Through The Looking Glass

"It is life, not truth, that really counts."

It has long since occurred to me to examine myself, to look at myself in the mirror and ask "Who am I?" This was not from any highfalutin' desire to be pretentiously philosophical but, instead, simply because it seemed to me to be the right thing to do with one's life if one wanted to take any responsibility for it. (Readers will recall that it was Socrates who said that "The unexamined life is not worth living.") I can report that looking at yourself in the mirror, perhaps even doing that and pretending, just for the few moments it is possible, that you are looking at someone else, gives you a different, more critical perspective on who you are.  Look in the mirror. Imagine you are looking at someone else. What do you see? Now I don't know if anyone else reading this takes a similar view on life. It may be that you never think twice about who you are, about what you want in, or from, life and you are content to just barrel through unthinkingly. But I'm not. And this is my blog and so now I get to write here a bit about what it has taught me. 

Now I could write this blog very philosophically but I'm going to try and resist the temptation. Philosophical terms and lots of "-isms" aren't always the most straightforward of things and in my blog I want to be as straightforward as possible. That's why I tend to make lots of the things I write about quite personal. Not only is this a reflection of my intentions but of my judgments as well. People relate to people better than ideas, I think, and I am a person first.

Now what you will be getting, I hope, if you have read any of my blog before, listened to my music or interacted with me on Twitter is that I am very interested in life and Being. Indeed, the year 2015 has been all about this for me. I can scarcely remember why now but I know that since January I've been writing music in that vein and thinking and writing about it a lot. Recently, I've begun a new phase of reading and thinking, initially started by a friend engaging me in conversation about robots and AI. This led me to start thinking about consciousness and, inevitably, this got personalized and I began applying the thought to myself. Now, this weekend, I had one of those moments I sometimes have where I try and summarize my thinking to this point. This blog is going to be that summary.

I have wandered down a number of paths in life. Many were dead ends as, inevitably, they will be. But some of these paths tend to lead somewhere and it's then that we become more enthusiastic in the journey and become eager to see where they go. One such path for me was the path of studying existentialist (sorry for the big word!) philosophy. I came upon this kind of thinking initially because of academic commitments but, as they fell away and became irrelevant, consumed by the relentless march of life, I found that the interest in this thought stayed. I was fortunate that when I was a PhD student I was blessed with a certain amount of money and at that time I bought a number of texts which stay with me to this day. Many lay unread for years but were just sitting on the shelf waiting to have their contents devoured. I have also found that the internet is an ever-burgeoning source of all the reading material you could ever want to find. Hit *author's name* and PDF and up will pop lots of choices on the Google page.

But to the meat. I am a thinker. I've always been a thinker. Partly, I was made that way. Partly, I was shaped that way. We are the products of genetics and environment, each of us living out unique lives that only we could possibly live for no one else completely matches us in those two crucial components. We may say that the journey defines us. But so does the start point. I have consistently found myself asking, even from boyhood, what is all this about? At younger ages these questions had a more religious focus but there was a point at which I got past that and found talk of gods unbelievable. I continue to find such talk unbelievable and beside the point to this day. My focus increasingly came to be this life that I had, the life we all have as individuals. It's the only life I believe any of us have and the only place we will find either answers or meaning.

And that is why I came upon existentialist (sorry!) thinking. OK, here is the explanation bit. Existentialism, in a sense, doesn't really exist. There is no school of existentialists and only really one man, Jean-Paul Sartre, was happy to call himself an existentialist in the first place. Existentialism, is really a body of thought grouped together as a category by other people that centres on thought about life, being and the self. So what is it about? Here is my quick version:

1. Responsibility. An existential frame of mind regards each of us as responsible for our own lives. There is no god or nature or ways of the world or rationality or other body to whom we can shift this responsibility. All higher powers, however conceived, are regarded as cold and indifferent to us.

2. Freedom. Existentialists are concerned with issues of freedom, be that free will or political freedom. This is also from the perspective of inspecting freedoms and asking how they come to be. For example, it's an existentialist question to ask how free "free will" actually is. (Answer: not very!) So existentialists think a lot about how much life "chooses" us and how we can choose it in return. In addition, there is a general acknowledgement that all freedoms come from situated contexts. Freedom is never an absolute and always a specific kind.

3. Individuality. Existentialist thought recognizes that each of us are individuals with our own consciousness, thoughts and feelings. In this sense, we know ourselves intimately in ways others don't. In this sense, we live and die alone. We can, therefore, neither live for others nor have someone else live our life on our behalf.

4. Rationality vs Passions. Existentialists are concerned with the human being and how we are in ourselves. Thus, they grapple with our make-up as rational yet also feeling beings. They question the prominence given to rationality over "the passions" as if the latter were base and unhelpful. (Compare Mr Spock in Star Trek or Mr Data in a later incarnation of the series.) Instead, they recognise that no emotion is ungrounded and that the different characteristics of a human being are not so easily separated in actual use. People are angry, sad, frustrated and a whole host of other things for situated reasons rather than at random. It may be that an impotent rationality is actually helped out by authentic emotions.

5. The Now. Existentialist thought tends to focus on the now of lived experience as the most important thing in life. It might be said that either we find meaning in our lives as they are, and as they are lived, or we don't find it at all. Another way of saying this is that this life, your life in all its particularity, is the only life that will ever mean anything. Some would also suggest that it doesn't really matter much how you live, it only matters that you lived. Thus, meaning is regarded as a personal thing that you experience in the concrete conditions of your life whatever they may be. It is in this sense that even mistakes are steps on the way to somewhere. It is the fact of a journey that is all that matters and the individual steps recede in importance.

