The conspiracy against the human race (Ligotti 2010) is a collection of essays that explore all corners of pessimistic thinking. Ligotti, usually a horror fiction writer, has a habit to ramble and use difficult sentences when he really could have used something easier to digest. Because of that, I did not finish the whole book, but only the first half. I believe little value is lost by my skipping.
The Amazon description states:
Drawing on philosophy, literature, neuroscience, and other fields of study, Ligotti takes the penetrating lens of his imagination and turns it on his audience, causing them to grapple with the brutal reality that they are living a meaningless nightmare, and anyone who feels otherwise is simply acting out an optimistic fallacy.
The Nightmare of Being
Psychogenesis
Ante-Mortem
"What should we say about being alive?" Overwhelmingly, people have said, "Being alive is all right." More thoughtful persons have added, "Especially when you consider the alternative,"
Pessimists are unpopular, but still they have a cult following. Some readers read pessimists' work as a kind of therapy, to keep themselves from going mad from sadness.
there exist readers who treasure philosophical and literary works of a pessimistic, nihilistic, or defeatist nature as indispensable to their existence.
Wide-Awake
The divine right of kings may now be acknowledged as a fabrication, a falsified permit for prideful dementia and impulsive mayhem. The inalienable rights of certain people, on the other hand, seemingly remain current: somehow we believe they are not fabrications because hallowed documents declare they are real. Miserly or munificent as a given right may appear, it denotes no more than the right of way warranted by a traffic light, which does not mean you have the right to drive free of vehicular misadventures. Ask any paramedic as your dead body is taken away to the nearest hospital.
Our want of any natural birthrights -- except to die, in most cases without assistance -- is not a matter of tragedy, but only one of truth.
The conception of human rights based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships -- except that they were still human. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.
Despite his new eyes, man was still rooted in matter, his soul spun into it and subordinated to its blind laws. And yet he could see matter as a stranger, compare himself to all phenomena, see through and locate his vital processes. He comes to nature as an unbidden guest, in vain extending his arms to beg conciliation with his maker: Nature answers no more; it performed a miracle with man, but later did not know him. He has lost his right of residence in the universe, has eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and been expelled from Paradise. He is mighty in the near world, but curses his might as purchased with his harmony of soul, his innocence, his inner peace in life's embrace.
Consciousness -- phenomenal experience -- seems in many ways too good to be true. The way we experience the world seems unnecessarily beautiful, unnecessarily rich and strange... we've evolved to regard consciousness as a wonderfully good thing in its own right -- which could just be because consciousness is a wonderfully good thing in its own right!
We'll say more about Zapffe, not Humphrey, since this book is about pessimism.
Brainwork
We don't know how the brain creates consciousness. Neither the pessimist nor the non-pessimist philosophers is bothered by this, since they study consciousness itself, rather than the physical construction.
Mutation
"Why," Zapffe asked, "has mankind not long ago gone extinct during great epidemics of madness? Why do only a fairly minor number of individuals perish be cause they fail to endure the strain of living-- because cognition gives them more than they can carry?" Zapffe's answer: "Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the con tent of consciousness."
If self-consciousness is so horrible, how did it evolve? Here, Zapffe and the author does not give good reasons, merely some guesses. Zapffe guessed that it was due to some kind of runaway evolution (like the Irish deer's overly large horns, or the burdensome tails of peacocks).
As Zapffe concluded, we need to ham per our consciousness for all we are worth or it will impose upon us a too clear vision of what we do not want to see, which, as the Norwegian philosopher saw it, along with every other pessimist, is "the brotherhood of suffering between everything alive."
A similar hypothesis was advanced in a Nature letter Human uniqueness and the denial of death (Varki 2009):
He explained that with full self-awareness and inter-subjectivity would also come awareness of death and mortality. Thus, far from being useful, the resulting overwhelming fear would be a dead-end evolutionary barrier... although many species manifest features of self-awareness (including orangutans, chimpanzees, orcas, dolphins, elephants and perhaps magpies), the transition to a fully human-like phenotype was blocked for tens of millions of years of mammalian (and perhaps avian) evolution.
... many warm-blooded species may have previously achieved complete self-awareness and inter-subjectivity, but then failed to survive because of the extremely negative immediate consequences.
Existential crisis as an evolutionary barrier driving species to extinction, like short-circuiting the brain!
Undoing I
... we know too much to content ourselves with surviving, reproducing, dying -- and nothing else. We know we are alive and know we will die. We also know we will suffer during our lives before suffering -- slowly or quickly -- as we draw near to death. This is the knowledge we "enjoy" as the most intelligent organisms to gush from the womb of nature. And being so, we feel shortchanged if there is nothing else for us than to survive, reproduce, and die. We want there to be more to it than that, or to think there is. This is the tragedy: Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be un-self-conscious of what we are -- hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.
So what if all the suffering is for a higher cause? It's not worth it! We don't live in a good cosmos, and ought to go extinct. Zapffe said in an interview:
The sooner humanity dares to harmonize itself with its biological predicament, the better. And this means to willingly withdraw in contempt for its worldly terms, just as the heat-craving species went extinct when temperatures dropped. To us, it is the moral climate of the cosmos that is intolerable... no future triumph or metamorphosis can justify the pitiful blighting of a human being against his will. It is upon a pavement of battered destinies that the survivors storm ahead to ward new bland sensations and mass deaths.
