[In his published monograph, Eldritch Revelations (One, Two, Three), the psychiatrist of the infamous thinker Jurgen
Schulz wrote that only short fragments of Schulz’s philosophical journal
survived his escape from Borsa Castle. But following the psychiatrist’s mysterious
death shortly after publication, longer fragments were discovered in his office, locked in a drawer. The publisher of ER herewith appends these longer
fragments as they’re made available by the translator, beginning with this
passage on the problem of consciousness.]
* * *
Perhaps the oldest fiction is that there are two worlds
instead of one, the timeless, invisible, spiritual heaven that directs the
material realm in which things come and go. And our unique dignity as
enlightened beings is supposed to lie in our having a foothold in both worlds.
Our consciousness belongs to the unseen utopia, to the hidden source of truth
and beauty, while our body is plainly a physical object that emerges, evolves,
and decays along with everything else in nature. But as physiologists learned
how the body operates, the mystery deepened as to how ethereal consciousness,
which used to be known as the spirit, could arise from matter. Our inner domain
which seems like a sliver of supernature is full of mental contents, including
tastes, smells, emotions, and thoughts, which are utterly unlike the stuff in
which our body, including our brain consists. When you taste an exquisite
dessert, you wouldn’t thereby be tempted to eat the neurons that are associated
with that sensation, since the two tastes would be altogether different. There’s
a philosophical mystery of consciousness, then, because there’s a mental
blockage in our attempt to conceive of how a physical thing could have an interior
point of view, a private world of meaningful mental states.
Less well known is that this problem of the apparent duality
of matter and mind has two equivalent formulations, one of which proves more
enlightening than the other. The common formulation is the evolutionary one,
according to which we have difficulty explaining how mind emerges from matter. Notice, though, that the explanatory
relationship can be reversed, in which case we might wonder how mind can be dissolved into matter. This latter
formulation is just an abstract statement of the problem of death, as opposed to the question of how
consciousness is created in the first place. How material compounds can cohere
in such a way that they take on a conscious viewpoint which allows the material
aggregate to act knowingly and creatively in what is mostly a lifeless void is
one mystery. An equivalent mystery begins with the datum of consciousness and
proceeds to the question of how consciousness fades away with the body’s
eventual demise.
The second way of putting the problem shows why both
mysteries appear to have no solution. The heart of the conundrum isn’t
intellectual, but emotional. It’s not that we lack the brainpower to conceive
of how mind can be merged with a material body; rather, we can’t bear to pursue
the issue forthrightly, because we’re innately horrified by the inevitability
of our personal death. Indeed, we’d prefer to live forever, but are confronted
by the impermanence of all natural things. Thus, we’re blocked from
understanding how a material thing can be conscious, because we’re disgusted by
our future in which we’ll be no more, as our body deteriorates and expires.
Were we presented with a theory that specifies the mechanics of how
consciousness interacts with or inheres in matter, we would refuse to accept
the implications as long as we still feared death.
That fear is in turn a consequence of our love of life.
Every cell of our being drives us to live more and better, which is why the
contemplation of death is morbid and taboo. To ponder what your death will be
like is to betray the genetic compulsion and hormones and cultural conditioning
that establish the norm of living with blinders to certain dark realities. Biologically,
we perceive only that fraction of the universe which is useful to our survival,
although science has entered us into the infamous Faustian bargain in which we
dare to see further than is recommended to maintain our sanity. Death is
despicable because we’re naturally driven to prolong our life at all costs, and
this instinct is at least a precondition of the mind-body problem. Of course, the
theoretical problem is agonized over by living
creatures, by clever animals that figured out not just how to be self-aware,
but that the self will apparently be extinguished at the end of a process of
material dying. The certainty of death is apparent only to highly intelligent
creatures that have learned to wrestle with complexities and abstractions that
are unknown to lesser organisms. Nevertheless, the will to survive is universal
in the animal kingdom and thus the terror of death persists even in the
philosopher.
True, we can be depressive and suicidal, but even should we
relinquish the zest for life and embark upon a plot to kill ourselves, we can
experience only the act of dying, never the end of death. As long as we live,
we live in bodies that evolved to protect themselves, to preserve and to
transmit their genetic code. Once we die, the emotional component of the
problem of how mind relates to the body is of course undone, since we then no
longer exist and thus can no longer fear death or be compelled to endure. Suppose,
though, that someone were somehow to have no fear of death and thus no love of
life. Such a being would contemplate the prospect of dying with perfect
neutrality. Were she biologically programmed to defend her life, she would be
alienated from her body, since by hypothesis she would have no emotional
attachment to her life. At most she would observe herself going through the
motions of breathing, eating, and generally of preserving her life, say, by
checking that the way is clear before she crosses the street, but she wouldn’t
care about the outcome. However, these life-preserving instincts would be less
effective without their emotive component. So such a being would more likely
act neither for nor against her benefit. She would be as indifferent towards
her life as would be the rest of the universe. To that extent, she would be an
object rather than a living thing. What this indicates is that the mind-body
problem arises only for a creature that’s at least minimally self-interested,
who prefers to live and who thus loathes the thought of her passing into
nothingness.
Fear of death isn’t just a precondition of the mystery of
how a material body can be conscious; rather, that fear is what renders that identity a problem. Again, the problem isn’t
that we can’t understand how material things can come together to form a
subject, since at the subatomic level matter itself is as ethereal as any
ghost. No, the problem is that we don’t want
to be bodies that face the certainty of losing everything we once had. We
refuse to dwell on this agonizing certainty, because we’re intrinsically
disgusted by it, and so we’re mentally blocked from picking up the problem from
the other end, from imagining how a material thing can become conscious, since
the two statements of the problem are philosophically equivalent.
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