Calvin: That's why I want to ask you, as a tiger, a wild animal close to nature, what you think we're put on Earth to do. What's our purpose in life? Why are we here?
Hobbes: We're here to devour each other alive.

Moral Compass [Cardboard, paper, ink, credit card plastic, container lid plastic, metal hardware; 12x12x1 cm]

June 2009

Manufacturing Absurdity

30.10.04 If you think about it, there really is no absurdity in the natural world because everything exists and occurs for a reason and in response to a previous event, even if it's simply quantum chaos. But the artificial world constructed by human endeavors is riddled with absurdities; people seem to do things all the time without any apparent reason.

All absurdity originates in artificial living because it can’t be found in the natural world. And this isn’t an event related to modern characteristics but can be traced back at least as far as ancient cave art – the first evidence of abstract expression. Voodoo and other shamanistic practices are further examples of the primitive, abstract mind at work; for instance, trying to transfer personal suffering into another person as a means of releasing oneself from their own pain.

The human mind and its imaginative powers created absurdity with the advent of the ability to conceive things that aren’t there. This is also why humans can laugh because laughter is the evolved response to absurdity needed to maintain sanity, a self-created absurdity no less! Laughter is a necessary component of human mental health; one of the primary symptoms of severe mental illness is the inability to laugh or laugh appropriately.

Human imagination is clearly a powerful force and one that can harm as easily as it can help. It's fine to pretend and play with fantasy, imagination is healthy after all, but when you start to believe to the point of faith then it becomes pathological. Faith in a belief is intentionally blocking out alternative explanations; it is willful denial. All of the distortions and perversions of man stem from the belief in unverifiable and disconnected unreality, and the only thing that can temper the imagination is intellect.

Disentangling the Absurdity in Artificiality

Reduction is a very powerful methodology for explaining the way things work but it fails when used against very complex and heavily inter-connected systems. Social systems for instance are simply too tangled to reduce and then generate any useful answers from the results. So, for instance, reduction has serious problems when it's used to against human interactions, essentially it answers with an error message. But the fact that human activity does generate meaning creates a blatant contradiction. Why do people want to talk all the time? Why do they do things like paint or throw rocks into ponds or try to climb mountains, or perform any other arbitrary act? The complexity of social interactions within advanced human society makes discerning origins and initial forces very difficult, cause and effect are confusing or not even apparent - often creating a façade of absurdity.

Addressing and understanding the source of meaning and its absence is important because nihilism is a response to the ubiquitous absurdity of artificiality in modern existence. It may be that the only way to explain these ultra-complex systems of interactions, and perhaps the absurdity associated with them, is to factor in a tertiary meaning derived from the interactions themselves. In other words it's not the individual pieces that matter here so much as the interactions binding them together.

Possession shapes and consolidates the "I" of philosophers. "I own, therefore I am" expresses a truer psychology than the Cartesian "I think, therefore I am." A man's deeds are imputed to him as their owner, not merely as their creator. - John Dewey, 1921.

The Electronic Collective Subconscious

22.01.03 I'm going to start out by stating that the Internet is a giant collective human subconscious, one that is not hidden in private dreams or masked thoughts but free and openly accessible for just about anyone. It's a giant venue full of all those things that are so often deemed 'bad' in conscious life, such as sex, racism, rude behavior - if you can think of it, it's out there someplace. All the things that people often avoid saying to a judging public audience are safe to express with the anonymity of the Internet communications medium.

The negatives of this sort of expression are quick to be recognized, such as the fact that someone can be the most rude and obnoxious jackass online without the risk of getting the swift punch in the face such anti-social behaviour would justly earn in an actual physical meeting. Nevertheless, the benefits should be noted as well. The free expression that the Internet currently provides has certainly kept not just a few from losing their sanity. This is really the basis of dreams, that being a way to express and deal with emotions and thoughts that are incompletely developed, or simply unacceptable for expression during everyday situations.

So given that much (but obviously not all) of the Internet is a massive subconscious expression of multiple individual thoughts and desires, I would predict that in the near future the public will resist efforts by corporations and government interests to identify and track people who use this communications medium, example the advent of sites like Anonymizer.com. The public will resist efforts to reduce their anonymous use of the Internet because it's an important creative outlet and one that they didn't have before, much in the same way that the printing press created a new means of expression for the public's ideas and emotions.

