The Death Bed

Consider the following scenarios.

1.) A man is on his deathbed.  He is a wealthy man; a man with the means to hire the best minds on the planet to come up with some way of prolonging his life.  One day his most trusted adviser comes to him bearing good news.  He tells him that they have found a way to clone him (as a young man of course), and more than that, they found a way to imprint the clone with the man's thoughts and memories.  Ah, but the adviser has made a crucial misstep.  A clone has already been made, imprinted with the man's memories as fresh as the past 24 hours.  The adviser makes the fatal blunder of bringing the clone to the man's bedside to introduce him.  The man beholds the clone in horror.  He sees in it, not a continuation of himself, but rather a replacement.  He knows that the clone is not really him, because although it possesses the imprint of his thoughts and memories, he can not see out through the eyes of the clone.  It's mind is closed to him.  It is something other...different.  It is every bit as much a stranger to him as anyone else in the room, or even the world.  He orders the clone destroyed and lapses into deeper despair.

2.) Okay, now this scenario is the same as the first, the same man, the same cloning technology, ect.  but without the adviser making the fatal blunder.  In this case the adviser simply comes to the man and tells him that they have found a way to transfer his mind into a clone as soon as he dies.  "Transfer his mind", those are the words that the adviser uses, but he really knows nothing more about these metaphysical mysteries than anyone else does.  He only knows that the man's thoughts and memories will be imprinted on the new clone.  He just says, "transfer your mind" to the man to reassure him.  And it does reassure the man...for a while.  But at night, when he's left alone with nothing but the beeping and pinging of his medical equipment, he begins to have doubts.  He ponders his own essence.  Will this clone really be him?  Will he really be there, or will he be gone, leaving someone else to live his life with his memories?  This "not being there" tortures him more than the thought of death itself.  He stares up into the dark.

3.) Okay, let's leave the dying man aside for a moment to consider a hypothetical proposition.  Suppose that our consciousness isn't the continuum that we think it is, connected from birth until death.  Maybe every time we drift off to sleep or fall unconscious our consciousness dies.  Maybe it disintegrates when it's not actively sustained.  Then when we wake up, it is with an entirely NEW consciousness which has simply inherited all the memories of the old consciousness.  In other words, every time we wake up it's as an entirely new person who just thinks they're the person who went to sleep simply because we remember being that person.  This is an unfalsifiable theory...or at least apparently so as this point.  Still, it's not completely far fetched.  What reason do we really have to think that our consciousness maintains a continuity with our identity?  Perhaps consciousness is just an abstract commodity, accessed when needed.  When you turn your computer on, you find the same stuff in memory, the trusty icons arranged the same way on the desktop, but yet you wouldn't think that this was being powered by the identical electrons in the electrical current, right?  What if the vital spark operates in a similar fashion?  The dream may even be a kind of booting up process, a side effect of the new consciousness accessing the memory.  This would kind of explain why we can never remember our prior waking lives during the dream.

This is, of course, highly speculative.  But you notice that it bears a similarity to scenario 2.  We've only removed the concept of the clone from the equation.  Just like the man on his deathbed, we face the possibilty of "not being there" when we wake up, but somehow it isn't really troubling at all, is it?  Why exactly would that be?

4.) Consider an even wilder hypothesis.  Suppose that a few years back you sat at the bedside of a dying friend.  We'll call him Freddy.  You were with him at the very end.  Now what if, at the moment of death, the essence of Freddy's consciousness leapt from him and into you, due to your close proximity.  This consciousness either supplanted your own or blended with it.  But it was only his consciousness, none of his memories.  Once he was in your brain, he only had access to your memories.  So in effect, from that day forward you weren't "you" anymore, you're now Freddy, but you only remember being "you", and you talk act just like "you", and so you never noticed that anything was different.  Again, we're in highly unfalsifiable territory, but yet the idea isn't all that disturbing, is it?  Whether your "you" or Freddy or the King of Siam, you're still HERE, still able to breathe the air, and feel the sun on your face, and be thankful for it.

5.) Okay, final scenario.  Let's return to our dying man.  The adviser comes to see him and tells him that he has found a mystic who claims that he can transfer the man's consciousness into someone else's body, but only his consciousness, none of his memories.  The adviser brings a bright-eyed young man to meet the man on his deathbed.  He tells him that when he dies he will leap into this young man's mind, seeing through his eyes, but only ever remembering being the young man.  The adviser, naturally, doesn't know whether this mystic is a fraud or a fool or the genuine thing, but he senses that it doesn't matter.  If the procedure is a success, no one will ever really know for sure.  The man on his death bed senses this as well, and he drifts off, his mind finally at ease.

