Share a pipe in the House of Strange Thoughts!
Immortality, Part Two
Machines, Prisms, and Occam’s Razor (July 17th, 2008)
“We are all the same person trying to shake hands with our self.”
Wavy Gravy
In
Part One
, I suggested that you won’t survive the next moment, let alone death. Some immortality! The paradox: if the Transporter duplicates your body perfectly, which “you” would embody your consciousness?
My favorite resolution might be Buddha’s too: the question is absurd because, although consciousness exists, “your” consciousness does not! Your mind is local, creating an illusion that consciousness is local.
We sometimes talk about human brains as if they were machines that generate consciousness. Maybe our brains are more like prisms that block, reflect, and refract an undifferentiated consciousness that radiates like light throughout the universe, or that simply
is
the universe. This idea is disturbing, perhaps incomprehensible, as long as we identify with the prism rather than the light. But sometimes the illusion of separation falls away (for hippies, anyway), and what I’m trying to express becomes intuitively clear. Then death doesn’t seem so encompassing or frightening.
Scientific thinkers may object that this is false comfort, magical thinking: I am resorting to an invisible agent (undifferentiated consciousness), making assertions that can’t be tested, and ignoring
Occam’s Razor
. If we posit forces that can’t be observed to support unnecessarily complicated hypotheses that can’t be falsified, we might as well believe that Jehovah created the universe 6000 years ago. But in this case, “common sense” explanations don’t do any better. Why didn’t evolution result in complex but unconscious meat robots? Every scientific explanation of consciousness I’ve heard suffers from what philosophers call a “category error.” Consciousness is necessary for complex adaptive behaviors, and therefore is generated in our brains, though no one knows how? A witness, a subject who
experiences
life: what does consciousness have to do with enabling complex behavior? The common sense view: life evolved, and consciousness somehow evolved with it (a mystery). My view: consciousness somehow exists (a mystery), and intelligent life differentiates it. I think William of Ockham would call it a draw.
Denizens of Marin County might equate my perspective with a belief in a solicitous God, or a stake in the workings of astrology, psychic readings, crystal healing, and all manner of synchronicity. For all I know, every oracular system is perfectly sound. But my sense of a conscious universe doesn’t lead me there. When I’m happiest, no God intervenes on my behalf, no esoteric knowledge shows the way. Quite the opposite: the prism is as ephemeral as a ripple on the pond, and none of its occlusions could possibly trouble the dancing stars. Hallelujah!
Clatch of other Strange Thoughts:
2008-06-07 -- Immortality, Part One: Identity, Continuity, and the Star Trek Transporter
2008-05-14 -- Tripping out of Trees
2008-05-08 -- Color Octaves: Sight, Sound, and Elegant Recurrence