your body will tell you

Your body will tell you when you are ready to write. Once you are in it, it is like you came from nowhere, have always been here and can go forever.

But these are all just words I’ve been taught, apparently spit out statistically according to the chemical states of my brain thing.

But again, these are also just words, meaningfully interpreted in a grand first-person tradition according to the loftiest hopes of sapiens in order to decrease the near-term entropy of the world (read: impart “understanding”).

So, is pure randomness the language of the universe? Wouldn’t it be funny if it were, and so extending the metaphor of the blind watchmaker down deeper into the random ejection of photons or neutrinos, might absolute randomness at the quark-and-below level, even down into the domain of strings, simply be the “fodder” onto which the “natural selection” designer merely plays the game according to the “laws of physics” (we desperately need a new term for that), weaving the resultant particles, forces, symmetries and eventual macro-dimensional “events” (i.e. our genes and us).

Is it “turtles all the way down” then? Perhaps that phrase will come to have an unintentionally serendipitous meaning after all.

And what about the equivalent of “state change” (like when water becomes ice, a bunch of people become a country, or a band becomes a merchandising company)?

Or is it too conclusion-driven to even assume we need to ask that question. Need there BE any “equivalent of state change” in this analogia? Indeed, need there be analogia at all?

In my time, it is assumed and taught that humans are pattern recognizing machines and seekers of analogy in order to promote efficient, encapsulated learning (thus survival). But I have also read that one of the pitfalls of philosophers (and probably inventors and historians) is to model their thinking upon the conventions and inventions of the time. No doubt, that is a hard pit to avoid in any era!

Indeed, I would take so much care as to avoid words altogether if I could find a better way to communicate. And I freely admit that any philosophy cannot and should not defend itself from critique (proper or improper) of third parties. A way of looking at the world does not need to be a movement, or even shared by more than one. Movements have names. I’m not looking to name this, even if it makes it a more efficient meme. I will probably stumble onto the creation of certain phrases (two will probably be “large purpose” and “purpose vector”), but trust me, it’s all very undesirable, and please do not distract yourself with any cleverness, intentional or otherwise, on my part. I think the most honest observers are by necessity humble, realizing the magnitude of what they do not yet know.

WAYS OF LOOKING AT THINGS

If you drop a red key on the dirt and search for it with a white light, you’ll find it more easily than with a red light. The key hasn’t changed.

I don’t think it’s as important to argue a winner in the myriad ways of looking at life. Just as you would not pit your knife against your fork, but use each when appropriate (or, gasp, even both together on occasion), there is no need to conduct arm wrestling contests between philosophies. If that were their purpose, they would be much more quantified instruments. Why else would arm wresting be appropriate?

Since it is not, I am inclined to think of philosophies like tools, silverware, sunglasses (white flashlights).

Arm wrestling between ideologies is not their best use. I have heard clever people argue all night long about whose philosophy was more “correct” or “right”, while missing the powerful point that using the philosophies (and other POV’s as well) rather than debating them can yield otherwise impossible outcomes.

THE ARGUMENT FOR ARGUING EFFICIENTLY

One of the most striking deficits in perspective that I have witnessed is the “philosophical argument” wherein two differing POV’s (let’s call them “apples” and “oranges”) are brought to bear on each other in debate, or conflicts among two or more “causes” or “parties”, all the while not understanding that this action is like hitting your wrench with your hammer. They are tools designed to be used on the rest of the world. Not on themselves or each other.

But this is only apparent if one is currently looking at these dueling philosophies “from a helicopter” (in other words, from a sufficient distance to see a shape that might be hidden if the scale of the examination were closer to that of the “object” itself).

Remember when you were told that “you” are mostly space (between your atoms). But you have no problem understanding your whole solid arm. Quite often, however, “large purpose” is masked (actively and passively) by the inappropriate scale or shape of the examining tools.

I understand “what my cat wants” and do not understand “what the world economy wants”. I don’t even understand what kind of a “what” the latter might have to be, to satisfy that presumptuously posited desire.

So when I hear people arguing the large and the small of movements (religions, philosophies, etc.) I often hear “errors of scale” wherein an advocate pits a small, local “building block” position or belief against a larger-scale construct of a competing philosophy. The result is wasted time and energy, often represented by the fact that “neither side can convince the other side”, which may be down to (1) the parties’ insufficient knowledge of their subject, (2) the parties’ insufficient rationality, but also often (3) a duel of two or more inappropriately “scaled” purpose vectors held by “apples” and “oranges”.

Rock, paper, scissors, indeed.

ENTITIES THAT DON’T NEED TO BE PRESERVED

It was a difficult time for The Movement. In its long history, it had weathered social and political upheaval, always finding a strategy to control the sequence of events that guaranteed the best outcomes, namely (but not named): the survival and continuation of “The Movement”. But the price of survival is constant diligence and flexibility, so as conditions continued to change, The Movement broadened its recruitment of reasonably close philosophical adherents. And congratulated its leaders by rewarding them with the upflow of resources that seem always to be in the plumbing of organized pyramids. And the onus of the worker bees at the object’s bases inherit the caloric needs of the directors, and proceed to burn their own honey to that end.

What is not apparent to the members (but perhaps is to the leaders) is that The Movement is like a hill of ants, and will assume any shape that guarantees it will have future (read: not discorporate). Just like Sally, who is no longer composed of the atoms of younger Sally (yet we still call her Sally), The Movement has become: anything that it must in order to continue. Thus, looking at The Movement now, and and making assumptions about its motives merely because its name has been retained, is to miss all of the above.

So you’re hoodwinked by the fact that something (like a political party) has the same name as one that operated 100 years ago? So this is why a perspective change is useful, to introduce a kind of “stereo depth perception” into your rationality, so that keys that would vanish in too harmonious a light can stand out in bold relief when we adopt a different type of illumination.