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lydyYou make it sound so fascinating, but even so I'm glad I'm not on that cycle.
Intellectually, it is fascinating. It's being stuck with the actual results that's dreary.
More and more, I wonder about the relationship between biochemistry and personality, biology and consciousness. There's a quote I like, "Mind is what the brain does." All my experience with mood-altering drugs, legal and illegal, and all my experience with strong emotions such as grief and love, support that theory. The last time I fell head-over-heels in love, obsessively and totally, I could feel the various neurochemicals coursing through my brain. It felt like LSD coming on in its power and the way it altered perceptions. The changes are so profound, and so meaningless.
I don't know what I am, anymore. I don't mostly mind being what I am, I've gotten a lot of practice at it and it could be much worse (has been much worse). But I am farther and farther away from answering the larger, stranger questions of consciousness, honor, responsibility, and emotion. I don't object to being nothing more than a series of neurochemical reactions. That contains within it so much depth and complexity that there is plenty of room for wonder. The night sky is no less beautiful now that we know that the stars are distant suns.
People worry, at me, for me, or in general, about "medicating personality." They worry that people will "find a pill for everything." Talk to me again in a hundred years, or a thousand. The drugs they worry about are crude hammers. I like to joke that psychiatry isn't past the feather and rattles stage of medicine, but thank heavens they've learned to sterilize them, first. Oh, you can medicate someone into a stupor, you can remove their entire personhood with a knife, or you can dose them into something rather like happiness for a time -- though that last usually has a hard crash at the end. Those are all gross effects, and who we are, even if it is nothing but a chemical soup, is vastly more subtle than the sum of those simple effects. When technology advances to the point where they can create fine, distinct emotions without affecting vita systems, such as the pulmonary system, and when they can remove specific emotional pains without wiping out nearby neurons, talk to me again, and I'll worry with you.
It's true that drugs can "change" a person. An alcoholic is not the same person as she would be if she weren't drinking, at least, not quite. However, it's a physical problem, just as someone who's had both their legs amputated at the age of nine is not the same person they would have been if that had not happened. We make choices throughout our lives that have a hugely greater affect on our future selves than any chemical concotions currently available are able to. Who would I have been if I had fled the Midwest as I so desperately wanted to, 20 years ago? I would feel every bit as much myself if that had happened as I do right now. However, everything would have been different. It would change me in attitude, perception, and demeanor far more than taking anti-depressants for the last 10 years has.
If all this is true, and I believe that it is, then what are we? A bag of biochemical soup wandering around a landscape with sharp and soft spots, just blundering about from day to day? If love and hate and fear are nothing more than chemical reactions, then even though we can't replicate them in the laboratory yet, doesn't that make them meaningless? Why are we here, why do we die, and why do we spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches? Is all this strange speculation is nothing more than the confluence of having grown up as a preacher's kid followed up by years of therapy and a boat-load of drugs?
If I ask the question another way, though, I get answers I can use. If I ask, is the world marvelous and beautiful and miraculous because of its improbable existence, is evolution one of the strangest things of all time, then I know that randomness is not meaninglessness on a human scale. I do not live on a cosmic scale. A cosmic scale is important to some problems (like traveling to other stars) but it doesn't scale down. I can't "feel" the difference between a thousand years and a million years. It can be measured, and I can admire the elegant way events click into place over time to bring me to this very spot, but that understanding is not emotional or personal, it is entirely abstract. I have emotional and personal relationships to those abstracts, but not to those time frames or events themselves. Time may flow backwards at the quantum level, but for the moment, that has absolutely no relevance to my life. Why should I seek for meaning on a scale that I can't even experience?
I am I. That's what God told Moses from the burning bush. That's what I tell myself. The ontological questions are delightful in their own right, but they have no effect on my life-on-the-ground. I still have trouble hauling myself into work every morning, I still like sushi, and I still hate liver. Whatever and whoever I am, I am still I am.
Intellectually, it is fascinating. It's being stuck with the actual results that's dreary.
More and more, I wonder about the relationship between biochemistry and personality, biology and consciousness. There's a quote I like, "Mind is what the brain does." All my experience with mood-altering drugs, legal and illegal, and all my experience with strong emotions such as grief and love, support that theory. The last time I fell head-over-heels in love, obsessively and totally, I could feel the various neurochemicals coursing through my brain. It felt like LSD coming on in its power and the way it altered perceptions. The changes are so profound, and so meaningless.
I don't know what I am, anymore. I don't mostly mind being what I am, I've gotten a lot of practice at it and it could be much worse (has been much worse). But I am farther and farther away from answering the larger, stranger questions of consciousness, honor, responsibility, and emotion. I don't object to being nothing more than a series of neurochemical reactions. That contains within it so much depth and complexity that there is plenty of room for wonder. The night sky is no less beautiful now that we know that the stars are distant suns.
