I wrote an entry called On the Nature of Selfhood two weeks or so ago, in which I made certain claims about selfhood that further reading and reflection have made me realize were wrong. I said some things about multiple personalities that I ought not to have said, simply because it was mere speculation - or worse, unconscious fabulation intended to give my treatment of the subject the appearance of being consistent. Steven Pinker in his book The Blank Slate cited an experiment in which the corpus callosum was cut, and the subject's left and right cerebral hemispheres each appeared to have become a different person. The left brain generated "baloney" (in Pinker's words) to explain such actions as the right brain was instructed to perform without the knowledge of the left. "The spooky part is," he says, "that we have no reason to think that the beloney-generator in the patient's left hemisphere is behaving any differently from ours as we make sense of the inclinations emanating from the rest of our brains.
Then he quotes Freud: "Humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science three great outrages upon its naive self-love": the discovery that our world is not the center of the universe; the discovery that we are descended from animals, not specially created; and the discovery that often our conscious minds do not control how we act but merely tell us a story about our actions.
The flower that I placed in the bell jar appears to wither just as rapidly as if it had never been protected from the world. The notion of selfhood that I constructed - which, in spite of its lack of mystical properties, was certainly mystical in its essence - almost a soul - appears now to be unremarkable. I don't know what it could be that gives us this weird, ineffable experience of being; and I don't know if it makes sense to wonder what it must feel like to be alive any more than it does to wonder what it must feel like to be dead. My dread of losing forever my universe, my consciousness, is still there, though.
The banalities that I spoke of are... I don't remember. It was something to do with the word "fuck", and I was going to wonder why people find it offensive, but I don't have any good arguments right now. I used to use it excessively in the ninth and tenth grades; but then I sort of stopped, since I didn't like seeing the word in writing, and considered writing the noblest expression of language. Now I've started using it again, because keeping up the priggishness in the face of the horrid assignments and the general difficulty of going through life seemed an unnecessary burden to place on myself. Also, with the number of fucking retards in this world, it would be a shame to deny oneself the satisfaction of calling them "fucktards", which was a favorite word of mine back in the day.
Then he quotes Freud: "Humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science three great outrages upon its naive self-love": the discovery that our world is not the center of the universe; the discovery that we are descended from animals, not specially created; and the discovery that often our conscious minds do not control how we act but merely tell us a story about our actions.
The flower that I placed in the bell jar appears to wither just as rapidly as if it had never been protected from the world. The notion of selfhood that I constructed - which, in spite of its lack of mystical properties, was certainly mystical in its essence - almost a soul - appears now to be unremarkable. I don't know what it could be that gives us this weird, ineffable experience of being; and I don't know if it makes sense to wonder what it must feel like to be alive any more than it does to wonder what it must feel like to be dead. My dread of losing forever my universe, my consciousness, is still there, though.
The banalities that I spoke of are... I don't remember. It was something to do with the word "fuck", and I was going to wonder why people find it offensive, but I don't have any good arguments right now. I used to use it excessively in the ninth and tenth grades; but then I sort of stopped, since I didn't like seeing the word in writing, and considered writing the noblest expression of language. Now I've started using it again, because keeping up the priggishness in the face of the horrid assignments and the general difficulty of going through life seemed an unnecessary burden to place on myself. Also, with the number of fucking retards in this world, it would be a shame to deny oneself the satisfaction of calling them "fucktards", which was a favorite word of mine back in the day.
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