 6. The Absurd. For some existentialists, for example, Albert Camus, life is an experience of the absurd. Camus himself conceives of this using the example of Sisyphus who was condemned to roll a huge rock up a hill only for it to roll back down again. He then had to repeat the task. Endlessly.  Camus argues that all of us are in the same position as Sisyphus was in our own lives and that life, for each of us, is ultimately futile. At the start of his book discussing this he thus says that the only serious philosophical question is suicide. That is, why are any of us choosing to live at all? For Camus the answer is in rebellion against the absurdity. This is not to deny the scenario he sets up (life really is absurd and futile) but to refuse to be consumed by the absurdity by taking personal responsibility. It is also to be noted, as I did in a previous blog, that this "futility of life" thought is an old one that we see repeated many times throughout the recorded history of our race.

7. Thrownness. The term comes from a German philosopher but the thought is common to a number of existentialists. The idea is that we are "thrown" into life. We neither choose who we are nor what our circumstances are. So much about who we are and what our opportunities or possibilities are were decided for us by other factors. Each of us lives in a situation we largely do NOT control. This includes not only our genetic make-up (who we physically and biologically are) but also the way we were brought up or the choices and possibilities we have in life. A novella which illustrates the dilemma of this "thrownness" is Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis" in which a man wakes up to find himself transformed into an insect and has to deal with this new form of life.

8. Authenticity. The idea here is one of "becoming who you are" as Nietzsche put it. Each of us lives in social contexts and the temptation to run with the herd is strong. In contradistinction to this, the existentialist is interested in being authentically who they are and living out the full potential of that. So this is about maximising the potential of the particular journey through life that you happen to be on as opposed to just following the crowd. Authenticity is a primary valuation of an existentialist frame of mind.

9. Knowledge vs Meaning. Existentialists come down very firmly on the side of meaning, personal meaning, as the thing which really matters in life. They see things like a search for knowledge as ultimately pointless and self-defeating. There will never be an end of knowing. It is literally a pointless exercise. But not only would you never be able to know enough, what would happen if you did get to the end and know everything? Nothing would. You would just have collected facts. But there is also the question of understanding. Existentialists suggest that existence cannot be rationally understood and therefore the knowledge is again pointless. Instead, what counts is a personal engagement with your own experience of life. In this sense, Camus argues that the impersonal, abstract, scientific view of the world, what one contemporary philosopher has called “the view from nowhere" is what gives birth to the absurd. Ultimately, only personal experience is meaningful.

10. Reflection/Rationality vs Experience. We find the same issue here as in our last point, albeit with a slightly shifted focus. The point, again, is that the lived experience of our lives is all that really matters and gives meaning. In that sense, reflective rationality, is both meaningless and impotent. All the thinking and explanations ultimately fall away and all you are left with is the fact that you lived. It is in your personal struggle with this fact that meaning comes to be. Your journey is what matters, your experience. There is no rationality of the world to get in touch with, no reflection that will make all things clear (as if there was a true, clear or genuine view to find).

So we can see, I hope, that existentialism (which doesn't really exist) is very much a philosophy of life, a philosophy of actual concrete, individual lives. It's not abstract equations or theories of everything. It's about you and me in all our particularity. Thinking about it and reading the words of those plugging into this kind of mentality has certainly helped me to get some sort of handle on my own self-understanding and to set goals for myself. It has also helped me to shape beliefs about who I am and the bigger questions such as "why are we here?" that, I guess, we have all asked at one time of another. Of course, the thought itself is much more complex than this and I have only provided the Existentialism 101 version here. But even if you think about those 10 briefs points here you can see how all sorts of existential questions begin to arise.

Most of all, I think, it focuses the mind on maybe the most important question of all: what is it to really be existing? Existentialism answers: to exist is to take responsibility for yourself, to commit yourself to creating who you are, to commit yourself to the journey that is your life, even though you did not choose any of this and have been thrown into a world and a life much of which you don't control and will never understand. Or, more simply, it's up to you. No one is going to live your life for you.

Now you might wonder why any of this matters and you might also wonder how this actually affects anyone's life. But take it from me that it does. For example, if you go on over to my Bandcamp site, elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com you will find there a lot of albums of what I now conceive of as "existential music", music which, it now seems to me, reflects the views and valuations inherent in a lot of what I have just said. I started out this week with a creative task. That task was to make music that reflected "nothingness". (My next album is to be called Nichtigkeit which is German for "nothingness".) I asked myself what a "music of nothingness" would sound like. And then it hit me. As I have developed my music and my creative persona that has come through automatically. I have been making an existential music, a music of personal responsibility grounded in my specific life, a life and being based in nothing greater than itself, all along. So, for me, the "music of nothingness" is going to sound like me. Just as it always has done.

We are now through the looking glass......

Being is Nothingness

"Stoic absence of passion, Zen absence of will, Heideggerian gelassenheit and physics-as-the-absolute-conception-of-reality are… just so many variations on a single project - the project of escaping from time and chance." (Richard Rorty)

 It is our human nature to rage against the dying of the light, to fill the nothingness with somethingness, to give meaning where there is none, truth where there is none, knowledge where there is none, to make reason where none exists, to be rational where irrationality reigns. At least, this is my observation. I thought I should write something about this at this current time and lay out a more comprehensive article after my last few on being and consciousness. As you will know, these things mean something to me and I want to try and give a slightly more comprehensive account of them from my own understanding. It will at least help me to do this and, maybe, one or two others as well.

