metonymy4u

If the position and momentum of any given event can never be determined to any arbitrarily specified confidence interval, then what can we ever know? If I can’t even tell you precisely where [I] end and all the rest of the [universe] begins, then how can I claim to know anything at all? Should we invent a different sort of “knowledge,” to fill in the “gap?” Or perhaps abandon the concept altogether? Embrace ignorance? Learn to celebrate, untruth?

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For the last 300 years or so, the west has been obsessed with the investigation and preservation of the principle we call “freedom.” There is literally nothing we would not do to preserve this idea as we understand it: bomb any nation, condemn any person, fabricate any data, entertain any delusion. What I think we have lost sight of, though, is the fact that when we enslave ourselves to a convention, even one as laudable as the idea of freedom, we lose contact with the nature of the way things are, here and now.

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Humanity has for centuries told stories of the beyond. And whether we have pictured it as a radiant celestial realm above (the Platonic-Christian tradition) or a dark inscrutable underground (the Dionysian-Pagan tradition) still there has always been a sense that whatever is im-mediately happening is not sufficient. That an additional explanatory model must be adduced to whatever is our experience. But what if we try a different way of thinking? What if (like Kant or the Buddha) we try to think of everything being right here and now, in one world only? How then should we live?

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Suffering is not the same as pain. Suffering can be defined as the replaying of pain, re-hashing, re-making, re-creating or re-eating it every day. Sometimes for decades of a life. Or centuries, of a people.

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I think one of the lessons of the buddha is that suffering is the product of social learning. We have to be taught to suffer. This does not mean that the pain is not real, simply that suffering can be learned or unlearned, depending on the context. Here in the west we have been averse to the imagined threat of nihilism for thousands of years. Yet I hear that buddhists speak of samsara and nirvana as always already present in each moment. And so the common western interpretation of buddhism as the doctrine that “life is suffering” is nothing more than a hollywood movie version of same. If we want to navigate a different course, I think we have to unlearn what has been taught to us about it all over again.

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this is the effect of building gothic cathedrals with such high ceilings: so that you would come inside and automatically look up: filled with awe at a marvel of architecture, and remembering god.

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hume said that an idea is nothing more than a re-created memory. that we create our ideas every time we think them. that they start in sense perception and fade from there. that knowledge as enduring understanding is an illusion. kant agreed, and added though that just because thought is contingent, does not mean we aren’t aware of useful patterns. the river still flows in navigable runs.

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