–Shakespeare
What is reality and what is consciousness? I'm not sure, but
let me go off on a phrase I used at the tail end of my last post: 'sincerely-interested
empathetic understanding of the world.'
A friend recently (he was drunk) discussed the idea that
there is no reality separate from consciousness. In other words, Cartesian
dualism: the mind is separate from the body (I think, therefore I am [Cogito
ergo sum]). Sorry for utilizing Wikipedia so much these days, but I’ve been
tied up with an internship as well as being engrossed in the Brothers
Karamazov. Wikipedia:
Dualism is closely associated with the philosophy of René Descartes (1641), which holds that the mind is a nonphysical substance. Descartes clearly identified the mind with consciousness and self-awareness and distinguished this from the brain as the seat of intelligence.
This is not true. I'm not going to direct ya’ll readers to
the thinkers who disagree with Descartes: you can find them on your own.
But the lure of Cartesian double-think is that it’s hard to
refute. How to argue the mind is not a nonphysical substance? How does our
self-awareness argue our self-awareness is a product of the brain (cognitive
science)?
And perhaps this is how Ayn Rand structures her arguments in
The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged; egoism is difficult to falsify. The best
refutation of Rand in my opinion was written by a philosophy professor named Judith
Lichtenberg in an article named 'Is Pure Altruism Possible' for the New York
Times philosophy blog: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/is-pure-altruism-possible/
Snippets:
The view that people never intentionally act to benefit others except to obtain some good for themselves still possesses a powerful lure over our thinking.
The impossibility of disproving egoism may sound like a virtue of the theory, but, as philosophers of science know, it’s really a fatal drawback. A theory that purports to tell us something about the world, as egoism does, should be falsifiable. Not false, of course, but capable of being tested and thus proved false. If every state of affairs is compatible with egoism, then egoism doesn’t tell us anything distinctive about how things are.
Altruism is possible and altruism is real, although in healthy people it intertwines subtly with the well-being of the agent who does good. And this is crucial for seeing how to increase the amount of altruism in the world. Aristotle had it right in his "Nicomachean Ethics": we have to raise people from their "very youth" and educate them "so as both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought."How powerful and how real: ALTRUISM is possible and altruism is REAL. Forget cog sci and Objectivism and ‘A is A’ and Descartes: kindness is possible and kindness is real. And may I venture forth and criticize people (including me) for not caring enough about homelessness in the United States. For many, homelessness is not a reality for themselves; for many, homelessness (and the fear of it) is a constant concern. Homelessness is a function of poverty. How many of you have felt a sense of powerlessness when you were put in a financially-stressed situation? If intuition is a matter of expanding the heart, then when do our hearts start caring about the ones around us? When do we stop in our desire and dreams to become more than who we are and amass as much wealth as possible? Because let me say it: you are in a rat race you’ll never see the end of until you have the patience to see that there are others around you. We’re trapped but the key is in our back pocket and the door is open. You just have to turn around and see the light seeping in under the door, by the hinges, and through the narrow opening left as it is closing steadily. And you the rat are almost there, just running and scurrying and passing slower rats who are all sprinting with mouse legs toward the exit/entrance into freedom. You see your rat friends all heading the same direction. And just when you’re about to cross into paradise, you get caught. The door has closed on you, and your little rat lungs are struggling to keep air flowing: you’re slowly losing consciousness. Finally, your best friend sees you: through the narrow opening your body has created in the door, other rats have been able to reach Heaven. Your sight is diminishing rapidly. And though your friend could easily slip into Nirvana quietly, he taps the comrades around you; he brushes tails with tails and slowly a small army is on your side. They push: you and the door. More join. It becomes a struggle of epic proportions: one thousand beings against the mighty door of salvation. Finally, the door’s hinges succumb to the combined force of rats trying to escape the rat race.
That is altruism: help you didn’t know you had. Help that comes to you by no inquiry of your own: love. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown, but now, the crown is ours. Wear your crown and escape the rat race. It is possible. Anything is.
