After the Fall (was Re: religious in public life)

Joanna Sheldon cjs10 at cornell.edu
Thu Jul 13 13:16:12 PDT 2000


Hi Ted,


>Feel free to attack without mercy any or all of the ideas contained in this
>post.
>
>Just a suggestion.
>
>>A self-generated misunderstanding. I like that. There's a lot of value in
>>living out misunderstandings -- as with accidents in chemical labs, they're
>>often the source of new material that couldn't have been arrived at through
>>plodding, methodical logic.
>
>You're awfully agreeable.

Yep -- when it comes to imponderables, unspeakables and invisibles, an attacking style feels too much like shadow boxing. Poking about makes more sense. If I hop up and down in exasperation from time to time it's usually when I've just read the expression of certain certainties re: matters on which there is no certainty.

So consciousness is a kind of accident, a
>misunderstanding, a case of mistaken identity.

This was your suggestion, and I thought -- interesting. But I wouldn't want to take it a whole lot further than that. Give 'em an inch and metaphors tend to drag us down the garden path. By our hair. Still, I did let it feed my notion of the brain as alchemy lab, so I'll play along.

We're not really
>"individuals" after all. There's no singularity of "self."

Who da hell knows? Why couldn't we say that we (our little selves) are the products of inspired -- to use a loaded word -- accident? (I mean "inspired" in the loosest, most impersonal, irreligious way and probably shouldn't be using it at all.) That is to say, that our sense-of-selfness is, as much as it is a response to the otherness of others, an event generated by somewhat haphazard synaptic pinging. It doesn't happen very often, anyway, that we have a genuine feeling of "I'm a person, in this little body, it's, er, me talking in there...shit..." (when it does happen, the experience is usually disconcerting).

And another thing, how do we know we're the only ones to have the impression of being a self (for it is an impression isn't it, and not an understanding)? When you look into a dog's deep brown eyes and she looks back at you, with more profound restfulness than you'll ever find in the confused gaze of your fellow humans (we're all half crazy with guilt and unsatisfied needs), who's to say that the dog's brain isn't saying (non-linguistically, we presume, and I do think we need to presume the possibility of non-linguistic thoughts) "we're us", which is a way of acknowledging both of you? ...Never mind what's been said and written on the topic by experts of all stripes, doesn't it seem likely that the feeling of being a "self" is almost purely a response to being acknowledged by others? It's just possible that the catalyst for the spark that says "I'm me" is recognition as some kind of "you" by some other critter. A dog sure does it for me, I'll tellya. Cats we won't talk about.

If it's the case that the self is primarily the product of relationship, then it makes all the more sense that we should be able to leapfrog over the shackles of biology -- write our own history, and the history of the world (invent ourselves, in other words). Maybe it's the same gesture: the one in which we feed each other our identities and the one in which we help to generate new ideas in one another, giving us the ability to develop consciousness beyond what evolution had in mind. (Kleist's "Ueber die allmaehliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden" ("On the gradual shaping of thoughts through conversation") springs to mind for the second time in a week (the first time was w/ ref. to [PEN-L:21332]) -- Kleist's conclusion: that it is not we who know things but a certain condition of of ours that knows ("Denn nicht wir wissen, es ist allererst ein gewisser Zustand unsrer, welcher weiß"), in other words, as we move from one condition to another we know and don't know -- which introduces a graceful element of humility into the production of ideas, don't you think?) And maybe the reason we, and not the rest of creation, perform the little self-generating trick is that somewhere along the line we developed an obsession with noting things in passing: setting things down, in memory at first, and later in dirt, stone, skin, paper, zeroes and ones.

(BTW -- I'm worse than Homer when it comes to divagation -- the reason I believe we need to presume the possibility, or rather the likelihood of the existence of non-linguistic thoughts, is that dogs dream, and they reveal their dreams quite vividly, by making running motions with their feet, digging, whining, howling, barking, growling, feinting this way and that and generally carrying on as though they were reviewing the day's outing, in which they pursued a rabbit, chased the fire truck, and then met the neighborhood bully and gave him what for.)

There's no
>freedom or intention or emotion or thought or memory or desire or anything.
>Just brain cells arranged in neat rows. That's all we find when we peek
>under the hood.

Well we've in fact tended to find more than that (at least as far back as Penfield), but in any case how much can you tell of the experience of driving a well-hung roadster by looking under the hood?

And a brain ain't arranged half so neatly as a car engine.


