(In case anyone is wondering, everything in a box was written by me between 2003 and 2004)

The second most important book I have ever read, I read in October 2003. Paul Broks “Into The Silent Land” is a neuropsychologist’s journey into the physical make up of the mind, and much further, ending up with two strands that at once break you heart and make you feel alive. Oliver Sacks was his inspiration as a writer, but whereby Oliver Sacks – particularly in “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat” presents a shop window of remarkable mental occurences, Paul Broks cannot help but become involved in the meaning of what is going on in his patients’ minds.

Paul Broks shook me out of innocence.

Where is the self? Is it hidden in a tiny part of the brain – a soul that hides from damage or intrusion?

But if the self is a physical soul, then we must be connected to it. It must sense and emote as we do; it must be us. So where is it?

Is it floating in space, enveloping us, each cell, each molecule? Billions of tiny homunculi, each contributing to our sense of self. But it must still be us, otherwise how would we know what we are? Maybe it’s a casual observer, safe from harm, feeding into our senses the information that makes us what we are.

Or maybe we are just brain matter. A tide of emotions, generated as feelings from within – memories as internal senses – visual, auditory and kinaesthetic, just bypassing the sensory organs. The passing of time as a set of biological cues from our internal clock which can be set against those memories, all laid out in chronological order.

What are we?

Are we just our hardware; bones, tissue, organs?

If so, then what makes us each so different? Different people. The way our brains are organised, the neural connections laid out by each experience, each shock, pleasure, guilt and fear?

Do we see ourselves as others see us? If we got inside someone else’s head, what would we see – ourselves from the outside, or a new host from the inside?

Each atom in our body is changed every 12 years – we are not who we once were. But we are still us.

Too many questions.

I learnt about the nature of self, and tried to understand who we really are. Broks pointed me towards Derek Parfit, possible the most important living Philosopher; who I will write about later – the person who allowed me to find the meaning of my life.

As I sat, numb from Broks’ book, I tried to put us into perspective. What if we really are just pieces of meat? Does it matter to anyone but ourselves?

Let’s accept, for the purpose of this thought, that there is no soul. No central point of activity into and out of which all sense, memory and thought are channelled, and which can be called “the self”. It is a difficult idea to hold – surely we are inside something, looking out – but in all likelihood our “self” is just a collection of impulses that have differing effects on our internal senses.

That being the case, then we can be rightfully classified as an organism; a part of the global environment. We may think we are special, and indeed we are, by our own terms, far more skilled than any other organism, and far more able to induce change in the environment. But that does not mean that we are any more important than a member of an ant community or a tree in the forest.

We are clearly aware of our presence, as are maybe all organisms. But it is clearly absurd to say that a tree can think – isn’t it? So we take on the role of supreme organism, at the very top of the global ecology. But the strange think about ecologies is that what happens at the top is not nearly as important as what happens at the bottom. To put it another way, our interactions with other organisms are predatory and dependent. In the natural world, nothing depends on humans surviving, but a great deal of benefit would come about if our predatory nature were removed from earth – an ecological balance could be restored, over time, which would not be subject to our desires.

This brings us back to the self. We think we matter because, to each individual, we are egotistically central to what is important to us. If we do not exist physically, then the self cannot exist. Therefore, we make the most of our existence by satisfying our needs. We are naturally selfish.

But, if we are really just physical matter, albeit designed and programmed in a unique way, then our non-existance really doesn’t matter. If we go, then our self goes, and we are none the wiser.

I felt very small.

Keith Farnish
www.theearthblog.org
www.reduce3.com
And Proud Member of The Sietch