And yet, it moves

Something that I’ve been struggling with for a while is the idea that consciousness is just a physical function. Like farting, but different. This is the logical conclusion of the ideas in “Reincarnation, a critical examination” a book I read on anticant’s recommendation.  It’s a book I found to be cogent, coherent and all too probable.

For the sake of amicable discourse let us accept that I couldn’t find a logical flaw in the book’s argument that consciousness is a function of the brain and that there is no evidence for any part of us surviving after death. You are of course as entitled to your own views about the immortality of the soul as I am; I am not going to try to persuade you of anything one way or the other and I’d appreciate it if you’d show me the same courtesy in return.

I’ve been struggling with the idea that I’m just a by-product of my own existence ever since I read the book, and today I could finally articulate it :

Consciousness – our sense of self – isn’t an entity in its own right, it’s an effect, a result, it is ends rather than means. In fact, it’s less than that: it’s a side-effect, a by-product. As the DNA store puts it: DNA is life, the rest is just translation.

It is lurchingly disorientating to realise that consciousness is  incidental. Dawkins of course is explicit that evolution is about survival on the level of individual patterns of genes not on the level of entire genomes, still less on the level of consciousness or any other abstract idea. I’ve been able to accept that we are Bede’s bird, flying though the firelit hall out of darkness and back into darkness, but I find it hard to hold on to the idea that the bird itself is, as I said, a side-effect.  I’ve been like a dog trying to catch its own tail for weeks.  I find it almost as hard to understand this idea (and not just the words it’s expressed with), as I’d find it to see the back of my own head without a mirror.

This is an idea as subversive, maybe even more subversive, than the heliocentric solar system, and it’s an idea of the same kind.

Oh well.

Brief candles

I am feeling giddy at the moment.

I commented in a previous post that “The only school of “alternative” thought which I have not yet found to be intellectually undermined is the Buddhist approach to re-incarnation” and Anticant obligingly provided me with an antidote. I’ve been reading “Reincarnation: A Critical Examination” by Paul Edwards on and off since it arrived.

I’ve always thought a Hereafter was at least possible, and for a lot of my adult life I’ve considered it to be probable. There’s internal coherence to the Hindu and Buddhist world views, but they fall down when you test some of their underlying assumptions using nasty practical empirical science. (The one world-view that has never made any sense to me whatsoever is paradise, judgement day, heaven and hell). So during my adult life, my position on life after death veered from the conclusion that reincarnation made absolute sense to dragging it along like a comfort blankie while I got on with my real life. I think I even put Buddhist down on the 2001 census. I certainly wasn’t going to put Jedi.

I like Buddhism. I like its practicality. The techniques it teaches, such as meditation, produce real quantifiable changes in the people who practice them. I like the idea of the soul taking several lifetimes to explore different things. I like the idea of karma, that every action has a consequence and that you cannot escape the consequences of your acts. (This is very different from the judgement / punishment view of Christianity, where there is an external deity keeping score. Karma as consequences is more mechanistic and simpler, like a law of nature rather than the whim of a petulant despot). I look around me and I can see karma working on a small scale, and I was comforted by the idea that it worked across lifetimes too. I like the idea that I chose my own parents, that I might get a second chance with lost loves, that I might yet be a mother, that I can catch up next time with what I don’t do this time. I’ll miss Buddhism, but oddly enough I am more interested in it now, not less.

Buddhism, or a Buddhisty theory of reincarnation, provided answers to the questions that I asked, and the aforementioned comfort blankie of course.

Edwards argues simply and fairly clearly that:

1. there is no credible evidence for reincarnation and even the best cases evaporate into delusion, wishful thinking or fraud under close examination
2. the mind requires the brain to exist, and consciousness does not survive the death of the brain

Edwards also deals with things like Near Death Experiences, (feelings of warmth, love and total understanding, culturally specific spiritual figure at the end of a tunnel of light, etc); Astral Travel (which he debunks as bunk); remembered past lives, (which never produce information not available in this one), and so on.

Ultimately, of course, it comes down to a matter of belief, but religion is essentially a ritualised version of “here be dragons” and as science maps out more and more of the unknown, the remaining dragons are left balancing on smaller and smaller islands. Edwards argues that the dragon of reincarnation no longer has a foot to stand on. Being an Oriental Dragon, it has no wings and cannot fly. Or that’s my metaphor, and I’m sticking to it.

