All is Flux

All is flux, change, impermanence.

In the debate between the mutability of all things and the immutability of all things three possible positions exist. All is unchanging. All is change. Somethings change while others remain unchanged.

The first position is patently absurd. We are constantly surrounded by change and movement. To maintain that change is unreal it is necessary to maintain that all that one sees is unreal, to postulate a separate reality more real than the one in which all knowledge and experience occur and forever inaccessible to any faculty but the imagination. This separate reality is unchanging by definition and for that reason and that reason alone must be un-effected by the constant change which characterizes the experience of everyday life. This reality is actually by its nature beyond experience because experience requires change, all human senses require change for their function, sight relies on the movement of light through space between subject and object, hearing the movement of sound waves, touch the coming together of object and subject, taste and smell the transfer of molecules from the object to sense receptors in the the subject... In order for all things to remain unchanged one must first eliminate from the category of all things, all things, and instead populate the set with mental object conceived specifically to be unchangeable by definition and therefore unconnected to the world outside of themselves and the imagination.

To jump to the third proposition, that somethings may remain unchanged while other things are changed will quickly prove the truth of the second proposition, for when any one thing changes all others are inherently changed, if only in their relation to that which has changed. A simple thought experiment will make this clear. Imagine a universe consisting only of 2 things, one a rock “immune to change” the other a river of constant flowing change in which this rock sits. The rock supposedly unchanging in the midst of the changing river is itself inherently changed by its relation to the river around it. One instant it is a rock of dimension x sitting in the midst of a river with flow state y, the next instant it has become a rock of dimension x sitting in a river with flow state y+1. In order for the rock to truly remain unchanged it would need to be defined as having no relation to the universe around it, and in so doing with have removed the rock from the universe and relegated it to the imaginary world required by the first proposition of a universe without change. In this way we have discovered the truth of the second proposition, that all is in fact change. A universe in which 1 thing changes is a universe in which all things change, and a universe in which no thing changes is a universe in which we clearly neither do live nor could conceivably live. Heraclitus stands triumphant Parmenides weeps and we all move on to contemplating the existential implications of our living in a world of constant change.

Proven Necessary Probable

All Knowledge is a question of Certainty.

Nothing can be said to be 100% certain... but those things which are highly certain may be said to be Known.

Things which may be said to be Certain fall into two Categories: That which is Necessary; That which is Proven

That Which is Proven is that which has been reliably experienced; The Reliability of an Experience is determined by its relation to other experiences as well as to that which has been shown to be Necessary and that which has been shown to be Probable. That which is Proven need not be Necessary or Probable: I am Proven (all that cogito bullshit) but certainly not Necessary and not particularly Probable (on the cosmic scale)

That Which is Necessary is that which follows logically from That Which is Proven. That Which is Proven False (Disproven) is Shown to be Not Necessary (Unnecessary)

That Which is Probable is that which follows logically from That Which is Necessary as well as that which has been experienced but not Proven and that which has been reported by reliable external sources. The Reliability of External Sources is determined by the history of past reports which have been Proven, Shown to be Necessary, and Shown to be Probable. 

Those things which have not been Proven one way or the other may be talked about in reference to their Probability or Necessity. A thing may be shown to be Not Necessary but Probable and so thought to exist and included in theoretical models provisionally. A thing may be shown to be Necessary even if Not Probable (Improbable) (2 distinct categories?) such a thing may be said to be Known as would a thing Proven. However should a thing called Necessary be Disproven such a thing would be Shown to be Unnecessary and the Knowledge of it to have been mistaken. Ultimately all Knowledge and Certainty flow from Experience and while Necessity and Probability may be used to judge and assess Experience  if an Experience or collection of Experiences are determined to be reliable then the Necessity and Probability of an idea must be reassessed in accord with the Experience. The Three categories of Proof Necessity and Probability for a mutually supporting pyramid in support of Certainty and Knowledge.

