I am going to insert 3-4 thought blocs in here.
In some respects, this blog represents an effort to reconcile not just “conservative” and “liberal” approaches to improving the world, which was my original thought, but also an effort to show that respect for science is consistent with spirtuality; that intellect and emotion require one another to operate properly; that compassion untempered by prudent ruthlessness is damaging; that truth can never exist unmixed with error in a time-based system; and that identity is never a final thing.
A couple nights ago I was in a motel room in Indianpolis–a cheap one which needed a printed warning about noise, doing drugs, and sneaking extra people in the room–and I found myself dreaming someone elses life. I was a young black man, getting locked up for the first time. I felt the sadness, the resignation, the almost inevitability of it; the getting through, the moments of small triumph, and final release.
One can certainly psychoanalyze dreams. Some warrant it. In my view, though, imprints can be left on the world that endure, and they can be picked up. This metaphysical question is less interesting, though, than this: who was I, when I was him? Was I him, me, or someone else? I know these questions pop up a fair amount on this blog. They interest me.
William James, who I will refer to again as easily the most underrated mind produced by the American nation, talked of consciousness as continuous. He felt this was the most useful way of thinking of it, even though we have no way of knowing we were not just placed in a two day trance and our memory removed; or kidnapped by space aliens and our memory eradicated by trauma.
When you sleep, who are you when you do not dream? You are dead, are you not, for all intents and purposes? But you don’t know it. This would be, I suppose, a consolation for those who think death is final: you’ve practiced it many times, and only vanity would compel mourning.
What I wanted to propose, though, is thought I had a while back, and decided to insert here. This is a sort of thought experience, a thought movie, with different scenes, changes of milieu [my God, I am a nerd].
As I have said now quite a few times, I think of thoughts as machines. I see them floating in a stream. If consciousness is a river, thoughts are places you can disembark (from your boat, let us say, although you are the water in the river too) and walk around. They are fixed, and their approximate operation rarely changes. Machines don’t really repair themselves. Once they exist, they tend to operate within narrow limits until they break. And even then, MOST of the machine is still intact.
The brain, the physical brain–which I do not consider the same as the mind, which I think transmits through the physical brain–is a machine. It is a relatively uncreative machine, which has as its major function sorting. It places things in categories. Edward de Bono’s whole career, in some respects, can be seen as prefigured in his book “The Mechanism of Mind“.
The point I wanted to make here is that consciousness, per se, exists as a background to thinking. Thoughts are evanescent things, and emotions are a sort of thought too. This is certainly not original to me–it is an essential element in some forms, perhaps all forms, of Hindu philosophy. I am thinking here of the Samkhya philosophy that is paired with Yogic philosophy. They posit that your “self” is composed of an immortal soul whose sole attribute is consciousness, and “attibutes”, which are material and perishable, and which contain all the personally distinguishing traits we think of as us.
And how unique are any of us, really? Is our identity not largely a function of the people around us? Is this not in part the reason solitude is painful, that it is harder to know who we are, and what to do?
Life is change, and no path can be straight which is not crooked (this is borrowed from Chuang Tze) and if the self is conflated with a mechanical structure–a fixed pattern of thought–then you can’t bend when the road does.
This is the point made in the first line of the “Tao Te Ching”: the path which can be named is not the eternal path. Nothing with fixed attributes can be hewn to.
Few thoughts for a Saturn-day morning.