-Socrates
Welcome to the Paragodox.
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Neurophilosophy?
It’s been interesting simultaneously taking Behavioral Neuroscience and Theory of Knowledge. The two subjects tackle the question of “How do we know?” in entirely different ways.
An interesting perspective from which to approach the subject is from the Dualist “Mind-Body Distinction” proposed by Descartes. It’s weird. Neuroscience scoffs (generally) at the idea that we have an independent “mind/soul/etc” that is separate from the material composition of our brain. It seems very odd that a shit ton of neurons (billions, in fact) connecting to each other and firing electrical impulses, causing the release of hormones, etc. somehow explains that feeling I get when I see a sad movie or win praise from someone. What causes the neurons to fire in the way they do? What is the source of the stimulus? How does experiencing a certain stimulus lead to the chain of events in the brain?
It seems almost like the same problem facing the origin of the universe. Does it “just happen?” Perhaps the question is out of our grasp. Perhaps science will one day answer it for us. It seems almost like philosophy and science complement our need for knowledge in different ways. Philosophy fills in the gaps where empirical experimentation comes up short.
Just some thoughts =P
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Ayn Rant
I used to have a lot of respect for a philosopher named Ayn Rand. Her views seemed to be very well-reasoned, even if they were controversial. They had a sort of cool “IN YOUR FUCKING FACE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM!” feel to them.
The more I’ve read about her though, the more I seem to think that she was just a bitter lady taking out her personal inclinations through philosophical argumentation. Take for instance, her assessment of philosophical giant Immanuel Kant, who she dubbed as a “monster” and “the most evil man to ever exist.” This hardly seems like a fair and honest assessment of a man who practically defines the discussion of ethical theory for the past 250 years.
Also, her books. I read the first 250 pages of the Fountainhead. That was more than enough. I got her point about fifteen pages into the book. Howard Roark is a genius who only cares about himself and conventional wisdom is stupid and need not be the way people live their lives. You don’t need 800 pages to make that point. Apparently Ayn Rand doesn’t care about trees in addition to anyone else.
Essentially what Ayn Rand’s theories do is justify being a selfish prick. Rather, I should say, they ATTEMPT to justify them. I guess you can make a reasonable philosophical argument for being selfish to promote the goodness for the self. But that hypothetical situation is just a plain dumb way to approach life. As a champion for libertarians and/or conservatives, Ayn Rand has made people really think that living for yourself and telling others to fuck off is a good way to approach living your life.
What Rand misses is the core of being human, our “social” nature. You can’t simply dismiss others throughout your life and enjoy it (See Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Social Interaction a la Evolution by Natural Selection, History of Mankind). Not everyone is an isolated, narcissistic, arrogant sociopath like Ayn Rand seems to think. Her philosophical view misses the key ingredient of practicality. She assumes we’re all Frank Lloyd Wrights who just suck our own dicks all day long or Paris Hiltons who don’t need to help others because we already have it well off.
I understand this is not how she conceives her argument. But I like to apply Philosophy to real life. And being selfish is no way to live real life. Helping others has real benefits and it’s what makes the world go round. I’m terrible sorry that a woman as smart and talented as Ayn Rand didn’t bother to recognize this.
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Love
- I used to believe in love.
- I used to believe that the one you loved was someone you shared a soul with. Someone you knew felt exactly as you felt. Someone who took you as you were, no matter what. I used to believe that there really was only one person for everyone, and that you had to go through a lot before finding them. This included pain and failure. In the end, living in this desolate and random world would all be worth it because you had the ONE and ONLY person who was made for you, who defined your existence…the one person you lived for, and the person who lived for you. Love was really the only thing worth living for. Nothing mattered without love.
