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?

The Philosophy Tree

When we think of philosophy, we tend to think of an esoteric subject far removed from the actual practice of living.  We think of the obscure terminology, the perpetually ponderous "isms" and the various schools of thought which bear their names.  We tend to think of the great names of philosophy, Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, and so on, those giants of wisdom who's names we invoke in intellectual arguments as though they were the patron saints of their own peculiar ideas.  If we're in a particularly imaginative or hypnagogic state, we may even picture philosophy as the domain of the wise hermit living on the mountain top who pilgrims have to brave treacherous paths and passes to reach in order to hear his sage advice.

In short, we tend to focus on the vast body of work done on the subject of philosophy, accumulated in books and texts, rather than on the object of study itself.  While the stars serve to remind us what the astronomer is looking at, and the flowers are there to remind us what the botanist is up to, philosophy studies something that isn't quite so easily brought to mind.  It seems like something more intangible and remote.  So it's easy to fall into the misconception that philosophers are off hunting ghosts in another dimension with no relevance to the real world.  "That's all well and good.", we say, "But we've got work to do and bills to pay.", and we move on with our lives.  This is a dreadful mistake.  Philosophy isn't hard to fathom because it's so remote from our lives.  Quite the contrary.  We have a hard time seeing it because it looms so large in our lives, because it is so fundamental and all encompassing.  Philosophy is nothing less than the study of existence itself.  Deeper still, it's the study of our understanding of existence and our place in that existence, and our understanding of ourselves.  It makes all the difference in the world.

Imagine that you and I and everyone else has a tree growing somewhere deep in the core of our minds.  As trees tend to do, this tree branches out from a central trunk, and those branches branch out into more branches and those into even smaller branches, and so on.  This tree and these branches form a kind of network which connects all the ideas and opinions and beliefs that you have about everything, from the seemingly inconsequential things like the etiquette for parallel parking out along one of the small twigs, to more meatier issues like where you stand on the death penalty on one of the sturdier limbs.  Your position on fundamental matters along the main branches are going to affect all the smaller branches that lead off from it.  It's all connected.  The tree as a whole represents our concept of the world and our attitude and approach to life.

Philosophy is the study of that tree.  More than that, it's a way of caring and tending, trimming and maintaining that tree.  Many people don't bother.  They let the tree grow wild, the gnarled branches twisting haphazardly around each other at random, choking the life out of some branches and leaving others neglected in the shadows unexposed to the nourishment of the sun.  They suffer the consequences of this in their actions, their choices, and in their very feelings towards life itself.  There are others who do tend to the tree, but some of them end up doing even worse damage because they don't know what they're doing, because they're not careful, and because they don't take the task seriously to begin with.  They cut into some vital organ and leave the tree half-barren, lifeless, and rotted from the inside.

If I say that I am a philosopher, I don't mean that as a matter of vocation or title.  I am a philosopher in the sense that I am an eater, a dreamer, a bather, and a sleeper.  I am a philosopher because I tend to my tree.  I've devoted a large part of my life to tending to my tree.  I've nursed it to health through the long, grey winters; I've cultivated its blossoms in the spring.  I've tried more than one ill-advised method and risked permanent damage, but hopefully I've learned something from my mistakes.  It's nearly a full-time job, taking on the task myself.  It takes time and thought and study and research.  But so far I've resisted the temptation to farm the job out to any religious group or political affiliation.  I have consulted a few experts on occasion, though.  I let Nietzsche have a go at it one summer.  The tree grew tall and strong, and even a little terrifying to behold.  Kant proposed putting a box of mirrors around the tree, blocking out the sunlight completely.  I sent him packing.  And of course Sartre still drops by now and then in the evenings.  He smiles and nods and reminds me that the tree is mine to make what I will of it; the choices and the possibilities are up to me.

And it's up to you as well.  You can tend your own tree, or you can ignore it altogether, or you can hire someone else to do it and find all of your ideas in their debt.  But make no mistake about it.  You have that tree too.  We all have that tree.  Philosophy studies something which is relevant to all our lives.  We all have some way of looking at the world.  The question is: Are you going to let that view fall into place by a random accident of jumbled ideas, or are you going to cultivate that view deliberately and help it to grow into something wonderful?  The choice is yours.                    