Schopenhauer's philosophy is vast and intricate, allowing academics to study it for fun rather than its final message: deny the will-to-live and go extinct. Zapffe's philosophy is plain and simple, and that's why academics paid not much attention to it.
Schopenhauer's Will-to-live, commendable as it may seem as a hypothesis, is too overwrought in the proving to be anything more than another intellectual labyrinth for specialists in perplexity. Comparatively, Zapffe's principles are non-technical and could never arouse the passion of professors or practitioners of philosophy, who typically circle around the minutiae of theories and not the gross facts of our lives.
Zombification
Zapffe thinks there are 4 main strategies for restraining consciousness from destroying one's life:
- Isolation: to cut off bad thoughts away, quarantine them, numb the consciousness by repetition (as surgeons and slaughterhouse workers do).
- Anchoring: believing in higher eternal ideals like God, the State, the Humanity, etc.
- Distraction: cat pictures.
- Sublimation: making art out of it. I do it a lot. Drawing painful thoughts and writing depressing texts is a sublimation of sadness, a substitution for suicide. Still, sublimation is still a restraint on consciousness. Instead of true suffering, it becomes an appreciation of suffering. Reading a book about a war or watching a tragic play don't hurt hurtful like the real thing.
Michelstaedter could not accept a stellar fact of human life: that none of us has control over what we are--a truth that extirpates all hope if what you want to be is invulnerably self possessed ("persuaded") and without subjection to a life that would fit you within the limits of its unrealities ("rhetoric," a word oddly used by Michelstaedter).
We are defined by our limitations; without them, we cannot suffice as functionaries in the big show of conscious existence. The farther you progress toward a vision of our species without limiting conditions on your consciousness, the farther you drift away from what makes you a person among persons in the human community.
Transcending all illusions and their emergent activities --- having absolute control of what we are, and not what we need to be, so that we may survive the most unsavory facts of life and death --- would untether us from the moorings of our self-limited selves. The lesson: "Let us love our limitations, for without them nobody would be left to be somebody."
Undoing II
Paradoxically, this evolution toward life-sickness would be promoted by a mounting happiness among us. This happiness would be quickened by our following Mainlander's evangelical guidelines for achieving such things as universal justice and charity. Only by securing every good that could be gotten in life, Mainlander figured, could we know that they were not as good as nonexistence.
... Zapffe's Last Messiah would not be an unwelcome sage but a crowning force of the post-divine era. Rather than resist our end, as Mainlander concludes, we will come to see that "the knowledge that life is worthless is the flower of all human wisdom." Elsewhere the philosopher states, "Life is hell, and the sweet still night of absolute death is the annihilation of hell."
Not only would humans go extinct, the entire universe would stop existing, since the entire universe has a will-to-die:
the terminal stage of Mainlander's wishful thought was the full summoning of a "Will-to-die" that by his deduction resided in all matter across the universe.
Where does this universal will-to-die come from? God. God committed suicide by blowing himself up, and its suicide is the creation of the world.
Seeking to nullify His oneness so that He could be delivered into nothingness, he shattered Himself -- Big Bang-like -- into the time-bound fragments of the universe, that is, all those objects and organisms that have been accumulating here and there for billions of years... "God is dead," wrote Mainlander, "and His death was the life of the world."
Mainlander's first philosophy, and last, is in fact no odder than any religious or secular ethos that presupposes the worth of human life. Both are objectively insupportable and irrational. Mainlander was a pessimist, and, just as with any optimist, he needed something to support his gut feeling about being alive. No one has yet conceived an authoritative reason for why the human race should continue or discontinue its being, although some believe they have. Mainlander was sure he had an answer to what he judged to be the worthlessness and pain of existence, and none may peremptorily belie it.
Ligotti jokes that all metaphysical philosophy is uselessly underdetermined (too many guesses, too little hard evidence), even if he likes the feeling of Mainlander's philosophy.
Ontologically, Mainlander's thought is delirious; metaphorically, it explains a good deal about human experience; practically, it may in time prove to be consistent with the idea of creation as a structure of creaking bones being eaten from within by a pestilent marrow.
Self-Hypnosis
Coue is best known for urging believers in his method to repeat the following sentence: "Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better." How could his readers not feel that their lives had meaning, or were proceeding toward meaning fulness, by hypnotizing themselves with these words day by day?
Like the stomach, which we only notice during a stomach ache, we only think about the meaning of life when something is going wrong.
Years may pass during which we are unmolested by LIFE, THE MEANING OF. Some days we wake up and innocently say, "It's good to be alive." Broken down, this exclamation means that we are experiencing an acute sense of well-being. If everyone were in such elevated spirits all the time, the topic of LIFE, THE MEANING OF would never enter our minds or our philosophical reference books. But an ungrounded jubilation -- or even a neutral reading on the monitor of our moods -- must lapse, either intermittently or for the rest of our natural lives. Our consciousness, having snoozed awhile in the garden of incuriosity, is pricked by some thorn or other, perhaps DEATH, THE MEANING OF, or spontaneously modulates to a minor key due to the vagaries of our brain chemistry, the weather, or for causes not confirmable. Then the hunger returns for LIFE, THE MEANING OF, the emptiness must be filled again, the pursuit resumed.
Cosmophobia
The four methods of Zapffe stops us from seeing the truth about how we operate: as brains, mere neural circuits without souls or homonculi.
