We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.
-- Otto Neurath, "Anti-Spengler"
In a word, this book is about everything.
More specifically, it is an attempt to hone in on the mind-brain-reality nexus and the dichotomy between subjective reality and objective reality that is both the basis of our lived experience and its greatest mystery. But it does not do so by a direct attack. Instead, it takes the approach of strategically and methodically staking out a boundary of the objective by totalizing the subjective and concluding that the limits of the objective world must be beyond such a boundary. Thus, we come to the title of this book.
Yet before we discuss the title, the above description is very abstract and may border on impenetrable word salad to many. However, it becomes more clear when a visual metaphorization is added. Imagine a Venn diagram with a single central space denoted "objective" or "shared" reality. Then nestled around that central space is all of the subjective realities of every individual in the world. What this book attempts to do is to exhaustively define the limits of my subjective reality so that others who read it can compare their subjective reality to mine and see where the two differ. The conclusion would then be that those elements of my experience that are not common to theirs lies within the boundaries of my subjective space and not in objective space while the places where we agree may be part of the objective. In theory, iterating this process for every individual in the world would allow us collectively to democratically decide what is in our shared interest as a species by being able to separate "objective fact" from "subjective opinion".
Perhaps this seems like a very tedious and, at base, impossible exercise. On the one hand, there are new people being born every day. When would their contribution to such an exercise be meaningful? And what about people who do not have the intellectual capacity to convey such information or understand what is being asked? Are the subjective domains of people with severe mental disability invalid because they cannot be shared? On the other hand, isn't it obvious that the objective is what's "out there" and the subjective is what's "in here"? Philosophy has had many iterations of trying to tackle this subject-object dualism. To name a few, Descartes had his cogito to define what is inside, the empiricists had their sense-data to define what is outside, the idealists had their dualistic metaphysical structures of e.g. noumenon and phenomenon (Kant) or will and representation (Schopenhauer). This is all fine. And although it may not seem like we are any farther ahead because of these metaphysical abstractions, a little reframing can make the abstract much more concrete. I will provide two such reconceptualizations of the aforementioned impossible exercise.
The first is the more abstract. Let us consider the philosophers and their constructions and their systems. From the angle of the objective, it can seem extremely dry, quite specialized, and in some sense pointless. Reality is reality. Forget about it and live your life within its confines, whatever they may be. But if we stop to think about the human behind the philosopher, the subjective, it becomes a little more interesting. Human evolution is a process. In the abstract, we are all just minds and bodies, and our minds do not differ markedly. Looking at these philosophers simply as minds, we may see as a lowest common denominator a central problem that has multiple approaches to fleshing it out. And these approaches ebb and flow with the social demands of the era in question. So instead of or in addition to trying to solve the problem, it can be interesting to solve the solver. What is so special about this problem that so many minds obsess over it? And why this approach? What can we learn from the subjective process rather than the objective problem?
I can give two immediate examples and then I will come back to the second reconceptualization of the subjective-objective boundary problem. The first relates to an experience I had a number of years ago when a close friend of mine studying law came to me explaining that she had too many exams in a short period of time and no way to study for them all. She feared that she would do extremely poorly and asked for my advice. Although I knew nothing about law per se (aside from a few conversations, sitting in on a few lectures, and the general process and some results of law as practiced, e.g. O. J. Simpson), I had studied philosophy and political theory and generally understood the why and the how of law. So I said that I would pull an all-nighter with her and I would take one of her courses, study it, and teach it to her. And I decided that the history of Justinian law would be by far the most theoretical and the least technical, so I took on that one. What I remember is that it talked about how the original Justinian law had evolved into various legal systems with their own idiosyncrasies, in particular contrasting the British, French, and German systems. And almost immediately I realized that the legal systems simply reflected the dominant philosophical tradition. Lockean liberalism based on private property in Britain, Calvinist semi-collectivism and Rousseauan social contract theory in France, and Gestalt idealism in Germany. It was thus fairly easy to teach her the forest rather than the trees. Thankfully, she passed all her courses and in fact the Justinian law course turned out to be her highest grade.
The second example relates to our inherent collective bias as humans to subjectively assume objective norms when interpreting the work of others. Although much is made of Nietzsche's life, his mental illness, his insanity, and tragic end, there is still the tendency to read his works from a neurotypical point of view. And I had always done this in the past when I was really focused on these bigger philosophical questions and how they come together in the objective sphere. However, after I had my series of ecstatic seizures and started to reflect on what those extremely intense and extremely personal experiences actually meant and why they happened, I gained a far greater appreciation for the way in which an external representation (text) reflects an internal domain (mental idiosyncrasy). Before these experiences, I would read existential novels from the likes of Dostoevsky, Camus, and Sartre and say "wow, these are incredible ideas, how do they come up with this stuff?", but after I wrote my novel metaphorizing my internal relationship to the world and saw how much of myself was in it (write what you know, as they say), I immediately started to think "hmmm, these existentialists must have had extremely weird brains..." There is no consensus on Nietzsche's "diagnosis". I have seen the original historical assessment of neurosyphilis increasingly called into question as our understanding of neuroscience broadens and deepens. Instead, I have seen some arguments for CADASIL, and some for Gastaut-Geschwind (Dostoevsky) syndrome. Having the latter myself, and being able to reflect fully on the symbolism of those intense ecstatic experiences, I see a lot of the same subjective symbolism in Zarathustra's Prologue.