Long Absence

OK so yes I did go away for about 2 weeks... I should not have done that... It started with Thanksgiving and then just went on from there... No excuse... I need to hold myself more responsible. I have done a similar thing with regard to my studying of German via audio lessons... That has something to do with my phone having problems, but I will get that fixed... ok Sorry. That is all.

CAP: 10. There are no fundamental morals

One of the core assumptions which both underlies my atheism and is a direct result of it is that there are no universal fundamental morals which pre-exist and are independent of human judgment. Morals are socially constructed by people not handed down from on high.

This leaves us all in the moral wilderness with no guidance, exactly where we should be. We can fall back on the traditional morals which have guided us for so long and served us relatively well... however in doing this we must recognize we are doing so by choice. There are many “traditional” moral codes and in following any given one of them you are choosing not to follow all of the others. You have to answer the question, if only to yourself, of why you have chosen any one over any other, just as you would in choosing a “non-traditional” moral code. In this regard the argument that “it is the morality of my fathers” is insufficient. We must choose our moral course consciously and rationally, and ultimately we will need to follow our deviate from our supposed moral course consciously and rationally.

In every situation we choose the moral code we wish to guide us because we believe it will bring us the results we desire, and we choose how closely we will follow it in every situation based on our desires, nothing more, nothing less. We may say we do X because it is proscribed by our moral code, but we can just as easily choose not to do X, and we can just as easily choose another moral code which would not tell us to do X and then we would still have to choose when faced with the choice whether or not to do X... There are no answers, there are no rules, we are Free, terribly and frighteningly Free.

Part of the social construction of morality is the social establishment of reward and punishment for “moral” and “immoral” actions. These rewards and punishments are a replacement and reflection of the false promises made by religion of reward and punishment in an afterlife. This is the source of law, but even this structure does not save us from the terror of choice because we always have to answer the question of whether our fear of being caught and punished is sufficient to cause us to conform. We also have the social responsibility to make the laws which will govern us. In the modern age of democracy we are no longer offered the false option of abdication of responsibility, false because even such abdication to higher authority was itself choosing, as it is to choose not to participate in the processes of self-governing.

Continuation of previous post on creation of meaning

The making of life a creative act is not to deny the truth of experience or imply hidden reality behind subjective reality but rather that subjective reality generally and broadly accurately reflects the objective reality from which it is derived, the creative act is in the interpretation of experience and the conceptualization and categorization of raw experiential data into understanding. We are presented by our senses with information which our minds must sort and organize into useful form. We can do this by using the long established categories passed down for generations, and this is certainly a reasonable expedient and logical method of avoiding needless repetition of work. However this also has the potential of repeating past errors. It is also important to understand that choosing to use the categories established by others is still a choice and a creative act. We take in the world around us and filter it through our mental structures and concepts of what the external objective world most like is and create our mental subjective image of the objective world. We can (and should) choose to continually reexamine our assumptions and categories used to comprehend the world around us. This can become a social act when we compare our understanding with that of others and confirm or throw doubt upon our own understanding. By each person approaching the world as an individual and then individuals coming together to agree on that which is common across all experience, we begin to approach the social construction of reality. This socially constructed reality gives light to the political arm of my nihilist philosophy, and I realize how controversial it is to claim that word and I intend to defend that choice in the future, but as we recognize the socially constructed nature of the world around us we see that things in the world do not need to be as they are and can be changed by the simple will of people to change the world around us and the ways in which we address and understand it. This again is not to imply the non-existence of truth, there is certainly truth which is undeniable by and independent of human interaction with the world but this is merely the factual limitations of the world around us but the way in which we address these facts is entirely up to us.