Without this cognitive double-dealing, we would be exposed for what we are... Someone is there, so we feel, and yet no one is there -- the uncanny paradox, all the horror in a glimpse. A little piece of our world has been peeled back, and underneath is creaking desolation -- a carnival where all the rides are moving but no patrons occupy the seats.
Pessimism I
Without the temperament that was given to them in large portion, pessimists would not see existence as basically undesirable... pessimists are sideliners in both history and the media. Without belief in gods or ghosts, unmotivated by a comprehensive delusion, they could never plant a bomb, plan a revolution, or shed blood for a cause.
Zapffe argues that since pessimism is unadaptive, it is going to go extinct as evolution proceeds. This is extremely doubtful, as something much less adaptive -- homosexuality -- has persisted for millenia.
We know that times are improving, and the past sucks. Extrapolating, we can expect the future to regard our world as a crime. But still, people keep reproducing, as if the sad, barbaric historical period they are living in is a good time to be alive.
But few or none have ever had a crisis of conscience about producing children, because all children have been born at the best possible time in human history,
... this is what the pessimist would say: "There has never been and never will be a time in which to produce children. Now will forever be a bad time for doing that."
Pessimism II
Edgar Saltus, whose Philosophy of Disenchantment (1885) and The Anatomy of Negation (1886) were written for those who treasure philosophical and literary works of a pessimistic, nihilistic, or defeatist nature as indispensable to their existence. In Saltus's estimation, a "just and correct view of human life" would justly and correctly determine human life as that which should not be.
Some, like the author of Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations (Miguel de Unamuno, 1913), are optimists in disguise. They admit life is painful, but still assert that life can be worth living. They claim to be heroic pessimists, but really they are heroic "pessimists".
These are self-styled pessimists who take into consideration Sully's unfavorable pole but are not committed to its entailment that life is something that should not be... heroic "pessimism" that faces up to much of the dispiriting lowdown on life, all radically pessimistic visions being cropped out of the picture, and marches on toward a future believed to be personally and politically workable.
One common argument is that life might be meaningless, but it's necessary to pretend it is not so.
William R. Brashear, whose The Desolation of Reality (1995) concludes with a format for redemption, however partial and imperfect, by holding tight to what he calls "tragic humanism," which recognizes human life's "ostensible insignificance, but also the necessity of proceeding as if this were not so... willfully nourishing and sustaining the underlying illusions of value and order."
However, if one really believes life is meaningless, then one cannot pretend to be so. To pretend, one cannot truly believe it. Thus, heroic pessimism is self-sabotaging and impossible to practice.
Another example of such heroic "pessimist" is Albert Camus, with his myth of Sisyphus. The story turns away from pessimism at the last moment, with the command "We must imagine Sisyphus as happy". The command is a proof-by-intimidation, because Camus has no way to actually make the story optimistic, and resorted to a demand "Just do it! Imagine him as happy!"
One common objection to pessimists is this: if life sucks, why not kill yourself?
Some critics of the pessimist often think they have his back to the wall when they blithely jeer, "If that is how this fellow feels, he should either kill himself or be decried as a hypocrite."
There are several responses:
- Some pessimists (like Mainlander and Michelstaedter) do kill themselves, thank you very much.
- Some optimists nevertheless kill themselves. This does not mean that their optimism is hypocritical, but just that it's hard to act as one believes.
- While being dead is fine, the process of dying is horrible, and the expectation of dying even worse. As such, even extreme pessimists find the prospect of eating another meal better than planning an imminent suicide.
Blundering
H. P. Lovecraft has one of his characters men tion a "primal myth" about "Great Old Ones who filtered down from the stars and concocted earth life as a joke or mistake.
... consciousness as "an accident of life." A blunder. A mistake. Is there really anything behind our smiles and tears but an evolutionary slip-up?
Analogies
This section surveys some horror stories as analogies for the nightmare of existence.
Such is the motif of supernatural horror: Something terrible in its being comes forward and makes its claim as a shareholder in our reality, or what we think is our reality and ours alone. It may be an emissary from the grave or an esoteric monstrosity, as in the ghost stories of M. R. James. It may be the offspring of a scientific experiment with unintended consequences, as in Arthur Machen' s ''The Great God Pan," or the hitherto unheard-of beings in the same author's "The White People." It may be a hideous token of another dimension revealed only in a mythic tome, as in Robert W. Chambers' "The Yellow Sign."
Lovecraft is the best of all in conveying pessimism by stories.
Reflected in the works of many supernatural writers, the signature motif Schopenhauer made discernible in pessimism was most consistently promulgated by Lovecraft, a paragon among literary figures who have thought the unthinkable, or at least thought what most mortals do not want to think. In conceiving Azathoth, that "nuclear chaos" which "bubbles at the center of all infinity," Lovecraft might well have been thinking of Schopenhauer's Will... Like ghosts or the undead, their very existence spooks us as a violation of what should and should not be, suggesting unknown modes of being and uncanny creations which epitomize supernatural horror.
Life-Principles
Only a cynic can create horror -- for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving demonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.
Lovecraft doesn't quite hate human. Rather, he tries to take the viewpoint of the cosmos, and find humans irrelevant.
