04.27.07
Posted in Everything/Nothing, Insightful... at 9:38 pm by tempo502
There’s a certain granularity, a roughness about life these days and in everything I look at. It’s not difficult-rough; it’s texture-rough, like the world is composed of sintered powder and cemented aggregate. Things aren’t things anymore; they’re not even collections of parts — they’re piles of unidentifiable substance, held together by perception more than fact. The world is a pile of gravel and I’m the kid playing king of the hill. Slip, stumble, find purchase, ascend… just don’t fall down or you’re in a world of hurt. There’s no mommy to kiss your bruises and bandage your scrapes here.
Of course it’s all in my head — probably nothing more than mood and imagination collaborating to confuse. Minds do that sometimes. Heaven only knows how much of this culture’s products have been the children of unsteady perceptions.
I said recently that I’m hollow. I’m not. I’ve got clockwork inside. Everyone does to some extent, but a certain way of thinking can really highlight the action-reaction, cause-effect, condition-response aspects of life. I can explore physics and learn our theories of far-flung galaxies, or I can read biology and understand the minutiae of life’s smallest workings. Knowing what’s what doesn’t tell you what to do. The edges of science don’t help you find your center. I’m tired of this mechanical existence, which is odd, because for a machine, the only way to be “tired” is to run low on fuel.
I guess my problem is that when you’re thinking about the mechanics of what you’re doing, you second-guess and lose sight of the motivation for doing it. Can you hold the how and the why in your mind at the same time without losing either? I don’t know.
I caffeinate myself into a stupor and take backwards pleasure at the moody brew of prose that results. There’s a metaphor for you — my editorial judgement is the flimsy paper filter that keeps ground-up thoughts out of your delicious cup of prose.
I just need a chance to let things percolate for a bit. We’re so heavily programmed to objectify our surroundings that it’s hard to step back and think of a different way to think. Maybe we shouldn’t even try. I’m overthinking, overanalyzing day-to-day existence and the inevitable result seems to be malfunction. I know for a fact that the human mind isn’t good with metadata. Thoughts about thoughts about thoughts ad infinitum, ad nauseam. Everything I do involves some level of planning or analysis or judgement. I’ve got nothing mindless left to me. Nothing to give me a break. When reality starts to grate, it’s time for a vacation. I just don’t know where I can go to escape myself.
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04.21.07
Posted in Insightful..., Rant at 7:12 pm by tempo502
How?! How can people not believe us to be marvelous chemical machines? We consume fuel and produce waste. Change the thermal or chemical state of our environment and our bodies will sputter to a halt and die. We swallow factory-produced pills and experience fundamental alterations in physical and mental behavior as a direct result. Chemicals do not interact with god-stuff or soul-stuff! Introducing a foreign agent to your body could not change the way you think unless the entire act of thinking was a physical process to begin with. Your consciousness must be the product of the unfathomably complex network of tissues and neurotransmitters in your brain. You are matter and energy — nothing more, nothing less. I don’t mind if someone believes in spiritual modes of existence. I can’t prove intangibles don’t exist, but I can prove their claims that souls and spirits guide our actions are fundamentally unreasonable. Mark this point well: if such intangibles could interact with the tangible world in any significant way, they wouldn’t be intangible at all. They would be observable and subject to scientific examination. Your heart would have a soul-atrium or your brain would have a spirit-cortex. By definition, non-physical things cannot affect your mind or your world.
If you believe things happen without cause, you simply don’t have enough imagination or education to conceive of what the cause might be. The fact that people don’t understand endorphins or serotonin does not mean that those chemicals are not the reason they smile or cry. The fact that your mind does not seem to be the product of sparking neurons does not make it impossible for this to be so. If someone wishes to posit that a soul is a special sort of energy that resides within a body and acts as a center for moral choice, then by all means, they are welcome to advance that theory and we may examine and test its predictions. But if he then proposes that “free choices” arise spontaneously from nothing, or that his mind is somehow separate from the mortal shell that holds it, then I will vehemently reject his claims and the spurious assumptions they rely upon. I have no intellectual or moral responsibility to permit people to misuse logic and ignore evidence.
You may claim that spiritual forces are a special form of energy which may act upon the physical world and yet not be acted on in return. You may claim that God, rather than having a manifestation in the world, either exists outside it or permeates it fully. You may claim, if you truly wish, that the networks of the brain act as a gateway medium to communicate with the soul instead of being responsible for the mind in themselves. A person can make any evidence-poor claim he wishes in order to justify his obsolete theology — but he cannot declare his thoughts, and his alone, exempt from the burden of proof. “Faith” is knowledge-sans-evidence. Faith is an intellectually bankrupt form of thought. Faith is what people have when they have nothing real.
We dare claim to possess the sole truth of the world? The belief that this existence could be for our benefit is the grossest form of narcissism. All evidence suggests that our self-awareness is the tiniest flash of light, outshone by the glare of a trillion suns. We have the insufferable gall to suggest that our metaphysical tripe can approach the meaning of the cosmos. The universe is a system of such scope and grandeur that it dwarfs all childish human concepts of the Divine. None of us have even begun to imagine the vastness and irreducible complexity of the universe. The deities and purposes that culture has crafted us are the feeblest imitation of what we have yet to discover.
