Spirit

When I was younger, I decided that a soul was some quality of the flesh, that my body both was and contained what I deemed my "soul."  If I possessed such a thing, I reasoned, it seemed unlikely that it would be any less than everything I was, my body naturally being at least a part of my self.

On the foundation of this definition, I began to explore its implications for what people said of souls: that they were our eternal aspect, that I'd live on in such a state after my body died, etc.  While most of the explanations I heard were vague and decidedly fluffy, science had already pretty well laid out what would happen to my body when I died: I would turn to dust if left on my own, but more likely go to nourishing other living creatures long before then, being decomposed by them in the process.  What those creatures, bacteria and worms and bugs mostly, consumed of my flesh would provide them with energy for living while becoming a permanent element of their own varied compositions.  This was a cyclical process, I saw, for those living creatures I contributed to with my death would themselves one day die and be consumed in their turn, starting the process all over.

Even back then, I wasn't satisfied with the offhanded dismissal such a process got.  Perhaps in response to this, I dreamt up my own terminology to try and salvage some of the wonder I saw so clearly: living things became "life-structures," death became their "collapse," and the vast interplay of the living which was the stage for these a "life pool."  My death, then, would be the time when all the organisms composing my body ceased to work collectively toward my continued existence; those constituent organisms, the substance of which was the only thing I could bring myself to call "life," would then merge back into the life pool to contribute to other life-structures' existence.

To this was added an idea from Chaos Theory, namely that of the accumulation of minute(as in very small, not 60 seconds) influences.  What I took from this was that everything that happened to anything left some imprint, however small, on its subject; the sun shines on a rock for an hour, and that rock is forever different than it would have been had it not undergone said exposure; everything that happens has an effect on what it happens to, I guess.  And if this is true of simple, unthinking things like rocks, how much more relevant to dynamic, melodramatic rocks like us.  Our experiences, then, left an imprint, changed us in some way, and that change was carried on to whatever consumed us at our deaths, etc.  This, I decided, was the purpose of life, to change through experience of the world and so contribute to the dynamic character of the life pool.  I didn't have any clue what the purpose of that was, mind you; it's just the process as I saw it at work.

Maybe it's just me, but even back then this seemed so much cooler than going to an afterlife where you just sat around being happy all the time.

Recently, between studying Tool lyrics and a fascinating book on brain dichotomy, I've been developing what I think of as a religious outlook: a sense for the spiritual, or other side of matter; ideas of what life means and is for, and what happens when it ends; a sometimes overwhelming feeling of wonder.  I decided that we're all the same being, manifesting as individuals for the sake of experience unavailable to us in our unified form, and that such experience contributes to the character of our unified self when we return to that state.

I say recently, but I've been months mulling these ideas over; I'm sure I listened to the album Lateralus at least a hundred times over the course of the summer.  All the while, I felt I was discovering something new; not part of reality or at all resolved with it, but something else, something perhaps connected to reality through us as conscious beings; as personalities influencing material bodies, ideas made flesh as it were, we're the closest thing to a marriage of the real and unreal as I can imagine.

It wasn't until now that I realized why this idea, of interconnectedness and a single consciousness and such, rang so true for me even though I had long since discarded all that religious tomfoolery in favor of a purely rational outlook on the world.  It's a new perspective, a new degree of wonder and understanding, given to an old idea.  It's us as aspects of a unified whole, and that whole as a dynamic living consciousness best described as Life.  Of course the world isn't just something around us, but neither is it just something we're a part of; it's us.  Like, you know: Us.  Consciousness is important, remarkable and valuable in this scheme; it's how we've been able to accelerate the evolutionary process beyond anything nature ever did unconsciously.  We are a new step, one that takes the process of steps into its own hands and makes a conscious effort out of the automatic imperative that defines life: Growth.  Advancement.  Becoming.

Spots

Everyone has issues that are near and dear to them, hangups which corner an otherwise sound and sensible intelligence into stubbornly defending inherently indefensible positions; inherently, I say, because any belief which assumes an unchanging, ultimate truth to be in the possession of such limited creatures as we are must inevitably be less than wholly true.  In my own life I call such beliefs blind spots, points of error one is incapable of even noticing due to limitations of perspective.  When such misapprehensions are pointed out to us, we most often react emotionally, in extreme cases shutting down or even fleeing the conversation.

