THE PURSUIT OF WORLDLINESS
 A blog by Barry Edelson


CRUEL JOKE 6:

I Think, Therefore
I'm Immortal



QUERIOUS
I finally finished that tome you lent me.

ANTAGONĒ
The one about consciousness?

QUERIOUS
Yes.

ANTAGONĒ
What did you think?

QUERIOUS
It put me to sleep.

ANTAGONĒ
So you didn't enjoy it?

QUERIOUS
It's not exactly the kind of book one derives pleasure from.

ANTAGONĒ
I don't know about that. Some people find the topic fascinating.

QUERIOUS
The fact that human beings are conscious is remarkable, but I don't happen to find these pseudo-scientific polemics about it by Dennett and his crowd at all interesting.

ANTAGONĒ
Didn't you learn anything new?

QUERIOUS
Yes, but what you really want to know is whether the book brought me any closer to an understanding of human consciousness, and the answer is no. I can't deny that it was provocative and even sensible at times, but a premise that makes me twist my mind into contortions to follow the line of argument is doomed to be thoroughly unconvincing. Consciousness is the kind of subject that seems to recede the closer one gets to it. In a month or two I'll be hard pressed to describe anything I've just read.

ANTAGONĒ
That may, in fact, be a defining characteristic of consciousness, that it resists understanding. But before you forget, tell me quickly how you would describe the book's unimpressive premise.

QUERIOUS
Well, the assumption that consciousness is merely a mechanical function of the brain — albeit an extremely complex one — flies in the face of experience. The way our minds interact with the world around us is so spectacularly vivid and endlessly original that there is no way to reduce it to a simple set of objective propositions without losing its essence entirely. Also, these self-styled philosophers rely too heavily on the analogy of the mind as a kind of computer. I understand why the computer happens to be a convenient point of reference at present, but it's obviously a huge mistake to predicate any understanding of the mind on such an inadequate comparison.

ANTAGONĒ
Why is it inadequate? It's only being used as a metaphor.

QUERIOUS
I think you're too tolerant. Computers are currently being applied quite literally to this question, not only by this particular author but by most of others researcher he cites in the book as well. How can they be so narrow-minded as to explain away the extraordinary mystery of the mind by comparing it with a dumb machine that didn't exist half a century ago? If anything, it's the computer which is a dim reflection of the minds that created it, not the other way around. The mind is most emphatically not like a computer in any serious respect, not least because we know exactly how computers operate, while we still haven't a clue about how the mind works.

ANTAGONĒ
Notwithstanding all the volumes written about the nature of consciousness and the vast quantities of pertinent research on the subject in recent years?

QUERIOUS
If this book you've given me is the most definitive attempt to explain consciousness that has yet been produced, I, for one, would insist that the entire enterprise has been a colossal waste of time and energy.

ANTAGONĒ
It's human nature to explore the unknown. They're not going to stop just because you find the effort fruitless so far.

QUERIOUS
In the first place, I don't believe that the nature of consciousness is simply unknown, but intrinsically unknowable. And in the second place, good luck to them if that's how they want to spend their talents. Just don't expect me to accept any time soon that a bunch of Ivy League eggheads has cracked the code of the human soul.

ANTAGONĒ
Haven't you just leaped into an entirely different sphere with the word 'soul'?

QUERIOUS
Not in the least, and the fact that you can ask such a question shows just how far afield our thinking has gone on this subject. Where in all these intellectual meanderings is there a single reference to the spirit of man? What makes anyone think that an explication of the mechanics of how we think will lead to an understanding of what makes us human? People are still reading Shakespeare and Dante after all these centuries, not to mention Homer and Virgil and the Bible, for the depth of meaning they offer about the human condition. But how many scientific discoveries of the 16th century or earlier can you name that have any relevance to modern life? A clever discovery or two just doesn't add up to a portrait of experience, and these treatises you find so scintillating will be as quickly forgotten as the work of medieval alchemists.

