Oakland, Death and Everything In-Between
Was it Gerrude Stein who commented about Oakland that "there's no there there"?
That's my reaction to TMcD's comment below. TMcD says that: "You're essentially hiding behind scientific method to avoid addressing uncomfortable questions. " But I'm not. I concede that death, especially the death of a loved one or one's self, is an "uncomfortable" issue. But what's the question? There's life, and then there's death. I don't think that science is the problem here (singulrities), because an individual death is a single data point, but death is a regular occurrence in this world. The problem is that there's just not much to say about death. It's the end of life. Sure, at that point we only have metaphors. But that doesn't mean that there's some deeper reality that the metaphors obscure. I offered the light switch metaphor as a way of "conceptualizing" death. That's all.
The eternal return thing is just strange. Clearly, the repetition of my consciousness is an impossibility, because if it happened again, it wouldn't be mine. Part of individual identity is the continuity of existence. I am me because I was me yesterday, and the day before, and back in 1985, and back in first grade, in 1975, and so on. If there was some physically identical-to-me person in three trillion years, that would be a physically identical-to-me person, not me. The same thing with the continuity of consciousness theory. If my consciousness is the consequence of my brain's wiring, then when that wiring finally shorts out, my consciousness can't just leap to another brain . . . it will be kaput. Neither of these theories is consistent with scientific principles. My view is. There's no evidence for recurrence or leaping consciousness. Maybe the choice of the rules of evidence has to be meta- or non-scientific. But if that's unavoidable, then so be it.
There is much that is unknowable. That is true. But let's not fill in the gaps of the unknowable with myth, fable, and conjecture.
posted by Number Three @ 6:15 PM
8 Comments:
On the subject of religion and confronting death, you might enjoy the notice about a short documentary about the Aghori, a tiny, ancient ascetic Hindu order. An Aghori Sadhu devotes his life to reversing values, to violating taboos and to embracing the most degrading and reviled aspects of life in pursuit of transcendence and enligtenment. They live alone, nearly naked covered in ashes, in cremation grounds, eat and drink from bowls made of human skulls, and eat rotting flesh.
The Scotsman
Fri 28 Oct 2005
New short film shows flesh-eating holy men
RAMOLA TALWAR BADAM IN BOMBAY
A NEW Indian documentary sheds light on a secretive sect of Hindu ascetics who allegedly eat human corpses, believing it will make them ageless and give them supernatural powers.
The ten-minute film, Feeding on the Dead, delves into the little-known world of the 1,000-year-old Aghori sect, whose sadhus, or holy men, purportedly pull bodies from Hinduism's holy river, the Ganges, in northern India.
The sect has been written about, but rarely filmed performing its rituals. Cannibalism is illegal in India.
Director Sandeep Singh said it took him more than three months to gain an Aghori sadhu's trust and persuade him to be filmed while performing a cannibalistic ritual.
Unlike other Hindu holy men, most of whom are vegetarians and teetotallers, the Aghoris also drink alcohol. But it is their consumption of human flesh which has earned them the condemnation of other Hindus.
While filming, Mr Singh and three cameramen waited with an Aghori holy man for ten days in June before the sadhu found a corpse floating in the Ganges by the city of Varanasi. Hindus generally cremate the dead, but sometimes ceremonially dispose of bodies in the Ganges.
Mr Singh said the sadhu ate part of the corpse's elbow, believing the flesh would stop him from ageing and give him special powers, like the ability to levitate or control the weather.
"It's a fascinating life and I want to know more," said the filmmaker.
Thanks for starting off with the snobby Gertrude Stein quote, which supports my point. As it turns out, there IS an Oakland "there" (luckily in this case, I can confirm, since I've been there and back again). She just wasn't interested in it because it didn't fit into her elite cultural sensibilities: if it is not New York or Paris, it must not even exist. Natch, afterlife for the secularist.
Ok, so you want to hinge your theory of identity on "continuity of consciousness," eh? So how do you deal with amnesiacs? Are they two completely different people, one before and one after losing their memory? If they lose memory repeatedly, are they born anew each time? What about "Memento" men, who have fragmented memories? Yours doesn't seem like a very good answer, Mr. Materialist Science, if there is continuity of physical body. It would seem to push you into an idealist position that assigns mental events a reality independent of the physical.