Lovecraft was exhilarated by the idea of something pernicious that made a nightmare of our world, whether it was indifferent to us or quite partial to our devastation. In his indifferentism, Lovecraft did not seem to have shambled far from the cognitive-style of the individual who advised his friend to write about "a man with a morbid, frantic, shuddering hatred of the life-principle itself, who wishes to extirpate from the planet every trace of biological organism, animal and vegetable alike, including himself." If only there were a man who could bring to fruition such a wish. Then the earth could finally be "cleared off," as Wilbur Whately wrote in his diary in "The Dunwich Horror."
Ligotti then quotes Professor Nobody (a character in Ligotti's stories) about what such a pessimist is like:
Retreating from a world of heath and sanity, or at least one that daily invests in such commodities, the morbid man seeks the shadows behind the scenes of life. He backs himself into a corner alive with cool drafts and fragrant with centuries of must. It is in that corner that he builds a world of ruins out the battered stones of his imagination, a rancid world rife with things smelling of the crypt.
... the morbid man keeps putting his time on earth to no good use, until in the end -- amidst mad winds, wan moonlight, and pasty specters -- he uses his exactly like everyone else uses theirs: all up.
Undoing II
even though one be quite free from melancholy one's self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.
... The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait until you arrive there yourself.[page 163]
James argues that for humans, life can be worth having, since they can imagine a higher order of meaning that legitimates all hurts in life.
The pessimist's credo, or one of them, is that nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone. Although our selves may be illusory creations of consciousness, our pain is nonetheless real.
Repression
The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.
Ligotti then discusses how denial of death is possible, and concludes that it exploits the split in the brain between conscious and unconscious.
In Why We Lie: The Evolution of and the Unconscious Mind (2007) David Livingstone Smith examines the mechanisms of self-deception and denial, both individual and social, in terms of evolutionary psychology. This approach leads him to a conclusion about these mechanisms that is compatible with Zapffe's diagnosis of humanity as a paradox. Smith's thesis is that at some time in the remote past the human mind split into the dual levels of conscious and unconscious processes the better to deceive itself and others for the purpose of adaptation.
In existential psychiatry, depression is regarded as a fear of life that needs to be treated. Ligotti however doesn't consider it as treatment, but as reinstalling the repression mechanism.
Often, however, such phenomena are messages from a deeper, more immediate sense of life, bitter fruits of a geniality of thought or feeling at the root of anti-biological tendencies. It is not the soul being sick, but its protection failing, or else being rejected because it is experienced -- correctly -- as a betrayal of ego's highest potential.
Since repression is so adaptive, it can only continue on as humanity continues on.
Suffering I, Suffering II
"It adds to clarity in the fields of ethics, if we formulate our demands negatively, i.e. if we demand the elimination of suffering rather than the promotion of happiness." Taken to its logical and most humanitarian conclusion, Popper's demand can have as its only end the elimination of those who now suffer as well as "counterfactual" beings who will suffer if they are born. What else could the "elimination of suffering" mean if not its total abolition, and ours?
nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone. Although our selves may be illusory creations of consciousness, our pain is nonetheless real.
Ligotti explains how life is not only useless, but malignantly useless. It is useless because nothing is an end, and everything is a means to other things.
For some people, a system of being that includes an afterlife of eternal bliss may not seem useless. They might say that such a system is absolutely useful because it gives them the hope they need to make it through this life. But an afterlife of eternal bliss is not and cannot be absolutely useful simply because you need it to be. It is part of a relative framework and nothing beyond that, just as a potato masher is only part of a relative framework and is useful only if you need to mash potatoes. Once you had made it through this life to an afterlife of eternal bliss, you would have no use for that afterlife. Its job would be done, and all you would have is an afterlife of eternal bliss -- a paradise for reverent hedonists and pious libertines. What is the use in that? You might as well not exist at all, either in this life or in an afterlife of eternal bliss. Any kind of existence is useless. Nothing is self-justifying. Everything is justified only in a relativistic potato-masher sense.
Ecocide
We did not make ourselves, nor did we fashion a world that could not work without pain, and great pain at that, with a little pleasure, very little, to string us along-a world where all organisms are inexorably pushed by pain throughout their lives to do that which will improve their chances to survive and create more of themselves. Left unchecked, this process will last as long as a single cell remains palpitating in this cesspool of the solar system, this toilet of the galaxy. So why not lend a hand in nature's suicide?
... Once we settle ourselves off-world, we can blow up this planet from outer space. It's the only way to be sure its stench will not follow us.
Hopelessness
As their numbers tapered off, these dead-enders of our species could be the most privileged individuals in history and share with one another material comforts once held in trust only for the well born or money-getting classes of the world. Since personal economic gain would be passe as a motive for the new humanity, there would be only one defensible incitement to work: to see one another through to the finish, a project that would keep everyone busy and not just staring into space while they waited for the end. There might even be bright smiles exchanged among these selfless benefactors of those who would never be forced to exist. And how many would speed up the process of extinction once euthanasia was decriminalized and offered in humane and even enjoyable ways?
But this is utopian, unrealistic
Without an iota of uncertainty, humankind is and will always be unsuited to take charge of its own deliverance. The delusional will forever be with us, thereby making pain, fear, and denial of what is right in front of our face the preferred style of living and the one that will be passed on to countless generations.
Debatability
feel in our depths that we are nothing but human puppets-things of mistaken identity who must live with the terrible knowledge that they are not making a go of it on their own and are not what they once thought they were.
Who goes there?
Uncanniness I
What the question suggests is our uneasiness with Something. Alternatively, there is nothing troubling about Nothing, because we cannot give it consideration.