It is my intuition that the time has come to acknowledge the gaping hole that exists at the centre of Being, to acknowledge that our human powers and perceptions fail, to acknowledge that truth is insubstantial, knowledge is merely what is useful, that our seeing is partial and mostly blind, that we are contingent and merely fitted for a form of life, a very narrow form of life, evolved to live and die on an inconsequential speck in the vastness of space. I do not see that there is any Whole or Unity or Truth or amount of Knowledge or Privileged Insight or Enlightenment or Meaning that we can work our way towards or find. There is no Deity or Spirituality, no Body of Privileged Information or Holy Being which is going to allow us to see behind the veil of our limitations and glimpse the Holy of Holies of  "how-things-really-are" or "what-life-is-all-about". There is no "our-true-place-in-the-universe". These things are a mirage, and we are victims of their illusion.

It should be noted, then, that I am hardly the first person to diagnose nothingness at the centre of all that is. "Nihilism" has been a problem for European philosophy for 200-300 years. In other traditions, emptiness has been held as a value in itself. 2,300 years ago there was at least one Jewish teacher (a person named Qoheleth, the speaker in the biblical book of Ecclesiastes to which I will return below) teaching that life is "breath" and a chasing after the wind. And he was continually asking "What does it profit...?" So we can be sure that we are not the first to have the thought that at the centre of Being is…. nothing and that life itself is insubstantial. It may be, like the Ego, that certain illusory goals and beliefs (the aforementioned list of gods and pseudo-gods such as Meaning, Truth and Knowledge) were necessary and that evolution fitted us with them to best enable our survival. But we make a terrible mistake in taking them too seriously, petrifying them and making deities of them. But, then again, maybe we are only living out the life that we were meant to lead in doing so?

Nevertheless, I want to suggest today that the claim that something "is" (in any essentialist or foundational sense) is the most meaningless claim any human being could ever make, in my opinion. We have neither the insight nor the means to make any such claim. We live in a constant stream of existence, of consciousness, and randomly pluck things from the torrent as it rushes past and then make connections between one and another. If it has the utility of working or being, so it seems, repeatable, then we deify it as something that is…. but have no genuine right to do so. We can only ever speak properly of a constant becoming, a changing as one day turns into the next. We are part of a stream and we observe a small stretch of the journey before we blink… and cease to exist.

I think the key insight here, which I hope to flesh out below, is that it's not in spite of the nothingness that we make meaning, truth and knowledge: it's because of it. It might have been thought, pre-reflectively, that these things arise as we have an awareness of a greater thing that is out there, some god or truth or insight into being that is currently beyond us. And so we yearn to reach it guided by our belief that there is "a-way-things-are". But this is not so. Instead, we experience the void of nothing and experience the edge of chaos and cannot bear it. And so we become (or, in evolutionary terms, became) machines for the creation of meaning, truth and knowledge to give us something that can allow us to live. No one could survive the chaos, it would make our lives unlivable. Instead, we find a form of life through which we can survive, endure and prosper. Because at the heart of Being there is a void, we find things plastic to our touch and begin to create. This is to say that our "reality" is not nearly so fixed as some might have you believe. Or, at least, not nearly as restrictive.

It's worth noting at this point that I am not here making any claims to universal knowledge. That would be both arrogant and entirely contradictory to my point. I am simply emptying out onto the page my understanding such as it is at this current time as it has been educated by the thoughts, and the thought, that I have encountered on my journey down the stream. I regard "right and wrong" in this connection as to be strictly missing the point. I don't regard the journey as about right or wrong. I regard it as about the experience of the journey. I regard philosophy, which is nominally what I am doing here, as about utilization of the mind and as about, as it originally was, a love of wisdom and not as a means to some fabled special insight, much less some technical or hidden knowledge. As such, I believe that questions are more fundamental than answers and that thinking is the most important activity, one that can lead us to find the questions at the heart of our existence and our being. This, I see as I look back, is what I have really been doing throughout my life since I was 8 or 9 years old.

For myself, I see myself at a crossover of Philosophy and Spirituality, two things which can, indeed, be compatible. There have been many spiritual and philosophical thinkers. The belief in god is a logical outworking of one way of doing these things but not a necessary one and not one I have found myself coming to be convinced by in the end. Indeed, I think back 20 years to when I would have said I believed in a god and cringe at how naive I was at that time. However, I don't think that spirituality, in itself and in all its forms, is to be pilloried or violently attacked as some like Richard Dawkins do. Both Philosophy and Spirituality are searching for things to fill the nothingness at the heart of being (things like meaning, truth, knowledge or god) and, as such, are entirely understandable in that context. The attacks of those like Dawkins merely show an arrogant and boorish lack of humble understanding. Humility, we should remember, is perhaps the quality human beings need most in the face of the all-encompassing nothingness that surrounds us. Perhaps those who are least humble are the ones who are most desperately running away in a futile attempt to escape it? I would argue that where Dawkins sees "god" and rages he actually only sees "Truth" instead - which functions in much the same way for him as god does for his opponents. He is more like those he despises than he would ever want to admit.

