Social difference

Behold, my latest contribution to the Pool, a written piece (from http://pool.org.au/text/ndisarray/tribalism_and_the_other)

“We’re defined by difference. It’s the first rule of semiotics — the word “cat” develops its meaning as we understand that it’s “not dog”, “not rat”, “not bird”, etc. And in light of this system of negation and negative meaning, any sense of “togetherness” that we can collectively develop is fairly miraculous.
“We” come together from time to time, because that’s how togetherness works. When we’re faced with opposition, an “other” of some sort, seemingly unrelated people unite.. in the face of “terrorism”, or “the internet” or “adolescent depravity”. “Togetherness” cannot exist without “otherness”, and both are social tools that serve a social purpose.

Are we to celebrate tribalism? Human civilisation is itself a super-tribe of sorts.. and without tribes and societies, I wouldn’t be thinking these thoughts right now.. let alone publishing these thoughts to the internet. But I’m reluctant to embrace tribalism in its entirety.. We’re dying for purpose. We’re dying for a place to belong, a reason to live on this planet.. and because this “us and them” mentality *gives* us this sense of purpose and identity, it’s dangerous. Our logic is relentlessly binary, and every tribe excludes.. every tribe has an “other”. Jews, refugees, the young, the old, people who don’t barrack for an AFL team… I don’t know what to think. We define ourselves against what we are not.. we define our social groups and tribes in this same negative manner.. and this tension between “us” and “them” has driven the development of human civilisation over thousands of years. It’s incredible. We’ve come so far.

But perhaps we’ve reached a point where tribalism has taken us far enough. Is it possible to step back and acknowledge that social difference is both great and terrible?”

I’m quite pleased. Again, it’s not particularly positive, but it may stimulate some conversation.. I like playing devil’s advocate. And in this case, it’s more than an act.. I do believe that “tribes” are fairly problematic social structures. Go and argue with me. On Pool of course..

on the inadequacy of language

It’s paradoxical… extremely paradoxical. We build up immense systems and structures that allow us to understand this world, to make sense out of it. And ultimately, we find that as we develop our languages and paradigms and discourses, we move further and further away from the world we’re trying to understand. We start talking about abstract concepts, debating the meaning of arbitrary terms that have no necessary connection to the world around us. Everything used to seem so certain. We were all striving for truth and human progress.. we were rapidly gaining knowledge about how the world worked, and our wisdom grew exponentially. But no… it’s all crap. We questioned the world, and then we questioned ourselves — bad move. We find that we’re physiological beings with irrational drives and horrible urges. Our belief systems are relative and probably serve as survival mechanisms rather than a set of objective truths. The entire concept of “knowledge” breaks down as we begin to scrutinise it, and we find that our “truths” were all founded on chains of fundamental assumptions… right down to the way our language organises reality, it’s all arbitrary, and there are so many other ways of doing it. Nothing’s certain, nothing’s objective… suddenly the enlightenment age collapses and we’re left with is 20th century bleakness, angst and avant garde jazz. ugh. The problem with discovering that our discourse on reality is so inadequate, and that our languages fail to convey anything about the nature of reality, is that we can’t seem to avoid using language. My thoughts involve language (at least, a great deal of the time they seem to) and the thought of trying to stop thinking with language is inevitably another thought centred around language.

Tom Bombadil serves to show us that there are always anomalies in a text.. always discrepancies and “impossibilities” within the systems we construct. That in itself is quite a reasonable statement. There is no constancy in this world, everything is flux and continual change.. all we do is find approximations, crude similarities, and then start labelling the world accordingly. My question is, what do we do now? Our systems are clearly defunct, yet we continue to use them, perhaps unconsciously.
We could all become postmodern artists and celebrate the complete breakdown of reason and logical sense, but I’ve never found that appealing. “Weird for the sake of weird”, as the Simpsons quote goes, does seem quite empty. What I do like the sound of is silence. If we’ve established that our language systems are fundamentally flawed, it sounds like a good idea to get away from them, at least temporarily. And since I generally think within the frameworks of language, I have to deaden my thoughts. The result is going to be something more harmonious and holistic, because rather than breaking the world down into atomised parts and considering what purposes they may serve, I will be experiencing the unified totality of the world around me. Rather than entertaining words and abstractions, raw sensations will permeate my consciousness. If we know that words cannot convey the essence of our reality, it follows that silence will. Underneath the elaborate structures we create is something infinitesimally more complex and profound. In comparison, our logocentric systems are bare and one-dimensional.

