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| | | | | The Game | | | The Game
Jobs are to be worked
Money is to be earned
Money is to be spent
Happiness is to be bought
Money is not to be kept, at least, not a lot
Money is not to be given, at least, not a lot
Play the game, Play the game
Buy a false promise
and do it again, do it often
habits can decide who I am
Because, and don't forget
Happiness is to be bought
I pay for happiness
but get satisfaction
Satisfaction is good enough for now
Next time I'll get happiness
after all, it's overdue
Satisfaction has a price
that price is always cabbage,
moola, green, cash
I'll work the job that's not great
to be moderately thrilled
I'll try not to comtemplate
why I feel unfulfilled
I'll spent the months away
I'll spend the years away
I'll spend my only life away
because I'm gunna live forever
and next thing I buy
will change everything for better
I'll one-up my friend
I'll one-up my neighbor
I'll one-up that person I rarely see
I'll make them want what I got
and it won't be long till I want,
what they, just, bought
...and it never ends
because I have no memory
... because if I did
I might actually see
that I always pull over,
and offer a spare tire
but I'd rather have my coffee
and allow a child to expire
I can't think about it like that though
no one thinks about it like that
that is too hard
I think I'll stick to what's easy
I don't really question the game
I don't really question what I actually want
I don't really question what I actually need
I don't really question how nobody admits when they're wrong
I don't really question the fact that I'm never wrong
I don't really question who I could save
I don't really question what is at stake
children die, the planet shrivals
and it's a tragedy
but, it's not -my- fault
cuz' everybody knows
that everybody has to play the game
those who don't, are pretty lame
when judgement day comes,
I will hide behind everyone else's judgement
so that like me,
god won't really see
what I chose to do,
and what I chose not to
Original work by Captain Cardio |
| Living between the void | | | Hey, thanks for reading.
Like last time, I have some rather disconnected thoughts I’d like to put forth. Please forgive me for my rather shotty formatting or ability to stay on subject, but for me it comes down to whether I post something that is a little disjointed, or I don’t post anything at all. If I insist that anything that anybody reads of mine be perfect, I become ridiculously critical of my own writing, and get nothing done. I would appreciate some feedback, perhaps in private message, to let me know if my blog is at least a little bit interesting for people.
Sometimes I think we are so afraid of being wrong, we are fearful of voicing or entertaining concepts we come up with, if we can’t immediately come up with solid evidential reasons for those concepts. I sometimes feel like that, like hunches about the way the universe works, are put into my mind, but I can’t express them properly, and so I don’t bother trying to talk about them with other people, as it gets so abstract that I would just seem nutty. I have an idea that I think makes helping others a part of self-interest, if it could just be fully realized. I’ll talk about that later.
I called this entry living between the void, to refer to the thoughts that might circulate through one’s mind, if they believe there is no afterlife,
Living between the void
I think that’s an appropriate title, given that in this view, the time we live on earth, is essentially a period of time between two endless**(thoughts on the idea of endless universe below)** periods of not having consciousness, or of unperceived nothingness.
At the beginning of the film “Run Lola Run” there is a quote:
“After the game is before the game.”
I think that reflects upon the idea of our consciousness ending at death, it will simply be like the ocean of time that existed before we were born, that we were not there to experience.
It seems strange to me that people who believe they will cease to exist when they die, can continue to live life in a non-profound way, day after day. To comprehend atheist death in another way, you could say, that once they have died they have ceased to exist, and even if the universe ceased to exist one day, existence for that person who died at that point, would not change.
I guess if people living mundanely think further about it though, it doesn’t matter that they will not remember their life, because in the long run they aren’t going to remember having squandered their life anyway.
It seems like we either approach the universe existing, as either caused (like it MUST have been caused) or not caused. But we are just human, there could reasonably say there are more possibilities, that we aren't aware of; I believe the following is strong evidence for the limits of the human brain.
**Sub-discussion concerned with the length of existence/cause of the universe
I believe that even though ‘forever’ isn’t fully comprehendible, it seems like the mostly plausible ‘cause’ of the universe. – I use the word ‘cause’ loosely; as that thought would intrinsically imply that there was no cause. It seems that causation as far as human activity is concerned, is what is happening, but maybe causation itself is a property of the universe itself, just like other seemingly fundamental properties of the universe (width, height, length). Some people would argue that causation is not absolute, because the universe would not have had a cause, a 'first cause', or 'uncaused cause'. I believe that is mixing up the way we use our language to try to understand some properties of the universe, in a way that does not make sense. Some of these properties are light, heat, width, height, depth, time, gravity, I’m sure the list goes on for awhile.