My approach below in the rest of this blog will be based on a firm belief that all the connections human beings make in their thinking are fictions. They are merely either useful or not useful. (It is to be noted that fiction is not an opposite of truth. We habitually share fictions that, whilst not true in themselves, elucidate some truth or beliefs we would hold dear.) All syntheses are at least fictional and tell a story that works at a certain time and place. We know that nothing stands for all time and so in place of models of accuracy and truth, models which have their very failure inscribed within them from the start, I use models of honesty and authenticity which have a validity of time and place. What follows will be my attempt to describe the nothingness at the heart of not just human being, but all Being, and how I came to find it. I will do so in my own words (believing that this is the most authentic way I can do it in a blog for general readers) and I will also try to point up some issues this raises and some of the options before us. I take it that I don't need to point out again that this is merely my own partial account (in at least 2 senses).

So why would anyone think that at the heart of Being there is a gaping chasm of nothingness, a black hole at the centre of all that is? For me this realisation came by thinking and reading in addition to the lived experience of my life. I read philosophers like William James who said that "truth" was those things that were merely "good in the way of belief" and Richard Rorty who wrote papers and books extolling the idea that beliefs are not true or false in the sense of corresponding to an antecedent world, but only in the sense that they are useful beliefs and that it pays to believe them. Where James, a man of his philosophical time, talked about the world of experience, Rorty, in keeping with the linguistic turn and focus in more modern philosophy, talks about language. Indeed, Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher obsessed with thinking about Being, called language "the house of Being". But it is when thinking about language that we begin to realise that language is not a perspicuous tool for penetrating to the heart of Being but, instead, a collection of "tools for coping with objects rather than representations of objects, and as providing different sets of tools for different purposes" (Richard Rorty). Another very famous philosopher of the 20th century, Ludwig Wittgenstein, described language as like a game in which we, as various different communities, need to know the rules of the game we are playing in order to take part in using the language. This makes language sound very much like a social practice as opposed to the innate logic of the universe, something that, at first, Wittgenstein himself had tried to find. But, on his later thinking, no language gets us closer to reality because that is not what language is for. Language is there to help us deal with things not represent them, correspond to them or describe them in their essence. All this is to say that language is in no way foundational to Being like a code for how things really are. Rather, it is descriptive of it in as many ways as there are human purposes.

There were for me other philosophical indicators that traditional god substitutes such as Knowledge, Truth or Meaning had ideas above their station. About 16 years ago, as I prepared to start my PhD studies, I chanced upon a book by Friedrich Nietzsche. I knew next to nothing about him save that I knew his work had been co-opted (and corrupted) by the Nazis. I began to read the book (which, soon after, grew to become all his books) and found it very reader friendly but in no way simplistic. I have learned many things in those 16 years since by reading Nietzsche. One of those things is the "will to system" that human beings have. Another is that human beings are excellent at deceiving themselves. Nietzsche, at times, is a very astute and insightful observer of his kind and of their intellectual habits and failings. Thus, he describes truth as "a mobile army of metaphors" and says that "We believe when we speak of trees, colours, snow, and flowers, we have knowledge of the things themselves, and yet we possess only metaphors of things which in no way correspond to the original entities." In the same piece of writing he will argue that our concepts are a "making equivalent of that which is non-equivalent" and that "The thing-in-itself (which would be, precisely, pure truth, truth without consequences) is impossible even for the user of language to grasp". Perhaps my favourite Nietzschean thought, though, is this one:

Life as the product of life. However far man may extend himself with his knowledge, however objective he may appear to himself - ultimately he reaps nothing but his own biography.

I find in this perfectly crafted thought (and Nietzsche's books are full of hundreds of such thoughts as well as more lengthy arguments) a perfect summary of all of our lives. Life, so it says to me, is not about knowledge or truth or meaning. Language does not get to the heart of anything. We do not perceive past some intellectual or spiritual barrier to something that is more real than real. Life is just a time period and all we do when we live is create our history.

And so I took up and ran with this theme as I continued my studies. I entered the world of  French 20th century philosophy where Camus tells us that the only genuine philosophical question is to ask if life is worth living at all. In that same environment Sartre proclaims that we are all "condemned to be free", an expression of our individual existential freedom, Foucault delineates how our human knowledge is shaped by the operations of power and Jacques Derrida builds a whole philosophy around the idea that human language, and human meaning with it, corrupts and deconstructs itself even as it goes about its business. 

My final philosophical insights came not from a Frenchman, but from the very American literary and legal academic, Stanley Fish. His work on meaning as constructed, on human communities as always situated and contextualised and, thus, on just "anything" never having the possibility to be the case, ("anything that can be made to go, goes" is his insightful gloss on the more traditional "anything goes" that people who "don't believe in reality" are often accused of believing) convinced me that there can be no "real world" in the highly philosophical sense that some people often mean it. There is the world that is available to us, the world that we sense and describe and brush up against every day. It is a world that constricts and constrains us. But we cannot penetrate it in the way that some deceptive dualisms such as those like reality and appearance or intrinsic and extrinsic would have us believe. There is no inner reality to find. There is, for example, no inherent morality of the universe (there is merely prudent or considerate behaviour). Instead, all we have is a world of relations and descriptions, some more useful than others, a world that constrains but that is also material for the constructive and creative engines of our minds and language and purposes.

