Colour Changing Card Trick

Brain Dead (Fragment of a letter)

The brain is the size of a grapefruit. It weighs about 3lbs (Einstein's was 2.75lbs), and has the consistency of custard. You could scoop it up with a spoon. It is the single most complex system in the universe, perhaps more complex than the universe itself. It has over a hundred billion neurons in it, each with hundreds or even thousands of connections. It has evolved at an incredible rate over approx. 300 millions years, growing in size and complexity. It is here, inside the skull, that all emotion, sensation, all human art and science, all gods and angels are created.. and for the most part we are not even aware of it.

A person has a heart attack and lives, they get shot in the liver and survive. Throughout they maintain their consciousness, their personality, their sense of "me." But then they get shot in the brain. They either die instantly or live. If they live, and depending on where the bullet strikes, they are no longer the person we used to know. Their personality is radically different. Anyone who has known a person with Alzheimer's understands how a disease that effects the brain can erase a person's former personality, in a sense, killing the person we loved so dearly, leaving a body that on the surface looks like our loved one, but essentially is a different person, sometimes not recognizing who we are as if they had never known us, even ill treating us.

What implication does this have for any notion of an afterlife? A philosopher once said: "If we can be dead when we're alive (the complete loss of who we psychically are due to disease or injury), we can be dead when we're dead." In other words if physical damage to the brain can erase our personality, what makes us think that the physical damage of brain death and decay once we die is any different? It seems clear that there is no continuation of personality or awareness after death. It will be the end.

Someone once asked me, but what do you believe happens after we die? I asked them "what was it like before you were born?" Here is the answer.. It will be a radical nothingness that we cannot be aware of. Somewhere, sometime in the universe, a new consciousness will be born from a young mother.. the light at the end of the tunnel is in a sense the light at the end of the birth canal.. a new beginning.

To Remember or Not (Letter Fragment)

You seem skeptical.. a mind of our age.. a thought without guarantee.  It's funny you mention false memory.  I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately.  For example did you know that after WWI at least 70% of returning soldiers reported having a battlefield encounter where they could see into the eyes of the enemy, a moment of contact before sticking their bayonet into them or shooting them?  But when it was empirically verified the statistics were closer to .5% actually having experienced this.  There are some interesting explanations as to how this could happen (a way to mitigate a deep anxiety etc), which I won't get into here, but it at least supports the idea that we may "remember" things that never took place.  It is possible using various techniques (some quite basic like suggestive wording etc) to help a patient "recollect" a memory that never existed, or distort an authentic memory.  Last year a psychologist in New South Wales (Australia) was prohibited from continuing his practice for this reason (among others): that he "repeated requests for his client to recall or reconstruct memories of childhood traumatic incidents" even though these incidents never took place the way the psychologist suggested.  It is a known fact that people who have been a victim of false memory suggestion often cling to these constructions even in the face of objective evidence pointing to the falseness of their recollections.  The memory takes on a vividness and clarity that few authentic memories possess.  It seems especially despicable to me that here at the hands of a person we go to in confidence for emotional aid such a great deception and sinister lie could be perpetrated.  As someone has pointed out, the person becomes quickly obsessed with the reconstructed memory (often merely the interpretation of the therapist), to the point that the true cause of the mental distress is neglected or overlooked.  It is a comfort to know that many within the healthcare field recognize and fight to overcome those within their fold who through either poor training, insufficient qualifications, the desire for power, or perhaps sheer stupidity cause further damage to the progress of some in their care.  

I think you're right to draw the conclusion that all this suggests the limitations of the human mind, that it is inherently limited, easily manipulated, even able to dupe itself.  It was Darwin who said: 

"But then arises the doubt, can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?"

No doubt there is something to the idea that in our inherent "animality" we are already self-limited.  Are we monkeys dressing up in suits and taking on airs like the chimpanzee I would sometimes see on television, lounging in a sofa chair and looking every bit like George Burns?  What game are we playing with ourselves?

The Capitalist Brain (Letter to a Friend)

I've been convalescing after a small operation.. picked up a copy of Laing's The Divided Self and have been enjoying it thoroughly. It is a pity the contemporary psychiatric establishment is quickly falling prey to neuroscientific reductionism.. What a rich and wonderful world exists just through the rabbit hole, and to be banished by a few milligrams of compressed colourless powder seems almost a crime. Will all this not result in a Romantic counter-revolution? Perhaps it already has..

I think where Laird may be used as a counter-critique is in his understanding that mental illness functions within a social field, that it can never be fully removed from it. Here neurological reductionism fails miserably in that it treats merely the underlying chemical realities. Perhaps this is precisely what it wishes though.. it ensures a long and profitable future for the pharmaceutical industry along with its boot-licking cronies the reductionists. No, Laird would perhaps agree with me that this will simply not suffice. The more fundamental treatment would involve not just the brain organ, but the whole field in which the brain organ functions, i.e. society. Such a great project has already been (re) proposed and is steadily reaching its new realization. That is: The Communist Hypothesis, the little red pill for the capitalist dis-ease.

Regards

jeremy.

Existentialism

I refute this notion of existentialism that we are "thrown into" existence, that we find ourselves suddenly in this or that place or time, that even at the dawn of consciousness we find ourselves suddenly with a story or interpretation. No, this idea too easily suggests that "I" somehow pre-exist, that it is "I" who am thrown into something, that there is something or Someone there to throw in the first place. It makes too much of consciousness, as if it arrives a completed project from somewhere else. I detect here also the modern mechanical notion of the human subject.

I counter this with the immortal Watts who rightly criticizes the mechanistic worldview of modernity, the implication of the notion of the great Architect who constructs the universe, the idea that reality is a kind of machine. Human consciousness is not uploaded to a body, or installed into a biological machine, ready to run like a software program. No, for Watts organisms should not be said to be "put together", but to grow, like (using Watt's example) an acorn into an oak tree. In this sense development is organic. We see these perspectives played out in the difference between a child asking "How was I made?" (the typical Western question) and "How did I grow?" (the Eastern child's equivalent- to generalize). Consciousness then is as organic as the brain it arises from. It is not "thrown into" existence, it grows out of it and is it.

This then is the solution (elaborated by Watts) to the state of mind produced by our human confrontation with the vastness of the cosmos (see comments previous blog). For the one who believes in a separation, a fundamental difference between what's "out there" and that which is the essence of the human subject, there can only be fear and trembling when faced with such vast cosmic being (as separate from my own being). But when one realizes that humans themselves grow out of this cosmos, as an oak tree out of an acorn, or an acorn out of an oak tree, does the fundamental attitude not shift? The cosmos loses its sense of otherness, becoming instead the very ground of our existence, the very substance of the human subject. To put it another way: We are the stuff of stars.