System Update
It's a unique experience to hit upon an insight. So much of our lives is spent immersed in routine. Even those of us who are not plagued by an ever-growing to-do list find ourselves surrounded by the same people, going to the same places, and performing the same tasks we've carried out countless times - from scrolling through Instagram to picking out produce at the grocery store. We are enmeshed in routine.
So when we are suddenly struck by a profound thought it can feel as though the world around us is shifting under our very feet. An insight can strike like love, out of the blue, and intensely, and an insight can be precisely that: an in - sight. Suddenly a light is cast upon some aspect of ourselves which has remained hidden, and which might have remained hidden forever, yet it has revealed itself to you. This profound sense that you may not know yourself suggests that who you are right now is only a caricature of your real self, a sketch of a more complex identity. There is more to you than you acknowledge, and insights help to draw these complexities in your personality and in your psyche out into conscious thought. Insights can force us to re-imagine who we are and who we might be.
As a consequence, the world post-insight can seem novel and exciting. The world seems to adjust itself to our newfound sense of adventure, and why wouldn't it? Too often, when caught up in our routines, we imagine that we more or less understand the world and like a chunk of old bread it grows stale to our perception. As our comfort grows, life's innumerable facets can seem to dissipate and we can fall prey to the thought that life is not as mysterious as it was when we were children. But life, far from being on-dimensional, is a twisting landscape whose hidden avenues you cannot help but be blind to when in the midst of a set routine.
In fact, the complexity of the world is what drives us to seek routine. There is no person alive who could properly integrate the plethora of information and stimuli that would assail us constantly were we not able to disconnect from the psychic noise. But just as we disconnect from this noise, we must be reminded that it is more than just noise, and that we must reconnect to it continuously. This is why just having someone to talk to can greatly improve your mental health. Since we cannot integrate all information, and yet we are conduits for the articulation of stimuli and information, then dialogue with another is the ideal stage for elaborating upon this information.
This is the premise underlying Freedom of Speech, and why Free Speech absolutists make the claim that they do. Dialogue is the means by which we best illuminate the shape of life and reveal it in all its complexity. Less dialogue means a loss of nuance, a lessening of detail, and thus our imagination of what life is or may be becomes stunted, and life's actual shape recedes into shadow allowing for superstitions regarding its true aspects to supplant reasonable alternatives. If we suppress dialogue we don't discard bad ideas, we lose access to them.
We have all experienced, for instance, painful personal trials which left us devastated (a bad breakup, a job loss). Sometimes these trials could be traced to faulty assumptions that we personally held regarding life and people. In spite of the pain of these errors we have often seen that these experiences have often served best to shine the correct path forward. Similarly, bad ideas have real-world repercussions. But while the repercussions are unfortunately forgotten over time the bad ideas remain. Only through a constant wrestling with bad philosophies can we properly reveal their errors so as to not continue repeating them. Suppressing dialogue in favor of supposedly sheltering us from offensive ideas has the actual consequence of robbing us of the opportunity to reveal the errors of these ideas.
And here we come full circle. The word "insight" has a positive connotation in the minds of people. Yet, if unchecked, insights can be dangerous. Notice for example the feeling of having an insight. It seems to come from nowhere and dawns on you with a sense of profundity. If one were not critical here, he or she might imagine that what was just revealed to them is true in the deepest sense, and should be treated as such. Perhaps, one should build his or her life around this insight. It should be fundamental. An insight in this case would actually result in dogmatism. Should an individual internalize an insight too deeply, it would become inseparable from Self, and an attack on this insight would be cause fro retaliation.
I was thinking the other day that it seemed perfectly reasonable to me that consciousness should be a mere product of the brain. Why should it bother some people that consciousness is mysterious? After all, love is mysterious, and yet we have no problem pointing to its source as the brain - namely the chemicals processes in the brain. Why is consciousness so different?
I was turning this idea over in my head, just toying with the thought wondering how a person might believe this. I didn't feel one way or the other about it. I was just trying to see the argument. And yet I continued to think about it through the day until I found to my surprise that it had become a belief. I was convinced that consciousness in spite of its mysterious nature, was nothing to be too concerned with. It was a product of biology, and nothing more than the culmination of various regions firing in unison and creating a higher echelon of "thought" based upon simpler operations.
The source of this idea was that I am deeply concerned with what it means to properly live a good life, and this idea of consciousness as being merely a byproduct of cerebral processes was at most pointing out to me my own bias in this regard. I am predisposed to assuming that consciousness is only a higher operation of matter. Yet rather than addressing that assumption as a possible error I had adhered to it more strongly than before.
Class is almost starting. The gist here is that I have to keep in mind that it is UPDATING THE SYSTEM that is important. Not being right.