Links
FeedOn the Nature of The Tethered Soul
Thursday, July 05, 2007 → by DanieruI reach into the shadows behind the screen and retrieve a small, semi-transparent plastic bucket. I dip into the bucket and fish out a human brain. I have no idea to whom the brain belonged. I can't tell if it's male or female, black or white, or, with and reliability, its age. I may even have passed this person on the street. In its natural state, encased within the skull, brain matter is gelatinous. This brain, fixed in formalin, has a solid, rubbery feel and would carve like a very tender tuna steak......When the Apollo astronauts went to the moon and brought back pictures of our planet of oceans and clouds hanging over a grey moonscape in the middle of a black nowhere, it changed the way we saw ourselves. We knew already that we inhabited the surface of a small, spinning sphere that rolled around an ordinary star, at the edge of an unremarkable galaxy, just one of indeterminate billions in a vast, indifferent cosmos. But now, occupying a few degrees of retinal space, comfortably absorbed in the folds of the visual cortex, a mere portion of the visual field, we saw our home in its true colours. It was precious and vulnerable, a small fragile object, a thing we should take care of. It was, indeed, our home. We might have extrapolated these sentiments from the knowledge we already possessed, but the images set off an interplay of intellect and imagination that made the new perspective irresistible.
Something similar happens when you see the brain. Imagination infiltrates intellect. You get a sense of location and venerability. Our home...
...Like the surface of the Earth, the brain is pretty much mapped. There are no secret compartments inaccessible to the surgeon's knife or the magnetic gaze of the brain scanner; no mysterious humours pervading the cerebral ventricles, no soul in the pineal gland, no vital spark, no spirits in the tangled wood. There is nothing you can't touch or squeeze, weigh and measure, as we might the physical properties of other objects. So you will search in vain for any semblance of a self within the structures of the brain: there is no ghost in the machine. It is time to grow up and accept this fact. But, somehow, we are the product of the operation of this machinery and its progress through the physical and social world.
Minds emerge from process and interaction, no substance. In a sense, we inhabit the spaces between things. We subsist in emptiness. A beautiful, liberating, thought and nothing to be afraid of. The notion of a tethered soul is crude by comparison.Extract from Into the Silent Land by Paul Broks
Categories: Science, Consciousness, Quotes, Books, Links, Psychology, Philosophy, Reality, Human, Perception, Ideas, On the Nature of
Labels: On the Nature of
|
Subscribe via RSS!
Via Email
Why should I care about the world if my life is only once off? If there are no consequences of this life for me, what holds me from killing myself?
Don't forget, the the visible universe is not the end of the story. Think about the dark matter and energy and all the rest of it that we can't yet observe. Existence has to be infinite. Think about the possibilities.
July 10, 2007 11:47 PM
July 11, 2007 2:05 AM
July 11, 2007 2:56 PM
Conformity to survive, Chaos to grow.
July 14, 2007 7:20 AM
I hope the book goes on to flesh this out because it sounds like it was yanked from a New Age, self-help manual. We subsist in emptiness? Inhabiting the spaces between things? What the hell is that supposed to mean?
At least the notion of a "tethered soul" is relatively clear. Which brings me to my next question: why is the tethered soul concept "crude"? I know it's an intellectual trend recently (especially among undergraduate philosophy students) to denounce all "dualisms" as "crude." But if you press the issue and ask what that means, I've found that the response is usually empty emoting.
How is moving the discussion from the tethered soul concept to vague abstractions like "subsisting in emptiness" liberating?
July 15, 2007 4:34 PM
It's sort of like learning that there is another stretch of land before the end of the earth.
However, I have something to say on the matter of:
"...why is the tethered soul concept "crude"? I know it's an intellectual trend recently (especially among undergraduate philosophy students) to denounce all "dualisms" as "crude." But if you press the issue and ask what that means, I've found that the response is usually empty emoting."
Quite right, however, perhaps not the way you might think. We are not a solitary "thing", but a collection of atoms arranged like a "thing" that we are able to recognise. In the same sense, a group of people can be considered as a corperation. Like a school of fish where each individual brain makes up the whole, and the sum of consciousness is the
consciousness of each individual fish minus the inefficiencies involved with communication. To say that we are not a dualisim is to say that there is no difference between you,
me or anyone else, and that they are the same thing. This is only true if you are content with saying that I don't need to speak, because the cosmos has spoken for me. Dead fish have a similar attutude toward communication. In short, there is nothing crude about dualisims or knowing stuff you don't already.
Unless you are dead, then here's no real reason to do anything. On further consideration you may notice how much mass is given to life as opposed to the stuff that it lives on.
The confusion lies in knowing that you are here, completely capable of seing the world through a distorted lens--like a fish eye. There are other eyes to see out of.
Ever tried parallel parking with one eye closed?
March 25, 2008 7:34 AM
Post a Comment