The Mind-Body Problem: Phenomenology to the Rescue

I ran across this browsing in some odd reddit...

My body is the container from which I experience my life. We all make these kind of statements in our daily speeches and writings, but I don't think many people really take the time to think about, and try to understand what these statements tell us about the composition of a human being. If you say, ''my x'', or ''I have y'', or ''I possess z'', what you are trying to communicate(whether you realize this or not), is that you are a separate entity from the object you claim to possess. You cannot be a part of an entity you have, or possess. My body... My mind... My emotions... My feelings... My intellect... etc.. Think about this. Who is this man called Me, who has a body, a mind, emotions, feelings, and intellect, and can boldly say MY body, mind, etc. After thinking about these things(and many other theories) for a long time, I have come to the same conclusion that most religions believe in, that: Man is a spirit, who lives in a body. I have a body and I can control it and make decisions for it. But who am I? Or Who is me? Somebody help!

Help is at hand. The Mind-Body duality thing has plagued philosophy and psychology since man first thought about it, and still continues to fool brain-studies academics. It wasn’t really until the mid-twentieth century that Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty got their phenomenological groove on and provided the basis of an answer. To save you wading through Being and Time (Heidegger) and The Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty), I’ll summarise.

You are your body. Your body includes your brain, and your brain is a self-conscious organ - unlike your spine, where large chunks of autonomic functions happen without anyone being any the wiser. The brain can be self-conscious because it isn’t doing one huge task, but a whole bunch of independent tasks that can inter-communicate. Many of those tasks (facial recognition, throwing balls, recognising bad smells) are built right into the firmware. Some of those tasks involve monitoring and modifying other tasks (hence the phrase “think, you idiot!”) and that’s where the self-cosciouness of the brain arises. What’s that you say? That’s what a multi-tasking operating system does? Am I saying that OS X is self-aware? Well, which do you want? Accepting the idea that a modern computer has formal self-awareness, or more obfuscation and mysticism about souls, spirits and non-material consciousness? (I rate OS X somewhere about the level of a cat.)

The “Me” in “Who is me” is probably the dominant voice that’s chattering in your head at any given time, along with the dominant physical urge you’re experiencing (your head says No No No and your dick says Yes Yes Yes). That’s why we sometimes wonder what the hell’s going on with us: occasionally a brain task that doesn’t usually get much air time, gets on the phone and rants away. Where did that come from? Who am I?

Your body, your self. (I could write a book with that title… oh, wait…).

Cold Wind and the Chastity Blues

Recently for reasons that don’t matter, I came up with a definition of depressed: imagine that someone gave you £10,000, and you couldn’t think of anything you could buy that would improve the quality of your life. Here are some answers a regular person might think of:

A luxury two-week holiday
Replacing your old second-hand car with a later model second-hand car
A few trips to, uh, masseurs whose, um, publicity material you’ve seen online
A blow-out catered supper for all your friends and acquaintances
A bunch of city breaks throughout the year
Re-stocking your wardrobe
Upgrading your hi-fi and media kit
A really good leather sofa and armchair
Replace all the mattresses in your house
Get the bathroom or kitchen refreshed
Pay down your debts

You know. Lots of things. All of which are reasonably attainable and don’t involve fantasies involving Mica Arganarez.

Any excuse for a picture of Mica.

Some of them I’ve done already. The point is, I realised that if I did some of these, it wouldn’t make me feel any better about my life or myself. And I can’t tell you how much I still look at my three-year-old kitchen and pat myself on the back for it. I appreciate material stuff. I am after all a Taurus.

But right now? Nada. And not because I am super-spiritual right now.

Some of it is the Chastity Blues (celibacy is not being married, chastity is not getting laid) . Extended chastity is not like long-term sobriety: it’s easy not to take the first drink. Staying chaste requires the same lack of effort (don’t buy booze, don’t approach women) to maintain, but I’ve found that long-term chastity puts my soul under a constant tension that every now and then breaks one of the its fibres.That’s when I feel the hurt, and think that some intimate contact would be a tremendous relief and wash me through with Good Hormones. But of course, when I’m feeling the hurt, I wouldn’t go near an opportunity, because it would mean too much, and be too painful if it failed.

