Day Zero: EXISTENTIAL DISHONESTY

 

The dominant myth of the culture I live in would have it that I am an observable object. I am a thing made up of and caused by other things. These other things are themselves observable objects. They have observable, predictable properties. The combined action in time and space of these observable objects and their observable properties explains me. They are the truth of me. So, the values I live by and the values I oppose are entirely explicable in terms of the disposition of observable objects in time and space; my experiences of beauty and ugliness are entirely explicable in terms of the disposition of observable objects in time and space; my experiences of freedom and constraint are entirely explicable in terms of the disposition of observable objects in time and space. What this amounts to is that everything I am is explicable in terms of objects that are entirely other than me. Moreover, these objects that are entirely other than me are to be observed by others who are not me and are to be manipulated by others who are not me, and whom I may not like. I am determined absolutely by otherness, to the last syllable of recorded time – and space.

            Hooray! – yes, this is science and this is the vision of absolute personal negation that is all it ultimately offers. Most scientists claim to have no problem with such a view. Of course they don’t – it doesn’t apply to them, only to all that is not them. But you should listen to them squeak when there’s any threat of them actually having to confront what it is that they have made of this universe. You’ll hear them talk glibly and reassuringly of emergent properties, quantum indeterminacy, the unpredictabilities that chaos theory allows. You’ll hear them invoke anything, in fact, that will permit a fig leaf’s cover of freedom. Why do they bother, I wonder? – especially when it should be blatantly obvious that any one of these tactics they resort to can only ever distract from the absolute inevitability and inescapability of the scheme they operate. Randomness and unpredictability are not the same as freedom and creativity and never will be.  For a start, they are observable objects – observable conceptual objects, readily made tractable by that faculty of awareness that deals with observable conceptual objects, which is the human intellect and its operating activity, reason.

            Talking of reason, the reason adherents to the scientific view of the universe are prepared to resort to these manoeuvres is because to actually experience oneself as the thing they have made of themselves is excruciatingly, agonisingly, insupportably painful.  But the blind, natural selection-determined thing that is all that they would have us be has built into it any number of fail-safes and in the last resort it can finally fall back on is double-think. I once watched in astonishment as a prominent evolutionist proclaimed, with all the smug seriousness of a comfortable vicar, that he had no problem with the apparent contrast between the absolute inescapable mechanistic determinism of his vision (and don’t for one second believe anything you hear about how it isn’t like that really – it is like that, really) and his daily experience of freedom and values. On being asked how he could act according to this daily experience, he said something along the lines, ‘This is the way I experience myself and I will live and act accordingly’. From the point of view a doctrinaire evolutionist and materialist fundamentalist, this person was behaving in that moment as an organism whose behaviour was being operated by highly-evolved neural networks that were marshalling themselves to isolate the operating consciousness of the organism concerned from the implications of the structure of thinking it was using to achieve status and a full belly. From the point of view of a critical human being, this person – and any other scientist operating the same double-standards – was guilty of what I can only call existential dishonesty: he has made of us one thing, but chooses for himself to be another – another that is not a thing.

~ by apostatescientist on January 22, 2011.