okay, just something i wrote
just a brief preface: the below is not something that i consider to be particularly deep. i don't think that it fits my definition of philosophy, but then, maybe philosophy just doesn't very often fit my definition of itself. if it is in some sense philosophical, it's probably a post-modernism-tainted existentialism, and that's a whole sackful of grannies i don't want to unpack. not that neither of those vaguely-defined encrustations of ideas are lacking in merit or utility; i just am leery of latching on to any of the tendencies towards secular mysticism that both of them are guilty of. and maybe i am some sort of secular mystic; i'd just rather come off a little less eccentric then that. and of course the other sort of mysticism is right out. for me. so i claim. at this moment. (with no prejudice, or indeed, postjudice on any mystics but the sillier ones) in the end, i'm just sort of considering this a working metaphor for a mindset that may be currently useful to me. vague. yes. vague. sort of freewriting as self-help plan? oh is that what journal writing is?
it is unedited, as i want to get it down and have someone tell me that there is something to it before i start paring and shuddering at my style, my shallowness, my lack of adequate erudition. so, apologies, and,
That the mind is separate from the body is self-evidently fiction. The brain is meat and mind is just the projected image that the brain uses to order its functions. Mind is the sense of otherness, and that seems to be useful to the brain in ordering and directing the meat machine. Sometimes I've considered the metaphor of a software operating system to be a good one for the mind, but I think that it has less of a connection, perhaps less power over the hardware. The mind seems to me more like an imaginary user of a particular operating system, a negative reflection of the OS itself, which has what I am going to term a greater degree of agency than the fictitious user. To crudely use illustrative equations, if the brain has an nth degree of agency, then mind has an (n-1)th degree of agency.
I'm sure that this is by no means a shocking proposition to cognitive scientists, AI theorists, or any philosopher of any sort post-Wittgenstein, but it is an idea that has just caught my interest, because the mind, although it is a fiction, is the part that keeps the meat machine interested in being alive. I am aware that there are difficulties in calling something fictitious "a part" of something that I am sort of assuming is real, or at least realer, but I'll have to come back to that. Or maybe I deal with it later; I'm not sure. Mind is the film on the borning-fucking-breathing-eating-shitting-dying flight of the meat machine (I'm sorry to keep repeating that rather inelegant phrase; it's already annoying me as I transcribe this from longhand), and although the movie might not be the ultimate reason for the flight, we may enjoy the trip more if we act as if it is.
In all likelihood, the mind is the ghost of chemical reactions and electrical impulses, not even a silhouette, but the semblance of one, one traced imperfectly on heavy black paper and cut out jaggedly with dull safety scissors. In all likelihood, the mind that makes us enjoy our lives, that feels our passions, that inclines us to watch television or read about Charlemagne is a more or less completely and utterly meaningless fiction.
That rather junior-high bit of nihilism uttered, mind is a useful fiction. Mind makes mind happy when misfiring meat or (often enough) mind itself creates unhappiness. When chemicals, those native to the body or those ingested make me depressed, when convoluted logic spins into melancholies, it is my mind's tendency to prefer pleasure that seem to be the most effective antidote (this is not to devalue psychiatric drugs, or to go Tom Cruise on people. They have their place, and they seem to help people). In effect, state changes in the pattern of the fiction seem to have the most benefit. Plot changes, the introduction of characters, refinements in style, changes in point of view; such metaphors as these seem to have a powerful effect on an individual's happiness. Religious conversions, the achievements of what are defined as milestones or heroic acts (in the context of the fiction), changing one's appearance, visiting unfamiliar places (settings); these are shifts in the narrative, the plot points and well crafted dialogs that make our fiction worth reading.
Here's where I'm going to consider love, and this is the part of this piece that I feel shakiest about. I want to believe in love, but I tend to be dubious when I even see the word written down. I mean this sort of category or location of sensation that I tend to identify as my heart does something that I think is to feel something that I think I identify as love, but, well Jesus Christ, you see the problem with even touching this one. And if I keep digressing and exegizing on this when I said I wasn't going to edit, I'll even be too confused to spell check it and look out for sentence fragments, and fuck, I do have some dignity.
If love is a product of the mind working with the bundled with the OS sex-software, resulting in a leitmotif that we seek to share across other fictions (can you believe I used the word leitmotif? People like me should be let out on the streets), usually horribly translating the above-mentioned theme that I pretentiously described with a German word--getting wordy now, shit
then I am totally okay with that. If the cosmos does indeed conform to that ontological oldie-but-goodie "everything that exists is the dream of a sleeping giant," so the fuck what? We have to act like we're here, we have to deal with the odd left-turns and no-pants-in-schools of that sick asshole's dream. Hell, we may as well treat it as though it's real. (you remember how I was talking about creeping Existentialism earlier? There it is.)
And I don't know anything about anything, but biology itself, the body and everything associated with it and like it, all that stuff might well be at an n-something level of agency, of organization. We certainly seem to be composed of various sorts of lattices of subatomic particles, and perhaps what we see as life is just the manifestation of an arbitrarily convenient form for various lesser aggregates of subatomic material to swirl about in a perfectly-traceable-to-the-Big-Bang determinist pattern on the surface of a greater aggregate. As above, so below, and so on and so forth and over and over. And there is, there really is a sort of austere, stoic kind of beauty and perhaps even comfort, a watchmakerless Deism. Seems to make Richard Dawkins happy enough, if I understand him right. To veer towards -isms I've been trying to avoid, I think that Camus and some Buddhists might see that too. But I think that both those last would agree with me when I say that I like to think that I like to think that I like to think... and so on, with all possible variations, starting on different beats sometimes with another voice phasing in and out of synch like a Steve Reich piece, sometimes replacing or interpolating "like" or "think" (maybe somehow "I" or "to" or "that" too) with verbs such as "feel," "believe," "prefer," in new combinations, in new ostinato phrases of differing lengths, maybe even throwing the verb "know" in occasionally when I'm feeling daffy. These combinations and permutations are probably fictitious (because I'm not having such a daffy day, so no knowing anything), so probably fictitious, but still having a sort of pleasing rhythm, with just enough variation and richness to keep it (often enough for me) feeling rich.
