World Mental Health Day

Were I a more courageous man than I am then we probably wouldn't be having this conversation. I'd be dead, my life taken by my own hand. Lucky for you, then, that I don't have the required level of courage. It leaves me here to write blogs for you to read.

Today, I learn, it is World Mental Health Day. Apparently, this is on October 10th every year. I chuckle a little because only last night I fired off a sarcastic tweet about "every day being something or other day" these days. Lots of those days are mere advertising campaigns and none of them are really official days for anything. Its marketing and you are being sold something. But then, irony of ironies, the next morning World Mental Health Day turns up. If today is the day that mental health is being sold then I'm all for it because today I'm here to tell you that lack of mental health is no walk in the park. 

And I can speak from some considerable experience. I can't say exactly when my life began to go out of shape. Maybe it was as early as age 10. Maybe even before. But certainly by ages 14-16 I was disturbed enough to have appointments with an educational psychologist. I treated it as a game in which my task was to convince the doctor that I was a normal boy feeling fine. I guess I did a good enough job because I only saw him a few times and no further action was taken. But one morning when I woke up, aged 19, I thought, genuinely and completely, that I was about to die and then I might have wished that there had been some more rigorous investigation at an earlier stage. I was experiencing my first full blown, thorough-going panic attack. I was leant over the kitchen sink, cold tap running, sweating like a pig as I dry heaved. I really did think I was going to die. My head was racing. I had no idea what was happening. I felt terrified for my life. When the moment passed, as I've learned through multiple episodes since it always does, I spent the rest of the day a drained zombie, unable to think or eat. 

That first panic attack was over 28 years ago. And I'm still very aware as I write today's blog for you now that I could have another at any time. One does not become immune to them. I did, for a time, have a few good years in the intervening period when the fog that descended on my personality with that first attack cleared a little and a bit of sunshine shone into my life. But circumstances change and you can find yourself back at square one. In that intervening period I learned many things, not least that the attack I'd suffered and repeated many times since was not just about "external circumstances". It was quite likely very much something to do with who I am physically as a person too. There is a history of mental health problems in my family and so its more than possible that I was vulnerable to such problems even from my very birth. Since that first attack I've had many more. I've found myself terrified on trains, buses, planes and just out in public. Its worse if I'm in public because people might see me and stare and wonder if I'm mad. I've seen the look in their eyes as they shy away. But I'm not mad. I'm just scared and asking myself "Why is this happening to me?" And sweating like a pig.

Having such anxiety problems changes your life. When told you've been invited to a party, for example, you might be thrilled at the idea there's fun to be had and laughs to share. I would be worried in case I felt a panic coming on. I'd be asking what I might do if I started to feel bad. I wouldn't want anyone to know. Probably best I make up some excuse not to go, I'd think to myself. That solves all the problems that I'm imagining and anticipating in my head. And experience would back this up because I've been in so many places at so many times sweating my balls off and not wanting to be there, a rising fear filling my mind, my guts churning, just wishing I could get out, run away and escape. Because I know if I could only step out of that door and leave this situation the symptoms I'm experiencing would disappear just like that *snaps fingers*. But, knowing all that, it turns you into a person who takes the easy path all the time, the path of least resistance, the path that doesn't lead to horrible feelings and mental struggle with yourself. Could you really blame me for becoming a hermit, a recluse, one who just wants to live without the gaze of others?

But there's more. Life doesn't stand still. I read in an article for World Mental Health Day that "mixed anxiety and depression is the most common form of mental disorder in Britain". I can well believe it. I suffer from it. I can feel it now in the regular headache I've developed over the last 12 months. (I'd never had a headache in 47 years before that.) I've become so very attuned to every twitch and burble of my body. I've become over-sensitive. Every pain I fear might turn into an agony. Every twitch might become another problem. I live daily in fear of pain and agony and physical struggle. Each day is turned into a waiting for something bad to happen. Imagine just that burden on your mind besides anything else you might have going on in your life. And its this sense of always having things "on my mind" that becomes a problem too. I'm never free. There are few moments in which care is abandoned and the moment becomes one of enjoyment. You become a person who is constantly monitoring themselves, always on watch, forever on the lookout. "When is the next bad thing going to happen?" is always on your mind. You try to negotiate your life around all the perceived problems of being yourself in the world. And there's never an off day from this job. Its 24/7/365. And the question keeps rearing up in your head "How do you escape a problem when the problem is you yourself?"

This blog is not really about me and its certainly not to say "Poor me, look at me, have sympathy for me". But I think that sharing personal thoughts and feelings is helpful because maybe it jolts one or two people into realisation to know that people suffering from mental health issues might feel this way and, for some others, it will make them realize that there are other people out there who feel this way too. Mental health issues are not uncommon, whether temporary or of the more permanent kind, and the Mental Health Foundation estimate that 1 person in 6 likely experienced a common mental health problem in the last week alone. Expand the time frame and more and more people will know what it is like to have experienced such things. One of the immediate thoughts people have having experienced a mental health issue is that they are alone and no one else understands how they feel. Having once sat in a support group for people with similar issues to mine I realized that's not remotely true. Indeed, what I realized is that many people might feel a hell of a lot worse than me. I sat down in that group with people who could barely walk without shaking, people who seemed terrified to exist and locked in a prison of the self. I myself have lain in bed unable to stop shaking and it wasn't because I was cold. It was because in some way it seemed like my soul was mortally terrified of the conditions of its existence. Such is life for some of us. We can become prisons for ourselves with only our own painful emotions for company.

But, of course, its one thing to recognize this and another to do something about it. For some people, people lucky enough to have someone who cares enough to take the risk of stepping in, doctors and possibly pills and therapies will help them. I'm glad for them but I also think that's not the case for everyone. For some people, lucky people, a friend is enough, should they be lucky enough to find one. That's good too and it goes to show that caring about somebody in a genuine way really can and does make a genuine difference to someone's life. But, again, this may not be true for everyone. My experience of mental health issues is very narrow and limited to my own experience. But there are many kinds of mental health problems and they aren't all experienced as the same and neither do they necessarily have the same solutions. Or, indeed, any solutions. However, I do struggle to imagine one in which no one giving a fuck about you as you suffer with it will help. Of course, as I've tried to show, with some common mental health issues it can cause the sufferer to isolate themselves as a defence mechanism and this can give further opportunity for their afflictions to attack them all the more. That said, I personally would respect anyone's right to deal with their situations as they feel able to. I have certainly isolated myself out of self-preservation. If trade offs have to be made to accommodate myself to the things I must suffer then to suffer them without outside interference seems a reasonable trade to me.

So today is World Mental Health Day and if you were someone who thought that you didn't know anyone who had mental health problems, well, now you do: me. But I would wager someone more close to home than me whom you already know does too. The purpose of this blog is really just to say "be aware". We really do not know what goes on in the minds of others nor what they have had to suffer or how it affects them. Maybe you or someone you know is that person who avoids things "in case they feel bad". And maybe the feeling that motivates that response for them is something more than just not liking groups of people. Who knows? We are complex beings who react in diverse ways to things. The events of life affect us all differently and, for some, become problematic and even a life-long struggle.