Even something as relatively innocuous as text file 'cookies' have generated intense concern; same with creating unique identification numbers for the CPU chips to specifically identify a computer. Business' have a significant interest in eroding anonymity because they can exploit that information to target their products. For instance a while back somebody figured out that the online store Amazon.com was charging different prices for the same products to different customers based upon the cookies and personal information they had collected! Amazon discontinued the practice (so they claim) but only because they were caught and publicly revealed, not out of any respect for business ethics or personal privacy. Who else do you think is doing this sort of thing now?

My point is that anonymity is important to people because it increases the allowance for free expression of strong emotion, uncomfortable thoughts, and socially marginal notions. And whether you or I like or dislike what's being expressed, the truth is that for psychological health these things have to come out some way or another, and it's better to have it done in a fairly creative and mostly non-damaging way than have it suppressed and spewed out in unpredictable and non-constructive, damaging ways. Bottom line is that the best defense against unpleasant or disliked expression encountered in this medium is to simply ignore it and move on to something you do like, as opposed to censoring it or getting the government to try and outlaw it, and as a bonus that way you don't have to get your hand messy with the ol' face-punch either.

The Evolution of Evil

24.06.02 The concept of something created from nothing by God is a common creation theme transcending both history and disparate cultures, for example the book of Genesis chapter one. But this division presupposes a duality between two elements, nothing and something, dark and light, evil and good. And since the 'something' created by a righteous God is good, then evil is of course those dark uncontrollable forces and chaotic elements opposing, subverting, and destroying righteous creation.

Similarly we have the structures of civilization, those elements of human invention such as laws and leaders who are God's representatives on Earth whom we are supposed to always obey just as we do God himself. The book of Ephesians chapter 6 verse 5 admonishes all slaves to dutifully obey their masters. Meanwhile the disobedient, the lawless, anti-civilization barbarians remain the implacable forces of evil.

The mediaeval Church would often put animals on trial, nearly driving cats to extinction on continental Europe at one point and dramatically promoting plague in the process! The witch trials are more commonly known today, a tradition carried over into the New World. Witches or rogue animals were believed to be inhabited by demons, invisible spirits compelling allegiance to a dark master. In the book of Mark chapter five, Jesus drove the "legion" of demons out of one sick man and put them into a herd of swine as per their request. Immediately afterward they all ran off into a lake and died, all 2,000 of them. One would think the owner of those pigs would be rightfully furious, nor does the Bible say that he was compensated by Jesus for the costly loss of property. No doubt the promise of a "heavenly reward" quickly soothed the agitated.

Evil was something that came from demons and dark forces of chaos and disorder that could never be controlled by human powers, and instead one had to rely on (meaning hope, pray and sacrifice to) heavenly forces to save your sorry ass from evil and eternal damnation, hence the importance of the priest, the saviour, going to church every week, but most importantly being a very good, obedient and tithe paying citizen. Hebrews 13:17 sternly reminds everyone, "Obey your leaders and submit to their authority. They keep watch over you as men who must give account. Obey them so that they their work will be a joy, not a burden, for that would be of no advantage to you."

Nature itself, although being created by God, was nonetheless emblematic of the ever present forces of chaos, darkness and a permanent haven, for evil could not be conquered by human power, merely kept at bay through the bright lights and city walls of civilization and artificial order. In the epic of Gilgamesh, the hero, along with trusty sidekick Enkidu, leaves his sunny city and travels far off into the dark and primeval cedar forest to battle forces of evil like the nature divinity Humbada. Man versus nature, no quarter granted!

Just over a hundred years ago it was very unusual, and generally considered suicidal, to simply venture out into the wilderness unless forced to. Lewis and Clark traveling across the new Louisiana Purchase in 1804 was an accomplishment at least as momentous to contemporary minds as America on the moon in 1969! Not until President Theodore Roosevelt, suffering from massive masculine insecurities, ventured out into the rugged outdoors for entertainment and adventure did such things become remotely reasonable endeavors for the public. Today many think nothing of climbing a 20,000 foot mountain on a weekend, or driving far out into the national forest and camping for the night, then complaining about bears ransacking food supplies or getting stuck on the mountainside and dialing up the cell phone to call for help. Or more egregious yet, constructing housing subdivisions in the woods and then desperately searching for someone to blame when it all burns to the ground in a seasonal forest fire!