To be honest, I don’t think there’s much I can criticise about this. As soon as we stop to question the “certainties” of life, we find that we’re dealing in a superfluous layer of abstractions devoid of substance. If I have any “problem” with the concept of negating my thought, it’s in the practical concerns of how I continue to live my life. This “double-game”, in which one is able to void all thought, experience the “isness”, yet also come back into the realm of language, understanding that it is an arbitrary game that serves various purposes in terms of interacting with other beings. And also, you’re free to place this game inside a larger pataphysical framework, in order to imbue it all with meaning, thus maximising your ability to perceive beauty within the world. The concept itself works… it’s just a matter of applying it. I don’t think I can fault the theory of silence. I’m just so aware of this paradoxical state where in.. learning, via language, that language is inadequate, and then trying to use language in order to void our language-based thoughts and become attuned to deeper experiences underneath it all.
It’s re-enchanting, I’d say. difficult, but there’s no excuse… it’s re-enchanting.

Experiential Re-enchantment

I’m having trouble writing this journal entry. I don’t feel like I can start outlining the lecture arguments or fundamental ideas because it feels like I’ve missed something. Right from the beginning, everyone’s throwing this “beauty” concept around.. it’s in the headline of the lecture, Kant differentiates between different kinds of beauty, it’s assumed that we’re all looking for more beauty in our lives… yet I don’t even know what it is any more.
We’ve established that there are “particular” beauties.. eg women and cars. Particular beauties can become fetish objects because we desire to possess them and hence we lose our worldly perspective, etc. That’s all well and good. But what makes a particular thing “beautiful”? (I’m starting with particular things because this is how we generally conceive of beauty. If we can isolate what it is from here, we can apply the concept in a holistic context). Kant says that these particular “dependent beauties” rely on some idealised conception or set of criteria.. that a beautiful woman is one who conforms to our “ideal women criteria set”, basically. Tall, slim, blonde, whatever. But is this definition good enough? The woman is beautiful because she fits our ideas about women? In the same way, do I consider my essay “beautiful” when it gets 100%, meeting all required specifications and criteria? Obviously not. Beauty can’t be this simple, it’s not a set of objective requirements.. or else I’d probably consider my dinner table to be beautiful, since to my mind, it is perfectly a table.. very level.. has 4 legs.. made of wood.. beautiful? The beauty of particular things is certainly dependent on our ideals and conceptions, but I don’t think this is a sufficient explanation of beauty.
We may subjectively like things because they taste “good”, or look “good”. Is “beauty” merely a strong feeling of liking something? Or is there a fundamental difference between liking something and finding it beautiful? I think that “beauty” suggests something more sublime. You’ve got to step back and become aware that you are privileged to witness something beautiful. You necessarily become aware of the nature of your own experience, become appreciative of that experience as something extraordinary or wonderful or whatever. It’s different to eating an icecrem in the car on the way home from work, I think. The fundamental difference between.. witnessing the Aurora and eating an icecream is that the icecream does not fascinate you. You like it and eat it, but unless your trying hard (via Zen), you’re not going to step out of yourself and appreciate the experience in its own right.
Now I think we’re getting somewhere. Conventionally “beautiful” things such as sunsets, or ultra-attractive women, are beautiful because they are unusual — they fascinate us. By contrast, when we consider something to be “regular”, “standard”, “unsurprising”, we dismiss it, ignore it, cannot appreciate it. I think that beautiful things are surprising and extraordinary.
And from here.. how do we perceive more beauty, in a more holistic way? By undermining our sense of the “ordinary”. If we realise that the world is immensely detailed and elaborate and absurd, and that the world’s existence is in itself miraculous, then otherwise ‘mundane’ experiences can become fascinating. Rather than looking at objects in terms of their functionality, or in terms of their place in logocentric language systems, etc, we purge our mind of logocentric thought and focus on raw, unmediated experience.

This is exactly the point of last week’s lecture, I realise this. I just thought that the initial concept of ‘beauty’ needed to be explored or established first. At times, it’s a misleading word, loading with confusing connotations because we throw the word around a lot. I’m not sure whether we need to use “beauty” as such, to describe this sort of perceptual shift. Anything in the world can be appreciated as a raw experience, from sunsets to rotting corpses. You can call this experience “beautiful”, I guess, but I think there are too many excess connotations. Could we instead call this perceptual state “re-enchantment”? or “fascination”? or “renewed appreciation for consciously existing within this universe?”

