It Was So Refreshing

We look to experts - the famous, the respected, the elite, the peer-reviewed, the learned, people who are supposed to know, the well-paid, the acclaimed, the degreed, the successful - but feel no hope, see no light. Dry as dust. Same old, same old. Like that.

La Bohémienne endormie by Henri Rousseau

But then some fresh reality, like a child even, comes along and surprises us with the truth we were looking for in the wrong places.

I think now of how an art historian, probably my truest teacher, once described to me how he felt on visiting an exhibition of Henri Rousseau's paintings. He spoke of the experience just like a child, directly, purely: “I just felt so refreshed by it.”

 

The immediate reality before my eyes is a newly-published book by Nick Flynn, “The Reenactments,” in which a theme is that our consciousness is like a series of movies that run electro-chemically inside our heads. That's the latest mistaken metaphor for consciousness. That's the exact word being used - “movies” - not “film” not “cinema” not “shows.” My best guess is that this latest metaphor is derived from digital film files such as we download from YouTube or Netflix. It's the very latest metaphor in the materialist tradition. Quote used by Flynn, p. 47:

HEADLINE: Scientists Use Brain Imaging to Reveal the Movie in Our Mind (UC Berkeley News, 2011)

Imagine tapping into the mind of a coma patient, or watching ones own dream on YouTube. Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and computational models, UC Berkeley researchers have succeeded in decoding and reconstructing people's dynamic visual experiences – in this case watching Hollywood movie trailers.

As yet, the technology can only reconstruct movie clips people have already viewed [in the lab]. However, the breakthrough paves the way for reproducing the movies inside our heads that no one else sees, such as dreams and memories, according to researchers.

“This is a major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery,” said Professor Jack Gallant, a UC Berkeley neuroscientist and coauthor of the study published online today in the journal Current Biology. “We are opening a window into the movies in our minds.”

Now, as you read the original research report, here, a first reaction might be, 'Oh well, I guess these very sophisticated people know what they are talking about and have honestly confronted the philosophical/metaphysical assumptions about perception on which their research is based.

Is there someone inside the head who is conscious of the movie/consciousness? That's the “simple” but fundamental question that Flynn and some neurobiologists ask about this sophisticated scientific research. If consciousness is assumed to consist of electrochemically-formatted movies, then all there is is movies about movies! Is there some independent perceiver of the movies, or is this just same-old solipsism and lack of acknowledgement of the existence of anyone or thing else outside of one's own head?

I come back for the millionth time to love - appreciation of an other - being the basic but missing question of science, as Eben Alexander might put it, as well as everything else.

A neighbor lady needed some help with her car yesterday, and after I got it done I picked up and held her little four-year-old grand daughter who was with her and watching what was going on. This dear little girl was full of questions and also wanted to tell me about some gadget her mother had just given her. I thought that, yes, here is the essence of true non-solipsism. It was so refreshing. The Berkeley scientists' “breakthrough” seemed delusional and true-death beside it.