ANTAGONĒ
So you would toss science out the window in favor of — what? Superstition? Sophistry?

QUERIOUS
Of course not, but an exploration of human consciousness isn't science at all, it's a parlor game for professors. It's not just that the problem is very difficult; Einstein's theory of relativity is very difficult, too, but I could manage to explain it to you if I had to. What we're talking about is nothing but pointless speculation.

ANTAGONĒ
Only if you're right that we will never be able to explain it. Which you cannot really know.

QUERIOUS
I'll take my chances. In any event, whatever twisted theorizing that I am able to glean from a book like this about how my brain makes sense of the universe isn't going to alter my understanding and appreciation of that universe one iota. Trying to understanding consciousness is a little like trying to look at one's own nose — it's just impossible to see it without the aid of a mirror, which provides an image which is too self-referential to lead to anything but foolish vanity. And there isn't even a mirror that can show you your soul, or your consciousness, or whatever you choose to call it.

ANTAGONĒ
Just because consciousness eludes our understanding doesn't mean there isn't a perfectly rational explanation for it. That we happen to perceive ourselves and our place in the world through the use our meager senses is a poor rationale for abandoning the search for answers. If I were to tell you the Earth really isn't a solid object at all but actually a molten blob with a wafer-thin crust, you would say that you know that perfectly well, that's it's a known fact, and so what? But until a few decades ago — the blink of an historical eye — this simple fact of geology was unfathomable to every person who ever set foot on solid ground and, if suggested, would have been met with derision. Our sensations and intuitions about the world are not necessarily in concert with objective circumstances. Consciousness is the most fiendishly difficult aspect of the world for humans to comprehend because it stands directly in the way of its own definition. If researchers follow a circuitous route in pursuit of consciousness, it's because they have no other choice. As you said yourself, if you stare at it head on, you just can't see it.

QUERIOUS
You are misunderstanding my objections. Consciousness can't be explained, not because our rational faculties are limited, but because it derives from something which is beyond our faculties altogether.

ANTAGONĒ
If I understand you correctly, the reason you think consciousness is unknowable is because people possess an immortal soul that is beyond the reaches of mortal intellect. Is that right?

QUERIOUS
You could say that, yes. Though I don't see how immortality is relevant to the issue.

ANTAGONĒ
The soul is generally presumed to be immortal. Otherwise, what's the point of having one?

QUERIOUS
I take it from your tone that you don't believe you possess a soul, immortal or otherwise?

ANTAGONĒ
Most emphatically not. I find the notion preposterous.

QUERIOUS
You would prefer to believe that your brain is a biological data processor rather than believe you have a soul?

ANTAGONĒ
What I would prefer is irrelevant. I simply cannot accept figments of the human imagination as though they were irrefutable statements of fact. The soul is one of those superstitious fantasies that people have conjured out of thin air to explain away matters they have neither the intelligence nor learning to contemplate in a rational manner. I will readily concede that there is a great deal more to our humanity than you will find in the theories and thought experiments that scientists or philosophers have so far managed to scrape together, but it is an intolerable syllogism to assert that we therefore have a soul that is distinct from the body. In addition to being an obvious reflection of our fear of mortality, a belief in the soul is a manifestation of the very phenomenon we're discussing. All living things have a highly developed sense of self, and are inherently able to distinguish themselves from their surroundings. This may seem too obvious to be argued, but it is by no means a simple concept and it was certainly not inevitable that life on Earth would turn out this way. A mountain has no awareness of its existence, but even the simplest microorganism does possess, in a purely physical sense, a kind of rudimentary consciousness. The difference between a rock and, say, a sea anemone is that the rock is not engaged in the act of self-preservation while the anemone is concerned with nothing else. The biological purpose of self-awareness has remained unchanged since life began: to ensure that a being knows the difference between itself and its environs so that it can keep itself alive. In homo sapiens, this mechanism has been elaborated into a more sophisticated consciousness of self, but it is no more than a different means of achieving self-defense. The problem with humans is that self-consciousness inevitably creates an illusion of self-importance, as well. Just like other animals, we can see the world only through the prism of our own senses, but we humans go one step further and are unable to imagine the universe without ourselves in it. Even worse, we seldom cannot imagine the world without ourselves at the very center of all things. Our conscious fear of death leads us to believe that the struggle for survival is not merely aimed at the preservation of our bodies but of consciousness itself, to keep our minds alive, as it were. Immortality is therefore not a fact but a wish, an illusion bred of consciousness and inseparable from it.