The denial of inherent meaning in the universe amounts to a denial of all forms of idealism and an embrace of empiricism. We are not interacting merely with representations of a reality we cannot access but with the actuality directly. We cannot come to knowledge through abstract thought and logic alone but rather only through direct experience. Logic can tell us the constraints upon what we might expect to find through our experience but it cannot tell us conclusively that what we experience is or is not true. Obviously our experiences can mislead but this does not happen solely when they are no longer logical... we can be wrong but still logical...but when any of our senses are misleading we can fall back on other senses and on the senses of those around us to confirm or negate our own sense perception.

Creation of meaning and deriving ideas from Kurt Vonnegut

Day 6:

It is one of my core ideas, beliefs if I have to use that word, that there is no inherent meaning which pre-exists the individual instances which make up existence. This is an extension of the existence precedes essence of traditional existentialism. I say an extension because in most cases this was thought to be a unique aspect of human Being, whereas I take it to extend not only to the human condition but to the Being of all things. There is a ling which I have long thought I stole from Kurt Vonnegut but have never been able to pin down exactly where he said it, “All people, places, and events, real or imagined are purely coincidental.” I always took this to be his spin on the standard disclaimer at the beginning of many books regarding resemblances within the work, but also a profound truth about the universe. Another line of Vonnegut, this one I am sure is his, is “in the beginning was the thing and one thing led to another.” These two concepts I take as founding ideas of my understanding of the profoundly absurd meaninglessness of the universe around us. There was a state of affairs which came into being at the first moments of the universe, it could have been any of an infinite number of circumstances, and over the course of infinite time it has and will be all of them, but this one was such that it brought about the universe as it is today, and another circumstance would have brought about a profoundly different universe or no universe at all. It seems miraculous that things worked out so perfectly to create this universe but it only seems that way in retrospect, essentially the Goldilocks theory, that had things been different either no intelligence would have arisen to notice, or a different intelligence would have arisen equally resultant from the unique conditions of the universe in which it exists and equally amazed at how perfectly the universe was tuned so as to create it. A mistaking of cause and effect.

Taking this purely random universe as our starting point we have to ask ourselves how to live in such a universe. So much previous philosophy existed in the inaccurate belief in an inherently meaningful universe and sought to find the meaning inherent in the universe. Now that we realize the meaningless nature of the universe we can recognize the profound mistake in this approach, searching ceaselessly for that which never existed in the first place. What no one realized for centuries was that the real project of religion was not the revelation of meaning but the creation of meaning. Because we mistakenly thought that meaning which we were creating was meaning discovered we took it as absolute and unquestionable rather than the socially constructed meaning it was, revealed absolute meaning cannot be changed or questioned, but socially created meaning is always subject to social amendment. If the meaning we are using is not providing the outcomes we desire it is entirely within our power and right, but also responsibility to create new different and better concepts of meaning. It becomes the primary act of living to create the meaning of the life lived.

The other part of this is in the creation of meaning not only in our lives but in our understanding of the world around us. Our understanding of what makes up our reality and what value to place on the objects and events which surround us... This will be the subject of tomorrows 500 or so words...

More empty promises about making this blog better

I have been reading back through some former posts as I try to get back into doing this thing in a serious way and I have noticed some bad habits. I am really all over the place with essentially no focus or follow up. Apparently a year ago I made a big deal about starting a long form paper on the subject of Schopenhauer's essay On Suicide, which to the best of my memory I never wrote a single word of... I do remember reading the essay though... so that is a step I suppose... but yeah I need to develop a structure for continuing work and organization... but at the same time maybe I need to stick with what I am doing now at least until I have proven myself of sticking with even that much easier thing, before trying to move on to more complicated commitments. So even though I am well aware no one else is looking at this I want to apologize to anyone who may one day see all of this for its complete lack of organization or follow up... Part of me feels like it would be best if no one saw this as it might come across as a crazy person's scribbling... but I also know that there is value here even if I will eventually have to go back through it all and dig it out at some point. I have tried to just do this and keep it all on my computer but I never seemed able to stick with it, not that I have proven I can stick with it doing it here either, but maybe making it theoretically public will give me a sense of responsibility to make it work...

