August 26, 2011
quote out of context
Ian McEwan makes a telling point. “What I believe but cannot prove,” he says, “is that no part of my consciousness will survive my death.” His enlightened fellow Edge contributors will take this as a given, but they may not appreciate its significance, which is that belief in an afterlife “divides the world crucially, and much damage has been done to thought as well as to persons by those who are certain that there is a life, a better, more important life, elsewhere.” The natural gift of consciousness should be treasured all the more for its transience.
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Thanks, Kelsey. I enjoyed reading this.
I’m glad, Daryl. I’ve been making my way through the entire archives of Paul Bloks in Prospect Magazine, where he wrote about his experiences as a neuropsychologist. While I can’t say that the introduction to this awesome field has made me doubt my recent choice of career change, I am sure that I’ll be closely following the research and developments by Bloks and those like him. Where psychiatry searches for drugs to mostly tamper unconventional psychological experience, the field of neuropsychology seems to hold space for the curiosity of human life. The ways we make sense of ourselves and the world around us, in relation to how operational our brains are. What I find myself asking is, what’s a fully operational brain? Aside from all the physical expectations of what should be included and excluded inside our skulls, how can there be a standard amidst our diversity? And if we decide, someday, on a criterion for brain performance, will we unwittingly be further subjugating the extraordinary or unorthodox among us?
Kelsey, I share an interest in, and fascination with, neuropsychology as well.
Kelsey, I’m glad Deron moved your comment up (I never know which place to then add something!); your question of “how can there be a standard amidst our diversity” gets right to the heart of a whole host of important questions and fields of study. I’m inclined to ask: Must a standard be set in stone to be useful, or might it be seen in terms of quality? People in the sciences are gun shy of the whole notion of “quality,” since it seems inhently subjective and thus not subject to argument or test. And yet what measure of human health can exclude terms such as sadness or happiness or curiosity? My sense of how a human brain should perform is inexorably tied to questions I might ask about observed behavior–in relation to my confidence (or lack of it) that my own informing limitations may be accounted for before I make judgments about another person. But sometimes I very clearly sense that a person is suffering, or that a person is a bit too frantically happy, or angry in a way that warns of inner and outer damage. Maybe what I’m saying here is that even if we had a standard we regarded as solid fact, the knowing of that fact would still involve constant acts of judgment. Our desire to link our perceptions and decisions to a chain of steps that lead back to an unassailable foundation says more about us than about the authority drawn from a sense of foundation. What we have that matters is a way of seeking better explanations: those that aren’t easily changed to suit something unexpected, and that tend to reach out in ways that allow us to more fully respond to the needs we have noted and sought to fill.