Implicit Dualism
Dualism — the notion that there exist things beyond physical matter, such as the soul — is not a particularly difficult belief system to refute. I have done as much on a few occasions right here on this blog. It’s easy for materialists such as myself to sit back and say “There is no soul” and “Consciousness is an operationalisation of the brain’s physical substrates”. Fully comprehending this, on the other hand, is considerably harder.
If you’ve ever found yourself musing over thoughts like “I’m lucky to have been born in this country”, or “What if I’d been a different person?”, or even “What if I’d been born as an ant?” … these are based on an intuitive dualistic belief that is almost impossible to shake off.
Let’s actually think about that first statement. What does it mean to be lucky to be born somewhere, or in a certain time period, or in a particular fashion? For luck to be involved, we need a random process, and indeed people say this as though there was a random allocation of souls to bodies going on. The implication is that you had an equal chance of being born anytime, anywhere, and your actual birth was the result of the trillion-sided die roll. Who rolls that die? Nature? A god? A collapsing quantum probability wave?
The answer, of course, is none of the above. There was no die roll, and in no way were you randomly allocated to your body, or your body randomly allocated to you, or either of them randomly allocated to your mother’s womb. And no, this doesn’t mean that you were purposefully allocated to your body. There was no allocation involved, because there was nothing to be allocated. You don’t “have” a brain that was granted to you at birth. You are that brain. You are the small shifting mass of molecules that were assembled from the planet’s stockpile according to a set of genetic instructions. Yes, there was chance involved in how your parents’ two sets of genes were mashed into one. Yes, there was chance involved in precisely which individual molecules were used to build you. Yes, there was chance involved in the sequence of events that shaped you into a person who thinks to consider the fortunate circumstances of their birth. It’s all the same, boring, meaningless type of chance that appears in the anthropic principle: chances that can’t be comprehended if they don’t occur.
A rich CEO can think to himself, “It was lucky I got to work at this company.” To think the same thing about your mind/soul/spirit/consciousness as “hired” at your brain/body is the implicit dualism I am talking about. The CEO of You, Inc. was put together from spare parts lying around the place — and it wasn’t functional until a couple of years after your company was born. Boring chance determined the layout of the manufactory behind the scenes, and eventually enough stuff fell off the end of the assembly line to recognise itself.
But it’s not all bad. If you believe the universe is infinite, then somewhere, somewhen out there is an Earth-clone with a genetic copy of you that thinks it was lucky to be born in 3rd-century Rome instead of 2nd-century Egypt.
No, there was no chance involved in which Earth-clone “you” were born on.
Funny, Robin and I were literally just talking about this. And I’ve spent the day contemplating it. Thanks once again for putting it all into clear simple words.
The prospect of infinite time and space entails Nietzche’s ‘eternal recurrrence’, and quantum immortality. Neither are particularly pleasant concepts. Much as I’m sure we’d appreciate a lifespan of more than sixty years, maybe the alternative isn’t so sweet either.
You’re welcome. I’m sure we’d all like to reach the point where we no longer age and can self-euthanise on a whim, but only after we’re not all stuck on the same planet and rely on fresh young minds replacing yesterday’s tired old coots.
In regards to the post, another thought I believe to be implicitly dualistic is “I wonder what it’d be like to be [person].” Of course, given the theoretical ability, you might mimic their memories and personality with your own brain…but considering you would ‘overwrite’ your original brain in the process, what would be left to appreciate it? Can you really ‘experience being someone else’ beyond inheriting their environment or installing a camera behind their eyes?
I think that’s a topic deserving of its own blog post or ten. It’s a crucial, fantastic, fascinating question of memory that sadly few works of art explore. It hinges on the incomprehensible fact that our memories are nothing like even the world’s shabbiest scrapbook, but are re-created and re-interpreted every time we bring them up. Our emotions heavily influence both the encoding and retrieval of memories. The idea of ‘downloading’ someone else’s memories and scrolling through them in isolation from emotion is ridiculous. But then the question is: what WOULD happen?
I’ve had that exact thought too. You may be interested to know from an academic standpoint that some hallucinogens are capable of putting you in a completely different mindset (for example, yourself from your distant past), while maintaining some sense of self and objectivity. Essentially you simultaneously experience two or more different inner realities.
I agree this topic warrants at least one entry.
[...] friend Grimrukh recently wrote a post about the counterintuitive nature of our individual experience. He demonstrated that there’s [...]
Transient and Fragmentary « Viridian Circles said this on May 16, 2011 at 3:20 pm |