Comments | leezyfosheezy: random thoughts on a cold sunday night

leezyfosheezy

random thoughts on a cold sunday night

Feb 05, 2007 04:25

i had a nice, long talk with jesse tonight about the mutual feeling we both have that everything we do is seemingly without purpose. if the purpose is there, it is invisible to us, and as such it is incredibly hard to get motivated to do anything at all. it's terrible, really. this is how it's been since i can remember, but i've had enough stuff to ( Read more... )

Comments 8

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leezyfosheezy February 6 2007, 06:29:36 UTC

hah. thanks.

it's been far too long. how're things back in the clarksville?

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leezyfosheezy February 10 2007, 06:23:46 UTC

things are going quite well for me. i'm not kidding when i say that college will change your life. i know it seems rather obvious, since everything changes your life a little bit and college is something you do for (hopefully) 4 years or more, but even after a semester and a third i am a completely different person, for better or for worse.

just like everything else, it's what you make of it.

the only bad part is homework. god.

maddict February 6 2007, 08:52:37 UTC

This might seem odd, but I think your nausea is profoundly Protestant. It would make sense: for 90% of your life, your emotional experiences (and the attendant neural architecture) were under the overpowering influence of a Church of Christ environment ( ... )

maddict February 6 2007, 08:53:05 UTC

Now, the reason I say you're thinking like a Christian, is that you're talking about the metaphysics of an all-encompassing and omnipresent totality of human thought, action, and experience--a Real World--and the ethics of a teleological and omniscient arbitrator of human affairs--a Final Judge. I think there's a middle ground between the two poles you've illustrated. First, there's the place where watching sports and listening to music matters: the world between your eyes and ears. That's a very important world, and from a certain perspective (yours), there's nothing bigger than this world. Like, physically, there's nothing bigger. Those distant things? They're teeny. Ah, but then there's the other world: God's world. We have jumped from your perspective to the dark side of the moon, where God sits on a park bench throwing bread to the moon-ducks. From God's eyes, as contrasted with your eyes, we can observe the whole world at once, deciding who is working the hardest, who is the best, who meets our criteria for a good person ( ... )

maddict February 6 2007, 08:53:20 UTC

What I want to get at is the nature of conscious experience. A semester in neuroscience ought to be enough to dispel any lingering suspicions you had about the existence of a rational soul who exists independently of your material biology. There's really only energy in motion, or energetic motion or...whatever--"energy" and "motion" are both nearly indefinable, as far as I've read. I haven't come across anything, from Aristotle to Newton to modern physics, that defines either term using more fundamental terms, or that proves the impossibility of such a definition. I've got a hunch that such a definition is impossible, however--similar to the way a joke seems funny, but it's tough to explain why. For instance, coming up with a rigorously satisfactory and universally applicable definition of "energy" or "motion" would be about as futile as stabilizing/freezing/immobilizing the definition of "funny". Does that help you see what I mean when I talk about ambiguity and uncertainty as natural events ( ... )

maddict February 6 2007, 08:53:36 UTC

This talk of actions can finally bring us to a discussion on nature. We've seen that "reality", if it is to have any use in a scientific conversation, can be thought of as a series of increasingly complex levels of coordinated energy. A few possible synonyms for "energy" that could give you some sense of what I'm referring to would be "information", "potential", or "communication". Information in motion, maybe? Communicating light? The etymologies all lead you to Parmenides/Heraclitus. Basically, if the distinction between "natural" and "unnatural" is to have any meaning, you have to peak a certain "level" at which to begin human autonomy. You have to take one of the concentric circles and say, From here on out, humans are in control. Anything done with hands and tongues is a good place to start ( ... )