March 31, 2007
consciousness
Paul Broks in Prospect:
One day I'll be dead. The thought swirled by on a summer's evening in Crete. There was cold beer at my elbow and my sandalled feet were up against the trunk of a pine. A book lay open in my hands but I wasn't reading. I was noticing colours: the bark running blue-grey to rust, the red geranium. I was noticing insects and animals: the tiny green bug on my forearm, the microscopic orange thing that dropped on to the book, no bigger than a full stop, the ginger cat stretching in the shade. The air was filled with the din of cicadas and Mediterranean scents. I sipped my beer and savoured the moment.
The open book was Nicholas Humphrey's Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness. I'd stopped reading by the second page, derailed by Joe King's email. Joe is 20 years old and severely disabled. He is writing to tell Humphrey of his concern that, when he dies, "this crippled body might be all I have." Yes, Joe, I'm afraid so. "Do u believe consciousness can survive the death of the brain?" he writes. No, Joe, it can't. Why kid ourselves? These were my answers, not Humphrey's. I turned them over as the sun sank. I could imagine Joe's disappointment. Humphrey would give us his reply in due course, but, for now, he was focusing on the young man's question because it revealed something important about the nature of consciousness, which is that consciousness matters to us. It matters more than anything. Of course it does. Yet the fact of its mattering so much goes mostly unremarked by scientists and philosophers of mind.One day I'll be dead. It's an oddly exhilarating thought. Something unimaginable—nothingness—awaits us all.
More here.
Posted by Sughra Raza at 08:35 AM | Permalink
Comments
The default "us" in "consciousness matters to us", as well as the default "consciousness", aren't provable, much less proven, constructs. They're assumptions, based on experiential evidence and logical trains that are razored down to the bare minimum, but assumptions still.
In that schema the whole species/life thing is just an aggregate of self-interests, and can never be anything more. In that schema the blank purposelessness of accidentally-evolved individual conscious mind is met at a dark crossroads on the edge of the void by absolutely nothing at all rising up to meet it - nothing in conjunction with nowhere, throwing all values and valence back on that individual "self". Making the self the metric of everything, knowing, morality, reason - all.
Nothing, in the context of identity and being, is greater than the self, and there's nothing important or worthwhile that's smaller than the self.
Just "self" and its mechanical relationships, sitting there contemplating its own wonderful and astonishing presence in a big tank of inconsequential matter, along with other, equally separate and equally wholly-contained selves in exactly the same boat. No greater beings to worry about, a few lesser, unimportant, sometimes useful ones.
Yet possibly this "us" is still essentially an unknown, barely even glimpsed in outline, picked up in bits and fragments too widely separate to make any coherent image, yet, and for all the brilliance of Dennett's theorizing the most anybody's got on consciousness, the heart of the "self", is utilitarian description - what it does is what it is.
It's at the edges of what we are where the real stuff is happening I'll bet, where the real accurate definitions will come from, and they're still in the hard-to-see-into, outside the reach of our instruments.
Rational narcissism is still narcissism, even though it lacks the tang and flourish, and transcendent potential, of more aesthetic self-involvement.
Posted by: Roy Belmont | Mar 31, 2007 3:43:32 PM
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