Philosophy

Where have I been?
What happened to me?
What am I?
Where am I?
How long will I be here?

In my experience, most people are anxious, primarily, about what will come after this life.
My existential angst concerns my existence, not its loss.

Descartes in the absence of religion?
The evil demon has already presented itself.

Religion and Rationality.

While clearly religion can be shown to oppose rationality, no proof can show a strict adherence to only rational beliefs to be in anyone's best interest. The two greatest logical minds that our civilization ever produced found ways to be miserable and off themselves.

Perhaps any answers to my questions, even if baseless, would be better than none. However, I know not how one might go about fooling oneself.

Excerpted from Newsweek interview of Woody Allen:

So why go on? "I can't really come up with a good argument to choose life over death," he says. "Except that I'm too scared." Making films offers no reward beyond distracting him from his plight. He claims the payoff is in the process—"I need to be focused on something so I don't see the big picture"

Music as distraction:

Is the value of great art simply its ability to lure us away from morbid thoughts? To temporarily put off consideration of the 'meaningless flicker' of life?

I wish that I could conceive of life as a game. At various points I have. Becoming the best musician, earning the most money, these sorts of things offered a metric by which success could be measured. Thus flattened, life was easier to take, comprehensible.

Is honesty to be found only in uncertainty?

About four years ago, my friend Joshua Herman introduced me to the idea that we only consider things that do not work as they should. Take computers for instance. A typical computer user with modest computing needs seldom considers the inner workings of a computer in the absence of some sort of technological bugaboo. In the presence of such a snag, however, such a user suddenly develops an unprecedented interest in memory, networking etc. On the other hand, consider gravity. We know of no reason why gravity should exist, but it operates so flawlessly and consistently that most of us waste relatively little time considering what its nature might be.

This idea isn't a hard and fast rule. My own mother expressed to me how intriguing she finds even technology that always works as it ought. That opens up just one class of exceptions to this idea. Things that consistently work as they should but came into being partly through someone's life. Still, its an idea that I find myself returning to periodically over the years.

In light of my recent experiences, the idea is prominent in my thoughts. The world that our conscious mind sees, interacts with, is the perceived world, not the 'real world'. For all we know, the world is simply a sufficiently competent set of computer generated stimuli. These thoughts are nothing new - anyone who has seen The Matrix has encountered them - but they inform the point I am trying to make. Having my experience altered by these recent cognitive malfunctions, in a sense, from my perspective, it is as if the entire world became broken.

For most of my life, I took for granted that the world worked in a sort of equilibrium. Bureaucracies manage, if somewhat incompetently, to regulate most human activity. The very existence of an economy that can achieve employment well over ninety percent is an astonishing fact that seemed unremarkable when, from my perspective, it had always been. When all of reality went haywire for me, however, I gained a new appreciation for just how precarious our situation on this planet is.

We are ants, crawling around a moldy piece of cheese that is orbiting a fireball in the middle of nowhere at a speed of 3.0x10^4m/s (relative to the fireball). There is nothing more than physics keeping our minds from decaying into thoughtless balls of mulch. Our memories, thoughts, identities, hold on by a thread, and even then, only temporarily. Still, as I recover, I am consistently amazed at how well things that I convinced myself while sick are impossible really do exist. When I became sufficiently weak that I could not take care of myself, I became convinced that no one would. I was unable to conceive of being able to take care of anyone, so it seemed impossible that anyone should be able to take care of me. Miraculously, however, that was not the case. Often, now, I find myself working to reestablish the sorts of faith in the world's workings that will allow me to get on with life. Perhaps I am more religious, in an abstract sense, than I care to admit.

Today I was walking near my hotel, pondering my goal in writing. Naturally, I thought along the lines of “what overarching idea am I trying to capture?” I thought about what criticisms one might rightly raise about the consistency of my entries and their relationship to one another. Alighting on the topic of contradiction, I asked myself three questions.

What contradictions can already be found between the few paltry offerings I’ve already put forth?