- But…like anything worth having in this world, love is impossible. The prospect of finding someone who mirrors your desires and fulfills your needs in every way possible is hopeless. Literally. You will inevitably find fault with anyone you end up with and you will then fall into justifying why you deal with certain less desirable aspects of who they are. The intellectual, hilarious girl is actually a psycho pathological liar with low self esteem. The calm, collected, dependable girl provides TOO MUCH predictability and thus leads you to become bored. The pursuit of love is what I believe to be a man-made time waster, spicing up the now predictable process of human life.
- But that’s just it, isn’t it? The only people who know what love is are those who have felt it. Love is not defined. You can only know it and not describe its feeling. The old couple married for 50 years looking into each other’s eyes feels it. But they can’t explain it. One can only imagine what love feels like until one’s experienced it. Adults these days seem to fall into two categories: Those who fake their love and those who gave up on it a long time ago. But there are those rare exceptions of people who seem to really be happy together.In this human world which prides itself on cold calculation and what can be known…love is paradoxically the source of the truest form of happiness for many: It has no price…It can’t be measured…There is no formula to attain it…You can’t learn it…You probably don’t get any better at it with practice…It just “is.” And for many, that idea is a bit daunting. We humans want answers. If you can’t get it easily, fuck it. It isn’t worth it and doesn’t exist.
- Perhaps though, this is why love is so powerful. It violates our very human instincts and ensnares us in a way that cannot be explained. It’s neurological process can be described, to be sure, but never explained. It is a great mystery.The pursuit of love validates life, even if you never attain it. To neglect the process of love is to neglect being human, I’ve come to find.
- I guess I better start believing in love again.
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Madness
- Reason is how we live our lives.
- We spend our lives attempting to be “normal,” attempting to “think the right way,” attempting to “be reasonable.” But to what end? Society tells us that it is acceptable to think a certain way about things, lest we be scoffed at and be labeled irrational. Being reasonable beings is certainly the hallmark of our species, so why should we fight it? We should celebrate it, embrace it. After all, it is through the process of reason that mankind has accomplished wondrous feats in philosophy, science, and mathematics, to name a few.
- Then process of reason is a predictable one. It is comforting. You base your conclusions upon premises and arrive at an answer. The answer makes sense. Just about anyone would agree that it makes sense. It’s the right thing to do. We can breathe a sigh of relief. I’m sick, so I can skip work. I just go paid, so I can buy that new car. I have an A, so I can afford to procrastinate on this assignment. All is good in the world. As we all too often figure out, though, things that are comforting are rarely satisfying.
- Then there is madness.
- There are moments in one’s life when one is struck inexplicably by a moment of genius. When one’s thoughts are so consumed with an idea, so entrenched with its perceived validity, so impassioned with its possibilities that literally nothing else in the world matters. Think of a basketball player who is “in the zone,” or “unconscious.” He hoists shots towards the basket without considering form, follow-through, or fundamentals. They go in, seemingly by magic. This is madness, and it applies to all forms of expertise.
- In a sense, madness is the reward we receive both from dedication to craft and the gift of our talents. Guitarist Eric Johnson described his Grammy-award winning instrumental track “Cliffs of Dover:”
- “I don’t even know if I can take credit for writing ‘Cliffs of Dover’ … it was just there for me one day … literally wrote in five minutes … kind of a gift from a higher place that all of us are eligible for. We just have to listen for it and be available to receive it.”
- Talent and dedication, two seemingly contradictory concepts, seem to merge as the formula to attain the genius that is madness. Eric Johnson spent his entire life pursuing his talents, and he was rewarded, seemingly from above. In this sense madness is something we can strive for, something we can hope to attain.
- The notion of “conventional wisdom” dilutes the potential power that madness can have. No knowledge is permanent. Ask Isaac Newton, who infuriated the church with his scientific inquiries. Ask Albert Einstein, who shifted Classical Physics (coincidentally developed by Newton) downward with his Theory of Relativity. We must inexorably, permanently, strive for something more. Madness is how.