QUERIOUS
Do you imagine we could survive for a moment without believing in our own immortality? Without it, we would live in constant dread of our demise, and would be unable to sustain our existence at all.

ANTAGONĒ
Absolutely true, but how does that prove we have a soul? You're arguing now in favor of immortality as a necessary illusion, rather than an eternal truth. Animals don't need to bother with these elaborate inventions because they are unable to contemplate the future beyond their next meal. But the human mind, by its nature, can't help but ponder the universe and wonder what we're doing in it, and therefore needs to forestall any consideration of death by constructing a thicket of illusions to keep itself focused on the task at hand, whatever that may be. Belief in an immortal soul may be a useful tool for living, but the mere fact that we are able to imagine that we have one doesn't make it so. It is only further proof that consciousness is more mysterious than we have so far imagined.

QUERIOUS
Your rigidly rationalist way of looking at life cuts you off from consideration of everything that can't be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. You insist that everything in the universe is knowable, if only we had the ability to perceive it, but whether or not our consciousness is actually extinguished at death is inherently unknowable. Mortal man cannot, by definition, know what happens when the lights finally go out, which is irrefutable evidence that it is literally impossible to know everything. I'm willing to give human intuition the benefit of the doubt in some cases. What makes you so certain that faith in immortal life isn't so compelling because it happens to be true?

ANTAGONĒ
Oh, come on. Whose version of the afterlife are we to accept as truth, then? Am I supposed to sign on to some fairy tale about the soul's eventual passage to some lovely, spiritual plane? And where exactly is this mythical landscape supposed to be? You can't possibly answer that, because every system of faith in every era of mankind has had a different answer entirely, all of them lacking. Isn't it astonishing that Dante's vision of hell, imagined in the 13th century, looks remarkably like a medieval torture chamber? Am I honestly expected to believe that my soul — which is supposed to be a non-physical entity — faces the possibility of eternal bodily suffering in some inescapable pit of fire because no clergyman ever got around to sprinkling water from the baptismal font over my head and thereby expiating my share of the culpability for the sins of the two hapless alleged ancestors of all mankind?

QUERIOUS
Your ridicule of an imaginary idea of an afterlife fails to address the question of whether there is more to our consciousness than the electrochemical wiring in our skulls.

ANTAGONĒ
Imaginary? Ask the Irish Catholic boys I grew up with in my neighborhood if the priests' passionate exhortations about fire and brimstone were intended to be nothing more than metaphors for the punishment they could expect to receive if they persisted in their sins of the flesh. It was very real to them, I can assure you.

QUERIOUS
But it's still a different matter from the fundamental questions of consciousness and immortality. The excesses of specific religious practices don't disprove the existence of a spiritual side of man. Nor do they even disprove the truth of church teachings.

ANTAGONĒ
The only reason why this silly argument about the distinction between the body and the soul is even alive in Western thought is because of the devil's bargain that Descartes made with church leaders 200 years ago. They allowed him to continue his scientific research as long as he acknowledged that the church retained authority over all spiritual matters. Long after scientists have supposedly ceased to consider the soul as an explanation for any aspect of human experience, they remain unwittingly locked into the Cartesian mode of thinking. Concepts like consciousness are kept at a safe distance because it is assumed that theories of the body are inadequate to explain them. It's only very recently that medicine, for example, has even begun to consider that the mind and the body aren't two divided portions of a person but are intricately connected parts of a single organism. Even today, the vast majority of doctors are trained to treat illness as if the patient didn't even possess a mind, and anyone who suggests that there are mind-body connections in disease symptoms is still greeted, by and large, with overpowering skepticism. It's as if everyone assumed the existence of an immortal soul, even those who profess not to believe in one.