The radical change in power-position that has transformed the human outlook over the past century is remarkably understated in its most crucial elements, that being how we deal with life itself and the eternal forces of nature. Gone is the era where President John Adams could boast with confidence of a thoroughly awed public response: "My family, I believe, have cut down more trees in America than any other name!" Instead of a mortally antagonistic position of one versus the other, it is now generally accepted that we are the stewards of Earthly life, rather than its victims. And homo Sapiens are no longer just another animal in the menagerie, but now the zoo keepers! Today certain organizations are desperately trying to save butterflies in the Amazon basin or rescue hopelessly stranded and brain damaged Orcas. This interface between humanity and nature has shifted so suddenly that it's no surprise significant cultural fractures occur between the traditional camp continuing to espouse exploitation and the new camp promoting manic preservation. And so the definition of evil, or more importantly the source of it, remains muddled in the modern mind.

Someone to blame...

Evil has begun to turn inward from residing within mostly vague external forces into an endogenous evil. The age old excuse, 'the Devil made me do it!' just doesn't work anymore, not in court and not within the context of any serious social setting. Indeed, the existential source of contemporary evil is really none other than man himself. The monsters of our era don't live in poorly lit cedar forests; they live in whitewashed State Houses on the taxpayer's dime. Stalin, Hitler, Mao Tse Tung, these are our emblems of evil. Never mind the millions of eager and willing participants needed for the enactment of their 'mad' whims. And yet herein lies the crux of the existential dilemma, one that fills entire book shelves in libraries and endless circles of debate and concern, how can one normal individual become a monstrosity of evil in one lifetime? Witness the concomitant rise of philosophy grasping to explain the duality conundrum within humanity. Demon possession, once such a convenient and fitting answer, appears less and less palatable. In some cases the religion, or lack of it, is portrayed as the culprit of the madness. But a more acceptable answer, serving to schism the evil from the good within the very narrow boundaries of humanity, is of course ideology. Ideas are the playground of good and evil once inhabited by simplistic angels and demons or wilderness and civilization. And once again the error lies in trying to split the indivisible for the sake of satisfying a fictional notion. [All Bible quotes from the NIV.]

Dead

"The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible." - Albert Einstein

11.09.01 Philosophy fixates on the apparent complexity of nature, and classical thinkers ponder the grandeur and mystery of the universe. Yet one who builds meaning with the substantive materials of scientific knowledge eventually reaches the stunning, inescapable, and diametrically opposed conclusion: existence is so absurdly simple it's utterly disheartening.

Making things predictable and understandable erodes their power and vitiates the drama. Just think of the simple fact that the laws of the universe and biology are all even capable of being comprehended with a modicum of human effort. The fact that things are both consistent and quite understandable is utterly devastating to philosophical thought.

Even the most enigmatic and bathetic of topic for poets and philosophers, love, is just simple chemicals in the brain. Sexual and maternal bonding is just oxytocin from the pituitary gland.

The truth is depressing, ignorance really is bliss and if God ever went to school he took the short bus with his name sewn into his underwear and his mittens pinned to his coat. Welcome to your new world, mystery is dead, philosophy is dead, faith is dead, love is dead, sex is hollow and hedonism is boring.

System Health

19.02.01 Medical science is long on quantifiable fact and short on qualitative feeling, which is unfortunate because the human body is more than just a series of chemical reactions - it also includes the human mind, a largely non-quantifiable yet extremely important part of the health process. Human health is about environment, sanitation, nutrition and health care, all of which are well represented in modern hospitals and clinics. However the health of the mind is still the realm of quacks, pseudo-scientists, and masters of mumbo-jumbo worse than the bone-saws and leeches of medicine 200 years ago. A healthy mind sustains a healthy body, and people that have purpose in life and a desire to live will outlast those that don't regardless of mitigating factors.

Instead of pouring billions of dollars into eradicating illness' that affect a fraction of the population it would be wiser to invest that money into the afflictions of the entire population, that being mental health. Instead of a small return for a huge sum we could gain a huge return for a small sum.

Physiology is but a part of the answer because social interactions and stimulation is the environment that creates sickness or health for the mind. Employment, or lack of it, vapid degenerate entertainment or edifying education, mental exercise in learning or dumbing-down. Medical research will eventually come around to the conclusion that the human mind is a part of the human body and both are an intricate part or a larger system. The entire system must be healthy for any of the parts to ever be healthy as well.

God's Depression

15.01.01 & 05.07.09 It's typical metaphysical fashion for everyone to think they would want to be God, but after the abuse of power wore thin would you really? Think about it, God must have the most boring and lonely job possible - no equals, no one to converse with or learn from. Knowing all and having experienced all leaves nothing to explore, discover or encounter! Even the most slovenly dullard doesn't wish to watch TV reruns every night. The source of life's excitement is the unknown, the chance and risk within all new encounters. Take it away, make everything predictable, knowable and the result is stasis, boredom, hatred for life and eventual suicide.