During the two years & change I spent identifying as an atheist, reading atheism-inspired blogs and articles and such, the most common blind spot I was aware of was religion.  Indeed, within a year of my first flame war on the subject, I was very nearly convinced that religion was THE prototypical blind spot, that most if not all the ills of human society could be cured if only those poor misguided people could be talked out of blind faith in their bronze age fairy tales.  Though I like to think I've relaxed in my pretentiousness toward theology and metaphysics (while maintaining that organized religion uses these concepts to exploit those hungry for connection), it still seems that religious identity is a touchy subject to those who maintain one, though I now suspect this is more a matter of identity than religious beliefs themselves.

Another such blind spot I've encountered is faith in reason, the idea that truth is always and only to be arrived at by logical progression through known quantities.  Indeed, it was my disillusion of this idea that ultimately drove me from the atheist movement, which underhandedly seems to equate disbelief in a creator with a purely mechanistic view of reality.  Similar reactions may be observed when challenging any number of issues on which someone may "take a position:" abortion, democracy, racial equality, etc.  The one subject, though, which I feel is most commonly a blind spot for us all is that of free will.

We aren't all sure we have it, of course; some are quite as well convinced that we don't.  What interests me is the startling lack of fence-sitters on this issue; there are plenty of agnostics in the world, extending their perspective into all of the above mentioned subjects, and yet free will tends to be an all-or-nothing position.  Most of us are sure we have it, I think, while some thrive on the novelty of saying that, No, free will is an illusion, your choices are decided before ever you are born, etc.  For my own part, I've usually favored the latter of these positions, with the caveat that our capacity for the insane frees us from the restrictions of rationalism imposed on us by the rational universe; it was only in doing the crazy, I thought, the weird and utterly ridiculous, that one could truly be free.

I still hear the ring of truth in this, freedom through chaos, but what I propose now is a relatively simple, and perhaps more rationally palatable, definition: free will, a matter of degree, exists inasmuch as does awareness of one's options.  Or, in fortune cookie format: You can only make the choices you know you have.  Slavery, then, is imposed, not by restraining one's body, but by restraining their mind; the method of this is imposed ignorance, and its fruits abound in the world today.  Likewise, desisting from the exploration of our abilities is the unconscious surrender of our own innate freedoms.  This can be a difficult process, I admit; if being confronted with our present limitations from without is uncomfortable, what masochism must be necessary to force ourselves to do so from within?  And sometimes, yes, an outside perspective is necessary for us to notice what we can't see, but the choice to actually look at such things must be made for oneself.

Things

How do you know there's anything outside your own head?  The only evidence you have for the world comes from your senses, after all; nothing more than electrical signals.  What if you're the only person there is, and everything else is just in your imagination?


This is an idea which can be credited, I think, largely to philosophers' pleasure in messing with people.  It is the sort of self-justifying skepticism which dilutes and destroys knowledge, attempting to measure reality by methods applicable only to the spiritual (that is, the unreal); similar arguments pervade the political world, where misinformation is the coin of the realm.  And yet in their own minds, people know better; they know that there is such a creature as truth, that there are immaterial forms of existence, that the world is a thing beyond their own selves.  Such knowledge is born of human experience, of our interactions with the world and what those interactions produce in and around us.

But, science culture that we are, we insist on analysis, on tracing the mechanism of a thing before we admit its existence.  There is no particular harm in this; indeed, analysis is the intermediary step to developing any sort of knowledge, and so a great good.  The problem, as I see it, is one of vocabulary, as so many hindrances to understanding seem ultimately to be.  "How do you know there is a world, when you rely on your nervous system to describe it to you?"  To be sure, it makes as much sense to wonder how one can claim to walk while blithely assuming their feet do it for them.  But I get ahead of myself.

