Fiction Monologue: Mr. Bat on all things being conscious to one degree or another, subjectively--on horror writers being big on openness to experience and neuroticism--and on the illusion of empathy

Mr. Bat wrote an email to friends:

"I think it would be interesting to write a ghost story which is premised on the idea that all matter has some degree of consciousness. I think that there is consciousness in all things to some degree myself. An quark has an experience, but it's very small, very simple, I suspect. The atom has more consciousness, and the human has more still. The universe has a consciousness too. Consciousness is inherent in matter, I think. The reason I suspect this is because it seems impossible (maybe it's not, of course) to figure out why a human has subjective consciousness and aren't philosophical zombies. By saying that matter is conscious, you side step the problem, but then you have to face the problem that you're saying all matter is conscious.

"I think horror writers tend to be high in the personality trait of openness to experience, but also neuroticism. So the ghost story writer is interested in weird phenomena but also scared of it. So you get stories like those written by M.R. James or H.P. Lovecraft in which characters are drawn to strangeness but at great risk to themselves. Openness is curiosity essentially, and neuroticism is the ability to feel negatively about things. M.R. James had a story called 'A Warning to the Curious'.

"I was thinking about something--I suspect people don't really have much in the way of empathy. They don't really understand people that are different from them, and they don't really like people when they are different from them. So we only understand people like us, who speak or emotional language I suppose, or our psychological language, and we sympathize with them because they have the same values and ways of understanding things. Women sympathize with other women. Men sympathize with other men. Women and men don't understand each other or sympathize with each other's plight. Except in the sense that they are both humans--on that level they understand each other and sympathize.

"Anyway, thanks for reading my ramblings. Have a good day!

"Mr. Bat"