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In the brain model proposed here, the causal potency of an idea, or an ideal, becomes just as real as that of a molecule, a cell, or a nerve impulse. Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and, thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains.
the bottom level, though 100 percent responsible for what is happening, is nonetheless irrelevant to what happens — sounds almost paradoxical, and yet it is an everyday truism.
analogy has force in proportion to its precision and its visibility.
The laws of particle physics involve only particles, and larger macroscopic boundaries drawn for the convenience of thinking beings are no more relevant to them than voting precinct boundaries are to butterflies.
This flip side is, ironically, an inability — namely, our Klüdgerotic inability to peer below the level of our symbols. It is our inability to see, feel, or sense in any way the constant, frenetic churning and roiling of micro-stuff, all the unfelt bubbling and boiling that underlies our thinking.
In the brain model proposed here, the causal potency of an idea, or an ideal, becomes just as real as that of a molecule, a cell, or a nerve impulse. Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and, thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with the external surroundings to produce in toto a burstwise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet, including the emergence of the living cell.
No one has trouble with the idea that “the same novel” can exist in two different languages, in two different cultures. But what is a novel? A novel is not a specific sequence of words, because if it were, it could only be written in one language, in one culture. No, a novel is a pattern — a particular collection of characters, events, moods, tones, jokes, allusions, and much more. And so a novel is an abstraction, and thus “the very same novel” can exist in different languages, different cultures, even cultures thriving hundreds of years apart.
The name “Carol” denotes, for me, far more than just a body, which is now gone, but rather a very vast pattern, a style, a set of things including memories, hopes, dreams, beliefs, loves, reactions to music, sense of humor, self-doubt, generosity, compassion, and so on. Those things are to some extent sharable, objective, and multiply instantiatable, a bit like software on a diskette. And my obsessive writing-down of memories, and the many videotapes she is on, and all our collective brain-stored memories of Carol make those pattern-aspects of her still exist, albeit in spread-out form —
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But the key question is, no matter how much you absorb of another person, can you ever have absorbed so much of them that when that primary brain perishes, you can feel that that person did not totally perish from the earth, because they (or at least a significant fraction of them) are still instantiated in your brain, because they still live on in a “second neural home”?
If this is true, then Carol survives because her point of view survives — or rather, she survives to the extent that her point of view survives — in my brain and those of others. This is why it is so good to keep records, to write down memories, to have photos and videotapes, and to do so with maximal clarity — because thanks to having such records, you can “possess”, or “be possessed by”, other people’s brains. That’s why Frédéric Chopin, the actual person, survives so much in our world, even today.
After all, that is what a brain is made for — to be a stage for the dance of active symbols.
Much of my fabric is woven out of borrowed bits and pieces of the experiences of thousands of famous individuals whom I never met face to face, and almost surely never will, and who for me are therefore only “virtual people”.
We are all curious collages, weird little planetoids that grow by accreting other people’s habits and ideas and styles and tics and jokes and phrases and tunes and hopes and fears as if they were meteorites that came soaring out of the blue, collided with us, and stuck.
All of this suggests that each of us is a bundle of fragments of other people’s souls, simply put together in a new way.
To my mind, there is an unambiguous answer to this question. The cells inside a brain are not the bearers of its consciousness; the bearers of consciousness are patterns. The pattern of organization is what matters, not the substance.
When someone dies, they leave a glowing corona behind them, an afterglow in the souls of those who were close to them. Inevitably, as time passes, the afterglow fades and finally goes out, but it takes many years for that to happen. When, eventually, all of those close ones have died as well, then all the embers will have gone cool, and at that point, it’s “ashes to ashes and dust to dust”.
Our lifelong ingrained habit is to accept without question the caged-bird metaphor for souls, and it’s very hard to break out of such a profoundly rooted habit.
Though the primary brain has been eclipsed, there is, in those who remain and who are gathered to remember and reactivate the spirit of the departed, a collective corona that still glows. This is what human love means. The word “love” cannot, thus, be separated from the word “I”; the more deeply rooted the symbol for someone inside you, the greater the love, the brighter the light that remains behind.
them). In fact, that’s the main business of human brains — to take a complex situation and to put one’s finger on what matters in it, to distill from an initial welter of sensations and ideas what a situation really is all about.
you’re a satellite to your brain. Like a fireplace, a particular brain is in a particular spot. And wherever it happens to be, its resident strange loop calls that place “here”.
since each perceiver is always swimming in its own activities and their countless consequences, it can’t keep itself from fabricating a particularly intricate tale about its own soul, its own central essence. That tale is no different in kind from the tales it makes up for the other mind-owning entities that it sees — it’s just far more detailed.
The sole root of all these strange phenomena is perception, bringing symbols and meanings into physical systems.
There’s nothing too puzzling about this. And I repeat, there is nothing
What makes no sense is to maintain, over and above that, that our wants are somehow “free” or that our decisions are somehow “free”. They are the outcomes of physical events inside our heads! How is that free?
