The Problem Of The Uncanny

There is a miniscule dent in the nail of my right index finger. How it got there, I have no idea. I don’t remember hitting my finger with a hammer or anything. It just appeared. I’ve been watching as it grows out day by day. I will soon trim that nail, and the little dent will be gone. The mystery of the dent will be history, its origin forever unanswered. And then it seems to me that there are so many things in my body that I know very little about, or power to affect. I don’t grow my hair, my hair does that on its own. I don’t digest my food, my stomach takes care of that. I didn’t invent me eyes or lungs or legs or thumbs. I don’t have a patent on kidneys or blood circulation. I can’t take credit for a single item or process pertaining to my body. The question is therefore obvious: who am I? What am I? Am I my body? How can I be my body if I didn’t do a single thing to participate in its creation?

It seems to me that my mind is separate from my body, is it not? Because it sure feels that way. It feels like I’m up here in my head looking down at my hands as they scamper across the keyboard of a laptop typing these words. I’m looking out of a pair of windows called eyes and processing sounds called music and feeling the weight of my body enjoy the support of a chair accompanied with a little muscular tension in my back. I am somehow in my head, this person to which I attach the pronoun ‘I.’ It’s a difficult phenomenon to describe as it is simultaneously identified with this body and yet somehow separate, somehow transcendent and incorporeal. I am a walking talking contradiction, a paradox of neurology, experience, and hair. On the one hand arms and fingers and feet and on the other nothing: a spirit, a soul, a mind. A captain in his bridge looking out upon the ocean that is the world.

Is there any validity to this sense of identity independent of my body, or is it an illusion? Is there a spirit that inhabits my body but is not my body, and is this spirit, which has a personality, the continuing narrative that is me, me? Am I the spirit? Does the mind have reality?

These questions become increasingly pertinent as I age. Because the body is mortal. When it gives out, I go with it.

Or do I? Is there a soul? Was Swedenborg, right? Is there an afterlife that is similar to life on earth? Will there be houses and balloons and suppositories and wallets? Will I have to retake a driver’s test in heaven in order to get my license?

Is there a world beyond ours, a world of spirit and vision, a universe of waves and auras, spiritual energies unencumbered by matter? Is the mind an essence, a phenomenon independent of empirical reality?

Last night I watched six men stab a man to death. The man was Julius Caesar. The six men were friends and colleagues in the Roman senate: Publius Servilus Casca, Lucius Cornelius Cinna, Marcus Junius Brutus, Decimas Junius Brutus, Gaius Metellus and Gaius Trebonius. The stabbing was a fiction, part of a drama written by William Shakespeare, who was fascinated by ghosts and wandering spirits. His plays abound in spirits. Fairies, witches, ghosts, prophecies, hallucinations, sylphs and sprites. He seems singularly obsessed with otherworldly beings.

Shakespeare must’ve had a pretty acute sense of unreality during his life. He describes the state so forcefully, particularly in The Tempest, in which everything that occurs on the island has a feeling of enchantment and dream, in which the division between empirical reality and vision or hallucination is an on-going segue, shifting back and forth with the ease of a shuttle on a loom, concluding brilliantly with Prospero’s speech about unreality:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

Reality just isn’t what it used to be. I’m not even sure what that means. Reality hasn’t been the same at least since I first dropped acid in 1966. But am I speaking for myself, or countless others?

I can’t speak for others, no. But there are others out there who share my obsessions. Neurologist Donald Hoffman, for example. What is the relationship between consciousness and brain activity, he asks. How is it that irritating nervous tissue results in consciousness and a sense of subjectivity? And, most importantly, do we see reality as it is?

No, we don’t. What we see is an abridged version. We see what serves our survival. We construct our world. We construct what we need in the moment. Or, more accurately, we re-construct our reality, and we do so according to however much the accuracy of our perception provides an advantage to our survival.

Except that it doesn’t. It has been mathematically demonstrated that the species that perceive reality with greater accuracy tend to go extinct, whereas species that do not see reality fully but use tricks and shortcuts to discover what is needed at the time in their environment, do better at the game of survival. A lot of reality gets filtered out. Not perceiving reality as it is, is useful.

Is that not strange?

Evolution has given us an interface that hides reality and guides adaptive behavior. Nature has given us representations (venomous snakes, high cliffs, speeding trains) that we need to take seriously, but their appearance is not the equivalent of their literal reality. We get by because we’re blind to our own blindnesses. Brains and neurons do not cause our perceptual experiences and behaviors. They’re symbols, or “life hacks.” Once we let go of our massively intuitive but massively false assumptions about the nature of reality, it opens up new ways to think about life’s greatest mystery.

