Differentiation and separateness, loneliness and togetherness

Long absence from me blog - much on, and a bit of a lapse in faith in the value of my blogging. Still, here we go again...

We are highly differentiated matter. We start as two cells and very rapidly become more complex and differentiated. Some bits of us are a liver, other bits an ear or an optic nerve. That’s how we are, in ourselves. But maybe we over-differentiate ourselves from everything else around us.

Difficulties – unhappinesses–arise when we feel ourselves to be totally different, entirely separate from everyone else, from the rest of life on the planet, from the planet itself and the universe it moves with. An ultimate loneliness, you might say.

Then the time comes, relatively gradually for many of us, mercifully abruptly for others, when the energy which sustains this differentiation dies away, and so do we. We are then still matter, but a lot less differentiated, no longer a set of processes working together.

All of this is also valid for living creatures in general, but there’s one big difference: we know this last dissociation is going to happen, not only knowing it just before it happens (a gazelle when a cheetah lands on its back) but for most of our lives. Our consciousness of ourselves as differentiated, as a self separate from everything else, knows it.

Much in our cultures and ways of life at present strengthens our sense of being a separate self, a differentiated ego. I’m not sure we could survive in our world, as we’ve adapted it, without this ego.

We even differentiate between our egos (our minds) and our bodies. I think for much of my life I semi-consciously regarded my body as what I made use of to cart my brain around. 

Now I have slowed down and calmed down (relatively speaking!) I am able feel much more strongly that I am one set of systems encompassing toenails, eyeballs, brain – areas of the same thing. I have come to feel that there isn’t a “mind/body problem.” That dualism is the fault of Descartes and his "I think, therefore I am." I wish he'd said "I am, and I think. It's part of what I am."

Recent reports about the way our guts (literally speaking) are part of how we feel and think support this conception. We're a lot more than the tightly focused, reasoning consciousness that I guess Descartes was referring to. Much of our brain's activity is below the radar of our reasoning minds.

That’s not to deny that consciousness is a fascinatingly complex and problematical phenomenon - philosophically, psychologically and physically. What's the difference between a mind and a brain, between me and someone else, headwise?

I think it was Dennet who explained that a brain is a thing in a body, much resembling other brains, whereas a mind, a unique set of procedures and processes, is what a brain does. A brain is, a mind does. 

A car is a set of mechanical and electronic systems, but it’s not a journey. A journey is what a car does. A mind is bound to be unique, because it is formed by a brain out of an individual set of life circumstances and genetic inheritaces.

But if my mind is unique (just as well, I might think, on a bad day!) that doesn't mean I'm uniquely alone in the universe. That horrible, crushing, depressive feeling seems to me to be a dangerous illusion.

In the book from his TV show "The Brain," David Eaglemann makes the point that our networks of neurons are so much linked in with other people's networks of neurons, that we (homo sapiens) could be seen as one huge network. 

And I guess the more we internet each other, the truer that becomes - for better or worse, because the internet also creates "the other," s/he who must be opposed. Just look at Fkbook at election time!

So each of us is unique, but none of us is truly alone in the universe. "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower, drives my green age." 

We belong to each other. 
We are of and in each other.
We are of and in "IT" (everything else.)