Monday, March 19, 2012

The Basis of Cotard Delusion

There are not entirely uncommon cases in Science when a person feels that he is a stone and that he is devoid of life. The medical pragmatist tended to call this a delusion but it is quite possible for one to suddenly feel lifeless. Feeling lifeless is not a low feeling or a catatonic spell. Although it could be a delusion, the feeling of lifelessness by itself is a valid experience. If it is a form of madness then like Michel Foucault said; “madness is the déjà la of death” (from Madness and Civilization). But there is a difference as there is absolutely no anticipation of reality in a person with Cotard delusion. Let me explain why I chose this topic. One point I can make for choosing it is that its experience shakes the foundation of what we commonly call reality. We experience the life of every sensation that breathes through our veins. It is for this reason that it is quite complicated a matter to define life. It would be better to resort to a more pathological perspective just to escape the metaphysical implications of this state.

The Cotard syndrome is considered to be a negation delirium. It occurs when a person has a delusional belief that he is dead which is why it is also called walking corpse syndrome. One may feel that one’s existence does not exist. The negation of oneself is treated as a consequence of existence itself. Of course it is distinct from other states such as derealisation and depersonalization. The first hint at what it means to not have life is typically boredom. In boredom one feels a lack of excitement. This lack of excitement is a state one is usually conscious about. In the case of someone with Cotard delusion the experience of lifelessness or death is not a state to be conscious of. It might be argued that this state cannot be discussed or explained by someone without this syndrome. Martin Heidegger talks about how boredom reveals the totality of existence and how boredom takes you away from the trivial and the ordinary. As long as one is conscious of something there must be life.

Supposing you walk in a garden and suddenly feel disconnected from your surroundings and your thoughts then what are you left with? You may be left with consciousness but if you are then you cannot experience lifelessness then because what takes you back to your surroundings is your consciousness. In case you lose consciousness of your own consciousness then you experience the black out of sensory perception. In this situation you cannot continue walking, clinically ‘alive’. The active cogito-reflex is absent and so is the negation of it. In such a state one is alive only to the surroundings but not to oneself. There is no self as the cogito-reflex is dead and this experience is perceived medically to be the Cotard syndrome. It is called a delusion because it is not enough for the self to deny its existence but also for the objective reality to do so.

In case someone continues living just for self/body-preservation then he is said to be in a state of ennui rather than lifelessness. The state of ennui is the affirmation of the meaninglessness of life but not death of life. The negation is not achieved in ennui but is achieved by someone with the negation delirium. The ennui afflicted individual treats experiences as a passenger would in a train. He would experience the Doppler Effect and other cascading effects and lose them as they go out of sight. The Cotard syndrome may be called the anti-solipsistic fallacy where there is someone to say that he does not exist. There is something to say there is nothing and therefore nothingness denies itself. As it is not enough for someone to say that he does not exist and as it is equally necessary for the objective reality or the ‘others’ to also negate his existence he cannot be said to be non-existent. But through it, it is still possible for someone to experience lifelessness or the negation of self despite being alive to objective reality. Therefore there is a layer of vacuum beyond consciousness which marks the end of identity and experience.

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Is there a Changeless Self?

In my previous essay, ‘The Mistake of Intelligent Design’ I had said that the Hindu thinker claims the self to be the only unchanging entity. Let us look at this more closely. He says that man lives in a universe where everything keeps changing and the only entity that can be relied upon is the cosmic consciousness. According to this claim, consciousness is omnipresent. There is only existence and the objects that you see in the world are projections of illusion. The question of whose illusion it is can seldom be answered. It is inferred as a consequence that the illusions are those of ‘Brahman’. This Brahman is what the Hindu thinker refers to as ‘the changeless Self’. But if it has been identified as a ‘self’ that is ‘the other’ to the ego of the individual, there can neither be an individual nor the other. This means that both the individual self and the objects around are part of the illusion. If this were to be the case then any ethics that arrives out of it cannot be treated seriously. Any logic born out of illusion must ultimately be a fallacy. But even Brahman is part of this illusion and you end up with circular arguments. Brahman or the cosmic consciousness cannot be identified as the self in the first place because it is not an individual self. It is an idea created by a human being and this idea must therefore also be an illusion.