I know it’s all semantics. But it helps me. This is a new idea to me.. I need a new word for it.

Pataphysics

“Truth”, “Logic”, “Reason”… they’re all dangerous ideas. From the French revolution to WWII, there are plenty of examples of where our thirst for “knowledge” and “absolute truth” can take us. The Enlightenment Age came to an end when we started to realise that humans were incapable of making objective statements, and that all perceptions of the world were limited and relative. We are not wholly logical beings, and there can be no objectivity, no omniscience when each of us is trapped within a single body, with a single pair of eyes.
It seems that every possible statement rests on a chain of assumptions about the world; each ultimately comes back to a set of unjustifiable axioms. And logic breaks down, in that some things are both true and false simultaneously. There are vicious circles and anomalies in our thought, in just about any thought. For instance, Socrates cannot claim that he knows nothing, for if this were true, he could not know it. An Australian claiming that “all Australians are liars” creates a similar logical problem.

Hence pataphysics.
In theory, I have no problem with giving up on truth and embracing a form of philosophical playfulness and irony. Aesthetically pleasing belief systems would be logical to adopt, as we could never hope to know which (if any) theory was correct. In this way, our philosophy would become an artform, something poetic that we could prefer to entertain, regardless of its validity or truth.

But how do we go about entertaining such ideas? Perhaps some pataphysical notions are easier to entertain or ‘believe’ in than others are. For instance, it may be easier to pataphysically adopt a positive ontology, one in which death is the awakening of a greater self, an experiential realisation — because we have never (to our knowledge) experienced death. We don’t have as many pre-conceived ideas about death as we do about the laws of gravity. What i’m trying to say is that while pataphysics theoretically allows us to completely reinterpret the world in a way that we find pleasing, much of our understanding of the world stays the same. I’d probably still believe that I need to eat/drink in order to live, I’d still believe in crossing busy roads when I get a green light, etc. Pataphysics may allow me to reorganise my thoughts about death, about what happens when I am hit by a truck.. but can it allow me to let go of my belief that stepping in front of a truck will lead to death? I’m not sure it can.

We’re saying that there is no truth, no objective knowledge. We can believe whatever we want. Yet there seems to be a realm of common-sense, pseudo-knowledge that we are not prepared to question. Regardless of pataphysical ontologies, we seem to live within a matrix, and we seem to ‘know’ the consequences of doing certain things within this matrix. I’m suggesting that pataphysics works beyond, or outside the realm of this matrix. We may use it to reinterpret worldly events, to shape them in a more positive way. But the matrix itself stays the same. No one doubts what will happen when we jump out of a building, when a nuclear bomb drops onto one’s house… we can think about death pataphysically, but the rules of the matrix remain unquestioned.. that’s all I’m saying.

Pataphysics makes sense, in that we cannot prove one ontology to be correct over another, everything is relative and so it is reasonable to adopt the most positive ontology for the sake of our mental wellbeing. But there are limits to our reorganising of reality. It’s not a case of “there’s no truth man, everything’s possible!” Our experiences of this worldly matrix are deeply ingrained, and effectively limit the way we look at the world, to some extent. We would have trouble thinking of ourselves as magic fairies with a multitude of fairy powers, because there would be a discrepancy between our pataphysical belief and our experience of reality. In this way, it seems that pataphysics belongs in the realm of the metaphysical, applied to notions of ‘death’ and ‘god’ and ‘soul’, because these are things that we cannot directly experience, so these sorts of discrepancies cannot arise.

God and Death

God is back? That surprises me. I’ve never found religion to be compelling, and I don’t know many religious people.. it seems uncommon, to me at least. So, the notion that most conventional religions are logically incoherent and generally dysfunctional does not come as a shock or anything. Nevertheless, this week’s lecture provided a succinct summation of some fundamental flaws and contradictions common to many mainstream religions.

1. First you’ve got:
If God is morally righteous and good, how can he cause (or permit) such extreme atrocities taking place on this earth? Surely standing by would render this God morally questionable, a volatile or indifferent God at best…

2. And then there’s:
If God is omniscient and omnipotent, how can he be ontologically separate from us? He cannot know what it is like to be us, and hence cannot know everything, unless he is us.

