I'd always thought that if I had an intelligent, erudite roommate, we'd either get nothing done, or everything. But the frequency of my bedtime thoughts suggests that we would just keep each other awake with our epiphanies until we both died from lack of sleep.
I've had trouble sleeping pretty much all my life. But what was it that used to occupy my thoughts? There seems to be a K-T boundary, maybe even a Mohorovičić discontinuity, between my present and past selves, somewhere around 3 years ago (ironically these geological terms come from before that boundary, sometime in primary school when I used to love dinosaurs (and yes, that is K for Kretaceous)). I no longer know him. But is he buried and fossilised inside my mind, or was I within his, waiting to be exposed by the erosive processes of time?
This may be my only chance for an aside on dinosaurs, so here goes. What did dinosaurs mean for me, and for children in general? That there may be dragons in the world after all? But that we were born too late to slay them? Was it an encounter between our pitifully short existences and the vastness of deep time? Children often wonder how they and the world they inhabit came to be; operating on the inductive belief that past is a good guide to the present, they become fascinated with stories. This archaeological urge eventually brings them face to face with dinosaurs. Perhaps the reinterpretation of dragon bones as fossils was a triumph of the scientific over the mythologic, a visible arena in which the drive of curiosity overcame that of fear. The idea of the dinosaur is the resurrection of secrets once interred; the appeal of the dinosaur is the promise of truth and answers to be wrested from the world. They are ideals which we are told really existed, dreams which are safe from the battering of reality that necessarily comes with growing up.
The dinosaur is a child writ large; its simple urges for food and fun would be easy for young audiences to identify with. The Mesozoic could have been a metaphor for ours, a simplified world where all relationships are reduced to that of eater and eaten. Or was it a warning that the dialectic of predator and prey ends in extinction and futility, that even the mighty must fall? But while it lasted, the Cretaceous was also an age in which childhood dreams were realised, a utopia in which form found its superlative perfection, though perhaps less like Rousseau's noble savages than Nietzschean Überlizards. For a brief period, the world was a colosseum governed by bushido, a Hunger Games played by all, where no losers kept their lives. Strange that children love them dinos more than adults then, when their's was a wistful world of could-have-beens. Damn you, Yucatán asteroid!
Yet the image of the dinosaur might have survived to exert a latent influence on adults. What is the role of the dinosaur in the popular imagination today? In Jurassic Park, dinosaurs symbolise the power of nature, a triumph of man that proves very dangerous, just like in Frankenstein. The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers harness the power of the dinosaurs to protect the Earth, reducing the dinosaurs to just totems and instruments (and riding on the popularity of dinosaurs to sell merchandise). That is not too far from what happens in The Flintstones, where dinosaurs are pets and tools. Barney is a purple tyrannosaur that with his unbridled cheeriness evokes something very close to coulrophobia. Dinosaur meat is potentially a delicacy which could justify time travel in Chuck Klosterman's collection of essays Eating the Dinosaur. Godzilla, ostensibly a dinosaur, is the greatest of them all, and probably less unlikely than the talking dinosaurs that precede him in the list. The daikaiju is both destroyer and saviour, embodying two aspects of the Hindu trinity, an interesting concordance with the first part of his name.
Turning our gaze to the Internet, we see that dinosaurs take on very different meanings there, possibly because of the participation of a younger generation reacting to an older idea. Frustrated dinosaurs live an eternal recurrence in Dinosaur Comics. T-Rex is rendered impotent by this scenario, in which there is no possibility of hunting real prey. The relationships between him, Utahraptor and Dromiceiomimus are instead defined by love. In xkcd, velociraptors are a common motif, menacing adversaries both unseen and seen (with lightsabers). They are rightly feared by us, for they have already begun to take over the Internet in the form of the Philosoraptor meme, which depicts a highly philosophical raptor asking questions ranging from kōan and witticisms to deeply metaphysical paradoxes. The choice of species is itself wordplay, reflecting that flippancy onto the dinosaur himself. But that choice proves most inspired, for the agility of the raptor is akin to the lightness of Mercutio and Guido Cavalcanti, allowing him to dance around conundra with levity. Philosoraptor is trickster and rebel, seeking to subvert the authorities of language and common sense with guerilla dispatches and pamphlets all over cyberspace - he is the heir of no less than Wittgenstein!
Whether our cognitive categorisation of dinosaurs is based on prototypes or exemplars, their quintessential traits include being large, ferocious and predatory. Barney & Friends, in negating these, creates an uneasy tension between security and danger, for the true T-Rex is always lurking beneath the surface. The Flintstones depicts our mastery over nature, whereas Jurassic Park denies it. Godzilla, despite the eponymous character's awesome atomic powers, remains truest to the ideal of a dinosaur, hyperbolic yet Platonic. Dinosaur Comics and Philosoraptor play on the irony of anthropomorphising dinosaurs, giving us civilised reptiles where we were expecting savages. It is no coincidence that the most popular species in our culture are Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor antirrhopus, for they are bipedal, hence making it easier for us to attribute other human traits to them such as intelligence and love.
