"
"A summation…
Ξ February 23rd, 2009 | → | ∇ 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.
on February 23rd, 2009 at 3:09 pm
“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.”
Homework assignment: using the arguments of secular humanism, answer the question, “Why?”, in respect to the above.
(Not that I think it can’t be done; I’m just ignorant and curious as to what secular humanism has to say on the matter.)
on February 23rd, 2009 at 10:03 pm
Give you a two-fer. Why? *and* Why is there evil?
A common flippant answer would be “Why not?” A first-order response.
Most casual writings on secular humanism make some gross assumptions: that learning, growth, and improvement comprise the natural course of affairs. This still begs why and leaves a fair number of formal philosophers writhing in their graves.
How can the very concept of improvement (or “progress”) be viable, if we believe that all existence is ultimately a zero-sum game?
A second-order response lies in the phrase I cribbed from Kingdom of Heaven: “If [Jerusalem qua the kingdom of Heaven] lives only for a while, … it still has lived.” As well, refer to the aforementioned Viking saying (credit for which goes to Doug for getting me a Viking phrasebook back in 2001).
Because. Because the journey between birth and death is important. Significant to us individually, who live that journey. It behooves us to make the most of it, as we see fit. Still, where do right and wrong come from? Why not live as Hitler did? Or kill like the Khmer Rouge?
To get to the absolute core, my final answer is based on the mere fact of the existence of life — of dynamic complexity in the universe. Why do remoras live with sharks? Wasps sting tarantulas? People harvest grain?
4 billion years of complexity has led to a dynamically stable state of affairs we call life or the biosphere, on Earth. Its unliving roots can be seen in the solar system’s aeons-old but only momentarily stable planetary orbits.
The lesson: Sometimes, existence falls into stable patterns. Some a day long (mayflies), some 80 years long, some 8 billion years old. The stable pattern that we call life on earth is predicated on individual combinations of elements (which we call DNA, cells, plants, animals, etc.) all striving to perpetuate more of themselves. Up against the constraints of available resources, this must happen at the expense of other life — competition arises.
Competition and dynamic change lead us to grow, learn, adapt, and develop greater complexity as necessary to sustain and increase our auto-propagation. Thus, the answer to “Why?” is: “Because it’s in our nature.” However, too much competition leads to many (but not all..?) forms of evil.
Anything which threatens destabilization is dealt with, increasingly forcefully. Everyone gangs up on the most powerful Risk player. Countries slowly united against Napoleon and Hitler, the more those would-be emperors flexed their might. The Soviet bloc formed as a response to NATO, which was itself a free market response to the Communist manifesto. In contrast, Japan’s post-war economic development has achieved a dynamic and symbiotic tension with that of the US, such that the current Japanese state has now existed for longer than each of the three aforementioned failed empires — and has prospered more to boot.
Particularly virulent diseases can’t last long because they tend to kill off their hosts before they can propagate further.
So whether disease or dictator, evil behavior works too explicitly against the benefit of others. Those others will then work against the evil-doer. It’s all relative. Two Xerox salesmen will compete against each other, but not kill each other, b/c only a fractional difference in quality of life is at stake (e.g. a $500 commission). But two Somalian farmers may well commit violence for a few acres of scarce arable land, because their lives and their families’ lives depend on it — yet their situation came about only because the fecundity of prior generations led to an average family size of 11 and consequent overpopulation. The family size arose out of a disjunction between traditional values intended to offset historically high infant mortality rates, and the recent (1960s) introduction of modern medical care which dramatically lowered infant mortality rates before Somali agrarian culture had a chance to adapt.
(The world would be in a heapload more trouble if every Catholic was truly diligent in multiplying. We’re in enough trouble as it is, and initiatives such as zero-growth population and planned parenthood are only superficial-but-necessary triage measures which don’t address deeper social/environmental issues.)
Evil arises from real or perceived shortages of critical resources. We see actions spurred by real shortages as “tragedies”, and acts induced by perceived shortages as “crimes”. Theft and murder as we see them in the news are often a result of the perpetrator feeling that he lacks … money, his partner’s sexual fidelity, respect, whatever. He acts out of what we call reasonable proportion to his need, and thus the disjunction between his and society’s perceptions of his needs and shortages leads to his actions being labeled crimes. Grey areas of uncertainty tend to get exploited, then handled badly with things such as Sarbanes-Oxley.
Nations and societies, packs and murders, flocks and herds are the next natural step after individual organisms. And with that, we have to move beyond an exclusively DNA-based model of heritage and propagation.
Being artsy, smart, fit, sexy, etc. are all ways to improve our ability to continue some aspect of ourselves. This is usually through offspring, but there have always been humans who propagated their heritage via meme distribution. Why do many of the best thinkers, artists, scientists, etc. not have much of a family life yet are satisfied with how they have lived? (I note that they also tend to have a high incidence rate of depression or dissatisfaction, resulting from a mental disjunction between their competing desires for distributing their intellectual and genetic heritages.)
(To wit: an excess of passion for book learnin’ can lead to dateless Friday nights and a bitterly single life.)
“Why?” is answered with: Because change, growth, and adaptation are the quintessence of our 4-billion year living heritage. If there was no life, I’d be a rock. But there is life, so I’m an Asian swordsman with no GF. :D
(And there are probably some kinds of evil which are not rooted in resource competition, but I can’t think of any at the moment. Can you?)