Be aware and have a little understanding. Help if you can. For some people its life that is the hell and death that will be the blessed release.

Intoxication

In the recent past I made an album of instrumental electronic music called Forces of Nature. You can read about what's behind that album elsewhere on this blog. The album Intoxication that I have just completed is a companion piece to this.

Sadly, for those second guessing the subject of this album, it is not about alcohol. The "intoxication" at issue here is metaphorical but no less real or powerful in its effects. The intoxication under discussion here is intoxication as discussed in the written works of German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche discusses intoxication from his first book, The Birth of Tragedy from The Spirit of Music right up until books in his final year of sanity in 1888. For example, in his Twilight of the Idols. "Intoxication" is what Nietzsche thinks the greatest, most creative, artistic spirits must have. He writes in that latter book:

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.

But what is this Nietzschean intoxication? Nietzsche recognizes many forms of it - sexual, feasting, agitation, victory, cruelty. The list goes on. "The essence of intoxication is the feeling of plenitude and increased energy.... In this condition one enriches everything out of one's abundance: what one sees, what one desires, one sees swollen, pressing, strong, overladen with energy."

In short, Nietzsche envisages that the artist is full, and overfull, with inspiration as we might put it today. From their own fullness the creation comes to be. And surely there is something to this. Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, was writing in the context of Dionysian feasts and so it is not hard to understand where the idea of intoxication might have come from since at these feasts many were often quite literally intoxicated. Nietzsche expands on this idea metaphorically in the course of describing the conditions of culture and art as he saw it.

My album Intoxication is a hybrid project, however, in that it conflates two at first seemingly unrelated subjects that find their point of common interest in this idea of "intoxication". It is not the first time that I have done this this year. My first album projects of the year were Jedem Das Seine and Arbeit Macht Frei, two albums which united twin themes. In this case it was the horror of the Nazi concentration camps and the film Under The Skin which I conceived these two albums as an alternative soundtrack for. Here in Intoxication one side of the work reflects an interest in this Nietzschean notion of "intoxication" but the second is an altogether more serious subject - as before where I combined matters cultural and historical.

The second sense in which I use the term "intoxicated" here is in reference to current world events: specifically I use the term with reference to refugees - what some others may call "migrants". These are people I conceive of as being "intoxicated with life". That is to say that they find themselves in the direst of straights and they have that all consuming will to survive that only those who have looked death in the face really know. I can say from my own personal experience that someone never wants to stay alive so much as in that moment when their continued existence might be terminally in doubt.

So I find it easy to describe the many refugees we see across the world, many fleeing from war-ravaged areas, many others merely from living in poverty and squalor, as "intoxicated with life". They want to live and this desire fills them and overflows within them, pushing them across land and across seas and oceans in the hope that they might find the circumstances for it. I do not blame a single one of them. Indeed, I find it strange that in the 21st century, in 2015, the idea that we might let people die or go hungry because they happen to come from a different country to us is still prevalent. I ask myself if border regulations and our notions of civilization really count for much in such circumstances. In 2015 have we not progressed to the point where a human life can expect to find food, clothing and shelter as a matter of course? The answer, I'm afraid, is no. Our Western societies are very much infected with the idea that in order to have food and shelter you have to earn it. Thus, those who are not seen to be earning it are regarded as "scroungers" who are receiving "hand outs".

I don't see things this way. I say a plague on all your polite notions of society, of progress, of humanism, of needing to "earn" the right to live. Life will find a way and those intoxicated with life will naturally be pulled, as a magnet pulls iron, to those places where food and shelter and safety seem evident. Do not be surprised. Do not say "Go back where you came from". You would not go back where they came from. Do not say "They belong back in their land" when the history of this planet is the history of the people upon it moving around to places that supported them best. It is the significant characteristic of life that it wants to survive! Expect life, wherever it shows itself, to want to do exactly that!

So this album of mine called Intoxication unites an interest in the refugees of the world with the Nietzschean notion of a creative superabundance of energy. It is in this sense that it is a companion piece to Forces of Nature. I see it as a personal version of those forces. The force to create, the force to live and survive. Don't be surprised these things exist. Every organism that comes to be only wants to grow and make more of itself. Its genetic. It is the mystery of why there is anything at all instead of nothing.

You can listen to Intoxication on my Bandcamp HERE!

Forces of Nature

Who wants to live forever? Well, not me, that's for sure. I have never been seduced by the idea of a life that never ends. A life that stops? Now that is much more attractive. Its true that there was a time, in my formative years, when I was seduced by the dark side, by Christian voices speaking of an "eternal life" in "heaven" where all the "believers" went to. But the problem with that was that the older I got, and the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to be a childish fairy tale. It is now many years since I gave it any thought at all as a serious proposition. A current version of this belief, in new, technological guise, is held by some transhumanists who hope to build machines we can become and therefore expand our lives into the far future.

Another problem with this "eternal" talk (and there are problems with it, to be sure) is our growing knowledge of the universe. It would take only basic scientific knowledge (such as I have) to know that in the last five centuries or so our knowledge of what is out there beyond our planet has increased enormously (in relative, if not actual, terms). Five hundred years ago you could have pointed up into the sky and said that that is where God lives (whichever one you happened to believe in). Its a bit harder to do that these days and believers in gods have had to modify and make slightly more sophisticated what they say they believe in. For when we look beyond our planet's borders now, as we are increasingly able to do, we just see the endless soup of space, a billion planets in a solar system here, a billion more there. And that pattern seems to be repeated everywhere that we can see, minus an anomaly or too. 

It remains true, of course, that we humans have pathetically tiny perspectives on things. That same interest in our universe informs us that we live on an insignificant planet that orbits a nothing star. We have gone from being the centre of God's creation to being just another planet in only a few short centuries. What's more, rather than a feeling of permanence that we often have about our lives, we know that this star we orbit will not last forever. Our sun is burning itself up and one day (in about 5 billion years) the fuel will have run out. At that point the sun will have expanded to such size that life on Earth will have ended long ago and our planet itself will be destroyed. So we humans are here on an extended holiday and we can't stay because the planet itself is scheduled for destruction by the universe.

My new album is called Forces of Nature. In making it I was thinking about those things that seem somewhat more basic, more fundamental, more eternal, if you will, than all the others. Most things around us, our (lack of) insight into them notwithstanding, are very temporary. Indeed, in a world obsessed with things material (and not least scientists, who hold materialism as a tenet of their scientific faith) it is brought home to us very strongly that physical things are things that are not meant to last. To be sure, by our counting some things last a long time. But human eyes and human time spans are as nothing. A mountain range may last 50-100 million years before it is no more. That is age upon age to us. But in terms of the universe it isn't that much. The mountain seems permanent as we climb it but it is going away as surely, if more slowly, as we are. It shows us that how you see informs what you see. Leave anything on our planet lying around for long enough and it will crumble to dust.

