email #54, continued -- there was only enough content for one email, but it lasted... 8?? (at least 2)

[Leon Kraiem]

Hi friends,

Before we get started: My friend Annie, the data analyst, still needs a job before her work visa to the US expires. Do let me know if you know of/think of anything. 

Also, chag sameach. 

You should listen to my Chanukah playlist before the holiday is over. It’s very good.

There’s plenty to be said, also, about what happened in Australia — but plenty of people are saying it.

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Like a week and a half ago, I wrote a long email about an obscure metaphysical theory I’ve gotten into of late, and said I had further thoughts, but that they’d come separately.

One of my justifications for breaking the emails up (beyond just 'I didn’t get that far') was that these concepts are hard to wrap your head around and even harder to explain, and so I decided to pause and make sure I'd gotten the basic idea across before I started riffing on it. I invited you to respond, to tell me if my recapitulation of the theory made sense or not.

A few of you took me up on it, and literally none of you said it made sense. However, at least one of you said you’d enjoy more emails about it anyway. That was sweet. 

It’s currently about 2am, I’ve just finished a shift and I can’t manage to go to sleep (I tried for a whole five minutes or so), and it’s quiet and peaceful, so I think I’ll try to straighten out what was going to be ‘part 2’ of that email, that I axed and said I’d edit later. 

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If you actually want to follow along at home, you should probably revisit Part 1 — or, better yet, read ‘Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell’ by Bernardo Kastrup (my copy has been lent to one of you, and I quite like the idea of it floating around the neighborhood for a while, as other books of mine have), or listen to an interview with him, etc. He understands this theory better than I do, and he is better at explaining it than I am.

But, on one foot: The theory (as I understand it) is that the world is not made of stuff, from which consciousness (or ‘experience,’ or ‘mentation,’ whatever word you want to use) sometimes, somehow emerges; rather, ‘stuff’ is just what experience looks like, from the outside. Everything around us, is some sort of mental state. The reason some globs of consciousness appear to us as having size, weight, etc., is just that they aren’t experiences we’re currently having. 

Does that make sense? It probably doesn’t. And anyway, even if I explained the theory perfectly, and you understood it perfectly, for it to start clicking intuitively you’ll probably have to actively chew on it for a few days. I did, at least. Which brings us to what I want to talk about this time.

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I’m curious whether, when you’ve had a few days to play with this theory, enough that you’re able to ‘put those glasses on’ for a moment or two, to look at the world and interpret it as an Analytic Idealist would, you’ll have the same experience my dad and I did.

Which is that when you have another person in front of you, and you see that person — their expression, their posture, their hairdo, their outfit — not as a physical body (including a brain) that somehow produces an experience, but rather as what it’s like to be them, visible from the outside — the encounter is just, better. You find yourself palpably closer to the person you’re interacting with, like when you’ve been listening to the radio a little off-frequency, and then finally you get the dial to just the right place, and there’s no static anymore.

Now, I don’t know why that’s the case — set that question aside for a moment — the point is, it is. At least for me.

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To make this a little more concrete: 

Since my dad retired, he’s been moonlighting as a volunteer hospital chaplain. In the days after he read the Kastrup book, he told me, his visits with patients were noticeably more powerful, and — it seemed — more helpful. Moreover, the theory, which had been so hard to grasp in the abstract, became intuitive. “I walk into this room, with this guy who’s in terrible pain — and you know what? He looks exactly like what being in terrible pain feels like,” my dad said. “A little old lady, who’s anxious about whether her daughter will be okay. When I take the view that I’m seeing, and hearing, and hugging, that anxiety itself — I’m so much better at holding some of it.” 

 When my dad shared that observation with me, I found it interesting, but it wasn’t an experience I’d had myself. That happened the next day, with a dog.