I’m completely with him, until (I jotted a lot of this down from a TED talk), he says “perception is not about seeing truth, it’s about having kids.”

Suddenly, everything he has said until now (which I do find fascinating and tend to agree with) gets reduced to a stupid Family Circus panel in the Sunday papers. What about those of us who have never had the slightest urge to have kids? What about those of us who are moved by the sublime? What about beauty? What about our sense of awe? What about ecstasy? What about Hamlet, and corrupt kings, and scorned women, and the eyes of dead men?

Last night I listened to a podcast on France Culture radio of a show called Les Chemins de la Philosophie (the roads of philosophy), hosted by a vigorous young (30-something) French woman called Adèle Van Reeth. She speaks rapidly and exuberantly in a double register, her voice going way down then going back up and becoming soft and nuanced. Her personality exudes charm and enthusiasm. Her guest for this particular episode was Dylan Trigg, author of a book titled The Thing: A Phenomenology of Horror. Trigg, an Englishman, was translated into French during the interview. His premise is fascinating: he takes phenomenology as it has been represented by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas, and adds the element of horror to it. He says he was frustrated by what he perceives as a misunderstanding of phenomenology as a veneration of the body in harmony with its world, as a vessel of concord and unification. It is, instead, a conflictual relationship with existential implications. He sees a duality of experience, a subjectivity experiencing the body as something other than us, an alterity we inhabit with feelings of strangeness and dissociation. He refers to several movies and works of literary fiction, chiefly H.P. Lovecraft, to underscore this theme. He is particularly taken by John Carpenter’s The Thing, I presume the more recent 2011 remake of his 1982 rendition, which was itself a remake of Howard Hawk’s 1951 The Thing from Another World, starring James Arness (Gunsmoke’s marshal Matt Dillon) as the “thing.”

I’ve only seen the 2011 The Thing directed by Dutch director Matthijs van Heijiningen Jr. I enjoyed it, although it was not a critical success. Movie critics all agree that Carpenter’s 1982 The Thing is superior. The story is simple: in 1982 an alien spacecraft is discovered beneath the Antarctic ice by a scruffy team of Norwegian scientists, with a dead alien aboard. The alien is helicoptered to the base in a block of ice and put in a laboratory. When the team is downing brewskis and celebrating their find (one can’t help think of a bunch of rowdy Vikings in the mead hall partying it up before Grendel arrives and rips them apart) the alien bursts out of its encasement of ice and begins imitating their bodies. This is how it tricks then devours them.

The alien is a pretty cool looking object of horror. I liked how Roger Ebert described it as a “hideous and leaky smorgasbord of palpitating organs, claws, teeth, crab legs, lobster tails, beaks, snaky appendages and gooey dripping eyeballs. It doesn’t say much for life in the universe that with whole galaxies to choose from, that’s the best body it could come up with.”

Maybe that’s why the creature is so eager to assimilate other bodies. It’s a matter of vanity, and appetite. Imitate a body, trick one of its buddies, eat the buddy. Scientist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has to keep performing tests to verify whether people are human or not.

Trigg’s take on this is that it dramatizes not simply the horror of the body, but the horror of matter itself. “The problem of life,” he observes, “at heart, a problem of the uncanny, centers

…on the knowledge that one’s own body (to use a phenomenological idiom) signals a collapse not only in the experience of self, but also in the cosmos itself. For it is in the privileged expression of the human body that the strange facticity of matter gains its clearest expression.

It’s a compelling premise, but I don’t buy into it. Not all the way. I buy some of it. My body, at age 70, while still resembling what I think of as “me,” is beginning to show signs of its inevitable decay. A rather crepey look to my skin at the crook of my elbow when I bend my arm, hair growing out of the rims of my ears, bushy eyebrows that need constant trimming, a hypertrophic prostate that halts the flow of my urine. Stuff like that. Strangely, at present I am the most athletic I’ve ever been in my life. I run a minimum of three miles per day, do 50 push-ups, 20 sit-ups. My body is trim. I wouldn’t be embarrassed to wear a swimsuit at the beach. But I also know it’s ephemeral. It’s a sinking ship. And the sense of me, the ultimate sense of me, cannot accept being merely matter, skin and blood and bone and muscle. I feel somehow separate from my body. But I also know this is illusion. Or is it?