A Maze of Mirrors

by Benny Mattis

I recently watched a TED talk about mirror neurons, newly discovered brain cells that "reflect" the brain activity of other people.  When a particular action is performed, a specific corresponding neural firing pattern is, unsurprisingly, consistently conjoined with the performance of that action.  There is a subset of these activated neurons, called the mirror neurons, that is also activated when someone else is seen performing the action in question.  So, if "firing pattern X" is the activity observed in my brain when I open a door, a part of that pattern will also show up when I'm watching someone else open a door.  Upon observing me performing the action, roughly the same cluster of mirror neurons will be excited in their own brain, as well.

I think a good example of how these neurons presumably work is found in competitive rowing.  Crew is one sport that cannot be taught in books; the proper movements feel unnatural at first, and must be synchronized with everyone else in the boat.  How does this happen?  There are coaches, who definitely play an important role in noticing the shortcomings of each and every team member's technique--after all, mistakes that would be unnoticeable to an uneducated observer could make a noticeable impact over the course of a six-kilometer race.  But how do they point out flaws in technique?  Words usually aren't very useful, so they set the novice rowers in a place where they can view the varsity team.  When a novice is doing something incorrectly, they point to a varsity rower and say "See the way Jim is keeping his back at an angle?  Do that."  By seeing Jim's correct technique in action, the novice learns more than they ever could from mere language or still pictures.

Is this extra learning capacity the result of mirror neurons?  That's certainly a possibility.  In fact, Vilayanur Ramachandran suggests in the TED talk that these specific cells may have enabled us to accelerate the proliferation of tool use, shelter-building skills, language, and other technical knowledge for the last few hundred thousand years.   The idea is basically that mirror neurons turned us into evolutionary X-Men, building our civilization through technological (in the broadest sense of the word) leaps and bounds rather than slow hereditary adaptations.  If this is true, the ability to imitate others is a pillar of our modern industrial civilization.

Enter Isak Gerson.  In January of 2012, the then 19-year-old Swedish student succeeded in gaining official recognition from the Swedish government for the Missionary Church of Kopimism, a "religion" built around the practice of file-sharing.  The principles of Kopimism are posted on the Church's website:

-All knowledge to all

-The search for knowledge is sacred

-The circulation of knowledge is sacred

-The act of copying is sacred

In an interview with New Scientist, Gerson discloses that the Kopimists "worship the value of information by copying it."  Questioned about a Kopimist belief in the afterlife, Gerson responded: "Information doesn't really have a life, but I guess it can be forgotten, but as long as it is copied it won't be."

The apolitical aspects of Kopimism may seem like ad-hoc justifications for an organized illegal file-sharing culture, but I actually find in them a reflection of my own worldview.  My mother, for example, often says that you should be kind to others, follow the golden rule, etc. because others may end up imitating you, beginning a chain reaction of negativity.  Everyone is copying everyone else, and from this arises a sort of crude community-wide karmic reaction to nastiness.  To me, at least, this seems like one of the best ways to convince a hedonist to follow the golden rule.  A Kopimist basis for morality, perhaps?

Even eternal life is granted in some way through the communication of thoughts between people--as V proclaims in V for Vendetta (Warner Bros., 2005), "Ideas are bulletproof."  People looking for immortality usually don't care much about the fact that their matter and energy can't be destroyed--they want their phenomenal experience, what it is like to be them, to escape that very embodiment of mass and energy, even when it can no longer pump oxygen to the brain.  But what is language but the very transfer of this mental content?  Singularitarians like Ray Kurzweil want us to upload our souls into computers for eternal life, but the extent to which language actually communicates ideas is the extent to which we've already achieved this futuristic goal.  Who can listen to a particularly moving love song without feeling what it was like for the songwriter?  How can we even speak of "love" without communicating a complex mixture of feelings to the listener?  Of course, language isn't perfect, and this truth isn't likely to sate Kurzweil's appetite for immortality.  But there is more to earthly immortality than just a conscious memory of the dead; their habits and ideas, uploaded and preserved through spoken language and mirror neurons, could very well prolong the survival of what it was like to be them.

One must always be careful when mixing science with religion, and I suspect all this talk about immortality and karma sounds like a desperate pseudoscientific attempt at the resuscitation of dead gods.  Clearly, these things aren't the same as supernatural immortality or karma as found in popular Christianity or Buddhism, but they are facts about reality that do have similar consequences as--and grounds for analogy with--those religious concepts.  The importance of mirror neurons is that they show how these duplications of phenomenal information might transcend, and likely precede, the requirements of shared language or even shared species.

