Philosophical ramblings and musings on how and why the world works and how we perceive it
A biologist jumps and says when a living matter, or any matter which shows certain attributes like stimuli reaction, it is living and that is life. A pious man thinks life is some gift that God has gifted to mankind to live happily in service of his god. A system scientist thinks that life is an open self organizing system which interacts with its environment.
Everyone is the king of their own courts and quotes
In my opinion while their definitions stand sound in their own subject, they fail to stand onslaught by the other fields. A biologist may ask a priest how his “God Theory” explains Darwin's theory of evolution and he would stutter. Where did God create something to serve him if he is all powerful and self-sufficient? The religious man will then prick the system scientist citing examples like doomsday and fights between gods and humans with devils, and ask the system scientist what he thinks the end state of life is but he doesn't know. The system scientist can also pick up the biologist's definition by stating that robots are computer programs that can be made to mimic their definition of life but are they living?
“If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist will answer you, I am here to live out loud”
Art and Philosophy takes a more subjective stance, allowing for each individual to try and find out the answer for themselves. Not to leave philosophy behind in my rant, philosophy also doesn't satisfy the question with depth. Modern philosophy just named standpoints and feel satisfies and moves on. One might find themselves in conversation with a student of philosophy who might go, “Oh, then you conform to ‘stoicism’ view of life. It's trivial, it's trivial!”, without really delving into the implications. Art has disintegrated into a subjective abstract mess with ‘trash’ abstract art selling for millions and NFTs crashing markets. Modern Literature seeks clout, and capitalizes upon bizarre climaxes.
What do we know? What can we know? Imagine some prisoners chained in a cave, they can only see the shadows of what is happening outside. The shadow wall is their world, their whole reality, how do you find out something else exists? How do we know that the world is not just shadows of some other multi dimensional reality.
Dreams, Hallicugenics, Sensory deprivation tanks, Extra preceptory and near death experiences are described as a simulation. But what if those are the true worlds? And our day to day life a “dream”? I must admit I have created a track for myself to prove that a world is true. After all, What is “true”? I can be sure of only my own experience, which is perceived by me alone. As an example, I cannot even describe the color orange to someone. What is orange for me might be “yellow” for him. All orange-fruits to him are “yellow” but he calls that “yellow” color, orange and I can never find out! Let alone trying to explain to someone who is colorblind what colors are. So, if a mystic claims to have some spiritual experience he cannot make me experience or even come close to making me feel what wonders he has felt in his spiritual planes. He can only describe the effects it had on him. You cannot ask an artist to explain his art!
This non-transitive nature of experience made it to be labeled a “hardest” problem by the world around scientists, including the Nobel laureate in physics, Sir Roger Penrose.The only thing I can think of are my own thoughts and I can only describe them to others. I cannot translate the feeling or the experience to others.
Cogito Ergo Sum
(I think therefore I am)
The motivational quote wasn't really meant that way and doesn't hold so what he really meant was that the only thing we can be sure of existing, is “I”, because “I” is thinking “this thought”(I think therefore I am). The reason is because we are able to ‘think’ there must be something which is “doing” the thinking, therefore, I, my thinking self, exists. Everything else may just as well be a simulation. There is no way to know or prove otherwise. Like in a dream, our brain just constructs the environment and people. Why can't the awake state be just another construction of our brain. Everything we perceive is through our 5 senses all of which can be easily compromised. Some people don’t even have all of them.
Mal: I'll tell you
a riddle. You're waiting for a train, a train that will take you far away. You
know where you hope this train will take you, but you don't know for sure. But
it doesn't matter. How can it not matter to you where that train will take you?
Cobb: No, no, no, no. Mal you listen to me, alright?
Mal: Your world is not real!
Cobb: Look at me!
Mal:I'm asking you to take a leap of faith.
Just imagine if this was all a dream and when we “die” we awake into another world, a nirvana. And it was just a Virtual Reality game we were playing called life. The helpless feeling of not knowing, the curiosity to find out more. The more you think and know, the more you realize you don’t know. The truth, that the way to find out is just so easy has consumed many, myself included.
"You take the blue pill... the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill... you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes"
"It's the question that drives us, Neo. It's the question that brought you here. You know the question, just as I did"
~ Morpheus and Trinity (The Matrix)
“Question” or (the questions of questions, quite literally and metaphorically) drove and drives, extreme geniuses, people with unsurpassable intellect.
It cannot be a coincidence that club outstanding humans is a strange cult, Isaac Newton, Kurt Goedel, Ludwig Boltzmann, Florence Nightingale, John Nash, Cantor, Zermelo, Gödel, Post, Schrödinger, Vincent Van gogh, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, all attained prominence and succumbing to some type of psychopathology, including depression, delusions, and religious mysticism of the sort engendered by psychosis. People driven mad by mathematics and logic often lose touch with reality, devoting all of their time and energy to solving increasingly complex problems. They become socially isolated.
(I must confess, Just as a sting operation, the above paragraph was really written by chatGPT, a computer program, just to reiterate my point that we really don’t know what we perceive is also conscious.)
Starry, starry night
Paint your palette blue and gray
You took your life as lovers often do
But I could have told you, Vincent
This world was never meant for one
As beautiful as you
Now, I think I know what you tried to say to me
How you suffered for your sanity
How you tried to set them free
They would not listen, they're not listening still
Perhaps they never will
~Don Mclean on Vincent Van Gogh
Grothendieck,
Godel and Erdos, after experiencing pure math and proving math can never be
completely provable, turned to farming and food and drove away people with
sticks who wanted to talk to them about math. Isaac Newton and Schrodinger both
took refuge in biology(the easy problem) after looking at physics in its full
glory, Newton started poking needles in his eyes and theology and Schrodinger
wrote a book called “What is life?” after discovering the uncertainty of
Quantum Theory, you can never know whether the cat is dead until you open the
box! What chatGPT doesn’t know is, what the world calls mad, might just be the
ones who are not mad. The only ones not living like “robots”, the only ones
truly conscious, truly the masters of their mind and thought. Perhaps they were
not madmen like the rest of us, driven sane by their thoughts.
My conscious has gone mad, It searches for its home
In contrast, in eastern philosophy, we have always revered the “crazed”. The mystics have always been honored, whether they were cart sellers or kings. Buddha, himself, experimented with his own health to satisfy his curiosity. He realized that starving the body till the end was not the way. He found life to be an intermission for us to perform good deeds and free our conscious from attachment. Kabir Das, stressed upon the “conscious” as the true meaning of life, and told us to experience higher levels of consciousness through meditative practices. Upanishads is a treatise on the “brahman”, literally translates to, the supreme self, the creative doer, the conscious experience and the “permanent” reality. They stress upon connecting with nature to better understand the self and the only thing as true. One thing they all stress is that the meaning cannot be explained, one has to be guided to learn it for himself.
Hanooz Dilli Door Ast, Though the end is near, the destination is yet far away.
I’ve driven myself into a corner and confused my reader with grandiose visions of seeking reality. Flummoxing you even more, I do not snip the woven thread but I hand it over to you as I do not know how to answer the question, What is life?
It is a difficult question, my son, each one must discover for himself.