Long nights, short insights.
There’s a certain fascination in watching patiently as your skin reddens and burns. It doesn’t hurt at the time — merely a slow sensation of heat. Shouldn’t ultraviolet metaviolence register a bit more strongly than “oh, I’m red”? Proof people can get used to anything if it happens gradually enough, I suppose.
This is from the middle of 10 pages of… stuff. I was on the top of a cliff in the middle of the night when I wrote it. It’s exactly as handwritten.
blackest black, mercury yellow.
Lightning sparking distant horizon.
Sure-footed dance acrosscaffeine-fired
rocks? impossiblly sureinstinctscarrying
me madly across uneven, darkened terrain?
I was cleaning my apartment and found my notebook from Philosophy 3500: Existentialism. This is something I wrote by hand during one class period about a year ago. The bit about Sartre misrepresents his argument but I haven’t made any changes except some copy-editing.
Most philosophical lemmas stem from a fundamental misunderstanding or misuse of language. It is the simplest of fallacies to construct a phrase or question with the semblance of intelligibility, but which contains no valid communicative content. This particularly manifests itself in the discussion of intangible concepts — language has, by necessity, placed them on equal semantic footing with the concrete — and philosophical thought has vastly suffered for it.
“Reality lies beyond our vision” is a classic example of the abuse of language. “Reality,” as a word, refers to those things that exist. Existence entails different things to different people, but to exist, tautologically, a thing must have a mode of existence. What form does it possess? What manifestation do we know it by? Physical things can only be perceived rather than directly known, but at least we can assert that some external force or information is being filtered through the senses. Through commonality of experience we may determine that external information persists despite individual vagaries. From that conclusion — the things we perceive (even if inaccurately) are external to us — it follows that the things external to us have characteristics and attributes that are independent of us as well. Thus we derive empirical existence.
Empirical things are perceived directly or intuited through indirect observation. Matter and energy are (as science tells us, anyway) the sole means of objective existence. No thing “exists” except through energy and matter. To say a thing such as “Freedom exists” may represent two valid claims — that physical things exist which have conditions or properties that we label “free,” or that within the electrochemical storage of human brains lies a data pattern of conditions that we then sum up with the term. It does not make a claim to the same mode of existence that rocks or trees or photons exhibit. To claim otherwise is a gross extension of our generalizations upon the universe. Our generalizations are formed out of those things that are real. We use concepts to understand real things. Archetypes are not intrinsically real.
Rather, archetypes of things are conceptual. Individual instances of things are empirical. Neither alone is sufficient to mentally function — it is through generalizations that we are capable of encapsulating and processing individual stimuli. Without the multitude of sensations and experiences, we would have no drive to generalize, no fuel for idealization.
Intangibles — Freedom, Virtue, Sin, every “-ism” we can create — do not then have independent existence. Without a mind to think them, they disappear. These, lacking original expression in matter or energy, cannot be said to objectively exist (except perhaps in the way all thoughts exist via neurochemistry). We — sentient minds — create all intangible things. They are tools we use to better deal with reality. Unfortunately, sometimes these tools lead us down fallacious paths of logic. Consider Sartre’s claim that existence of an individual precedes its essence. Existence and essence cannot be separated. If a thing has no qualities, it does not exist. If a thing has qualities, it must exist to do so. “Existence” is not an isolated assertion of being, but a necessary corollary to possessing properties.
What other claims to linguistic accidents support? The most acknowledged proof of selfhood: “I think, therefore I am.” Yes, Descartes’ “Cogito” entails existence in the sense that semantics demand a verb have a predicate. When we divorce the teachings of language, though, we see in truth that the “I” and the “think” need not be connected. “I” is an assumption. “Think” is self-referential: “thought about thought exists.” The self cannot be proven by merit of the fact that an assertion of self-action exists. It relies on the unproven assumption that assertions must come from an asserter.
Do we then conclude that the self does not exist? No. We can reasonably conclude selfhood based on expedience and the mirroring claims of those who resemble us. What we need to conclude is that no a priori truth exists. Every claim ever produced lies upon assumptions of language — this is tautological, as claims must be made via communicative media.
If every claim needs the background of language, it is wise then to be clear and cognizant of what our words mean. It is too easy to slip into poorly-structured thoughts or to ask questions that do not query intelligible things. Language can construct phrases that do not carry content. A sufficient examination of philosophical disputes will show that problems of semantics and meaning — problems of language, not thought — are truly to blame.
My nightly routine is fairly simple. Turn off Trotsky’s daylight, plug in my cellphone, strip down, use the restroom, brush my teeth, hop in bed, set an alarm, and wait for sleep. That general order of events takes place probably 25+ days a month.
Many of those nights as I’m in bed and mentally settling down, some insight strikes or an idea occurs to me for something to write. I lay in bed, comfortable, undressed, with the lights off — and suddenly I have a thought that I want to remember. Should I get up and head to the computer and preserve the concept in its entirety (at the expense of sleep)? Should I find a scrap of paper and one of my ubiquitous pens, and hope the scrawled words seem as deep in the morning?