3. Which leads us to:
If God is omniscient and omnipotent, how can he hold us responsible for actions that he has determined for us to perform?

Good questions, I think. It’s tempting to leave it here, to dismiss conventional religion as self-contradictory.. but I should at least try to answer these questions from a religious perspective (I’ll go with ‘standard’ christianity, just to keep things simple).

*God-mode engage*

1. God stands by while atrocities happen in this world because… human beings have been granted free will and have misused it, resulting in tragedy? No, free will doesn’t work. No one has the capacity to choose their own dispositions, or any other factors that influence their behaviour.. ultimately, our selves are shaped (determined) by things outside of our control. hmm. Well.. then it’s the Devil’s fault? God and Satan function as two opposing forces in the universe, and God cannot be held responsible for worldly atrocities? Well.. the Bible states that God is almighty, and that Satan is a servant of God, so it can’t be the Devil’s fault. Our only option left is “God is all-powerful, and causes great atrocities to happen, because they serve a greater purpose and will ultimately result in great good.” I don’t find this particularly compelling… such an ultra-utilitarian God seems morally questionable, constantly inflicting suffering upon millions of people, the suffering never ends.. and i see no greater good that results from it. Of course, there’s no way to dispute “God works in mysterious ways”.. by definition we cannot understand these ways, cannot comprehend God’s will as mere humans.. which is quite a sneaky argument, but it works.

2. God knows everything, yet he is separate from us. How can this work? I don’t know.. I don’t think it can. God would need to effectively be us if he were to know exactly what we were feeling or thinking. If I were Christian, I’d probably say something cheap.. perhaps sacrifice God’s all-knowing-ness and say that he knows ‘a fair bit’. At least then he could be separate from us. Regular christians wouldn’t be happy, I know, but the bible messes itself over all the time, and many followers are prepared to accept that some parts of it don’t work. Maybe they’ve got to concede this point as well.

3. How can God punish us if the world is pre-determined and he knew what we’d do all along? I’ve been looking around at various christian sites, and it seems that the most popular answer to this question is that the world is *not* pre-determined, we are blessed with free will, and we misuse it and should be punished. This effectively means that God is no longer “almighty”.. he’s only “quite mighty”. But I think it’s a fair trade.. if I were Christian I’d sacrifice the word “almighty” rather than the concept of human responsibility. Still.. free will’s a troubled concept.. how is anyone really responsible for what they do when they have not chosen to be the way they are? etc. This makes me think: how can we hold God responsible? Has God created himself? Logically this can’t work, and so perhaps not even God can have free will. Christians aren’t happy with this either.

What I’m getting at is that yes, Christianity contradicts itself, it’s logically incoherent because it wants God to be almighty and determine everything, yet also wants people to be responsible for their actions. But dissecting Christianity is not the same as declaring that no God could possibly exist. God might be flawed, impaired, oblivious to worldly atrocities, etc, and in lessening the powers of God, we increase God’s plausibility. God doesn’t need to be all-knowing, or all-powerful. Maybe God is only half-conscious, with vague conceptions of morality and a vague influence on how the world is progressing. I don’t actually believe this, but I think it’s harder to refute. The grand claims of Christianity are easy to pick on, but we shouldn’t equate this with disproving God.

I think there are still some ontological possibilities left in the concept of God, theories that hold up better than confused bibles and grand [rp[jecoes. The existence of a transcendental self, quite a compelling idea, can also be described as a “God” in a way, ontologically connected to us so that we are effectively in control of our own destinies. This may be the best possibility. But there are probably more out there. (‘out there’ meaning ‘inside our heads’)…

Damn these photons

Time to revisit week 6 and all associated mind-boggles… let’s first set it all out, establish our problem.

So.. individual photons are fired, one at a time, at a board with two slits, and are registered by a sensor-board behind these slits. Over time, the scattered distribution of previously-fired photons begin to take the shape of a wave pattern. The brightest points on the sensor board are not directly behind each of the slits.. the photons are reaching places that would seem impossible, if they were travelling as discrete, solid particles. So the theory is that the photons are behaving like waves, and must be going through both holes simultaneously, colliding with themselves and scattering to form the wave pattern.
The plot thickens, for as soon as we place a sensor at the slits, to see which hole the photon ends up travelling through, the photons travel straight through one hole and the wave pattern is gone. It is as if the photons “know” we are observing them, and are “forced” to “choose” one slit over the other, rather than colliding with themselves.
This is the fundamental problem, it seems. There are numerous interpretations and explanations for why the experiment turns out this way, but the only theory I am mildly familiar with is the Copenhagen interpretation. According to this theory, discrete particles do not exist at particular points in space and time until we observe them. The presence of a conscious observer is said to collapse the wave function, forcing the random clouds and waves of probability to become solid, certain, concrete particles.