>The mind is nothing but imagery,

Yeah? Even this artist has trouble with that one.

and consciousness is what
>imagines it all. Of course, the primary image created by consciousness is
>consciousness itself. Otherwise, there would be nothing to imagine all
>those other images!

You speak with such confidence! If you like, you can define consciousness as that which imagines what the mind pictures. You can do so because the jury's still out on what consciousness is.


>But what *are* we except our biological and social history? We are bodies,
>and we are relations among bodies. The self is simply the overlap.

...Or not so simply, and perhaps "overlap" is the wrong word, and maybe "are" should, in one or two of the cases above, be "aspire to be", or something else, and maybe there's no clear distinction to be made between biological and social history -- they may, at least in some instances, be two expressions of the same sequence of events.

There's
>no essence to the self, just as there's no essence to human nature. We have
>no nature, either as individuals or as a species. There's a conversation
>going on alright, but it's not within us, because there is no us (aside from
>the conversation itself, that is.)

How do you know this? I don't know it. Even if you feel certain it's true, consider that the search for an essential human quality or complex of qualities might turn up some interesting ideas.


>What is it that makes us unique?

Maybe it's just *feeling* unique that's unique to us.

So what if the computer in our brain is
>accurate to a few more digits than is achievable in the brains of less
>fortunate creatures. The point is, they are simply "other animals."

You've lost me.

We're
>animals too. Arf. Arf. See? Just symbols-- that's all. So the symbols
>spoken by humans happen to involve a little more subtlety than those uttered
>by your typical furry beast. Mere degrees of difference.

I don't know why it's always assumed that the use of words implies greater subtlety in communication. Animals are in fact far subtler than most humans in their ability to read and respond to facial and body gestures -- in their ability to communicate without words. Consider, too, what an advantage humans have who can read each other's unspoken signals over those who cannot. (I'm always hearing of studies that show how much is communicated without words. The BBC I think it was recently reported on another one -- on communication in job interviews. Some huge (way over half) the information transmitted in the interview was non-linguistic.)

The animal has
>the urge to scratch itself. The human has the urge to believe that it has
>some kind of existence beyond scratching itself.
>
>>I've raised, killed and carved chickens, and I think their
>>physical bodies are the most complicated things about them.
>
>A fine occupation. But do you mean to say there's something to a chicken
>other than its "physical body"? You mean there's some kind of nonphysical
>"entity" involved in chickens? Where is this nonphysical chicken? Can you
>point to it?

The comment I began this theme with was that humans are more complicated than chickens. I meant our mental processes. Chickens don't have a whole lot going on upstairs.


>>In a sense, and yet, in the alchemical lab that is the human brain I
>>believe we're capable of coming up with definitions of humanity that go
>>right over evolution's head -- that allow us to leapfrog over the shackles
>>of biology. It's a quaint concept, perhaps, but it has its merits.
>
>So, we're all deep in our brains, playing with our chemicals. Okay... then
>how come we don't know intimate details about the workings of the brain?
>Why are all levels of brain function totally hidden from us?

We're pretty fuckin clueless in some ways, eh.

Yet somehow
>we're in there defining ourselves beyond evolution and breaking the shackles
>of biology. We're leaping around like frogs in there.

No kidding...

We seem to know our
>way around, but really we have no idea whatsoever, and no one has ever seen
>anyone in a brain, so maybe we're really not in there after all because
>there's nothing other than *there* in there. Everywhere we look, inside our
>bodies or out, we're just not there. We're nowhere. At least we know
>*when* we are. We are right now.

...except that we're almost always thinking about (and therefore realising, occupying) some moment other than the one we happen to be residing in....

But the problem with right now is that it
>keeps changing.

A peculiarly human illusion, though, innit -- or I would guess it is, observing other animals. But I think we should define the now as itself and nothing else (what else have we got to pin it down with, otherwise?). Because we're so aware of movement and change we have a hard time accepting the present moment -- since there is no movement or change in any given instant. Zeno's paradox just popped into my head: "That which moves, moves neither in the place in which it is, nor in the place in which it is not."

On many occasions I've been afflicted with the powerful
>sensation that it's the present, only to discover a moment later that it was
>really the past. It's always such a letdown. At first it's not so bad,
>because at least it's the very recent past. What's incredible, though, is
>how far into the past right now is capable of receding. There seems to be
>no limit. No limit to how far away from ourselves we can drift if we're not
>paying attention.

It's dreadful. Oh, to be a dog and never have any doubts about what time it is. It's always now! --Which means I'm always me, without ever having to think about it. Talk about jouissance...

cheers, Joanna

www.overlookhouse.com



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