Zen Physics

I'm a dualist -- can't help it, always have been -- no matter how eloquently Hofstadter tells me that I am a strange loop. And I just don't buy the bit about reincarnation. I've studied reincarnation from every angle, and it has simply never made sense to me.

Until now, that is.

I recently opened David Darling's 1996 book titled Zen Physics: The Science of Death, the Logic of Reincarnation prepared to defeat any and all of his arguments in support of reincarnation, but then he goes and blindsides me with this:

We are the products of our life stories. [...] So, inevitably, a lot of what we remember is not what actually happened--whatever this may mean--but rather a kind of myth or confabulation that helps us sustain the impression that we know what is going on. [...] We maintain a sense of continuity and so provide a basis for our feeling of personal identity at the cost of never knowing what is true. We are as much a myth as the stories we tell ourselves. (35-36)

This makes perfect sense from a Campbellian perspective, and from there Darling continues to chip away at every wall of incredulity. He goes on to show how the brain is a memory device, nothing more, and certainly not the source of consciousness as Hofstadter would contend. It is, in fact, a filter that limits our awareness of the singular consciousness that is the universe at large. Moreover, the brain seems to have a built-in storyteller that puts everything (i.e., the insignificant amount of data actually processed and stored by the brain) into a "single coherent narrative." With a nod to Hua-Yen Buddhism and Indra's Net of Gems, Darling advances into a discussion of Zen and quantum mechanics to show how upon death we will each undergo secular reincarnation into a new and previously unknown example of fragmented consciousness, each with a new story to tell.

If all the world's a stage, then the universe must be a multiplex theatre.

Maybe God's just a film buff.

I Am a Myth

As I reviewed Hofstadter last week, I enjoyed rereading another of his Platonic dialogues, "A Courteous Crossing of Words," this one between SL #641--a believer in the ideas of I Am a Strange Loop--and SL #642--a doubter of the ideas of I Am a Strange Loop:

SL #641: Earlier, I described your "I" as a self-reinforcing structure and a self-reinforcing story, but now I'll risk annoying you by calling it a self-reinforcing myth [emphasis is Hofstadter's].

SL #642: A myth?! I'm certainly not a myth, and I'm here to tell you so. (291)

SL #641 then explains itself this way:

The "I" -- yours, mine, everyone's -- is a tremendously effective illusion, and falling for it has fantastic survival value. Our "I"'s are self-reinforcing illusions that are an inevitable by-product of strange loops, which are themselves an inevitable by-product of symbol-possessing brains that guide bodies through the dangerous straits and treacherous waters of life. (291)

Such dramatic language would seem to invite literary support, but first we find support from another take on the physics of thought -- Zen Physics:

We are the products of our life stories. [...] So, inevitably, a lot of what we remember is not what actually happened--whatever this may mean--but rather a kind of myth or confabulation that helps us sustain the impression that we know what is going on. [...] We maintain a sense of continuity and so provide a basis for our feeling of personal identity at the cost of never knowing what is true. We are as much a myth as the stories we tell ourselves. (Darling, 1996, 35-36)

Darling goes on to assert that "[t]he brain, in effect, appears to have a resident storyteller that works ceaselessly to link everything that comes to its attention into a single coherent narrative" (87).

A single coherent narrative. A myth. A monomyth. That's what Joyce called it in Finnegans Wake, and it would become the basis of Joseph Campbell's concept of the hero's journey:

The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation--initiation--return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth. (Campbell, 1949, 30)

Separation--initiation--return. We do it over and over; furthermore, we remember each iteration and use it to inform the next iteration of the set of strange loops we call life. And the lifestory that we construct becomes a myth with a single protagonist: I.

So what is myth?

For Marshall McLuhan, myth "is the mode of simultaneous awareness of a complex group of causes and effects" (McLuhan, 1962, 266). This "complex group of causes and effects" is simply another way to express strange loops of separation--initiation--return; therefore, McLuhan's definition of myth would certainly support both Darling and Hofstadter. But James P. Carse gives us, perhaps, the most concrete definition of myth:

Myths [...] are not stories that have meanings, but stories that give meanings" (Carse, 1986).

Without myth, life would have no meaning. That is why I am a myth.