Dust to Dust

One of the great parts about blogging is the fact that while many of us often deal with the same pressing issues and difficult questions, we're still able to take our own style and approach to the subjects and frame them in our own unique ways.  Some bloggers openly declare their intention to hurt their reader's brains. Some bloggers tear at the scabs of people's complacent sensibilities.  My friend Vincent just likes to take walks.  His blog A Wayfarer's Notes has a premise which is beguilingly simple, while it's execution is prolific in its complexity.  It doesn't hurt that he's a damn good writer either.  He goes where his feet take him, and he lets his mind wander in a similar fashion, and on his blog he shares with us the results of these physical and mental ramblings.  His reveries aren't always confined to his walks.  Sometimes he's in bed half asleep; sometimes he's hanging the wash out to dry.  But one of the charms of his blog is that he often organically incorporates the physical details of his surroundings with the abstract musings of his ideas.  This has the sublime effect of placing thoughts in the context of life.

His latest post is a fine example of this.  He not only tells us of an epiphany that he had, an intuition of immortality, but he also describes exactly where he had it and even provides a picture of the spot.  Of immortality he says, "Normally, when we speak of being immortal, we refer to the notion of the 'I' not dying when the body dies. But I saw, in that moment, that the 'I' is nothing more than the body’s mechanism for looking out for itself. It dies and unravels, but consciousness is all-pervasive, in all beings, in all matter. Call it awareness, call it an indwelling intelligence in everything, if you like."  As usual with Vincent's post, this gave me a lot to think about.

It seems to me, if he wanted to pursue this idea (assuming even that he's interested in treating it as an idea.  He might be content to take it as a moment of awe and wonder, and leave it at that without further questioning.  He and I are of somewhat different temperaments.) ...but suppose he wanted to look deeper into this notion of consciousness being something larger than the finite existence of the ego and the individual.  Then, I would suggest that to find a clue to how it all ends, one needs to look at how it all begins.  If "our" consciousness, his and mine and yours and whoever's, returns to some universal mind upon death, then it seems to follow that they arose up out of that universal mind at birth.  If consciousness transcends the individual, mustn't it do so in both directions in time, mustn't it precede life as well as succeed it?

For instance, under that post I left a comment speculating about immortality on the basis of the Law of Conservation, the question of "Where does it all go?  Where does a lifetime of knowledge and my knowing of that knowledge...how can it all just vanish without a trace?"  This is, of course, an entirely different point from the one Vincent was making, and yet it proceeds from the same principle that consciousness is part of something larger than the individual life, in this case, part of the general substance of the universe, a transubstantiation of matter and energy and thought that somehow endures in some form.  To insist that it must return to something, is to insist likewise that it must have come from this something.  Arguing from Conservation requires a persistent continuum from which the individual rises and falls.

I'm reminded of Adam from the Bible, and I'm struck once again by the metaphorical insight of those ancient writers.  Adam was formed from the dust of the ground to which he would someday return, life rising up out of the very substance to which death would eventually return it.  Or as Mark Twain once put it, "I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."

But yet, we can't simply return consciousness to the shelf where we found it.  It's a used item, changed and worn and broken in by passing through a lifetime of our experiences.  It began for me as a crack of awareness in the world as I first opened my eyes.  I knew nothing beyond the most natural of bodily functions, breathing, sleeping, crying and so on.  As time went on, that crack of awareness has grown.  It has become a repository of information and experience.  It has gathered the dust of my life to complement the dust of the Earth.  When the one returns to the ground, what becomes of the other?  It has blossomed, grown in complexity and substance.  Isn't it made of something?  Where do it go?  Is it disseminated through-out this universal mind like fertilizer, enhancing its general growth and vitality?  Does that flash of memory in my mind, my foot making cracks in the ice...will that someday be part of a stream flowing over a rock?  Will the algebraic equations I learned somehow fall from the sky with the rain?  Will my laughter grow from the ground?  Where does it all go?

We're not done with this subject.  Not by a long shot.  It's one of the most important, most enduring questions of the human race.  It's also probably the most difficult to answer.  What happens to us when we die?  Only the dead know for sure, and they're not giving up any of their secrets.  So it's up to us.  I'll chip in.  I'll do my part, and I'll do my best to give you a headache in the process.  That, for what it's worth and while it lasts, is my "individual" perspective and contribution to the whole cosmic mess.       