Question regarding speed of light travel

I am going to do a little rambling and thinking with my fingers on the subject of light speed travel and its implications. I assume most of the questions I bring up here are already answered and hope to eventually learn those answers and understand them, but for the moment I have little more than a passing understanding of these issues...

If I were to travel to Alpha Centauri 4 light years away at the speed of light would I experience it as 4 years? How long would it be on earth? It seems like it should be 4 years on earth as if they sent a radio message to Alpha Centauri at the speed of light 4 years later they would say “ok it has reached its destination...” But in this case how would I traveling at the speed of light experience the journey? Possibly as instantaneous travel? It would make sense in that I would not perceive the ticking of the clock as the light which would carry the information to my eyes would never reach them... If I were to travel at 2x the speed of light it seems that I should experience that as taking 2 years to get to Alpha Centauri... What is the ratio of differentiation between the experience of time of the person on earth and the person traveling at light speed? No doubt this can be easily calculated with the correct set of equations.

Ok so now we hit on the interesting philosophical implication of these questions... If it is possible to calculated varying experiences of time of differing perspectives in relative motion to one another would it not be possible to establish a base perspective which could be chosen at random as long as it is agreed upon, and from this we could calculate time shifts to other perspectives to establish a universal time and simultaneity... One of the founding principles of relativity and perspectivism is the idea that there is no one correct perspective, but this gives rise to many problems of communication across equally valid perspectives. If we could built a socially constructed framework which does not blindly hold one perspective superior but rather provides a method for translation could we not solve many of these problems. Instead of looking for the non-existent ground we could collectively create our own ground upon which to build. In this way we might free ourselves from the error which has dominated philosophy, that of searching for external answers rather than creating them from within and more importantly collectively as a social and political act... There is objective truth in so far as there is collectively agreed upon universal, or near as possible to universal, subjective experience of objective reality. Where there is broad general consensus on the contents of reality we can consider that to be reality and focus our attention on the margin cases where consensus is not easily established...

See I knew this kind of rambling would eventually pay off with an interesting thought... And you thought it was pointless mental masturbation... OK that was me saying that... Though these are not thoughts I have not had before and I really should start to try to organize them and approach them in a more systematic fashion....

Cosmology Proposal part 1

The bold is new today...

I am going to start from a basic cosmology. What we perceive as both space and time are fields which interact with matter. There may or may not be several entities which resemble what we refer to as the universe, I would say that all these entities constitute one universe and that we need a new world to describe the entity we currently refer to as the universe but that is beside the point. Space and time by their nature must be infinite, otherwise the question of what lies beyond arises and clearly that is a question which cannot be answered within our current understanding or our ability to conceptualize any possible future understanding. Within this infinite space there is at least one area in which matter has arisen, our “universe” the concept of infinity would tell us that an infinite number of such areas must exist but that is something we can leave aside for now as they are at least at this moment inaccessible to us. There are two ways in which they might be inaccessible, firstly would be in terms of distance, they are simply so far away that the light and radiation they are putting out have not reached us, in this case they are not inaccessible, in that access is possible at some point in the future just not now... the other way in which access might be denied is if the light and radiation they give off cannot reach us. In order to understand how this might be the case we have to consider the interactions of space, time, and matter. Einstein showed that matter causes the curvature of space and time. When this curvature is significant enough, such as in the case of a black hole, light is unable to escape the curvature and loops back around upon itself. As light moves with the greatest possible velocity if it cannot escape the curvature of space than neither can anything else. This would occur if the mass in our region of space were so concentrated that it curved the space around it back in upon itself into an isolated bubble. Interestingly this would result in the region appearing as a black hole from the outside. Are the black holes we perceive entire universes unto themselves? Also as the matter in our universe has been shown to be expanding in all directions would this possibly lead to a change in the curvature of space such that it no longer folds in upon itself? Also if a region of space were to be self contained would that mean that light from an external source could not enter? Does that fact that the matter in our region of the universe is expanding imply that its mass is not sufficient to curve space in upon itself because it would make sense that if the mass were that great it would be sufficient to pull itself together and collapse into a singularity as the current understanding of black hole creation would imply. Are we essentially in the supernova phase of an explosion which will eventually collapse back in upon itself? This seems unlikely as I understand it because evidence shows that the expansion is accelerating... But it is also accelerating and expanding in all directions and not from a single central point. This could be interpreted as an expansion of the space between objects such that they are not so much moving away from each other as the space between them is expanding... Could this be an aspect of the changing curve of space and time as a result of a simultaneous movement of the matter? This is all possible in a universe formed by the sudden expansion of a region of unstable space in which energy ripples within the space/time field and with the sudden expansion the points of high energy convert into the building blocks of matter and begin to coalesce into matter, as more matter forms it gives stability to the energy which is constantly in a quantum state shifting between pure energy with out mass and the the subatomic particles which create mass. Possibly that is all the subatomic particles are is energy sans mass, and the sudden expansion gave rise to a Higgs field or itself was the Higgs field. As more energy converts to matter it stabilizes the Higgs field giving more stability to other energy to become more matter, etc. in a feedback loop, birthing the material universe as we know it.

