Tragedy

THE HUMAN TRAGEDY

There has been a lot going on since my last "status report". A few little insights have added up to quite a change in outlook - not so much from a logical point of view, but from the subtle emotional impact of it all. This post builds on some previous fragments and may seem to ramble a bit, but here goes ...

The Sam Harris podcast on consciousness made a few interesting points that take awhile to sink in.

• Sam points out that it is hard to imagine what an "explanation" of consciousness would look like. There is something about it that puts it in a different category from even the most notoriously difficult to explain things such as quantum mechanics and the Schrodinger wave equation.
• Thomas Metzinger plugs a powerful meme into my head when he suggests that final acceptance of our mortality leads to a "tragic" view of human existence.

That word, "tragic" seems to chew around the edges of everything I have intellectually decided to make it all feel real and more urgent.

Making things "feel real" is the subject of a book on neuroanatomy: Decarte's Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. For me, This built on the excellent "Behave: The Biology of Humans at Their Best and Worst.", along with "Zen and the Brain", which I read a few years back and started me on my "Zen Phase". Taken altogether, these texts have made me more and more comfortable with the general workings of the brain, along with some respect and awe. We know a lot, but there is a lot we don't know - perhaps a lot we will never know - cannot know (see Sam's first point). The issue of consciousness (the inexplicable "first-person" perspective) is fascinating and worth an essay or two on its own, but I will leave that for now.

It is obvious that we are a brain - more precisely we are a body with a brain (turns out you can't ignore the body when you consider emotions, which are phenomena in the brain). Through experiments and injury, you can disassemble the personality and, by inference, the mind itself - the "soul". Even major injury to the "body" (apart from the brain) can result in major changes to "personality" - who we are.

We have an unknowable soul that is mysteriously identical to the very fragile and mortal body (seen from an inexplicable first-person point of view). This is the tragedy.

UNIVERSAL IGNORANCE

As Metzinger points out, the vast majority of human beings deny the tragedy itself or respond in ways that completely deny the reality of the human condition. The "Abrahamic" religions, deny mortality in a direct way-we survive death (for better or worse - new problem). Buddhism and Hinduism, assume that the "soul" lives on to be reborn. This creates additional problems that were never far from the mind of the Buddha. All of these religions assume with no evidence that there is a kind of "moral machinery" behind the world, that cares about the minutiae of human behavior. 

Perhaps  Buddha* saw this most clearly. Life is unavoidable suffering. But his response was to withdraw from life and escape from the imaginary "wheel of rebirth". If life is awful, we need to avoid being continually re-born into it. So both his response (withdrawal) and the reasons for it were, to say the least, flawed. It's worth asking if life really is unavoidably awful but that's a subject for another essay ...

Over history, Buddhism has become just another religion, split into dozens of factions, including the one sponsoring genocide in Myanmar (Burma). As in all religions competing "schools" of authority lead to endless fragmentation and violence over fundamentally irreconcilable issues. This doesn't happen when authority is about something real, such as quantum mechanics, which enjoys its own controversies, rarely resulting in death. In science, evidence counts. In religion, only authority counts. But I digress ...

Religious wars and persecutions were sponsored by the Christian religion from the beginning (there are echoes in the New Testament over whether Jewish law applied to new Christians), through the middle ages (the Crusades) but also the Catholic/Protestant divide which still claims lives in Ireland. Again, the dispute is over who is right (the authority) about a subject that bears no relationship whatever to verifiable reality. Disputes like this can never be resolved - they simply fester and become more and more divisive over finer and finer points of mythology. The only way you can be "right" is to kill off those who disagree with you. That's the "solution" that has appeared in history for thousands of years and continues to this day.

Those who reject "organized" religion fail to fully re-think the question. We hear vague bullshit like "Things happen for a reason" or "There must be a power greater than us". Those who reject even this can claim to be "spiritual", which usually means attributing some cosmic significance to the soul or life in general, denying its indispensable connection to the physical brain along with the alarmingly contingent nature of human existence. 

Those who reject all of the above tend to deny the existence of the "soul" altogether. Supposedly, our feeling of being in the world is an "illusion". This idea seems to be a modern spin on the ideas from some minority sects of Buddhism - usually explicitly acknowledged by the modern Guru in a faint claim for authority. We also see quite a few philosophers and scientists who make grand claims to "explain" consciousness (usually "explaining it away") while never peering into the consequences of a worldview stripped of the most fundamental assumptions of religion - the existence of the soul.