The Microcosm

As another month draws to a close here at nuclearheadache, I figured that I'd leave you with a very old, half-baked idea of mine.  It's a little crazy, more than a little stupid.  I'd say that it would make you think, but seriously....Anyway:

Okay, so picture yourself in a smokey, dimly lit room.  You focus in and look closely at the smoke.  You see that it's denser in some areas than others, forming clusters and clouds here and there.  You zoom in closer until you see the atoms and molecules that the smoke is composed of.  The nuclei of these atoms are like bright little points of light, and the clouds are composed of billions and billions of them, clustered into different shapes, some round, some spiral swirled.  You focus in on a single atom that lies along the outskirts of one of the spiral clusters.  As you draw in, you can see the electrons orbiting around the brightly lit nucleus.  One of the electrons looks interesting.  You zoom in for an even closer look, and to your amazement you find that there is life on this electron.  It's absolutely teeming with life...intelligent life even.  They've established an entire civilization of this electron.  They have roads, and buildings, and technology.  The subatomic beings on this electron are full of questions.  They wonder how and why they've come to be.  They struggle and strain and make the most of their lives on this fragile little electron.  You zoom in closer to the towns and cities and neighborhoods.  You descend towards the roof of a familiar looking house.  You open the front door, go into the house and up the stairs.  You find a room with smoke coming from behind the door.  You go inside and find someone who looks exactly like you sitting in a chair by the lamp.  Your duplicate looks up, blinks and chokes for a moment and then tells you, "This is some good stuff."

See you next month.   

The Life & Death of Tony Soprano

It's been over four years since the above scene aired, ending the six season run of the HBO series The Sopranos.  It seems a bit belated to talk about it now, but at the time the ending stirred quite a bit of controversy (by which I mean "internet controversy", which is to real controversy what a McNugget is to a real chicken.)  Series finales have always been a bit polarizing among a show's fans.  The creators of these shows often go for something gimmicky or poignant, something a little offbeat from the normal flavor of the show.  Sometimes this works; sometimes it doesn't, but one way or the other, it usually gets people talking, which is the whole idea.

At first glance, it seems the The Sopranos ending is no kind of ending at all.  It randomly cuts to black in the middle of a scene.  There's no resolution, no closure, nothing.  Some have griped endlessly about this.  Others have dissected the scene shot by shot, and gone back through clues and references through-out the series, and they have reached the conclusion that Tony dies at the moment the shot cuts to black.  This seems to me to be a more than plausible explanation, and I'm quite willing to accept it.  The thing that I find interesting about it, though, is the way it has made me work backwards over the series, re-evaluating my impression and concept of it.

When I began watching the show in its first season, I felt like I had a handle on where it was going.  I felt like Tony was headed for some kind of break-through in his therapy with Dr. Melfi, specifically a moral break-through.  It seemed to me that it would be revealed that his black-outs and panic attacks were the result of some sort of struggle of conscience.  Well, as time went on, it became more and more clear that this break-through was never going to come.  Tony sank deeper and deeper into his multitude of sins, and while no one might be beyond God's redemption, things weren't looking too promising for the man.

Then at some point between moves, I lost my HBO subscription, and I lost track of the show for a while.  I picked up the show again somewhere in the middle of the fourth or fifth season, and I caught up on what I had missed in various ways.  Now a new overall plan for the series seemed to be emerging.  It seemed to me that Tony was going to be faced with a choice.  The show had always been about a man divided between two worlds and two identities, the brutal mafia boss and the family man.  Certainly the plan was to eventually bring these two worlds into an irrevocable conflict with each other.  And I could see exactly how they would do it too, Tony's son A.J.

All the signs were there.  A.J. was drifting and getting into more and more trouble.  Meanwhile, Tony had faced some hard choices, sanctioning the deaths of his cousin, his daughter's boyfriend, and so on.  What would happen if A.J. got himself into a position where Tony was forced to make that choice?  What if his role as mafia boss mandated that he kill his own son?  Would he give up the mob life for the sake of his family, or would he step completely beyond redemption once and for all?  It had an almost inevitable logic to it, and a dramatically Biblical overtone to boot.  The chess pieces were sliding into position.  Surely this is where it was headed!  But then, after A.J's pathetic assassination attempt on Junior, the whole thing kind of petered out.  Just another tantalizing plot thread that went no where.

And when it was all over, I realized that I had watched this show all these years, holding out hope for some kind of salvation for the man, or at the very least, final and irrevocable damnation.  I wanted closure.  We all did.  Christopher Moltisanti complained early on about his life having no "arc."  Unfortunately lives rarely do.  Tony Soprano's life went on for a while, and then it ended abruptly, as lives tend to do, and as mafia lives tend to do even more so, I imagine.  They don't generally end on an appropriate note, but rather in mid-song with so much left to do, so many sins unconfessed, so many mistakes uncorrected. All the while you're still trying to point your ship on its proper course, and if you'd only had five more minutes....  The Sopranos was never about any particular scheme or overall arc.  It was just about a man's life, as it went on for a while, and then it was over.  Cut to black.