“One never loves enough. . . for what came through the open door was the realisation of Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact.”
Aldous Huxley
The only philosophical problem is suicide. So Camus begins his work The Myth of Sisyphus in which he asks the question of whether the realisation of the absurdity of reality makes existence itself and our need for meaning still justified. His conclusion, after considering Sisyphus labouring for eternity to push a rock up a hill, is that “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
Of course many things in life constitute happiness, purpose or meaning, but many people without these things are not exactly suicidal by definition. Many people live lives of atrocious suffering, of mundane existence many would consider unimaginably dull or undesirable, and still simply exist.
The comedian Dave Chappelle starts one of his live Netflix specials by comparing the suicide of Anthony Bourdain, a rich chef whose job was to fly around meeting people and eating delicious food, and an old friend of Dave's who had got divorced, was at home living with his parents having had his money and career ruined by divorce and was perfectly happily plodding along working at footlocker.
Indeed suicide seems to be characteristic of a particular kind of mental illness, our baseline, our ordinary mode is to carry on and many with apparently meaningless lives can have a simple kind of satisfaction with existence. Whatever we might add to existence, existence for most people is a good by itself.
But by existence what we mean is consciousness. Consciousness is the ground of what makes your existence good, if I told you tomorrow you’d still be alive but your consciousness would cease and you’d just be a biological ‘zombie’ acting without actually possessing conscious experience, you would probably consider that hardly any different from being dead. Likewise if I said your body would die but your consciousness would continue to live on outside of it, you’d probably still call that life, indeed what else do we mean by life after death?
You might of course make the observation that the reason we continue to choose to exist is behavioural rather than because of consciousness itself, the basic rule of life is survival and propagation, and we are all built to just carry on existing as long as we can, just like plants and trees and every other animal on planet earth.
Yet the separation between behaviour and consciousness is somewhat problematic, even if it feels like the inevitable conclusion of a scientific approach to the mind. In his book Homo Deus Yuval Noah Harari compares consciousness to the noise coming from a jet engine, calling it nothing but “mental pollution”:
…consciousness may be a kind of mental pollution produced by the firing of complex neural networks. It doesn’t do anything. It is just there. If this is true, it implies that all the pain and pleasure experienced by billions of creatures for millions of years is just mental pollution. This is certainly a thought worth thinking, even if it isn’t true. But it is quite amazing to realise that as of 2016, this is the best theory of consciousness that contemporary science has to offer us. (1)
None of what he says here is contradictory to Camus’ conclusion about Sisyphus, if it is the meaning achieved pushing a rock up a hill that makes life worth living then the problem of existence is behavioural, explained by the hit of dopamine and endorphins at the top of the hill, and the next hill, and the next hill. Consciousness is just there experiencing it like the noise from the jet engine. Take it away and you would still roll the stone for the dopamine hit, or at least in theory.
Is it just meaning that keeps us going though? There is no doubt that meaninglessness is a problem, and indeed a characteristic of depression is a loss of the intrinsic pleasure that comes with doing things that give your life meaning. But on reflection it’s hard to reduce much of life’s meaning to stones and hills and Andrew Huberman style dopamine hacks. Meaning is complex, meaning is people and places, memory and history and a general sense of purpose and identity that cannot be boiled down to achievement or particular motivations reducible to firings of neurotransmitters.
But if we assume consciousness and action are not so easy to seperate as a materialist at the dead end of materialistic science would like to tell you, then they are ultimately aspects of the same thing. As I mentioned, for many people it is the continuation of consciousness that defines much of the basis of life, and in spite of the increasing of calls for assisted dying, even the sick or the elderly are hardly desperately trying to cease their existence. Philosopher Thomas Nagel put it on an essay on death:
There are elements which, if added to one’s experience, make life better; there are other elements which if added to one’s experience, make life worse. But what remains when these are set aside is not merely neutral: it is emphatically positive. … The additional positive weight is supplied by experience itself, rather than by any of its consequences. (2)
I don’t know about you, but on reflection I feel one of the most basic reasons I as a creature wish to exist tomorrow is consciousness. I may not push any rocks up any hills tomorrow, but without consciousness I have no meaning to experience. It is not the meaning itself that is good, it is the experience of that meaning. Experience is what is good, consciousness is the drug of life.