No-one with plastic and metal wires in their mouths can feel relaxed and at ease. I’ve cut back on the range of food I eat and while I still taste it, the act of eating is not itself a pleasure. That’s a lot to miss. It’s been un-naturally cold in the UK this year and I just haven’t wanted to leave the front door if I can avoid it. And us ascetic types get tired of the friction of just seeing and hearing the rest of the human race.

It’s called “functioning depression”. I get up and go to work. I eat and exercise. I don’t mope. I keep myself, my clothes and my quarters clean. I pay my bills and generally take care of my affairs. But I don’t do anything that results in me feeling relaxed, happy, satisfied, and generally at one and ease with the world. However temporarily. Because I can’t think of anything that might that wouldn’t basically be drugs (sex, booze, holidays, chocolate).

Expert Beginners - Ouch!

I follow Erik Dietrich's Daed Tech blog , as should anyone interested in programming and software. He has a couple of posts about the awful effects of Expert Beginners which made me wince.

I was that man.

Ouch.

Fortunately it was only ever in small companies, and mostly in my head. No careers or customer applications were damaged by my stupidity, neither were budgets blown or deadlines missed.

I’ve since become a modest journeyman with no pretensions of expertise.

But still…. Ouch.

Whisky, Cigarettes and the Meaning of Life

RooshV is a smart guy and playing a long game none of the rest of us get. He’s found his audience, and is cultivating them well. Some of it is good, some is okay, and some is just old-fashioned twaddle. Like this...

Lifestyle design has become so popular among both men and women because meaning and purpose have been removed from their lives, particularly god, family, and tribe. Without those, you have nothing to ground your existence on...

No. No. No.

The meaning and purpose of any person’s life cannot be found outside of them. We can decide to dedicate ourselves to a goal that is external to us, but it isn’t the goal that brings meaning, it’s the dedication. Any athlete, artist, scholar or entrepreneur will tell you that. Children don’t bring meaning, they bring the opportunity for the parents to find meaning in the task of raising those children - an opportunity that a noticeable proportion of parents don’t take. God cannot bring meaning, since there isn’t one (or a hundred): what makes the meaning of the religious life is the devotion and dedication. Meaning isn’t an object, it’s a process: it isn’t a goal or an objective, it’s the manner of one's living.

I read somewhere a story about a man who was having a slow recovery after heart surgery. One day the doctor suggested he put something on his bedside cabinet to remind him of why he was getting well. A couple of days later the doctor returns and is shocked to find a bottle of whisky and a carton of cigarettes on the man’s cabinet. “What’s all this?” the doctor asks, and the man reminds him about his suggestion. “Well, I meant a photograph of your wife and children, or some pastime like walking or sailing,” the doctor stutters. The man looks at him. “I’m not married,” he explains, “and I’ve worked hard all my life. I have no hobbies. This, the whisky and cigarettes, this is what I like to do, and it’s why I want to get better.” And the doctor did indeed notice that the man had improved even over the last two days.

That man understood. It wasn't whisky and cigarettes: it was smoking and drinking and all the things that go with that. The process, not the products.

God, family and tribe were never purposes, but institutions to whom we owed something for providing social order, support, welfare and work (maybe, if you were lucky). Today we discharge that obligation by working and paying taxes.

Roosh is right about one thing: find your purpose and your "lifestyle” will follow. Mine, as an ongoing amend for being a drunk and a psychological mess for so long, is to be a quiet, modest, useful worker and a quiet, considerate neighbour, as well as a reasonable brother, son and friend. From that, the early nights, training, work and quiet living follow.

Piper Harron’s Identity Politics

Piper Harron is a black woman who feels oppressed by mathematics. She has a PhD from Princeton and is married to a mathematics professor at the University of Hawaii. Her PhD is written in an informal style that crosses the border to cute a few times. She's been interviewed by no less that MathBabe Cathy O'Neill and Michael Harris has talked about her at least twice on his blog.