It is at this point that it would be reasonable to feel loss. We want to think that what we have in our hands is solid and, well, real. I say that the world I am describing, the one with nothingness at its heart, is and that I certainly have no problem believing that we live on an amazing planet in an amazing universe full of everything from planets, stars and galaxies to electrons and electro-magnetic radiation. It's just that there is no god figure for us to bow down before, nothing really real that we can feel appropriately supplicant before or in touch with, no divinity of any kind that we can share in, no "real-way-things-are" unconnected from some human purpose or description. There is only the world of experience and our means of describing it and making use of it. Perhaps, then, we might want to share in the conclusion of one of the biblical writers, Qoheleth (to give him his Jewish name), when he says "Sheer futility, sheer futility, everything is futile!" (Qoheleth 1:2). I myself often translate the Hebrew word "Hebel" that is behind the word "futile" there (I did study biblical Hebrew at university with some success and so feel able to make such comments) as "absurd". Everything is absurd. It is absurd not in the sense of funny or amusing but in the sense of being pitched into a game you must play but can't win or where, as Camus discusses in The Myth of Sisyphus, we must forever push a rock up a hill only to have it roll down. And thus the cycle begins again. 

Qoheleth looks out upon a world in which human beings die like beasts and the good suffer whilst the evil prosper. No path seems to lead to any meaningful conclusion. There seems to be no point, no target to aim for. In lieu of a better conclusion we might almost say that stuff just seems random, a matter of time and chance. "Why be wise when the wise and the fool both die?" he asks. "All is futility (or absurd) and chasing after the wind" (Qoheleth 1:17). In a later section, Qoheleth muses on that fact that we humans can grasp no overarching meaning or knowledge or truth about our existence or about existence in general. (Today we would call this the death of the metanarrative.)  His conclusion is that the only pleasure to be found is in "pleasure and enjoyment through life" (Qoheleth 3:12-13). And that sounds very like Nietzsche's biography comment to me. If you look for meaning in something greater than yourself, or something greater than you within, you will not find it. It's not there. All you have is the life you actually live - and to enjoy it. 

Of course, the charge may be raised that there are, indeed, many people who do find meaning and truth and knowledge in things greater than themselves. The world does not lack for believers in gods of many kinds - from the little old lady who goes to church to the evolutionary biologist who worships at the altar of "truth" (the aforementioned Dawkins). "So what is going on here?" you may rightly ask. One answer to this, I think, might lie in the thought of French postmodern thinker, Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard is famous for saying that things like the first Gulf War "never happened". He did not mean to suggest that there was no war. He means to suggest that the war we saw through newspaper headlines and 24 hour rolling news coverage was empty and devoid of referent. It was an act of creation in which the reporting came to replace and represent as true something that wasn't really there. This rolling news then became "The Truth" but had no actual referent behind it. Baudrillard's most famous work, Simulacra and Simulation, fleshes out this idea more fully. A simulacra is, for Baudrillard, "never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true". As Baudrillard notes in a section dealing with the media in this book:

We live in a world where there is more and more information and less and less meaning.

So what am I saying here? I'm saying that people can be deceived. I'm saying that much "information" today is shallow and useless and refers to nothing beyond itself in a very reflexive way but, nevertheless, becomes the truth that conceals there is no truth. I'm saying that people can believe anything for the purposes that they have that the world of our experience allows. This may, for some, include gods whilst, for others, it won't. I would remind readers here of the quote I used as the heading to this blog and it's focus on human beings wanting to escape the "time and chance" that they have, with complete disregard for their will, been pitched into. It has, to date, been a project of some, if not all, humans to try and escape the stream of consciousness, the time and chance which is all they have, to find a solid, firm foundation on which to stand. I doubt that this purpose will go away anytime soon. But given a wider perspective, we have every right to doubt the privileged access or insight some people claim. Better, then, to see it as just one more human attempt to shoot at the moon, one more self-referential news report about gods and rumours of gods with nothing behind it, one more go at the oldest human project of all - finding solid ground when, as Nietzsche says, all we have now is the vicissitudes of "the infinite sea".

But if at the heart of all Being there is merely nothingness, a reaching for something forever out of reach, as I claim, then what are we to do? I can think immediately of two things but I think that we are already doing both of them. The first thing we can do is hope. We can hope for a better life in a better world full of better people - whatever we take better in these cases to mean. We can hope to have a better life personally and we can work towards it. We can hope and so allow the seeds of imagination to flourish within us and make use of the opportunity that time and chance has afforded us in our being born. Of course, you can sit in a corner and wait to die too. It's up to you. You might even muse that in the end it doesn't make much difference and I couldn't really argue against you. Not in the end, at least. But there is always the here and now for the living to concern themselves with even if eternity is forever and life is short.

The second thing we can do in the nothingness is create. This certainly applies in the personal area. I was reminded by a friend's tweet the other day that there is no "inner self". Sometimes various kinds of guru try to claim there is an inner self and that you need to find it. But there is no inner self. Just like all the other attempts at grasping something really real, it has an imaginary target. But, in the absence of an inner self, there is just you in all your particularity with all your history, thoughts and feelings. And there is no one version of you for you are always becoming, always changing. You don't even know yourself better than other people. You just have your own thoughts about you, your own descriptions and your own reasons for preferring one over another, albeit that you have more information to go on because you have always been there! 

This world of experience that we live in yields to our descriptions. It is plastic to our touch. We can make use of it and manipulate it and make it useful for our many purposes. And we can do that with ourselves too. We have the opportunity to create something beautiful, if that's not too naively poetic. It may not be that it lasts for a long time for we know that meaning is as temporary as human beings and their projects but, as Nietzsche and Qoheleth both saw, all we have is the lives we are creating day by day. That is where we will find our being and the world of our possibilities: in our world of Nothingness.

I thank you for reading if you got this far!

Yours,

A Nihilist.

