mean? That’s like the big daddy of them all, isn’t it? But it seems like a real impossibility as the meaning of life is never revealed during life…or maybe it is, but only very rarely.
There are those that would say that the meaning of life is love. I have to admire these people because love is an extremely admirable, if incomprehensibly complex, emotion to base one’s existence on—I guess I’m thinking of the super-powerful flower in gun barrel image. To be sure, if love is what it is all about, then that is an incredible design from the almighty; however, large-scale love has never really worked. The closest we could probably come is peaceful co-existence. Yes, if everybody loved everybody the world would be a better place, but we are asking entire chunks of the world to unburden themselves of the weight of history, which is a mighty difficult task. I think the closest that this relationship could come to the meaning of it all is a love—hate thing, and while the ironic gap is pretty fitting, it only really accounts for part of something.
By this I mean that it is only a part of what the brain can do. The amydgala is small neural cluster in the brain that processes a lot of our negative emotions and the positive emotions are sort of strewn about—an interesting phenomenon in itself. What happens when we make decisions is that these sections of the brain seem to light up and duke it out letting us know how we ought to feel and therefore helping us make decisions. But I think the key here is that these are sections of the brain. The brain is more complex than love?
I don’t think anybody would forego derivatives for the whole unless you absolutely had to—thanks math—and for this reason there is good reason to believe that the first principle ruling each and every individual resides in the brain, and not somewhere specific either. The brain is as complex as life is, and is, arguably, what makes us capable of life or, more specifically, living.
The body is an amazing thing. Have you ever fasted? It’s a funny sort of thing that affects the body, and we feel it. To fast has been a part of almost every major religious or spiritual history, and for good reason because it makes us very aware of the needs of the body. I am still a big proponent of the two biological imperatives: survive and reproduce. From a purely biological standpoint, these two, fairly simple things are all that we need to survive. They are not the meaning of life because these are once again one section of imperatives. We also need to emote and cogitate and decide and do the things that make these two imperatives possible, and meaning should not be something you have to do. You find meaning, but you don’t technically have to go out looking for it—implied of course by find.
I’ve just had a disturbing thought that how I came into the world is how I’m going to go out of it: as a newborn I had colic and cried incessantly.
But if he head back into the depths of the brain, we find something else interesting going on there, and that is that something we would normally consider a positive emotion, empathy, in that it is a positive thing to be able to understand what someone is feeling, actually flares up some parts of the brain that deal with pain: pleasure and pain, a classic battle.
From this one battleground we can absolutely determine that pleasure and pain are not the meaning either because these are once again two separate feelings (opposites), and meaning does not really have an opposite. Meaning and meaninglessness would probably be the closest, but meaninglessness is determined by meaning, unlike pleasure being determined by pain in that it is entirely possible to understand the one without the other, but meaninglessness means nothing without meaning.
So, what are we getting from this? The brain, the intellect, and the question. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” you might say, “would you deny even spirituality?” Spirituality is a mysterious feeling, but we have already determined that feelings are derivatives of the brain’s functions and that we would not forego first principles for derivatives. Spirituality is different from love in that its mysteries involve asking the question, “What happens when the one we love is absent from our physical presence and we attribute all this power and grandeur and meaning to him or her or it?” But that’s about it. If you have ever been in a long-distance relationship, you have been close to this kind of thing. As a matter of fact, I highly recommend it. It is extremely challenging, and you learn one helluva lot about yourself in the process, but I guess it’s not everything now is it?
I am beginning to think that we are overlooking the most relevant part of the question we asked at the very beginning: the fact that it is a question: a question implies an answer. Now, let’s be very clear and say that there are some questions that are more difficult to answer than others, let’s just say for kicks we were asked to discuss theoretical physics or what Joyce was really getting at. These are nearly impossible questions to answer, but by asking them we are implying that it is worthy of investigation and the closer we get to the answer of these truly difficult questions is one step closer to understanding more about ourselves.
If the one thing we can grant is that the act reveals desire, and that we generally act for what we want, and further, that the act is a question because the future is unknowable, then the boiled down first principle of the thing seems to be saying something like act with the understanding you are questioning because that’s what you can do. You don’t have to, but you can. The more you actively question, the more you are revealing you want to question in general. You are always better for having acted (I am not advocating irrational, premature actions, but even these have the potential to make us better if we learn from them).
But even an action is a question that has no words right away. Sometimes we don’t know what question we are asking until we have the benefit of hindsight, so maybe it’s the question undefined that defines us. We can investigate everything, can’t we?