Here’s an extract from a post called Why I Do Not Talk About Math

“My experience discussing math with mathematicians is that I get dragged into a perspective that includes a hierarchy of knowledge that says some information is trivial, some ideas are “stupid”; that declares what is basic knowledge, and presents open incredulity in the face of dissent. ”

Translation: other people have strong ideas about what’s worth spending time on that they don’t hold back and I get upset by that.

To which the reply is; woman up, behave like an adult and join the community, or quit. Because that is going to happen to her wherever she goes. Some places they may be more polite about it, and then she will finish the year with a “struggling” grade in her appraisal, which she will know is their way of telling her to be employed elsewhere.

Attention-seekers feel oppressed by lack of attention. They don't want attention for what they have done, but for who they are, or perhaps for the fact that, being who they are, they have done what they have done. Attention-seekers take to identity politics like cats to catnip: it gives them so many ways to define the "being who they are" that makes their otherwise journeyman work attention-worthy.

And if Ms Harron thinks a bunch of nerds in a math seminar are bad, she’s going to get the shock of her life when she tries to fit in with the other mothers at the school gate. Then she will know scorn and rejection.

Harron’s affiliation with identity politics is a shame. Because she’s on to something with the style of mathematical papers and communications. Fifty years after Imre Lakatos’ Proofs and Refutations, a lot of mathematicians still write like Bourbaki. That’s something worth writing about.

It's April, Of Course I Have a Cold...

... and in about six weeks' time I'll get hay fever and be almost unable to stay awake in the afternoons. That will last about six weeks. Spring. I love it.

On the other hand, having a muzzy head means I can look at my photographs a little less harshly. So here's a few I prepared earlier...

From the top: cranes on the way into Vauxhall; orange pots at the bottom of my garden; the pub on the road into Poppit Sands, Pembroke; Dutch graffiti in a Banksy Stylee.

Affable Detachment

Why do I do this to myself? I read Julius Evola's Ride The Tiger recently, because someone enthused about it on a blog I read, and the Amazon reviews were positive. Evola came from a family of minor Sicilian aristocrats. He was well-read and seemed to understand what he read, which means he understood Heidegger, and that's more than most people do.

However, his book is rambling, long on critical exposition, very short on prescription and the text yearns for a return to something called "Tradition" that he never describes and which I can only assume is the way he saw the world when he was about ten. When people pine for the past, that's usually about the past they are pining for. When they were too young to see how complicated and messy the world was.

So let's say something out loud and address his real concern. There are a lot of ugly, dull and mediocre people in the world, and there are a lot of reasonably decent people who work well, love their children, tolerate their spouses and would have me heading for an imagninary appointment in twenty minutes. Some of them make a lot of money and drive nice cars and have trophy wives, and that irritated me at first and then I got over it as I understood what it takes to make that money and live with that kind of woman, and realised that I didn't want to be that guy. I want to have sex with his wife, but I want to hand her back afterwards. Most men are fine as colleagues at work, or for specific purposes and events, but not as someone I would want to spend a whole day with. I am easily bored and my vanity won't let me be seen with ugly people. Call me shallow, superficial and a jerk. I accept that.

The question then is how those of us who feel that way live. Surrounded by people that we would help in an emergency (if we could help at all), and regard as fellow citizens due the politness and consideration they deserve, but who we would actually want as a fixture in our lives, how do we live? How do we deal with the ugliness, triviality and tedium that can suddenly descend on us if we sit in the wrong place or with the wrong people?

The old-school answer involved the phrase "aristocratic detachment", which conveys an idea of formal politeness combined with distance and a visible reluctance to become involved or stay in any group or conversation, with the suggestion that one has an elsewhere to be soon. The catch with aristocratic detachment is that I still have to be aware of the ugliness, medicority and the irritation that always accompanies the discovery that an attractive woman is also an air-head.

That's way too much effect for the world to be having on me. I'm going to go for "Affable detachment”.

