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?

State of the Blog 2011

First of all, Happy New Year from everyone here at the nuclearheadache staff.  Of course, that staff is mostly just me.  So, I guess that means Happy New Year from me.

There are some benefits to running a one man operation.  I can make my own hours, set my own terms, and come and go as I please.  So, I suppose this is as good a time as any to announce that it's time for another break here.  I'm not sure how long.  It could be a month, or maybe more.  At the very least, I'll probably start posting on the Night Owl blog in the early spring.  The change in the weather always seems to put me in a sentimental mood.

In the meantime, I'm trying to work on some ideas for a Kindle series, something fictional, something serialized.  I'm open to suggestions.  Also, I'm sure I'll be kicking some nonsense up onto the FARNC from time to time.  And although I've neglected my Encyclopedia of Sheep for the past few months, I always hope to have some dreams to report over there.

So you won't be rid of me completely.  I'll still be around, reading everybody's blogs.  I just need to kick back for a while, go into a low power mode, amass my ideas and get my ducks in row.  Maybe I'll work on my metaphors a little.  I'd be a little more specific about time tables and such, but that's the point, I need to be a little unspecific for a while.  I need to relax.  Anyway, rest assured, one way or the other, in one capacity or another, I'll keep blogging and writing.  I can promise you that.

And finally, this blog topped 30,000 pageviews this morning!  Thank you slender man, wherever you are!   

Out Here Among the Stars

I was pleasantly surprised when I recently learned that Carl Sagan's Cosmos series is available through Netflix's streaming video service.  I don't know if it's a new addition to the service, but it is a welcome one.  I've seen most of the series' short thirteen episode run here and there in various different ways over the years, but this gives me the opportunity to watch it all in order and at my own leisure, which, naturally, is the nice thing about the Netflix service.  I find that, like all works that resonate deeply with me, I return to it time and again with a different perspective that reflects my own progress as a person.  It becomes like a touchstone or a familiar place; it remains constant and serves as something to mark your own change and growth by.

For instance, watching it now, I keep thinking about recent conversations with my friend Vincent, who has a somewhat passing, almost mild, antagonism towards science, depending on what kind of mood you catch him in.  Vincent isn't alone, of course, and there are plenty of other people with similar feelings.  Yet, I can't help but wonder if their problem isn't as much with science - as a collection of data and a discipline of factual inquiry - as much as it is with the attitudes and mind-sets of certain scientists who rub them the wrong way.  One might be tempted to cynically conclude that they just resent more sober minds raining on their fairy tales, and that they lash back with any means at their disposal.  But I'd like to think there's a little more to it than that.  I suspect that when Vincent thinks of science, he tends to think of Richard Dawkins or someone similarly disposed.  

Yet, the problem with Dawkins isn't necessarily that he's a scientist or even that he's an atheist.  Rather, the problem is the implicit insistence on an almost militantly prosaic viewpoint whereby he arrives at his conclusions.  He comes off as the sort of smug jackass who subjects a religion to ruthlessly "logical" interrogations, not as a way of trying to learn more about it and gain insight into its tenets, but as a way of holding it up to mockery as an irrational farce.  It's the sort of game a person is up to when they ask how Noah fit all the animals on the Ark or how reincarnation accounts for population growth.  These aren't necessarily invalid points, but the people raising them usually aren't looking to know; they're looking to deflate.  Consequently, some people come to feel like they are under fire from science and reason.  The irony is that the prejudice and dismissive close-mindedness that underpins such smug games goes against the very spirit of science and reason.

Most likely, Sagan would have agreed with Dawkins on nearly all matters of scientific fact, but it's the man himself that makes all the difference in the world.  His Cosmos series was billed as "A Personal Voyage", and it takes a moment's pause to appreciate the significance of this.  Clearly he wasn't talking about "personal" in the sense of "biographical", and there's little about the man himself throughout the series.  What is personal is Sagan's passion and wonder for his subject matter, his sense of amazement when he tells us that we are all "made of star stuff", his hopefulness of finding intelligent life out there in the universe, his benevolent optimism towards the human race, and his urgent concern about the possibility that we might destroy ourselves which he mentions again and again as a warning and a leitmotif through the series.  Sagan sees poetry where Dawkins insists on prose.  They may draw many of the same conclusions and believe much of the same things, but for entirely different reasons.

