I want to say that I love these questions. All of them. I can barely begin to answer them, but they buzz with the vibrancy of indicated insight. They are good questions.
Q2 in particular reminded me of the opening lines to the second section of Don DeLillo’s Point Omega,
The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not be anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we’re alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments.
Now, these are the words of a character named Richard Elster, who, like Robert McNamara with Vietnam, in the book is one of the intellectual architects of a more recent war. He has retreated to the remote desert to contemplate the empty space and silence, and now a young filmmaker has come wanting to make him the subject of a brooding art film. Then his daughter, a very weird character, arrives for her own strange reasons, and the situation soon unravels.
The notion of “true life” recurs throughout the novel, though not with the intellectual pep of Socrates. Rather, this is a man who is burned out on the world, who is probably at least partially responsible for countless deaths in distant countries, which some part of him still justifies with bitter wisdom. Now he feels called to embrace the death space in a final arc of silent tragedy.
The True Life is not an abstract ideal but rather the “submicrospic moments,” which are not necessarily the highlights or most dramatic episodes of life, but those transitional blurs when we are strangely in touch with ourselves, there is a feeling to how we are, and we may be doing nothing in particular. I feel this sense of my life sometimes when I am up in the middle of the night, going to the bathroom, or in the hypnagogic state between waking and sleep, or when we’re out for a walk and perhaps I’m just watching my daughters play in a playground, and I am noticing the clouds, sunshine, birds, and the whole scene is kind of hazy and layered. And there is a feeling, too, of everythingness and the faint sense of a secret pact one has made with oblivion.
It seems there will be a lot regarding “I” in this book. I am curious how intersubjectivity will be honored. There can be no “I,” I would say, without “We,” not to mention “You” and “It.” There is deeper grammar involved here. We never encounter a brain that doesn’t already belong to a group of brains. Brains come from other brains. I have barely read Hofstadter before (just some of GEB), and just glancing at his acknowledgements he is obviously writing out of a different tradition than I am versed in, much more slanted to computational models. It all sounds very interesting. We have explored idealist, consciousness-first, anti-physicalist, spiritualist, and integral approaches in the Café. Why not see where a purely physical description of consciousness takes us?
Thanks, Ewere, John, and Doug for sponsoring this series of events.