sort of continued in the next entry.
it is unedited, as i want to get it down and have someone tell me that there is something to it before i start paring and shuddering at my style, my shallowness, my lack of adequate erudition. so, apologies, and,
That the mind is separate from the body is self-evidently fiction. The brain is meat and mind is just the projected image that the brain uses to order its functions. Mind is the sense of otherness, and that seems to be useful to the brain in ordering and directing the meat machine. Sometimes I've considered the metaphor of a software operating system to be a good one for the mind, but I think that it has less of a connection, perhaps less power over the hardware. The mind seems to me more like an imaginary user of a particular operating system, a negative reflection of the OS itself, which has what I am going to term a greater degree of agency than the fictitious user. To crudely use illustrative equations, if the brain has an nth degree of agency, then mind has an (n-1)th degree of agency.
I'm sure that this is by no means a shocking proposition to cognitive scientists, AI theorists, or any philosopher of any sort post-Wittgenstein, but it is an idea that has just caught my interest, because the mind, although it is a fiction, is the part that keeps the meat machine interested in being alive. I am aware that there are difficulties in calling something fictitious "a part" of something that I am sort of assuming is real, or at least realer, but I'll have to come back to that. Or maybe I deal with it later; I'm not sure. Mind is the film on the borning-fucking-breathing-eating-shitting-dying flight of the meat machine (I'm sorry to keep repeating that rather inelegant phrase; it's already annoying me as I transcribe this from longhand), and although the movie might not be the ultimate reason for the flight, we may enjoy the trip more if we act as if it is.
In all likelihood, the mind is the ghost of chemical reactions and electrical impulses, not even a silhouette, but the semblance of one, one traced imperfectly on heavy black paper and cut out jaggedly with dull safety scissors. In all likelihood, the mind that makes us enjoy our lives, that feels our passions, that inclines us to watch television or read about Charlemagne is a more or less completely and utterly meaningless fiction.
That rather junior-high bit of nihilism uttered, mind is a useful fiction. Mind makes mind happy when misfiring meat or (often enough) mind itself creates unhappiness. When chemicals, those native to the body or those ingested make me depressed, when convoluted logic spins into melancholies, it is my mind's tendency to prefer pleasure that seem to be the most effective antidote (this is not to devalue psychiatric drugs, or to go Tom Cruise on people. They have their place, and they seem to help people). In effect, state changes in the pattern of the fiction seem to have the most benefit. Plot changes, the introduction of characters, refinements in style, changes in point of view; such metaphors as these seem to have a powerful effect on an individual's happiness. Religious conversions, the achievements of what are defined as milestones or heroic acts (in the context of the fiction), changing one's appearance, visiting unfamiliar places (settings); these are shifts in the narrative, the plot points and well crafted dialogs that make our fiction worth reading.
Here's where I'm going to consider love, and this is the part of this piece that I feel shakiest about. I want to believe in love, but I tend to be dubious when I even see the word written down. I mean this sort of category or location of sensation that I tend to identify as my heart does something that I think is to feel something that I think I identify as love, but, well Jesus Christ, you see the problem with even touching this one. And if I keep digressing and exegizing on this when I said I wasn't going to edit, I'll even be too confused to spell check it and look out for sentence fragments, and fuck, I do have some dignity.
If love is a product of the mind working with the bundled with the OS sex-software, resulting in a leitmotif that we seek to share across other fictions (can you believe I used the word leitmotif? People like me should be let out on the streets), usually horribly translating the above-mentioned theme that I pretentiously described with a German word--getting wordy now, shit
then I am totally okay with that. If the cosmos does indeed conform to that ontological oldie-but-goodie "everything that exists is the dream of a sleeping giant," so the fuck what? We have to act like we're here, we have to deal with the odd left-turns and no-pants-in-schools of that sick asshole's dream. Hell, we may as well treat it as though it's real. (you remember how I was talking about creeping Existentialism earlier? There it is.)
And I don't know anything about anything, but biology itself, the body and everything associated with it and like it, all that stuff might well be at an n-something level of agency, of organization. We certainly seem to be composed of various sorts of lattices of subatomic particles, and perhaps what we see as life is just the manifestation of an arbitrarily convenient form for various lesser aggregates of subatomic material to swirl about in a perfectly-traceable-to-the-Big-Bang determinist pattern on the surface of a greater aggregate. As above, so below, and so on and so forth and over and over. And there is, there really is a sort of austere, stoic kind of beauty and perhaps even comfort, a watchmakerless Deism. Seems to make Richard Dawkins happy enough, if I understand him right. To veer towards -isms I've been trying to avoid, I think that Camus and some Buddhists might see that too. But I think that both those last would agree with me when I say that I like to think that I like to think that I like to think... and so on, with all possible variations, starting on different beats sometimes with another voice phasing in and out of synch like a Steve Reich piece, sometimes replacing or interpolating "like" or "think" (maybe somehow "I" or "to" or "that" too) with verbs such as "feel," "believe," "prefer," in new combinations, in new ostinato phrases of differing lengths, maybe even throwing the verb "know" in occasionally when I'm feeling daffy. These combinations and permutations are probably fictitious (because I'm not having such a daffy day, so no knowing anything), so probably fictitious, but still having a sort of pleasing rhythm, with just enough variation and richness to keep it (often enough for me) feeling rich.
sort of continued in the next entry.