Thursday, 23 August 2018


Well, it's a brain state, and the circumstances that seem to lock it in, that make the here and now into a scene from a life, subject to all the patent and latent rules that govern such scenes, they are just brain states too. If you want to change it then submit to a graded series of experiences and associated chemical interventions which will trace out a certain path in the space of brain states and you will find your self feeling so much better about things. So, who then is this story about? Whose brain is it? Surely it's no one's brain, in itself, being a piece of matter in the world just like any other piece of matter in the world. Your dinner, for example. If you don't like what you are served then send it back to the kitchen and choose something else. But the brain is in a body which acts to protect it etc., and it is the identity of this body that distinguishes who you are. But what makes the body into a person capable of manifest rights of property? Its power to defend what is its own? All of it is just brought about, invested with such meaning and key distinctions as it has by further states of the brain. So, one system of the brain is dedicated to setting up and maintaining a subject for whom all these other systems of the brain are supposed to play out. It seems as though it all works only because it is not understood. Take away a certain enabling ignorance or error, and it all reverts to no more than the operations of a simple machine. If you take hold of the smallest materialist premise you inevitably end up with a picture like this. And you are still left with the question of who it is that has taken on the premise. You shouldn't have to go through this again and again, but you do. There is a point at which the assumptions renew themselves, an act that is made in a reality before thought. An act which amounts to imposing a gauge of time. 

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