I’m very happy to report that I’ll be doing some guest
blogging at R. Scott Bakker’s blog, Three Pound Brain (TPB), and that my first
article there has been posted. This article is called “The Rant within the Undead God,” because it summarizes much of what I’ve written so far in my own
blog (RWTUG). Scott is the author of the fantasy series known as The Second Apocalypse, but his blog, TPB, explores one of his other interests, which is
philosophy, specifically the philosophical implications of cognitive science
for laypeople’s intuitions about how our mind works. Scott’s blog can get a
little technical in his discussions of cognitive science, but because he’s also
a fiction writer I find that he does an exceptional job of clarifying his jargon
with creative and lucid explanations of some complicated subject matters.
For example, he’s written an entertaining dialogue between a super-intelligent alien and a
materialist about where progress in cognitive science truly leads.
Currently, Scott and I are debating an issue that’s of great
interest to each of us, namely that of how subversive cognitive scientific
discoveries are for the nonscientific, “folk” conception of ourselves. In other
words, the question is to what extent the traditional view of the mind as
having freedom, consciousness, meaningful beliefs, and desires that are right
or wrong is exposed as so much pablum by recent biology, psychology, and by the
other relevant sciences that collectively make up what’s called cognitive
science. As radical as I think I’ve been in saying repeatedly that science
shows we’re not as rational, conscious, or as free as we usually think we are,
I find myself resisting, to some extent, Scott’s more radical--or perhaps just
more informed!--understanding of the philosophical implications. At any rate, we agree that modern societies
would do well to prepare now for the upheavals of a catastrophic shift in
self-understanding, due to what I’ve been calling the curse of reason. I hope eventually to
post our email discussion on this blog.
Here, though, are the first few paragraphs of my introductory, greatly-hyperlinked post at TBP:
“Mark my harangue, monstrous abode of the damned and you denizens
of this godforsaken place! I have only my stern words to give you, though most
of you don’t recognize the existential struggle you’re in; so I’ll cry foul,
slink off into the approaching night, and we’ll see if my rant festers in your
mind, clearing the way for alien flowers to bloom. How many poor outcasts,
deranged victims of heredity, and forlorn drifters have shouted doom from the
rooftops? In how many lands and ages have fools kept the faith from the
sidelines of decadent courts, the aristocrats mocking us as we point our finger
at a thousand vices and leave no stone unturned? And centuries from now, many
more artists,
outsiders, and mystics will make their chorus heard in barely imaginable
ways, sending their subversive
message, I foresee, from one land to the next in an instant, through a vast
ethereal web called the internet. Those philosophers will look like me,
unwashed and ill-fed, but they’ll rant from the privacy of their lairs or from
public terminals linked by the invisible information highway. Instead of
glaring at the accused in person, they’ll mock in secret, parasitically turning
the technological power of a global empire against itself.
“But how else shall we resist in this world in which we’re
thrown? No one was there to hurl us here where as a species we’re born, where
we pass our days and lay down to die--not we, who might have been asked and
might have refused the offer of incarnation, and not a personal God who might
be blamed. Nevertheless, we’re thrown here, because the world isn’t idle; natural
forces stir, they complexify and evolve; this mindless cosmos is neither living
nor dead, but undead,
a monstrous abomination that mocks the comforting myths we take for granted,
about our supernatural inner essence. No spirit is needed to make a trillion
worlds and creatures; the undead forces of the cosmos do so daily, creating and
destroying with no rational plan, but still manifesting a natural pattern. What
is this pattern, sewn into the fabric of reality? What is the simulated agenda
of this headless horseman that drags us behind the mud-soaked hooves of its
prancing beast? Just this: to create everything
and then to destroy everything! Let that sink in, gentle folk. The universe
opens up the book of all possibilities, has a glance at every page with its
undead, glazed-over eyes, and assembles miniscule machines--atoms and molecules--to
make each possibility an actuality somewhere in space and time, in this
universe or the next, until each configuration is exhausted and then all
will fly apart until not one iota of reality remains to carry out such
blasphemous work. How many ways can a nonexistent God be shown up, I ask you?
Everything a loving God might have made, the undead leviathan creates instead,
demonstrating spirit’s superfluity, and then that monster, the magically
animated carcass we inhabit will finally reveal its headlessness, the void at
the center of all things, and nothing shall be left after the Big Rip.
“I ask again, how else to resist the abominable inhumanity
of our world, but to make a show of detaching from some natural processes of
cosmic putrefaction, to register our denunciation in all existential
authenticity, and yet to cling to the bowels of this beast like the parasites
we nonetheless are? And how else to rebel against our false humanity, against our
comforting delusions, other than by replacing old, worn-out myths with new
ones? For ours is a war on two fronts: we’re faced with a horrifying
natural reality, which causes us to flee like children into a world of
make-believe, whereupon we outgrow some bedtime stories and need others to help
us sleep.”
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