The increasing plumage of dinosaurs in depictions is analogous to the evolution of dinosaurs into birds, another example of a way in which the dinosaur is the symbol of change. The irreversible feathering evokes nostalgia for the good old days of our childhood, when dinosaurs had no feathers. Indeed, the addition of feathers to the dinosaur dilutes its symbolic power with that of the bird, creating a chimera that is not homeopathically better than either. That said, the feathered dinosaur may one day take on puissance as an icon, residing in the limbo between two worlds, becoming a symbol of saudade. Perhaps it is just like how Greek ruins are always depicted a pure, austere white, whereas they are believed to have been painted in garish colours. If so, we had best leave the dinosaur unfeathered, for the image of the dinosaur has transcended the fact and become the truth.
We can see that the idea of the dinosaur remains unsullied by the touch of traditional romances and fairy tales (though Calvino has composed one in his Cosmicomics). It is at once publicly shared yet personally meaningful, making it open in the sense of Wikipedia. It is protean, straddling the boundaries between science and fantasy, myth and reality, past and present, self and other. It is the compossibility of power and freedom that is sadly impossible in the modern world. That is why dinosaurs are so compelling - they are whatever compels each of us. Extant animals lack that air of legend, whereas mythical creatures lack verisimilitude. The dinosaur is, according to W. J. T. Mitchell, the totem animal of modernity. As such, dinosaurs are tabulae rasae onto which we can inscribe our hopes and fears, and palimpsests on which stories can be told and untold.
I left for last what is surely the most apposite work, Augusto Monterroso's seven-word-long (or short) story El Dinosaurio, which goes: Upon awaking, the dinosaur was still there. When I was a kid, I wanted to become a palaeontologist. That ambition has long faded, although Nathan Myhrvold has shown the way by proving that you can do regular work (insofar as doing research under Stephen Hawking, being Microsoft's Chief Technology Officer and authoring Modernist Cuisine, which has been hailed as the Principia of cooking, can be considered regular work) and still have time to look for dinosaur bones, write papers about Diplodocus tails, keep a T-rex fossil in your living room and have a garden of Mesozoic flora. Anyhow, after more than a decade's slumber without dreaming of dinosaurs, I find them still here in my thoughts.
Did I have a favourite dinosaur? I can only guess as to what that child must have felt. Was it the T-rex, king of lizards, feared by all, cursed by solitude and reduced to scavenging, yet nobly resisting in Sisyphean fashion? (Could I have foreseen an analogous fate for myself?) Or perhaps it was the raptor, epitomised by Utahraptor, Deinonychus and Troodon (technically not a dromaeosaur), utterly economical and efficacious, its sickle claw both weapon and emblem of an ancient pugilistic order, cackling as they rained down Nature's ire on those judged unworthy and extraneous to her Elysium. Who knows which of the two my past self would have chosen.
Perhaps only anamnesis can serve to elucidate the essence of that individual. I don't mean the fact that I've learnt so much that I'm starting to forget things I used to know, both episteme and techne. I could practically have been another soul that colonised this body by metempsychosis. If our minds would respond differently to the same stimuli, what basis is there for considering us the same? Then again, the self is of questionable ontology anyway. Firstly, all the cells and molecules that constitute us are in constant flux, the so-called 'Ship of Theseus' problem. Even if we restrict this to the brain or mind, neural connections are always changing, and memories always piled on. A genetic basis doesn't rescue the self either, for there is no way of differentiating between identical twins or clones, and somatic mutations can still occur. Then there is also the fact that we don't have as much free will as we feel we do, with a multitude of subconscious modules in our heads voting for control. The brain is democracy, and mind its decree. There is no unitary soul that decides our actions. Looking at it from a more subjective level, the famous cogito ergo sum in fact only proves that thoughts exist, and not necessarily a thinker or self. Perhaps the self is something that doesn't exist of which we are nonetheless aware via induction from the sequentiality of our qualia, a useful fiction for explaining phenomena.
Without considering the problems of consciousness and qualia, what is the theoretical basis for a self? Douglas Hofstadter describes the self as a strange loop, in which reflexivity allows elements at different hierarchical levels (i.e. elements and the clusters they form) to influence each other. Antonio Damasio provides a more biological account, where the self is formed in layers. Signals from the body are continuously fed to the upper brainstem, where they are integrated into maps which form the protoself. Interaction with objects (including thoughts) causes the protoself to be modified, which generates pulses of core self, possibly in the superior colliculi or thalamus. Finally, sets of memories interact with the protoself, and the results of these interactions are held in time, giving rise to the autobiographical self. This likely occurs in areas where large numbers of convergent and divergent signals intersect, such as the posteromedial cortices, which has connections to and from most areas of the brain except the early sensory cortices and the primary motor cortices. When all these processes are in motion, self comes to mind.
