Desperately Seeking the Soul

Some thoughts upon reading the Times > Opinionator > The Stone > Gary Gutting

"Mary and the Zombies: Can Science Explain Consciousness?"

...Also, few philosophers think these thought-experiments show that there are souls or some other sort of supernatural entities. Frank Jackson, who first proposed the Mary scenario, and David Chalmers, who gave the most influential formulation of the zombie example, remain philosophical naturalists. They maintain that there is no world beyond the natural one in which we live. Their claim is rather that this world contains a natural reality (consciousness) that escapes the scope of physical explanation. Chalmers, in particular, supports a “naturalistic dualism” that proposes to supplement physical science by postulating entities with irreducibly subjective (phenomenal) properties that would allow us to give a natural explanation of consciousness. Not surprisingly, however, some philosophers have seen Jackson’s and Chalmers’s arguments as supporting a traditional dualism of a natural body and a supernatural soul...

And in the follow up post, "Mary and the Zombies: Consciousness Revisited"

We need to examine much more carefully both the apparently obvious premises and the reasoning based on them. Along these lines, professional philosophers have uncovered a number of subtle and complex problems for both arguments. For anyone interested in pursuing the discussion further, I would recommend the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy articles “Qualia: The Knowledge Argument” (by Martine Nida-Rümelin) and “Zombies” (by Robert Kirk).

We opine, It’s interesting to see how the limited our language and concepts are in their ability to describe consciousness, And all of this is way more sophisticated than what we had in the Mishnah and the Talmud when they tried to define kavvanah - direction of thought - concentration - or any forms of meditation.

This suggests that there is a self-consciousness-limit to the ability of science and language to self describe what is going on in consciousness. The Mary and Zombie hypotheses are in essence metaphoric stories that posit the existence of straw creatures so that we can discuss among ourselves un-self-consciously, fome of the most crucial aspects of consciousness - namely its physicality or spirituality.

We need a new vocabulary that has more complexity than the physical v. spiritual. To me consciousness has characteristics that are:

(1) intangible (2) non-physical (3) transitory (4) vivid and real (5) dismissible (6) motivation (7) fearsome (8) fill in the blank - put in any other emotions.

How does one describe thoughts? We learn to slow them down and commit them to verbal or written expression, art or music, all of that flows from consciousness.

Sensory consciousness is the intake mechanism. Dreaming, imagining, creating, orating - etc - are the output means of consciousness.

We like one comment on the second article/post in the Times:

Judy Shimkus - Supposing consciousness results from a yet-unknown type of energy?

Actually we’d say it’s a given - we know the energy is there - we just have no granular enough science (chemistry, physics, psychology)  or modern language terminology - to describe consciousness in all its nuances.

There must be millions of operations that comprise human consciousness - and parsing and studying some parts of  them is surely possible given the super-computing power that we have now at our disposal.

The recording of all human thoughts - wow that would be not just a stream - but one cosmic sea of consciousness. The capture of every human dream... another vast sea. And then top have Google make all of that searchable as it expands second by second - billions of thoughts of billions of people.

And the meta-processing of all that would raise the billions to exponential powers. Are we not approaching the infinite?

We’d like to mention the notion of “soul dust”  here - in another application of the imagery. The components of consciousness are as numerous (in each individual) as the grains of sands of the sea.

Why assume that we need to dilute down consciousness to a few principles and elements? In fact we need to ramp up science and language and mathematics and statistics and create a rich symbology or consciousness that has the ability to express every derivative of the principal blocks of the c-world.

The financial world develops symbology to express the derivative instruments of each underlying equity or base instrument. The c-symbology will be way more complex by orders of magnitude.

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New Yorker: At His Birthday Party Philip Roth talks of Death

New Yorker has been churning out amazing content in the past few issues. David Remnick continues that flow with his account of Philip Roth's eightieth birthday celebration in Newark.

Remnick explains that death was Roth's main topic in his birthday remarks. An odd choice for a birthday festival for most folks but not for Roth.

Now, we usually don't dwell on the subject of death in our thoughts. But today we conclude our recitation of Kaddish for our dad. And that put us face-to-face with the subject. As we said in another post, we feel that through the public synagogue Kaddish ritual we firmly rooted our dad's soul into the community of Jews that he so loved and served with such dedication. As the community of Israel lives and flourishes, so does the energy of our dad live on. One form of immortality.

Dad's body rests in a cemetery in Israel on Har Hamenuchot overlooking the hills of Jerusalem. His presence there roots his soul in the Zionist dimension of our collective reality as a people. As the State of Israel lives and flourishes, so does the vitality of our dad live on. Another form of immortality.

Roth eloquently writes of the stones in a cemetery in New Jersey and the memory of his family. Roth has certainly rooted his soul in a public vital body of writing that will live on for a long time. A Rothian form of immortality.

Here is Remnick's teasing conclusion to his essay:

...Roth is the author of thirty-one books. His favorite, he has said, the one in which he felt the most free as he wrote it, is “Sabbath’s Theater.” Laughing a little to himself, Roth said that the novel, which was published in 1995, could easily have been titled “Death and the Art of Dying.” Its epigraph is Prospero’s line in Act V, Scene 1 in “The Tempest”: “Every third thought shall be my grave.” And within is the line from Kafka: “The meaning of life is that it stops.”

“The book is death-haunted,” Roth said. Mickey Sabbath, the turbulent, profane, and libidinous hero, is a man who is beyond discretion and taste, whose outrageous adulterous behavior is, Roth said, “his response to a place where nothing keeps its promise and everything is perishable.” As a boy, Sabbath lost the person closest to him in the world—his older brother, Morty, whose plane was shot down, in 1944, over the Japanese-occupied Philippines.

With that introduction, Roth read pages three hundred and sixty-three to three hundred and seventy of “Sabbath’s Theater,” one of the most stunning passages in all his work. He was not about to let us forget what eighty means. In the novel, Sabbath has gone south (“Tunnel, turnpike, parkway—the shore!”) to visit the Jewish cemetery where his grandparents, parents, and brother are all buried. I will not ruin it for you. To get the feel of the night, you must read the passage in full—or, better, read the novel entire. And imagine that this passage—with its great elegy of gravestones, with its memories of life lived, of a life cut short, and all of it in particular—imagine that this is what Philip Roth chose, very deliberately, as his birthday message, his greeting, his farewell. These were not his last words—please, not that!—but they were what he chose. Death-haunted but assertive of life. The passage ends with his hero putting stones on the graves of the dead. Stones that honor the dead. Stones that are also meant to speak to the dead, to mark the presence of life, as well, if only for a while. The passage ends simply. It ends with the line, “Here I am.”

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