The world is calculated as we move through it, and parts of it unravel, dissolve into a realm of probabilities when no conscious being is present. This interpretation seems to lend itself towards an idealist conception of reality, rather than a materialist one, for it denies material (particles) any existence independent of mind… the particles dissipate without a conscious observer, and hence they are mind-relative. The wash of probabilities that ‘exist’ outside the realm of consciousness simply become part of a matrix, a set of random variables that are calculated by our collective, transpersonal self, or a machine, or something to this effect.

This all seems fairly good, fairly coherent and logical. But I think we run into problems with the Copenhagen interpretation when we examine ‘consciousness’ more closely. What are the limits of my consciousness, in relation to this matrix… how much of the world can I collapse at any one time? For instance, If I look at the sky, am I collapsing every single photon between my retinas and the moon? Between my eyes and Alpha Centauri? Between my mind and the theoretical end of the universe?
Or what if I step out into the street and feel a breeze against my skin? Experiencing this breeze has collapsed it into a set of discrete air molecules in motion, colliding with each other, etc. Now.. where does the breeze come from? Hot air rises up, creating a vacuum for cooler air to move in, and there are currents of molecules moving all over the place, crashing into each other, forming a long causal chain, and so, if I’m experiencing the breeze, it had to come from somewhere — did I just collapse particles on the other side of the world, which were ultimately responsible for creating the breeze that I perceive when walking down the street? If the particles touching my skin have collapsed, if they’ve “chosen” where they end up, then this necessarily dictates where the surrounding particles are located, and where the particles surrounding the surrounding particles are located, and so on. It’s like sudoku. The collapsed particles are certain, set in concrete, like the initial numbers you’re given with in a sudoku grid. But based on these certainties, you can figure out the values of every blank space, and there is only *one* correct answer.. so there is no longer any randomness. Perhaps this means that great proportions of the earth *are* collapsed most of the time, and do behave like particles, most of the time..
But then again, this all rests on the idea that wind is the product of particles in motion… if it’s all the product of a collective mind, then particles are irrelevant, and a breeze can exist regardless.

Then there’s the problem with degrees of consciousness, and whether a cat, or a rat or a spider is capable of collapsing the wave function, in which case, perhaps the world is swimming with conscious minds and nearly everything is collapsed. If not, then we’re suggesting that human beings alone have the capacity to understand the world and collapse it, while animals themselves dissolve into probability waves while we’re not watching. That’s a bit too anthropocentric and Descartes-esque for my taste..

And then, there’s a bigger logical problem that I am still troubled by. We’re saying that when we’re not looking, particles break down into waves and don’t exist at any particular point in space or time. Massive paradox here, in that we can never know what’s happening without observing. Obviously it becomes more complex when you look at the actual experiments and understand all the scientific messiness, but really, I don’t know how you could ever get around this paradox with scientific deductions.. i’m yet to be convinced.

This would all be a lot easier if we said “The anomalies associated with the double-slit experiment are the result of some unknown variable that we alter when placing a sensor on the slits. The photons do not collide with themselves as waves, they are simply influenced by wholly material factors that we currently have no capacity to observe or measure.”
But I guess that would be a bit of a cop out.

Free Will vs Determinism

“Free will” has never appealed to me. People seem radically depressed by the implications of determinism, and feel that it would rob their lives of purpose if they were to accept it. But I’ve never felt that determinism changed very much. It’s determined, but you have no idea what’s going to happen next, or how your actions (“choices”) will influence the world around you. So there’s still just as much ‘purpose’ to life as there is if you acknowledge “free will”, it’s just that whatever happens, there was absolutely no possibility of anything else happening. That’s fine with me.
And it seems, at least from the lecture, that Determinism holds up fairly well against free will, as anti-determinists have to resort to dualism, souls and gods, in order to fight implications of acknowledging causality. It goes without saying that I do not find these last resorts of free will compelling. To me, dualism shrivels and dies the moment you ask “how does the non-physical interact with the physical?” And if a God created a blank soul, a spiritual tabula rasa, it does not make sense for this soul to choose its own personality, or its own tendencies, because this assumes that it already has a self. So in any case, the self/soul cannot be responsible for the formation of itself, or else we are dragged down into an infinite regress, vicious cycle, whatever.