Thoughts?

Sartre's Nothingness

"Nothingness can be nihilated only on the foundation of being; if nothingness can be given, it is neither before or after being, nor in a general way outside of being.  Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm."  Jean Paul Sartre

But what is nothingness?  It seems like a simple enough question to answer.  It is that which is not.  It is the absence of something...anything.  But what are we to make of Sartre's statement that "nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being"?  In a reality defined essentially by the fact that it exists, in a universe filled completely with Being, where does non-existence come in to play?  How can there be such a thing as nothing?  Being simply is what is.  Unto itself it suffers no lack or excess of anything.  It is the fullness of everything.  It is complete.  It is.  What possible commerce could it have with nothingness?

Yet, we're all quite familiar with the concept.  Let's say you're sitting around in your living room with a spouse or a friend, and at some point this person insists that they heard a knock at the door.  You get up to check, and then you come back and tell them, "there was nothing there" or maybe "there was no one there."  You had opened the door and found this absence of a person, this nothingness on your doorstep.  You shrug, and then go back to reading your book without giving it a second thought.  Well, it's precisely this sort of commonplace occurrence that Sartre asks us to stop and give some fresh consideration to.  

Now the first thing to notice here is that this nothingness doesn't make its appearance until you open the door.  Prior to that there is only being beyond the door...the porch, the steps, the front walk, the whole wide world out there.  It is only when you open the door expecting to find someone there, that you in fact find no one.  Those few cubic feet of space above your doorstep don't acquire meaning as an absence of a person until you open the door and give them that meaning.

Sartre illustrates this point time and again with the idea of a wallet.  Let's say my wallet is in my pocket right now and it has thirteen dollars in it.  The wallet, the money, it is what is.  The thirteen dollars is not too much or too little.  It simply exists.  But then I pull the wallet out, and I could have sworn I had fifteen dollars, or I had hoped to find fifteen dollars, or maybe I just needed fifteen dollars.  I have now discovered the absence of these two dollars.  Either from want or expectation, my wallet, which only a moment ago was absolutely complete in its being, is now short two dollars.

The conclusion is obvious.  It is through us, through our perceptions, that nothingness comes about.  It is because we were looking for someone beyond the door, that we found no one.  It is because I was looking for fifteen dollars in the wallet, that I found the actual amount come up short.  At this point, though, Sartre cautions us not to just dismiss nothingness as a quality of our judgement, a simple disparity between reality and our expectations of it.  He insists that this nothingness is a fact.  If we consider a few other scenarios concerning our door, perhaps we'll see what he means.

Let's say we answer the door, and we actually do find someone on the other side.  Our perception of the world beyond the door converges on this person.  They are the figure to which everything else becomes the ground.  They are the focal point of our attention.  This attention may drift in tangents, something they're carrying in their hand, their clothes, their car in the driveway, or any number of things depending on the person we find.  But these tangents connect and lead back to the person.  We perceive the world beyond the door as though it were arranged around this person.

Now, let's say we were to go to our front door now and just open it and look out.  We're not opening it to see if someone is there.  We're not expecting to find anyone.  We're just randomly looking out, and any number of things could grab our attention.  We could watch a bird settling on the telephone line with a slight flutter.  Or our attention could drift to the clouds or the traffic passing along the street in front of the house, even the refreshing breeze that sweeps in.  Our attention draws these things into focus for a moment, and then lets them go as it moves on.  We're just gazing serenely out the door, and no specific thing arrests our attention, demanding that our awareness of the world converges on that point.  

But when we return to our original scenario, where we opened the door and found no one, we find that something else happens.  We again find the same converging phenomenon at work that we found when we were greeted by a visitor, but we find now that our perception of the world has arranged itself around this void, this nothingness where we expected to find someone.  This non-existent shadow of a person is the figure to which everything else becomes the ground.  This nothingness pursues us wherever we look.  We think maybe someone is hiding in a bush, playing a prank.  We see nothing there.  The world converges around this empty space we discover behind the bush.  In short, we perceive this nothingness; we experience it.  If we were in a poetic mood we could return to the person in the living room and inform them, "I encountered nothingness on our doorstep.  I found nothingness haunting me wherever I looked in the world, and before this nothingness I saw the world itself fade away before my very eyes."

