metonymy4u

From the outside, it is easy to assume that sitting zazen is a very passive activity. But this is simply an illusion cast by the fact that behavior has become mostly private – gone covert. Feelings, urges, thoughts are all as real as any other event we can speak of.

I meet a lot of people who think that human behavior either is or should be governed by rules. Plenty of famous philosophers also believe and believed this. Leibniz and (maybe) Kant to name two. Hayes, Freud and Beck to name another two. Yet, I have doubts.

Consider the following sequence:

01110100 01101111 00100000 01100010 01100101 00100000 01101111 01110010 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01100010 01100101

It expresses one of the most famous phrases in the English language (or so I’m told). Can’t read it? Ok, here’s what it (supposedly) says: “To be or not to be.” Still can’t read it? Well, that’s strange, I just told you what it says. Why can’t you read it? Why can’t you just follow the rules and read it? Are you strange or something? A weird sort of person? Not normal? Why doesn’t this make sense?

The problem, I think, is that no one has ever been able to make sense of sense. No one has ever been able to live life, mean meaning, draw drawing, sing singing, or dis-cover discovering. Come to think of it, that would be a pretty good definition of God.

A God that tortures people who wonder about God.

Are abstractions real or the objects that are abstracted from real?

Plato: The objects are real, seeing them is difficult.
Aristotle: Actually, seeing them is impossible.
Augustine: God made the objects and gave humans the capacity to speak of them.
Descartes: I agree with Auggie, except I think therefore I God.
Leibniz: Objects are the same, abstractions are different.
Kant: I am rationally bound to agree with Aristotle and Descartes.
Kierkegaard: Yes, depending on your experience.
Berkeley: The objects are thought by God.
Hegel: The objects are thinking through history.
Nietzsche: Objects are power. Reality is power.
Freud: Resistance is futile.
Heidegger: What objects?
Sartre: I agree with Soren.
Skinner: I agree with Soren too, and I’m gonna prove it.
Wittgenstein: uh…WTF?

I take Searle’s Chinese room argument, the Turing test and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to be demonstrations of how pragmatically limited are questions about consciousness, reality, freedom, thought, intent, etc…One can argue to a multiverse of endless noumena and still get run over by a bus.

I’m thinking all definitions are quite circular. In the way a circle is. That is, circularly circular.

Are space and time the constant and unchanging building blocks of reality (or experience) that Newton (or Kant) thought they were? Experimentally it was discovered that the measured speed of light (C) is a constant no matter how fast the observer is traveling. Einstein realized that if this is indeed true, then our normal idea of the constancy of time and space must be re-evaluated. Because if speed is distance/time and the speed of light cannot change then something about distance and/or time must be changing, to explain the fact that one can never “catch up” to a ray of light (because to catch up to it would mean that its relative speed could change – but this is impossible based on observations). Additionally if nothing can ever catch up to or exceed the speed of light, then gravity thought of as an instantaneously acting force must also be re-evaluated. Gravity cannot be thought of as something that depends only on distance and mass, as Newton had suggested in his famous equation F_G = GmM/r². This is so in part because gravity as an event must be made consistent with the experimentally observed constancy of the speed of light and in part because the distance that Newton put into his equation is no longer the constant he assumed it to be. Moreover another consequence of the constancy of C is that masses also change in response to motion. One of the reasons we can’t ever exceed the speed of light is that as masses accelerate, they become more massive, causing resistance to further acceleration. As a result, one can approach the speed limit, but never achieve it. The consequence of all of Einstein’s ruminations is that we now think of C as constant and space and time as malleable.

The more I learn about science, the more it looks like religion.

I think of ethical principles along a spectrum running from empiricist to rationalist tendencies. On the one hand the empirical argument starts from an assumption that morality is a fiction better left largely untouched by the collective. The role of government or society is mainly to make sure the streets are paved and (mostly) free of bloodshed. The rationalist argument would be that morality, even if a fiction, is a useful one that keeps us not just civil, but healthy. Healthy because we are reaching for something greater than ourselves, even if it is a fiction. Of course, many authors neatly dance between the poles of this false dichotomy. The question comes down to this: are you an empiricist or a rationalist? Both or neither?

One significant problem we seem to face in the 2500 year old modern world is that of signal pollution. The self, being a contingent event, is increasingly scattered across the increasingly heterogeneous range of cues that make up contemporary existence. And being nothing but a set of responses to those cues, it naturally becomes more and more heterogeneous with them. At a certain point the signal sinks below our ability to detect it. Noise overwhelms signal. We ourselves are lost.

What is the remedy?

Does the rain lament a rainy day? Does the mountain feel its own weight? Do you judge yourself for being yourself?