My aunt died Tuesday morning. Been thinking of her. Dedicated a run to her. I should say, though, that it has been awhile since I’ve talked to her. Mostly sad for my mom and we went over for dinner that night. Told my mom that Aunt Margaret will be looking down on her or something to that effect. Funny how maybe a year ago I would never have thought such a thing. Never would have thought it – a passing on was marked by what? This life animation and after life perhaps the void. One’s spirit was maybe the unifying consciousness, the mysterious thing referred to by philosophers of the mind that have a mysterian bent. That appealed to me for quite a while. Do rigid scientists think purely mechanically? Is no mystery unsolvable? Is it my own in the bone feeling of uncertainty that shapes my views?
I think some people are of the rigidly no-mystery type. The first person I think about is Richard Dawkins. I’ve read The Blind Watchmaker. Still think it is good. A metaphor he uses, for how things became organized into life, are pebbles sorting out in streams, being sifted, being pulled by currents, rocks of a certain size/shape collected in the same place. Over and over again this sifting down leads to complexity.
But now I’m not so sure that this explains everything. When I read the book I thought it had it all. Consciousness sprang up, a side effect of a creature that developed and moved around in this world. Consciousness was not something that was exactly quantifiable. And then I read Colin McGinn’s autobio on The Making of a Philosopher. He espouses the mysterian view when it comes to neuroscience and philosophy of the mind. We will never pin point exactly wherein the brain consciousness arises.
This becomes a redoubt for an idea of the soul. Or psychic stuff. McGinn is a big name philosopher (read: teaches at a prestigious university and is very smart) and I respect the way he expresses himself – ad hominem understandings/critiques are valid to me – thanks Friedrich.
Why do I say redoubt? A safe place to get away to, an escape. Easy to defend. Was this my spurned Catholic background rearing up?
Right now I would say that it is growing older. Bottom line is more experience. An example is the music of the Verve. 10-15 years ago tried to get into them but couldn’t. Now I repetitively listen to their album Forth. Over and over and I listen to the lyrics. Who was it, someone said that Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is to be read when one reaches forty. Was it Martin Amis? I started that in my early twenties and maybe got 10 pages in. But plan on picking it up again in, uh, a few years. Definitely something to that.
But there is also brain development, the evolutionary explanation of which remains persuasive. This falls in the Dawkinsian camp. But still, and I think even researchers (smart scientists in prestigious schools) would agree: you can’t go back in time and examine each development, each step along the road which would have to be the case in order to truly comprehend how things went down. Take Francis Crick, the DNA Nobel laureate. He thinks crafts/asteroids were purposefully sent out from a planet somewhere a long way off and a long time ago. These contained DNA and bacteria and were sent to solar systems with the likelihood of fostering life. There you go. Smart guy. He thinks this is the only way DNA could have come to be, the Dawkinsian metaphor of gradual sifting just not working, DNA showing up almost fully formed in early life forms. I love it – a far out theory expressed by a legit scientist.
The people/entities that sent out these what, life rafts? ( – this is second hand info, read it in Graham Hancock’s Supernatural, original idea expressed in Crick’s The Astonishing Hypothesis, on my list), live on in DNA, communion with them capable via altered states of consciousness – just to flesh out something perhaps commensurable with Crick’s idea. So what have I done? Refounded mysticism and consciousness in something built by a smart interstellar species? Which, fortunately, begs the question. Because even if we are on the tail end of this train of consciousness, if our consciousness was endowed by smart, extraterrestrial peoples, those peoples must still have had their minds honed in a certain way. Mystery still remains.
So there is the inconclusiveness of my thoughts. I want to believe. I think of my Aunt. Where is she now? Just like actually trying is the necessary precursor to accomplishing anything, when it comes to unquantifiable things the first step is admitting a possibility. I guess I’m coming around to saying that belief must be present. This type of evidence is detected through some faculty of belief. I want to believe.
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