Are there any better threats to the Determinist paradigm? Yes.. after the lecture, I’d say that there are at least two.

The first: How do you establish the existence of causality? We can never observe causality in itself, and can only infer based on patterns. Just because the spark has ignited the gas 10,000 times, there is no reason to think that the spark will do the same thing once again. Inferences… logically, they’re not great. And to my knowledge, we’ve only ever assumed causality because of inferences, nothing more concrete than this.
Of course, the notion of causality is supported by the fact that we seem to be able to manipulate the world and accurately predict the effects of our interaction. Science seems to work, because our computers seem to work, and our cars seem to work, and so on. How could we make millions of computers that function in a (reasonably) consistent manner if there was no cause for them to behave consistently? So… causality “seems to work”.. hmm.

The second: Of course, computers may work because probabilistically, everything ends up doing what it should. If there is a 99% chance that a spark will ignite gas, and the gas does indeed ignite, is this a causal interaction? Clearly, the spark does not always ignite the gas, but if the gas absolutely cannot ignite without the spark, then it does seem like the spark caused the ignition… hmm.
Quantum indeterminism ruins everything, as usual. If subatomic particles behave in fundamentally random ways, can we still have causation? The world is composed of random particles — whose behaviours are not caused by anything at all.. then surely any perceived ‘causation’ is illusory? Or perhaps causality exists, yet the specific effect of a specific effect is still probabilistic in nature? ie rolling the dice onto the table does cause it to roll, but the random fluctuations of specific dice and table particles randomly determine the dice landing on 6.
The only solution that I can see is that this randomness would be on the tiniest scale, and perhaps irrelevant to causation on the scale that we’re interested in. My hand is composed of billions of random particles, shifting and fluctuating constantly, yet my hand consistently has 5 digits, and it is continually able to open doors and write blog posts. Have my random hands of constant fluxed *caused* this blog post to come into existence? I’d say, yes. (but of course, the hands are not responsible for this blog, because their actions are controlled by motor neurons, controlled by brains, controlled by past experiences and physiology and chemicals, and current sensations and awareness and ultimately by the dawn of the universe…)

It’s a mess. I can’t establish the presence of causality. But to deny causality seems absurd. The sun rises each day purely by chance? Then every sunrise brings with it a bigger and bigger coincidence, an absurd feat of probability, if there are no causes. And if science reveals that the world is composed of inherently random particles, are we to accept that everything simply happens “for no reason”, or that this randomness becomes unmeasurably small in the scheme of things.
I don’t know. Whatever the case, I’m still with determinism on this one. Not even quantum indeterminism helps you when you’re trying to argue for free will. Whether it’s random or set in concrete, it’s never your choice.

The Self

“The self” is always messy territory. What the frig is it?

Week 4 lecture covered numerous problems with the dualist conception of self, ie how could a disembodied “self” interact with or inhabit a physical body in physical space, etc. And then there was Iris Murdoch and Alzheimer’s, multiple personality disorder, amnesia, soulless clones, the existence of a non-spatio/temporal self.. many diverse and exciting things.
I struggled to find a common thread throughout this particular thought experiment, it seemed a barrage of separate self-related puzzles, though ultimately the idea of a non-spatial/temporal self prevailed I guess.

Going back through my notes, the idea that “self” is mind-relative, that it is a secondary quality, was an interesting thought. The reasoning here is that everything constantly changes in this world, nothing can ever be exactly the same as it was a moment ago — so I am only the “same” self as I was a moment ago by degree, by approximation, and as time passes I will perceive this sameness less and less. On many levels I do agree with this. Our perception of “self” is somewhat arbitrary and based on vague “patterns” of behaviour that we feel characterise ourselves or other people.
But perhaps it’s more complex than that. I think that the self is not a single entity.. we’ve simply chosen to label it in this way. The self is a mess of cognitive dissonance and varying degrees of self-awareness.. as soon as you talk about a “subconscious”, you’ve divided the ‘self’ into multiple parts that interact. The common thread through all this chaos, as I see it, is memory. If we have access to memories of what we’ve been doing, what we’re usually like, what we want to do in the future, etc, then our “self” can be continuous over extended periods of time. This also means that multiple personalities are separate selves, and yes, that attempting to get rid of them is attempting to “kill” a self.

