Inhabited

I have become inhabited; I live where I am, in this aging frame whose defects and furnishings have become first nature to me. The way I move, unconsciously adapting each moment to the biases of unbalanced muscle and bone, this is habitual, this is natural.

The scientists tell us that this is not true at the beginning in some ways. When you are newly birthed, the frame is developing, its control and sensory systems adapting to the world around it. The physics of the eye is such that light enters and is refracted into an inverted image by the lens — babies see everything upside down, and that is why they seem so uncoordinated and fall over a lot. And then the brain restructures to match the tactile environment, and we forget ever having seen things the other way.

It is the same with many other things — we begin with simple loves, of quiet, or of food, or human voices; we are acclimatized by other influences, acclimatized to other things or people, and develop more complex loves. Perhaps among us, at any time or in any place, are those with the rare ability to turn this complexity into words, or wine, or paint, or clay, or dance; then art is made.

I am in habit, and each moment I segue towards new ones. I am a multitude, although not a legion. I am a swarm of mes, each me shading imperceptibly through time and space to another me. I am a storm of selves, layer upon layer stacked until I am unsure if one is (I am) many selves, or many shelves.

Some day, I who write this will be gone and replaced entirely. I know this is true, because the person who wrote the first posts in this blog is not the person who writes this. And yet by legal fiat, they are one and the same.

The Plural of Self

The plural of self is selves, and if elf, elves; a shelf grows into shelves. And yet, here we are, not really knowing which is self and what is selves.

The fact is that there is no such thing as self; self is an image in the real that is ideal in the way it exists — no evidence can proof or prove the self, but yet it is hard not to think of self. Self, it turns out, emerges from the cocoon of reality and takes flight, and metamorphosis ensures it never remains the same.

Some people think of self as identity, or of self as being. It is possible to see the two things as the two sides of self, bearing in mind that you cannot be immutable being if you are to have identity.

Why? Because identity is defined in terms of what you are not; if thing X and thing Y are distinct, then X cannot be Y. But if things that are not X are always changing, how is X defined in terms of things that are not X? X must change too, and so it is never an identity in the ideal sense. It is a shifting panorama, a landscape, a kaleidoscope of identities, conflated as self.

And so, I am selves. I am many. If I, Christian, am in the image of God, remember too that God can be many, for in Genesis he is not only God (singular) but Elohim (plural).

Out of the Box

I was thinking about Stockholm syndrome and how it applies to many human dominance/control situations. The syndrome takes its name from an episode of bank robbery and hostage-taking in which the hostages ended up having more positive feelings towards their captors than to their rescuers. In established firms with a strong and authoritarian leadership echelon, and in some political entities (ditto), those who are employees of the former and members of the latter may find themselves locked into such a psychological response.

Whether this is true or not, it's probably a natural human tendency to like boxes and being in them, because humans are always happy to be able to delimit territory and determine boundaries. Humans will also test those limits and push those termini, but that seems mainly for the purpose of finding out what and where they are.

To think out of the box is not merely to puncture a membrane and look out, but to jump over the top into a place which is no longer bounded. When we are told not to conform to the pattern of the world, it is an out-of-the-box directive — and one extremely difficult to obey. That's because we're so used to being in the box, and so used to being relatively happy by being boxed up or boxed in.

I've found, myself, that doing work when out of the box is very much harder than doing work when in the box. In the box, you know what you can do and what you must do, so you don't have to spend extra energy pushing your personal limits and finding stuff to do on your own initiative. You don't have to attempt anything you aren't told to do. It's a great recipe for getting fat and predictable.

More insidious, perhaps, are the majority of the 'think out of the box' sessions that box owners sometimes hold. These enable box-dwellers to climb around on outside on the surface of the box, thus gaining relative freedom and not much else. Since these box-dwellers can't fly away, the surface of the box holds them almost as much as if they were inside it.

That's not to say that 'think out of the box' sessions are useless. Where box-owners have empowered their box-dwellers, genuine escapes and feats of imaginative and creative prowess can be performed by those who can jump, fly, tunnel, and otherwise transcend the surly bonds of boxdom.

Right now, I have just realised that having left one box, I spent quite a bit of time setting up my own box. Now I have to think my way out of this very nice, very safe, very comfortable box — if I want to do something more with my life. The question is: how do I do that, and why should I?

Sigh. Back to the box for now. At least it's my own box.

The Overimportance of Objectivity

Friar Tuck reminded me that we are subject to curious fits of self-doubt, by which I mean that we can always set up thought experiments to doubt that the self exists. But the fact is that while there are many ways to distract you from yourself, there is much more that persuades you that you exist.

No matter what science tells you about the molecular, atomic, or subatomic composition of your too-mortal frame, the fact is that you wake up in the morning, you feel the hangover. You feel the aches and pains, the sensations of being. No matter how unearthly the scientist, how objective his intellectual sensibilities, if he has heartburn or a headache, it is hard to remain purely objective. The disinterested observer of self does not exist.

To me, science and mathematics are games. Neither of them impacts my sense of self. I can intellectually believe that I am soup, or as Asimov (I think) once put it, water with impurities. But no matter how much empathy I muster, how much sensitivity I have that makes me tear up during certain movie moments, I am centred around me. It is my pain that I feel in my aching feet, it is my heartache I feel when I am sad. Even when I am sad for someone else, I am sad in me.

But what then of religion, of faith and my own quirk (at least that's how my non-religious friends see it) of Christianity? Well, since subjectivity is all, I am sure God will forgive me for having the purely subjective belief in Him. Do I care if I am wrong about Christ? No. Does it then devalue Christianity to not care if I am wrong? No. All such reasoning is hypothetical. I believe, I believe 'in my heart', and that's it for me. Not that I can't defend my belief if that's the game to be played, of course.

Objectivity is the Great Lie. There is no such thing. One would have thought that Einstein's ideas on relativity, and Newton's ideas before that, and the entire chain of ideas (for those who claim objective belief or beliefs can exist) would dissuade people from believing in that which they cannot directly engage.

Which brings us to the last frontier. Do we directly engage what we think is the self? I have no idea. All I know is that my feet hurt, I like coffee, I do things that seem to me to be good things, and I enjoy the company of certain people — who appear to have a real existence to me that I cannot penetrate. I have dislikes, I have tastes, I have the desire to use what functions as a language. But it's all me, and no matter how you can discredit solipsism by intellectual reasoning (yes, I know how it's done), that's all a game.

As that famous sage once said, "How are we to know if our reason has anything to do with reality at all?" I don't know, but if the game comes round, I'll play it.