Self is not an entity as a body is because the concept of self is a converging point of sensations which is not a material phenomenon. All sensations together constitute consciousness and the meeting point is what language calls self because it is the origin of duality. Without self-reference there can be no language and no transaction with the outside world. The solipsistic syndrome is akin to it because there is a disconnection experienced as a result of the detachment with the world. The point is that the meeting point or self is a convergence consciousness of all the sensations of the mind and the body. If there is no concept of self then the individual floats in objective reality and cannot be grounded in the firmament. If this syndrome were not to be the case then the individual forcibly denies the body and deceives himself that it is to be discarded when he needs the body to identify himself for the convergence happens in the body alone. Therefore the result of this is neurosis where this individual wants two contradictory things. He wants the body to the extent of wanting to deny it and he wants the dissociation because he wants permanence which the body or the objects in the world cannot give him.

The individual concerned is trying to lift the chair on which he is sitting. This is impossible but he thinks it is possible in the mind when in fact it is only possible in language. The mind also depends on the body for its chemicals. Neither the body nor the mind can be denied forcibly. What is achieved is only self-deception. The solipsistic syndrome is no intellectual phenomena but an outcome of experiencing dissociation with the world either from trauma or from being separated. The convergence-consciousness in such an individual identifies its limits correctly which the one without this syndrome cannot do. The self as the convergence of sensations cannot be treated as changeless or cosmic in the context of universal illusion/reality when it is its very consequence.

Friday, March 2, 2012

The Mistake of Intelligent Design

It is generally supposed that God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. If he was omnipotent he should have the ability to correct the flaws in the universe. I personally do not see him doing any of those corrections. The distinction between good and evil is at least in a profound sense blurred. It is difficult to say for sure if you can rest trust on any one individual including your ‘self’. The self is constantly changing and so are the emotions that accompany it. The Hindu thinker says that if there is one aspect that never changes, it is the ‘self’. We will weigh this statement a little later. But now if you take into account the experiences that you go through in life you cannot be impervious to the fact that there are so many flaws in the world around you. One part of the world is well off with high life expectancies and the other part is the exact opposite. Animals get killed by carnivorous animals. No one can blame them because it is not in their design to find alternate sources of nourishment. If they are not to blame then there is only one person and that is nature or maybe even God.

It may even be a fallacy to suppose that there is a God because there are so many logical contradictions in the possibility for the existence of God. For one it is difficult to conceive of a perfect being creating an imperfect world/ universe. The other argument which is a bigger contradiction lends itself to a question, “what did God do before he created the universe?” We can see around us that the living beings and even inanimate matter change through a process of conflict and struggle. The process as observed is self-sufficient. There seems to be no need for any intervention. The fact of the matter is that the cosmic force is impervious to the destruction as a result of the conflict which is all pervasive. So God as a being full of compassion is a matter of doubt. Is God omnipresent? If he was then the universe may as well worship itself. God would have been the other to man and man the other to him. There seems to be here a duality that challenges creationism.

Observations tell man that what happens around him is unjustifiable. You take for granted your existence as the self to the other and you observe the universe as a phenomenon of duality. You cannot observe otherwise because it is as much impossible to deny yourself as it is to deny experience or sensation. The only time when sensation is denied is when you are not conscious. The state of nothingness so to say only exists as a concept. This in itself is a flaw in ontology. You exist as a self and you exist as the other to the other self and what you have to justify existence is a circular argument. Existence is an a priori phenomenon as a result of sensation. The mistake in intelligent design, if at all there is an intelligent designer is to create life out of contradictions. A life out of contradictions can only produce ethics out of contradictions and the duality is itself the dwelling centre for the impasse called infinite regress.