random thoughts on a cold sunday night

[leezyfosheezy]

i had a nice, long talk with jesse tonight about the mutual feeling we both have that everything we do is seemingly without purpose. if the purpose is there, it is invisible to us, and as such it is incredibly hard to get motivated to do anything at all. it's terrible, really. this is how it's been since i can remember, but i've had enough stuff to

Comments

[maddict]

This might seem odd, but I think your nausea is profoundly Protestant. It would make sense: for 90% of your life, your emotional experiences (and the attendant neural architecture) were under the overpowering influence of a Church of Christ environment.

I'm trying not to sound like an authority here or anything--so assume everything I'm saying is theoretical and debatable.

A real atheist is possibly the last thing any of us will ever be. We've all grown up in Christian households where the moral environment came about from people who willingly thought like Christians. Environmental adversity--pain--is perhaps the one universal experiential constant: everyone suffers. However, the way we respond to that suffering differs widely, and more or less determines the direction of our entire ethical outlook. But I want to insist on the link between epistemology and neurology. Stress influences your intellectual perspective as well as your physical neural infrastructure. By instructing you on how to respond to stress physically and mentally, how to talk about it, how to understand it, how to deal with it, the "epistemic community" of your childhood shapes both your mind and brain. So in a very real, tangible sense, we grew up under circumstances where our brains were shaped to approximately match those of our community.

My personal definition of fascism is any society where there exists an abstract brain that all citizens are intended to approximate, perhaps asymptotically. In the case of Christianity, this perfect brain is Christ's. The goal of all indoctrination and ritual would be to reinforce certain patterns of thought which have a physical neuroanatomical manifestation. This might be a wild misappropriation of neuropsychology, but it seems to me that, in theory, if we could develop technology that was subtle enough, we could perform surgery to change the way people think. Electroshock therapy and lobotomies are two antiquated methods of brain-control, which have been accepted and encouraged by the scientific community for decades, centuries, millenia (Egyptian brain surgery). Today, the practice has been updated in the form of antidepressant drugs. I'd simply try and establish a connection between the ethics of brain-control and those of mind- or thought-control. By thus linking your social environment with your neuroanatomy, we would be entering into an ethical realm where censorship and lobotomy had the same end in mind, and would have to be engaged with simultaneously as two points on a larger gradient of fascist information processing. The causal relationship between the society and the synapse, whether it's linear or circular (or something else? zigzag?), is a false question to me.

Now, while framing it in terms of "what Christ would do" or "what God would say", we make it easier to distance ourselves from this kind of fascist epistemology. But really, we're talking about the nature of epistemic authority. We're talking about who you can trust and how you're supposed to act. To me, abandoning the idea that there is one correct answer or one objective reality or one good morality, means abandoning the idea that there is one good shape for a brain to have. But am I really arguing that intellectual disagreements come down to a difference in synaptic arrangements? ...I think I might be.