So what things did I think of as those basic forces of nature? I started very scientifically with the four actual primary forces (or interactions) of nature that scientists cannot, as yet, break down into any smaller or constituent processes. These forces are gravity, electromagnetic, weak nuclear and strong nuclear. These four are the interactions in physical systems that don't appear to be reducible to more basic interactions. But then things became interesting for me. I wanted to add some things to the list, things not quite so.... material such as our materialist scientist friends might add. Could I think of four non-material things to add to the list, things which, as far as we might be able to conjecture, were equally as basic to the universe, equally as prevalent, equally as universal? What I came up with will surely be controversial but is none the worse for that. As a thought experiment alone my exercise was worthwhile. The four items I came up with were as follows:

Time
Life
Consciousness
Decay

We can quibble over many things regarding my four items and I hope you will think about them as "universals". The four are, at least, ideas. I will also concede that at least three of them are connected to physical things. "Decay", for example, is a process that happens to all physical things (even if it happens so slowly that we humans, here today and gone tomorrow, can't see it). "Time" is the name we give to the fact that we can order things as events, some before others and some after. "Life" is the name we give to certain processes that seem to indicate an organism. "Consciousness" is what we have called a sense of awareness. 

But these things, attached to a world of physicality such as we inhabit, are also somewhat more mysterious (as perhaps all things are). They also point us in a direction which says something about us too. For all these things are our universe as seen through human eyes. The universe knows nothing of time or consciousness (unless it is itself conscious - an intriguing thought!). The universe decays daily and knows nothing of it nor cares. Life, in the terms of the universe, is just another energy process, the universe being understood in its entirety as merely the history of certain forms of energy and their processes. There are no more or less important things in our universe. But there are to us and, in that sense, these things become ideas which are important to people and to the ways they understand things. And so they become constituent parts in the tales we tell us about ourselves, where we live and who we are. They become part of the myth-making we humans have needed to inform ourselves since we could first string words together. In other words, these fundamental forces of nature are part of a human story.

And so Forces of Nature, an electronic, instrumental album made with synthesizers and drum machines, turns out to be a story about the universe and our place in it. In that story there are fundamental, primeval forces at work, inscrutable forces, forces we can neither grasp nor understand. They could be seen from one angle as mechanical processes and from another as the properties of things. I conceive of them, in some ways, as fields of vision on our universe which unite scientific, physicalist points of view with ones more spiritual. In my story all things are mysterious. Human beings are tiny beings stretching out their puny hands to know more but lost in the void of all time and space, not realizing just how BIG and beyond them everything really is. 

My myth of the universe is of a universe unknown, barely grasped, sometimes intuited. It is a universe of physical conditions and as yet unknown possibilities. It is a universe that contains life and consciousness, both things we don't understand, things more than the merely physical. But it is also a myth of a universe with an end. Decay is a constant, on-going process and it occurs daily in the form of change. I have tried to add these ideas to my myth in the form of two bonus tracks to my album, The Void and Heat Death. The Void acts in my myth as the context of everything. The universe is described as a big, dark, meaningless place. There is no logic to this place, no order. There are no rules for how it works. It just is. Make of it what you will. Or can. But then there is Heat Death. Heat Death is our event horizon. It is the terminal limit of this universe of my myth. Scientists tell us that the universe is cooling and in some trillions of years it will effectively become completely dead as it goes cold.

So these forces of nature of mine are a part of my myth of the universe. It is the universe we live in and my way of trying to explain it to myself and situate myself within it. It is, unlike religious myths, not a story of how I may or may not please implacable gods. It is not a story of how they are ultimately in charge of things. It is a story of a universe shaped by forces and processes. To be sure, this seems a lot less secure than it might. But who said that the universe is a place of safety? And it surely does not care what happens to anything. In my universe things just happen. Sometimes in the change and decay beautiful moments occur and sometimes these things can be beautiful destruction. Imagine, for example, a star exploding. My myth does, I think, help us to recognise just something of our place in the order of things. We are not at all important. But we do get to play the tiniest part in the history of all things. 

And that should be enough.


Forces of Nature is available now at MY BANDCAMP.

Commentary (Part 1)

From time to time I write a commentary on things. More often than not this is on myself or my past or things that occur to me in life. This week I will publish a number of these commentaries for public consumption by unwary readers. Often these comments aspire to be nuggets of wisdom. It is of course for the reader to decide what they mean, if anything, and if they are of any use.

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1.

Still the same room. Still the same things. Still the same external conditions. And yet now I feel more hopeful. A sense of finitude can do that to a Man. Of course, my question concerning “what the point of me is” has not been answered. I currently think it’s one of those questions that can never be answered. To seek after generalised meaning or reason is a fool’s errand. Perhaps now I see life as a process of understanding, an awakening from an Edenic innocence, in which you try to make sense of who you are, where you are and why. This, you may agree, is basically a study of Being and what it means in a world without purpose or meaning beyond the local and contingent. I meditate, sometimes daily, on the fact that my life is but an Augenblick and my non-existence will be an eternity. In that perspective, how can any earthly, human, “cares of the living” really be that troublesome?

2.

Anything that can be thought of must certainly be a fiction, so wrote Nietzsche. How can my self-understanding, my telling of the paths and conduits of my life, be any less so? It is no privileged account to be sure. It’s merely my own as it occurs to me at a point in time. But I am lying to you and I do have my reasons. How could I not? And how could you not read me with your own needs to be satisfied? We are none of us here blank slates.

3.

The clock is ticking. That’s how important you are.

4.

Innerspace and Outer Space. Within your own imagination you can dream a billion dreams. Without, there are a billion truths you will never guess at. Each of us is stuck between the world within and the world without, an insignificant point of contact between the two. To one, you are of utmost importance. To the other, you are almost an insignificance. It is a source of wonder and mystery how consciousness could come of something so unconscious as the Universe.

5.

I got my wish. Am I happier? No. It remains a truism that people have little idea what is best for them. As a species, we are half blind in the fog, scrabbling around. For me, relationships are an excellent example of my blindness. The scars of bad ones get deeper and have more long-lasting effects over time. Of course, isolation is no solution.It merely solves one problem by creating another one. I console myself that at least no one else is involved in that case. But it’s a sticking plaster to deal with a broken bone.

6.

Are people basically honest with each other, or basically dishonest with each other? I come down on the side of the latter. Oh, I know that from time to time some people (perhaps Christian types) try to show that human beings are good and basically altruistic. However, I think they are pissing into the wind on this one. Of course, people CAN be altruistic but it seems to me that the fact you need to point this out speaks against it. The fact is that altruism is occasionally useful. But it’s the “what’s useful to me?” mentality that prevails overall.

7.

Not so much crying these days. Over the past year or two I’ve become very attuned to the solar cycle. Currently, as I write, we are heading towards the summer solstice. The days are long and the light hangs on into the night. I awake to sun beams through a gap in the curtain. I experience the beneficial effects of extra electromagnetic radiation in the visible spectrum (that’s light to you and me). I’ve noticed over the years that I seem very sensitive to the amount of light that is around. It’s no coincidence, in my mind, that my worst episodes of panic occur in early Autumn when light disappears. I know that there is a disorder for this (Seasonal Affective Disorder) and I think that I might fall within that category. Like everything else, I’ve never been diagnosed though.