I don't suggest an independent reality, mind; the more I discover of the world, the less I am inclined to suggest an independent anything.  But neither can I bring myself to see the world as Only mind.  Consciousness pervades, yes, but it does only throughout we the conscious.  Rather, I see a reciprocal relationship between ourselves and the Out There, the world beyond our minds.  As such, I cannot begin to imagine what such a world might be like because, as that sad philosophy major with his third beer is so fond of reminding us, all we really see is light waves, not the actual things around us; what I see as green and what you see as green could be totally different and we wouldn't even know, blah blah blah.  Still, this is tripe born of sense; with only secondary effects to judge, primary causes can never be more than mystery.

It is here that science would have us stop our inquiry.  For, indeed, if secondary effects are all we have available to judge, they are in fact the things-in-themselves, as far as intents and purposes go.  This perspective fails us, however, when we begin to wonder about our relationship to those primary causes; when you say that the light wave is the thing-in-itself, you run up against such absurdities as reality changing when measured, and physics brings us full circle back to the latest in ancient Greek mental masturbation.

Mind analyzes matter, and analysis creates mind.  This is how the world, and the self, grow; few might be expected to object to the idea of a dynamic consciousness (or perhaps not; such is a staple of my own outlook, at least..), but a growing material world is a trickier notion to wrap the materialist's mind around.  It is a perspective I've found referred to as the emergent nature of reality, the tendency for characteristics of the universe to be discovered more or less in lockstep with our developing ability to analyze them.  To say that atoms, for instance, predated atomic theory is a given of the scientific outlook; it is as well to say that the depths and horizons of reality yet unknown are legion now, truly and literally existing beyond our current scope of inquiry.  To say that these truths exist independent of us the inquirers is a novel instance of an ancient problem involving sound of a tree in the forest; if a law of the universe manifests itself as apparent chaos, as all laws do to a sufficiently limited perspective, does the law yet exist?  Which came first, math or the mathematician?

I don't think a scientific perspective would have and real difficulty with the above questions, though perhaps some impatience with the flighty existential speculations; Yes, there are laws of the universe we don't know yet; Yes, those laws are still laws now; No, discovering them doesn't influence their essential existence, just our understanding of it.  Such, again, is like unto my take on reality: Yes, it's there; No, I don't know quite what it is, but I'm learning from the ways it manifests itself to me.  Where I may perhaps differ from the researcher of things concrete is my idea of the goal of research, and its limitations.  See, I don't think there can ever, in principle, be an endpoint to discovery; there may come a time when the human mind overreaches it's inherent limitations (though such is far from certain), but I believe an intelligence of theoretically infinite capacity could form new knowledge of the universe for as long as time allowed; indefinitely, if time were ever overcome as a limiting factor.  It seems absurd to me, given the progress discovery has made in human history, that there should ever be a wall around the universe that could not be dissected, or a truly "smallest" particle, though these are the white whales of scientific inquiry, itself at heart just a quest for conclusions.  No, the goal is the growing, both for us in our learning and the universe in its being.

One last point, tangent to my subject here but touched briefly in its introduction, is the fallacy of asking how one can know something exists when all evidence for it comes by way of the human nervous system.  I think this arises from accidentally doubling one's primary identity; claiming to both be and have a brain, then wailing that you can never know more than your brain tells you.  This is of course true as far as it goes, because one cannot know things without their brain to do the knowing.  We do exist as a consciousness additional to our brains, but such existence doesn't have the capacity for thought; spirit cannot remember things, cannot reflect on experiences, has no cognitive capacity whatsoever, because these are abilities which arise from the mechanism, the physical structure, of the brain.  These abilities, I suspect, are why we as spirit manifest ourself as such baggage-ridden, divided creatures, but such is one of my own outer horizons, and this is not the hour to go exploring afresh.

Worms

I think it's only our limited perspectives, and the conventions of language they have generated, that ever supposed that time was something that could pass us by.  December 13th 1942 8:47:54 pm is when it is; the idea of its moving somewhen else is only even conceivable because I can string together words to describe it.