“God” is a costly and unnecessary hypothesis. Spiritual approaches to phenomena intrinsically rob them of their real wonder and significance. There is truly remarkable value within the merest fragments awareness — how could the entire worth of consciousness be passed off as little more than divine whim? You are so much more than a fluff of soul-stuff! You are a fantastic system of interacting molecules, cells, and organs, forged through a billion years of evolution and millions of personal experiences. You are the latest and best achievement of this planet’s gargantuan web of energy and life. You are marvelous, and most incredibly of all, you are still utterly insignificant to the universe at large.
Religion arose out of the desire to explain, and it persists out of the sense of importance that it grants to human events. It has been utterly superseded in the former capacity by scientific empiricism — a paradigm capable of exploration, prediction, and the rejection of old ideas in favor of superior theories. The gifts of civil infrastructure and medicine have done far, far more to improve the human condition than any quantity of comfort that could ever be derived from vague platitudes and promises of everlasting life. Religion is obsolete. It is time for faith to make way for superior modes of thought.
The simple fact is that our actions are exactly as important as we make them. We don’t truly have the leisure of letting a benevolent parent raise us in accordance with divine plan. Humanity as a whole must grow up, and throw off the childish confidence that we are the center of reality. We have this tiny slice of existence, and we must collectively decide what is to be done with it, rather than passively accepting the rantings of sun-touched prophets and the persuasive angels of schizophrenia. We must base our world in something we create, because no god can anchor it for us. We must accept our nature, and decide what deeds will direct this brief flash of light.
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04.19.07
Posted in Insightful... at 9:01 pm by tempo502
Every love is different; every relationship has its own unique character. The interplays of words, actions, and memories that define human interaction are necessarily unique for each permutation of personalities. You will never love two different people in the same way. It’s simply not how love works.
You can define it however you like but I’m going to say love is a special sort of interaction. It’s trite to say, but there is a difference between loving someone and being in love with someone. Love isn’t the same when it’s an action and when it’s a state — the structure we use for language reflects in some real way the structure behind our thoughts, and it seems like most people intuitively grasp the emotional difference between “I love you” and “I am in love with you.” They’re different grammatical constructs and they represent different subject/object relationships.
So I suppose I should be more clear as to what I mean. It’s possible to love two people in the same way. Verb-love is not unique. Verb-love is trivial and common. It’s a one-way street and can be entirely determined in character by one person. An individual may replicate his emotions.
Really, it’s the connection that is unique. No two people are the same and by logical extension, no two people you connect with will relate to you the same way. In-love isn’t something people do or feel so much as the sum of all the intangible things that lie between two individuals. In-love is not a thing in its own right. It is the way we sum up the entire delicate dance of a million feelings, memories, glances, and words. It is irreducibly complex. It is marvelous.
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04.17.07
Posted in Everything/Nothing, Rant at 3:23 pm by tempo502
I am uncharacteristically jealous. Irrational anger! RAR!
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04.10.07
Posted in Rant, Ridiculous at 6:01 am by tempo502
I don’t know where that load of tripe came from. It’s just proof old sayings don’t amount to much, I guess. It’ll boil if you watch it long enough. What they don’t tell you is that watching pots is incredibly, excruciatingly boring.
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04.04.07
Posted in Insightful... at 2:40 am by tempo502
Edges define people, inside and out. Sensation, perception, and appearance all occur at the boundary layer between internal viscera and inanimate externalities. You are encased in a thin sheath of skin, and this barrier contains your ability to interact with and experience the world. Most of what you feel — hot, sharp, wet, smooth — exists only on your surface. Muscle-aches and nausea can be felt deeper, but certainly nothing extends beyond the confines of your mortal shell.
Touch the skin of your own arm or face. You’ll feel both sides of the touch, but there’s no sense of connectedness. Grasping your hand tightly around a small object will bring it entirely inside you, but it will not penetrate your permanent one-sided edge of selfhood. Bleed and your uniquely-marked cells will leave you, but they stop being you the moment they hit the ground. Lost property, perhaps. A few stolen drops of your most precious possession.
By and large, you end at your skin. You will never, at any point in your existence, feel or know what it means to be someone else. Every living, thinking thing on this planet is fundamentally disconnected and isolated from every other. We communicate, we touch, we empathize, but the subjective experience of being cannot be shared. We can merely project bits of ourselves into the world through actions, creations, and words.
How do you project yourself onto the world? You cannot objectively know yourself and others cannot subjectively know you. Unspoken thoughts flit away to oblivion. Unrealized intentions leave no imprint on the world. The feelings and ideas inside your mind are the defining essence of your being and yet are absolutely meaningless to the world at large. Let them out. Push thoughts through muscle and voice so they may earn an objective existence. You must act, and in acting, be the person you want the world to know.
Let your thoughts out. Live as if every mote of your being is worthless if kept inside. Bleed the products of your mind onto paper or canvas. You can only prove your existence to others by your works and deeds.
Build monuments and shift the earth.
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04.01.07
Posted in Ridiculous at 1:00 am by tempo502
ad am an as at ax be by do go he hi ho if in is it me my no of oh on or ox pi so to up us we ye
Got any more?
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