So we see that while nothingness originates with us, and is sustained by our perception, it is still a very real experience.  When you say, "There was no one there", you are speaking a clear and undeniable fact.  There really was no one on your doorstep.  And yet, there is still the temptation to dismiss this as simply failed expectations.  The void was only on your doorstep because you posed the possibility that you might find someone when you opened the door.  Well, this is precisely where Sartre's analysis of consciousness comes into play.

You'll recall that we established that consciousness was always removed from the focus of its awareness, as a subject to an object.  This perpetual withdraw from being creates a certain ...decompression of being, which allows us to slip this nothingness between us and being.  In the next post on this matter, we'll explore this further, and see how this ability of the mind to deviate from Being is a crucial part of the nature and function of consciousness, as well as a crucial part of our free will.                   

Sartre's Consciousness

You have before you the picture of an apple.  You see it.  You are aware of it.  At some point you become aware that you are aware of it.  And now that I've mentioned it, you've become aware that you are aware of your awareness of it and...well, we could go on like this all day.  Consciousness is an elusive little bugger.  It constantly slips away.  Try to catch it working, and you find yourself falling into this kind of infinite regress.  Many people have misinterpreted this as a layering of consciousness, but actually it's a demonstration of its method of operation.

For instance, when we say that you are aware of your awareness of the apple, we mean that you've set up camp across the hill, trying to catch consciousness in the act.  But once you've done this, the immediate awareness of the apple that you're trying to perceive at work is only a concept of awareness.  It has no living vitality.  You're no longer viewing the apple through this "awareness."  You're no longer see anything through it.  You're only seeing the apple indirectly from your vantage point across the hill, as part of a composition involving the apple and this concept of immediate awareness.  When we say that you are aware that you are aware of your awareness of the apple, this mean that you've moved to yet another hill more distant than the other.  Now you've postulated two concepts of awareness, and you've positioned them in a relationship with one another, one viewing the apple, the second viewing the first.  But again, these are just concepts, ideas of awareness.  You're not really there.  You're up on the distant hill, viewing a broader composition involving the apple and these inter-related concepts of awareness.  So, you're not descending through layers of consciousness; you're shifting its vantage points.  You're only ever viewing the situation from one perspective.

Sartre's idea of consciousness is like a perfectly translucent lens having neither depth or substance.  You can never get around behind it or beside it or above it to see it, because it's consciousness itself that does the seeing.  Furthermore, consciousness only exists as consciousness insomuch as it is consciousness of something.  It is a subject exhausted entirely in its object.  It's existence lies completely in its function.  Your awareness of the apple exists as a view of the apple, as a relationship with the apple and nothing else.  And yet this awareness is not the apple.  It is a perception of the apple.  It is something other than the apple.  This gulf between subject and object was the crucial point for Sartre.

It is when consciousness is turned inward, that this gulf becomes significant.  Consciousness is the seat of our being.  It is the nucleus of ourselves.  It is the eye of our soul that peers through this lens.  When I am aware of the apple, it is I who has the immediate involvement, consumed entirely for the moment in my focus on the apple.  When consciousness shifts to consider this awareness, it is I who am viewing it from the new vantage point.  I am the subject, always withdrawn from my object.  I am not the apple.  I am not my concept of my awareness of the apple.  I am always something else.

So when we turn this lens on ourselves and view the things which constitute our person, we find this same withdraw.  I possess a body,  I own it, but yet I am not my body.  I am not my job, or my house, or my name, or my memories.  I'm not even my thoughts.  I am removed from these things as a subject is to an object, just as I am from the apple.  I have these things.  In some cases, I control these things, but yet I am not these things, not at the core foundation of my being.  I find myself constantly retreating to the far hill to gain a perspective on them.

Thus Sartre proposes the fundamental paradox of our existence.  Our consciousness, which holds our very being, continually slips free from any defining attributes or any substance that could constitute its identity.  It's always somewhere else.  It is always something else.  It exists entirely in not being the object of its focus, and yet its existence lies entirely in its focus on those objects.  You chase it down and it falls continually away into the dark.  It is a void, a tiny black hole drawing perception into it, and existing exclusively through this perception.

This will be the starting point of my next post on this matter.