Unless… at a deeper level, the one “self” is adopting various personas, like sock puppets, and playing all 17 roles at once. But i don’t know, we’re back to my fundamental problem with transpersonal solispsism.. if the selves aren’t aware of each other, they cannot be connected in a meaningful way.. hmm.

I guess I’m thinking that “self” is a series of perceptions.. flux.. but it’s tied together to some degree by memory. If memory fails, you’ve lost your self. You may develop a new self that seems similar because you’ve both possessed the same genes and tendencies, but unless you can recall your former self, I’d say you are separate beings.
— Why not have many conscious beings in the one brain? I’ve often thought about this. Perhaps the cerebellum is self-aware, perhaps the brain stem is self-aware, or the limbic system, each in their own way, each conscious of the data flowing through it, and able to control certain parts of the body.. we could never know of these extra-consciousnesses, but perhaps there are billions… perhaps each neuron has its own warped intentions and experiences, adding up to this gigantic mass of wills vying for power. Maybe we’ve got multiple selves that all think they’re in control, and the illusion of having one self is maintained by the fact that these selves generally want the same thing in a given situation, because they’re all processing data from the same sensory inputs.

Back in year 12 psych we were learning about “Alien Hand Syndrome”… really strange stuff. After severing the hemispheres of a person’s brain, there was a chance that they’d develop two opposing selves that would contradict each other. One hand would do up the shirt, while the other hand was intent on taking off the shirt. Perhaps the two selves always existed, but only fought with each other when the brain was severed and they were effectively working with different sets of sensory information?

Large-scale thoughts, these. Too large for 1.40AM on a sunday morning. However many selves “I” have, they all seem to want to go to bed. Majority rules.

Meaningless Detail

Solipsism, of the transpersonal variety, is something I find mildly compelling. I like the idea of Brahma’s dream (from the introductory philosophy course), and think that this is a more plausible form of idealism compared to personal solipsism (eg “*My* mind is so powerful that it created everything else and it’s all mine mine mine”).
In this form of solipsism, the “master-brain”, the matrix, the machine, the simulator, or whatever, need not belong to anyone. It is a singular entity, and it is also a multitude of “beings” simultaneously. This makes me picture an octopus playing with sock puppets. Except it has billions of arms, billions of sock puppets, all interacting with each other. This all sounds good. But now we’ve got to put it to the test.

First, I want to raise a point that applies equally to personal and transpersonal solipsism, before we move into trans-specific areas.

If the world is a construction of some mind, one that enjoys narratives and the ways in which sub-minds interact inside this constructed world, then why all this detail? Why are there millions of sand particles on the beach, and why are there molecules and subatomic particles and various other things that would not matter to an idealist? If a mind created this world, then it is not composed of particles.. yet we seem to have found evidence of such particles. You can break down the world into smaller and smaller components infinitely, and although this does not mean that the world is material, it seems that all this detail is useless to an over-mind. Why does the mind care what its constructions are made of?
Alternate thought: perhaps the sand on the beach exists simply so that we, the sub-minds, are convinced that our world is solid? Perhaps particles “exist” to satisfy our need for everything to be “made of something”?
I have to note, however, that this problem only exists if the master-brain seeks enjoyment through simulating our lives. If the “master-brain” is simply a computing engine, a matrix, then atomic particles are simply the base components of the computer language.. the 1s and 0s, etc.

Anyway. What else is wrong with trans-solipsism?

If the overmind can divide itself into billions of self-aware beings that have no awareness of what each other are thinking, how are these sub-minds linked in any meaningful fashion?
You could say that they share a deep unconscious mind, one that influences their actions according to some shared, unconscious intent.
But inherent in the phrase “unconscious intent” is a reasonably damning paradox.. don’t think I need to spell it out.
Perhaps “subconscious” is a better word then. There is no clear distinction between the conscious mind and the unconscious master, for the subconscious mind is to a degree conscious, and could have vague wants or intentions. (Perhaps the collective subconscious is slowly growing more self-aware, constantly trying to improve its constructions and simulations… or mess with them further..)