The role of government in democracy and the use of technocracy....

     One of the problems facing the political discussion today is an insistence on using outmoded conceptions of Government. Many of our fundamental arguments about the role of government find their roots in arguments of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, a time when the Government was a separate and distinct entity from the people over who it governed. This is simply no longer the case. Democracy offers the idea of putting the governing power in the hands of the people in order that they by self-governing might cease to be governed at all. Government (in a democracy) is simply the mechanism by which society can set priorities for collective goals, and the use of collective resources. Government cannot be too big or too small, it only can fail to meet the goals it sets for itself, as the representative of the people who compose it. The function of a democratic government is to allow the people a structure through which they can debate the allocation of the shared resources of the community in order to reach shared goals. The current political debates in the United States ignore this aspect of government and instead attempt to frame things as a fundamental argument about government as if it is still a debate over the form of government rather than one within the already agreed upon structure of democratic debate. Instead of debating what the tax levels should be we need to be discussing what we want the country to look like, once we have agreed on those issues we will be able to move on to how to accomplish those goals in the most cost effective manner, and then how best to raise the resources necessary to reach those goals. It might very well be true that Americans cannot reach agreement on what it is we want our nation to look like... but I think much of the disagreement we see now is based on deeply entrenched misunderstandings of what would actually happen were we to pursue various policies. There is fear that such and such would take people's freedom away, but there seems little evidence to support any individual given claim. Democracy needs to find its natural partnership with Technocracy... Democratic decision making to set goals and a scientific evidenced based technocratic process to achieve those goals. Ideology cannot help us in deciding on methodology because it does not have a foundation from which to launch its criticisms. Either a method results in the desired outcome or it does not. I can see one of the main objections here would be the classic of whether the ends justify the means? And I would normally take the position that the ends do not generally speaking justify the means if that were not an ideological position such as the ones I have just now disavowed as having no valid place in such discussions... Possibly the solution would be to ask whether we would want our country to be the type of place that would use such and such means... but this again is opening the door to the exact same arguments I began by attempting to eliminate from our politics... now I need to take the time to reconcile these two conflicting opinions and redevelop this argument...

The replace-ability argument in Peter Singer' Practical Ethics

Can you sacrifice one being for another simply because the second would be happier?

The happiness of one being cannot be sufficient cause to kill another. Either it is acceptable to kill the being or not, the happiness of others is not a valid concern. The dead being cannot take part in the happiness created after and as a result of it's death and therefore cannot be expected to judge such pleasure/happiness as a valid justification or exchange for that death. Death can be validated be cessation of pain but not by the expectation of future pleasure.

