In the West we like to see the human brain in two parts: the physical organ of the brain (which is a part of the body) and its properties such as thought or the things we think about, which is derived from what might be termed the philosophy of mind, examined by Plato in his Phaedo. For Rene Descartes, thinking and writing many years after Plato, the mind was res cogitans and immaterial. But he also figured that the mind interacted with the body in a such a way that mental acts could “cause” physical acts; I believe the opposite formula is also valid. In a word, the mind interacts with the body. Importantly enough, for Descartes, there are 1) physical substances, bridges for example, and 2) mental substances, such as the images of the bridge we imagine in our thoughts. This is the essence of what we call Cartesian dualism.
I would never argue for or against this method of thinking about the human lifeworld or Lebenswelt, although the consequences of such a framework are interesting. Within the philosophies and sciences of the brain we have another interesting framework or metaphor from which, we might argue, the philosophy of mind is simply a piece of the puzzle. I think it’s older than dualism, but I may be wrong. It’s been known for a long time that in the West Reason is considered a master over Emotion because Reason considers the observable facts, whole Emotion is fragile, reactive, and bound to race off into the woods like a rabbit. In Biblical terms, Reason is masculine, Emotion feminine. Adam is Reason; Eve is Emotion. In other terms, Emotion is The Artist, Reason, The Scientist. Reason is Physics, a Hard (a masculine attribute) Science; Psychology is Emotion, a Soft (a feminine attribute) Science. Of course, all of this comes with Qualifiers and may have absolutely nothing to do with actuality.
Another way of looking at the mind is via the metaphor of the left and right brain. Right is the emotion side of the brain (the soft side), left, the logical (the hard side). We see this metaphor played out in fictions: The X Files, Star Trek, The Simpsons, A Good Man is Hard to Find, and Paradise Lost. All of these fictions play with the narrative of mind/body interaction.
Then there’s a question of Billy, however, Billy whose story derives from an archived video submitted for scholarship to the Examiners, which was a group formed many years ago by the President to understand why things break. A few seconds after the events depicted in the video, the recorded bridge collapsed. Witnesses at the scene, which included Billy and Billy’s father, were apparently shaken as their vehicle had just cleared the weakest portion of the structure.
Collapsed bridges are no laughing matter. There were several recorded bridge collapses at this time. But the question was raised despite this evidence: were Billy’s fears warranted? His father had asked, “Do you understand.” Billy had repeated to one of the officers at the scene, while his father stood by (his father had been instrumental in saving many of the people trapped by steel and concrete), “I understand.” The officer had asked, “Son, what did you see?” But Billy answered every question or observation with, “I understand.”
I was admitted into Billy’s room reluctantly by the Director, as he claimed that Billy could only see visitors for short moments, as he was in a fragile state. I entered the room and found Billy, an old man now, shuddering in his chair and staring at a blank wall. His was a special kind of tremor. Just visible within the material that cloaked him, a small vibration, the kind of interesting motion to his chin, lips, and knees, even his eye balls, that suggested not just a muscular suppression of internal pressure but also a methodical or learned method of restraining himself from shrieking against the things that had or might still threaten to injure or kill him.
“One time,” he said, “I was standing at a window, the window of my father’s pastry shop which faced the traffic, and a car from the street crashed through. And so, I face only hard walls.”
“Statistically speaking,” Billy told me, “very few people are killed by lightning. One day, while walking with my mother, I felt something tug at my arm. The next thing I know is my mother’s screaming and driving me fast to the hospital.”
I asked Billy how extensive were these occurrences, these breaks in the statistical likelihood of things disordered or breaking? He said, “Oh, it’s not what you think. Not everyday.”
The Director told me, “No, not everyday. Which, of course, was the issue with our Billy, who, as you can see has lived a long life albeit tortured.”
His records were clear. An airbag had released as he’d clicked in the seat belt. It had been his plate that had come with a small chip from the porcelain in his sandwich, slicing his tongue. The doctor had claimed that yes, it had been his lunch out of all the millions that had been stored in a poisonous plastic bag. The baseball had fallen out of the glare of the sun to knock him in the eye. Out of all the millions it had been his luck, out of all the millions his plane landed and as it parked at the terminal, a huge rending noise could be heard and the wing fell to the macadam.
“Then there was the case of the exploding gas can and the incident with the mower blade,” the Director told me.
Out of all the millions, perhaps billions, Billy’s roof was taken lifted by storm while the neighbors looked on, their own roofs secure and stable, thus verifying the notion of the unlikely or the probable.
Billy was, ultimately, a case prover, a being that brought comfort to others. As I departed the facility for the last time with my notes and my evidence, I got into my vehicle with a strange sense of security, a strange sense of comfort that I knew made no logical sense. I knew I would make it home safely and soundly; I knew that the bridge that would take me to my side of living would remain standing: Because so many things had already broken or become disordered for Billy, who shuddered in his room, wondering when the roof would collapse or a meteor would fall out of the sky to strike him clean from the world, reason told me that the bridge would stand for me.
But then I found error in my logic, and at this I felt a strange shudder in the foot that I used to depress the accelerator: what if I had been driving behind Billy on that bridge?
