How to Be Animal by Melanie Challenger

Author:Melanie Challenger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd

And what if the sleeper walks through the room, unaware she has a sleeping double? She’d laugh at the suggestion she is nothing but a dreamed phantom, an electrical wraith inside a lump of matter. What a ridiculous idea! And yet, at any moment, she will be extinguished by some noise or hum of light that brings the true sleeper out of her dream. The dreamed being will be erased instantly, leaving no trace, nothing.

I once had a sort of dream in which I lay awake in my bed while an exact copy of myself dressed, pulled on the light in the bathroom and stepped down into the darkness of the stairway. Once fully awake, I then rose from the bed and into the pathway of this dream like a car pulled onto the treads of a prior journey. It was as if for a moment I had cheated time and glimpsed a future dull and ordinary but a few seconds ahead of the reality in which I stood. Who was the more real? The future self? Or was I suspended not in the present, as I had assumed, but in some past state? A figure on a mechanism, carved by some invisible hand, tracking a preordained route. The memory of this half-dream still unnerves me now. By some glitch or another, I felt as if I’d caught sight, however briefly, of the backstage workings behind the grand façade of the present moment.

In a letter written to Lord Kames in 1775, Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid asked a question that has since become known as the duplicates problem. Reid wanted to know if his brain died but somehow, several hundred years later, could be revived and fabricated in a new form, ‘whether, I say, that being will be me; or, if two or three such beings should be formed out of my brain, whether they will all be me, and consequently one and the same intelligent being’. In other words, is there continuity or does the original cease to exist and a new one replace it? This matter of duplication is a serious business for those who seek to be the architects of our escape from animal life.

More recently, philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers came up with the extended mind thesis, which is based on the ‘active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes’. When Chalmers talks of an extended mind, he includes the human body and some of its environment. These kinds of philosophical discussions can get pretty trippy. Imagine in this extended mind that we replace a biological part with an external piece of kit that does some of the job of thinking. It’s still participating in the thought processes, yet it’s no longer human. As Chalmers writes, ‘A subject’s cognitive processes and mental states can be partly constituted by entities that are external to the subject, in virtue of the subject’s interacting with these entities via perception.’ This theory both allows for the whole body and

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.