You can find a whole catalog of music which flows from my existentialist and nihilist frame of mind by going to my Bandcamp including a series on Human/Being and another called Elektronische Existenz. Thank you for any listening that you do as I try to create and infuse with hope my own existence in this world.

What is a Human Being?

Introductory Remarks

As you may know if you have been following my music or this blog, this year I have been focusing my thinking and my art on the question which is the title of this particular blog. Namely, I've been asking what a human being is. I produced a ten part musical series whilst thinking about this but then, last night, it struck me that I haven't really written anything about it in so many words. (Even though I have written about what I was doing when I was making this music elsewhere in this blog and about related issues. Check out the rest of my blog for that.) And then I thought that I should at least try to put that right. This is not because I think I have anything startlingly original to say. Neither is it because I think there is not plenty that has already been written about it. Philosophers, as only one group of people, have been thinking and writing about being and being human for as long as they have been thinking and writing. It's a subject that has always been there and we as a species have always needed to come back to it again and again. Why else has this subject struck me as so important?

But in thinking about human being and human beings there are clearly a number of issues to overcome. For a start, I take the word "human" in my title as both an adjective and as a noun. That is to say that I am concerned with what a "human being" is as an individual creature and with what "human" being is as a specific type of being in the world. Here, immediately, we can see that this subject could become very dense and complicated and I hope not to make my writing about it appear that way. I hope to elucidate my thoughts clearly and concisely. This is a roundabout way of saying that I'm writing a blog here and not a paper for a peer-reviewed philosophy journal. (Although I would point out that my thinking and writing has been guided by an interest in academic philosophy stretching back more than 20 years now.) So I will try to keep my language as perspicuous as possible. I will do that, of course, at the risk of being misunderstood or not being as precise as I might be if I were writing in another context. So maybe now I should say what I'm setting out to do before then going on to make some observations about the subject of this blog.

Let me say straight away that I can't make any claim to be comprehensive here. I live a very specific (and unique) life that is not and will not be replicated by anyone else. (I thank the non-existent gods for that!) All our lives are individual in their particularity and this is something we value about our species. So the things I write below will be animated by my own life experience and the concerns that it has thrown up for me. I would more than welcome it, though, if you read this and feel that I have missed something vital out and feel the need to tell me what that is. I am certainly no oracle and am more than aware of my many thorough-going limitations. So I will be writing a very personal and situated answer to my question. (I could, of course, do no other.) My aim is to put into words issues and questions that I think bear on the subject and that are important to address. Each one could, I have no doubt, be subject to several book-length treatments in itself. I will, on the contrary, attempt to be brief and concise for the sake of my blog readers.


Some Thoughts About Human Being(s)

And so the first thing to say is that we, as human beings, are beings for whom "Being" is an issue. We ask questions such as "Why am I here?" and "Who am I?" and "Why is there something rather than nothing?". This is to say that it occurs to us to be aware of our existence and our surroundings. And these are not just questions about ourselves as individual people who exist. They are also the greater questions about existence as a whole. "Where did everything come from?" is a question of great import that doesn't, we think, occur to every living thing to ask. So it is this consciousness, this inquisitiveness, this awareness of self and surroundings, that becomes a constituent part of our make up as human beings. To be a human being is to experience the world as one. It is neither a gift nor a curse. It just is. And we can reflect on what that means because, as human beings, the meaning of things is important to us too.

But there are also a whole slew of issues that are important to us as human beings just by simple virtue of being alive. I refer to these myself as "the issues of the living". I use this term in distinction to being dead when, of course, these things would not matter at all. For me these things are the things of every day life, of survival and of daily procedure, the questions that we deal with as almost background issues and that are rarely overtly thought about or noticed as important. "What's for dinner today?", "Do my teeth need brushing?" "Am I late for an appointment?" and "I wonder what my colleague at work thinks of me?" would be examples of things like this but there could be a billion other such things. They are the things you think about and process because you are alive. If we wanted to put it more simply we might just say that being alive entails caring about things.

Being alive as a human being also entails caring, or not caring, about other members of our species. It is not unique to human beings to be social as we can see from our observations of the wider natural world. But we also know, as human beings, that we are infused with a strong sense of self. We value and cherish the fact we have individuality and are not, instead, part of some Borg-like hive mind in which everyone else's thoughts are constantly present too. So, as humans, our form of being is shaped by a kind of dual nature as beings who are individual yet also part of wider social groupings, be they familial or otherwise. Most of us have experienced some great communal event together and shared in a kind of group euphoria and we experience that as a group, as beings together in a way that is not individual. And yet we retain a foot in both camps and we can be psychologically affected if either our sense of self or our sense of belonging, or not belonging, to groups is called into question.

A very basic way in which our human being is shaped is by our form. Human beings are physical beings of a very specific kind in a physical world. We breathe air. We pump blood. We can see thanks to our optic nerve and the electromagnetic radiation that exists as photons of light. We can hear, touch, taste and smell. We reproduce in a specifically physical way. We walk on two legs in an upright fashion. We have active brains which can learn and adapt, often overcoming some of these limitations or finding ways around them if some of them are taken away in an accident or due to illness. We can talk. We have organs which stop us from being poisoned by the waste products produced in sustaining ourselves. We can feel pain. We decay. We die. All of these physical things are very specific and I want to make the point very strongly that they are inherent to what makes us human. For me, a human brain in a vat or a mind uploaded to a computer would not be a human being. To lose our physicality is, for me, to lose something vital to our humanity, something that has shaped who we have become and what we are. It may be that one day we evolve our species into beings not made of flesh thanks to scientific advances. For me that would entail a possible gain but certainly also a loss and definitely a change in circumstances. Physical things eventually wear out. As human beings that is always before us in very specific ways. I ask you to consider the question: "If all my body parts were replaced with artificial ones, would I still be me?" My answer to this is that I think being a human being, living a human form of being, is intimately bound up with the specific physical form of our nature.