One of the apparent properties of the universe, is that everything needs a cause, but what caused causation to be a property of the universe? If we are going to presume the human mind is capable of understanding the universe, I think the only way that understanding will come around, is if we accept the universe has been around forever. The other part of coming to a human understanding, would be to accept that the notion of causation as we understand it, is not absolute, as properties of the universe become non-sensical to presume a cause.
If the universe hasn’t been around forever, then let’s say it started at some point. That would mean that at one point there was a ‘non’-universe basically equivalent to what it feels like to be dead – nothingness perceived by no one. How would it make any sense for our existence to change from that state, of nothing perceived by no one with zero properties, no time, space, ideas energy, or matter, no anything to have any kind of relativity, even to something, how would it make sense for that to change into our now existing universe?
Even while I typed that above paragraph, I stopped typing as it hit me. It really doesn’t seem to make sense that anything exists at all. I felt objects on the desk in front of me to reassure myself that I raelly existed, I punched myself in the arm, hard, to provide some feeling, some way of logically providing to myself, some ultimate proof that nothingness isn’t what is happening. I hope that feeling could be conveyed through what I wrote here.
It’s funny to, because when I have moments of profound confusion like that, I want to hold onto that feeling and that frame of mind so badly, to try to explore it, but the moment I do I seem to pop right back into my usual daily mind frame.
So I personally come to the conclusion, that the universe must have been around forever in some sense, and causality can’t apply to all things (or some other method that maybe just beyond human comprehension). This would mean my demanding that all things have a cause; we are setting ourselves up to not understand what is going on in the universe, or to misunderstand what is going on. The universe couldn’t be breaking its own absolute properties, so causality must be, at least in some respects, a less than 100% accurate idea that humans use to deal with their environment. To me that (the universe having been around forever) has some grave implications, if it’s true of course, and I don’t feel particularly confident with my reasoning, as I know I’m just a silly homosapien in a world, where, when analyzed, acts in ways contrary to my reasoning ability. To provide examples of what I’m talking about I’ll link a Richard Dawkins video. I’d like to emphasize that I do not necessarily agree with his relgious views, (which are not presented in this video), but merely the science he has presented in this particular video I find to be humbling.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1APOxsp1VFw
Coming back to those grave implications though, if the universe has been around forever that must mean that Friedrich Nietzsche was on to something when he talked about eternal reoccurrence. The universe could just be repeating itself over the course of a ridiculous amount of time**.
(**Unless of course, a property of the universe is unlimited possible arrangements. But if time has existed forever, and the universe has unlimited possible arrangements, which infinity do we take to be more meaningful? On the one hand if we take the universe to have infinite possibilities, that would mean the universe hasn’t yet, and/or will never reach all possibilities. But if we emphasize that the universe has been around for an infinite amount of time, forever, then it must have already gone through every possible probability, every possible occurrence, if you look far enough back. Still though, I don’t think that unlimited possible arrangements is a property of the universe, even if they are a –ridiculous—number of possible rearrangements.)
So wait, if the universe is just doing a circular pattern of events, forever, then that would mean we’ve been here before, or would that just be somebody else who was exactly like we are, who lived the same life. That’s an interesting question that I probably can’t figure out. Say 100 ridiculous-illian years from now, a creature, identical to you in every possible way, to the quanta-second (probably not a word – whatever) of your conception from your parents, would you still be there to experience it? Maybe that would be you, but would your consciousness have resumed, or would it be gone? Would it be another consciousness living your life, identically to the way you just did? In other words, would your observer be there?
Would it basically be from your conscious perspective, when you die, instantly followed by your birth again at the next identical universe? (it would be instant I figure, because if you are dead and there’s no afterlife, you would not be there to witness time passing) but at the same time, the stream of consciousness wouldn’t necessarily exist like that, because you would have a consciousness ‘wipe’ so to speak, when you died. You would suddenly be back at square one, with zero memory of the identical life you had just lived.
That whole reoccurrence idea strikes me as pretty tragic, given that some people live pretty bad lives. But maybe it is incorrect to stack those experiences, as it is only ever really one life lived, because that person may not have any idea they will be coming back, effectively, a moment later.
Maybe it's a test of some sort, humanity needs to prevent eternal reoccurrence, by figuring out how to take over the universe, forever, and prevent it from doing whatever it does to repeat itself, (say figure out how to stop the universe from contracting and doing another big bang).
