Philosophy is the feverish desire to define words across time and space and contexts. Feverish in its zealotry, a totalitarian imagination project: you must believe as I do, for as I believe, so it is; here is the proof:
Here’s the common thread, however: as the possessors of brains, we are not soluble to singular definitions. Even getting to moderately shared definitions is a tenuous project. If anything, this series of interconnected essaying is meant to create unclarity, for it’s the illusion of clarity, the illusion of purpose, is the polemical target. It’s not that it’s impossible to define words, having held dictionaries. It’s just that each word cannot be taken out of its own context in an individual brain and transferred entirely to another brain. It’s a great myth that this is possible.
Not that attempting to bridge contexts with the fraying ropes at our disposal isn’t a project to do on a continuous basis; it’s just that these ropes cannot constitute infrastructure: it only takes a few sunny days and one good rainstorm before they decay and fall into the river below. Communication has an incredibly short half-life.
One thing I do believe is that my thoughts and imagination are physical, part of my body, real actions. In the same way that I move my finger, the imagination of moving my finger moves real things in the physical world, living not in a “mind” separate from the body, but in a series of physical things in my actual body. It might feel obvious that the mind is part of the body, but I don’t think there is a mind. The body-system may have an “organ” we call a brain, but this is an arbitrary distinction that makes it easier to do surgery. The brain is an continuous part of the whole system. If that finger is cut off, I’m going to feel a finger there for a long time afterward. So the finger is part of the brain? Or an image of the finger? These images are not distinct from the physical thing, because they are represented in physical realities in processing of the brain and all the other parts. So the brain extends across the whole body, really. The “body” is a brain, the brain. With memories, instincts, reactions, actions, the need for blood and oxygen. The body/mind distinction fuels more mythology than one might realize. The idea of the separation (and moral genealogies) between physical and spiritual and intellectual love. The idea of “right” actions vs. “right” thoughts. The extension of this notion of the body as brain without a separate mind is that the environment in which one lives is also the brain. The idea of an “individual” as a distinct “organ” from the remainder of things is attractive for those who want to explain everything through cause and effect. But even if the environment was so much simpler than it is, it’s much harder to draw clear lines between things than the cause/effect physicist-economists would like their paymasters to believe. The manufacturers of fictional legal “persons” are the most hypocritical; they understand that “ownership” by an “individual” is a series of fuzzinesses, while advocating for the rights of the Rourke-ian individual. It seems the advocates of strong definitions for the experiences of other abstractions fall into similar traps. Freedom and sameness are two sides of the same impossible coin. So why write anything? Why do anything? Why communicate at all? When it all seems to fall apart under even moderate scrutiny? Well, I have no idea. “Why” is such a presumptuous question: the idea that there is a reason is an ultimately aesthetic judgement by those who consider themselves “reasonable”, “logical”. Attempts to nail down the reasons and turn them into principles and sell the principles as books; it’s a heist of brain-energy.
The sound of pouring down rain and thunder, paired with a chocolate donut and more coffee unheist the brain. I feel in my bones the fact that they are not my bones, that they are the bones of the brain, the wider brain: impulses that do not have to (nor could they) explain themselves. Do I believe in science? The reproducibility of results, sure. The facts, probabilities that can be established. This isn’t the same as believing in the primacy of explicability. When I put onions in a pan at the appropriate temperature, I believe they will caramelize. When I feel a needle entering my arm and delivering something that is meant to prevent something, I’m happy and confident, even jubilant. But when I hear “scientists” claiming to know reasons for actions, the reasons life exists, or the “facts” of human cognition, I feel skeptical. The brain is complicated. Life is more than an evolutionary process. The way to live is an absurdity wrapped in immorally harvested bacon: tastes great on the outside, feels awful and chaotic on the inside. But progress! Productivity! The imperatives of duty and citizenship and interconnectivity and culture! A garbage dump, inhabited by unthinking seagulls. Feast, ye gulls! On the trash left behind by the wasteful civilizations from whom you’ve derived. I’d rather pick raspberries in the forest than sit at the refuse buffet. And new kinds of berries, even if some happen to be poison. I certainly eat the garbage when I’m hungry and the berries aren’t in season. And I vote for the continued existence of the buffet. But I couldn’t tell you why.
Roman Ryan 