Another way we can talk of human being is in terms of time. I have already addressed this in a number of musical pieces and philosophers have remarked on our inherent temporality for centuries. The fact is that we are beings who exist within time and who are always conscious of it. This is not merely in terms of appointments or notable dates but also in things like consciousness of death and the cycles of life. (Mid-life crisis? Becoming an adult? Retiring?) But we are also aware of the infinity of time which exists in such large amounts that we literally cannot conceive of the age of the Universe or of even our own planet within it. So, as with the social and the individual, there is a dual focus here as human beings have an awareness of both finitude and infinity and that affects our form of life here on earth. A way to imagine this is to think of the future and the past. One, the future, stretches out before us as an infinite possibility whilst, on the other hand, the past lies behind us as something insubstantial that has slipped through our fingers. Time, in some senses, leaves us completely powerless. We try to grasp it and hold on to it, but it is gone. Only the photograph or the memory manages to hold some traces and time even fades those too.

An important aspect of our humanity is to be found in our fallibility. Put bluntly and rather obviously, we are not omniscient. We are, indeed, quite limited beings. We see more than through a glass darkly. It is easy to fool the senses of human beings, which are our means of gathering information about the world, and there are many parlour tricks which are capable of doing so such as the never ending staircase or the duck/rabbit made famous by Ludwig Wittgenstein as shown below.

                                                             Is it a duck or a rabbit?

We have also developed our own pattern and habits of thinking which, whilst useful for certain purposes, are by no means to be regarded as the best possible or unsurpassable. Human beings have developed by evolution and their powers of thought and means of gathering information have been shaped by their environment and become useful for the form of life they lead. It is conceivable that beings from elsewhere might be nothing like us because their development would be suited to their environment and form of life too. One simple truth is that, if we are honest, we, as human beings, don't even know what it is we don't know. We are working in the dark in the only ways evolution has equipped us to do so. We also need to remember that human beings are not passive robots whose job is merely to be carried out passively as a response to commands. But this is my next point.

Human beings have intentions, attitudes, feelings and emotions. And often we act not simply with intellectual goals in sight but simply because we feel a certain way or because we have a certain attitude towards something. Its also worth pointing out that to have a goal is to be human too. Can you imagine a fly or a table to decide that it purposely wants to do something? Probably not. But you can imagine that a person decides to do something. You can imagine they do this for a number of reasons from it being something they want to achieve to because some other factor motivates them to do it. Human beings, then, are not simply calculators or computers or machines. They can get angry and make bad choices and harm themselves and others and then feel sorry for it. And I think it is important to say this since the machine or computer metaphor is very often used casually and lazily to describe human beings. I think its wrong and misleading. Human beings are not machines. They are, instead, animals and they are imbued with animalistic attributes such as intuition. I recall to mind here a scene from Star Trek in which Spock, who does not have all the information he needs to hand to make a calculation, is advised by the very human McCoy to "make his best guess". And that, indeed, is something that humans often do. They guess. Now when a human being feels cold you might want to describe it as a programmed (or learned) response to sensory stimulation. But is it really that simple? I don't think so. When you cry do you think that a machine could do that? When you feel fear, or anxiety or love you are acting as a living being would not as any machine we have ever yet conceived. I don't regard these things as mere developments based on increasingly complex networks. I think it something fundamentally different that we don't yet, and maybe never will, understand. It is something human. It is something to do with being.

So, for the purposes of this blog, this is my list of attributes when thinking about human being:

1. Ontological
2. Alive
3. Individual and Social
4. Physical
5. Temporal
6. Fallible
7. Animal

There is one more that I finally want to add at this point. And that is that we are incomplete. We are not finished but are always in a process of continuing to become something else. We are like this blog. No matter how much I say, there is always more that could be said. There will always be new occasions or contexts in which it could be said again with new force or in new and probably better ways. The understanding and the searching never stops. And so it is with us as people and as a people. We are never complete, we are never finished. Human being and human beings never reach a point at which they can stop and say they are done and there is no more to do. A constant process of becoming as people "condemned to be free" (as Jean-Paul Sartre put it) is the only game in town.

8. Incomplete


I hope what I have written above gives anyone who has got this far something to think about. If you want some music to have in the background as you maybe think about these issues then my Human/Being series is just for you and you can hear it at my Bandcamp.

Consciousness, Bodies and Future Robot Beings: Thinking Aloud

So yesterday I came back to thinking about consciousness again after some weeks away from it and, inevitably, the idea of robots with human consciousness came up again. I was also pointed in the direction of some interesting videos put on You Tube by the Dalai Lama in which he and some scientists educated more in the western, scientific tradition had a conference around the areas of mind and consciousness.

But it really all started a couple of days ago with a thought I had. I was sitting there, minding my own business, when suddenly I thought "Once we can create consciousness procreation will be obsolete." (This thought assumes that "consciousness" is something that can be deliberately created. That is technically an assumption and maybe a very big one.) My point in having this thought was that if we could replicate consciousness, which we might call our awareness that we exist and that there is a world around us, then we could put it (upload it?) into much better robot bodies than our frail fleshly ones which come with so many problems simply due to their sheer physical form. One can easily imagine that a carbon fibre or titanium (or carbotanium) body would last much longer and without any of the many downsides of being a human being. (Imagine being a person but not needing to eat, or go to the toilet. Imagine not feeling tired or sick.)