8.

Power. In the end, I think that quite a lot comes down to this. Having it. Wanting it. To feel it, just for a moment. A lot of things can be explained by the idea of power. And that’s without being Foucauldian about it. Power, and powerlessness, are things that you could get very philosophical about if you wanted to.

9.

I’m still impotent, of course. But I wonder if I might not have settled for less. I was embroiled in an internet conversation in which I had taken on a false identity and I revealed myself to my unfortunate and unwilling victim. He took it quite magnanimously, considering, but then left a landmine of his own behind by suggesting that if only I used my clear powers of intelligence positively I might actually achieve something in life. It came to me as a slap in the face, I must admit. It’s good to hear contrary points of view. Humans are self-deceptive. They need it.

10.

Death can be a shadow, there is no doubt of that. And we can live in that shadow. I had always wanted to be able to die happy, joyously, having, as it were, howling into the void that I had existed. It would have been futile of course. But it would also have been my victory cry. “I existed! Fuck you all!”

11.

I am 46 years old. Still NO actual friends. A lot of the time it isn’t that bad. I have time, such as now, to think and write. Life without other people is certainly less complicated. In an ideal world of my imaginings I wouldn’t have lots of friends coming round anyway. I like (or, I have learned) to keep myself largely to myself. And I don’t dislike that fact.

12.

“The record shows I took the blows and did it my way.” And isn’t that all that one can ask for in life? It’s easy to be negative. My autobiography gives some examples of where I am certainly that. But how about biting back? There can be no more perfect life but than that you took hold of your circumstances and lived the life you wanted to live considering the circumstances you had. I don’t mean this in some secular, economic sense. I don’t mean it in the shallow terms of capitalist society either. I mean that you followed your own beliefs and motivations through. Authenticity to yourself, that’s surely what counts when you have to look yourself in the mirror? On your death bed what comfort would it be that you had achieved material possessions or a life enviable to others in the world? I’d much rather lie there thinking I had been true to myself. You may occasionally need to justify yourself to others. But you will need to justify yourself to yourself every day.

13.

My life and my music are truly intertwined. For those with ears to hear, my music is the best guide to what goes on with me internally. Its the escape valve.

14.

I don’t honestly think that I have any duty to justify myself to anyone. Oh, of course, it may be that this is sometimes expedient. Sometimes, it may even be due to power and authority taking me in hand. But it’s all a joke, isn’t it? A game? I return to a perpetual thought of mine right now: my life is an Augenblick and my death will be forever. What do I care what you think about me? If you honestly wanted a genuine assessment from the horse’s mouth, I could give you one. It wouldn’t be pretty because I know the things I have done. But I’m not a very convinced bad person. When I do wrong its because I’m bored, because I can or because I thought it “clever” to do so. I often regret bad things I’ve done. My heart isn’t in it. I just want to be left alone really and “live and let live” seems to be the best policy for that.

15.

“Physician, heal thyself”. Pulling threads from the twisted haystack of life is certainly a perilous thing. I should heed my own, unasked for, advice. The women were largely a mistake and responsible for massive scars on my psyche. Do good times ever outweigh the bad? I find it hard to think so. If only there was a way to have good times WITHOUT the bad. A solution to this problem has not yet been discovered.

16.

Knowledge is not all it’s cracked up to be. This is a conclusion that gains more force the longer I live. What’s more, knowledge without wisdom is next to useless and dangerous. There is little good in the bare knowing of something. At a bare minimum you also need to know where it fits and what to do with it. This is why choosing not to know things is often the better course. It is hard to “unknow” and such is our make up that we often feel the need to do things about what we know. This way many bad things have happened and not just for me but in general.

17.

My origins are an absurdity to me. It must be true, I muse, that absurdity is the principle of the Universe.

18.

I don’t think that it occurs to people very much just how temporary and fragile they really are. Of course, the old and the sick have this reality impressed upon them more frequently and with more force. But, in general, we seem to have a consciousness which, on the good days, operates as if we are in some way eternal. And I suppose that makes sense. How could you live on an even keel if your every other thought was of how vulnerable and contingent you are? Well, let me tell you from experience that the answer is “Not very well”.

19.

“The crisis of Being”. Only now, as I keep reading, in fits and starts, do I learn that people have been discussing this for decades, if not centuries. Perhaps I’m not so weird and individual after all? This year I’ve written a suite of music in 10 parts called “Human/Being” which really functions as a musical meditation on what it means to be human and the whole subject of Being. If my life is become anything to me it is a process of self- Enlightenment, a process that will one day just be snuffed out. Gone. Unimportant. Another example of “the concerns of the living”.

20.

“The Wanderer. He who has come only in part to a freedom of reason cannot feel on earth otherwise than as a wanderer - though not as a traveler towards a final goal, for this does not exist. But he does want to observe, and keep his eyes open for everything that actually occurs in the world; therefore he must not attach his heart too firmly to any individual thing; there must be something wandering within him, which takes its joy in change and transitoriness.” - Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, #638.

I could accept this quite well as a description of me. If I am anything at all it is a wanderer.

Welcome to the "Mind Games"

 Just over a month ago I decided that I wanted to create some more. But I didn't just want what I created to be like everything else I had created so far this year. It wasn't that I wasn't happy with the body of work I had so far assembled. On the contrary, the work I currently have up on my Bandcamp site, most of it a collection of this year's writing to date, was and remains the music I am most proud of. But the issue here is that that can't carry on. At least, it can't if you are me. To create something and be pleased with what you have created is a gift. To be able to repeat it and see it as another good addition to your body of work is a good thing too. But no one really likes "Something New, Part 10". Its part 10, for goodness sake. Try something else already.

So I wanted to try and find a way to extend or develop the rich musical vein I have been in after my epiphanies at the end of last year and the beginning of this with the double-barreled shotgun of Kosmische music and the synthesizer sound of The Berlin School. But I also wanted my project to be about more than just churning out another 10 songs or something like that. It bothers me that music can become a production line, a site where more of the same old same old is churned out. I say this not from a listener's perspective. For all I know, someone hearing my new album will think it sounds exactly the same as the last one. And the one before that. No, I speak from my writerly perspective. For me, as a writer, I have to feel like I am trying something a bit different, developing the direction I was heading in or trying some side road from the main road I have been heading along.

Needless to say, in the 10 songs I have finally produced I think I have done that. The production of the music took longer than normal this time and it was more of a struggle. I juggled with a number of ideas and some songs were at one time included that have now been excluded. Whenever I make an album I always make a music journey that is intended to be listened to as a whole. I make music by instinct not by design and so the criterion I use is "Does it feel right?". "Feeling right" means being differently interesting. Good or bad I am not concerned with. I have released songs I didn't like before but I don't do it often. We all have an aesthetic sensor in our brains somewhere, connected to our ears, that tells us what we can live with and what we can't. Sometimes it is good to release something bad - if it makes a point and has some meaning behind it. For example, on my big "Elektronische Existenz" musical project from last year I released a track I don't often like when I hear it called "Vergessen". "Vergessen" is German for "to forget". The point of the track is that not everything has to be memorable or the best thing ever. And, if it isn't, just forget it. So the song wasn't to my mind that good. But that's ok.

