The Eternal Questions

I've had a text file by this name sitting on my desktop for a while. It's a big list. Here's an excerpt:

• love and hate. how do you explain them? what inspires them?
• humility and selflessness, and evil, sin, and pride
• knowledge, and wisdom
• what is god? christianity, spinoza/buddhism, hiduism, taoism and pantheism
• faith as something reassuring
• free will and determinism
• redemption and salvation
• suffering and misunderstanding
• epistemology: what is the foundation of logic? does every epistemology making a negative claim contradict itself? what axioms do we start with? do we take in everything, or a subset?
• desire
• can we overcome confirmation bias?
• what can we do? for the starving? the hurt? the egotistical?
• interdependence and independence: is one an illusion?
• do we have an essensce? why do we feel like we do?
• morality/shoulds/"supposed to". origins and humanism
• the nature of time. cosmological origins and the present (is time an illusion?)
• evolution
• the brain and consciousness
• government and anarchy
• originality and newness
• naivete and optimism
• sincerity
• do people change? what causes people to change?

Romanticizing Necessity

Supposedly both Nietzsche and Seraphim Rose wrote by candlelight (and Nietzsche with a retinal infection). Yet other philosophers have written in daylight, and still others have not needed to write at all.

We're encouraged when we hear stories about overcoming adversity, but romanticizing those journeys can lead to an unnecessary desire for their means(and a lack of appreciation for their ends). Not everyone needs candlelight to understand themselves.

The Seduction of Inaccessability

Someone just drove past blasting some hard funk from a few decades ago. I find it odd that we have millenia of musical traditions to draw from, and we generally listen to the last half-century alone. But this isn't too surprising, we do this with all sorts of things, and for a very practical reason: it's easier to access some things than others. The culture of the moment will preserve that which it can relate to best, and the things that are best preserved are easiest to obtain. In some ways this seems like a good thing — it's best to weed out the irrelevant. It also explains why inaccessible, obscure, "eclectic" things are so interesting: they're essentially a rebellion against the cultural climate.

Boredom and the Ego

Complaints in general are an interesting phenomena, but one in particular continues to captivate me: "There's nothing to do around here!". Frustration is understandable — when there are, in fact, very few things to do — but sometimes people will turn this frustration into an eternal lament, reminding others of their annoyance at every opportunity, like the underground man with a toothache. No longer a simple frustration, it becomes a standard, held high above everyone else: the very statement "there's nothing to do" makes a value claim on your surroundings, deeming them "unworthy" of your interest. It would be dangerous to associate oneself with a specific event or location anyway, it makes you part of a larger group — and everyone wants to be a unique individual. So, perhaps there's a bit of pride involved, but maybe it's even simpler: assuming "there's nothing to do" frees you from having to look in the first place (and it's so much easier to complain).

The Music Itself

Musings on music from an old sketchbook (around Novemeber 2005?):

What kind of music are people looking for? Jazz musicians will tell you that people want "genuinely deep, soulful, complex and beautiful music." Classical aficionados might talk about stories behind the music. Pop labels might say it's about "beautiful people making danceable cookie cutter songs". Others still... "real characters with an interesting story" (foreign groups, odd subcultures playing fusion...). Maybe we're all doing the same thing: romanticizing something associated with the music instead of just listening to the music itself?

Redefinition as False Insight

The ever impenetrable Humpty Dumpty, as immortalized by Lewis Carroll:

When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.

Anyone attempting a productive argument quickly discovers the necessity of agreement on basic definitions. Another phenomenon has taken me longer to recognize: the reframing of well-worn words as an attempt at profundity.

A friend once described a situation in his psychology class where the professor had just revealed that the eyes are part of the brain. Of course, the class responded with a subtle confusion — as though something had just changed in the world itself. The standard conception of a "brain" is about some squishy gray matter sitting inside our skull; when you call the eyes part of that system, we express confusion and surprise when our eyes don't become squishy gray matter.

What's sad is how often this happens during conversation with people who are trying to bestow their "deep insight" on others. I should know, I'm probably one of the worst offenders. I call every emancipated leaf beautiful — every forgotten mannequin a tragedy. And I mean "beauty" and "tragedy", just as the professor meant "brain" (ideas like interdependent arising make every minute occurence into an event of apocalyptic import) — but I need to be more careful when I use these kind of words. Unless the other person understands what I mean by them, the words become, at best, nonsense; and at worst, philosophical melodrama.

It's far too easy to use words (especially simple words) to alienate others. It seems wise to, instead, think of our words as gifts — not something we've been coveting, wrapped in our favorite colors and patterns (and "whatever we choose"), but something the other person will appreciate. 1 Corinthians 8:1 is a bit out of context, but the idea still applies:

Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.

Hilarious Giving

I stumbled across some naïve thoughts on selflessess from freshman year (2003, unedited for the sake of honesty — there are plenty of ideological mistakes):

...The desire of a selfish relationship is understood, but what of a selfless one? What reason is there to that desire? Perhaps it is only to act on your emotion, and to trust your desire to give. Should we give? Is giving good? The Bible says so, but what sense does it make? To give is to stop focusing inward and focus outward. To do this effectively, we must acknowledge that the subjective mind of others is more important than the subjective mind of the self. An equal good for a greater amount of people? The Lord loves a cheerful giver. Perhaps it isn't the giving that matters, but the cheer. God doesn't love giving, but the mind behind it, the attitude. It is good to follow the desire to give, because it brings forth (propagates) an attitude of cheerfulness...

(This is an excerpt, but there was no "prologue"; i.e.: I didn't put on a "Christian hat" at the beginning — I was just assuming) I find it interesting that the word used in that verse I was thinking of, "God loves a cheerful giver." (Corinthians 9:7) is only used once in the NT: hilaros.

Forgotten Pragmatics

Cynics sometimes cite phrases like "bless you", "good luck", "have a good one" and "cheers" as meaningless (of course, these are the same people that would point out my improper use of the term "cynic"). Sure, "cheers" and "have a good one" have little semantic content due to their ambiguity. And it's true, a lot of people don't believe in the reality of "blessings" or "luck" in the first place. But you must consider these phrases in a social context — you can't study a swimming fish while you hold it in your hand. In a social context, these phrases do have meaning: they communicate a simple kindness... acknowledgement and encouragement. The form is irrelevant, but understanding something does not put you above it.