Which one is the meditator?

A possible evolutionary origin of the concept of the soul

I’m reading Thomas Metzinger’s The Ego Tunnel, and found a great idea by someone else, quoted by Metzinger in a footnote. The context is a discussion about the flexibility of the body image, the way we can extend our sense of body ownership to tools, e.g. the way proficient drivers “feels” the boundaries of their cars.

If external objects can be reconceived as belonging to the body, it may be inevitable that the converse reconceptualization, i.e., the subject can now objectify its body parts as equivalent to external tools, becomes likewise apparent. Thus, tool use may lead to the ability to disembody the sense of the literal flesh-and-blood boundaries of one’s skin. As such, it might be precursorial to the capacity to objectify the self. In other words, tool use might prepare the mind for the emergence of the concept of the meta-self, which is another defining feature of human intelligence. (footnote at p. 80)

A very exciting new perspective on these issues. And Metzinger takes it further:

It now looks as if even the evolution of language, culture, and abstract thought might have been a process of “exaptation,” of using our body maps for new challenges and purposes [...] (p. 81)

This line of thought continues later in the book. Looking forward to getting there.

The need for a narrative structure to one’s life

There is a human need to understand our lives along strong and clear narrative lines. Two ways to acquire such a narrative:

1. Live an interesting, outgoing life where you collect personal experiences that can be told to others. By telling stories from your life, you simultaneously gain a narrative of it for yourself. Without reflection, you become the author and protagonist of your own life story.
2. Invent a narrative, or accept one presented to you by another, and believe in it. Become a believer. This option is traditionally associated with religion.

I wonder if there is a statistical correlation between being an atheist or materialist and living an interesting life. Personally, I do think the fact that my life is uninteresting to the people I know and talk to, significantly contributes to my fascination – dare I say, attraction – to religious belief.

Added: I guess a third option is to write a particular kind of diary.

Insanity

Only the fewest of us will manage to go through life without losing our minds – if not to psychedelic drugs or radical philosophy, then to ambition or the rhythm of habit. Or to each other.

We (that is, each one of us) are many

Found this cool drawing (here). Makes me think of the narrative self and how we all keep track of the myriad characters we encounter, both in our real lives and in the fiction we consume.

As a radical constructivist, an obvious but interesting point to make here is that the only thing that distinguishes the former category from the latter is an attitude of belief – we believe that a certain section of our character gallery (which includes our image of ourself) truly represents real people, even though the rest of the gallery has been constructed using exactly the same conceptual material. Making them real is just the flick of a mental switch. The border line between what we call reality and what we call fiction is extremely thin and uncertain, as we can all witness every night, in dreaming (and as anti-realists can witness every day as well, in our infinitely many habitual everyday superstitions).

It is incredible to me that our minds do not break down more often than they do. The mechanism is so fragile. Even prolonged thinking along these lines – reflecting on the apparently miraculous toughness of one’s sanity – threatens to cause the mechanism to malfunction!

The future of reading

The only reason we read is that we have yet to find a better way to consume composed thought. Text-to-speech-technology is still uselessly poor. But how will it be when we finally get there? What will we use our eyes for? Will we move about in the world? Speaking for myself, I don’t think so. But I would like to find something useful to do for my eyes. Maybe I can look at some kind of visual material relevant to what I’m being read?

The best possible solution would be to have a virtual world at one’s disposal, to explore a simulation of reality, full of images and organized information on almost everything. And there should be available a tool for quickly and intuitively taking visual notes (using maps, graphs, diagrams etc. – as close as possible to the language of one’s thought). I think it is realistic enough to hope for this. The way from thought to product will in any case be extremely shortened – a tendency that I think will asymptotically continue, with the limit point being a situation where thought and manifest expression (in virtual reality) are completely unified.

I am a radical constructivist!

Discovered Ernst von Glasersfeld and his radical constructivism a few days ago. I don’t think I agree this much with anyone, living or dead. The discovery came almost too late. I will have to thoroughly rework my thesis plan.

Also found a good way to visualize the position, be it called radical constructivism or empirical fictionalism:

This is obviously paradoxical, but is not meant to be purely provocative. It very accurately depicts what I believe, and leads attention directly to the heart of the matter I need to resolve for whoever I want to thoroughly convince.

Maybe I can put a prettied-up version of it in a prominent place in the thesis, like in the introduction. Use it to introduce the problems I’ll be devoting half the essay to resolving.

The realm of human concern

Are there tasks we would benefit from resolving that are out of our scales as mere individual human beings? Obviously, there are tasks that simply go beyond any limited capacity, like reaching mathematical infinity, but are there tasks that are resolvable at least in principle but yet out of bounds because beyond the scale of what is fitting for us as humans? The kind of tasks I’m thinking about is the kind a benevolent god of finite capacity would set himself in order to change the world for the better. Are tasks of this kind out of our scale? Is it hubris to take upon oneself the tasks of such a god, imaginary though he may be?

I don’t think it is. On the contrary, I think this is exactly the kind of tasks we should set ourselves. To spend our time grappling with the biggest, most important issues, those on the scale of the world, in particular if the alternative is to invest our intellectual powers to merely promote our individual place in this huge social and economic game that civilization seems to have degenerated into. I guess we can’t escape having ourselves defined as characters in some game or other, but in addition to being players, playing along in society as we must, we should be game creators and tweakers as well – (game) world tinkerers – or else we shall have lost the very heart of human dignity.

I think it is a good idea to identify oneself with a god, to the extent that a god is nothing but the embodiment of a full and comprehensive perspective and concern. The effect of immersion in this perspective is similar to that of immersion in scientific objectivity, insofar as one’s perspective and concern shifts from individual to universal. But it differs in that science has an exclusively empiricist focus. The imagined god-perspective I wish to define here is wider: Culture as a whole is the realm of tasks for this god of all the world within human reach – culture in a wide sense, including empirical science, but also religion, mathematics, the language of intuition, all beliefs shared or private – in fact, the entire virtual realm of possible thought and experience.

Is our culture sick? Well of course it is, nothing this explosively and elaborately developed can be healthy. But there are no gods to fix it but us. – So why don’t you get started? Trace out a problem, work hard on imagining what the ideal solution would be, and if you are confident enough in your solution, find out what practical obstacles there are to have your bugfix implemented in society at large, and… go campaign on Facebook or something.

Of course, there is not one huge problem with culture, but many large ones and countless smaller. Take for instance our flawed number system and time keeping systems (the clock and the calendar). The currently dominant solutions are terrible, finding better solutions to these are perfect examples of fitting tasks for culture gods like us.

– Please don’t let the silliness of the terms I prefer cloud the message. I am entirely serious. I would like to live this way, with a mind set on bugfixing or even recreating the world, taking on the biggest and most important tasks I can find, without letting practical concerns get in my way. Practical unrealizability is not an argument against theoretical action. Society is arbitrary and fleeting; the future is mental. Everything that can be envisioned can, in time, be realized.