Posted by DSCH on March 22, 2004, at 10:56:49
In reply to Re: Life imitating art imitating life, posted by Tom Grimes on March 22, 2004, at 10:13:49
> God, I've lost a really long response to your post. So, maybe just the end of what I can remember.
:-)
> I agree with much of what you said. I do believe that chaos theory -- which as Lorenz would say finds "order masquerading as disorder" can help us find a new image for the "river" of long term memory, the "stream of consciousness" that seems to masquerade as our "self."
Yes. This could be a very fruitful way of looking at things. Maybe you should introduce yourself to the folks at the Santa Fe Institute (of which Kauffman is one of the Mandarins)? I'm sure they would love to converse with a novelist who has a philosophical bent and an interest in psychophrmacology, chaos, complexity, and non-linear systems.
>Hume and Kant atomized Cartesian unity. Yet, we cling to the image of the unified self.
How many people bother to digest anything at the level of say, Aristotle or Plato, let alone Kant? The vast majority of people absorb themselves utterly in polite society, religion, work, politics, or frivolous distractions that parade themselves today as media, news, and entertainment. To take the plunge into serious philosophy (and not the New Age obscurantist poppycock that is yet another form of comforting escape) marks one out as a rara avis. And guess what? You're a natural for visiting a psychiatrist eventually!
I love Hermann Hesse's description of the "Age of the Feuilleton" in the Glass Bead Game. It hits contemporary western culture dead on.
I recoil at the majority of what is called music today. For my own sense of self I have retreated into Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Bruckner, Mahler, and Shostakovich (hence the forum handle 'DSCH'). In them I see the balance one needs to strike between the static death (too much order) and the random death (not enough). Most pop music is random death.
> Who wouldn't? It's our illusion of security. And to bring this back to simple human suffering I mentioned that in the novel my character Will realizes when he can't save his mother's life that we're all essentially contingent, that we're here by chance, and that we're powerless to do anything about it.
Check out Lenny Susskind's video interview "The Landscape" on Edge too. Physics is starting to wrestle with the notion of inevitability vs. contingency. The traditional view (expounded most publicly by Hawking) has been the universe is the way it is because there just is not any other way for it to be. M-theory suggests an infinite number of possibilities out which we happen to just have this one we call our own.
I'm no big fan of string or M-theory however. "My little finger" tells me otherwise; if I can be allowed the temerity to cop a quote of Einstein's. ;-) Wheeler, Weizsaecker, and others strike me as more provacative.
However, if you stick with the Newton-Laplace-Einstein view of the universe, you are simply embracing a materialist version of Calvinism and free will and time are illusory sense constructs.
If you allow nature some stochastic wiggle-room, these things come back into the picture! Heh, now Heisberg may re-enter the room! :-)
> And the sad and dispiriting thing about mental illness is that we have to observe our powerlessness as we lose, or tentatively hold on to, the one thing that gave us the illusion of power, that is, our sanity, our sense of self, our sense of inner continuity, stability, and familiarity.
Mental illness is pernicious for striking at the root of the will and the self!
> And that's why it's so unnerving. We have to comprehend what's being lost, with what has been lost or eroded.
Having had a good treatment response, I believe things can be regained.
poster:DSCH
thread:316365
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/books/20040211/msgs/326990.html