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Friday, June 20, 2008
I Hate My
body. Not in the traditional sense of I am unhappy with its appearance, mind you, but in the fact that the mere possession of it disallows soul freedom. What is wanderlust but the soul’s desire to move? Would that make it soulular wanderlust? Can you just make up words like that? I suppose the proper way to say it might be: wanderlust of the soul, but somehow a made-up word and a real word juxtaposed like that gives you a certain sense of the meaning.
That’s a fairly clever metaphor, no? The soul is kind of a made-up thing in its way, as we are never fully capable of knowing it. Or, rather more specifically, we are never fully capable of knowing its purpose assuming, of course, that it exists—and I think that is the assumption we are working under here, but perhaps we ought to investigate a little bit. Now, for those who believe in an afterlife, it is perfectly obvious that there has to be soul because the physical reality of a person cannot make the journey to anywhere once it’s lying, decomposing in the ground. Of this we can be certain. So, there must be some kind of metaphysical reality we call a soul, otherwise there would be nothing to transport the life force to the other realm. Now, as to those who do not believe in an after life, there are a couple of options. If transmigration of soul is the belief, then we are once again left in a fairly obvious soul situation because there has to be something that migrates, yes?
As it turns out, something like eighty-four percent of the entire population of the world could be called “religious,” and religious usually implies the belief in at least a god or a kind of god and things bigger than oneself. This belief goes hand in hand with idea of a soul because it is impossible to believe in a god or gods or something and not believe in the soul, as the god would have nothing to work on in the subject if it did not exist. In other words, to affirm one category of unknowable things (i.e. god or the after life) is to affirm the existence of unknowable things, and it is therefore illogical to categorically affirm one section of unknowability while denying another. Some things are unknowable.
Given all of that, then for that eighty-four percent of the population, the soul exists absolutely. Now, the other sixteen would probably be non-religious or atheistic. Even of this number, there are those who would deny religion and affirm the soul—I guess I would toss myself into this category because humans are capable of nothing but screwing up the understanding of religion because of the needs of the body. Even of those who would deny the existence of god altogether, there is a number that would cop to spirituality—where there is a sense of something or other in the world that is…unknowable. The only real category of people who would probably deny that there is a soul and that it is concerned with matters which we cannot fully comprehend (namely death and the meaning of existence) is those who would deny the existence of god and a meaning of life. They would be, finally, a very minimal (I believe the term in physics is negligible) percentage of the entire population, and in their negligibility, they are probably wrong. Now, the majority of the world’s population is generally mixed when it comes to matters of taste, touch, sight, smell and hearing because these are very culturally defined things. I like moo goo gai pan because I like chicken and mushroom stir-fried together in a delicious sauce. But the problem with the senses is that they are so incredibly individualistic. The individual senses then are a subset of the category “feeling.” To feel.
But physical senses are inferior to metaphysical senses. For example, one of these metaphysical senses would be love. Love is composed of the five physical senses, and this sense of something or other. It is the combination of those feelings, and most of the time—especially as time wears on—the physical senses and the pleasure that the other causes in those senses decline and the feeling of love remains in tact. Feelings of friendships would fall into this category as well because we can see our friends and in that sight reach a certain kind of happiness. We can smell something foul and the feeling that goes along with it would be disgust.
In all of this then, the body is the weight that holds the soul down. I think it would be preferable to think of this metaphorically like a ship sitting in a harbor, where the weighing of the anchor is the start of the soul’s journey into the unknown. It is holding you to the physical pleasures of the things dry land and fellowship with other humans can bring.
So, why don’t we just set sail? If the body is a vessel for the soul, and vessels hold things, those things have to be put there, and the vessel, then, is really like the guy you hand your beer to and say, “hang onto this for a minute, I gotta hit the head.” He’s waiting for you to come back and reclaim your beer, or at the very least you have some responsibility for the beer, even if it’s to say, “Hey bruh, yeah, your beer’s over there behind the plant. It was my turn for beer pong.”
To return to a more sophisticated metaphor, the ship of the soul cannot leave the harbor until it has sufficient supplies or some outside force causes the anchor chain of the body to break.
But, then the question must be asked, to which do we attend? The matters of the physical are gratifying in their way. Good god if we were to talk about sex. The body loves the feelings of sex: sliding, slipping, breathing, dripping, sweating, touching, moving, and contracting. But is it worthy of as much investigation as the soul? Or is it, rather, what we would probably more likely term a distraction from the investigation into this sense of higher things.
(All right, I feel it is pretty important here to make a small note about Existentialism, and that note is this: we’ll deal with you gazers, objectifiers, and god-deniers more fully later—thanks Sartre for giving me even more work to do)
But to deny the physical needs of the body is a preposterous notion as it is so very real and we can know it, which is comforting. The question goes back to spectrum and an understanding of what is actually necessary. Do we deny the things we can know to investigate the things we can’t?
