The Window To The Soul

We are told that body language is the key to what we are really thinking, that we should watch what people do with their hands, or the way they're standing, if we are to cut through the layers of ambiguity inherent in what is coming out of their mouths. Politicians are master manipulators of this and are often well aware of the ways in which they can use stance, posture and gestures to reinforce their agenda.

The face in particular is a crucial focal point, especially given that we tend to be drawn to facial reactions when we converse. The eyes are apparently the windows to the soul; and a simple bite of one's lip can give the impression that you are totally blown away by what you are hearing, in a way that words alone never could.

This site, on Vedic face reading, gives lucid examples of how interpreting someone's face might be beneficial in a social situation…

"You are in line at Starbucks and you meet an attractive person, you flirt with
them briefly, wondering, “is this someone I should ask out on a date?"

And leads into explanation of how the face is also a key point in identifying with the ethereal self…

"The basic idea behind Vedic face reading is that your gross physical body is
lying on your subtle body which has been in development for many lifetimes."

Regardless of the fact that this suggests there might be more to us than cells, atoms and neurons, it also raises interesting questions about the continuity of the self; namely that our supposedly unambiguous body language gives licence to a dependable impression of the ‘you’ or ‘me’ underneath.

This works fine if there is indeed an immovable, indubitable self underneath. But what of the body via which this clear spring of language is transmitted? It is constantly changing. Your skin will be replaced something like seven times over in your life, your eyes change colour between birth and old age.

A materialist theory would have to suggest that the truth, or at least one’s perception of it, may not be so reliable given that the membrane through which it is diffused is in constant flux. As we can not submit to dualism, that the mind might be separate from the body or the flesh from the soul, we can relieve the self from its shell, if we are to believe in the self at all. Therefore a reliance on body language to give us a direct link to the truth of the self is a reliance on a set of parameters that are continually being modified and re-edited.

It might be more appropriate then to view the subject as a house. We drive past the house one day and we point it out. A few years later, we drive past again, but this time the outside walls have changed colour, the windows have been replaced and a new set of occupants have moved in!

It’s still the house though isn’t it? The number on the front door is still the same and spatially it occupies the same plot of land. But what if the former occupants were to return? Would they look around and say “Ah yes, this was our house. But this is not our home anymore.”?

This might apply similarly to people; you may look at an old photo of yourself and identify the subject as being you, albeit many years ago. You may have changed in appearance and you may have changed in outlook, but it’s still you right?

Maybe not. Maybe it’s time we stopped investing so much provenance in the idea of the immovable, indubitable, centred self. Maybe it would be more progressive to accept that dualism can not be the solution, that if the body changes over time, then so must the whole of what you are. Therefore the self has changed too; the ‘you’ of now can not be the same ‘you’ of before.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to abandon all sense of self, or aim to dissolve the self in the way eastern philosophies such as Buddhism often promote. It might mean, however, that we can take comfort in the fact that we are not tied to the past in the way we often think, that we are far more mercurial in our relation to time and space.

Most importantly though, if we are to successfully abandon dualism and accept that there is no mind, soul, spirit, subtle body or ethereal self separate to the body, then we must accept that change is total and all-encompassing. Of course, this brings up a whole set of questions about whether we should be held responsible for our actions in the past; but that is best left for another time.

The Seemingly Unexplainable

In this video, Daniel Dennett discusses the necessity of 'deflating' consciousness in order to make it eligible for scientific explanation. By deflating, he means removing the facets of our perception whereby consciousness is left untouchable to the rational enquirer, too amazing, too vast, too mystical to comprehend.

It is certainly true that many people would be thoroughly perturbed by the idea that their entire conscious existence is reductable. Such a realisation would no doubt push many to the brink of depression or dejection. They don't want to know that everything they understand to be true about existence could be seen as the subjective experience of the brain in its current phase within the evolutionary process, that everything they have ever understood or been able to understand, or loved or hated, or admired or feared is subject to hypothesis, experimentation and scientific explanation.

Many people would claim that so much of what they are or what they believe in is unexplainable, unreductable. This quickly leads to the claim that such things are sacred, and should not be given to examination. The role of language plays a key part in this defence... if it can not be expressed in language then it is beyond explanation, beyond enquiry, and therefore scared or holy. God, if you like, is beyond language so God must be immune to rational enquiry.

Gerald Edelman takes this a stage further and describes the emergence of language as the tipping point where the primate transcended 'primary consciousness' (i.e. the identification of a banana as food) and began to explore 'higher-order' consciousness (i.e. the identification of a banana as food coupled with the existential lament that one must climb the tree to get the banana if one is to survive, or indeed the belief that an intelligent designer must have created the tree on which the banana grows). He writes:

"The emergence of the self leads to a refinement of phenomenological experience, tying feelings to thoughts, to culture, and to beliefs. It liberates the imagination and opens thought to the vast domains of metaphor."

Therefore language as a means of contextualising the self leaves room for interpretation of conscious process as amazing, mystical, transcendent. "Surely there must be more! Surely we can just be physical, we are spiritual beings!"

Just remember the hackneyed cliche that, before Galileo, people wholeheartedly believed the Sun circled the Earth. It took scientific examination to reveal this widespread conviction to be false. Just because consciousness seems to be too vast to comprehend now, we may have to start readjusting our deeply ingrained faith in the fact that some things simply can't be explained.

The Eschaton As Data Loss

Given the fact that our lives are largely controlled by databases these days, whether they be administered by governments, banks or retailers; it stands to reason that the loss or degradation of this data could be quite catastrophic.

As Tom Simonite and Michael Le Page wrote recently:

"We are generating more information than ever before, and storing it in ever more transient media. Much of what it is being lost is hardly essential - future generations will probably manage fine without all the family photos and videos you lost when your hard drive died - but some is. In 2008, for instance, it emerged that the US had "forgotten" how to make a secret ingredient of some nuclear warheads."

The article this comment comes from illustrates such a cataclysmic event and examines the ways in which various physical media will decay over the next few centuries, or decades in some cases...

What's interesting is the contextualisation of this scenario as an apocalypse theory... a literal end of the world experience; all the more alarming given the fact that we've only existed on databases as long as databases have existed, which is not very long at all!

Exponential acceleration of digital information storage and sharing technologies has meant that pre-digital media now seems at the least antiquated, and in many cases redundant, in today's society. Case in point: when was the last time you shared a cooking recipe with someone that didn't involve the web or email?

This in itself leaves us with a peculiar dilemma... if knowledge is power, and so much of our knowledge is now stored on hard drives, will the total loss of data mean the end of the human race as we know it?

Sure it wouldn't kill us immediately; but it might lead to a startling tipping point where we realise that all the digital support systems in which we house our collective consciousness are suddenly unable to support us. Such a realisation would mean us having to re-learn lost methods of communication... quickly.

This may also amount to a kind of creeping generative amnesia... where our memories and experiences disappear soon after we've committed them to the ether, leaving us to repeat age old mistakes and share not-so-new learning in a series of looped 'Eureka' moments. A human race eternally doomed to intellectual Groundhog Day.

This then is the end of the world as forgotten knowledge, the Eschaton as data loss... perhaps not so scary for the average individual but potentially disastrous for the species as a whole.

There may of course be alternatives to hard data storage in the future. But, until then, we'd better get used to continually re-housing our data before entropy has its way.