Posted by Tom Grimes on March 21, 2004, at 21:24:21
In reply to Re: Life imitating art imitating life » Tom Grimes, posted by DSCH on March 21, 2004, at 19:52:55
Dear DS,
I'll check out the Kaufmann video; it wouldn't load at the moment. Thanks.
As for "exact mechanism unknown" you say:
Biological systems are horrifically complex. If they were not they would not "be alive". If you throw out the notion of vitalism, you need to address the idea of how any living thing can "act on its own behalf".
Granted. Hence, information sickness. Like chaos theory. A butterfly flaps its wings in Buenos Aires, there's a tsunami three days later in Tokyo.
Our psychological complexity may be our undoing. And, at the speculative/philosophical level, the loss of the Cartesian and Englightenment sense of self -- that it's a single, coherent, personalized structure -- may simply be the beginning of our cultural undoing. Maybe we're the pioneers!
Philosophy, of course, is no consolation on the down days of the BP cycle.
But doesn't vitalism -- the ability of any living thing to "act on its own behalf" mean that a living thing can act destructively, to the point of destroying itself. Why does the mind attack the mind? Of course, an answer may be that the mind is made up of discrete, competitive parts, one attacking the other w/o any sense of unity. Our minds may be subject to Darwin's law just as everything around it is.
As for this exchange:
> So, the book came out of my thinking about the self. Am I more me before the pill, or after the pill? More me without it, or with it?
You are you. Just different than before. ;-)
This could be rephrased: you are no longer you.
Difference itself implies a prior state or stability.
Notice that our political/military language is about stability. We want to stabilize a region. Same with BP. We want stability.
We don't treat the degree of cycling, say, just the nature of it. A little or a lot. Doesn't matter. Let's stabilize it. Which, of course, is another attempt at coherence, unity.
But, if I'm different than who I was before, then I'm different. Not a different me. Just different.
Finally,
I believe most of what we refer to as consciousness is an illusory seemless screen over what is actually a very decentralized process. The purpose of the screen is to prevent us from being transfixed with the complexity of our inner perspective, seeing as we needed to hunt and gather/fight or flight rather than meditate for most of our history as a species.
Right, we're mostly gaps. I don't believe there's a little Cartesian homunculus in our heads, like a driver behind the wheel of a car. More like, our head is the interstate. It's all those zillions of cars, each one a neuron. 90% function OK. 10% crash. Each goes its own way, if and when possible.
I think it's the idea of treating gaps that comes back to the phrase "exact mechanism unknown." If there's no unity, then the chances for predicting how adressing one gap, or one car crash, will effect the overall "system" becomes exponentially more difficult.
We all like CNS depressant meds for a simple reason -- they do something very simple, they depress the CNS in a pretty simple way. .75 mg of Xanax and, as Tom Wolfe said, "Life is good."
But it may be that the number of gaps in our psychological make up are breaking up the clarity of our "illusory seamless screen." As the world around us disintegrates -- the Englightenment saw its integration, in cultural/philosophical terms; we see terrorism, chaos theory, qubits of ontological information -- our notion of the human mind may as well.
Best,
T
poster:Tom Grimes
thread:316365
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/books/20040211/msgs/326828.html