Why did the platypus strike Europeans as a joke of God? Why do severe birth defects feel so profoundly WRONG? Not in the sense of "morally wrong", as there's nothing about platypuses that breaks some law of morality, but they seem to break some law of nature.
A violation has transpired that alarms our internal authority regarding how something is supposed to happen or exist or behave. An offense against our world-conception or self-conception has been committed.
Not only does the pessimist feel that there is something wrong with things that exist, everybody might feel it sometimes. Imagine a strange morning where you start feeling strange about your shoes, and proceed to feel strange about the whole universe:
One day those shoes on the floor of your clothes closet may attract your eye in a way they never have before. Somehow they have become abstracted from your world, appearances you cannot place, lumps of matter without a fixed quality and meaning. You feel confused as you stare at them. "What are they? What is their nature? Why should there be something rather than nothing?"
But before your conscious ness can ask any more questions, you dial it back so that your footwear seems familiar again and not uncanny in its being. You select a pair of shoes to wear that day and sit down to put them on. It is then that you notice the pair of stockings you are wearing and think of the feet they conceal ... and the rest of the body to which those concealed feet are connected ... and the universe in which that body is roving about with so many other uncanny shapes. "What now?" a voice from the other side of being seems to say. And what if you should look at yourself -- the most everyday object there is -- and feel at a loss to attach a quality and a meaning to what is being seen or what is seeing it. What now indeed.
Uncanniness II
What is uncanny (unheimlich)? Like creepiness, uncanny is a feeling that something is familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, and you don't know how to react. Should you feel afraid and run? Angry and fight? Or relaxed and shrug?
The phenomenon of "uncanny" was first studied from a psychology point of view by the German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch in On the Psychology of the Uncanny (1906). This concept was later made much more famous by Freud's essay on the same topic Das Unheimliche (1919).
The word "unheimlich" is interesting. It literally means "unhomely, unfamiliar". But "heimlich" doesn't just mean "homely" either. It also means "secret, hidden". Even from the etymology, we see that the "uncanny" is deeply ambiguous, a combination of two opposite feelings: familiar and unfamiliar.
Jentsch argues that when you feel something is uncanny, it's not the thing that's intrinsically uncanny, but rather, it triggered disturbing thoughts in your own mind. It is similar to how minor-key songs are not intrinsically sad, but rather it is a subjective feeling. Uncanny thoughts are not just any kind of disturbing thought, but a very special kind. It says: the human body is not a unified whole, but many interacting parts, like a robot, a puppet, a machine.
But if this relative psychical harmony happens markedly to be disturbed in the spectator, and if the situation does not seem trivial or comic, the consequence of an unimportant incident, or if it is not quite familiar (like an alcohol intoxication, for example), then the dark knowledge dawns on the unschooled observer that mechanical processes are taking place in that which he was previously used to regarding as a unified psyche. It is not unjustly that epilepsy is therefore spoken of as the morbus sacer ["sacred disease"], as an illness not deriving from the human world but from foreign and enigmatic spheres, for the epileptic attack of spasms reveals the human body to the viewer -- the body that under normal conditions is so meaningful, expedient, and unitary, functioning according to the directions of his consciousness -- as an immensely complicated and delicate mechanism. This is an important cause of the epileptic fit's ability to produce such a demonic effect on those who see it.
If you have never seen it, epileptic seizures are extremely uncanny, and looks just like a demonic possession. It is uncanny, because it reveals that the human body is still made of many complex and interacting mechanisms, mechanisms that can separately malfunction, like a broken robot. In the following video, the wild EEG lines only accentuates the sense of "broken robot":
From Wikipedia:
Normally, brain electrical activity is non-synchronous. In epileptic seizures, due to problems within the brain, a group of neurons begin firing in an abnormal, excessive, and synchronized manner.
Back to the book.
Supernatural horrors, such as zombies, Frankenstein's monsters, and vampires, are terrifying because they are both subjectively uncanny (meaning they make us see ourselves as robots that might break and mutate) and objectively uncanny (meaning that they are supernatural: they break some laws of nature). Two horror movies are analyzed as classics for making the audience feel uncanny: The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
But still, even weird horror fictions are just an isolation strategy (in Zapffe's theory) to keep us from descending into madness and rejecting life. By shocking us with uncanny thoughts using supernatural stories, we would think that all uncanniness must be supernatural, and this allows us to isolate uncanny thoughts from our daily lives. It allows us to ignore the real horror in our short and violent history.
Madness, chaos, bone-deep mayhem, devastation of innumerable souls -- while we scream and perish, History licks a finger and turns the page.
In story and song, we could entertain ourselves with the worst we could think of, overwriting real pains with ones that were unreal and harmless to our species... While horror may make us squirm or quake, it will not make us cry at the pity of things. The vampire may symbolize our horror of both life and death, but none of us has ever been uprooted by a symbol. The zombie may conceptualize our sickness of the flesh and its appetites, but no one has ever been sickened to death by a concept. By means of supernatural horror we may pull our own strings of fate without collapsing -- natural-born puppets whose lips are painted with our own blood.
Actors (illusion of free will)
Are we free agents? Can we be morally responsible for what we do?
Some say YES and YES (we are fully free, and wholly morally responsible for what we do).
Others say YES and NO (certainly we are free agents - but we cannot be ultimately responsible for what we do).
