random thoughts on a cold sunday night

[leezyfosheezy]

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

Comments

[maddict]

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?

So anyway, there's energetic motion or motive energy or active potential or potential action or creative potential or poetic creativity--whatever--and this interaction is organized on increasingly higher levels. You go from quarks to geopolitics to astrophysics. The lines between, to me, seem both arbitrary and immutable: we can't conceive of everyday life without assumptions about individuality and objectivity, but we can't conceive of science without strict materialism and linear causality. Trying to reconcile these contradictory perspectives is painful, and it takes place on the battlefield of these existential crises where, basically, we ask ourselves if God is happy with what we're doing. "Does my life have meaning?" or "Is what I'm doing in any way meaningful?" seem to have a rough one-to-one correspondence with that kind of thinking. Because there's no such thing as "an" objective perspective--there is only "the" objective perspective, just like there is only One God.

The history of how the Jews came to see their deity as the master of all peoples is a hugely contested and fascinating field of inquiry--as well as one of many underlying political questions being answered by the Arab-Israeli conflict. Historically, various tribes used to believe that they each had their own deities, and it was loosely acknowledged and peacefully agreed that everyone's deities were equal. Unless there were a famine or a drought. Then you'd have wars over territories and virgins and cows. Picturing it this way, with the narrative scenario removed form us by thousands of years, it's easy to see how everything from politics to metaphysics was connected, though no one necessarily acknowledged it in those terms at that time. Some theories of action and theories of value would contend that "honest" actions are those whose full socio-metaphysical implications aren't fully understood by the agent. From there, you can actually start to talk about having "faith" in your actions, without necessarily acknowledging radical individuality or fundamental objectivity Again, the line between solipsism and monotheism becomes blurred, vague, ambiguous. So certainty isn't necessary for clarity, and clarity isn't sufficient for certainty.