FORWARD
This is probably the most pretentious story I’ve written yet. But I’m not letting that stop me.
There are many reasons why I didn’t move on to a Master’s program in philosophy after I completed my Bachelor’s degree. One of them is a profound lack of sympathy. I read Jean Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, for example, and thought, “Yeah, I’ve felt that way from time to time myself.” I just didn’t whine about it for seven hundred pages. In French. My response to Nietzsche less nuanced, and I was just afraid that Heidegger was going to give himself a coronary, given how hard he tried define “to be”. The poor fellow never succeeded, either.
Still, there are some areas of philosophy that continue to intrigue me. The nature of consciousness is particularly interesting, and I’ve spent a lot of time wrangling with the difference between consciousness and highly developed responsive behaviors. If we split open my epistemology professor’s head, for example, and instead of brains a million trained fleas poured out, and it turned out that he had just been a flea-controlled automaton all along, who’s to say he wasn’t conscious anyway? Philosophers worked on this question long before Alan Turing came along and named a test after himself. The answer — “Fuck if I know” — continues to inform philosophy and psychology to this day.
So inevitably I began to wonder whether the people around me actually had consciousness at all. Were they conscious entities, like me (I decided they were, by the way, just to soothe your possible concerns)? Or just very sophisticated flea machines? You can’t ask them, “Are you conscious?” because they would answer “Yes”, regardless of whether they were or weren’t because the fleas in their heads would be programmed to. But I continued to think about it, because it was an interesting way to frame questions of consciousness, epistemology, ontology, and ethics. I imagined a procedure which could take a conscious person, remove their consciousness, and yet retain their ability to interact fully with the world, and a world full of people like that. I even wondered what it would be like to be a person who interacted with the world but had no true sense of self. Well, of course, the answer is that it wouldn’t be like anything, because with no self that can experience the lack of self, the lack of self cannot be experienced.
I discovered, to my dismay, that there has already been a lot of work done in this field, though the philosophers who work with these concepts have the decency to use the term “zombie” to refer to de-consciousnessed people who continue to behave as though they were conscious. Technically, the term is “philosophical zombie”. Or, to those with a more Simon Peggish bent, “P-Zed”.
So anyway, I decided to deal with these issues in this week’s story of the week. I decided to use the term “animus” to refer to the consciousness, because it can act as such a cool root to a number of different related terms. I had fun playing around with point of view and tense as a way to express varying levels of experience of self; so any violations of rules related to these concepts were perpetrated deliberately. I’m interested in feedback to this story, if only because I want to know how well my messing around worked out.
Enjoy!
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