Introduction

Grizzly bears, electric bears, fire bears—these three are the most dangerous bears, my three-year-old daughter informs me. I don’t know how she knows what she knows, yet she knows many things. Lately it is all about bears. Electric bears? I ask her. I’ve never seen an electric bear. If you go into his cave, he will fill you with electricity, she tells me, gleefully. A fire bear throws fire; he will throw fire all over you (she is on my lap now, her face right up against mine; she uses her hand to show me, opening her tiny fist as it reaches my head, making a fire noise). Fire all over you now, she says.

What about polar bears? I ask. Are they dangerous? She shakes her head—polar bears, black bears, panda bears—not dangerous at all, of this she is certain.

I don’t know how she knows what she knows, but then I don’t know how I know what I know either. Aristotle, in his works, first addressed what we are (physics), then moved on to how we know what we are (epistemology). When I found this out, I also found out I’ve been misunderstanding—misusing (mystified by?)—the term metaphysics my whole life. The term is attributed to Aristotle (no surprise there), but not to refer to that which is beyond (meta) the physical realm, which is how I always used it, as shorthand for what cannot be measured, for what is unknown. It turns out that the editor of Aristotle’s works (Andronicus of Rhodes) simply placed a chapter on the nature of being (ontology) after (meta) that first chapter on physics—ta-da, metaphysics! It was an editorial decision, which, after years of mistranslation, spawned whole branches of philosophy and schools of poetics.

When I sat down to write this morning, I had one phrase written on a scrap of paper—the hard problem of consciousness—which I wanted to get clear on before I began my day. I’d stumbled across that phrase (the hard problem of consciousness) while trying to understand something about memory. This led me to read up on neurobiology (Ramachandran, Damasio, Pinker), which led me to metaphysics. Pinker calls the brain an information-processing machine—an understandable metaphor, but it feels incomplete. We all agree that the brain is this profound organism, capable of transcendence and beauty, but for Pinker this magic all takes place between synapses—everything is inside us. Everything. Damasio, in The Feeling of What Happens, offers this:

…in the end, consciousness begins as a feeling, a special kind of feeling, to be sure, but a feeling nonetheless. I still remember why I began thinking of consciousness as a feeling and it still seems like a sensible reason: consciousness feels like a feeling, and if it feels like a feeling, it may well be a feeling…

If it feels like a feeling, it may well be a feeling…I left Brooklyn one winter, took a job that (in part) required me to read poetry manuscripts for admission to an artist’s residency program (I was one of several judges). Hundreds of manuscripts, yet a year later I could remember only one title—“My Feelings.” It had to be a joke, it couldn’t be serious. I decided, before opening it, that it would be either utterly naïve or strangely brilliant. Now I might suggest a subtitle: My Feelings, or the Hard Problem of Consciousness. I wrote it on a scrap of paper before bed last night, I went to Wikipedia when I opened my computer this morning. I read about it, then closed the page, and so this will be from memory: it has something to do with subjective reality, with the phenomenon of perception, with why an album (Kind of Blue), or a certain color (cerulean), or a poem (“Bluets”) affects us as it does. Or, more important, why I (still) watch zombie movies this time of year, when the days are shortest (The Walking Dead). From the page on the hard problem of consciousness I linked, naturally, to a page on philosophical zombies (p-zombies), a new term for me. P-zombies apparently have all the physical traits of humans, yet without consciousness. They were invented (or discovered, depending on where you stand) as an argument against the physicalists, who believe it is all inside us, all in the synapses. A p-zombie looks and acts like us, but it is not us—if you poke it with a stick it will say ouch, but it doesn’t feel the pain. Thereby, the argument goes, p-zombies prove that consciousness can exist outside our bodies. Of course, there are counterarguments, as there should be. Just as we might not have had John Donne if we hadn’t had centuries of mistranslating what Aristotle meant by metaphysics.