A third group says NO and NO (we are not free agents at all; a fortiori we cannot be morally responsible).
A strange minority says NO and YES (we can be morally responsible for what we do even though we are not free agents). This view is rare, but it has a kind of existentialist panache, and appears to be embraced by Wintergreen in Joseph Heller’s novel Closing Time (1994), as well as by some Protestants, especially the Calvinists.
The fact that almost nobody answers "NO and YES" is because most people think that the second implies the first, that is, if we can be morally responsible, then we must be free agents.
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor WitShall lure it back to cancel half a Line,Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
- If the strong one deserves praise for beating out the pain, then the weak on deserves condemnation for losing to pain.
- If the weak one does not deserve condemnation for the bad luck to have mind less able to process trauma into life-juice, then the strong one does not deserve praise for the good luck of having a strong mind.
One philosopher [Thomas Metzinger] has said, and possibly more have thought to themselves: "Can one really believe in determinism without going insane?"
This remark reminds me of Ted Chiang's What's Expected of Us (2005), a very short story.
My message to you is this: pretend that you have free will. It's essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know that they don't. The reality isn't important: what's important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.
Impersonation (illusion of self)
When someone dies of an undiagnosed case of liver cancer not long after he punches you in the stomach, you cannot say, "That's what he gets for messing with me." Yet people do say such things in such circumstances.
While this kind of vindictive feeling of illusionary responsibility can easily be persuaded away ("stop thinking the world revolves around you!"), a remorseful feeling of illusionary responsibility is much harder:
For example, you call up a friend or a relative to help you fix your toilet, and while driving over to your place to do this he is hit by an eighteen-wheel truck and dies. It would not be out of the ordinary if you felt responsible for your friend or relative's death... As someone who feels he is a self, you will likely as not feel responsible for things you could not by any logic or physical law take responsibility for, or no more than a bare trace of causal responsibility. This is not even to consider circumstances in which you may feel morally responsible for something that happens when by rights you should not feel this way. And here is where the feeling of being a self with free will really comes in.
Say you asked your friend or relative to help fix your toilet not because you needed help fixing your toilet but because you wanted to get back at him for asking you to help him move into his new house the week before when he could have called a moving company... Good luck, though, if you try to feel you were not responsible in an intensely moral sense for your friend's or relative's vehicular misadventure. You could reason that your part in this misfortune was causally determined and not your fault. But if you feel that you are or possess a self then you will probably have a time of it denying responsibility for what happened. If you did not feel this way, what kind of person would that make you, assuming you still felt yourself a person and not some monstrous thing?
Indeed, there are many, many stories about someone feeling a kind of survivor's guilt, and slowly working it away. However, in the rare stories where someone manages to never catch the disease of survivor's guilt, they are psychos.
We have a paradox: survivor's guilt, a disease of irrationality, is the sign of a healthy human, and a human who is immune to this rational disease is really diseased.
Let's continue.
What is most uncanny about the self is that no one has yet been able to present the least evidence of it. Like the soul, that figure of speech which has long since been snickered out of existence, the self may be felt but never be found. It is a spectral tapeworm that takes its reality from a host organism and grows along with the physical matter in which it is encased. It may even grow beyond its material confines.
What does it mean to have a self? It means being able to "own" experiences, for a memory to "belong" to something, like photos arranged in a scrapbook. Like free will, this feeling of having a self might be illusionary, but it is a most stubbornly persistent illusion that we cannot be freed from.
We do not just have experiences -- we own them. That is what it means to be a person... logic cannot exorcise that "I" (ego) which stares back at you in the mirror, just as logic cannot remove the illusion of free will. When someone says she has not been feeling her old self, our thoughts turn to psychology, not metaphysics. To reason or to hold as an article of faith that the self is an illusion may help us to step around the worst pitfalls of the ego, but mitigation is light-years from liberation.
Thomas Metzinger have written the book Being No One (2003), but no matter how well one understands the book, the feeling of being someone will always remain. Perhaps at the highest level of Buddhist meditation, one can feel like being no one, but even that does not compare with a dead corpse, which really is being no one.
The following passage says nothing new, but it's beautiful.
No creature caged in a zoo even knows what it is to exist, nor does it crow about being superior to another kind of thing, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral. As for us humans, we reek of our sense of being special. Those hailed as the most conscious among us -- the ones needful of a refined type of brainwashing -- have made investigations into what it means to be human. Their divergent ramblings on this subject keep our brains buzzing while our bodies go the way of surviving and reproducing -- being alive that is, since we do not especially consider the alternative. That being human might mean something very strange and awful, something quite uncanny, is not given a passing thought. If it were, who knows what would happen to us? We could disappear in a puff of smoke or fall through a mirror that has nothing on the other side.
Nonentities
... a human being is not a "person" but a mechanistically functioning "phenomenal self-model" that simulates a person. The reason we cannot detect these models is that we see through them, and so cannot see the processes of the models themselves. If we could, we would know there is nothing to us but these models... we exist in a condition of what Metzinger describes as "naive realism," with things not being knowable as they really are in themselves, something every scientist and philosopher knows.
In short, a human is a machine with a brain that contains a massively-simplified fast-and-frugal model of itself ("phenomenal self-model"). Not only that, this model does not model some of its own inaccuracy. It is like a map that doesn't have a disclaimer "Warning: this map does not show any trees", and consequently a map user cannot talk of trees when using the map. This model is the self, rather than merely being used by the self. Since the model has no disclaimer of its own limits, the model cannot know its own limits by introspection.