- In this sense, madness is our gift. Indeed, reason may guide the ship, but passion must always power it. After all, sober sense is merely that: Sober. Plain. Subdued. No one may know why we are here, what we are for, and where we will go after our lives are done with, but we cannot methodically drift through life doing what others would think is reasonable or acceptable. We aren’t them. We’re individuals. We have individual talents. The synergy of our collective manifested talents can never be neglected.The world will only be what it can possibly be if we consider the power of madness.
- Socrates, himself a man of reason, said it best:
So, according to the evidence provided by our ancestors, madness is a nobler thing than sober sense. Sober sense is merely human…whereas madness comes from God.
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Time
- Imagine that, somehow, the rate at which we experienced life was not one second per second. Imagine how much more insight we would gain into the world and our nature as human beings if life really were experienced like it is in time lapse videos. This yields a great deal of insight into how short-sighted we are in general. Please allow me to explain.
- If you look at the organization of the universe from things as vast as the cosmos to things as distinct as an atom, you notice a certain microcosmic quality. The atom has a nucleus around which electrons orbit in a seemingly unpredictable way. The universe has numerous galaxies which operate similarly, although a “center” might not be identifiable given our limitations to observe it. How can these ideas apply to humans?
- The problem is one of scale in addition to one of time. Human psychology gives us an unbelievably grandiose sense of importance relative to just about everything around us. Thus we view our scope as THE scope…THE center…THE standard. Imagine, though, that instead of the literal center of the universe, we were, say, maybe a few cosmic feet to the left? Our importance dissolves a bit, and we are put into the wider context of the entire universe and how we relate to its overall functioning.
- Speed up the process of life a bit, say ten years per second. Examine the life of one individual. We are forced to neglect the trivialities of taking a shower on a Friday night, breaking up with a girlfriend, or looking at a watch to avert eye contact with a minor acquaintance in an empty hallway. Instead we are left with basics. Birth. Growth. Motion. Location. Directionality. Relation. Physical Appearance. Death. Decomposition. An entire life full of sadness, happiness, frustration, and contemplation would become a streaking blur of movement consisting of largely external character. The emotional, internal, “human” side of life is entirely removed. One can not help but wonder, due to our finite mental capacity and biologically endowed perception of time, exactly how much we are missing about the way things are.
- Do electrons get pissed at each other for flirting with an outsider in the D orbital? Do spiral galaxies talk about how shitty things are in their neck of the woods and start grassroot movements to accuse the elliptical galaxies of these circumstantial deficiencies? Before you ask, I am not going insane, I am simply contemplating the void of perspective that we humans have about the rest of the universe in relation to deeper, more intrinsic aspects of things we really only understand at a functional and external level. This appears to be due to our perceptual abilities, our biological limitations.
- We have made attempts to understand life at a speed other than “one second per second,” to be sure. Evolution is an elegant and altogether brilliant example of this. It appears, however, that we still fail to decontextualize ourselves from the here and now. Conservatives bitching about mandatory health care forget that the idea of “heatlh care” period came about a cosmic instant ago and that their lives represent an infinitesimally minute fraction of a fraction of a nanosecond in the Universe. Seems rather petty.
- I don’t really know why I felt like writing this. I suppose I wanted to flesh out my own thoughts regarding the egocentric nature of humanity in the universe as related to our finite mental and perceptual abilities. A facebook note at 4:30 AM seemed a great way to do so.
- Conclusively, I’m not crazy. I studied a lot tonight. I drank a Moutain Dew.
- I wonder if electrons like mountain dew.
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Games
- Guard it with vigor
- All that you hold
- Never lose what means most
- Growing weary with time
- You will never find
- Yourself passing the post
- Her eyes dive
- Into your own
- This surely a zone
- Over which you’ve flown
- Jockey for position
- Play with inhibition
- Defend with tact
- Be first to act
- Warfare is simple
- Be swift, be nimble
- Battleground shelled
- Pride upheld
- Fort is protected
- Enemy deflected
- Nothing is lost
- But at what cost?