In Defense of Defense as Defense

by Benny Mattis

"Philosophy?  What are you gonna do with that? Become a philosopher?"

So replied a mildly intoxicated stranger (emphasis his) upon hearing of my current major at a recent social gathering.  Most other responses involve more of an attempt at politeness, but when they still end up saying things like 'Well, at least you're going to finish your degree,' the effect is not much different.  The now-expected grimacing expression usually changes when I tell them how effective a major in Philosophy can be in preparing one for graduate school.

Some people seem to use the word "philosophical" as a synonym for "irrelevant;" philosophical problems are certainly not practical, and everyone knows that practical matters have absolutely nothing to do with philosophy.  I doubt the possibility of a more ridiculous notion in a world where people regularly blow themselves up in public in the name of supposedly "philosophical" differences.  Given the obvious relevance of philosophy in this (and every) era, though, the question still remains of "What is it for?"

My interests in philosophy and martial arts developed largely in parallel and in response to their portrayals in pop culture.  The roles of philosopher and martial expert often coincide in the same character, such as Master Splinter from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Jedi of Star Wars, or Morpheus of The Matrix.  They're always "wicked cool,"as we say in Massachusetts, and confident in their fighting and thinking ability.  Thus, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of philosophy is to achieve total badassery, which naturally follows from investigating the nature of reality.

Unfortunately, that confidence often translates to total unjustified douchebaggery in practice, and an attitude of elitism among philosophy geeks is a significant cause of its relative lack in general popularity.  So, maybe it would be better to look for answers to this question elsewhere.

Socrates said that philosophy is preparation for death.  I agree with this statement, but not in the way Socrates meant it.  Socrates saw the search for clarity as a way to transcend material existence, but I do not share his contempt for the flesh.

An awareness of death encourages people to give up unnecessary illusions and focus on core issues, or what "really matters."  What is the process of death but the destruction of all the trifling distractions that bog down our everyday lives as time goes by?  Regardless of whether a next life is better, that is no reason to squander one's time here on earth, and the finitude of that time serves as a reminder of this.  The true philosopher, the one who recognizes what is most important in this life and acts accordingly, will have already torn down their illusions to the fullest extent possible, and death's sting of surprise will be lessened if not entirely nullified.  On the other hand, the worldview that relies on falsities and self-contradiction will collapse upon itself when reality closes in.  As Ayn Rand noted, "We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality."  And reality, as that which exists even when you stop thinking about it (Philip K. Dick), really does close in on the individual like an experienced martial expert.

So, philosophy for me is like a kind of mental mixed martial arts.  It's a training method by which someone can test the effectiveness of their worldview in making sense of reality, in the same way that MMA tests the effectiveness of various styles in making sense of how best to respond to an immediate threat.  If your style is incomplete or insufficient, you will lose a fight or end up conceding to your opponent in philosophical dialectic, but you can then learn a better style, a new way of looking at things that is more in tune with your personality and that of the opponent (or the truth of reality).

The most serious threats are the street thugs of false propaganda, as opposed to sincere, tournament-registered fellow seekers of truth.  Mixed martial arts may be an attempt to discover the ultimate fighting style, but it's doubtful that one philosophical system or principle will ever encompass all that philosophy aspires to explain.  The original and most relevant purpose of martial arts is reality-based self-defense, and the most relevant use of philosophy is simply to discount various manifestations of nonsensical bullshit.  As C.S. Lewis once said, "Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered."

W.W.B.J.S.H.D.

by Benny Mattis

The modern heretic, given an initial rejection of nihilism, is presented with the various religious traditions as the first place to look for answers that cannot be provided by indifferent scientific observation (namely, how one ought to live).  As Hume wrote, you can't derive an "ought" from an "is," and science is only concerned with what is.  But there is a strain in atheism that is less preoccupied by the thrills of deicide and more concerned with helping people come to terms with life without God; Sam Harris is a member of this group, and has been working on adapting Buddhist spirituality towards a more fulfilling secular life.