Finally, we are left with hardcore skeptics who sweep aside the whole issue as not worth discussion. The problem is that who and what we are matters. Adopting a sensible position on this matter would seem to form the basis of any other decision, both personal and public.

So that's the second aspect of what I am calling the "tragedy" of the human condition. We live in a tragedy but tragically fail to recognize it. The mythical Buddha* would have advice for us on this score. Step 1 would be to accept the fact as an unavoidable circumstance, not a problem to be solved (by ritual, prayer, or living right for example). Step 2 is to realize we are all in this together, which should inspire genuine compassion for all living things. Or so it seems to me.

BEING ALL IN IT TOGETHER - GOOD NEWS/BAD NEWS

One thing that neuroanatomy teaches is that a great deal of our human neocortex (the gray matter) is taken up with getting along with / cooperating with other human beings. Specifically:

• We have extensive areas on the left side of our brains devoted to speech and speech recognition. This makes sense only in the context of communication with other humans. Speech is instinctive and fundamental to who we are. We are not born knowing a language but we are hard-wired to learn one.
• We have brain areas that specialize in face recognition. We are also great at voice recognition.
• Our logic centers, in the cortex that govern our ability to make decisions in social situations - such as what to say when your wife asks if her dress makes her ass look big. Social calculations play a huge role in our lives but we pretend that mathematical logic governs what we do or at least should govern it.

In my "Programmable Ape" blog, I have explored the idea that we somehow "clump" into entities ("dragons") that acquire a life of their own - sometimes having aims that work against the interests of the human beings that make up the "clump". Neuroanatomy provides the details of how we are "wired in" to such organizations, often to the detriment of ourselves and any other human being. We are assimilated. Resistance is futile.

THE TRAGEDY OF LANGUAGE

The "glue" that binds us together in clubs, nations, religions, corporations, and armies is primarily language. But language is, to say the least, imprecise. We can lie with language much more easily than by any other means. We can use language to sound like we are talking about something real (such as what "God Wants") when there is no substance behind the words. It is language that makes the poison of religious conflict possible. It is language that inspires young men to kill and die for causes spun out of thin air.

The Koran praises itself and mandates that the believer trust words over reality in these words:

This is the Book; in it is guidance sure, without doubt, to those who fear Allah.

Mysteriously, the word of God has required entire libraries of interpretation ("scholarship") and spawned dozens of sects at war with each other over fine points of interpretation. It is taken for granted that the ordinary believer cannot figure out what the Koran is saying without consulting one of many dozens of self-styled "authorities". This is only possible if there is no evidence behind the squabbles. It's solely about authority. Squabbles over authority are made more violent when the parties speak different languages (as do the Shia and the Sunni). The Shia (who speak Persian) remark in hushed tones that it seems that Allah only understands Arabic.

It is easy to see the entire history of religious conflict as one inspired by language itself: the use of language to support spurious claims of authority and the role of language to make different parties unintelligible to each other.

Of course, language plays the same role in International conflict and many conflicts within nations, including my own (Canada), which. 150 years after its birth as a nation, struggles over "language rights" for French and Indigenous peoples.

Language is the main instrument in the toolbox of those whose agenda is based on "us and them". This is the third face of our tragedy. We are helplessly tossed in a bag with our friends and neighbors, weighted with our superstitions and assumptions, then thrown overboard into an uncaring world.

LIVING IN A TRAGIC DRAMA

Tragedy has long been recognized as a rich theme in drama. Even our comedies - the good ones - encourage us to smile at our own foolish nature. We are not entirely uneducated in this way of seeing the world. Even in tragedy, the dignity of the human soul can shine. One might even say it is only in tragedy that we find deeply inspiring meaning. We are not living in a Walt Disney version of Jungle Book. We are living in a dangerous world where our lives and the lives of those we love can be snatched away at any moment. This is the curse of human consciousness: to know our ultimate fate. To my way of thinking, this is where we need to start if we are to face life and find meaning in it.
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* What we learn about Buddha in the "West" is the "Walt Disney" version. For those of us who have traveled in the birthplace of Buddha, Buddhism seems like a rather jarring example of ignorant religion. Study of the actual writings of Buddha reveals a man deeply caught up in the superstitions of his day. The way of life he recommends seems right and sensible only when viewed through the spectacles of an individual hungry for an authority to show the way. The same considerations apply to Zen, which has been laundered for the West as "mindfulness" and Hinduism laundered as "Yoga". Even self-appointed 21st-century sages such as Sam Harris seem unaware of how much they rely on the ersatz authority and (lack of) standards of evidence coming from "Eastern Wisdom" doctrines.