The little story behind "Vergessen" is instructive for me. It tells me that there is more to my music and my creation than just being differently interesting with sounds. There is some meaning in it. There is meaning that I want to try and communicate. There is a philosophy about the music and words that I write. This insight informed my creation of the second half of Mind Games - a booklet that comes with the download of the album which contains 27 separate articles covering things from "the meaning of life" to experimental music to a close reading of the lyrics of Eleanor Rigby. This document, also called Mind Games, is as vital to the creative project that became Mind Games as is the music you will hear if you go to my Bandcamp page. I have always thought of my music as a philosophical thing that was speaking with sounds to try and communicate philosophical meanings. Of course, for this purpose words are often much more useful because, as tools, they are much more focused and specialized. With Mind Games I have tried to bring the two together. So you can listen to the music whilst reading the book and, in doing both, you will start to learn about the philosophy of life that I have and interact with it for yourself.

The running order of Mind Games goes like this:

Music

1. Subjectivity Groove
2. Meaning
3. 157
4. Null and Void
5. Intricate Workings of The Mind
6. The Concentration City
7. Damaged Neurons
8. Mental landscape
9. Brain Radio
10. Danke Moebius

Text

1. Thoughts on "The Meaning of Life"
2. Such Lovely Lines
3. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
4. Walking
5. The Sex Business
6. Kierkegaard vs Cage
7. Existentialism
8. William James and his Pluralistic Universe
9. On John Cage's "Experimental Music"
10. Stanley Fish's "Rhetoric"
11. (A)Morality: An Amoralist's Point of View
12. Postmodern Nihilism: A Dispute about Terms, A Plurality of Narratives
13. How Can It Not Know What It Is? Deckard and the I(rony) of Existence
14. The Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges
15. The Concentration City by J.G. Ballard
16. The Memorial Address from Martin Heidegger's "Discourse on Thinking"
17. If the universe had a motto….
18. Straight Lines
19. This is Not Anna Kournikova
20. Pragmatism, Relativism and Irrationality by Richard Rorty
21. Forerunners of Modern Music by John Cage
22. A Close Reading of Eleanor Rigby
23. Pretentiousness, Philistinism and Gullibility
24. Ideology
25. Who Wants To Live Forever?
26. Random Access Humanity: Inhuman After All
27. Will to Meaning: An Autobiographical Tale via Viktor Frankl and The Historical Jesus

It will be seen that neither of these parts of the project are superficial. Both are substantial. The music runs to just short of 2 hours (so a double album, in effect) and the text is 75 A4 sized pages long. For me, making something substantial is part of the meaning making. It is easy in today's world to gloss things with a tweet or trite comment. I give listeners or readers the respect of doing things at more length. I also think there is meaning itself in making things something that you have to immerse yourself in and experience. Sure, you can dip into my music or my words. But if you do you will probably quickly leave again. And this is probably best for both of us. My stuff is there for those who want something more than 3 minutes or 140 characters.

A quick word on the title. I see most of life as about game playing in one way or another. It seems a basic way life has of keeping things interesting for us, of making sure that there are always stakes to play for. This is not to say that we always win though. Sometimes we can lose and lose hard. A basic focus of the project, accordingly, is about minds, brains and human subjectivity - interior life if you will. I don't know about you, but I like to think about how we think sometimes. Life is like a voyage of self-discovery. Of course, there are particular conditions attached to my own life which make this a more pressing issue and we each have our own existential concerns.

So I recommend my new project to you. I should add that in support of my text "Mind Games" I have included all the relevant source documents that I discuss to the download as well. This is just for those who want to explore for themselves and for sake of completeness. If you didn't want all these texts you could easily just hit "delete". So if you do download and find a number of documents that is why.

You can listen to Mind Games and download the whole project right HERE!

How Can It Not Know What It Is?

There is a scene near the beginning of classic science fiction film Blade Runner where our hero, Deckard, played by Harrison Ford, has gone to the headquarters of the Tyrell Corporation to meet its head, Eldon Tyrell. He is met there by a stunningly beautiful assistant called Rachael. Deckard is there to perform tests on the employees to discover if any might be replicants, synthetic beings created by the Tyrell Corporation, some of which have rebelled and become dangerous to humans. Specifically, he needs to know if the tests he has available to him will work on the new Nexus 6 type replicants that have escaped. Tyrell wants to see Deckard perform his tests on a test subject before he allows the tests to continue. Deckard asks for such a test subject and Tyrell suggests Rachael. The test being completed, Tyrell asks Rachael to step outside for a moment. Deckard suggests that Rachael is a replicant and Tyrell confirms this and that she is not aware of it. “How can it not know what it is?” replies a bemused Deckard.

This question, in the wider context of the film and the history of its reception, is ironic. Blade Runner was not a massively popular film at the time of its cinematic release and was thought to have underperformed. But, over the years, it has become a classic, often placed in the top three science fiction films ever made. That popularity and focus on it as a serious film of the genre has, in turn, produced an engaged fan community. One issue regarding the film has always been the status of Deckard himself. Could it be that Deckard was himself a replicant? Interestingly, those involved with the production of the film have differing views.

Back in 2002 the director, Ridley Scott, confirmed that, for him, Deckard was indeed a replicant and that he had made the film in such a way as this was made explicit. However, screenwriter Hampton Fancher, who wrote the basic plot of the film, does not agree with this. For him the question of Deckard’s status must forever stay mysterious and in question. It should be forever “an eternal question” that “doesn’t have an answer”. Interestingly, for Harrison Ford Deckard was, and always should be, a human. Ford has stated that this was his main area of contention with Ridley Scott when making the film. Ford believed that the viewing audience needed at least one human on the screen “to build an emotional relationship with”. Finally, in Philip K. Dick’s original story, on which Blade Runner is based, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Deckard is a human. At this point I playfully need to ask how can they not agree what it is?

Of course, in the context of the film Deckard’s question now takes on a new level of meaning. Deckard is asking straightforwardly about the status of Rachael while, perhaps, having no idea himself what he is. The irony should not be lost on us. But let us take the question and apply it more widely. Indeed, let’s turn it around and put it again: how can he know what he is? This question is very relevant and it applies to us too. How can we know what we are? We see a world around us with numerous forms of life upon it and, we would assume, most if not all of them have no idea what they are. And so it comes to be the case that actually knowing what you are would be very unusual if not unique. “How can it not know what it is?” starts to look like a very naive question (even though Deckard takes it for granted that Rachael should know and assumes that he does of himself). But if you could know you would be the exception not the rule.