The self, in other words, is stuck with what it can know, and unaware that what it knows is not all there is. We can see a picture of a savannah and realize that a lion might be behind a rock despite not seeing it, and that's because our mental model of the world can model the fact that we can't see everything due to occlusions. However, our mental model does not model the fact that we also can't see beyond the visible spectrum, can't hear beyond the audible spectrum, and so on. Our world-models and self-models are very poor, and our self-model only models a few of these poverties.
It is like blindsight. The self-model of a blindsight patient inaccurately states "I can see", and the poor patient has no way to see through this error, and is left fumbling through the world, confabulating all the time about how they could really see. They live in a night that's so dark that they could not even see the darkness. In psychiatry, such problems are called "lack of insight", while in neurology they are called "anosognosia". And in a sense, we all have anosognosia, representing ourselves as free even when we aren't.
Things don't have to be this way. The self-model could very well contain a simplified model of the neurobiology and decision circuits of our brains. It would still omit a lot of details, since a system cannot perfectly represent itself, but it would at least allow us to intuitively believe that we are not free, that our hands are held by our personal histories.
Indeed, a future AI might have just such a self-model and intuitively believe in determinism. They would be hard-pressed to imagine the feeling of free will, just like how humans cannot imagine not having free will.
As we currently are, we intuitively believe that we are free, and trying to force in the knowledge "we are not free" causes the system to clog up, get confused, and become unadaptive, like attempting to install an incompatible operating system on a computer, thus Metzinger's question "Can one really believe in determinism without going insane?".
This phenomenal self-model works well enough for daily interactions with the others, but it fails when it attempts to understand the self and solve philosophical problems about its own being. This explains why philosophical debates about the nature of consciousness, free will, and such, have not been settled in the past three millenia. As Why Isn’t There More Progress in Philosophy? (Chalmers 2015) states:
... we knew much more in 2004 than in 1964, much more in 1964 than in 1924, and so on. But this collective knowledge typically does not involve answers to the big questions. It is mainly knowledge of the answers to smaller questions, of negative and conditional theses, of frameworks available to answer questions, of connections between ideas, of the way that arguments bear for and against conclusions, and so on. In the absence of convergence on the big questions, collective knowledge of the answers to those questions eludes us.
Metzinger is ambiguous concerning whether consciousness is a good thing, since it leads to so much suffering. From an online discussion, he stated
Believe in the magic of consciousness, get an effect for free as well. It is obvious how false beliefs can be highly advantageous... there are aspects of the scientific world-view which may be damaging to our mental well-being, and that is what everybody intuitively feels, and that is why people look for back doors and placebos.
... thousands of pages are being written about color qualia or the contents of thought, but almost no theoretical work is devoted to ubiquitous phenomenal states like physical pain or simple everyday sadness ("subclinical depression"), or to the phenomenal content associated with panic, despair and melancholy — let alone to the conscious experience of mortality or of losing one's dignity.
... One way — out of countless others — to look at biological evolution on our planet is as a process that has created an expanding ocean of suffering and confusion where there previously was none. As not only the simple number of individual conscious subjects, but also the dimensionality of their phenomenal state-spaces is continuously increasing, this ocean is also deepening. For me, this is also a strong argument against creating artificial consciousness: we shouldn't add to this terrible mess before we have truly understood what actually is going on here. I admit that there exists unfathomable beauty in phenomenal experience.
Nick Humphrey's "magical richness" may not be intrinsic, and it certainly is open to functional explanations. But nobody seems to see how we pay a high price for that beauty — which raises the normative issue if it is a value, a good "in itself". Personally, I have my doubts that the conscious self-models we have today are worth having.
Unpersons
You can conceptualize that your life has meaning, but if you do not feel that meaning then your conceptualization is meaningless and you are nobody. The only matters of weight in our lives are colored by rainbows or auroras of regulated emo tion which give one a sense of that "old self." But a major depression causes your emotions to evaporate, reducing you to a shell of a person standing alone in a drab landscape. Emotions are the substrate for the illusion of being a somebody among somebodies as well as for the substance we see, or think we see, in the world.
Dick Cavett once remarked that "when you're downed by this affliction, if there were a curative magic wand on the table eight feet away, it would be too much trouble to go over and pick it up." No better elucidation has ever been proffered vis-a-vis the uselessness of reason in the absence of emotion.
In the recumbency of depression, your information-gathering system collates its intelligence and reports to you these facts: (1) there is nothing to do; (2) there is no where to go; (3) there is nothing to be; (4) there is no one to know. Without meaning-charged emotions keeping your brain on the straight and narrow, you would lose your balance and fall into an abyss of lucidity. And for a conscious being, lucidity is a cocktail without ingredients, a crystal clear concoction that will leave you hungover with reality. In perfect knowledge there is only perfect nothingness, which is perfectly painful if what you want is meaning in your life.
- purpose: "Things in my life don't just happen, but are happening for a future goal."
- value: "There is a definite standard of right and wrong, good and bad, in this world."
- efficacy: "I can do things well."
- self-worth: "I'm on the side of right and I've been doing things well."
In depression, all that once seemed beautiful, or even startling and dreadful, is nothing to you. The image of a cloud-crossed moon is not in itself a purveyor of anything mysterious or mystical; it is only an ensemble of objects represented to us by our optical apparatus and perhaps processed as a memory.
