Binary Brain

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.