Explaining
the human self is a problem for materialists. Under their
assumptions, there is no particular need for you to be a you. From a
Darwinian standpoint, things would work just as well if each of us
were just a kind of Pavlovian stimulus-response system, with no sense
of a personal self. So why do you have a self, particularly a self
capable of introspection, philosophical curiosity, spirituality, and
other higher human capabilities?
Faced
with such a difficulty, many materialists have resorted to a strategy
that we might call “shrink the self.” The idea is to describe the
self as a kind of illusion. Such thinkers claim, very implausibly,
that we are just a kind of stream of brain blips, and that our brains fool us into thinking this is a self. It's an idea which makes no
sense, for how could a self be fooled about selfhood unless there was
a self to begin with?
But
a recent book by Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos takes an opposite
approach, an approach that we may call “balloon the self to
infinity.” Their book is entitled You
Are the Universe: Discovering Your Cosmic Self and Why It Matters.
A profound insight or runaway ego-tripping?
The
book often contains enigmatic prose that leaves you wondering whether
the authors are speaking literally or metaphorically. There are
many statements that seem to be written in a kind of Zen Buddhist
style. For example, we are told on page 241, “To claim that there
was nothing before the big bang is just as correct as saying that
everything existed before the big bang.” On the next page we are
told, “It is permissable to see the universe as perfectly designed,
perfectly random, a mixture of the two, or, as some mystics would
declare, mere dream stuff with no substantiality at all.” Then we
have this cryptic passage on page 243:
Choosing
to call the soft green moss on a rock a living thing while denying
life to the rock is merely a mind-made distinction. In reality,
everything in the universe follows the same path from its origin
(dimensionless being) to a state that consciousness chooses to create
out of itself. Since they follow the same path from the unmanifest to
the manifest, a rock and the moss that clings to it share life on
equal terms.
On
page 95 the book tells us, “If we can look past the illusion
created by clocks, the race against time comes to an end, and the
fear of death is erased once and for all.” But on page 253 we are
told the following:
Death
is the termination of a particular qualia program (the life program
of an individual). The qualia return to a state of potential forms
within consciousness, where they reshuffle and recycle as new living
entities. The consciousness field and its matrix of qualia are
nonlocal and immortal.
At
this point in the text the reader may be forgiven for saying, “Cold
comfort!” Apparently the authors think that the self is not
immortal, but that death brings some “return to a state of
potential forms” and a reshuffling in which little parts of your
self (qualia) are thrown into the vat, ending up perhaps as parts of
some new person. That sounds for all practical purposes just like
death not followed by any meaningful survival of the self. So if
someone believed that his fate at death was such a fate, I don't see
why it would be a situation that “the fear of death is erased once
and for all.”
Qualia,
incidentally, are transient “this moment” mental events
experienced by a self, so it would seem to make no sense to speak of
the qualia of one person being reshuffled and recycled into
“new living entities.”
We
may skeptically ask: if “you are the universe” as their book
title asserts, why can't you at least have at death some fate better
than just being reshuffled and recycled, like some tin can ending up
at the recycling center? Like forty other statements at the end of
the book, the statement quoted above is delivered in an oracular and
dogmatic manner. The book discusses scientific findings, but the
discussion is just window dressing for metaphysical conclusions that
are derived through philosophy rather than scientific inference.
The
authors make no mention of paranormal phenomena or psychic phenomena,
which anyone should be studying before he pontificates on the fate
of the soul. Such phenomena suggest a fate more hopeful than the
“recycling center” fate the authors imagine.
The
subtitle of the book is “Discovering Your Cosmic Self and Why It
Matters.” But the book fails to explain much in the way of any
implications of their philosophy that matter. They describe some
mysterious consciousness field giving rise to consciousness, but this
conclusion doesn't seem to have any implications for mankind's
future. They depict this consciousness field in such an impersonal
way that it's hard to imagine such a thing taking much interest in
the fate of man. The book's description of “qualia recycling”
upon death doesn't seem to be any news flash that would cause anyone
to think: now that really matters.
I
think “you are the universe” is a poor way of expressing whatever
truth the authors were trying to express by making such a claim. How
could each one of us be the universe when there is such a difference
between individual minds? Whether it is mainly material or mainly
mental, the universe is something vastly more than any one of us.
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