I am trying to absorb various truths. When I die, I’ll go out like a candle. There are no second chances, if I don’t do it this time then I won’t get to do it at all. The people who I know who’ve died have stopped. And the big one: life really is a bitch and then you really do die.

As well as the truths, I now have all sorts of other questions swirling in my mind. How can morality have merit if it is merely a human artefact? What practical meaning remains to the word “spirituality”? What merit is left in Buddhism if you take out reincarnation? Does this mean the Dalai Lama isn’t cool any more?

Oddly there is one question I am pretty clear on which is why are there no pre-20th century cultures which are entirely irreligious?

It seems clear to me:

1. that religions provided creation myths and an explanation for why stuff happened and
2. that religious belief provides just enough of an advantage to individuals and societies in times of crisis for there to have been a very slight selective advantage in a strong religious faith.

Dawkins is such an evangelist for atheism that I rather like the idea of religion providing an evolutionary benefit. It seems highly likely to me that dogs have gods.

At the moment I veer between two contradictory feelings. Sometimes I am shocked by how dramatically the stakes have been raised: as the the saying goes, “there ain’t no justice, just us”. We cannot rely on any external checks and balances to iron out the world’s problems. If we don’t sort it out here and now, then it won’t be sorted out, and that’s not all right. And then I veer towards nihilism: in the long run we are all dead and nothing is remembered. How can justice matter if the victims can neither know nor care?

It is this spinning around which is making me giddy.

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Edwards’ book, incidentally, is irritating in a number of ways. It is printed on very odd paper and the whole thing turns into two parallel tubes when you are reading it. It is appallingly badly proof-read, which is unforgivable in a second edition. He promises to discuss various subjects such as childhood prodigies and extremes of talent, but doesn’t, and he fails to discuss Out of Body experiences at all, refering the reader in toto to Susan Blackmore. It is however also fun, witty and sarcastic. I just wish it had been better edited. Or edited at all, really.

Lost for words

I’ve set myself the task of writing something here every day – or every weekday at least. The challenge of course – as with most things on the internet – is content. I have to find something interesting to say every day, and something interesting to other people. Because, of course, whatever I say must be interesting, challenging, witty, incisive and intelligent. And, ego and vanity aside, whatever I say should be worth other peoples’ time to read.

Some years ago I went on a Buddhist retreat over Christmas. I’d still recommend it as a good way to spend Christmas or New Year. I was one of the few people I knew that year who lost weight. On retreat we meditated and prepared food and walked and slept and listened to stories about the Buddha and cleaned the retreat centre and were generally simple and spiritual and vegan.

By far the most interesting part of it, for me, was the 36 hours we spent in silence. Eating in communal silence is simple enough. You tend to take more care of people: you check to see if they need the salt or the pepper and if you are stuck at the wrong end of the table from the egg-free salad dressing, you just touch your neighbour gently on her arm to attract her attention and point. Sharing chores becomes calm and companionable when you communicate softy with touch and with sign language. It’s all very pleasant.

The really interesting thing, however, is what happens when you don’t have to socialise; when you don’t have to babble about what you are doing, or ask friendly questions, or empathise with a tale of woe, or listen to someone else’s anecdotes. You don’t have to scrabble around to fill those social silences. The space that you are in becomes physically companianable, and mentally or emotionally stress-free.

Of course, the silence can have side-effects. All the stuff you’ve been drowning out, not saying, denying, suddenly has a space to come out in. You may break down in tears because you are not clamping down on whatever it is that wants to cry out.

But the most interesting thing is that words suddenly have value. You don’t squander them on social-oil and small-talk. The odd thing about those 36 hours of silence, was how much more gentle and honest the silent signals were, when the noise of words did not get in the way.

The mindfulness of cats

The cats fascinate me, particularly in the summer.

They step delicately out of doors and enter whole-heartedly – whole-bodiedly – into the outside world. You can see them react to every sound, savour every smell, watch for every movement and every change of light. They seem greedy for physical sensations. When they are outdoors it is as if they are swimming: every sense is fully immersed.

They are fully in the moment – practising the mindfulness of being outdoors. They sun themselves; they luxuriate as they twist and turn, rubbing their shoulders in the dust; they drink in the flavour of the breeze. They watch, and listen, and kill things.