The Randomness of Consciousness

Perhaps I was deluding myself a little when I said in a previous post that I wasn't much one for commenting on current affairs. Earlier this morning, I came across a post on facebook arguing against same-sex marriage. A number of the commenters stated that they "didn't hate gay people", but that they thought that marriage should have nothing to do with non-heterosexual relationships. I chewed my lip for a few minutes, knowing that if I posted a comment, given that this link came from a page openly against same-sex marriage, I would probably spend the next several hours anxiously awaiting responses that would evidently be hostile. But I also felt that it would be wrong to stay quiet. Even if I could never convince anyone to change their viewpoint, I felt it was important to question the reasoning that it was okay to deny to one group of people a privilege allowed to others.

This got me thinking, in turn, about my own wider ethical viewpoint, which is something that's been on my mind a lot over the last couple of weeks. I think that at the very basis of how I think about such things is my long-held sense of the randomness of consciousness.

I'm well aware that 'the randomness of consciousness' sounds like the sort of elliptical phrase that an early twentieth-century philosopher might coin, to the frustration of twenty-first century students everywhere, so let me elaborate. I vividly remember a moment, when I was about seven years old, when I was standing at a sink next to another girl at school, and I looked in the mirror and wondered what it would be like to look up into the mirror and see not my face, but hers. What would it be like to exist in another person's head? 

For a while after that, I chewed the issue over in my head, sometimes even wishing that I could escape the shackles of the body and mind that 'I' existed in and to live life as someone else. It seemed to me, in a way, immensely limiting that I should only ever know what it was like to be 'me'.

Lately, this has transformed into a general sense of how very unlikely it is that I should be experiencing life as the individual that I am. It is completely by chance that I happened to be born in England, that I find myself attracted to people of the opposite sex rather than the same, that I incidentally identify as the gender which lines up with my physical sex, that I had the fortune (perhaps!) to be born with a fairly high degree of intelligence, that my skin by chance is of a pale complexion, that I happen to have a fairly healthy body, that I ended up being born to parents with reasonably steady incomes. All these things are the case, and I cannot change them - but I feel strongly that the fact that I am who I am today, living the life I live in the conditions I live it in, is entirely due to chance. 

Therefore, when it comes to intensely debated ethical issues, I've tried not simply to wonder 'how does this affect me?' but also to ask 'how would I feel if I was one of the people involved in this'? Not simply in a straightforward 'putting myself in their shoes' sense, but also because of my above sense that I could just as easily have been born into their circumstances as they could have been into mine. A human being does not choose their parents, their place of birth, their IQ, their inherited socio-economic status, the colour of their skin, or their sexual alignment. I'm not being completely deterministic about this - people can obviously move beyond the limits into which they are initially born in some ways, for example with regards to socio-economic status - but often, the things for which people are persecuted in this day and age (their gender, their sexuality, their nationality) are those which they had absolutely no part in deciding.

This leads on to the other key tenet by which I try to figure out whether something is ethically "good" or "bad". This is that a human being should have the freedom to pursue their own happiness insofar as it does not impair the happiness of others. I've often seen this referred to as ethical humanism. To this I would also add the caveat that it is my belief that human beings have a duty to endeavour to aid the happiness of others, insofar as they are able without impairing their own. (I know I'm probably mixing my Kant with my Mill at this point...)

So, those are the two categories by which I judge an ethical problem. The first is, if the ethical problem is related to a part of someone's identity that is completely chance-dictated (such as race or sexuality), then I would consider what my emotional reaction to the two sides of the argument (pro/anti-same-sex marriage) would be if the issue affected me. The second is - how would a given issue affect the happiness of the people involved? So, with same-sex marriage, homosexual people who want to be married obviously feel strongly that it would increase their happiness to be able to do so. On the other hand, it seems to me that how two people define and demonstrate a personal relationship has no impact on my own happiness, save, perhaps, to increase it by seeing them fulfilling their own.

And that, I suppose, is how I try to live my life, and why I sometimes feel the need to wade into arguments on the internet that will just leave me shaking with sadness and rage. I do not always succeed in living up to my own ideal, but it seems to me that human beings should try to follow a rule of kindness in their interactions with people - even those who are strangers, or those they will never meet. Essentially, because of the (probably rather incoherent!) things I feel about the 'randomness of consciousness', I think that one should always endeavour to 'treat thy neighbour as thyself' - because all that separates you from your neighbour is the roll of a dice.