I was enjoying a walk yesterday evening and, as usual, it set my mind to thinking going through the process of the walk. My mind settled on the subject of Fibromyalgia, a medical condition often characterised by chronic widespread pain and a heightened and painful response to pressure. Symptoms other than pain may occur, however, from unexplained sweats, headaches and tingling to muscle spasms, sleep disturbance and fatigue. (There are a host of other things besides.) The cause of this condition is unknown but Fibromyalgia is frequently associated with psychiatric conditions such as depression and anxiety and among its causes are believed to be psychological and neurobiological factors. One simple thesis is that in vulnerable individuals psychological stress or illness can cause abnormalities in inflammatory and stress pathways which regulate mood and pain. This leads to the widespread symptoms then evidenced. Essentially, certain neurons in the brain are set “too high” and trigger physical responses. Or, to put it another way more suitable to my point here, the brain is the cause of the issues it then registers as a problem.

The problem here is that the brain does not know that it was some part of itself that caused the issue in the first place. It is just an unexplained physical symptom being registered as far as it is concerned. If the brain was aware and conscious surely it would know that some part of it was the problem? But the brain is not conscious: “I” am. It was at this point in my walk that I stopped and laughed to myself at the absurdity of this. “I” am conscious. Not only did I laugh at the notion of consciousness and what it might be but I also laughed at this notion of the “I”. What do I mean when I say “I”? What is this “I”? And that was when the question popped into my head: how can it not know what it is?

The question is very on point. If I was to say to you right now that you were merely a puppet, some character in a divinely created show for the amusement of some evil god you couldn’t prove me wrong. Because you may be. If I was to say that you are a character in some future computer game a thousand years from now you couldn’t prove me wrong either. Because, again, you could be. How you feel about it and what you think you know notwithstanding. Because we know that there are limits to our knowledge and we know that it is easy to fool a human being. We have neither the knowledge nor the capacity for the knowledge to feel even remotely sure that we know what we are or what “I” might refer to. We have merely comforting notions which help us to get by, something far from the level of insight required to start being sure.

“How can it not know what it is?” now seems almost to be a very dumb question. “How can it know what it is?” now seems much more relevant and important. For how can we know? Of course Rachael didn’t know what she was. That is to be normal. We, in the normal course of our lives, gain a sense of self and our place in the world and this is enough for us. We never strive for ultimate answers (because, like Deckard, we already think we know) and, to be frank, we do not have the resources for it anyway. Who we think we are is always enough and anything else is beyond our pay grade. Deckard, then, is an “everyman” in Blade Runner, one who finds security in what he knows he knows yet really doesn’t know. It enables him to get through the day and perform his function. It enables him to function. He is a reminder that this “I” is always both a presence and an absence, both there and yet not. He is a reminder that who we are is always a “feels to be” and never yet an “is”. Subjectivity abounds.

How can it not know what it is? How, indeed, could it know?



This article is a foretaste of a multimedia project I am currently producing called "Mind Games". The finished project will include written articles, an album of music and pictures. It should be available in a few weeks.

The Perfect Human Being?

I was exercising yesterday climbing up hills. I've always liked exercise, particularly the aerobic kind. I was always a runner or a cyclist or a swimmer. Anyway, as I was on my walk around my hilly neighbourhood I had a thought. (Incidentally, this is one reason why great minds have always walked. Walking stimulates thinking.) The thought I had was this: imagine, if you can, the perfect human being. What would that human being be like? What attributes would make them "perfect"?

I thought for a minute and considered my question. My challenge to anyone else thinking about it (besides setting aside the trite responses) is this: I don't think it's possible to think of or create a "perfect" human being. I think we have no reference for what that would be like. No set of looks, mental abilities, interests, motives or concerns could make a "perfect human being". So, in fact, I don't think that there is, nor could there be, any such thing as a perfect human being. All we have is the imperfect versions we are and will keep on being. And that is something to think about.

Do you agree or disagree?

Elektronische Existenz: Art imitating Life

"We wait. We are bored. No, don’t protest, we are bored to death, there’s no denying it. Good. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste. Come, let’s get to work! In an instant all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness." - Vladimir, Waiting for Godot.

 Good music doesn't exist. Bad music doesn't exist. You think they do exist though, right? And you think I do too. So what do I mean by making these statements? I mean that in matters of taste there can be no final arbiter and there can be no authoritative voice that speaks for all. No, in matters of taste everyone can be king (or queen). Maybe you do not like the fact and you try to resist it in practice - even though we all know that this is true. We wish there was a binding judgment of quality or innate worth to things. But there isn't. Questions of value can be agreed with more or less. Or not at all. And music falls squarely into the area of "things of value".

This is an issue that I have needed to wrestle with as I make my own music. I don't know about you, but as one who creates music semi-permanently the question of what it is worth always comes up. Another disguise this question wears is what we might call the art/crap distinction. Imagine a continuum. At one end everything is art. At the other, its useless crap. Somewhere along that line we place the music we hear or make. But the continuum is imaginary and it doesn't really exist. It's just a judgment others are free to completely ignore. It disappears like so many imaginary friends.

You will know, if you have read previous blogs I've written about music, that the philosophy of music is something I take very seriously. Maybe I even take it too seriously. I think that to make worthwhile music it needs to be based on a good idea. I think that it needs to have something behind it to express. It needs to be substance not surface. I think that if you do things this way it can even make your music into art. I don't think that this applies to all music though or that music, to be music, is mandated to follow the philosophy I set out. I am happy to live with the fact that music is made for lots of disparate reasons and for no reason at all. I cannot determinate why or how someone else makes their own music. Occasionally, if I hear something I dislike or despise, I may regret that fact. But the payoff is that people cannot tell me how to make mine or what reasons can motivate me to do so. As deals go, I can think of worse ones.

But what of the music I make? What is there to say about it? The first thing to say, in the context I have started this blog off in, is that it is not for everyone. Indeed, no music is for everyone. The consequence of having tastes at all is that not everyone will like the same thing. There are, at best, lesser and greater circles of people interested in any given music. Mine, I imagine, is quite a small circle. That's ok. I don't conceive of my music as throwaway (for reasons that will become clear below) or mass market. In general, I would hate to be popular. I want what I have called in the past "active listeners", people who are engaged in the music I make and what it is about. I want listeners who feel themselves emotionally entangled by the music I make. If you don't "get it" that is ok. It wasn't for you.

But there are further aspects to the music I make that need to be explored. There are a number of characteristics to it that are not immediately obvious and require thought - even for me, the one who made it! For example, my music is not obvious. By "obvious" I mean that I am trying not to fall into populist patterns. I'm not trying to do what is expected, pleasant or nice. Dissonance consequently plays a part in what I do and that is off-putting. This is a direct reflection of my own character. As a person, I am very wary of others. I would admit that I have a certain spiky personality and people have to persevere and probably overcome lots of irritating things about me if they want to pursue or forge any kind of friendship. Its the same here with my music. I'm not going to make it completely easy to like it. You must struggle with it and see, if you will, the beauty inside. This echoes my belief that music is not candy floss. It should be something with the power to effect change in you.