In the case of animals for food, it is not the happiness of the eater, or the happiness of the next animal who will be bred to replace this one that matters. It is a contract, (one which obviously the animal cannot be thought to have properly entered into but that is a different issue...) Exchanging the food shelter and care the animal has received for the life and meat that results. Obviously in the modern industrial agricultural system many animals are not provided with happy and fulfilling lives but this is a failure to fulfill the inherent terms of the exchange and not a justification of ending their lives in order to end their suffering. This is one of the great failures of the modern American food system, that we trade our moral responsibilities to the animals we use for food for lower costs and convenience. It is the responsibility of society to provide our livestock with the most pleasant and comfortable lives the healthiest feed and the greatest freedom possible in the time prior to their deaths. This goes not only for those animals we kill for their flesh but also for those we use for all purposes, eggs, milk, wool etc.

Abortion of the disabled fetus, it is not the replacement fetus that matters it is the removal of pain suffered by the disabled child and by the parents as well as the social cost of caring for the child etc. This of course does not make the decision about whether or not to abort a social decision, it remains a private decision to be reached by the parents of the child along with disinterested and honest medical advisers. The choice to abort a fetus cannot be made contingent on the ability, willingness, or intention to have another child to replace the lost fetus. This would present the potential to force a woman to have a disabled child for which she is unable to provide a replacement, or to have a child she does not wish to have merely to replace one she chose to abort due to disability. Women need to be made free to abort or keep a given fetus for whatever reasons she judges appropriate.

Core Assumptions and Principles: 24. All of our perceptions and experiences are filtered through our conceptualizations about the world.

500 words a day project

DAY 1:

Human beings experience the world around us through our senses but the senses only provide large amounts of raw stimuli to our brains. So must stimuli that it would be completely overwhelming and incomprehensible if it were not filtered and organized on a subconscious level. The unconscious mind filters the stimuli of the senses through the preconceptions and expectations of prior experience and logic in order to present the conscious mind with a comprehensible image of the external objective world. This of course simplifies our interactions with the world but it also has the potential to lead to mis-perceptions and misunderstandings as we perceive that which fits our preconceptions and expectations rather than that which is actually there. More than this though we fail to improve our understanding of the world because we do not allow ourselves to use new data to amend our existing conceptions and understanding. We miss the particulars of reality and experience things not as they are but only as we believe they should be.

Part of the reason for our conceptualization of the world around us, beyond the need to simplify our experiences, is the human development of language. Language connects words to objects and experiences which also furthers our ability to make connections and develop complex ideas which do not correspond to any external reality but only to the words used to derive them. This is of course incredibly positive but it also has negative effects... because we connect to the word rather than the actual object we frequently miss the truth contained in the object and in the direct experience of it. We live solely within our mental images alienated from the objective reality they represent.

But it is also important to recognize that the words we use and the conceptualizations to which they refer are not separate from the objective reality but are derived from it. Words and conceptions even when they are learned through abstract instruction or developed through abstract thought are originally founded in direct experience of the world around us. Everything no matter how synthetic or abstracted must find its original source in experience of the world outside of ourselves. We do not create anything entirely from within without deriving it from the source material of experience. First we must as babies accept the overwhelming constant stream of the world around us completely incomprehensible and frightening. But we are not completely without tools, we are not purely blank slates. Our brains come into the world with the necessary structures to allow us to begin to make connections and filter the information bombarding us into the first basic concepts and words which we eventually begin to use to communicate with those around us, and they in response communicate back to us and reenforce our practice of conceptualizing and begin to hand down to us their own conceptualizations. This is a necessary and natural practice, but it also contains the opportunity to do great harm, in the form of passing along the misconceptions which cripple generation after generation. We give to our children the necessary tools to understand and survive in the world that surrounds them, but we also give to them our mistakes and oversimplifications.