We reached this point in the tute. And I’m not sure I have anything to say about it. The collective subconscious has dreamt this world up according to vague intentions, as it is self-aware to some limited degree, (possibly extremely confused given the sheer amount of sense data it receives from its subjects), and influences our behaviours, based on its general wants.. what it wants to experience at different times, or in different parts of itself…

The only problem I can think of, is again, the meaningless detail. Why dream up grains of sand? I realise, the subconscious may not have deliberately created the universe to be a certain way, it was perhaps the construction of a sub-subconscious? Then we get trapped in an infinite regress of mentally impaired master-brains incapable of thinking up such a detailed world.. I don’t know. No ontology explains how anything *begins*, so i cannot hold this against the primordial master-brain. But someone dreamt up sand.. grains composed of grains composed of grains, devoid of interest or meaning. So which facet of this multifarious octopus of a universal mind can I blame?

Personal Solipsism

Never realised there were two sorts of solipsism (or more?). Though it does make sense.

We can distinguish “personal solipsism” from “transpersonal solipsism” in that the former involves “only me”.. only my conscious self. All other apparently conscious “beings” out there are simply constructions of my own mind, and none of these constructions are self-aware.. they merely appear to be.

This does seem quite radical, but also compelling, in that it is a simple explanation, involving a single mind. Ockham’s razor.. we do not need to posit the existence of multiple minds if one is enough to explain sufficiently. And to paraphrase, “Should we not doubt the existence of other minds and a material world, much as we doubt the existence of purple dragons?”
Perhaps this is the most rational position to take. We would no longer depend on the existence of some elusive “material world” to support our ontology. Perceptions have no material cause, but are products of a single mind. Sounds alright. But then.. most ontologies do, at first glance.

Devil’s advocate mode:

Mr Advocate: When I stare at the sun, it is painfully bright and I do not appear to have any choice in what I perceive. If all this is a construction of my mind, why don’t I have freedom to do what I like, to experience whatever I want? Why do bad things happen? Why can I feel pain?

Solipsist: Well, it is a product of your mind, but not of your conscious mind. This is all a construction, but there are rules that your unconscious mind must follow. And perhaps your unconscious makes bad things happen for a reason. It’s all a story, a mental narrative. Like Brahma’s dream, your dream would be boring if all was harmonious. Conflict drives the story forward, and so on a deep level, you want to experience conflict, you want to “achieve” something, struggle against adversity, etc. — even though you’ve created this adversity yourself.

Mr Advocate: Right. So my unconscious creates a world of conflict, so that my conscious mind can struggle within it and not get bored… ok. But this “unconscious” self must be incredibly powerful to have constructed this immense and complex world around me. How can it comprehend so much at once?

Solipsist: Look man, it just does. How could you ever hope to know how powerful your unconscious self is? By definition, you’re not conscious of it, you’re unaware of the way it works, the power it has. For all you know, it’s capable of anything. And judging by the nature of this world, it probably is.

Mr Advocate: But if I am so incapable of understanding this all-powerful “unconscious self”, how can it be considered part of “myself” at all? It is some sort of God-like master-brain that creates everything I experience. Is it not pretentious to assume that this God-brain belongs to me? Why am I so special?

Solipsist: You’re the only consciousness you are aware of. This is what makes you so special. You cannot know of any other self, any other cognitive being, so it is an assumption to think that other conscious entities exist.

Mr Advocate: But isn’t it also an assumption to think that my “unconscious” exists and that he has created the entire world? I cannot know of this God-brain, just as I cannot know whether other beings are conscious, or whether a material world of primary qualities exist. Hence it seems that this “unconscious self” is just as unknowable as the primary qualities of matter. Attributing my sensations of the world to some other part of me that I cannot know is hardly helpful. Perhaps my unconscious is also a “purple dragon”?

Solipsist: Hmm. Shit.

What I’m trying to say is that the mind is not a unified “thing”. You can label it as a “thing”, you can call it a “mind” and think of it as a self-contained entity… but as soon as you introduce the distinction between “conscious” and “unconscious”, you’ve divided the one “mind” up into two or more separate components, only one of which we directly experience (the conscious self). We cannot get outside of this conscious self, and so saying that the “unconscious” is the source of our sensory experiences is no better than saying that they are caused by an external, material world.

I’m not convinced by personal solipsism. But at the same time, materialism is no more convincing either. Call it a draw?