Except, what really is consciousness? I guess no one and everyone knows. What Yuval Noah Harari is pointing out when he says the best theory we have is that consciousness is just “mental pollution” is another way of saying we actually don’t have any theory whatsoever and some scientists inclined towards cynical reductionism are content to leave it at that.
But suggesting the basic reason for experience being good is nothing more than the noise from a jet engine seems eminently ridiculous, it is unsatisfying both as a valuation of something that seems clearly valuable, but also without any explanatory usefulness whatsoever. If “It doesn’t do anything. It is just there”, why on earth is it there? Or to put it more simply, why are you experiencing things and why is that experience itself good?
There is always the possibility that we might see consciousness not as a thing we possess among other things but something much more intrinsic to reality itself. Indeed consciousness is intrinsic to reality just by its basic fact of existence. If I want to explain how it is that an eye or a flower exists we generally assume I explain its nature by reducing it to the things that compose it, and so compose the nature of all things. What is an eye? Atoms. But atoms cannot be the answer to the question, ‘what is consciousness?’ because consciousness is an intrinsic quality by itself, it just exists, and quality itself cannot be reduced to anything but what it already is.
Of course part of the problem this raises brings us to how little we actually understand about reality. Understanding that water is made of atoms doesn’t really tell us what the nature of water itself actually is, nor does it tell us how it is that it possesses emergent properties such as wetness. Reality as we understand it comes with a kind of level problem, we like to believe in theory that history is explained by biology, biology by chemistry, chemistry by physics and physics by mathematical principles, yet consciousness itself is the obvious defeater of this assumption: whatever consciousness is, it cannot be a mathematical principle, and all fancy ideas attempting to explain it such as ‘Integrated Information Theory’ can offer is an attempt at correlation with physical properties, formulas that describe the jet engine but not the noise.
Strangely religions for countless millennia have been making what we regard as the wacky conflation between the ground of creation, consciousness and goodness or love. Hinduism perhaps most neatly packages this with its identification of the Atman, the individual soul with the Brahman, the ground of all being and reality. A passage in the Chandogya Upanishad, written somewhere between the 8th to 6th centuries BC says: “The Spirit who is in the body does not grow old and does not die, and no one can ever kill the Spirit who is everlasting. This is the real castle of Brahman wherein dwells all the love of the universe. It is Atman, pure Spirit, beyond sorrow, old age, and death; beyond evil and hunger and thirst. It is Atman whose love is Truth, whose thoughts are Truth. Even as here on earth the attendants of a king obey their king wherever he goes, so all love which is Truth and all thoughts of Truth obey the Atman, the Spirit. And even as here on earth all work done in time ends in time, so in the worlds to come even the good works of the past pass away. Therefore those who leave this world and have not found their soul, and that love which is not Truth, find not their freedom in other worlds. But those who leave this world and have found their soul and that love which is Truth, for them there is the liberty of the Spirit, in this world and in the worlds to come.”
This was a conclusion arrived at by the bearers of counterculture in the latter half of the twentieth century who took psychedelics and had experiences of consciousness apparently borne from its confines of the ego. Indeed many who take drugs such as psilocybin, in an oddly similar way to near death experiences, claim to have experienced consciousness somehow freed of its bounds in a way best expressed by William Blake, who said “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” Aldous Huxley after his experiences with LSD would write, as I quoted at the start of this essay: “One never loves enough. . . for what came through the open door was the realisation of Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact.”
Were these people revivers of ancient wisdom or just hippies who took too many drugs? Certainly as Roger Scruton put it “you certainly cannot achieve the goal of philosophy merely by swallowing a drug”, but in many ways the idea that consciousness is nothing but the meaningless roar of a jet engine is a view of a narrow few in our relatively recent time as materialism has led itself down an alleyway with a brick wall at its end. Since it seems consciousness cannot be objectified as a property it must either be left as a waste product we cannot explain, or we must take seriously the idea that its reality is much more fundamental to our nature than we currently accept. It’s a reflection of the absurdity of our time that such a proposition seems far out instead of glaringly obvious, and who knows, it might even be exactly what our chaotic world needs to realise that such a fundamental nature is itself the good for which we exist, a good that we once used to believe in by another name.
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"materialism has led itself down an alleyway with a brick wall at its end"
The best summation of materialism I have come across. And the emptiness of the drug experience is but an endless chasing of one's tail (or someone else's.)