So let's raise the question on the opposite side. Suppose we do go to a physical body standard instead of a consciousness standard. And suppose the same atoms do reform into the same structures, just at a remove in time. I know you're a trekkie, so just use a Star Trek analogy: it's like getting "beamed up", teleporting, just across time not space, although EITHER time or space works in this case. Now let's say that you just happen to get amnesia as you go through. Same physical body, etc., you just have amnesia. Why ISN'T that you? How do you know that "you" wouldn't be peering out on the moons of Rigil 7? What we're talking about here is the inner experience of perception, which is, to some extent, a singularity since I have no direct experiences of perceiving through others. But my lack of additional data points doesn't mean they don't or can't exist, just that they don't subject themselves to the methods of empirical science.
I'm not defending the "eternal return" scenario as a personal position. I'm just saying that it's plausible given the right set of materialist assumptions and a certain amount of imaginative interest in the post-life. I think that a lot of today's secularists like the light switch metaphor (and that's surely what it is, since you still "perceive" after a non-metaphorical light bulb is switched off) because it gives them a sense of psychological superiority. "I can handle dying! I'm honest with myself. I'm not like those religious people who believe in Santa Claus stories." Congratulations. But what you've really done is to claim to "know" something scientifically or rationally that you can't possibly know, and you've based this on logical and psychological assumptions that you have left unexamined. So you're really not much different that the religious believers you deride or the ancient Epicureans, who, incidentally, embraced atheistic atomic science precisely because it served an ethical purpose, dispelling violent superstitions about needing to please the gods through sacrifice, etc. But, as it turns out, you are being less "honest" than religionists who acknowledge a difference between logos and mythos and know where to draw the lines. (I always like to end on a power grab for the moral high ground.)
Em, I just re-read your post, and it seems you may not be arguing for a "continuity of consciousness" theory of identity (I have memories from 1975, 1985, etc.), as I assumed on my first scan. But I don't think that alters the basic point I made. Either way you go there, you've got a problem on issues of identity that your science does not solve without importing a lot of metaphor, speculation, and even metaphysics.
I'm in the midst of my grading marathon, and I can only play hookie for a few minutes, so I can't respond to Emery's lengthy post yet, but I did want to respond to Frances's thoughtful comments.
First, I share your concern about religious exclusivity. But haven't you just traded one kind for another? You've replaced the suspicion that OTHER religions are missing the boat with the suspicion that ALL religions are missing the boat. I can understand why that is a "liberating" feeling, a kind of psychologically satisfying fairness toward each religion by dismissing all of them equally. However, that may help add evidence to my point above about how secularists, just like the religious, often accept positions as much for their psychological effects as for their objective rationality (a very Nietzschan point, ironically--am I allowed to use him!?).
I loved your Hindu example, by the way, but I'm not sure it makes the same point that you use it for. I would say that it shows the faulty reasoning and ethics of one particular branch of one particular religion. I've got plenty of other examples, if you want them. But showing the silliness of one religious sect doesn't logically demonstrate the silliness of religion, per se, any more than me giving you the example of one silly and immoral atheist proves that all atheists are silly and immoral per se. (As it happens, I don't think they all are.)
The real difference between us is that I accept the legitimacy of a religious outlook on life, for both moral and logical reasons, but you don't. Having accepted the legitimacy of a religious outlook, I'm prepared to make some judgments about them and some choices between them. Your judgment that these are all just "intellectual systems" assumes that they are mere social constructions without any connection to a deeper reality. By contrast, I believe that, although they are developed and articulated by human beings, they do have a connection to a larger reality, one within which humans navigate as moral creatures.
I don't believe that God exists, that humans have eternal souls, that there is an afterlife. This unbelief is not a matter of choice, at least not as I experience it. Belief and unbelief are not matters of the will. One believes what one is convinced of. I have no reason to accept the truth claims of Christianity or any other religion. I've never seen any evidence that God/souls/angels/devils/eternal lives exist. As theories, they add nothing to my understanding of the empirical world. They subtract from it, in fact, miring me in troubling paradoxes and mystification. The world is far more understandable if I don't try to think of it as a part of divine creation.
In matters of faith, one is asked to believe without having seen. I cannot believe, despite having grown up making a solid effort at it and for many years feeling very guilty about it. Yes, it is a mystery to me how so many others can see things so differently, that atheists are such a tiny minority of people in the world. I do find it difficult to understand why super smart, well educated people like TenaciousMcD don't see things like I do. Such thoughts aren't quite in my ability to control, though I am alert to arrogance and know I don't have any good reason to indulge that vice. I've learned to just set such thinking aside and chalk the differences up to different experiences of the world.
But, contra your post above, I just don't see how my unbelief is exquivalent to belief in any given creed or doctrine. I've rejected belief for a set of reasons: There's no empirical evidence for the truth claims of religion, and they afford no clearer understanding of the world (as, say, "the Big Bang" helps physicists make sense of observed phenomena). If those reasons could be addressed, my unbelief would change. If Jesus would come show himself to me, I wouldn't be a doubting Thomas.