Lost with indecision and uninterested in getting out of bed, I resolve to trust my powers of recall. I will wake up and extract the premise from a fuzzy-but-intact recollection. I should sleep.
No.
I never remember. One time in ten at the most.
Last night at 3:30am after an exhausting day (fully cognizant of the alarm’s ring five hours hence) I had an idea. I decided I would write about it the next day.
I woke up after five restless hours of sleep and could think nothing but half-articulated grunts and expletives. Every weekday morning, the contents of my brain are as follows:
No, I don’t think any other swear words. Just fuck. I don’t know why. Ten minutes later, the process repeats except I now panic at being behind schedule. Adrenaline clears just enough fog to get me to stand up.
Notice that there is no mention of the prior night’s insight. I have no idea what it was. It was insightful, perhaps about geopolitics or the military-industrial complex? I don’t know. Sleep wiped all coherence from my mind. I get in the shower and start the day.
A murmur of unrest ran through the crowd. The demonstration was running late, and few of the scientists that filled perhaps half of the large conference room’s seats were surprised. These things never went well. Researchers publish their results in reputable journals; only nutjobs hold spectacles. The draw here was the man making the claim: the once-distinguished Professor Vanden P. Szilard had loudly declared to the academic community that he was going to give the demonstration of the decade, and this had piqued a fair amount of interest.Of course, it was the same sort of interest that one has in trashy tabloids at the supermarket. A few of the graduate students present had only read Dr. Szilard’s early works on neurobiology and were thus suitably excited. However, most of the professionals in attendance remembered the intellectual fallout from the last time Szilard published.
Five, then ten minutes passed. The crowd shifted restlessly as if it were a single organism and the conversations grew louder. At precisely 8:11, a distinguished biologist audibly announced that he’d ‘expected better’ and stood to leave.
At that, the lights dimmed. The hall grew silent and the irresolute gentleman quickly retook his seat. Vanden entered the room with no fanfare.
Dr. Szilard was not a physically imposing gentleman but after four decades of tenure and countless groundbreaking publications, he carried himself with an air of unimpeachable authority. But for his public embarrassment six years prior, his primacy in the field of neurobiology would have been utterly uncontested. He was of average height and not particularly striking in appearance. His bald head was slightly overlarge and covered in wispy gray hair. His suit fit well but was clearly dated. Not a soul in the room noted any of it.
All eyes were on the thing in Vanden’s arms. It was boxy and bulbous. It was covered in dials and small protrusions. It had lights that blinked intermittently and gauges measuring heaven-knows-what. It hummed softly, and had no visible power cord. It was precisely the sort of device that intrigued everyone who laid eyes upon it.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he intoned in a strong, clear voice. “I see many familiar faces here today, and welcome you all to the demonstration of a lifetime. For those of you whom I have never had the pleasure to meet, I am Dr. Vanden P. Szilard. You may have heard of my work.
“You may also have heard of the career-ruining declarations I made in a respectable forum some years back. I assure you that our gathering today has nothing to do with that nonsense.”
At this, the audience visibly relaxed and some murmurs of disappointment were heard from the back. It seemed some attendees had been hoping to see a public humiliation. Vanden placed his device gingerly upon a table and continued speaking from the nearby podium.
“For most of known history, the conceptual separation of body and soul has dominated spiritual and intellectual matters. Only as recently as the last century did we make the great scientific strides necessary to unify mind and body. The study of neurophysiology has given us incredible insights into human behavior and a vast suite of pharmacological tools to alter the mind. I don’t think myself presumptuous to say that every person in this room believes chemical interactions to be the sole determinant of human behavior.”
In another age such a statement would have garnered vocal disagreement or surprised laughter. It was a testament to the advanced state of theoretical neuroscience that such a consensus existed. Psychiatry had become nearly as precise a science as physics.
After a brief pause to examine the audience, Dr. Szilard made a sweeping gesture to his mysterious device and said, “What I will propose to you today will not overturn all that, but it will surely upset every established theory in the field of cognitive science. I have made a fantastic discovery and I am certain you would leave this room convinced of my incompetence were it not for the equipment that I have created to demonstrate the veracity of my new theory. Gentlemen, I give you…”
A triumphant pause and flourish preceded the next three words as buzzing dissent filled the hall. Dr. Szilard said loudly, “The Ethics Engine.”
The phrase ‘upset every established theory’ is generally taken by scientists to be code for ‘absolutely barmy nonsense’ and Vanden was forced to raise his voice over the crowd. A few snide catcalls floated up from the back of the hall. Vanden ignored them and explained.
“For years we have discovered progressively more about the mechanical functioning of the mind. If you isolate a test subject and present a controlled choice, modern instrumentation can predict the outcome with ninety-nine percent accuracy. Many of you have contributed to the vast body of evidence that the brain is a quasi-algorithmic computational organ and little else.