**
Discussion of where ideas come from:
When I think about it, I don’t suppose that many original ideas originate from me. It seems that we can only take existing ideas and explore them through our critical thinking capacity. To say that in another way, all ideas come from somewhere. I think I’ve made peace with that though, and am happy merely being a conduit of information I find to be interesting.
It seems like we can't come up with ideas out of thin air, another limit of the mind, the best we can do is to combine ideas we already are aware of into new ones that at first glance seem altogether new. Science cannot be understood in ideas that have not already been developed or built up. or maybe its the other way around, we get our ideas from our physical reality upon observation, and from those, there is a limit to how much we can build up our own thoughts just through talking and constructively thinking.
Like last time, unrelated:
I ran into another two quotations somewhat recently that I liked:
“In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just, and expound to himself, and upon occasion to others, the fallacy of what was fallacious. Because he has felt, that the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner.”
- John Stuart Mills
Dwayne: I wish I could just sleep until I was eighteen and skip all this crap-high school and everything-just skip it.
Frank: You know Marcel Proust?
Dwayne: He's the guy you teach.
Frank: Yeah. French writer. Total loser. Never had a real job. Unrequited love affairs. Gay. Spent 20 years writing a book almost no one reads. But he's also probably the greatest writer since Shakespeare. Anyway, he uh... he gets down to the end of his life, and he looks back and decides that all those years he suffered, Those were the best years of his life, 'cause they made him who he was. All those years he was happy? You know, total waste. Didn't learn a thing. So, if you sleep until you're 18... Ah, think of the suffering you're gonna miss. I mean high school? High school-those are your prime suffering years. You don't get better suffering than that.
- from the film “Little Miss Sunshine” |
| Some messy freethought #1 | | | "We need the intellectual imagination to sympathetically try to see what is meant when people write in a style which is from a philosophical point of view sloppy and imprecise. I don’t want philosophy used a tool to score points off people we are not really trying to understand."
- Julian Baggini
I'd thought I'd start with that, because I worry my thoughts here might not be expressed in the way I understood them. To say that in a different way, what might actually make perfect sense, might not have been expressed properly in this entry, so I might seem crazy.
I'd be happy to try and clarify or figure out where I made a bad assumption or something that didn't logically build onto itself, feel free to send me a PM, just be kind. :)
Does anybody but me have consciousness?
I phrase that in a very self-centric way to get across what I mean. If in fact other people, or you, do exist, you could simply speak the question aloud as if you asked it yourself, to get yourself on the same page of thinking. (That might even give you the impression that I really do exist, I know I do, but somebody saying that same thing to me would not be as persuasive as I incorrectly feel my saying it is.) Really though, now that I read that question again myself, it is as if my now previous self, that I will never again experience the exact state of being again, is asking my future (and whoever reads this), and momentarily present, and now past, self. If I decide I am going to reread that statement again, it is something that my future self will experience, I will now reread it
“Does anybody but me have consciousness?” I typed it while I reread it, so I was present experiencing that sentence when I typed it, even if my contemplation of what it meant was a little bit barred by my mind being distracted by the process of typing.
That was a present moment, but every moment I was typing it instantly became past the moment I had perceived it. I remembered concentrating on that moment being present, but now when I talk about it, it has very clearly become a past memory of focussing on what seemed to be the present at that time. I find this a bit disturbing, maybe not all readers of this would, but to me it cements the notion in my mind that nothing is permanent. If nothing will last forever that we do, what is the point of doing anything? Can we be satisfied knowing that what we do will be useful or satisfying in the future for a little while? Say we help build a house and that house is used for the next 75 years. Can we be satisfied, even visualising the house we are currently working on, being demolished in the future, in 75 years? Maybe so long as we get paid so we can assist our own satisfactions, we don’t care whether the house lasts forever. Surely though, we would not be as satisfied if we were simply paid to dig a hole and then fill it with what we just dug up, over and over again? Would the reason that wouldn’t be satisfying simply be because it would be mind numbingly boring to do repeatedly? Certainly any job we do is going to be somewhat repetitive, even if some are far more than others (assembly line worked compared to say.. police officer or artist?) Say we have an activity, the building of a different house on the same lot over and over that gets destroyed and then you start again. Maybe the reason we would find building a house for somebody to live in, even if repetitive, more satisfying than that similar, but useless activity of building houses that get instantly destroyed, (even if we get paid in either scenario) would be that we would know that it would be working towards giving somebody a home, or working towards the overall productivity of society (or just feeling productive in general). To dissect what giving somebody a home means, we could say, the knowledge that we are helping somebody out, (I use the term helping loosely, because technically you would just be doing your job). Maybe the difference in terms of satisfaction, in building a useful house and a useless house, would be the feeling of being useful itself. I keep bringing up the idea of the house that gets used and the house that gets instantly destroyed, to try and figure out if we are deceived with our satisfaction of doing anything, since anything we do will one day come crashing down, even if we are not present or alive to witness it.