So why do I draw the line between my past self and recent self? Perhaps because my past self was more reactionary, but my recent self is the product of choices I made (or would have made), i.e. I can identify with my recent self. This explanation sounds very circular, but it is probably a matter of reflexivity, where the self starts making choices that act on itself to change itself, as opposed to merely acting on objects and people in the environment. I have more second-order (or higher) desires, which are desires to desire and hence act in certain ways. My recent self acts reflexively. I agree with his actions and can thus take responsibility for them. Ironically, this self emerges from first treating the self as an other which can be moulded by its actions.
There is a big difference in perception as well that could have preceded the above changes. It all started with a reevaluation of things, where I realised many things I'd considered secondary were actually important. This led me to proceed with an open mind, more cautiously and respectfully, for I could never know what other things I might find to be valuable. Naïve and absolute views became complex and nuanced. I could look at things from a diverse set of perspectives, whether aesthetic, social or ethical, which I once would never have bothered with. Things that once seemed unrelated now appeared blindingly similar. One major epiphany was the role of active, constructive perception, both by myself and others. My Umwelt was expanded; seeing new things made me ask new questions, which made me discover other things. I entered a critical phase, in which discovery became self-sustaining. Eventually, I learnt enough to direct the process, which launched my autodidacticism. I became a different person.
Was he destined to become me? That depends on the view of determinism which we adopt. If we allow for any contingency at all, the right triggers must have been present in the environment for my past self to start on the trajectory to becoming my recent self. This gives us a reason for amor fati then - without the right history, we would not be who we are. However, if the momentum of each thought brings it crashing into the next thought or action, then there was no other possibility but for him to become me. Indeed, it feels like my current self emerged of necessity. If so, do all minds have the same tendencies to converge? After all, simultaneous discoveries occur frequently in science, suggesting that once the right ingredients are present, they react in characteristic ways to give birth to ideas. This is interlinked with the concepts of intelligence, representation, search and explanation, which will receive a full treatment in the future.
Yet as I write this, he is coming back to me. Although my values have changed somewhat, we still have things in common. Creative expression has always been important to me, although it has taken different forms in the past. When I was a boy I used to draw, write and design games. Even during adolescence, when I spent too much time playing computer games, I would devote great amounts of energy and time to coming up with novel strategies. Nowadays, I expend creative energy by writing, playing soccer, contemplation, and also in my attire.
I must not forget the one quotidian sink of creativity I've had all my life - telling jokes. According to the neurocomputational model of Hurley, Dennett and Adams, humour occurs when one discovers a commitment to a belief now shown to be false. Comedy thus requires misleading others into unwittingly committing to false beliefs. Since we never know perfectly what lies within the minds of others, nor how they move between thoughts, it is easy to see how that would require tremendous creativity and skill, like trying to warp the spacetime of someone's mind, hoping that the resultant wormhole brings them from where they are to right where you want them. That's why jokes can be so hit-and-miss, a bit like playing Battleship, really. I've also regained a love for things intellectual, which I had felt until I was 12. Picasso once said, "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up." Jonah Lehrer rewrote that, replacing 'artist' with 'scientist'. They were both correct. We are born curious and creative, with a love for knowing things and making things. That love feels so sweet and natural, like part of my true self that I had abandoned for many years. Perhaps this is what Aristotle had in mind when he suggested that virtue for man is in excelling at his highest function, which is that of the intellect.
Is there also a self which only appears when writing? Borges considered this in the essay Borges and I (and also the difference between past and present selves in The Other). The author that the reader gleans from the work is not the person of the author. But what of the relationship between that simulacrum and the author? Is the authorial self constructed in parallel by the self as a by-product of the work, where the foreignness of glyphs leads us to posit their origin as another? Or is it assumed by the self in order to produce a work that is suitably distanced from the self yet personal enough for readers to empathise? Like a moulting insect, the authorial self can only grow in spurts, so it is a useful indicator of the growth of the actual self, which changes ever so imperceptibly with each moment. But memory is hazy; all we remember of the past is reauthored as we recall. Thus the writer examines the exoskeletons shed in the past, and wonder what form he will take.
In my attempt to understand the dinosaur and the self, I have traversed thoughts procellous, and I who emerged at the end may not be the same person as he who started the journey. Many of the issues discussed remain debatable, perhaps waiting to be resolved by some future academy of Philosoraptors. But I leave you now with the deepest philosophical quandary that Philosoraptor has ever had to face, one concerning his being and essence - in other words, his very self.
ah, insightful question, philosoraptor.
ReplyDelete