That’s a fairly clever metaphor, no? The soul is kind of a made-up thing in its way, as we are never fully capable of knowing it. Or, rather more specifically, we are never fully capable of knowing its purpose assuming, of course, that it exists—and I think that is the assumption we are working under here, but perhaps we ought to investigate a little bit. Now, for those who believe in an afterlife, it is perfectly obvious that there has to be soul because the physical reality of a person cannot make the journey to anywhere once it’s lying, decomposing in the ground. Of this we can be certain. So, there must be some kind of metaphysical reality we call a soul, otherwise there would be nothing to transport the life force to the other realm. Now, as to those who do not believe in an after life, there are a couple of options. If transmigration of soul is the belief, then we are once again left in a fairly obvious soul situation because there has to be something that migrates, yes?
As it turns out, something like eighty-four percent of the entire population of the world could be called “religious,” and religious usually implies the belief in at least a god or a kind of god and things bigger than oneself. This belief goes hand in hand with idea of a soul because it is impossible to believe in a god or gods or something and not believe in the soul, as the god would have nothing to work on in the subject if it did not exist. In other words, to affirm one category of unknowable things (i.e. god or the after life) is to affirm the existence of unknowable things, and it is therefore illogical to categorically affirm one section of unknowability while denying another. Some things are unknowable.
Given all of that, then for that eighty-four percent of the population, the soul exists absolutely. Now, the other sixteen would probably be non-religious or atheistic. Even of this number, there are those who would deny religion and affirm the soul—I guess I would toss myself into this category because humans are capable of nothing but screwing up the understanding of religion because of the needs of the body. Even of those who would deny the existence of god altogether, there is a number that would cop to spirituality—where there is a sense of something or other in the world that is…unknowable. The only real category of people who would probably deny that there is a soul and that it is concerned with matters which we cannot fully comprehend (namely death and the meaning of existence) is those who would deny the existence of god and a meaning of life. They would be, finally, a very minimal (I believe the term in physics is negligible) percentage of the entire population, and in their negligibility, they are probably wrong. Now, the majority of the world’s population is generally mixed when it comes to matters of taste, touch, sight, smell and hearing because these are very culturally defined things. I like moo goo gai pan because I like chicken and mushroom stir-fried together in a delicious sauce. But the problem with the senses is that they are so incredibly individualistic. The individual senses then are a subset of the category “feeling.” To feel.
But physical senses are inferior to metaphysical senses. For example, one of these metaphysical senses would be love. Love is composed of the five physical senses, and this sense of something or other. It is the combination of those feelings, and most of the time—especially as time wears on—the physical senses and the pleasure that the other causes in those senses decline and the feeling of love remains in tact. Feelings of friendships would fall into this category as well because we can see our friends and in that sight reach a certain kind of happiness. We can smell something foul and the feeling that goes along with it would be disgust.
In all of this then, the body is the weight that holds the soul down. I think it would be preferable to think of this metaphorically like a ship sitting in a harbor, where the weighing of the anchor is the start of the soul’s journey into the unknown. It is holding you to the physical pleasures of the things dry land and fellowship with other humans can bring.
So, why don’t we just set sail? If the body is a vessel for the soul, and vessels hold things, those things have to be put there, and the vessel, then, is really like the guy you hand your beer to and say, “hang onto this for a minute, I gotta hit the head.” He’s waiting for you to come back and reclaim your beer, or at the very least you have some responsibility for the beer, even if it’s to say, “Hey bruh, yeah, your beer’s over there behind the plant. It was my turn for beer pong.”
To return to a more sophisticated metaphor, the ship of the soul cannot leave the harbor until it has sufficient supplies or some outside force causes the anchor chain of the body to break.
But, then the question must be asked, to which do we attend? The matters of the physical are gratifying in their way. Good god if we were to talk about sex. The body loves the feelings of sex: sliding, slipping, breathing, dripping, sweating, touching, moving, and contracting. But is it worthy of as much investigation as the soul? Or is it, rather, what we would probably more likely term a distraction from the investigation into this sense of higher things.
(All right, I feel it is pretty important here to make a small note about Existentialism, and that note is this: we’ll deal with you gazers, objectifiers, and god-deniers more fully later—thanks Sartre for giving me even more work to do)
But to deny the physical needs of the body is a preposterous notion as it is so very real and we can know it, which is comforting. The question goes back to spectrum and an understanding of what is actually necessary. Do we deny the things we can know to investigate the things we can’t?