It is a necessary action to begin to de-conceptualize our experiences to free ourselves to access the direct experience of the world around us unmitigated by deep seated conceptualizations. We need to learn to experience the world as it is to reveal the truth free of received error.

500 words a day project

I am going to force myself to write at least 500 words everyday. They will be on whatever subject and hopefully will begin to connect together into longer pieces. I have no idea. I also want to try to write some fiction. But yeah the point is that my old way of not having any structure clearly was not working...

Also Retroactively Saturdays and Sundays are optional....

The Empirical Confirmation of Objective RealityThrough Subjective Experience

There is a subject, an object, and a light source. Light from the source is reflected off the object and hits the subject's eye stimulating nerves which transmits signal to the brain, the brain interprets the signals and constructs a mental image of the object. The mental image is the result of brain structures determined by past experience and genetics, themselves the result of generations upon generations of past experience in trial and error at creating more and more accurate and useful mental images of the world around us. A similar process occurs with the other senses adding to and refining our mental representations of the external objective world.

The Influence of Evolution on Subjective Representations of Objective Reality

Our subjective perception of reality is dictated by the functionality of our sense organs and the architecture of our brains. However both of these factors have themselves been determined, through the mechanism of evolution, by the objective reality which they represent to us. Those beings over the course of time whose sense organs and neural architecture resulted in the most accurate subjective representations of objective reality would have a distinct competitive advantage over others and so would succeed to pass these traits down to their descendants.

Some notes written in my phone which need to be expanded on...

Social construction of ethics.
      "Good" that which we find desirable
      "Bad" that which we find undesirable
      No universal method or measure to determine desirability
Government (democracy) the mechanism by which society set priority of collective goals and use of collective resources.
The end of locality: the effects of action extend beyond borders, resources shared across borders.
Global governance as path to global anarchism...

The simple fact is that the universe is evidence of one of two states, either at some point something sprung from nothing, or there exists an unbroken string of something stretching back infinitely. I cannot say definitively which is the case and neither can anyone else but i can tell you that God is not a solution to the question...

There are no strings as posited by string theory rather what they refer to as strings are the interconnected fabric of space which is vibrating as they posit. Different vibrations create different particles...

Spatial dimension (as well as temporal) is only perceivable as relation between objects (time as relation between events) but that is not to say space or time is created by the observation, it is created by the relation...

Time and space as fields in which and with which matter and energy interact. However they are also the result of the interactions of matter and energy. No matter or energy outside time and space, no time and space without matter energy- Co-dependent origination

just hitting keys on the computer

I have been away for over 2 fucking months... I have no reason for this I just stopped posting, and my last post was about how an impediment to posting had been removed... This post will not contain any content it is just here to let my non-existent readers know I am still alive and to break the wall of having not posted in hopes that I will start again. My first post back, were it to have something to say would have the pressure of actually saying something so to alleviate that weight I am posting this bullshit so as to make the post I plan to post tomorrow or the next day not as important... we will see how that works out won't we....

Gravity's Rainbow done!

Oh so the last time I posted about how I need to post more and promised to post more and then did not do that, I mentioned that I had made significant progress in reading Gravity's Rainbow. Well now I have finished the book. Which I think is pretty awesome, both the book and the fact that I finished it... I plan to read it again before my 35th birthday which gives me almost exactly 5 years... Anyways I have decided to stop promising to post as it seems everytime I do that I fail to live up to my promise... Although what I am going to do is start promoting the fact that this blog exists which I pretend I have done before but in reality I have only mentioned it obliquely in hopes no one would actually see it.

On the Constant state of change and the unity of identity over time.