Through the advent of the demise of idealism and the triumph of scientific reason we've found ourselves at a unique juncture. Despite fervent efforts to conquer the unknown, ultimately it's clear to carry this purpose to a final conclusion would be counterproductive. Hence the perpetual popularity of extraterrestrial encounters, ghosts, demons and angels, ESP, LSD and peyote psychotropic drug experiences, psychic and paranormal powers and similar 'mysteries of the unknown'. Of course they can be explained with non-supernatural answers, even ghosts are just infra-sound waves. Excuse my repetitiveness but reality really is just a profound misunderstanding of simplicity.

Still people continue to believe because they find the topics fascinating. Humanity wants to know so as to be able to control, but without some mysteries life is intensely dull. So it really shouldn't be any surprise that boredom is a plague across the western industrialized world. We collectively ask "is that all there is to life?!" The reduction wounds run deep, "but there must be more!" Science's success at generating predictable models is its own weakness; will delusion and myth create a new era or will scientific ennui reign forever-more?

And this is no idle issue because the need for myth, for the supernatural even, is wholly ingrained into the human psyche. Despite the rational conclusion that God is an absurdity with suicidal tendencies, every culture employs an almighty deity in single or multiple forms! The human mind stubbornly refuses to accept that life is just this nihilistic clockwork mechanism designed to perpetuate a malignant stasis descending from nothing and headed to nowhere.

Beyond the truistic hyperbole the solution remains elusive. An explained myth is like a revealed placebo, it doesn't have much validity unless one sincerely believes in it. Archeology will provide entertaining mysteries for some time and since the universe is largely unexplored astronomy should provide sufficient vagary for contemplation. For the moment quantum physics poses a few perplexing conundrums. Neuroscience has a ways to go yet, surely the human mind will occupy theologians in some form. But really, ennui and boredom are mostly products of laziness and lack of effort. The more we look, the more mysteries we find.

Nihilism Meets Holology

08.01.01 One must ask the question first, then focus the mind. What does it mean to be a Holologist? Traditional problem solving entails the reduction paradigm - breaking down all into components and then building up again. Essentially building simplistic simulations of the original, something purified to the point we can better understand it. But as even a simpleton knows that life is no simulation, darn that elemental chaos! No, it doesn't always work because components and the whole aren't equivalent, example synergy and quantum systems. Ultimately we'll realize what the Holologist already knows: strategic solutions must come from the incorporation of disparate datum mixed and mastered in a mind to generate a hypothesis which then can only be verified in-situ. But testing on real-life doesn't really happen, rather it's either employed or it isn't. Thus one accepts the hypothesis and the proponent or not, in-toto, the map and the guide, the prophet and the saviour, the ultimate package deal. Keeping in mind perfection exists only in the simulations (any artificial system lacking chaos).

The Holologist is rational but not devoid of spiritual elements because they understand what can be discerned given present knowledge and what cannot. The unknown remainder is the spiritual realm, a hemisphere oddly enough at least as equally relevant to human well-being as the known.

It's tough to fit in socially, most people solve the conundrum by sacrificing personal identity for the collective uniform of conformity, then cynically employing delusional phrases and symbols of channeled rebellion and acceptable heterodoxy to mask their doublethink. Personally I don't fit into any social niche; I gave it up long ago, and probably couldn't even if I tried. But after sacrificing the superficial connection I found that even finding an ideological niche eluded me.

Persons cut adrift like this tend to become nihilistic, but true some people simply have a greater need for social acceptance than others. But after blaming myself and feeling sorry for my apartness I came to the realization that much of the reason is not my own but rather the narrow range of acceptable categories we must subscribe to in our plastic, digital society. My problem must not afflict just me but many! Today we should have more options ideologically than ever, yet we discover that instead we've all been channeled into a binary reality consisting of gray and more gray, damned if you do and damned if you don't. I don't need to be damned, so instead I quit the game and won.

Nihilism is about the closest established 'ideology' I could find that properly characterized my beliefs and feelings. It works in a fashion but like most everyone else I have a hard time allowing it to be the ultimate end of a means.

Evolution of ideas with the fusion of known and unknown yields Holology. It works even better since it's organic - not a marble statue but a living evolving entity.

The Interpreters Ruin The World

21.10.00 Many times simplicity is its own beauty. Leave it to the interpreters to destroy the simple maxims of the Ten Commandments. Rabbis turned it into the Talmud and themselves into monopolist-portals to 'truth'. The Bill of Rights gets perverted and interpreted by Supreme Court, legislators and lawyers. Classic works of literature get interpreted and convoluted by self-described experts, the literati losers telling us all what it really means. Even the most banal and simplistic Hollywood film needs at least three critics to invent disparate spins and generate enough confusion and intrigue to boost ticket sales.