“Yet we have always struggled to explain certain facets of cognition. Our ability to anticipate behavior decreases exponentially with increased numbers of interacting humans. I simply do not accept the prevailing opinion that interpersonal psychology contains too many variables to be subject to rigorous analysis. We have missed something. We have missed something crucial.”
This line of rhetoric quieted the assembled scientists but it amplified their unease. The issue was a black eye for the community. Group psychology had not kept up with the rest of neuroscience. Many of the researchers in attendance had built their reputations on attempts to attach some of the mathematical respectability of chaos theory to their field, as a surrogate for the biochemistry and quantum mechanics that underpinned the rest of the discipline. It was widely understood that interpersonal psychology could explain behavior retroactively but do nothing to predict it. As such, it was widely understood that interpersonal psychology was stuck in the dark ages.
Vanden continued. “As a scientist, I am hesitant to propose entirely new forces to solve old problems. History is replete with such failures: luminiferous aether, dark matter, the neutrino shift. It is only based on physical evidence that I am convinced I have discovered the missing factor. Indeed, it may have been staring us in the face all along.
“Gentlemen, today I shall demonstrate conclusively that in addition to being an unmatched probabilistic computer, the human brain is an antenna, capable of receiving and amplifying short-range empathic broadcasts.”
After a moment of silence, a derisive laugh catalyzed the room’s reaction. Jeers and rude rebuttals carried through the conference hall. Many of the younger attendees who had been enraptured by Szilard’s speech grimaced at their gullibility and prepared to leave.
Professor Vanden silently surveyed the room from his podium and reached for his device. The electric hum was, despite the dignified cacophony of irritated scientists, still audible to the entire room. Vanden hit a switch, and the audience froze.
“You see, my friends,” he declared to the now-silent assembly, “I have quite conclusive evidence of my theory’s truth.”
The smell of sweat trickled through the large room as every person in attendance cowered, paralyzed. The sound of a stifled sob carried forward from the darkened back seats and Vanden frowned. He flicked the same switch and the spell broke.
A moment of silence reigned. Quickly, shouts of confusion echoed through the hall. Over a hundred highly-educated adults had just felt their individualities give way to an iron clamp of terror. None could specify what exactly they had feared, yet every single one of them reeled at the suddenness with which the fright had come and gone. Vanden P. Szilard held up a hand and yelled for silence. The audience acquiesced.
“This device is, for lack of a better term, a psychic broadcaster. I cannot claim to have yet developed an a priori theory of its operation. Four years ago quite by accident I stumbled across a simple feedback loop while using several pieces of equipment and was driven nearly mad by the force of its emanations. I later gained some measure of control over the phenomenon. The refined version you see on this table operates by amplifying and distorting certain harmonics on the frequency of natural brainwaves. It will doubtless take years to fully understand the mechanism by which this resonance occurs.”
Dr. Szilard swept his gaze over the stunned audience and asked, “Do any of you doubt that the effect I describe is real?”
For a moment no one spoke. The adrenaline rush of fearful panic was still coursing through most of those present. A middle-aged man in the fourth row stood and shouted, “What kind of game are you playing?! You’re using some kind of drug in the air– or hypnosis or, or something! You can’t scare us into believing this nonsense!”
The man looked around and yelled disjointedly, “You’re mad, and, I’m– we’re all leaving before… before you hurt someone!” Shouts of assent followed and his motion towards the exits cascaded into a mass exodus.
Vanden reached to the opposite side of the device, adjusted a dial, and pressed another switch. This time, the occupants of the room did not freeze, but stumbled and sagged. Across the conference room, faces registered surprise and then contentedness. Smiles spread. Men wearing suits sat on the ground cross-legged facing Dr. Szilard. Those closest to the doors swayed as they pressed back towards the front of the room. Some kneeled in the aisles.
Szilard beamed at his attentive flock and said, “I’m sure many of you have never experienced this. Religious rapture is one of many forms of mass hysteria that resonate with the human mind.
“The Ethics Engine taps into what we have long considered irrational behavior. This device can manipulate the sole aspect of behavior that has never seemed to be chemical: the subtle cohesion of culture. In society, each mind is a resonating amplifier that builds and sustains the field that dictates mob psychology. In the lab, a tuned device can stimulate that psychic field a hundred times more effectively.”
Vanden P. Szilard walked forward and ruffled the hair of a wide-eyed grad student in the front row. Every face in the room was glowing with delight and faith in their savior’s power over the human mind.
Szilard’s voice lowered and the conference hall strained to hear his words. “I was doubted once. I was cast out from my field. I was a pariah. This… this is my vindication.” His voice rose to a crescendo as he said, “This discovery, my children, heralds a new chapter of the story of humanity!”
Ecstatic cheers met him and he roared, “Today is the dawning of the Church of Szilard!“