Masks Too

In an earlier article , we explored the idea of Masks – you know, those faces you prepare “for the faces that you meet.” (Eliot) We determined that our masks are Markov Blankets, i.e. that they follow The Boston Protocol (named in honor of the Lowels who talk only to Cabots and the Cabots who talk only to God); we summarized our conclusions in a meme: “I talk only to my masks and only my masks talk to you.”

We imagine we are nobility attending a pre-Revolutionary masked ball. We don our masks only when we choose and we can drop them at any time to engage more authentically with our costumed interlocutors. But that’s not what we mean by masks!

In ordinary states of normal consciousness, we only interact with each other’s masks. Despite the vain but well-intentioned efforts of 10,000 published novelists, we have no more idea what’s behind those masks than Alice knew what was through her looking glass.

Society is a ‘non-virtual’ video game, and we anonymously manipulate our avatars with joy sticks. IRL, you behave as you behave. Perhaps you intend your behavior to reveal aspects of your innermost self, but ultimately you have no control over what I see or even over what I’m shown. You communicate with your avatar; you hope for the best…but don’t expect it!

In a lifetime, we will wear many masks; in fact, we wear multiple masks every day. I’m wearing several right now. Our masks are translucent (not transparent) so we can layer one atop another to create all sorts of special effects. Like children dressing up in old clothes found in an attic trunk, we never tire of being someone we’re not. Who would? (BTW, is that a uniquely human trait?)

That I wear a mask is hard wired. There is no ‘social me’ without one; but the configuration of that mask, its layers and progressions, is constantly in flux. That I wear a mask is my uber-mask; what mask I wear is situational…and ever shifting. Like Proteus, or a certain Heraclitean River, I am never the same…and never different.

A 5^th century BCE Greek philosopher, Empedocles, nailed it: “In so far as they never stop interchanging, they are forever unchanged…running through each other they become different at different times and (so) are perpetually alike.” (Fragment 25)

So did a 20^th century existentialist: “I am not what I am, and I am what I am not.” (Sartre)

Absent the possibility of an altered state of consciousness, philosophy’s Other Minds problem is insoluble. Per Turning, there is no way of knowing if my interlocutor is conscious, and per Searle, there is no way of knowing if communication between avatars is intentional, i.e. meaningful, or algorithmic.

Therefore, I cannot know what’s behind the faces that I meet. It’s possible that the answer is ‘nothing at all’; it’s possible that my uber-mask (my mask of masks) lives in a world of cardboard cutouts…but I choose to believe otherwise.

Generous as I am, I am willing to grant you ‘personhood’. (You’re very welcome; I’m sure it means a lot.) Seriously though, it’s the ‘Occam’ thing to do: to suppose that all phenomenal masks conceal unique individuals, but unique individuals who share a common ontological status. In English? “You’re just like me only different.”

Unfortunately, though, even that doesn’t help. I am perpetually projecting images onto my uber-mask’s reverse side. This is the me I want you to see. This is the me I see in my mind’s mirror. This is my ‘beloved son’ with whom I am well-pleased.

But that’s not the ‘me’ you meet. What I am to you (obverse side of my mask) is different, often radically so, from who I am to myself (reverse side). Your mask (you) responds to whatever my mask happens to be projecting; my mask responds to yours in the same way. Neither of us has control over those projections. In fact, I learn what I’m projecting only by seeing your mask’s reaction. I see myself only as I am reflected and refracted in you.

Because each of us is always alienated from our masks, we live in individual, solipsistic universes, hermetically sealed to ensure no cross contamination. We react ‘we know not how’ to projections that tell us ‘we know not what’ about ‘we know not whom’.

We are who we are not, pretending to be who we are, interacting with folks who are pretending to be who they are not. “What we have here is a failure to communicate!” (Cool Hand Luke) A failure, literally, of cosmic proportions. No wonder we’re so messed up!

I mentioned ‘ordinary states of normal consciousness’ as if I knew what that might mean. There may be ‘special’ states that do allow us to make unmediated contact with the man or woman behind a given mask. I’m speaking, of course, about Sex, Drugs & Rock and Roll.

We sometimes refer to such states as ‘ecstatic’ – a good choice of words since it comes from the Greek (ekstasis) meaning to ‘stand outside of one’s self’. This is precisely what would be necessary if one were to have unmediated contact with another subject.

The literature regarding such interpersonal encounters is vast. Sartre calls it Being for Others. Jesus et al. refer to ‘loving your neighbor as yourself’. Marxists call it solidarity. Tellingly, a party drug reputed to promote ‘intense feelings of inter-personality’ has the street name, Ecstasy. 

We may shed our masks during an AC/DC concert or at a performance of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto or in front to a Monet haystack, a Van Gogh wheatfield, or a Giotto landscape.

And finally, we have the realm of religious/spiritual experience: the visions of saints, the enlightenment of Buddhas, the love of a Mother Theresa, prayer and/or meditation. It is not for us, now or ever, to comment on these testimonials; but the rest of us, we muggles, remain hunkered down in our WWI era trenches. For us, today is just another day behind the barricades, i.e. behind our masks.