Notes on a question at The Edge,
and an answer by Paul Broks at Prospect:
"...the condition of believing that the mind is separate from the body, even though you know this belief to be untrue..."It's territory. The flaw, the block in understanding is the sense of ownership we have, the body as territory that we control, the circumference of our bodies being a political boundary inside of which we control everything, or have a legal right to, even if we don't really control everything within its borders. The missing piece is the infinitely small, the assumption that anything down there must be trivial and completely subject to human control, because it's smaller than we are. That assumption stems directly from another - that at its most fundamental the infinitely small is a miniature void, an emptiness, a place where nothing is. That has the same cause as the now disproved assumption that "space" is a void, a vast dark emptiness. These are part of a methodology of seduction and entrapment.
"Alexander Vilenkin, a physicist, believes that our universe is just one of an infinite number of similar regions. But "it follows from quantum mechanics" that the number of histories that can be played out in them is finite. The upshot of this crossplay of finitudes and infinities is that every possible history will play out in an infinite number of regions, which means there should be an infinite number of places with histories identical to our own down to the atomic level."
"Ian McEwan...says, '...no part of my consciousness will survive my death."
We could say with equal validity "the condition of believing that the body is separate from the world" - we could say with equal validity "the condition of believing the world is separate from the universe". None of these are accurate beliefs, none of them are inaccurate, what they are is imprecise, and what makes them imprecise is they don't incorporate the inexact nature of existence. We come to consciousness inexactly, we live through time inexactly, we see ourselves inexactly, and we have no exact idea of where we are while all this goes on.
The body is not separate from the world, though it can be shot into space, and given enough time and the inclination a machine could be assembled and shot into space and it could then assemble the parts of a human being and that human being would come into existence separate from the world in a strictly logical sense except for its origins which will always be here, in this world, where everything we ever do will have its origins.
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Our understanding of the world is as inexact as our understanding of consciousness - that's part of being human; the mistake is to ignore that partiality, or to pretend it can be made whole by an accumulation of fact alone.
Of course there are an infinite number of "regions". This is all happening within an infinite context. The flaw there is that we take our sense of territoriality and extend it in all outward directions, then convince ourselves we've grasped the infinite, seeing it mainly as a larger "here" without limits. This is compounded by a cartoonish possibility-of-the-imagined-whatever that seems to emerge from the reality of infinite things being a real part of where we are. Our experience of life doesn't seem to be infinite, any more than our lives seem to be eternal. But the context in which we live is obviously eternal and infinite - time can't exist outside of or separate from an eternal context, and spatial dimension has to have an infinite context around it. This is what's so suspicious about the constantly revised claims for a finite universe.
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Selling the promise of immortality to mortals hungry for it is a marketer's wet dream.
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When Vilenkin says, from within the infinite context of his thought problem - "...there should be an infinite number of places with histories identical to our own..." he could as easily say there should be "an infinite number of places with histories nearly identical to our own", and "more-or-less similar to our own", and "relatively like our own", as well as infinities of exotically different places with foreign histories, as well as bizarrely alien places with experiences of time so unlike our own we couldn't comprehend the existences of the beings that inhabit them. We could keep going, because we have - not just an infinity to extrapolate from and into - but an infinity of infinities - a fractally increasing, exponentially exponentiating infinitely infinite numberlessness - to play around in.
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McEwan's consciousness won't survive the death of McEwan, that seems axiomatic, but the assumption working behind the statement is that McEwan owns everything that can be said to exist inside the borders of his identity, that all that's there is McEwan's consciousness, and that he encompasses that, he owns it. That - even though like all the rest of us, McEwan came to his consciousness out of the formless but living void of early childhood - McEwan is the master of his own consciousness, by which we mean not just the identity that's self-aware, but all the processes taking place inside the territory circumscribed by McEwan-ness. This is a natural assumption but it's clearly untrue.
The parallels to the relationship with and the attitudes toward land and the skeins of living that the land carries, and the sea as well, and the bitter arrogance human beings so often bring to that relationship, are striking; that bizarre psychotic almost raging demand that anything superior show itself or be denied, and the truly psychotic claim to superiority over anything we can damage beyond repair.
Thus we have a photograph of Teddy Roosevelt, with a rhinoceros broken and bleeding at his feet, on its knees to his triumphant masculinity, and his dominant humanity.
The corollary being that anything we can kill is obviously inferior; the isolation inherent in that attitude makes it easy to forget that making other things inferior doesn't improve our position at all.
The killing of the rhinoceros is presented in the same forced dualism as all the other important questions, it's the same entrapment. The inexactness is missing, and with it balance. Balance isn't stasis; we walk by falling and recovering, it's a very rare thing for a human to achieve conscious immobility - an art that must be practiced. We live by balancing. Roosevelt's not so much a villain, especially in terms of intent, as he is a dupe; someone whose integrity and strength were harnessed toward ends he wouldn't have approved if he'd seen them in time.
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What McEwan's doing really is answering the folk superstitions of pie-in-the-sky salvation that can be won with a few dollars and a few hours and rote repetition of a few stock phrases. In that context he's right, and especially in the context of the transience of existence he's right. Every noble thing we look toward comes from the acceptance of that transience followed by sacrifice. What I'm saying is underneath the transience is something astonishingly brighter than the dizzying void of not-being.