Interpreters build a new world based on bias and truth monopolies while profiting from confusion. Unfortunately, this trend will only get worse as specialization rampages through our society. No one seems to have the time or patience to figure anything out for themselves, so they rely on their political representatives, or their Pastor, or their favorite film critic. And when these fake heroes fall whose really to blame? You can't control your own destiny until you start to think for yourself.

Dreaming

06.03.00 I think the nonsensical dreams are created by intense emotions such as anger, fear and so on, while more moderated and orderly dreams are formed by desires, wishes, and imagination. And generally dreams deal within an unrecognized realm of a 6^th sense. A sense dealing with emotional feeling - likes dislikes, hates and those feelings transposed onto others people and situations, as well as the detection of those feelings in other people.

The neural paths that determine memory are spatially organized, and likewise remembered in three dimensions. This causes complexity in dreams and makes them difficult to directly understand in a conscious state. The dream world is also like a foreign language that's long since untranslatable and it appears confusing or nonsensical upon awakening and translating in the conscious mind.

Freydis Landers, Self-Help Guru

28.12.99 Our subconscious minds are influenced by everything we see and hear. Our surroundings subtly shape our perceptions and beliefs, which is especially pronounced strategically. In other words little things like names, ideas, and visual imagery all coalesce in the mind. This is proven through dream studies. Amazingly, our mind actually remembers everything, all details, it’s just that most gets buried in our psyche. Nonetheless it still exerts influences on our daily lives. Our spontaneous ideas are often just a replay of things we've seen or heard of.

A little scary huh? Indeed, but we can now understand that the first step to self-empowerment is to control our own environments as much as possible, taking ground when we can bit by bit. Control the influences on your life and direct the input you receive, see the things you like and avoid the ones you don’t.

Denial tactics? In some ways, I’m not saying ignore things that are detrimental to self and others, like deny that truck is about to hit you head on while driving down the Interstate. Just change the little things, the entertainment what you read and what you hear as much as possible in more profitable directions for self-enrichment. Degrading and negative milieus will have sympathetic affects on you. You are in many ways a summation of the constant influences surrounding you. Advertisers spend billions of dollars and I’m sure they wouldn’t be wasting all that money if it had no effect on the minds of consumers. Think about that next time you watch television, see a movie, or buy a logo shirt.

The greatest marketing coup has to be the guy that figured out how to get consumers to pay to see advertising (think of cable TV and movie theaters)!

Coincidence?

30.01.99 Concerning the nature of ‘coincidences’, ask what do they all have in common? The answer is that they’re all impulses from the subconscious. Never are they forced or a product of desire, just a flowing feeling that occurs usually suddenly.

This means that the subconscious is dictating much, if not all, that occurs during conscious state. Almost as if we live the lives we planned out during the subconscious sleep time.

Thus in order to manipulate what we want to experience we need to transfer a conscious idea into the subconscious realm of thought. But you know this happens all the time, just on a less focused basis. This is why TV commercials and advertisements do have effects on us. Even the most subtle concept repeated enough times creates a new reality.

Dreams are Backwards future

11.07.99 It could be that if dreams are really visions of the future then they appear confusing because they're being played out in reverse time and motion. This subconscious interpretation of reversed temporal events would explain why dreams are often so confusing. The present moves from past to future, but any future time frame would behave the opposite way and progress from end to beginning. If one were to view this occurring it would seem confusing to say the least, but if one were aware of what was happening you could make sense out of it, or of some of it at least.

Modern quantum theory posits that anything traveling faster than light speed (tachyon) would also be traveling backwards in time (from our tardon perspective). In this case the end of a dream would actually be the beginning of the future event and vice versa.

Who Needs God Anyway?

12.12.97 Is it too presumptuous too state that I'm happy to be Godless and exist within the perfectly predictable framework of physical laws? When I make mistakes it’s my fault, but I know that I made the best decision given the known datum. When I succeed I know that no one deserves credit except myself! Fate is merely the events that occur beyond my control and I see no need to attribute those events to any supernatural being. Why do so many people seek out the most complicated and convoluted explanations for everyday life? People invent philosophies that can’t be disproved and then decry their sorry outcome on abstract constructs.

I’m happy to be me, the sum of both functional and dysfunctional. Who needs God except the coward that wants to deny fault?

Cotopaxi by Church 1862