Specifically, a Siberian Husky named Ace, who was just adopted by some dear friends of mine in Riverdale. (Sidenote: their kids — who have been raised primarily in Yiddish — immediately took to calling Ace ‘Eisav.’ My dad and I both find this vaguely insulting toward the original, Biblical Esau — but interestingly, that intuition seems not to be shared by most of my friends, who tell me they’d also name a dog Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob. My hypothesis: It’s the Syrian in us. Not big into dogs over there. Anyway,) I went up to Riverdale to meet this Ace, and as I sat in my friends’ living room watching him sniff and stroll, I found myself putting these new metaphysical glasses on, and then taking them off, and then putting them on again.

Now, I can’t imagine what it’s like to be Ace. I can’t smell a fraction of what he can smell, for one thing, nor do I know what it’s like to walk on four legs, or to be covered in a coat of thick hair all over your body (unlike the dog taboo, I didn’t inherit that particular gene from my Syrian side). But those are the little things. What I’m really curious about is: what’s it like for him to be curious? how does affection feel, to a husky? Ace is already exhibiting a sort of loyalty to his family — does he think about them when they're not there? and he’s so gentle when the baby puts her hands on him, he clearly gets that she’s more vulnerable than the boys — what’s that like? What’s going on in there? What’s it like to be Ace?

 I still don’t know. This theory I’m trying on doesn’t help me imagine what it’s like to be Ace. But when I adopt it for a moment, and I see what it’s like to be him, whatever that is, walking toward me, and I get to scratch its belly — when what it’s like to be me right now makes direct, tangible contact with what it’s like to be him right now, with nothing, ultimately, in between -- that species gap between the two of us, the chasm left by eons of divergent evolution, somehow feels a lot more bridgeable than it does when I look at both of us as made of physical stuff, from which consciousness happened to emerge.

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I’m aware, as I write this, that I’m sort of talking around this experience, more than I am actually describing it. That’s because capturing any experience in words is hard, near-impossible.

That’s, incidentally, why really good fiction is bona fide magic, and George Eliot was an actual (benevolent) witch. It may also be why we kept burning witches at the stake, and tarring and feathering people, for thousands of years, and then abruptly stopped. I read a book in college ('Inventing Human Rights: A History,' by Lynn Hunt) that tied the emergence of the anti-torture movement in the West to the emergence of the novel as a popular form of literature. It was only when people read, to themselves in private, descriptions of another person’s subjective experience, that the whole idea of human rights, of the individual person as the locus of moral standing, took root. I found myself thinking about that, amid this consciousness business.

 

Before I close, It’s worth reiterating that Analytic Idealism (as I understand it) makes no normative claims, in and of itself. This isn’t a theory about how things ought to be, nor is it an argument in favor of choosing to look at things a particular way, e.g. because that way of looking at things makes you more empathetic, or compassionate, or respectful. The claim that the physical world is just conscious experience seen from the outside is a strictly descriptive one. 

And yet.

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Alright, there’s part 2. Next up, Buber. 

Jerusalem folks: I'm working from home from mid-afternoon until 11pm or midnight Mon.-Thurs. this week; the door is always open for you to come co-work/hang out/eat my snacks, etc. So if you're passing by -- knock on my door and say hello!

Also, if anyone wants to park themselves earlier in the day at a cafe or something, I'm applying for a bunch of things w/ new years deadlines, and would love company for that, too. Much to do! Days to seize!

As always, I am alive, and I am well -- thanks to others, not all of whom are.

Know that I will be making 'I haven't seen you since last year' jokes well into February, so prepare to forgive me for it now.

Finally: Jerusalem has one Santa that people go to, except instead of your uncle at the mall it's a Greek Orthodox guy named Issa who used to be a professional basketball player; he lives in the Old City, his 'workshop' is a 700-year-old building in the Christian Quarter, and he rides a camel in lieu of a sleigh -- I doubt I'll have time to convey any messages to him, but that felt like a worthwhile fact to share anyway.

May all your oil last for eight long nights, and all 14 of your cows be well-fed,

Leon