Monday, June 9, 2008
A Note in
brief. There’s a thing, horizon-wise, that sits unfamiliar on my tongue, and believe me I can taste the sunset/rise. Without the horizon beckoning us, what would drive us to move and act and be and search and ponder and quietly contemplate and sip of the nectar of corporal reality and pass the day in wonderment?
I guess I’m thinking now that the horizon is not a point. It is not a piece of metaphysical punctuation, but rather the area where possibility opens up. The area. Length times width. The Horizon is composed of the earth, a line (albeit sometimes a blurry one) and the sky. The earth has a range. If you were another planet and staring, the line would be between the boundaries of Earth and space—same concept, different viewpoint? At any rate, it represents the space bounded by the finite on one side and the infinite on the other. Perhaps it could be said it’s the infinite number of finite possibilities that we can reach. Another way to put it would be to say that the earth is real in it’s finite boundaries and the sky/space would be imaginary in it’s infinite state, so the horizon, that line, would be the possibility of a finite number of infinite realities.
So we wonder about possibility. “Into the Mystic!” Van Morrison you have a way of showing right up on time. And we find that those who are interested in the horizon are those who are seekers, failed-seekers some of them (thank you, Dr. T), but seekers nonetheless. I love questioners. Those people who are never satisfied with facts. You find out facts in search of something else. In business you find out the numbers so you can watch trends and come to a more complete understanding of what your business experiences on a daily basis in order to help supplement and develop in the most appropriate ways. In science you study the wing patterns of butterflies to discover compartment specific gene effects. In math you play with numbers to give humanity some way to understand how there are some things you can predict and figure out by knowing first principles. At any rate, these are all folks seeking to help humanity, in one way or another.
But there is a kind of corollary here, in that if you are not actually seeking what you want, you will eventually fall into that failed-seeker category mentioned above. I want to do this, but I’m doing this. Why am I doing this? I so want to be there. But I am here. Complacency, comfort, and regulatory patterns kick in after a while and we learn how to live by repeatedly doing what we are.
If touching the horizon were a betting man’s game, the odds would be 1:∞, from total possibility to infinite possibility. And yet there is possibility, so the question is: how do we activate this possibility to experience infinity?
(I just realized that you can't see my little infinity symbol in the ratio above...sorry, I couldn't find a way to fix it :-(
Go looking for the horizon, I guess. It’s bound to be somewhere isn’t it? Maybe you won’t even know you were there until you have a moment to sit under a tree and look back at the way you came. But you were there, weren’t you? If only briefly…
I guess I’m thinking now that the horizon is not a point. It is not a piece of metaphysical punctuation, but rather the area where possibility opens up. The area. Length times width. The Horizon is composed of the earth, a line (albeit sometimes a blurry one) and the sky. The earth has a range. If you were another planet and staring, the line would be between the boundaries of Earth and space—same concept, different viewpoint? At any rate, it represents the space bounded by the finite on one side and the infinite on the other. Perhaps it could be said it’s the infinite number of finite possibilities that we can reach. Another way to put it would be to say that the earth is real in it’s finite boundaries and the sky/space would be imaginary in it’s infinite state, so the horizon, that line, would be the possibility of a finite number of infinite realities.
So we wonder about possibility. “Into the Mystic!” Van Morrison you have a way of showing right up on time. And we find that those who are interested in the horizon are those who are seekers, failed-seekers some of them (thank you, Dr. T), but seekers nonetheless. I love questioners. Those people who are never satisfied with facts. You find out facts in search of something else. In business you find out the numbers so you can watch trends and come to a more complete understanding of what your business experiences on a daily basis in order to help supplement and develop in the most appropriate ways. In science you study the wing patterns of butterflies to discover compartment specific gene effects. In math you play with numbers to give humanity some way to understand how there are some things you can predict and figure out by knowing first principles. At any rate, these are all folks seeking to help humanity, in one way or another.
But there is a kind of corollary here, in that if you are not actually seeking what you want, you will eventually fall into that failed-seeker category mentioned above. I want to do this, but I’m doing this. Why am I doing this? I so want to be there. But I am here. Complacency, comfort, and regulatory patterns kick in after a while and we learn how to live by repeatedly doing what we are.
If touching the horizon were a betting man’s game, the odds would be 1:∞, from total possibility to infinite possibility. And yet there is possibility, so the question is: how do we activate this possibility to experience infinity?
(I just realized that you can't see my little infinity symbol in the ratio above...sorry, I couldn't find a way to fix it :-(
Go looking for the horizon, I guess. It’s bound to be somewhere isn’t it? Maybe you won’t even know you were there until you have a moment to sit under a tree and look back at the way you came. But you were there, weren’t you? If only briefly…
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