QUERIOUS
Aren't you contradicting yourself? Isn't is precisely because the rejection of anything remotely spiritual is so ingrained in our technological culture that we are hesitant to admit even the most undeniable mental processes into our consideration of why the body works as it does? Most scientists don't want to confront the problems of the mind because they fear getting bogged down in these very questions about immortality and consciousness, questions that they can't possibly answer. That's why the field is left to philosophers to pick over. Unsolvable problems make scientists nervous. And the existence of anything they can't see or touch or smell makes them positively hostile.

ANTAGONĒ
In one of his stories, Gabriel García Marquez says that disbelief is more resistant than faith, because doubt is rooted in the senses.

QUERIOUS
If science were based entirely on reason and skepticism, I would say that it was more reliable than religion. But the sad fact is that scientists are as prone to bending the facts to suit their own purposes as any revival tent preacher, and they build tyrannies of thought that are no less ruthless and uncompromising. Just ask any researcher whose discoveries dare to challenge the established order of the moment.

ANTAGONĒ
I happen to find the notion of immortality itself to be a form of mental tyranny, though you and countless millions of others may find comfort in it. When I was a child, I was led to believe that every bad thought I had and every misdeed which I thought no one knew about but myself was in fact being observed and judged not only by God but by my forebears. I was terrorized by the thought that the dead were watching over me. Talk about oppression! By a certain age, it occurred to me that living in the Soviet Union must be a lot like this, and that decent people weren't supposed to sanction that sort of intrusion into daily life. Eventually I came to understand the power of my own conscious imagination, and the ultimate realization that when the dead were dead they were really gone forever filled me with indescribable relief.

QUERIOUS
Do you call that rational? How does a child's desire to be held harmless for his actions form the foundation for an adult conception of life and death?

ANTAGONĒ
Grown-ups didn't teach me to fear retribution from the unseeing eyes of departed souls in order to convey a sense of the wonderful spirituality of life, but to get me to behave. How is instilling such fear into a child a sound basis for establishing the belief that there is more to life than what literally meets the eye?

QUERIOUS
My upbringing was filled with all sorts of nonsensical ideas, too, and I rejected the ritualistic and dogmatic side of my religious training just as you did. But, unlike you, I didn't conclude that the basic tenets were wrong, or that they didn't have a great deal of value to teach me. If doubt is truly more resistant than faith, that's owing to our natures, not to the merits of faith itself. No convoluted treatise on consciousness whose arguments rely on currently fashionable ideas is going to convince me that human beings don't have a soul, any more than the overwrought religious paranoia of bad teachers and burned out clerics ever convinced me that we do.

ANTAGONĒ
But you still believe we do.

QUERIOUS
I believe that there is a spiritual side of man because everything I have experienced in my life, particularly in my relationships with others and my unfailing feeling of connectedness with the rest of humanity, leads me at every turn to the conclusion that our souls guide us where our intellects cannot. Your preferring to call the soul some kind of central, controlling intelligence that stands apart from the strictly neurological reality of the brain is of no consequence. Whether or not the existence of the soul means we are also immortal is beyond knowing and, as far as I'm concerned, unimportant; whether we will all live in eternity or whether humanity will be snuffed out tomorrow without a trace has no relevance to the conscience we bring to bear on the way we conduct ourselves today. You can argue until you're blue in the face — and I have no doubt that you will — that morality and decency and even spirituality are all no more than evolutionary instincts wired into our heads, but you won't change my mind.