So the advantages immediately become apparent. Of course the thought also expressly encompasses the idea that if you can create consciousness then you can create replacements for people. Imagine you own a factory. Instead of employing 500 real people you employ 500 robots with consciousness. Why wouldn't you do that? At this point you may reply with views about what consciousness is. You might say, for example, that consciousness implies awareness of your surroundings which implies having opinions about those surroundings. That implies feelings and the formation of attitudes and opinions about things. Maybe the robots don't like working at the factory like its very likely some of the people don't. Maybe, to come from another angle, we should regard robots with consciousness as beings with rights in this case. If we could establish that robots, or other creatures, did have a form of consciousness, would that not mean we should give them rights? And what would it mean for human beings if we could deliberately create "better people"?

At this point it becomes critical what we think consciousness actually is. It was suggested to me that, in human beings, electrochemical actions in the brain can "explain" the processing of sense data (which consciousness surely does). Personally I wonder if this does "explain" it as opposed to merely describing it as a process within a brain. One way that some scientists have often found to discuss the mind or consciousness is to reduce it to the activities of the brain. So conscious thoughts become brain states, etc. This is not entirely convincing. It is thought that the mind is related to the brain but no one knows how even though some are happy to say that they regard minds as physical attributes like reproduction or breathing. That is, they would say minds are functions of brains. Others, however, aren't so sure about that. However a mind comes to be, it seems quite safe to say that consciousness is a machine for generating data (as one of its functions). That is, to be conscious is to have awareness of the world around you and to start thinking about it and coming to conclusions or working hypotheses about things. Ironically, this is often "unconsciously" done!

So consciousness, as far as we know, requires a brain. I would ask anyone who doesn't agree with this to point to a consciousness that exists where there isn't a brain in evidence. But consciousness cannot be reduced to things like data or energy. In this respect I think the recent film Chappie, which I mentioned in previous blogs, gets things wrong. I don't understand how a consciousness could be "recorded" or saved to a hard disk. It doesn't, to me, seem very convincing, whilst I understand perfectly how it makes a good fictional story. I think that on this point thinkers get seduced by the power of the computer metaphor.  For me consciousness is more than both energy or data, a brain is not simply hardware nor is consciousness simply (or even) software. If you captured the electrochemical energy in the brain or had a way to capture all the data your mind possesses you wouldn't, I think, have captured a consciousness. And this is a question that scientist Christof Koch poses when he asks if consciousness is something fundamental in itself or is rather simply an emergent property of systems that are suitably complex. In other words, he asks if complex enough machine networks could BECOME conscious if they became complex enough. Or would we need to add some X to make it so? Is consciousness an emergent property of something suitably complex or a fundamental X that comes from we don't know where?

This complexity about the nature of consciousness is a major barrier to the very idea of robot consciousness of course and it is a moot point to ask when we might reach the level of consciousness in our human experiments with robotics and AI. For, one thing can be sure, if we decided that robots or other animals did have an awareness of the world around them, even of their own existence or, as Christof Koch always seems to describe consciousness, "what it feels like to be me" (or, I add, to even have an awareness of yourself as a subject) then that makes all the difference in the world. We regard a person, a dog, a whale or a even an insect as different to a table, a chair, a computer or a smartphone because they are ALIVE and being alive, we think, makes a difference. Consciousness plays a role in this "being aliveness". It changes the way we think about things.

Consciousness, if you reflect on it for even a moment, is a very strange thing. This morning when I woke up I was having a dream. It was a strange dream. But, I ask myself, what was my state of consciousness at the time? Was I aware that I was alive? That I was a human being? That I was me? I don't think I can say that I was. What about in deep sleep where scientists tell us that brain activity slows right down? Who, in deep sleep, has consciousness of anything? So consciousness, it seems, is not simply on or off. We can have different states of consciousness and change from one to the other and, here's another important point, not always do this by overt decision. Basically this just makes me wonder a lot and I ask why I have this awareness and where it comes from. Perhaps the robots of the future will have the same issues to deal with. Consciousness grows and changes and is fitted to a form of life. Our experience of the world is different even from person to person, let alone from species to species. We do not see the world as a dog does. A conscious robot would not see the world as we, its makers, do either.

In closing, I want to remind people that this subject is not merely technological. There are other issues in play too. Clearly the step to create such beings would be a major one on many fronts. For one thing, I would regard a conscious being as an individual with rights and maybe others would too. At this point there seems to be some deep-seated human empathy in play. There is a scene in the film Chappie where the newly conscious robot (chronologically regarded as a child since awareness of your surroundings is learned and not simply given) is left to fend for himself and is attacked. I, for one, winced and felt sympathy for the character in the film - even though it was a collection of metal and circuitry. And this makes me ask what humanity is and what beings are worthy of respect. What if a fly had some level of consciousness? (In a lecture I watched Christof Koch speculated that bees might have some kind of consciousness and explained that it certainly couldn't be ruled out.) Clearly, we need to think thoroughly and deeply about what makes a person a person and I think consciousness plays a large part in the answer. Besides the scientific and technical challenges of discovering more about and attempting to re-create consciousness, there are equally tough moral and philosophical challenges to be faced as well.