Spark of Life
In the newspaper I read about the Edge Question, a call for essays in response to the following prompt: "When thinking changes your mind, that's philosophy. When God changes your mind, that's faith. When facts change your mind, that's science. What have you changed your mind about? Why? You can read the essays here, and they are worth reading.
One of the essays selected was by Tor Norretranders, blogger (primarily in Danish, but he kindly has a category for his English language posts), and author of the sociological study The Generous Man: How Helping Others is the Sexiest Thing You Can Do, discussing a concept he calls "permanent reincarnation."
The idea is that the thingness of a living being is different from, for example, the thingness of a chair. A chair is a fairly consistent set of molecules in a fairly consistent shape; that is it's essential thingness. A bit may chip off, it may break off a leg, eventually it make be broken so severely that it can no longer be called a chair. But for the most part there is no debate over the existence of the thing. The debate is over the meaningfulness of our communication about the thing- Do we all experience the thing in the same way? What about thing gives it the definition of chair?
A living thing is different. Every year, about 98% of the molecules that make up a respirating creature (such as a human being) are shed off into the universe and similar, but not the same, molecules are re-taken up out of the universe. Not only are we mainly not the same thing from year to year, if we lived long enough we would be a universal thing- each of us would have been the entire universe. On the flip side, if I don't live, the thing that will be my corpse is only an accident of timing. If I had died in a different year, my corpse would be a completely different thing. Given all of this, one can only stare at the consistency of a human consciousness in total awe.
On a related topic, in The Conservative Soul Sullivan touched on the idea of cultural or philosophical consistency. I don't have the book in front of me to cite the particular Chinese parable used, but the idea is this: whatever is "right" about a person, or also one could use the world "virtuous," is contained in the existence of that person and dies with her. Any words they may have left behind are mere bones- things like a chair more than a thing like the person that wrote them. The words may be excellent for what they are, but they are only what they are. Human virtue has to be reborn each generation; it does not exist in books.
Indeed, as Nooretranders pointed out in his essay, it barely clings to the human corporeal. It was astonishing enough to think that the human spirit is built over the chemicals and biologies of the human body, but it is even more astonishing to think that in our very biology is the fact that the human spirit is beyond biology.
P.S.
Of interest in relation to my previous post on multilingualism, I noted that Tor Norretranders wrote a post encouraging multilingual blogging and discussing practical issues with the practice, which he himself employs.
