Smoke and Bounce

5:16 am EST

"OPPOSITE DAY: INTERPRETING GENESIS IN 2013"

Before I stopped going to the bar, I had a conversation there with an alcoholic psychology professor which tried my patience and foretold of the vapidness I'd hear him utter through his Killian's of the future. When he told me he taught psychology, I asked him if he teaches classical psychology or neurology; he responded that there is no difference between the two (and apparently not even for the sake of argument) -- thus, the man has a penis and is quite, quite aware of it. Now let's lay him aside.

The classical psychology of Descartes asserted a mind-body duality, if I understand it correctly. You might call it more accurately a soul-body duality, since "psyche" derives from the Greek of the same spelling and meaning -- "soul". Nowadays, thanks to market forces, the mind is often identified as the absolute sum total of brain activity, no more no less. Thusly, the duality is called into question, and consequently the existence of independent consciousness is called into question: is it in fact just something emergent from the material nervous system and a highly evolutionarily useful "trick"? I would advise the dualist psychologist to win over the materialist psychologist by beating him at his own game: water the semantics dry and employ the term "subjective experience". One cannot explain subjectivity because there is nothing to explain. It cannot be measured; its qualifications are crude; and one could not intelligibly assert that it is evolutionarily useful without standing on a bottomless heap of assumptions about the nature (social and otherwise) of its advantages. The suffering it causes can cripple, and yet it cannot be switched off definitively.

The delusion is that a sense of identity is some kind of cognitive, neural achievement. The vain animal looks at a spire in the desert and assumes the spire lacks a sense of self simply because it does not perform a mating dance or courtship display for him. Ironically, the spire pities the organism because the organism is saddled with an ego even in solitude, when shame forfeits all utility and yet stubbornly remains.

My interpretation of the book of Genesis in the Hebrew scriptures conforms to my animist beliefs and my background in the biological sciences. My corporeal form and my soul are both paradoxical; they are both neither individual nor universal, yet as my life progresses they push forth in both directions simultaneously. I don't necessarily distinguish myself from the desert spire: it rests on geography and I rest on nutrition, sandstone and bran flakes, in this case. Consequently, I don't see biological life as a punctuated leap in Creation; all Creation is living, and it is all infinitely emergent but infinitely original as well.

So henceforth, when I say "brain", please remind yourself that I might as well be saying "bag of amethyst ping-pong balls at the bottom of the sea". And when I say "soul", I have no clue what I am talking about except the clue that I treasure it.

The grand finale: In the beginning, the soul was for a sense of self and a sense of connection with God. The brain, meanwhile, was strictly for pleasure, the pleasure of nature and natural existence. Then the forbidden fruit was consumed. When this happened, the respective perceptions of soul and brain were inverted; all creation now understood the soul's function as pleasure and the brain's function as self-awareness. For the first time in history, it was "opposite day". It's still opposite day today. But some people are catching on.