ways this is made most strikingly clear is by the strange neurological condition known as blind sight. Following some kinds of injury to the visual cortex, people may become blind in one half of their visual field. But although they claim an inability to see anything in their blind half, they sometimes seem capable of absorbing information from that half...
...
p 23 In medieval Europe, society was rigidly structured. Everyone knew their place in the scheme of things -- a scheme based on lineage, gender, and social class. There was virtually no chance of escaping one’s birthright, whether as a peasant or a feudal lord, no scope for social mobility. To appreciate more readily the mentality of this time we have to recognize that our modern emphasis on the fundamental, overriding importance of the individual is not universal. Medieval attitudes lacked this emphasis, in large measure because of the overarching importance of the Church of Rome. The medieval faith in Catholicism was absolute. But what mattered in this faith was not the individual’s role but the broad cosmic sweep of holy law and salvation. Personalities, individual differences and opinions, were considered irrelevant and undesirable in the face of such totalitarian religious belief. And this downplaying of the personal is reflected in the fact that medieval times produced virtually no autobiographies and very few biographies -- and then only inaccurate, stereotypical lives of saints. In these writings, the psychology of the person makes no appearance; all that comes across is a cardboard cutout of a man or woman, an anodyne approximation to the Christian ideal, unashamedly embellished with archetypal miracle tales.
This was the culture that Naphtha (in The Magic Mountain) and Dostoyevsky (in The Brothers Karamazov) revered and craved.
By the end of the Middle Ages, however, a change was evident. Instrumental in this was the rise of Protestantism, particularly in its most extreme form -- Puritanism [I think Calvinism is more to the point]. John Calvin preached that some, “the Elect,” were predestined to enter heaven, while most were doomed to spend eternity in hell, it had the effect at the time of casting the individual into sharp relief, of differentiating between one person and another. And, in general, Protestantism of every kind argued for the private nature of religion. Catholics did not need, and were not expected, to face God alone. Priests, nuns, saints, the Virgin Mary, and all manner of rituals were on hand to intercede for the masses, so that the masses didn’t have to think too hard or deeply for themselves, didn’t have to become too involved as individuals or worry too much about the implications to themselves of the great issues of life, death, and redemption. [This sounds like Ivan's “The Grand Inquisitor.” ] Protestantism, by contrast, sought to diminish the gap between the layperson and God, while Puritanism sought to close it completely. The Puritan faced God alone --- in the privacy of the individual mind.
p 24 And there were soon to be other factors at work in the West, helping to turn the spotlight even more fully on each man and woman, forcing the self out of hiding. Not the least of these was the Industrial Revolution and, at its heart, that great engine -- literally and figuratively -- for change. Suddenly, the old agricultural lifestyle in which son did like father, and daughter like mother, generation after generation, and in which it was frowned upon and futile for the individual to act any differently from the rest, was swept away. And in its place was development (often for the worse for those who lived in the new slums) and technological progress, the rise of personal ambition, of the entrepreneur, the winner and loser, and a new emphasis on individuality and concern for one’s own welfare. Suddenly, it was good and potentially profitable to be an individual, to go one’s own way, to be different from the crowd. And that attitude has not altered to this day.
In the modern West, we revere the self, we set it up on a pedestal. There has never before been a culture, a time, in which people focused so obsessively on the well-being and elevation of their egos. And what do these egos turn out to be? Nothing, says science, but artifacts of the brain. We -- our feelings of being someone in the world -- survive as long as the brain lives. And when the brain dies . . .
Our prospects look bleak. The very mode of inquiry that has helped shape the modern world and that we have come to rely upon so much informs us that, in effect, we are the dreams of carbon machines. There is no real substance to us, no deeper, further fact to being a person than just one feeling after another after another. Impressions, sensations, thoughts, emotions, continually well up into awareness and the sequence of these experiences, bound together by that fragile thing called memory, is projected by the brain as you and me.
p 25 Our choice of how to respond seems simple. We can despair or we can deny…
This is what Nietzsche foresaw as the eventual failure of the Socratic/
Alexandrian/Scientific path. This is what Dostoyevsky hopped to keep out of Russia. This is what Settembrini and Naphtha battled about. And when it comes to social roles, this is what Ford Madox Ford's Christian Tietjens saw as the end of Toryism.
But there is a third option -- one that appeals both to the intellect and to the heart. And this is to recognize that although, at one level, selves may not be as substantial as they normally appear, at another level they are real and important objects of inquiry. The very same situation applies to atoms, because modern physics has revealed beyond reasonable doubt that atoms consist almost entirely of empty space. And even the supposedly tangible nuggets of matter inside atoms -- quarks (which make up protons and neutrons) and electrons -- give no sign whatever of having any extension. Knowing this, it might seem incredible that, in large numbers, atoms can give such a convincing impression of solidity. And yet, in the everyday world, solid they undeniably are…
The soul -- whether it exists or not -- appears to lie outside the realm of scientific inquiry. But this is not true of the self. We can probe the self in many different ways and, as a result, hope to learn more about what it means to have a self -- and to lose it.
No comments:
Post a Comment