No, time is, to my mind, like unto dark glass: the more you try to look through, the less you can see, and yet this a world we fight desperately to traverse and survive.  No friendly river, this; time is solid, unmoving, hemming in our helpless mortality on all sides.  We fight it, not because we are strong, or proud, or even desperate, but simply because we must.  This helpless struggle in the dark, groping for any edge, any leverage we can use to pull ourselves another inch through something so unyielding, is part and parcel with existence, though not without its price.

Oh yes, glass yields only as shards and splinters, and the analogy holds; this hopeless tunneling through infinity will scrape us down to nothing.  First skin, then blood, and finally bones will be stripped from us, left floating in the wake that is our lifetime.  We go on, still, be cause to move through is to live; we reach out, still, searching for something time can't scrape away, something we can call eternal.

8-11-2011

I get it.  I experience the world, then I contemplate to see the other side of that experience, which teaches me what effect that experience will have on me, which refines my skill at choosing my experiences, which makes the next ones that much richer, more valuable for contemplation, more educational for my future choice of experience, on and on.  This is why I do it.

If logic seems circular, that just means you're getting it right; not teetering the truth on your fragile faith in your assumptions, trying to force the world to be as simple as one thing after another after another from start to finish.  Truth is not an end or a goal, it is a path taken; a spiral you cannot see or draw in its entirety, just trace as far as you will.

I'm finding the words, completing these ideas so I can build on them.  In sum, a good day :)

Postscript:

It's important to note that experience isn't necessarily beneficial, doesn't inevitably lead to greater understanding; some skill at distinguishing the good from the bad is the object of the education mentioned above.

7-3-2011

Every human head carries around equipment for two fundamentally different perspectives on reality; a brain can think in two different ways, see the world from two different angles, if you will.  Analogous to binocular vision, this duality allows us to perceive the depth of concepts just as having two eyes lets us distinguish the distances of real world objects.  

No sane human, however, would ever suggest that there are two cyclopses living in their head, each seeing the world from a slightly different angle and then quickly comparing notes to judge distances; yet that is essentially what happens.  Similarly, it is a mark of mental illness to suggest that your own head houses two distinct people; you might think of things this way, and then that way, but in each process the goal of the act of thinking is the same, so there is only one identity involved.  

Imagine, however, physical barriers of bone and distance.  Imagine as well a different, more difficult, method of communication; within a single brain, it's a thin band of fibers called a corpus callosum carrying electrical signals; what if it were words and body language?  Does it become sane to call yourself different people then?  Does following conflicting processes to conflicting goals suddenly make sense because communication becomes less efficient?

5-27-2011

Let's suspend disbelief for a moment, see what there is to see with eyes unfocused..

There is an entity; from the start, this is a woefully inadequate description of the subject at hand. Emphasis may help to somewhat compensate for this deficiency in what follows, but for the sake of convenience one must, for the moment, accept such a gross understatement. “An,” indeed..

There is an entity which is, in fact, all things: everything that can be described or even obliquely referred to, and everything else as well. This entity spans, not just one piddling universe, but the grand intercosmic dramas that give rise to universes. Its depth begins at the thin sliver of reality humans can directly observe, and extends through and throughout the vast majority they cannot. It is all matter, all energy, all motion and, so much more, it is the progenitor of these same things. It is its own creator, maker of itself as everything, birthed in a purely rational process which is nevertheless simply beyond the scope of human comprehension.

It has a particular gender, opinions about whatever the current political issues are, a strong desire that people who talk about it a lot should be given lots of money, and a suggestively vitriolic hatred of gay people. Also, bears a remarkable resemblance to the cultural norms of whatever small handful of humanity it reveals itself to at any given time.

I think it would be better for everyone, especially believers, if people thought about their deities more and talked about (or listened about, rather) them less. There would be less inconsiderate violence and hatred, to be sure, and maybe smooth talkers wouldn't run the world quite as much as they do. Further, the thought experiment of speculating about one's creator might help people to a better understanding of their own moral responsibilities; or not, but that's beside the point in any event. My point is only a manifesto of my own: that the absurdity of the above description, of trying to resolve what people said about their gods with what such a being would actually have to be to exist, is why I've never been capable of religion, even when I did entertain the possibility of having an imaginary friend with superpowers.