Throughout the Cosmos series, Sagan displays a boundless enthusiasm that fits him well in his role as a teacher.  He constantly puts things in a perspective that's deliberately designed to evoke awe and curiosity.  I particularly liked the calender model he uses to try to bring the fourteen billion year existence of the universe down to a manageable scale that the mind can grasp.  He stands on a stage with a giant illustrated calender laid out on the floor.  The calender year represents the entire life-span of the universe, and down in the right hand corner is a tiny little spot, the last few seconds of December 31st, which represent all of recorded human history.  "Everyone we've ever known, every story ever told, happened right here.", he tells us, and suddenly the majesty of the universe, and our fragile place in it, is as clear and touching as it has ever been.  This is the amazing achievement of Cosmos.  "What we do at the beginning of the next cosmic year is up to us.", he continues, touching again on the themes of optimism and concern.

So, I come away from all this wondering if there isn't another dimension to how we draw the lines between us.  We get hung up on the differences between our beliefs and ideologies that we tend to lose sight of the fact that it's the people behind those differences that really matter.  Whatever side of whichever line someone falls on, it's the spirit of the person, the humanity, the compassion, that bright eyed warmth that really matters.  A heart in the right place is worth far more than the details of any particular dogma, as far as I'm concerned.  We focus on the difference between things like science and religion, and we forget about the difference between people like Dawkins and Sagan.  We're all on the same journey, turning and revolving out here among the stars.  Sometimes it's how we feel about that journey that makes all the difference.

Sartre's Anguish

I remember the first time someone told me what would happen if you were outside on a cold winter day and you stuck your tongue to a metal post; how you were likely to find yourself securely fixed until the paramedics arrived.  This idea held a grip on my imagination for days, weeks, even months after that.  I was afraid that I would find myself in a situation where I would just go ahead and...stick my tongue to a metal post.  It wasn't that I wanted to do it.  I wasn't particularly curious about what would happen, and I had little cause to doubt what I'd been told.  And I could hardly imagine a situation where I would need to stick my tongue to a metal post.  In fact, I really had no conceivable reason what-so-ever for sticking my tongue to a post, but despite all that, I was still afraid that somehow I was just going to go ahead and do it anyway.  I suspect that many of you at one time or another have had a similar experience.  Sartre calls this feeling "anguish."

Anguish, as Sartre uses the term, is a special breed of fear: fear before one's self.  A soldier going off to war may understandably be afraid of the enemy, of battle, of leaving home, and many other things, but there's another sense in which he may fear the potential of his own actions.  He may be afraid that he won't measure up in his duties as a soldier.  He may fear that he'll run when he should have taken cover, or that he'll take cover when he should have ran.  He may spend long, sleepless, hours possessed by the thought of inexplicably sticking his head up out of a hole at the wrong moment to see what's going on and catching enemy sniper fire right between the eyes.  More even than the fear of being killed, it's the fear of doing something stupid and getting himself killed that seizes the soldier's heart with such a powerful rush of anguish that it takes his breath away.  So he tries to be a soldier, as a thing in a uniform equipped with a weapon, a machine designed exclusively for war.  If he must die, he wants to die as a soldier, not through his failure to fulfill the responsibility of that role.

Of course, we don't need to invoke the special circumstances of war to find anguish.  There is, perhaps, no more common or appropriate illustration of our experience of anguish, than our morbid fascination with suicide.  I'm sure that most of us probably have no pressing wish to kill ourselves or serious plans of doing so, but yet the thought does flutter in now and then, doesn't it?  We think of the opportunities that might present themselves, the rigged noose and the chair, the gun laid in our lap.  We sense all too well that we are capable of pushing through all those layers of resistance, all those reasons not to do it, and with a quick flip of the foot or twitch of the finger we could end our lives....Snap! Just like that.  It's enough to turn your blood cold.  It's the feeling of standing on the edge of a cliff and knowing that you could just say the hell with it and hurl yourself over the edge and nothing would stop you.

It's not a all a question of mortality.  It crops up in a number of little ways.  I remember a while back when I debating some of the finer points of free will and determinism with Mr. John Myste, I used the example of how I had to continually force myself to get up for work night after night, how I had to perpetually sustain my role as a responsible family man.  I told him that I could throw it all away at a moment's notice.  I could just get in my car and drive off into the dark, never to be seen from again.  Even writing those words gave me a flash of anguish, a dizzy spin of vertigo from the cliff's edge.  It's not even that it's a particularly terrible prospect.  It's just that facing the fact that you could change your life so radically at the snap of your fingers is exhilarating and yet horrifying at the same time.