These two examples are meant to provide an appreciation of how much more we may be able to get out of anything simply by switching our lens from the default objective static-for-all time monolith to a meta-analysis of its historical context in the first place and its internal composition in the second place. Nothing in this world that is a product of humanity springs forth from nothing. There is always a creator with a certain mind existing at a certain time. To the layperson, marvelling at the objects of archaeology may be the extent of one's interest, but to the archaeologist, asking questions about who made it and how it got there is what teaches us about how our species has evolved over time, and how to conceive of our fundamental social and biological building blocks stripped away from the hustle and bustle of contemporary times. This metaphorization of an archaeological dig of the objective domain through a combination of subjective consciousness and historical context is central to understanding this book. Not only does the metaphorization relate to the subtitle and hence the central "what" of the book, but the process by which that metaphorization comes about, the "circumstantiality", is one of the five main personality traits of Gastaut-Geschwind Syndrome and will reflect one aspect of how neurodivergence manifests within this text. This book also has a creator and a context. And everything is carefully layered.
Now that the theoretical, abstract reconceptualization of our subjective-objective project has been woven together, let us consider a more practical, immediate reconceptualization. Suppose you exist in an ungrounded state where you're not sure what is real. What do you do? When you are trapped in the objective, you go through the motions and make do with what you have. The world is real and you are in it. If all else fails, do what the next person does and you will generally be okay. But what if you are trapped in the subjective? What is a strategy that you can use to make progress? Later in this book, I will talk about my subjective experiences of its underlying utility in stripping away what Kojin Karatani refers to as "the will to architecture" in Architecture as Metaphor. The general idea is that if we find ourselves completely ungrounded, it is then possible for us to choose the ground from which we construct the rest of our reality rather than taking it from the external. Faith is the Absolute Paradox, as Kierkegaard wrote in his Philosophical Fragments. And if someone convinces you to have Faith, then your Faith is in that person and not God (or yourself).
So far this second conception is also very abstract. Let me make it concrete. Suppose you were in a psychiatric ward and you were convinced that you were sane but everyone else, including the hospital staff, were insane. David Rosenhan's famous experiment of "being sane in insane places" provides real-world clarity on such a scenario. After infiltrating a number of psychiatric wards with fakes that presented with made-up (but consistent in accordance with the scientific method) symptoms who were then committed, the fakes attempted to explain that it was all an experiment, but they were not believed by staff and were refused release. This was despite the fact that they were recognized as highly suspicious by other patients. The only way that they could get out was to play along and admit that they were insane but improving. After being released and publishing the findings, the entire institution of psychiatry was in disarray as it had to admit that it seemed the "experts" actually knew less than the patients.
The details of the entire saga are extremely interesting, but this is not the point. Rather, if we go beyond the objective institution to the subjective experience, we see a theme that recurs again and again in our social reality, namely that the process of life requires us to defer to objective ideologies, institutions, and experts (starting with our parents, then onto our schools, academics, jobs, lifestyles, etc.). And there is good reason for this in that without a certain degree of training, predictability, and shared goals, society would fall apart. We are conditioned historically, genetically, biologically, familially, and socially. Indeed, without these hard-wired Pavlovian mechanisms of observation, mimicry, and reward in our brains, we would remain helpless babies.
And yet, there is the obvious danger of too much conditioning, when we merely become unthinking ideological zombies stripped of any sort of creativity. Further, there is the inherent evolutionary need to go beyond mere conditioning and control to extend opportunities for authenticity to those that have been historically oppressed. It is not only just, it is also both necessary to make progress and in our best interests to do so. There are many examples of persons who have made incredible breakthroughs but whose peoples were at one time deprived of any opportunity to develop the tools needed to make such breakthroughs. The Indian Satyendra Nath Bose made fundamental contributions to our understanding of quantum physics, but his contributions to the betterment of humanity would have been lost if Indians had not been extended a right to education under colonial rule.
Let us now return to this question of strategy but within the context of taking this subjective ungrounding to its extreme in a real-world thought experiment. Of course, there is always the option of following your neighbour if you find yourself without ground, but then one is faced with the scenario of Brave New World where the last free person takes the soma and there is no way back. Suppose then, you believed that the entire world was insane save for you. What is your recourse?