Harris recently tweeted a link to his speech at the 2012 Global Atheist Convention, entitled "Death and the Present Moment."  Never content to let the audience merely wallow in their shared disrespect for belief in the supernatural, he brings up what tends to be the elephant in the room among antagonistic atheists: the simple fact that a belief in the afterlife does bring people a great amount of comfort, and that a destruction of that belief can lead to a rather violent rude awakening to the injustice and overall absurdity of life on Earth.  Nobody's beliefs should be influenced by a desire to escape uncomfortable truths, and any serious religious folk would agree, but I'm glad Harris brought up this topic because, as he mentions, atheism is nothing more than a way of "clearing the space for better conversations" about the art of living.  The funny part is that it seems like these "better conversations" consist largely of reclaiming leftover pieces from the religious beliefs that had to be "cleared" out of the way in the first place.

So, how does Harris propose the modern infidel deal with suffering and finitude?  He notices that "If we're right, and nothing happens after death, death, therefore, is not a problem.  Life is the problem.  The problem is that, without God...life appears to be an emergency."  The constant demands of living in reality, Harris claims, are constantly tearing us away from well-being and towards stress and neuroticism.  A solution to this natural flight from the present into the future, linked to the decline from mindful appreciation to irritable discontentment, is the Buddhist practice of mindfulness meditation.  Harris takes it upon himself to lead his audience in a complimentary trial of this spiritual technique, advising them to avoid being swayed too much by their various 'objects of thought.'

I think here would be a good place to mention Slavoj Zizek.  Zizek, a self-professed Christian materialist, notes in his book The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity that Harris' brand of spiritualism can function rather well as a tool of harmful political ideology, currently leading people to become ultimately indifferent to some of the less-than-appealing aspects of global state capitalism; I wonder if it's just a coincidence that Harris, in his litany of uncomfortable truths and absurdities the modern man is presented with, mentions the dismal conditions of the workers who make Apple products in China and elsewhere.  Zizek would likely say that the way to find true well-being in the face of such suffering would not be to discount 'thought objects' of future justice in order to accept the present as it is, but rather to make that future a reality by working ceaselessly for it in the present, losing not one's attachment to justice, but rather one's attachments to inner peace and even survival.  In other words, you can only really live by finding something you'd be willing to die for; a world of emergency is, therefore, full of opportunities for truly meaningful existence.

This concern regarding indifference to injustice finds its object in Harris's talk about the conscience.  "If you're constantly ruminating on what you just did, or what you should've done, or would've done if only you'd had the chance, you will miss your life," warns Harris.  "The conversation we have with ourselves every every minute of the day comes at a cost.  I'm not saying that discursive thought is not necessary or useful, but it is the mechanism by which most of our suffering is inflicted."  Harris paid his respects to the late Christopher Hitchens in the beginning, but hearing this part of the speech reminded me of Hitchens's praise for the "inner witness" as the primary source of morality, and I don't think Harris's own view on 'ethical intuitions subject to rational justification' is much different.  So, it would seem that Sam Harris, champion of secular ethics, in this speech advocates for a moral moderation of sorts.  But is this much better than the so-called religious moderation that he so (rightfully) detests?  If one's ethical intuitions must be domesticated and controlled to avoid stress, then how does one know when to actually pay attention to them?

The problem when life stops appearing emergent is is one of boredom and anxiety.  What is there to do once you've escaped the vicious incarnate cycle of attachment to virtue?  No action can be justified or condemned, not even by one's own 'objects of thought.'  Real anxiety comes not with moral sensitivity, but at a distance from the self-evident validity of those stress-inducing ethical intuitions.

Yet, this is not a problem for Harris or the Buddha.  They do not discount all the value of human well-being, but take it upon themselves to spread their teachings into the rest of the world.  Like Christ, who "Being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant" (Philippians 2:6-7), Sidhartha Gautama, being in very nature Enlightened, gave up the isolated bliss of nirvana by investing himself in the spread of wisdom throughout the world.  As Harris tries to bring back morality without anxiety and guilt, so too Jesus "Redeemed us from the curse of the Law" (Galatians 3:13), forgiving past sins without destroying the role of morality as an imperative to progress.  Once detachment has been achieved, re-attachment or Christian love can be chosen by a free choice, in spite of the suffering that comes with it.

What if Buddhism, like Atheism, is just a way of "clearing the space for better conversations?"  What if those conversations lead back from detachment and nirvana to a conscious embrace of attachment and its resultant suffering?  Zizek wants to set Christianity and Marxism in opposition to a bourgeois spiritual detachment from significance, but it seems like the love and sacrifice of Christ may only be fully understood through the Buddhist lens of attachment and nirvana.  Next time you're faced with a moral dilemma, be sure to ask yourself: "What Would the Buddha, Jesus, and Sam Harris Do?"