Naturally, a determinist would insist that these are baseless fears, a odd glitch in our psychological programming.  They would say that this agonizing over suicide, for instance, is a pointless waste of time.  They would say that no one has ever been seized by such a reckless impulse of self-destruction; no one has ever pulled a trigger because they were overcome by their own willpower.  But yet, people do kill themselves, do they not?  Who's to say that all of those people had better reasons for doing it than you or I do?  Where do you draw the line?  Where does the determinist stand over the body lying on the floor with the smoking gun and say, "causality led to this"?  I submit that not only would I disagree that no one has ever pulled the trigger out of sheer willpower, I'll go as far as to say that it always goes down just the way we fear.  It's rarely a clear cut case of a person just wanting to kill themselves.  There's struggle, conflict.  There's nearly always some reasons to live.  But the person pushes past all that, says the hell with it, and does it anyway.

This all makes anguish sound like a negative thing, but it's actually a necessary part of our existence.  It serves much the same purpose psychologically, that physical pain serves biologically.  It is the constant pin prick, keeping us on our toes, reminding us of our responsibility for our actions.  It drives the soldier to train, to learn, to sustain his role as a soldier.  The sobering awareness that he is not merely a soldier, as a thing, that he has within him the capacity to fail to live up to the demands of being a soldier, prods him and drives him on.  To try to defuse that feeling, as determinism does, is dangerous and deadly.  A soldier without anguish, a soldier who has fallen into bad faith, has sealed his fate.

And suppose I'm wrong, and Sartre's wrong, and free will is all just a big delusion.  Well, then what difference does it make?  Whatever's going to happen is going to happen, and I have no more control over the fact that I believe in free will than I do over my own eye color.  Ironically, there's always, behind a determinist's argument, an implicit subtext that they came by their position by choice.  They keep telling you why they're a determinist and why you should be a determinist, even though from their position "why" shouldn't matter a bit.  They are a determinist as the western wind blows and nothing more.  So, if I'm wrong, it makes no difference, and I can't even help being wrong anyway.  But if I'm right, and we really are free, then believing in free will makes all the difference in the world.  It means that you assume ownership of this life, and all the possibilities open to it.

For now, we end our adventures in Sartre's theory of free will out along its most paradoxical outskirts: will beyond reason, choice beyond control.  We face the disconnection between the person we dream ourselves to be and the consciousness which is free and unbound by the limitations of that dream.  We face anguish with that nauseating drop in the pit of our stomach as well fall into nothingness, free almost even from ourselves, overwhelmed by that freedom.  Sartre said that we are doomed to be free.  Well, so be it.  Let's make the most of it.             

Get Your Slender Man Buttons, Coffee Mugs, and T-Shirts

A recent check of my stats for this blog shows that I've gone well over four thousand pageviews for this month, and I'm well on my way to topping five thousand by the end of the month, possibly even topping 30,000 total pageviews by the end of the year.  This has easily been the most successful month so far here at nuclearheadache...at least traffic-wise.  Unfortunately, I find this achievement to be somewhat hollow, and I don't get much satisfaction or sense of accomplishment out of it.  It seems that I owe all the credit to that Stretch Armstrong of child abductors known to his friends and family as...The Slender Man.

Pictured: NOT Slender Man.

Yes, there appears to be quite a Slender Man following out there, a thriving sub-culture much larger than I would have ever guessed.  They want to know his hopes, his dreams, his passions, his obsessions.  They want to know where he buys his suits and how he knots his ties.  Some are looking for pictures of "real Slender Man sightings", while the more skeptical are looking for reassuring confirmation of a "Slender Man hoax."  And apparently this ravenous wave of curiosity is washing up on my nuclear doorstep.  In a little over a month since it was posted "Ballad of a Slender Man" is far and away the most searched and viewed post on this site.....Or at least the pictures are.

That isn't him either.

So let me set the record straight here, folks.  This is not a special Slender Man blog, providing one stop shopping for all your Slender Man needs.  I'm afraid I don't have exclusive, never before seen, video footage of Slender Man.  In fact, I have the same incredibly realistic photos of Slender Man that everyone else has.  I do not, NOT, possess the secret, shocking, truth behind the Slender Man legend.  I'm not giving away free Slender Man pizza coupons, or offering amazing bargains on Slender Man ink cartridges or pre-paid Slender Man cell phones...just in case anyone was wondering.  And...I can't be adamant enough about this...I most certainly do not provide Japanese, crossover, Slender Man, tentacle, fan-fic, anime, fetish porn.  Nope.

Ehhh...Close Enough.

There.  That should clear things up ;D