Essays on Fundamentals
Once an expression compresses to an acronym, we can make safe assumptions about it. A great many people have agreed on its meaning without conferring. Dictionaries may track its first use in print, but rarely identify an inventor.
At their most benign, they save time. Occasionally they spawn an especially apt new word, (RADAR, for instance,) or even a funny one – SNAFU and its near cousin FUBAR are examples of this.
At their most malign, they offer an opportunity for asserting sneering superiority, especially as they pass like so many calcified stones through the systematic, ever-renewing, bilious and braided fluxes of the many jargons – business, education, technology, psychology, popular culture, ad nauseam.
In all cases they serve to generalize experiences. All language is code, but acronyms represent this code at its most abstruse, dependent on the belief that we can know one another’s unstated thoughts. Fundamental to that belief is another assumption: we know our own thoughts, we know who, what and where we are.
As I lack the credentials of either a scientist or a philosopher, I state my thesis as a mere believer: Self-knowledge is entirely a matter of faith; all knowledge is entirely a matter of faith.
Matters of faith are not susceptible to explanation. Appropriately, I am not attempting the sleight of hand, the subtle oxymoron represented by professing a faith in explanations. Rather, I am professing an abiding faith in the pursuit of explanations as the basis of knowledge. I intend by this writing to provide myself a study, and perhaps a hymn to that faith.
This study’s provocative event, or inspiration, occurred around sixteen years ago, and involved a phenomenon that has earned its own acronym – NDE – for “Near Death Experience.” It was not my experience, my NDE, but that of my grandfather, Keith Monroe Lyons, who described it to me on the front porch of my parents’ home in Omaha, Nebraska one summer evening in the late 80s.
His story knocked me for a loop. I was moved to plunge into writing a novel about a young man whose grandfather told him about his NDE, and so was moved to seek an explanation by way of an Einsteinian formula, which he struggled to synthesize while pursuing the love of his life to New York City. Cast of wacky friends. Bizarre adventures. A marriage. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
I actually produced a first draft and circulated it among a few friends. Early in 1996, its wobbly legs gave way. It was cast onto the heap of abandoned projects to which I have contributed so richly over the years.
Then, in 2006, Natalie died. She was a lifelong friend of my nineteen-year-old daughter, the only child of a couple my wife and I had come to love shortly after our daughters met early in grammar school. My grandfather’s story acquired a potential usefulness.
I have made scant use of it, which I will explain later. On to another catalyst.
Around the time I abandoned the novel, I acquired the book THE MIND’S I by Hofstadter and Dennet. I had enjoyed Hofstadter’s GOEDEL, ESCHER, BACH, but remember being disappointed by its successor. I made no connection between THE MIND’S I and my grandfather’s story.
Then, as I said, Natalie died. Things that made sense before lost their cohesion. Also things I never would have related to one another suddenly seemed intimately connected. The relationship between Natalie’s death and my grandfather’s story is pretty self-evident. However, the connection between those two things and Hofstadter’s book about the nature of consciousness, the locus of identity, and my grandfather’s story was a surprising revelation, though it certainly seems obvious to me now. I picked the book off our shelf on a whim shortly after Natalie’s death. So it found me, Jungian synchronicity in action.
THE MIND’S I runs the reader through a series of rigorous challenges, either essays or short stories, each followed by what amounts to exegetical analysis. While Hofstadter aims to justify his quest for creating true Artificial Intelligence (brace for the acronym – AI) that possibility, whether or not it is practical, shrinks in significance next to questions raised and relentlessly explored on the nature of consciousness, however it may be brought into being.
The authors give the rostrum to serious and thoughtful critics, and even detractors of their own opinions. This dialectical approach encourages the reader to perform a task entirely germane to the book’s subject matter – make up his or her own mind.
These essays are my attempts at making up my mind about what I believe is likely to be real and true about the world I inhabit. Here you will find no certainty, nothing but speculation – and at the root of it all, a species of faith.
| Fragment One | Fragment Five |
| Fragment Two | On Despair |
| Fragment Three | Loneliness and the Subjective Imperative |
| Fragment Four | . . . |
The Authentic Self