There IS no past. There IS no future. There IS only now. The past exists only as memory and has no meaningful physical reality, as the future exists only as mental expectation with no true physical existence. They are as existent as are the stories contained in a novel. That which WAS in the past, passed out of existence as it became that which IS now, as that which will be the future comes into being through the annihilation of that which IS now as it passes out of the present into the past being simultaneously replaced by that which we conceptualized as the future. That which existed in the past shapes that which exists now through the process of cause and effect but as all things are in a constant state of becoming moving in time from moment to moment they cease to be as they were becoming what they are and moving forward to what they will be. This is what might be termed the "problem of generation and extinction" as it is by Masao Abe in his discussion of Dogen in Zen and Western Thought. However this is not a problem, it is merely a fact of existence. In defining it as a problem we create the concept of a solution, a solution which cannot exist. It is the naming it a problem which creates the problem, a problem whose solution is merely the acceptance of the fact and there by the destruction of the problem.
The question which is raised by this constant coming into and passing out of existence is that of the continuity of identity through time. The fact is that from one moment to the next a being is in a constant process of change but not such a radical change that the totality is unique from one moment to the next but such that over time no single aspect may be said to be identical across all moments. Being in this conception is a gradiant such that no individual point can necessarily be deistinctly differentiated from all those surrounding it, though they all do contain differences, but such that one end of the gradiant may be pure white and the other pure black with no distinct point of change between the two. There is no core aspect which is you across all points in time but rather at any given point you are the sum total of the points which have been in the past, and you are contiguous with all the points before and after the one you are currently along an essentially smooth curve, though each is differnt.

Core Assumptions and Principles #6: Knowledge is merely a level of certainty about the truth of a statement.

The key point in this understanding of knowledge is the impossibility of complete certainty. Traditional conceptions of knowledge exist in a world in which a person can know beyond all doubt that a statement is true. This is simply not the world in which we exist. The world in which we exist is essentially a skeptical reality, one in which the possibility of error is ever present and the best one can do is strive to minimize the likelihood of errors and the impact they may have. In this situation any prior definition of knowledge is rendered useless and to hold to it would result in the statement that nothing can be known... Well nothing can be known, at least not in the classical understanding. The question becomes how one can go about living in a world in which nothing can be "known" this would seem to imply a state of constant confusion and instability. The solution to this state of constant uncertainty is to understand what while absolute "knowledge" may not be possible this does not mean that no level of certainty or knowledge is available to us.
Do you know the sun will rise tomorrow? No, you do not know that beyond any shadow of a doubt... Will the sun rise tomorrow? Yes. The chances that any of the things which might stop the sun from coming up will actually happen are so remote that they are not worth giving much thought or relevance. Do you know that the guy in the next office is named John? Well what do you mean by "Is named John"? He asked you to call him John, maybe his parents did not call him John at birth, maybe he never went into a court to make that his legal name and its not on his driver's license but hey none of that really matters, call him John and go on about your day, but no you cannot know beyond all doubt that the guy next door is "named" John in precisely the way you mean the question but ultimately it hardly matters, it is through accepting the possibility of uncertainty and considering knowledge to mean a certain level of certainty even if it is not 100% beyond all doubt... The real issue is in the social relation of the use of the term know to denote a level of certainty other than 100%. Some people may be willing to claim knowledge of those things they are 70% certain of, others may require 99%... and further some may not be able to accurately estimate their level of certainty about any given point of knowledge... This also opens up the possibility that a person might quite accurately state their knowledge of a fact which ultimately proves have been false. Does this mean that they did not know that which they claimed to know, and can you know a falsehood or only that which ultimately is true even if you cannot know for a certainty that any given statement ultimately is true. Can you state that x is true if you cannot know beyond a shadow of a doubt that x is in fact true? Ultimately this all comes down to the use of language, something which is a social construction and as such can be constructed however we all agree to use it. In philosophical terms perhaps we cannot use the terms "know" and "true" or "false" but must, as science has already done, reformour use of language to speak only of relative certainties and percentages and probablities. In everyday life we may fall back on the comfortable conventions of knowledge and truth just as we fall back on notions of God, and soul which we know on a higher level are merely comfortable constructs to refer to more complicated issues.