Why should I care about these contradictions / what exactly is the problem they pose?

More generally, are contradictions unavoidable, and if so, under what circumstances do they simply reflect an ability to entertain two opposing thoughts rather than an inability to form cogent ideas?

As a starting point, let’s consider the notion of ideas that are consistent. In mathematics any two true statements are consistent because they flow from the same set of axioms. And all the axioms in any mathematical system must not contradict each other. As concerns almost anything else that we talk about, however, no one can honestly claim to have derived their ideas on wide-ranging subjects all from the same set of consistent axioms. Especially as concerns values we hold, it’s easily proven that we do not.

Take for example value of equal opportunity and the value of limiting the human population. It seems sensible that one can value both these things simultaneously. But, as concerns welfare, providing financial rewards for having more children encourages more births. Also, not providing additional financial assistance to mothers with more children denies those children the same opportunities afforded to those born into smaller families. These values invariably clash, forcing one to choose a point, somewhat arbitrarily, where one favors one over the other. Maybe this shouldn’t be surprising.

The only way one could expect these ideas to be consistent is if one was derived directly from the other, in the way that any mathematical proof concerning the natural numbers can be derived entirely from the definition of a natural number. This level of rigor is neither possible nor preferable outside of mathematics, especially as concerns such topics as the arts. How can we derive a system of thought from a single definition when none of the things we are trying to talk about can be succinctly and completely defined in a way that will satisfy anyone who considers them worth talking about?

One could perform verbal gymnastics in a vain attempt to produce a contrived method of deriving absolute truths in the philosophical realm, but even then those ‘truths’ could only be expressed in natural languages, which are inherently inconsistent if sufficiently expressive to capture the sorts of ideas we’re talking about. The idea of finding any objective truth as concerns anything human should be considered dead. Several pragmatic questions then arise. If no thoughts can truly be considered to be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in an absolute sense, on what basis are we to judge these arguments? If truth cannot be found, why do we bother thinking, writing, and arguing?

Surely, this lack of an ideal of perfection to which we can aspire doesn’t sit well with many people. The idea of a right way to live, the right kind of society, or rightness in the arts is comforting. It makes for an easy time ascribing meaning to one’s life. One only needs only to swallow one single lie and suddenly all questions of purpose evaporate. By this method, even the secular can capture the comfort of religion through embracing a similarly irrational dogma. Perhaps this is a better life choice: to make the irrational choice to believe that the human world can be organized rationally rather than the rational choice to accept that it is irrational and unsolvable. Here I make a case for the latter approach.

Returning to the questions posed above, what is the point of writing if all ideas are inherently contradictory and unprovable? I pose the analogy of building a house. There is no ‘right’ house. There are many different guiding principles in architecture which too, like various axioms from which an argument is constructed, will invariably clash in some situation or another. This doesn’t stop people from building houses. Rather than expect to discover profound truth on any matter , I suggest that we reconcile ourselves to the futility of this goal, focusing instead on exploring new and challenging ideas, appreciating their elegance or identifying their problems without considering the possibility of attributing truth.

Taken literally, the idea of a philosophical proof is inherently flawed. Even the most convincing and elegant proofs hardly represent truths. “Cogito, ergo sum.” This is not a proof. We have no definition for thought or existence, nor can we. And if we independently defined truth and existence, we could probably use one to disprove the existence of the other.

Returning to questions posed earlier, “If no thoughts can truly be considered to be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in an absolute sense, on what basis are we to judge these arguments? If truth cannot be found, why do we bother thinking, writing, and arguing?”

I have the following response: in the interest of developing, exploring and satisfying curious minds, we can evaluate the validity of arguments not on their truth content, but on the subtlety of their flaws. Descartes proof of his existence is not ‘true.’ But to challenge it, one must break down many assumptions that ground most other human thoughts. How many people would normally argue either that they do not exist or that they do not think? Similarly, arguments concerning the arts that refuse to go down easily warrant our consideration. By this standard, the poorest arguments are those which merely insist that a particular truth exists.