Binary Brain

We’re living in a crazy world. The way that media – social and old – are treating Covid-19 is like watching my 3 and 4 year old argue over the existence of zombies. There are micro and macro level causalities. Micro-causalities can be relatively simple and easy to follow. Macro-causalities quickly become complicated and links between stages in causality can be impossible to follow, let alone predict. The Covid-19 discussion is mostly about macro-causalities. We shouldn’t be discussing things in terms of surely this or certainly that. Those statements are not only wrong, but impossible. All of the predictions were false and, yet, we keep discussing them and prognosticating about the future as if we will be more right this time than last time. I struggle to exist today in a world that has seen the results of bad projections and bad speculation. Remember Trump couldn’t possibly win?

We are manipulating – and often ruining – people’s lives by developing projections and using said projections to coerce people into a given set of behavior. It is hubris pure and makes me think that we really are living amongst children.

So many things have happened over the past year and I decided that I’m going to finally take advantage of turning 40 (in a little over 3 hours) and embrace not only the new year, but a new decade in my life. My 30s were crazy and I might take some time to look back at a number of exceptional experiences. Off the top of my head, the following define my 30s:

• Experiencing a spouse go through the agony and terror of cancer (that started my 30s a few months after turning 30).
• Finally accepting my role and a job that I took in my early 20s (22, to be exact) and stop trying to figure out what the next best thing was going to be. I read a book by Thich Nhat Hanh that talked about living in the moment instead of in the future. Between that and watching my spouse go through cancer, I finally decided to embrace the life that I was living and try to experience it day by day, hour by hour. (Only through Grace will I ever learn to do it minute by minute.)
• Going through a divorce. Those who have experienced it know how it is a living death. No matter the reasons (it is always complicated), divorce is like watching a car crash in slow motion. The only difference is how many fatalities there are along the way.
• Moving to the big city from the country. Finally, I felt at home. Weird. I know. I happen to enjoy being around people most of the time – even if I don’t necessarily want to engage in a long conversation. So far, as an example of this, Manhattan continues to be my favorite place.
• Meeting a woman who would change my life and give me four absolutely amazing kids.
• Becoming a dad at 37 is the single biggest and most important accomplishment of my life. Children change everything. Everything. For the better. You will never be the same and I implore you to consider it. Have more than one. Have 10. You will never say that you had too many.
• A lesson that I’ve learned in my almost-40-years that rings true tonight more than ever: you cannot predict the future. You cannot claim to know for certain how something is going to turn out. (Yes, I realize that gravity will win out no matter how many times I try to jump off the roof.) Large scale, complicated systems, however, never work the way we theorize. Our theories are summations and simplifications. Let wisdom and faith guide your days. Enjoy ever.single.day. Find something good in your experiences and stop insisting that other people do what you want them to do.

Let’s see what my 40s bring. If my 30s are any indication, it’ll be a wild, crazy ride. I promise to check in more often than I did in my 30s.

It is only as I have gotten older that I actually recognize death as a foe and not as some nonexistent thing that happens to unlucky people.  The other night, I had a terrible dream that someone I cared for deeply had died in their sleep.  (This same person was very close to death recently because of a bout with cancer, so the connection between the idea of death and her is very intertwined.)  My heart stopped and thoughts from random areas of the brain raced through the thing I call my mind.  I woke up and realized it was a dream, but the feeling and emotional response to the non-event stayed with me.

Many people confronted with death go through mourning and eventually forget about the event or use the event as an impetus to do something different.  As I have gone from being very religious to non-religious, I have observed my own concerns with death.  At first, there was the pang of, “if I don’t believe in God and an afterlife, then what the hell happens to me, my soul, when I die.”  Nothing.  Something.  Who knows?  Even without the question of whether or not a deity is going to impose an eternity on my left-over consciousness, I still find the idea of death as a great motivator.  It is a reminder that we only have so long on this earth to do something.  The question is, what?  And, how?  And, to what end?  (Although, I wonder about people who have no desire to do anything.  What has consciousness afforded them?  Nothing.  Consciousness is our way of knowing we’re here and discovering – even if misguided – that there is a purpose to life.)

This dream of death drove up all kinds of reminders about what I was supposed to do and why.  Because I might die.  I might even die tomorrow.

How does this fit in with my quest to understand consciousness?  Well, for one, it keeps reminding me that there are final things, limits, limitations on what consciousness affords us today.  It is of no use to imagine powers that are not there.  (On the other hand, evolution has given us such a great and odd gift, who knows what will happen as we continue to evolve.  Maybe dark matter is the answer to psychic communication.  Maybe we’ll learn how to use the physical effects of consciousness to move matter.  Maybe consciousness already moves matter and we just don’t realize it.)  Ockham’s Razor is a powerful tool in the world of introspection, though.  The simplest explanation is often the right one.  So, instead of imagining what a non-physical mind would look like, why not just assume that what we have in front of us is totally physical?  (Oh, and for you idiotic behaviorists out there, just because we don’t understand the full functioning of what is going on, does not mean that we can deductively mechanize the process into if -> then statements.  That’s just stupid.  It leaves so many things unexplained in favor of a dry and limited explanation of human behavior.)  We can go a long way to describe the mind and consciousness on a physical level if we wish.  Maybe we will never really understand consciousness because it would require us to be objective observers of a process that is required for understanding that process.

I’ll come back to this subject of death later.  For now, it’s imprint on my mind from a few nights ago has not been lost on my subconscious.  It is clearly something that can affect and change behavior.  The question is how that emotional function works and why it might have developed as far as it has in the first place.

As I was folding my laundry today, it occurred to me that one of my greatest struggles with regards to materialism was the wonderment of how a materialist can possibly be happy.  How can someone who does not believe in nor see a God be happy about anything?  So much of my ideology of the good revolves around the idea that there is a God (or there are gods) who define the nature of The Good – as Plato so aptly discussed in The Republic and other discourses.

Then I came across a great interview of Daniel Dennett by Bill Moyers on the Charlie Rose show.  A number of times, Dennett gushed over the amazing wonderment that he beheld when listening to great music or confronted with beautiful nature.  I was truly surprised he didn’t wash away such amazing things with a statement of “…oh well, evolution can be magical, indeed… if you believe in that sort of thing” or some other pithy reply.  And today, thus, it hit me: is that all the debate is about?  Is this really a matter of awesomeness and whether or not awesomeness can happen without guidance from some transcendent or supreme being?

I think that is where my hangup has been all these years and maybe that is the problem for most of us when we are confronted with the possibility that without God we are left with a lack of explanation for all the awesomeness that surrounds us.  Somehow if we relegate consciousness to nerve endings and quantum impulses, we lose the beauty that is the soul?  Perhaps, we need to forget all of that mumbo-jumbo and realize that beauty is what our minds hold in awe… without guidance from above.

Awesomeness has never been a good reason to fall back on faith.  The terrible awesomeness of cancer doesn’t mean that I search out a cure from my neighbor voodoo doctor, does it?  Imagine someone from the 1800s traveling to today confronted with the technological wonders that populate our lives.  Wouldn’t they think we were transcendent, with so much access to power and control?  I don’t wish to take away the magic that is the consciousness, but I do want to question why it can’t be mere material processes that have combined qualities that other materials don’t exhibit.  As Dennett continues to emphasize, magic is not magic.  It is a method of distraction.  We need to realize that distraction does not equate to miracle and without miracles, we need to find scientific explanations for which awesomeness is not a fact, but an adjective describing a fact.