Here is the strategy I suggest. You go up to some other person (it is probably best if it is someone you know well), and you share your respective subjective realities and corresponding biased opinions and ideas. You then work out the areas where you disagree until you reach a general consensus about the nature of objective reality in terms of sanity. Then you can conclude that you are either both sane amongst the insane or both insane amongst the sane, even though you still cannot say which scenario applies. You then do the same with a third person, and a fourth. And once you have four people that are all either simultaneously sane or insane, you theoretically have a just system of an avower to make a declaration, a discussant to make counterpoints, an adjudicator to make a decision, and a referee to ensure rules are being followed. You can then begin to establish subjective "truths" within an ever-expanding community through an iterative process of debate and consensus.
* * * * *
I suspect that by now, the reader will be able to decide whether this is the type of book to delve further into or not based on the goals of the book introduced at the beginning of this chapter and the general themes and processes that have been touched on thus far. There is no summary because there should be no ground and no "facts" to begin with. There is only ways to think in the subjective, ways to observe and interact in the objective, and the processes of objective history and subjective composition that bring them together. This, then, is the loose framework within which I propose to begin to understand the mind-brain-reality nexus. The rest of the book will attempt to stitch everything together through a winding narrative.
With reference to the title, the subtitle should now be fairly clear. It describes an initially ungrounded process of transition back and forth between subject and object through history and composition in order to try to "construct" known boundaries between the subjective and the objective. The meaning of the title "To Be or Not To Not-Be, That is the Question" is two-fold. First, it is the first thing that a potential reader will see and the first bit of propaganda that will convince a reader to open it and look deeper. In our world of mass connection and mass consumerism, attention spans are getting shorter, choice is rapidly getting broader, and competition is getting more fierce. If you are writing a book that you believe in and you want others to read it, you must convince them to do so, and the window of time within which to do so is only getting shorter and shorter. The quote from Hamlet is immediately recognizable as an initial means to ground a potential reader while they puzzle over the subtitle. It is hoped that the two of them combined will induce the observer to open it up and see what lies within.
Second, it reflects a conception of metaphysical reality that first came to me during my first ecstatic seizure. In Kant's metaphysics, he maintains that there is a "back door" into the noumenon that contains the "thing-in-itself". And what occurred to me is that there are two ways to conceive of the subject. The first is directly by saying "I am me". The second is exhaustively by saying "I am not anything other than me." In other words, there is the tree, and there is what is not the not-tree. These are the two extremes by which we define ourselves. And in an increasingly complex world, this contrast between the means by which we choose who we are becomes more and more pertinent. Before the internet, we may have said "I want to be a doctor", but we were generally in the dark about what the process to become a doctor entailed and what the reality of being a doctor actually consisted in. With the internet, we have immediate access to a myriad of doctors from any specialty and working in any context. We can also chart an optimal process by which we can become one, complete with externally-regulated minimum requirements. More generally, there are examples of any profession or future or way of being right at our fingertips. We are spoiled for choice. But all of this information also allows us to become more familiar with what we don't want to be and how we don't want to live in ways that could not be conceived of before the internet. Hence we have another subjective-objective conundrum, this time about identity. To what extent do we say "I want to be this in here" versus "I don't want to be that out there?"
It is within this limbo that we will begin the journey through this book. It is the limbo within which I exist due to my epileptic condition. And it is the limbo within which my attempting to balancing being and not-being has made me who I am. In the subsequent chapters, the reference to "extreme" is not to say that I have done so much that no one has ever done and I feel I deserve praise for it. When it comes to that sort of extreme, I would direct the reader to someone like Erik Weihenmayer. Rather, "extreme" simply implies the boundary that of my subjective that I am trying to rigorously and methodically construct via a "totalist" (i.e. exhaustive) synthesis of what I have found within and without. And I believe that I should try to do this because on the one hand no one ever has (and we have to start somewhere, even if we are dead wrong), and on the other hand I believe that the epileptic condition that has made my brain as neurodivergent as it is creates an ample place to start to try to construct a "somewhere" from a "nowhere" exhaustively, while at the same time providing an expansive foundation of content related to minds and brains and reality and being for others who are interested in starting from "nowhere" and seeing where they end up.
The concretization of being "trapped in the subjective" as feeling like the only sane person when everyone else is insane is not intended to be an expression of narcissistic ego. It is rather a reflection of having been in these ungrounded states subjectively (e.g. via my ecstatic seizures and this larger epileptic personality disorder) and objectively (jumping from project to project, location to location, job to job, friend group to friend group, country to country, and, sometimes, psychiatric ward to psychiatric ward), and coming to you, the reader, and saying "Are we both sane or insane, or do we fundamentally disagree? If the latter, what can we do about it?"
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