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"A summation…
Ξ February 23rd, 2009 | → 2 Comments | ∇ Fitness / HEMA, General, Philosophy, Work |
…of divers topics lately arisen within my sphere:
Advancement
Blood, mine (again)
Consciousness, the question of
Employment
Exam preparation
Expansion, activity participation
Faith, questions of
Family, fundamental trade-offs
Friends, new and old
Growth, personal
Imperative, Kantian
Purpose, eternal
Swordplay, brilliant
It’s not the life we would have chosen, but it is the life we have made for ourselves.
Things are tentatively set to be really great / tough on the employment front. I shan’t too closely calculate my flightless avians until we’ve reached an appropriately post-gestational point.
Hope to have some presentations and surprises re: HEMA prepped in a week or two. I imagine it’s not much of a priority for anyone but me, nowadays, given where we all are in our respective lives, but I’d like to share it anyway.
And finally, it’s been quietly exhilarating to know that my secular humanist faith has been tested and found sufficiently robust. Many atheists and less rigorous believers in science find in times of crisis that theirs is a brittle faith when they suffer too-great personal loss or challenges. It sometimes gives spontaneous rise to some sort of home-grown agnosticism, and possibly eventual conversion.
But I feel.. well, blessed, if you will, that I’ve successfully upheld my faith in the god of Science. That is, science as a metaphysical philosophy. It can be a tough reconciliation to make, in the face of multiple deaths and personal losses, difficulties, etc.
Apparently, I made mine years ago, b/c I’ve weathered recent events with an almost indecent aplomb. I had moments of doubt, wondering whether I was just callous and insensitive to e.g. my parents’ problems. Objectivity can seem heartless, but I have the best reasons I can find for the manner in which I’m helping them — which no longer means doing what they want me to do. There’s no calm postgame here — it *is* tough, and we’re not nearly done yet.
And a lot of my strength to face it has come from the fatalistic belief that we are all ultimately in a zero-sum game. It has led others to nihilism, cynicism, Gen X angst, or emo (goth, punk, or grunge in earlier eras). But I think the billion-year death throes of our planet’s constant decline are beautiful.
As the sun dies ever so slowly, it indiscriminately casts its prodigious energy into the void. The merest ray happens to glance off our planet, which itself is slowly cooling from its fiery birth to a lifeless, cold end. Ancient light fed and induced unthinkably random molecules and compound substances to recombine again and again, until seeds and squirrels, mushrooms and mammoths, sea cucumbers and swords, and pretty girls in short skirts all came about.
Now we have chemical combinations existing in such complex dynamic stability that they each perceive themselves as a gestaltic consciousness beyond mere molecular reactions. We have created sorrow, war, religion, anger, joy, romance, spoken word poetry, and whimsy. It’s like a firework rocket that explodes and cascades into countless swirling submunitions — they all flicker out after a too-brief flash of brilliance.
How is that *not* grand in its tragic elegance, its simultaneous sophistication and simplicity? A beautiful profusion of life inevitably headed for death.
And when it all ultimately ends someday, either when our star becomes a red giant, goes supernova, or beyond at the heat death of the universe, it’s okay. Because, for a brief billion-year instant, we existed.
So it comes back to us individually: No death is cause for grief, because it means we existed for a short while. That is our wyrd, and it is the wyrd of our gods. All that remains is how we go to meet it. Concern yourself only with what’s within your power to effect; don’t worry about what you can’t affect. Live the best life you can, always growing, learning, doing, screwing up. Be satisfied with what you’ve done, who you are, but never settle. Difficulties and failures serve to teach, and thus are natural parts of our existence. There can be no stasis so long as there is time.
So what is consciousness, then? A computer runs on on/off bits, zeroes and ones. Put gajillions of them together, and you get… an electronic copy of the entire corpus of Shakespeare’s work. Hydroelectric turbine performance figures. Rag doll physics and first-person shooters of unnerving verisimilitude like CoD 4.
All of which is meaningless zeroes and ones without a human observer to interpret them in 32-bit color. A dog or a fly wouldn’t see all the color and detail of the computer screen.
The natural world would similarly be meaningless without a human observer to appreciate fresh spring breezes, smog-tinted rosy sunsets. Glass-sheathed skyscrapers and Argentinian tango are just as natural, though we usually and arbitrarily call man-made artifacts unnatural or artificial. All of our endeavors are natural, because we’re part of the natural world. There is nothing unnatural in the universe, because it all *is*. And we can each say about ourselves: “I am.”
In their own way, maybe that’s what the ancient Hebrews were trying to capture — that sense of the self — in their simpler, pre-Kierkegaardian language.
And when it all dies or burns, it will be. What is, is natural. Nothing to regret about a lifeless lump of rock — because who will be around to regret it?
But I am working at living a rockin’ life long before we get to that point, and to ensure the best possible quality of life for my spiritual or genetic descendants.
