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.

The Elusive Tyranny of Reality

When Dick Cheney comes over all smug about the members of the reality-based community, to whom is he referring?  The vast majority of Americans who have signed on with one of the Big White Guy in the Sky plans (otherwise known as Verizon and Sprint or Catholic and Protestant)?  The Biblical creationists who disdain the findings of Hubble because it can’t locate the firmament?

Probably not, since they all voted for him.  But still.  What about the people who think that our government killed JFK?  What about the people who thought margarine was good for you? (recommendation now reversed by the medical establishment; please forget we ever made it)

Where is this reality-based community?

Or, as a character in a Terry Pratchett book said, “You’re responsible to the truth?  Really?  How?  Does the truth come and slap you in the face if you get it wrong?”

The scary thing about this community is the geographical vagaries and absent infrastructure of the community.  There is a certain lack of governance as well…

What Darth Cheney presumably meant to say was that we liberals lack vision because we feel constrained by what “responsible” “experts” have told us, while the merry band of Reverse Robin Hood Neocons set out to refashion what is possible.  In the Agincourt fashion of Henry V’s “we few, we lucky few” speech, Cheney seeks to rally the impossible dream.

Of course, Harry actually had a plan (the longbow) and, you know, won.  Although there were likewise some gaps in the occupation plan.  Cheney isn’t even eligible for the Eternal Honor Merit Badge pioneered by Thomas Beckett’s change-by-martyrdom strategy.

I think what Cheney fails to grasp (and perhaps Harry and Thom as well, though we have subsequently written that tragic edge into their stories for them) is that we would all dearly love for there to be a reality based community to migrate to – however depressing the atmosphere, however eternally partly cloudy the sky, an address in the real-estate would at least relieve of us of this lingering feeling that a good life is something that one gets away with, quickly, before history changes its judgments on our values or the status quo crushes us under it.  Humanity is the original source of the idea for built-in obsolescence.

But even the tenuous link with that fairy-land of reality (gripped until dawn by a faithful Janet Reno) is not something that just any Thom, Dick or Harry can conquer.

The thing about overthrowing reality is:  it only happens in retrospect, after the next regime of reality is safely established.

What now?

The entire reality – that “collective hunch” as Lily Tomlin put it – is “really” a sea we have created to see the ripples of TheReal in; as if the world were a mirror for the wind, the leaves the bright flash of its hair, the grass the cool sussuration of its skin.  It makes itself up in us.

(All is vanity – actually a vanity, a mirror for the toilette of the unseen).

TheReal and reality cannot exist apart; they are what Romeo and Juliet mistook themselves for/became.

Because with every moment of the Thing, the Colour Out of Space, the Haunting of Hill House… there is always a morning after:  a Midas who cannot bear to see his daughter wear yellow, but a Midas who all the same knows he “has” normality when he sees it interrupted by memory.  A Lazarus who cannot sleep.  But who nonetheless continues.  A Schliemann standing at a little soiree, staring at the clean, buffed nails adorning his hand hard-edged with calluses won from shovel after shovel of Troy’s dirt…  his heartbeats metronome the moments between explanations of the difference between Paris and Paris.

This is a love note – a little Cyrano deBergerac pen pal piece – from reality to TheReal:  we love you.

Every time we take out the trash, we hope the bag will rip and some impossible piece of an artifact will fall out, half a crown, a map, a feather made of night.  A blue bottle that sloshes full but weighs nothing.  A snail shell in which you can see the night sky.

Anything.

We love you.  We cannot live without you.  We need not.  Like Morrison’s Beloved, you return for us.  Like a boomerang, nicked with the blood of some fantastic prey.

Every last breath is a waiting room for deus ex machina; a lobby always full before a door that might yet open.  A thirst that might bring rain.

In our secret hearts, we always hope that the answer to “What now?” will be your face.

You are the wind beneath our world.

You are the glance that need not speak.

You are (,) beloved.