From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri Nov 17 2000 - 21:05:25 MST
At 12:56 PM 17/11/00 EST, Spudster wrote:
<< When you die, the machine is gone, and no ephemeral "soul" survives- yet
existence, the true I, continues. The metaphysical implications of this are
pretty deep, and extremely hard to understand from a human perspective.
-Nicq >>
>Whew, you're telling me. This kind of sounds like a Hinduism or Jainism
where
>people get reincarnated into bugs, grass, cows, dung beetles; depending on
>their Karma.
To me it sounds more like standard issue postmodern discourse theory:
`selves' are `traversed' and `interpellated'
(hailed-and-thereby-defined-as-hearer-by-speaker) by tides of discourse
flowing back and forth across and between individual bodies/brains.
We are *constituted* in/by the fields of discourse we inhabit and
contribute, all of which are soaked in ideology, values, preconceptions:
the political unconscious.
I have considerable reservations about this construct, but in some degree
it's obviously valid. The (Enlightenment?) notion that the
political/value-laden world is atomistic, bottom-up from sovereign
individual monadic nodes, is simply untenable. Each of us, however ornery
and skull-bounded, is constituted *within* and simultaneously *against* an
informing culture.
None of which means that when the node-machine dies, the personality
construct associated with its functioning could possibly continue somewhere
else, or `merge back into' the cosmic flow, or any other `holistic'
formulation. That's just as muddleheaded. Yes, those aspects of our
`selves' that echo or implement ordered structures circulating among
individuals (call those aspects, loosely, `memes' or `standing waves' or
`attractors', whatever) will persist, while slowly or swiftly morphing. Any
impress we as individuals have left upon the discursive fields will remain
for a time to impose chaotic influence on other living nodes, but we'll be
toast. Too bad. Keep the dewars chilled and prepare the nanos for node
revival in due course. Otherwise, the tide's gone out and there's only
drying kelp left on the beach.
Damien Broderick
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