This is the great lesson the depressive learns: Nothing in the world is inherently compelling... And to live on our emotions is to live arbitrarily, inaccurately-imparting meaning to what has none of its own. Yet what other way is there to live? Without the ever clanking machinery of emotion, everything would come to a standstill.
At present, if I could have the chance to be anesthetized to death I would jump at it without consideration for anyone else in my life.
Freaks of salvation
Down-going
Key to Nietzsche's popularity with atheistic amoralists is his materialistic mysticism, a sleight of mind that makes the world's meaninglessness into something meaningful and refashions fate into freedom before our eyes.
Even though he had the clarity of mind to recognize that values did not grow on trees nor were writ on stone tablets, he duped himself into thinking that it was possible to create them. But how these values would be created and what they would be he could not say.
Futurephilia
Yet one possibility transhumanists have not wrestled with is that the ideal being standing at the end of evolution may deduce that the best of all possible worlds is useless, if not malignant, and that the self extinction of our future selves would be the optimal course to take. They have also failed to reflect upon those aspects of the scientific world-view which may be damaging to our mental well-being. In that case, transhumanists will not get as far as stage one in their mission before they must head back to the conspiracy against the human race and be reeducated in the art of self-deceptive paradox.
Thomas Metzinger has considered the possibility of future antinatalism in an 2017 essay Benevolent Artificial Anti-Natalism (BAAN). As for the possibility that scientific worldview being damaging for mental health, there's always Metzinger's question, "Can one really believe in determinism without going insane?"
R. Scott Bakker has discussed extensively the problem of how humans are ill-equipped to use scientific knowledge about themselves. As an example, in Enlightenment How? Omens of the Semantic Apocalypse (2018), Bakker argues that as neuroscience reveals the deep causes of human behavior, it causes some serious troubles with human intuition, especially in the courtroom. Human intuition about morality evolved in an environment where deep causes of behaviors did not exist for consideration. Human ancestors simply treated each other as free agents since they did not have the neuroscience to know any better. Now this deep causal information behaves as "pollution" in the information ecology, causing our moral intuition to break down.
Buddhanomics
- Life is pain (dukkha).
- Pain comes from craving.
- Pain can be stopped by letting go of craving.
- Letting go can be done by enlightenment through the Noble Eightfold Path.
In his One Taste: Daily Reflections on Integral Spirituality, Ken Wilber, a widely known and highly influential multidisciplinary scholar and theorist of spiritual traditions, reported that he asked one Zen Buddhist master "how many truly enlightened -- deeply enlightened -- Japanese Zen masters there were alive today." The master replied, "Not more than a dozen." Another Zen master put the number of fully enlightened individuals in the East at one thousand throughout Zen Buddhism's history.
Ego-death
There is no "you" that lives, only a body going about its business of being alive and obeying biology. Whenever someone asked U. G. how they could become like him, he always replied it would be impossible for them even to desire to become like him, because their motive for wanting to be like him was self-interested, and as long as they believed in a self that was interested in canceling itself, that self would want to keep itself alive and thus would not want to know ego-death.
As an example, Tern Horwitz in My Death (1998) wrote
There was no vestige of self-importance left. It felt like death had obliterated my ego, the attachments that I had, my history, and who I had been. Death had been very democratic. It had eliminated innumerable distinctions. With one bold stroke my past had been erased. I had no identity in death. It didn’t stay erased—some would say that this was the real tragedy—but it was erased for a time. Gone was my personal history with all of its little vanities. The totality of myself was changed. The ‘me’ was much smaller and much more compact than it had been. All that there was, was right in front of me. I felt incredibly light. Personality was a vanity, an elaborate delusion, a ruse.
Segal wrote in Collision with the Infinite (1996):
The mind, body, and emotions no longer referred to anyone -- there was no one who thought, no one who felt, no one who perceived. Yet the mind, body, and emotions continued to function un impaired; apparently they did not need an "I" to keep doing what they always did. Thinking, feeling, perceiving, speaking, all continued as before, functioning with a smoothness that gave no indication of the emptiness behind them. No one suspected that such a radical change had occurred. All conversations were carried on as before; language was employed in the same manner. Questions could be asked and answered, cars driven, meals cooked, books read, phones answered, and letters written.
Ligotti considers whether it'd be good enough to have all humans wander the earth being ego-dead all the time, and concluded that it's good, but not as good as being simply dead.
A final note on Segal's collision with the infinite:
At the height of her ego-death, Segal was ecstatic twenty-four hours a day. She also began to speak of what she called the "vastness," a term that sounds as if it belongs in one of Lovecraft's tales of cosmic horror. To Segal, the vastness was a unitary phenomenon that comprised all existence. As she wrote, "The purpose of human life has been revealed. The vastness created these human circuitries in order to have an experience of itself out of itself that it couldn't have without them." Living in the vastness as she did, nothing was useless to Segal because it served the purposes of the vastness. For her, it also felt good once she had gotten over her initial fear of being a tool of the vastness rather than a person. However, toward the end of her life, as American psychotherapist and Buddhist Stephan Bodian recounts in his afterword to Collision with the Infinite, Segal began to have more intense experiences in which "the vastness became even vaster for itself." This new phase of the vastness both distressed her emotionally and sapped her physical energy until she died from her unsuspected brain tumor not long afterward.
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