ANTAGONĒ
It's funny you should say that about mankind coming to an end, because I just read a novel on that very subject, "The Children of Men," by P.D. James. It's set in England in the not-too-distant future. Mankind has become infertile from some undetermined cause, which is being frantically investigated. When the book begins, the youngest people are 25 years old, and the population has begun a dramatic decline.

QUERIOUS
Not my sort of book, once again.

ANTAGONĒ
Nor mine, usually, but it raises a lot of fascinating issues about the way we look at our place in the world. Without children, or the prospect of having any more, society is altered in very peculiar, and not entirely predictable, ways. As the reality sets in that the infertility is irreversible, the future no longer interests anyone. A kind of widespread ennui takes over, and people become indifferent to almost everything except their creature comforts. Procreation is shown to be such as ingrained part of our consciousness that everything else we do depends on it entirely. In the story, Britain easily descends into a kind of benevolent police state, and few people seem to mind as long as the people in charge keep order and provide the basic services. This becomes increasingly difficult, of course, because the work force is shrinking, many of the young have become rampaging marauders who have no fear of the consequences, and the very old and sick are encouraged to commit suicide so as not to be a burden on the state.

QUERIOUS
And people submit to this? It sounds implausible.

ANTAGONĒ
Most people, yes, because, well, the end is coming anyway and what does it matter? A few people do rebel against the repressive government, as they see it, and the plot centers around a tiny group of subversives who try to foment change.

QUERIOUS
The general apathy you're describing is not what I would have predicted. It seems to me that individual will and desire are irrelevant to, and independent of, all other considerations. How does the absence of children prevent me from living out the rest of my life as best I can, and for as long as I can? And how does the presence of children keep me going? I can't see how I would feel any differently about myself and my own prospects for a contented and moral existence if everyone on Earth suddenly decided not to have children ever again. I can well imagine how the closing down of the schools and the empty playgrounds would make many people wistful, and turn the atmosphere sullen and grey for the many people who might have wanted children. But the end of man is literally not the end of the world, whether or not there's an afterlife.

ANTAGONĒ
If you think that, you are in the minority.

QUERIOUS
I not only think so, I know it, and so do you.

ANTAGONĒ
Yes, rationally, we know the universe existed before us and will go on long after we're gone, but imagining the future is a major piece of human consciousness, and children are not just biologically but psychologically necessary to sustaining our interest in life. The very notion of immortality is inescapably bound to the assumption that life on Earth will continue forever, or at least until there is some divine intercession, which is proof, I think, that man's need to believe in his own immortality is a strictly terrestrial matter and that delusions about the next world are just the side effects of a hyperactive imagination fed by ignorance of the natural world and its processes. We habitually juxtapose the words 'life' and 'death' as though they were opposites, which of course they are not. Death is the state we enter after life (if that statement in itself doesn't present an insurmountable rhetorical barrier) which makes its true opposite the state we were in before birth — namely, none at all. We were nothing before we were born, and will be nothing again after our natural life span is over, the interlude of our conscious lives constituting no more than the accident of innumerable biochemical collisions. If the question of immortality is unanswerable, as you have maintained, then my conviction is as sound as any other and, I must insist, infinitely more likely to resemble the truth than an adolescent belief in endless reincarnation or the wings of angels. Why do you think the people in this novel become so despondent, if not because the idea of children, and therefore the idea of an endless, immortal past and future, has disappeared along with the children themselves? There may be sadness in death, but where is the tragedy of someone never having been born, unless we equate that emptiness with the loss of our own mortality?

QUERIOUS
Or the loss of our souls.

ANTAGONĒ
If the failure to reproduce ad infinitum is the equivalent in people's minds to the failure to achieve immortality, then my point has been proven.

QUERIOUS
How does the novel end?

ANTAGONĒ
One of the subversives gets pregnant and saves the species from extinction.

QUERIOUS
I should have known.

posted October 2007




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