What’s this? A hurricane-season weather map of the Caribbean under LSD? Microbes under magnification? A barnyard floor after a goat gets sick? Or maybe just a really poor attempt at computer art? Well, my blog as been criticized as being overly “word-driven”, so I’m just trying to get in touch with the other side of the brain, with the visual side of human experience. Yea, I know what you’re probably thinking: stick with the left side. Get back to word abstractions, not abstract art (or whatever the heck this is). OK, fine.
Speaking of the brain, I’ve been continuing my readings on the topic of human consciousness. The latest read is A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness by V.S. Ramachandran. Dr. Ramachandran (aka “Rama”) is a neuroscientist, and this is definitely a nuts-and-bolts approach to the brain and how consciousness is created within it. Not that Dr. Rama, or anyone else, quite knows yet just how consciousness is in fact created amidst all those squishy neurons and electric pulses residing up above your eyebrows. But the good doctor can and does take a lot of interesting guesses.
One point that Ramachandran makes is that experimental evidence shows that conscious decisions to move some part of the body (the finger, the arm, the mouth, etc.) are actually set in place in the brain before we become aware of it. Well OK, that makes sense in a highly instinctual situation like eating, fighting or sex. But even in a calm mood, the decision to get up out of a chair or reach for a telephone is already in motion by the time that you think you are deciding to do such a thing. It’s almost as if there is a “zombie self”, a machine up there in the head, which really decides what to do. The conscious part thinks it is calling the shots, but in reality it is simply watching. (This is called epiphenomenalism). A lot of consciousness scholars would say that it’s even worse than this; my whole description here is totally wrong, as it still assumes “the little man within”. They say that we have to get used to a whole new way of thinking about what we really are.
These are Alice-In-Wonderland times we are living in. Is anything really as it seems to be?
One more bumpy segue here: A guy at work who knows some Middle-Eastern Arab people said that his friends believe that al-Zarqawi’s death was something like an old-fashioned Mafia rub-out. They postulate that there are ongoing arguments and power struggles between the various factions within the Iraqi insurgency, and that some factions recently decided that al-Zarqawi had gotten a little too big for his britches. So they got in touch with the United States military, and we agreed to do their dirty work. It keeps them from walking down the “Arab street” with Arab blood on their hands (especially since it’s an intra-Sunni thing).
Hmmm, something to think about. It’s possible that the local Iraqi insurgency factions, with their Baathist / Saddam Hussein roots, decided that the al Qaeda outsiders represented by al-Zarqawi and their pan-Sunni Arabist theologies were no longer useful and desirable. If so, I see two implications: first the local insurgency in Iraq now feels strong enough and confident enough to work alone; not an indication that the US will successfully establish a stable democratic government in Iraq. But second, the al Qaeda idea of uniting the Islamic world against the west is thus not catching fire. Anti-westernism is still a strong and dangerous current in that world, and the risk of terrorism is going to be with us for a long, long time. But as to the al Qaeda ideology fostering a war of the empires, akin to our rivalry with the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s . . . . that probably ain’t going to happen.
Which is still a bad thing for us, as the USA knows what to do against other empires, being an empire ourselves. We don’t do as well when a set of unaffiliated but similarly motivated tribes peck at us from a variety of directions. Throughout the history of the great empires (Chinese, Indian, Roman, Ottoman, British, American), that has often been the beginning of the end. Can American ingenuity keep history from repeating itself? Stay tuned; our accustomed way of life here in Rome, err, America, is riding on this one.