It sounds to me like you're making the same rhetorical move that intelligent design advocates make: "Accepting the theory of intelligent design is neither more nor less dogmatic than accepting a theory of a willed creation." But belief and unbelief are not equivalent. In assessing truth versus falsehood about the empirical world, I believe in things for which there is evidence that the human senses can (through some means) vouch for, and I don't believe anything else. Unbelief is merely what one is left with when one doesn't accept a set of affirmative truth claims.
Moral and ethical controversies are an entirely different matter. There isn't a clear standard for judgment there, as there is in evaluating claims about how the world works. Religous teachings and writings here can be greatly helpful to human thinking, and the history of moral and ethical thought is entirely bound up with religion. (Kant's deontology surely can't be understood outside of Christianity, as one of an endless number of potential examples.)
But the truth claims religion posits have been so easy for me to let go of. As soon as I stopped trying to will myself into belief, I found myself here. Or, put more precisely, this is pretty much where I have always been, except I don't torture myself about it anymore.
P.S. Above, I meant to say that intelligent design advocates argue that "Accepting the theory of intelligent design is neither more nor less dogmatic than accepting a theory of a undirected evolutionary development."
Frances, I understand your point, and I do not challenge the sincerity or reasonableness of your disbelief. You refuse to believe in things for which there is no empirical evidence, as defined by accepted scientific standards of rationality. That is certainly a legitimate perspective, one I share in part, since I am a believer in that methodology regarding natural phenomena. But the point I've been trying, ineloquently, to make is a slightly different one: there are aspects of our existence that simply do not lend themselves to such methodology (e.g., ethics and death), for which I consider religion a necessary compliment to empirical rationality.
Part of our disagreement here results, I think, from the fact that we're often talking about religion in different ways. For example, you write above about not believing in souls, angels, devils, etc. I don't think I've ever committed myself to defending those things. I certainly do not believe in literal angels and devils. Indeed, as for the latter, in my posts I have consistently taken the Augustinain Xian position that there is NO "embodiment" of evil, no literal hell, no Satan, etc., except as symbolic representations of the temptation to turn from God, who is life itself in all its goodness; hell is simply death, the absense of life.
As for "souls," I do not think that Xianity (or religion generally) is bound to a quasi-Cartesian conception of soul as a kind of spiritual "thing" that's dropped into the physical body. From what I can tell, that view results from an excessively "Greek" interpretation of the Bible (drawn heavily from Plato's Phaedo, etc.), one that often comes closer to a Gnostic than true Xian teaching. Instead, the "soul" is a description of human being in terms of its moral components, rather than its strictly physical ones. There is no reason that such a view needs to be hostile to a secular, rationalist materialism.
To bring this all together, I see religion as the symbolic apparatus that emanates from and provides support for life, understood from the moral rather than the physical standpoint. As such, religion must necessarily grapple with aspects of our existence that do not lend themselves to the methods of physical empiricism. I've already hammered the death point, but I'll add this on ethics: go back to my posts on Thrasymachus & Nietzsche and think about the problems that their arguments raise for ethics. On a purely empirical reading, why would you ever be ethical if you could get away with injustice? From a purely rational standpoint, power always trumps morality. Religion allows us to think beyond the physical aspects of life, to contemplate our relationship to the unknown, that which we face most directly in the mystery of death, and to find a meaningful and ethical place with the larger order of creation.
An addendum. You concede that ethical thinking is inextricably bound up with religion, as in Kant, etc. If you're looking for evidence of the "truth claims" of religion, I'd say that is where you will find it. Morality is our imperfect window onto the divine, a point that Kant himself made. At core, this is what distinguishes the Xian worldview from that of Greek philosophy (Plato and Aristotle, etc.): it elevates the "will," hence the faculty that defines our moral personhood, above our "intellect," the faculty that defines our rational personhood, as the central feature of human existence. Rather than looking upon religion as bad physical science--a mistake that fundamentalists and "intelligent design" theorists commonly make--think of it as a "metaphysics of morals," to use Kant's phrase. Judge religions primarily by the lives their adherents live and their ability to cultivate moral lives. Admitedly, some very prominent "believers" and religious sects won't fare very well (and many individual atheists will). Still, that's the relevant truth claim, not some lab test on the physical existence of Hallmark card characters like angels. Faith may add little to your understanding of the physical world that is measured by empirical science, but I would suggest that it can add much to your understanding of the moral world that science cannot fully capture.
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