Maybe the reason building a house that will be destroyed is not satisfying, if it is in fact not satisfying, would be that we would know it is not advancing anything. Even if we build a house that only lasts for 75 years, but gets used during that time, it is contributing to the overall advancement of humanity.
A lot of this entry seems to remind me of Dust in the Wind by Kansas. Also it makes me think that maybe these ideas I think I’m coming up with aren’t really new ideas at all, since I might just be re-stirring the ideas given to me by this song I heard ages ago. I mean I’m always sure somebody else has certainly already thought of what I’ve said before, but I still like the idea of having come to the ideas on my own, rather than just regurgitating something I heard awhile ago but didn’t consciously realize it at the time of regurgitation.
Here are the dust in the wind lyrics
“I close my eyes, only for a moment, and the moment's gone
All my dreams, pass before my eyes, a curiosity
Dust in the wind, all they are is dust in the wind.
Same old song, just a drop of water in an endless sea
All we do, crumbles to the ground, though we refuse to see
Dust in the wind, all we are is dust in the wind
[Now] Don't hang on, nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky
It slips away, and all your money won't another minute buy.
Dust in the wind, all we are is dust in the wind
Dust in the wind, everything is dust in the wind.”
I value just about everything the song says as having some merit. But what do they mean when they say “Don’t hang on”. Does that mean to not worry about holding on to moments? or remembering moments? Or to not hold onto reality, and commit suicide, because life is inherently pointless when we face the facts?
There's also a quote from Shakespeare's Macbeth
"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. "
Maybe the notion that our lives and everything we do is meaningless in the long term, gives us freedom. We are still bound to our fears of pain though. We could drop everything in our lives, and abandon everybody we know, move somewhere else, and try taking on another life. Still though, there would be temporary or even long term emotional discomfort, if we had any sense of responsibility to the people we worked with, or our loved ones at home. Our feeling of guilt could at most, last as long as we live though, which from the sound of “as long as you live” sounds like forever. Really though, as long as you live, is just that, the finite amount of time that you will be alive on the earth. Their pain or anger, aswell would be finite. I guess what it comes down to in that consideration, isn’t of whether the consequences would last forever of such an act, but whether such an act of randomness, in interests of taking advantage of the freedom we have, and of exploring new experiences, would be worth the perceived risk of doing so.
People seem to approach life quite passively most of the time, not really acting in the way we would think people who know they are going to die, would act. Maybe people don't usually realize that as the reality though. I'm sure some people do accept that as a reality though, and still might not treat their lives any differently. Maybe we are already doing what we believe, given all the pros and cons of our situation, makes us happiest, and trying new things isn't necessarily better, even though the fact that we only live once might lead us to think that trying new things is always better. At least it would depend on the individual, I think.
Perhaps it is a weakness of the human mind, to want good things to exist forever, to hold on to the positive moments and feelings. But is there anything we can truly be satisfied doing, once the moment of appreciation and satisfaction is over? Or does knowing that we have already experienced that satisfaction, provide satisfaction in and of itself? Well maybe it does, but surely satisfaction also fades. Our emotions positive or negative must fade, or we would become increasingly emotional. I would imagine that a being that retained every emotion it ever felt would be a chaotic consciousness, but perhaps a greater mind capable of experiencing more things at once, might not feel chaotic about that. Still though, it does not seem possible to retain emotion indefinately, unless of course part of the brain existed that was able to perfectly record an experience in every stimulus involved, and play it back to the conscious part of the brain. Surely humans can do that, even to a lesser extent than that perfect brain. If we didn’t have that small amount of record and play back ability, we wouldn’t remember anything at all. Our recordings, our memories, do fade though, and even remembering something isn’t at all like how it felt when we lived through it the first time. Our memories seem to be fluid. They degenerate quickly and can be wildly inaccurate. We can see evidence of that occasionally in our own lives.