And so what is my music in this context? Before I would have said that it was me, a clear and definitive personal statement and autobiographical text in musical form. But I think that summary needs some work. There really is no "me" to find. I am an inconsistent stream of events, thoughts, intentions and attitudes and in my music what I create is a series of snapshots of that stream. And there is never a whole "me" to express anyway. What I give birth to musically is an expression of my own musical imperfection, tied to me and my earth-bound, limited ways of being in many ways. It is an individual thing and one reason we value personal creativity is because, in a real sense, no one else could do what we do. So, in that sense, the music I make is my own imperfect shots at making some kind of musical meaning.

Let's put it another way. Things are always changing, from one moment to the next. But what point or purpose is there in the fact that change just happens anyway, ironically unchanging? None. It just is. The action of time is just ceaseless, constant, meaningless change. You can't escape from this. All you can do is wait for it to end. And in the waiting you experience the ceaseless, constant, meaningless change over and over again. But you can never grasp it for there is nothing to grasp. As with a real stream, the stream of experience just evades all attempts to capture it. All you can hope to capture is a memory, a feeling. A timeline, then, is not a real timeline. Its a fiction made from any number of contingent snapshots forced to tell a story, whatever the story is that you want to tell. In one set of musical pieces I wanted to try and capture an attempt at my life story seen through my own melancholic eyes. And so I called it "Elektronische Existenz" (electronic existence). This went on to become the name for the whole project of what I do.

And yet we musical poststructuralists, we postmodernists and pragmatists of musical thought, know that there is a problem with a project built on meaning. And, indeed, with "meaning" itself. We consider the absurdity that life is both terrifying and wondrous, often in the same moment. And that is absurd. I have meditated on this fact of life long and hard in relation to my own self-expression. I've come to the view that I make an absurd music that is "out of harmony" and "devoid of purpose". It is a waiting and a passing of time just as life really is. This music, which is often deeply meaningful to me and takes on new meanings as I begin to listen to it over and over, ultimately ends up being useless and partakes in the ultimate meaninglessness of existence. In some pieces I think this is quite explicit. Some of it tries to bring this dark world to life, to make it present. So my music comes from nowhere in my imagination or arises in the randomness of what I did at a certain place and time - and goes back to it. It can be random, insensible or deliberately unheimlich (eerie, sinister). It is an experience of the aesthetics of (my) life.

This year I have evolved to a new form of music and, if anything, become more prolific. I have settled into a longer format of around 15 minutes per track based, initially at least, in German influences from the so-called Berlin School and also the more esoteric edge of Kosmische Musik. This wasn't deliberate. I just found that what I was doing fitted into that when I heard some of it. This longer format really takes the form of cycles, all slightly different and yet all the same. The same pattern over and over again. This is life. The point is to endure, to live that life and experience the whole journey. This is not because there is an end. There isn't. For the next cycle then begins… The point is to experience yourself as a being-through-time, a being who lives through the experience of this music. I have a friend who also seems to make longer tracks. I appreciate his music, which is itself highly individual, because it is a different journey. The experience is king.

We can compare John Cage's 4 minutes 33 seconds here. This is, in the common mind, silence. But it was never silence for Cage. It was 4 minutes and 33 seconds of experienced sound, the sounds of the environment, the sounds of life. I share with Cage this focus on sound and experience and the interplay thereof. I share with Cage the idea that you should listen to life and hear it as music. At the end nothing is resolved. Everything is just the same as at the start. But you have experienced. And in that you have experienced change and taken part in the flux and the becoming of life itself. So when you listen to one of my tracks this is what you are doing: listening to a snapshot of life, listening to another's experience. If you listen enough and to a selection of tracks you may start to pick out the distinctive sounds and emotions that are woven together there. There is an identifiable kind of song I do because we all fall into habits no matter how hard we try not to. But better to fall into your own habits than copy others. That is inauthentic. To truly fulfill your musical purpose, for me, is to fully presence yourself and add what is uniquely you to the world of sound and experience.

You may find it strange but the music I make is not the music I want to make. Its the music I can't help making. The music I want to make is always out of my grasp. And that is a reflection of life. For the life you live is never the life you want to live. Its always the life you can't help living. The life you want is always out of your grasp. So this music/art/life imitation thing seems to be going on. Indeed, how could the music or the art not be an outgrowth of the life, full of all the values, interests and moods that the life contains? Here a philosophical conclusion informs both my life and my music. Just as the only meaningful choice in life is whether to keep breathing or to stop, so in music the only meaningful choice is whether to make music that authentically expresses you or not. This is a life or death question. And the authenticity comes in living that out to the full. You must own the choice you make every time you make a sound.

And that is why, when you listen to music by me, you get the random, the chaos, the instinctual. This is because I have a distrust of the deliberate, the reasoned, the "purposeful". These things have lying mouths and promise what they cannot deliver. I have a sense that life is fleeting and without purpose and so I live in the shadow of the tomorrow that will never arrive and, consequently, need to find meaning in the circumstances of here and now. And yet the attempt to presence meaning here and now is ultimately not enough. All my music ends up being is sound marks that, in themselves, mean nothing. This is one reason why I write so few melodies. You, as listener, are challenged to find your own melody within the music or accept that there is nothing there. However, in the end, no matter how many works populate my Bandcamp, no matter how good or bad the music is subjectively judged to be, it amounts to a shout from the void into the void. My music accomplished nothing. But whilst I lived it was good to shout. Indeed, how could I not?


So what I provide you, the listener, is musical fantasies. And this, in itself, is instructive. For for a fantasy to be fully experienced is to enter it's world and partake of it fully. One cannot experience a story fully unless one reads the story and enters the world for a while. And so it is here too. You are cordially invited to listen to one man's experiences of, and reflections on, life. What is served up is a series of pieces that serve as my atonement for the sin of having been born. It may turn out to be that they do not mean much within themselves. But, should you listen for long enough, maybe they triangulate with something in your own experience and become part of something that I could never have imagined. That, after all, is what art is. Is has no inherent value but it can come to have some if you allow yourself the time to see something in it. But not to worry if it does not. There are many other examples left to try so long as human beings yet walk the Earth. I can but hope that my own Elektronische Existenz spoke to your own existenz in some way.

Should this tempt you to want to hear some of my work you can hear it here at Elektronische Existenz which is my Bandcamp site. Thoughtful listening!

Is the physical all there is? Andrew and Bob, part 2

Last Sunday I published a blog that was a conversation between myself and an online friend and music collaborator of mine called Bob. We discussed human being, mind and consciousness, a subject that interests us both greatly. We come at this subject from quite different positions which makes for good conversation and I thought it would be a good idea to make a blog of our first exchange of questions. Bob agreed.

But, of course, it didn't stop there because these are questions about which it is difficult to find ultimately satisfying answers. And so the conversation continues here with part 2 in which we discuss minds and if human beings are entirely physical or if, as Bob contends, there is a non-physical component.

Andrew's Question:

On a material mind.

