In the movie, I Heart Huckabees, the essential question is whether we as humans are all connected, or whether we are all essentially alone. It took the question to extremes where one camp argued that humans are so connected that they are like a blanket. In their view, it didn’t matter whether you live in the mansion on the hill or sit alone on a dung heap, because humanity is so connected that we are, in essence, one. If someone else lives in the mansion, so do you. If someone sits on a dung heap, so do you.
On the other extreme, the movie proposed the nihilistic view that nothing matters because we are so separated from each other that connection and true knowledge of anything are impossible.
Both are extreme views, and the movie happily dumps the viewer in some happy little medium where both views coexist as two sides of a philosophical coin, but it avoids even the smallest attempt at reconciling the two philosophies. If it had made the slightest attempt, I could’ve avoided all this writing, and you could be doing something more useful than reading philosophy 101 from someone who doesn’t even smoke weed or have a pony tail. Yay.
The question is: can the two polar extremes of people being utterly disconnected and completely connected coexist, and both be true?
I don’t think that there is argument against the existence of connections existing between parents and children or among siblings. What about connections to people we just met, where we just seem to “hit it off” without the slightest effort? Anyone who has ever shared a laugh with someone knows that we can share some connection with people. If we can agree these connections exist, can we stand beside the premise that we are utterly alone?
Now, those of you who subscribe to the premise that “all humans are one” can line up at my front door. First we’ll weed out 23% of you for being on drugs, a solid 49% of you for being below average intelligence, and 7% for being guided by some form of higher being. The 21% of the critical thinkers left will get a good old fashioned kick in the nuts (I suppose we can set up some sort of equally painful uteral tweaking for the ladies) to see if it hurts me as much as it hurts you. If we are all one, it should, but it won’t, so we’re really not.
So we’re not one, but we’re not separate? Yes. Both and none. This has nothing to do with magic, jebus, or Stephen Hawking. Simply put, our problem is our brain.
There are cases in which people intentionally distort and misrepresent situations to us, and it makes some of us mad as hell, and throws others into years of therapy, yet our own brains do the same thing to us all the time and we happily ignore it. Our perceptions may paint an untrue picture of what is happening around us, or our brain may fill in the gaps where our perception left off to present us with an uninterrupted picture of what is going on in front of us.
Your eyes are doing it to you right now. Your eyes are taking high quality samples of these words right now and storing them in your brain. It is creating a virtual model of the room you are in, right now and that is where you are living: not in the real world, but in the virtual representation of the world as stored in your head. You’re here, but you’re not. Close your eyes and take a second and really try to picture the last time you were reading a book before reading on.
If you are like most people, you visualized the scene where you were looking at yourself reading. I will extend the assumption of your normalcy to include the premise that you’re not prone to out of body experiences while reading. Yet, quite naturally, you have visualized a scene not as it was, but from a point of view that you could not have held in the real world.
And you do this with everything. You see a table, your brain creates a little table in your head and stores it there. You and I can both interact with the same table, and we can both agree that it is solid and brown without conference. Yet, we will store different tables in our heads based upon what we individually find interesting about it. I might store the short table with the scratch in the leg, while you store the veneer table that could use some polish. We see the same object, yet we create different objects in our minds.
What if we turn the table into a person? There is only one person in the real world, but all of us have built models of that person in our heads based on the attributes that stand out to us. And because you create a little carbon copy of them in your head, you never really interact with the other person. You only interact with your perception of them. Who they really are, can only be felt by them, and even if they could express it with the most truthful of words, you would never reach it. You would always be interacting with someone that you have created, rather than the person who really exists.
They will always exist to you as filtered through you and your perception. You will always project onto that carbon copy the attributes that you want them to have and deny them the attributes that they don’t deserve. You will force their actions to fit into your model of them, irrespective of their accuracy in the real world. Did Jim just yell at me because I’m driving him crazy? No Jim yelled at me because James a dick. Did Mary just pocket that ten bucks off of Jim’s desk? No way! She’s a sweet old lady. And, plus, like I said, Jim is a dick.
So, are the Nihilists right? Are you really making any connection with other people at all? Or are you merely interacting with a model that only exists in your head? If you are only interacting with a model of someone in your head, you are then incapable of making any real connection with them. We are all alone.
Yet, if the only connections that you make with people are really interactions with models of them in your head, then you are God. Everyone in your world was not only created by you, but exists within you. And if everyone exists within one being, then everyone is connected and we are all one.
With talk like this, I should probably take up drugs or drown it all out with some Slayer.