Loggity Blog

The Riddle of Consciousness (New York Times)

What is life?

Or, to reject the simple black and white of it all: When are we living?

I read this article today—

The Riddle of Consciousness (New York Times):

The deeper that investigators dig, the more hidden chambers they find. Last Wednesday, scientists in England and Belgium reported that five people with severe brain injuries who had been identified as “vegetative,” beyond reach, showed activity on brain imaging that strongly suggested conscious awareness. One of them, a 29-year-old man thought to be “vegetative” for five years, began to answer yes and no questions by alternately showing brain activity when thinking about tennis (lighting motor areas), then about walking in his house (lighting spatial areas).

A locked door on consciousness had swung open, all right; but on the other side was yet another dark corridor. After five years of being in effect buried alive in its own skull, what kind of consciousness was left for this patient? Who, exactly, lives behind those blank eyes? And, for that matter, what name do we give to this conscious state that looks totally absent, except for the ghostly blinking pixels on a brain imaging machine?

Deathly hallows, showing life but not in action

Socrates described life as the function of the soul. Our soul it needs to be quenched, it needs to be completed. Our mind, our self, will usually receive this ethos of our soul in the form of desires, and responds in the form of action. We go to the world for its objects; beautiful, satisfying and fulfilling, and in that way we become alive.

We are then most dead when we are not actors in the world. When we are not responding to beauty, when we are not engaging, seeking, acting— when we are comatose, when we are dead— our soul suffers. But is it still living?

Our lives, our bodies, our selves, our minds, are the vessels for our souls. If they are not strong, if they deteriorate it is like the cup that holds our tender soul (our wants, our desires, our eros) is leaking. The substance within still exists— our soul still the same— but our agency, our potential to quench our soul is inhibited as well.

If the cup breaks, our soul may be scattered, helpless as a puddle. Still existing, still yearning, but lost to itself…

2 years ago reblogged from psychotherapy

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