You argue against "the strictly material approach" to the origin of mind being physical on, what seem to me, to be flawed grounds. You seem to have a number of such grounds, one of which is that you can't understand how it might work. You ask about the brain's electrochemical activity and ask how it can account for the no doubt millions of processes it needs to account for on a constant basis. You say that a brain would likely burn out if asked to carry out this workload alone. I find this response a little puzzling. Let me give you an example of why. Imagine I have a large amount of water and a pipe. I see the water and the pipe. The pipe seems too small. I have no conception of how the water could possibly fit through that pipe all at once. But am I to rule out the possibility of a bigger pipe? Am I to say that a bigger pipe is impossible? Am I to say that no combination of water and pipes would be able to carry out the physical task I have in mind? Or am I to say that because I cannot see how this would work that I should, instead, conceive of a non-material pipe which could do the work of transmitting water for me? It seems to me that, especially since you say you have no idea how the brain's electrochemical activity might work, that you simply have no basis to make the claim that because you don't understand how it happens that you must therefore refute the possibility. As I read your answers, you don't understand completely how the non-material option might work either. And yet this fact does not stop you choosing that. So I think that, to be consistent, not understanding how something works is not a sufficient reason to completely close off that possible solution.

This same issue affects the question "what determines the content of thought?" Now "determines" is one of those words that as a thinker I don't like. It sounds very like determinism and that's not something I'm a fan of. Again, you seem at a loss to give a material response to this question because you don't understand how physical or material processes could achieve it. Now neither do I. But I know that material processes are happening. So I find it entirely plausible, in line with Occam's Razor (the simplest answer is to be preferred), to start there. And, by the way, I don't think I have to say that electrochemical processes are "determinative" for anything either. I am open to the option they are a means for thought to occur with some other, unknown factor or process the originating point instead. I'm also open to the option that, as you say, thinking of blue monkeys is caused by some electrochemical process itself. And I ask "Why can't it be?" It seems to me that you don't answer why it can't be. You just throw your hands up and say it doesn't make sense and you can't understand how it might work. My point is that in order to posit the kind of mind you have chosen to prefer (something I think is an unfounded deus ex machina) I think you need to give some evidence for it and some evidence for why simpler options are not taken up first and, if necessary, dismissed on better grounds than "I don't understand it". It could be argued, I think, that you have simply chosen to prefer a more obscure alternative when you have established no reasonable basis to do so. You start off by suggesting that the mind could be some type of energy or state and these can be conceived of materially. I myself rule neither option out. And I wish you had stuck with that line of thinking.

Bob's Response:

OK, so let's address information processing power, water and pipes. If you do some practice of being aware of your thoughts and their content, there is an insane amount of stuff going on in our brains. The brain is an amazing information processor, but the amount of information is simply staggering. Can you imagine enough pipes in a bio-mechanism the size of a cantaloupe to handle all that and store all the past experiences of your life? If you can, fine, but I find it difficult.

There is a way out of that with a still entirely physical explanation in that perhaps part of the processing is taking part in one of the other dimensions of quantum physics or string theory. This is how physicists now explain the force of gravity, which has an attractive force that is not explainable by the constraints and mathematics of our 3 dimensions. It is out of proportion and doesn't act the way it should (a problem that haunted Einstein). However, if you add the other 7 dimensions mandated by string theory (11 dimensions total), the math works perfectly with part of the force action taking place in another dimension and part here. So I would be comfortable with that as a material way to explain the amounts of processing.

However, information processing is not the same as consciousness. In your blog on Ex Machina,  you argue that Ava is capable of actions motivated by self interest and preservation but is incapable of feeling and emotion and always will be. If Ava has sensory input and information categorization abilities at least as good as ours, why can't she feel emotion? In a materialist framework, you would have to argue that there is a physical component in humans that is missing in machines. If that is so, it should be identifiable. What is it that produces emotion (and identifying the part of the brain that lights up when you're angry or happy is not the same as saying that part is producing emotion)? As T.H. Huxley said, "How is it that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as the result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djinn when Aladdin rubbed the lamp." So, what is the physical origin of emotion and what is the physical necessity and function of it?

(Andrew: I would like to point out here, briefly, that I don't think I do say this about Ava in my blog on Ex Machina. In fact, I say the opposite! I invite readers to read for themselves and decide if I do or not.)

I think this leads us into the non-material mind and I did give 2 pieces of evidence, out of body experiences and past life memories. I left it to you to pursue examples so that I would not guide what you would find. You have not addressed these, so I will give two examples for you to respond to. I was listening to a lecture by a psychiatrist (a podcast of a lecture given this year) who was explaining why he believes the mind is capable of leaving the body. He said that when he was an intern, he was put in charge of the university sleep research lab. Separately from his clinical duties, he met a woman who claimed that she had regularly had out of body experiences during sleep since she was a child. For a long time she thought everybody did that and thought it was normal. As she grew up, she learned not to talk about it, but she said the experiences were still occurring. She was very convincing, he was curious, and he had the perfect lab to scientifically test her. She agreed to come to the lab and he told her all she had to do was get in bed and sleep. After she was in bed, he wrote a random number (selected from a book that was thousands of pages of random numbers spit out from a random number generator) on a piece of paper and placed it on top of a clothes wardrobe too high for her to reach. He told her there was a number on the piece of paper (she's already in bed) and in the morning he would ask her what the number was. She was on camera the whole time and never left the bed, yet every time, time after time, she correctly recited the 5 digit random number that was on the paper. There are other examples you can find.The University of Southampton just completed the largest study of near death experiences (including near death out of body experiences). 

For past life memory, I'll use the example of the Dalai Lama. Dalai Lama is not a hereditary title. After a Dalai Lama dies, the next one needs to be found and tested to make sure he is a continuation of the same mind. The current Dalai Lama is the 14th. He was born shortly after the death of the previous Dalai Lama, but he was born in a remote, isolated area of northern Tibet to a poor farming family. When he started talking, he spoke in the dialect of Lhasa, even though he had never heard it and nobody there spoke it (though some could understand it. He also talked of people he knew by name who were actual people in Lhasa and accurately described buildings and places. He also passed the test (as all the previous Dalai Lamas had) of correctly identifying all and only the personal items that belonged to his predecessor out of an array of similar objects. However, he has said that the memories of his past life started fading about age 4 and now he cannot remember any of it.

There are other non-religious documented examples (about 3,500 I think) of children who can speak languages they've never heard and describe places they've never been. The interesting thing is that this almost universally occurs between ages 4 to 6. That's why I asked what your first memory was. You said it was at age 4. Mine was also age 4. It seems to me this is when the current identity formation begins blocking memory of the past in the same way that learning Japanese blocked my past knowledge of German.

So, if a mind can pass from one body to another, it would have to do so in a non-material state, or at least in a state of material we don't understand and can't measure. Going back to my examples of Jeffery Dahmer (and serial killers in general) and Mozart (and child musical prodigies in general), and homosexuality, materialists will have to posit a complex array of physical attributes, conditions and processes to account for these, and as such these should be identifiable and observable. From a non-materialist view, Occam's Razor is on my side.

Bob is @iceman_bob on Twitter and a native of Montana, USA.

Andrew is Herr Absurd, a Brit and the owner of this blog.

This conversation will continue.