Coming back a bit though, what can we do that has any kind of permanency. Well despite the despair I feel in realizing it, it does seem that anything that I or anybody does, would be eventually become useless and forgotten. What then, could be a logical course of meaningful action? Or is permancy just a nice idea, but isn't actually linked to meaning? This starts to make me thing of Albert Camus, who I believe was of the stance that life is absurd, so we need to make our own meaning.
It seems like the inescapability of time passing is self-evident. I’m sure there are other possibilities, but maybe those possibilities are difficult or impossible to imagine from this line of reasoning or my human brain. To better question whether that future present past thought is what is happening, I might need to think of some whole new scenario or idea to approach with, or be thinking about a completely different concept which turns out to link and lead me into having such an idea. Also, to correctly understand the future present past thought, I may need to be much more intelligent, maybe to a point of not being human any more. But would I really be understanding how that scenario worked, if my brain suddenly became super-intelligent, that it hadn’t been all my life? Wouldn’t that be somebody else now understanding the future present past thought? Or would it just matter that I was the observer of my own actions, the one feeling the understanding, even if having that more capable brain would give me an identity to outside observers that would seem different.
Whenever I type something down, and I go back and read it, I don’t actually remember having typed it. Maybe this is just because my brain doesn’t store mundane information. My brain simply might not be capable of storing 100%, or maybe not even 1% of the incredible amount of information about the perceptions I experienced in a day.
It seems that there is no way for us to currently verify a consciousness external to ourselves. Given the evidence we run into in our daily lives, and from what we can infer though, it seems that it is possible that other people have consciousness. It is hard to figure out whether to say external consciousness is possible, impossible, likely/unlikely or any other vague appeal to the probabilities involved. If it is that I am the only consciousness, or that everybody has a consciousness, it seems that it would be simply one way or the other. We don’t have any facts about the mind-body problem that we can apply to predict any probabilities or ‘chances’ associated with such a scenario. Science does not seem to be equipped to explain this experience that is tied to the currently observable matter and energy of the brain.
If we want to get very deconstructive, a case can even be made for our own consciousness not existing. How would that go? Well maybe we can at least be certain that we are experiencing the present moment, or the moment that happened a moment ago that we just perceived, perhaps refered to as the moment of perception. We seem to have a built in confidence in our perceptions and/or memories. I feel almost no substance behind the notion that I was not in this chair 5 minutes ago, because I seem to remember that I’ve been sitting here for the last hour and a half. But how do I know I was here? Based on my perceived circumstances, I am at work, and I remember that I start my shift at 5:15 to 5:30, and it is now 7:15. For all I know, I could have been experiencing another humans viewpoint for the past hour and a half, and have only just popped into the body of what I perceive as me. This me I have just entered, has the memory of having been here in this chair, and the logical reasoning of the remembered work schedule I have. But if I was somebody else a moment ago, I wouldn’t have any idea, because the whole brain of that perception would not have not transferred inside my brain, just the feeling or observer part, which has now been given the confidence of this person’s memories.
So what I suppose I’m suggesting, is that the actual feeling of consciousness between human beings, could be swapping around constantly. We have no guarantee that this was the human brain we were experiencing being in a moment ago. If absolutely nothing is carried on in terms of memories or physicality from observing one human to the next, and we can’t actively verify we were the one experiencing this body a moment ago, then we could be swapping around between different human or animal perceptions constantly. But what would be the cause of that potential swap. If that swapping is the way things work, then that would some sort of basic fundamental of the universe, so we cannot necessarily apply what we can already observe about our physical reality through science, to predict how likely or not that is.
Why is it that our brains are separate, and that I cannot feel other people feeling their nerve stimulus. How does it make sense that my body can tell why a pain in my hands feels different than a pain in my foot. This reminds me of an Albert Einstein quote “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” When I start to really think about it, my brain starts to get quite uncomfortable, as I seem to know very little about what’s actually going on around me.
If we were to start to accept any evidence at all, or infer anything based on what we can observe though, it would seem plausible that other people do have consciousness. I say plausible rather than likely, because trying to assign even a ballpark probability for something that is either true of not true, without knowing any numbers to apply to that probability calculation, would be meaningless.
We can imagine a simulation situation, so it is therefore possible that this is all just a dream, and that I, or you, are actually the only person here, and everybody else is just part of a computer program or is a consciousnessless zombie, so to speak.
Unrelated, but I found this quote recently and I liked it.
"Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day as Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresea, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein."
- H. Jackson Brown |
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