5-15-2011

We are walking chemistry, as determined in our being and actions as an explosion, and yet we have this thing we call consciousness; we experience ourselves, and react to that experience, changing it. Calcium ions jump back and forth in my head, causing me to experience the idea of calcium ions jumping back in forth in my head, causing them to jump still more. And yet, stir up just a tiny pinch of brain cells, and consciousness goes away, though everything else remains the same.  This big collaborative effort of millions of neurons, as much as we enjoy it, just seems incidental to our physical existence.

I wonder what else does this. Do stars think they're deciding to explode? Could there be some sense in which it's true?

5-5-2011

Several months ago, while they were waiting in line for something or other, a woman's baby began to squirm and cry quietly. Naturally, the woman responded by patting the infant on the back while making cooing noises and jostling it gently in her arms. I can't say that I'd never witnessed such a display before; working in a department store, it's as commonplace as many other personal moments in people's lives. This one affected me, however, and not just with the “D'aaw” emotions you'd expect. That child reminded me, more than anything else, of a monkey; the scene, something out of Animal Planet.

It wasn't the first time I'd compared babies to animals. Speculating on ideas of humanity and the self, I've often wondered at the apparently gradual humanizing of babies, whose behavior suggests less intelligence than that of puppies, into creatures with minds capable of interpersonal connection. For a long time I'd tried to figure a definite line in early childhood development when the ego sprang into being; indeed, I'd almost given up hope of figuring this out before I have my own child to experiment on. The scene at work, however, changed the problem for me, made me look at it from a different angle. Rather than drawing a line at where the humanity began, I thought to find the point when people stopped being apes.

The mother, first: waiting in line for food, comforting her distressed child, likely en route to a home with a family unit, possibly including other children and/or a mate. Hmm, nothing there. No great authority on what “people do,” I decided then to think over my own activities and extrapolate from there; I'm not so different from others, so it stood to reason that my desires and methods for obtaining them should be similar to those of people in general. That day I'd: woken up, eaten, showered, played on Facebook for a bit, then taken the bus to work. Well...Facebook was certainly beyond the realm of mere animals, but then I hadn't invented the thing, merely used it; arduous indeed if you've never used a computer or keyboard before, but I was raised with such trappings of the communication revolution. Likewise, the internal combustion engine I utilized to get to work was a technological marvel, but not my own; just another achievement of humanity that I knew how to use.

Technology, then, was something definitively human, something mere animals couldn't make. So creating technology could be called an act of real live humans. Great, except that my spiffy new definition applied to only the tiniest fraction of homo sapiens that have ever lived. Try as I might, I couldn't bring myself around to anything else people did that other social animals didn't, so I decided instead to expand my definition of technology. There's science that precedes the actual inventions, which means experimentation, a process always initiated by hypothesis; hypothesis, then, could be expanded to include the whole of abstract thought(yes I get this bored at work).

From this angle, technology is relegated to the incidental; imagination, the ability to create ideas, is the dividing line I was looking for. Babies become people, then, when they learn enough about the world they live in to start speculating about what else is in it. What still bothers me, though, is that I had to do such philosophical cartwheels to get to this; why I couldn't just look at people, with all their creativity and original ideas, and trace back the continuity of this state from their early childhoods.

Ah, well. Working in a department store, you don't always see people at their best.

1-25-2011

It may be naive of me, but whenever I spectate conflicts of opinion I can't help but believe that the root of the disagreement is one of vocabulary; I think the logical terminus of any rational argument is in the differing interpretations of some particular word or words; similarly, I think irrational arguments(i.e, what's right or important or somesuch) inevitably devolve into disputes over values.  The words most vulnerable to this kind of divergent interpretation almost exclusively describe very abstract concepts, things like freedom or love or trust.  Reading debates and cross-criticisms between atheists and religious people, as I often do, I've noticed another such word which is apparently susceptible to this sort of double-definition.

