Paul Broks' Into the Silent Land is the new fave.
The other book, John Conroy's Belfast Diary, is perhaps too striking and too thought-provoking to be instantly liked. It would not make a good Christmas gift. It's something you read and mull over and don't necessarily foist upon your friends. How do humans manage to live in a the midst of a simmering conflict, of random sectarian violence and random official persecution? And what of the intimacy of the conflict? Your neighbors betray you; your foes are quirky, human, and deadly. It's hard to agree on a story, even, at the end of it all.
It's easier to retreat into the mind, the "silent land" of Broks' title. There's no easy answer here, either, but it's a Not Knowing with which I can easily agree.
Wouldn't it be absurd for an airline pilot to deny knowledge of the principles of flight, or for a physician to claim ignorance of the basics of human physiology and anatomy? Yet I, a neuropsychologist, can give no satisfactory account of how the brain generates conscious awareness (p 92).
So, does conscious awareness have a physical location: mine, here and now...precisely somewhere between my ears? Self-evidently, it seems. But then, go into the skull; visit the brain's interior workings and you will see that there is nothing much to see. Not a spark of colour or whisper of sound and no signs of intelligent life. As you wander through this silent land you can describe its geography adequately enough in the third person, but, quite obviously, not in the first.
From this vantage point it seems self-evidently true that consciousness does not have a physical location. ...We are embodied, but nowhere traceable within the physical structures of the body (p 95).
This point of view is all too rare, both in the popular press and among neurobiologists. Describing phenomena does not mean we understand them. And nobody does a very good job of locating, or
even defining, consciousness. We are trying to define the universe from within the universe; any answer we find is a product of the system we are attempting to encircle with ideas.
3 comments:
I'm back in Belfast - or the outskirts - myself, after eight years. Hate it. One of the first news stories I heard on the radio was about the Orange Order designing a new "super hero" to appeal to kids.
You know, in case they were threatening to grow up not becoming sectarian bigots.
Sounds...modern. It's interesting to think that the old ways of arousing support may be changing with the times. Seems to me the Loyalists are now prone to perceive themselves as a battered minority in a way they didn't years ago. Kids must be validated for speaking Ulster Scots, for example.
Would you say things have changed in any sort of positive way? There is less political violence overall it seems, but the BBC website for the North seems to be full of rapes and beatings and other unkindnesses....
Some things have changed.. yesterday I walked around a shopping centre that could have been cut-and-pasted directly from somewhere in WA: complete with Starbucks.
There are less overtly "terrorist" crimes. Currently the biggest problem is that the ex-terrorists are now drug dealers, trying to get the young hooked of various substances
Post a Comment