Affable detachment is what we do when we realise we cannot go on and on being disappointed and dismayed and disgusted. So we stop hoping for anything from the world and it no longer tires us out with its banality, ugliness and inconvenience. We find our own interests in the huge range of sciences, arts, crafts and participative sports and training, that are available in this post-modern capitalist economy. Those interests are what gives us the value in our lives.

Affable detachment is recognising the awful ("land whale trying to sit next to me on the train") and then carrying on with your life so that you don't think about it because you have something that interests you to occupy you. It is the art of tuning out the world when it does not deserve our attention. We do not ignore it because it is hateful, we ignore it because we are giving our attention to something we like more. That’s the real difference between affable disengagement and aristocratic detachment. We don’t begrudge the "real world” with its “real women” and “real men” and “real relationships” for not interesting us. Affable detachment turns the outside world into a giant art gallery with a lot of very tatty performance and installation pieces. We have to walk through it, but we don't have to buy any of it and take it home.

Noise-cancelling earphones help, as well as something to read or a computer to type on. Also a place of your own, and a gym membership.

One thing we affably disengaged have in common with the aristocratically detached and Rational Males, is that women are an enhancement to a man's life, but not its centre or purpose. I’m not going to expand on that now.

This does not mean we don’t have friends and confidants. We can and often do. We don’t expect any of the next three hundred people we meet to be either. Just as we don’t expect any of the next three hundred females we pass by to be even remotely sexually attractive and available. Just as we don’t expect the next programme on television to be worth watching, or the next single from the next over-produced girl singer to be worth hearing. We do not live in despair at never finding love, or sex, or friendship: we understand that those things are rare, and it is very unlikely that the next person we meet will provide any of them.

Affable detachment is easier to do when I'm employed in a job I find okay, with enough money coming in to pay the bills and some over for fun and savings, working somewhere that's half-way reasonable, having quiet, unobtrusive neighbours, and a daily routine that doesn't force me into lengthy contact with oafs, dummies and fuglies.

There are some circumstance where affable disengagement isn't going to work. Stuck with a shrew for a wife, or a bully for a boss, or with a drink problem, or a lack of employment or money, for instance. There are things that sensitise us to everything else in the world. I've been there, and if you are, you have my sympathy. In the end you have to change your circumstances, or wait for the boss to move on and your shrew to die or divorce you.

It sounds like some utter slob could be affably disengaged. Well, that's not likely. Affable detachment works when you have a justifed sense of self-respect and don't need other people to notice and validate you. (This is different from getting good reviews around annual review time, but if you can't do that without compromising yourself you need to change employer.) So you will be in shape, exercise, eat well, dress becomingly but modestly, and all that good stuff. Slobs know they are, and so they know everyone else knows they are, and shrugging that thought off is not easy. It's a lot easier not to be worried about what other people are thinking when the chances are they are thinking "what a good looking older man" (women) and "He's a boss. You can tell just by looking." (men).

You can seek promotion, play Texas Hold’Em, make art or music, write books, study for a PhD, climb mountains or do whatever else you want to do. In fact, that’s the whole point. That you have something in your life that gives it direction and value to you, and that you don’t get your validation from outside, from the gang, from the admiring glances of other men as you walk in the room with Anna Ewers on your arm, or from Ms Ewers herself. Prizes and recognition follow commitment and achievement. This week’s blonde, and this year’s CEO Of The Year “award”, are not prizes awarded by peers but liabilities.

If I'm spending all day being as little connected to and affected by the world as possible, will I still get aroused when she appears? Yes, because I'm still scanning the world, I'm not ignoring it. When someone appears who does arouse me, I know it immediately. Happened to me recently, and every time it does I feel disappointed in myself that I didn't approach her. There are many women I look at and think "Well, yes, if it was easy" or fit them into a particular fantasy and don't have a moment's regret that I didn't approach. As with women, so with jobs, clothes, music or anything else. If it's what you want, you will feel it when you see it. And you won’t like yourself if you don't go for it. We don’t stop hoping, we just quit bitching and moaning when our hopes are disappointed.