"Reason," according to common usage, works as a bridge between circumstance and action(i.e, "My reason for having done something is that it seemed like a good idea at the time.").  There are two ways to interpret this concept: as a motivation, or as a logical conclusion.  In practice, these two perspectives work almost seamlessly with each other; logical analysis connects one's present circumstances, through various courses of action, to a number of likely outcomes.  Personal values then dictate which outcome is most desirable, and the appropriate behavior is undertaken.  So, one may say that they do something, "...because I want outcome x," or just as validly, "...because I have concluded that doing so will result in outcome x."  

One phrase that I've encountered often while reading religious arguments is, "Reason to believe," and I think that its variety of usages and interpretations is near the heart of the entire debate.  One may believe something because one wants to, or because it is a logical conclusion.  Hence, I can both have every reason to believe in the existence of a benevolent creator (because it would be comforting), and no reason whatsoever to believe in the same (because I've never seen any evidence for its existence).  A dying person has a very good reason for believing in a paradisaical afterlife (death is scary) and, at the same time, no more reason for doing so than they did before they found out they were dying (inasmuch as the world hasn't changed from then to now).

Interestingly, I now think the responsibility for this confusion is somewhat shared by the word "believe."  I think if you consider it as a volitional action, something about which you have a choice, then it makes sense to have a reason-as-motivation to believe something, since believing has consequences like any other action and can be weighed accordingly.  On the other hand, if the act of believing is something inevitable given some particular circumstances, "choosing" to do it is as absurd an idea as choosing to be subject to the laws of physics.

I could say that we each consider ourselves the one true god of our own mind, making nothing that occurs there inevitable.  I could dissect the practice of denial as a proof of the volitional nature of belief.  I could describe integrity (as internal consistency) as a value, give arguments for its utility, and contrast it with the act of denial.  I could spend hours splitting off into new ideas, because that's how my head works.  But I started this post with a goal, dammit, and have now accomplished the same.  Peace out. 

12-9-2010

Life does not throw buses.

I really think its the movies that encourage an attitude to the contrary.  Every fiction you've ever seen in the theater had a main character undergoing some huge life-changing challenge and, usually, emerging on top.  Even if they lost(a degree of realism that rarely survives Hollywood), they were still the victim of some huge and intimidating trial.  The lesson conveyed, in either case, is, "I could handle that!"  Movies are good at this, giving us a perspective so clear and objective that solutions seem simple and obvious.

In reality, however, challenges are neither so remarkable nor so occasional; life throws, not buses, but breakups, and uncomfortable shoes, and annoying coworkers.  Its easy to discount such small fry as incidental, to keep focused on getting ready for whatever life throws at you.  But those big, heroic monsters on the horizon are ephemeral; its easy to get worn down by inches holding out for that final battle, losing all the little wars.

Life is in no part a prelude to anything else.  Look back over the last hundred or so hours you've experienced; that is exactly what you've got to be prepared to deal with.  Trouble getting out of bed, a weirdly pulled muscle in your back, someone cutting you in line for coffee: these are the best trials we're likely to get, and they are what we must learn from if we are to grow as people.

You could get hit by a bus.  Your parent's could die, though not very often.  Someone could blow up your place of work, killing thousands of people on the day you called in sick.  Or didn't.  Historically speaking, big things do happen; statistically, they just don't.  You die, you stop existing; someone else dies, you take a week of bereavement leave from work and go bury them.  But you won't crash a plane in the wilderness and get hunted by a bloodthirsty bear.  A psychopath isn't going to kidnap and torture you.  You aren't going to meet an interesting stranger on a train through France who turns out to be a witch, or possibly Satan.

You might, however, spend five years watching a parent with Alzheimer's fall apart and try not to hate them for it.  That bus, if it ever shows up, might leave you a quadriplegic; not yet thirty, and already looking forward to a lifetime of home care and soft foods.  You could get cancer, and spend two years in radiation therapy.

I guess what I'm getting at is, bad things happen, but not all at once; those big, life-changing milestones that take a day or two in movies last for years  in real life.  If you want to prepare for that, learn not to let the little things hurt you; the biggest tragedies in life are just seemingly endless strings of petty annoyances and discomforts.