From cleath@u.washington.edu Fri Oct 10 11:36:19 1997 Received: from jason01.u.washington.edu (root@jason01.u.washington.edu [140.142.70.24]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.8.4+UW97.07/8.8.4+UW97.05) with ESMTP id LAA12680 for ; Fri, 10 Oct 1997 11:36:17 -0700 Received: from saul7.u.washington.edu (cleath@saul7.u.washington.edu [140.142.82.2]) by jason01.u.washington.edu (8.8.4+UW97.07/8.8.4+UW97.05) with ESMTP id LAA18200 for ; Fri, 10 Oct 1997 11:36:15 -0700 Received: from localhost (cleath@localhost) by saul7.u.washington.edu (8.8.4+UW97.07/8.8.4+UW97.04) with SMTP id LAA02989 for ; Fri, 10 Oct 1997 11:36:14 -0700 (PDT) Date: Fri, 10 Oct 1997 11:36:14 -0700 (PDT) From: "C. Leath" To: being-l@u.washington.edu Subject: discussion Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Hello, I was just writing Rebecca about dissecting people, and while my discussion is not clear and well-thought out, I thought you might appreciate it as being thought-provoking. ------------- After I talked to you [to Rebecca about dissecting people] I spent a long time imagining dissecting people. And then I imagined it was more like dissecting myself, than dissecting a rat would be. And then I imagined dissecting myself, and people dissecting me. This is a pretty interesting thing to do. It made me think about what I am.- how there are all these little parts of me that I have no idea what they do, really, like there are sperm and other things swimming around in me- going about their business- and I am not too much aware of them. Then I began to think about the dead body, and how it once was alive. And now it's not working for some reason. Then I began to think about what I am-- I am some sort of result of these parts working together. Then I imagined that maybe a lot of what I am is somehow in the connections between neurons inthe brain- and that maybe- for example what we think of a person is not really knowable from dissecting the body- what made them person-like is more stored in the brain, probably, and I was imagining that maybe there is some way to get an idea of what the dead person is like by analyzing the brain pretty carefully, in ways we don't know how to do yet. Just the whole idea of me somehow being able to dissect myself is a very interesting one. Like imagining dissecting my intestines- or imagining being on the dissecting table. I realized that this was not a very fruitful line of thought- following it could lead to 'the experience of nothingness.' I kept reassuring myself by saying repeatedly that 'the whole is more than the sum of it's parts.' This seems evident when comparing the living human with a dead one. Earlier that day I had thought that all the people in the lecture hall would one day be dead. All these people would be non-existent. It is so wild to think about these things. And as I do I always realize, that though I'm here now, and will go, likely, into oblivion, just like one of my sperm cells- or a mouse, or a gnat, the thing that I am a part of, and my sperm cell, and the mouse and gnat, is greater than what each of the individual things is. I began to think about consciousness- and how I'm sure the rats and the pigs, and the gnats even have it to some extent -- it is the sort of thing that characterizes the living animal and not the dead one- it is in one sense a characteristic of the whole that makes it greater than the sum of its parts. So then I wondered if the society of which we are a part has a consciousness- just like my sperm cells have just a little idea (well, not really) that they are a part of something bigger, maybe society has a consciousness. If it does, I don't think it is like what we experience as 'awareness' but it seems to have a lot of the same characteristics. What we think is special about us is that we're not driven only by more basic laws (instincts) but that we can impose order- new direction- ontop of the more basic laws. It seems to me that flys do this (on a different level) too. Yet- even though I think all this top down stuff, I think that our ability to create more order is driven by an even more fundamental basic law- so I don't know where I'm getting here. At any rate- I see that I'm a part of whole that goes on after I'm gone- and while the whole is increasingly comprehensible by me, it is never wholly conprehensible. And while consciousness is a pretty special characteristic we have, I bet it makes up an even more special characteristic of the thing we are a part of- life, society, the universe... It's still really wierd though to think that what I am, uniquely, ends (each moment, and when I die too)- and all these unique beings end. And yet we, (considering increasing levels of generality), always go on. And at the same time- we make up things with increasing (or does it increase?) uniqueness, simply by having lived. I don't know. .