People worry, at me, for me, or in general, about "medicating personality." They worry that people will "find a pill for everything." Talk to me again in a hundred years, or a thousand. The drugs they worry about are crude hammers. I like to joke that psychiatry isn't past the feather and rattles stage of medicine, but thank heavens they've learned to sterilize them, first. Oh, you can medicate someone into a stupor, you can remove their entire personhood with a knife, or you can dose them into something rather like happiness for a time -- though that last usually has a hard crash at the end. Those are all gross effects, and who we are, even if it is nothing but a chemical soup, is vastly more subtle than the sum of those simple effects. When technology advances to the point where they can create fine, distinct emotions without affecting vita systems, such as the pulmonary system, and when they can remove specific emotional pains without wiping out nearby neurons, talk to me again, and I'll worry with you.
It's true that drugs can "change" a person. An alcoholic is not the same person as she would be if she weren't drinking, at least, not quite. However, it's a physical problem, just as someone who's had both their legs amputated at the age of nine is not the same person they would have been if that had not happened. We make choices throughout our lives that have a hugely greater affect on our future selves than any chemical concotions currently available are able to. Who would I have been if I had fled the Midwest as I so desperately wanted to, 20 years ago? I would feel every bit as much myself if that had happened as I do right now. However, everything would have been different. It would change me in attitude, perception, and demeanor far more than taking anti-depressants for the last 10 years has.
If all this is true, and I believe that it is, then what are we? A bag of biochemical soup wandering around a landscape with sharp and soft spots, just blundering about from day to day? If love and hate and fear are nothing more than chemical reactions, then even though we can't replicate them in the laboratory yet, doesn't that make them meaningless? Why are we here, why do we die, and why do we spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches? Is all this strange speculation is nothing more than the confluence of having grown up as a preacher's kid followed up by years of therapy and a boat-load of drugs?
If I ask the question another way, though, I get answers I can use. If I ask, is the world marvelous and beautiful and miraculous because of its improbable existence, is evolution one of the strangest things of all time, then I know that randomness is not meaninglessness on a human scale. I do not live on a cosmic scale. A cosmic scale is important to some problems (like traveling to other stars) but it doesn't scale down. I can't "feel" the difference between a thousand years and a million years. It can be measured, and I can admire the elegant way events click into place over time to bring me to this very spot, but that understanding is not emotional or personal, it is entirely abstract. I have emotional and personal relationships to those abstracts, but not to those time frames or events themselves. Time may flow backwards at the quantum level, but for the moment, that has absolutely no relevance to my life. Why should I seek for meaning on a scale that I can't even experience?
I am I. That's what God told Moses from the burning bush. That's what I tell myself. The ontological questions are delightful in their own right, but they have no effect on my life-on-the-ground. I still have trouble hauling myself into work every morning, I still like sushi, and I still hate liver. Whatever and whoever I am, I am still I am.
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no subject
Date: 2003-09-04 04:34 pm (UTC)MKK
no subject
Date: 2003-09-05 01:54 pm (UTC)Actually, I think you're addressing a different issue. I agree with you, but whether or not we have free will is not the same question as whether or not it means anything.
Game pieces on a board have no free will, but they mean things within the context of the game, so even if we as individuals have no true ability to choose, nevertheless there could be ontological meaning in our lives and deaths. As people like to remind me constantly, God is very obscure and our suffering may serve purposes beyond our understanding. Personally, I think that explanation knocks a huge whole in the theory of a loving god, but many people have been known to disagree. Some at the point of a sword, in fact.
If, as seems likely to me, the universe came about at a random moment creating time and space, and largely random forces functioning within the framework of the material world bring us to this point, then our lives have no ontological meaning. Lacking validation from outside the mechanistic, vast, uncaring universe, are we meaningful? The question of who I am and what I am, is an iteration of that same question. Why am I born, why will I die, and why did I spend any of the intervening time wearing a digital watch?
It's true, whatever it is, we are stuck with it. But that's partly a depressive viewpoint. The slow, painful plodding of life isn't what life is about, but it sure constitutes the majority of my waking life. We do it because it's how we get to the next bit, and the bit after that. Whether or not it's worth the journey, well, I'm often of mixed minds myself. I don't make a very good fatalist, though.
Did I ever tell you that I figured out a good answer to the question, "Why don't I just kill myself?" It's a perfectly valid question, and there are days when it's very hard to think of a good reason not to. My answer, though, is, "Next year, the medtech will be better." Life may not mean anything, but eventually it might stop hurting, and that would be an awfully nice thing.
no subject
Date: 2003-11-14 01:14 am (UTC)Your diary helps me to continue feeling relatively normal.
Thankyou.
Polly, from Australia.
Assay, right-minded a check up on
Date: 2011-03-04 03:07 am (UTC)