call no quote happy until it is anonymous

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=call+no+man+happy+until+he+is+dead&aq=1&oq=%22call+no+man+happy+until+h

As you can see from the link – at least according to the results off of Google (presuming the absence of evil in this case…), the quote “call no man happy until he is dead” is attributed to at least 3 philosophers on the first page of results alone.

Perhaps that means it author is finally happy, having acheived a sort of prose immortality that is utterly divorced from any possibility of having his reputation maligned, since no one knows who to malign….  And yet here he is (it’s a solid bet on the pronoun thing, btw) – talking to us.

Who needs Prozac when you’ve got Father Time?

Living in a Material World…

Sooner or later, I think it all comes down to this:  Any way I have of dealing with anyone who thinks that mind is anything other than brain (or an emergent effect of brain or an epiphenomenon of brain, created by it for some evolutionarily advantageous reason) is nothing other than a more or less respectful, more or less jargon-filled way of saying:

“…AWWW….. isn’t ooo a cutie?? ‘ook at da liddle dualist!  Yes, oo’s a cutie!   ‘Es oo is…”

Seriously.  Pinpoint damage to the brain causes pinpoint damage to the self — to language, to morality, even to the ability to recognize faces as faces instead of, for instance, hats.  A stroke can cause you to no longer recognize that your leg belongs to you; Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) can leave you with the belief that you are, in fact, dead.

Unless you want to go to a Spinozan or Leibowitzian level in believing that something coordinates the specific area of brain with a specific skill or trait – even though that area of the brain does not contain or cause it – because some kind of cosmic coordination is occuring….  The mind is spread throughout the brain, with different aspects of it located at different pinpoint areas of the brain.

And that’s just the 19th century version of the argument made based on evidence from unique cases of brain damage causing mind damage.  We also have the post-1950’s version:  activating a neuron in the brain from outside, with electrical stimulation, causes a specific memory or sensation to occur – the same one every time you touch the same neuron.  That’s a rather high bar for a substance dualist to leap:  every little bit of the mind has its own home in a corresponding little bit of brain, and activating that piece of brain electrically alters the “interior” experience of consciousness.  I know, the sustance of mind is:  electricity!

Seriously, people.  Materialism, ok?  Deal.

You cannot get a hall pass from the laws of physics.

Descartes before I’m hoarse

So:  if we examine our own place in the world (once we’ve cogito-ed ourselves back into believing in it), we find that bodies are matter which has been shaped by evolution – that is, matter whose guiding principle is the deployment of realiy for the benefit of itself.  This guidance is stored in/wielded through the genes, which are the essence and principle of embodied life.  These genes are information, and that is the nature of matter; it feeds on knowledge, and lives through it.

But, once having realized that our nature is not the nature of matter – that we can conceive of ourselves as disembodied (look, just play along here) – we come to realize that our nature is separate from that of matter.   What, then, should we assume is the nature of the substance which we are when we are not embodied?

I think there is one excellent, oft-overlooked candidate:  stupidity.  Our bodies, after all, are harmonized with reality through the very principle of their essence; how, then, do we find reality so counterintuitive and difficult to hang onto?  Where does this attachment to wishful thinking, sampling error, the just world fallacy – where does it all come from, when the body itself which we inhabit is maximally adapted for reality?  Do ameobas find certain nutrients taboo?  Do subatomic particles avoid “bad neighborhoods”?  Clearly it is not in matter that our delusional tendencies originate!

These must, then, originate in the substance that animates the bodies, in our souls, which have a substance:  stupidity.  This is the animating principle of humanity!  This is what we truly are!

Indeed, we now have the means to distinguish human life from lower forms of life.  For – since the soul can only be known by its possessor  – we have no knowledge of the interior life (or lack thereof) of any form of matter.  Yet, if we are animated by a sustance, why should we not assume that other forms of life are as well?  Of course, other forms of life behave quite reasonably, presumably because they are animated by a substance which is not so far divorced from matter.  Perhaps they are animated by a substance which mimics the soul but is not the soul; by something which is closer to the essence of matter:  mere reason.

We higher forms of life alone have the means to move beyond this reason, to the animating principle of stupidity.  Without it, we would have been without the imagination and defiance to create the world anew around us, full of industry and pollution, education and willful ignorance, pharmaceuticals and iatrogenic deaths!  Perhaps we should rather call our substance:  fiction.  And feel pity for the reality-based community of life forms, animated by mere reason.