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The ancient fantasy for total mechanic control of Life is playing itself out as AI quickly takes over every aspect of the human economy
New jobs will of course be created, so too will new philosophies and ways of thinking and being emerge, and this is really the problem the modern era faces: That for all our history, for all these thousands of years of evolution, we've been trying to avoid Death and be safe and survive, Bee Gee's Staying Alive (1977) on repeat, and we've finally done it, made it to the point no species ever has, we're staying alive, staying alive, oh oh oh staying aliveeeee! And now we must answer: What to do now?

We understand the words 'Good' and 'Death', in part through our relationship to our constant pursuit for survival. How many moralities, philosophies, ways of thinking, have been but shadows of a desire for power, itself being a shadow of a desire to simply survive? Yes, yes, I want to survive Dr. Mann maniacally shouts in Interstellar (2014). The science of Evolution has incontrovertibly established this in showing us all the various ways in which our psychology, neurology and biology is evolutionarily-constructed, leading over-eager Western intellectuals like Robert Sapolsky and Sam Harris, to consequently adopt a fully evolutionary view of humanity where in which self-consciousness itself is nothing more than a tragic mistake. Dear old Albert Camus can't exactly save us here -- a great thinker, but one who could only (and clearly) define himself against the immediacy of Death and the problem of suicide -- so if we can live, and eventually live without restraint, what will we do?

The rich and prosperous enjoy a certain advantage here in that they've been stuck with this issue for a couple hundred years now: With castles and now viral Tiktokers, we are seeing the existential yearning for a grand narrative in every born-again influencer and junkie movie star.
The situation humanity itself is approaching is totally without prior comparison: That on one hand we have the grand existential threats to humanity as a whole (whether in climate change, politics or the economy) and that on the other hand, on an individual level, most of us in the West are assured of immediate survival, taking away the majority of the evolutionary pressures that have guided and shaped humanity's collective psyche.

Consider that: That for the overwhelmingly vast majority of human existence, our daily, lived experiences would be totally dominated by the need to ensure survival. You are fucking hungry, you don't know how the world works, you don't have any explanation or guard against natural disasters, you've got not clue what malaria is so you don't know what's happening to your grandmother, every aspect of your Being is consequently going to be structured by your attempt to deal with this raw, animalistic reality. Now; now, you are confronted with the information age, with all of the world's problems all at once whilst simultaneously being assured of at least some level of healthcare, education, food, shelter, warmth, survival: Of course this situation is not present for everyone, but this situation also exists in every city of the world. There's no guidebook here at all: No set of commands, codes, formulae, a ready-set philosophy designed to deal with this exact situation, so we're all kind of clueless (perhaps this is why the economy of being totally clueless whilst marketing yourself as all-knowing is exploding, if you want to make money, realise that in our existential confusion people love a comforting Father Figure that can solve all of Life; indeed this is many of our gurus, public figures, politicians, this is the eternal allure of the Authoritarian State to guide and structure every aspect of your Being)

Now, here is you, in this unique situation: Existence is somewhat precarious, but at least for now, seemingly assured. Technically, you can do nothing. Just exist, just Be, just live. Like a vegetable! Enjoying the summer breeze. At the same time, we are all inundated with moral messaging, from all the political parties, from every corporate call-to-action, from all our influencers, we are hyper-exposed. To what, exactly?
Each philosophy, taking a certain set of facts, presents a certain narrative by which to look at and understand the world, contained within this philosophy are all sorts of moral commands, assumptions and ideas
We are hyper-exposed, for example if you are American, to the moral narratives of everyone on the Right and everyone on the Left and what this particular Right-wing person thinks of everyone on the Left and what this particular Left-wing person thinks of everyone on the Right and so on and so on. In this massive open-market competition, playing itself out in countless forums, social media posts, conversations nobody remembers (or even really cares about), we're not realising that we've created so much information that nobody can go through it all, we are stuck, badly, called-to-action by every bad situation, problem, philosophic question, every point of epistemic uncertainty, every person's recollection of the universe.

This is what is happening, how will this great human world respond?
We already have and are and our response is becoming solid by the day.
Through the death drive of detachment, along multiple axis, we've established a praxis of detachment; a carefully cultivated denial of life, a denial of subjectivity, a complete abdication of the self (for the capital mark, Self -- of which we cannot say of anything, a clever way to shut down all conversations and even to kill the possibility of conversing), and worst than that, we are glorifying and relishing in our own philosophic suicide, thinking that we chose it (whereas what we are really doing is getting rid of the concept of 'choice', as the Buddhists did thousands of years ago -- do you sill consider works like Nineteen Eighty Four, A Brave New World and I Robot to be 'abstract, science-fiction'?)

Here's the sickness spelled out:
The feminists understand quite clearly how various gender and social norms will carefully construct our lives, such that many relationships are founded not on actual connection but rather through the fulfilment of various social roles.
Further along are the modern economic critics that have time and time again pointed out the dehumanising aspect of modern neoliberalism; how through rapid commodification, people are reduced to fundamentally economic roles, judged and living by an economic standard of morality, where we are assessed and provided perceived value according to how much money we make, reducing our identity to the delivery of goods and services.
Finally, is the axis of ancient spiritual ideology in new, unholy matrimony with the positivist materialists of the West; the idea of the individual as a mere illusion, of free will as non-existent, a view of nihilistic self-annihilation, as expounded in my article: The Miraculous and Inexplicable Nature of our Being.

So along social, economic, scientific, spiritual and philosophic lines, we are straddled to death, our own, unique, lived sense of individuality and freedom relegated to unimportance in favour of the social roles we have to play, the economic demands we are attached to, and finally the scientific/spiritual/philosophic death in academia: Mass entertainment and Andy Warhol helped to reduce the arts to an economic and political game, science is admittedly still science (especially the so-called traditional sciences: physics, chemistry, biology, no doubt where much of humanity's progress has and will continue to come from) but is nonetheless straddled by the military-industrial complex that funds it and demands its direction, limited the scope of our discoveries greatly especially in the social sciences, and finally, with materialist philosophy we can effectively disregard any metaphysical claim (except the metaphysical claim that is itself materialist philosophy), relegating anything spiritual or profound to the category of 'academic unimportance' (ironically, these 'important academics' themselves no doubt grew up on Socrates, Nietzsche, Hegel, all themselves 'academically unimportant, illogical, irrational', the humour of the situation escapes these academia-folk).

If I've perhaps said too much, I'd leave the viewer with a quote from Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy (1872) p. 53:
"The entire comedy of art is neither performed for our betterment or education nor are we the true authors of this art world. On the contrary, we may assume that we are merely images and artistic projections for the true author, and that we have our highest dignity in our significance as works of art -- for it is only as an aesthetic phenomena that existence and the world are eternally justified -- while of course our consciousness of our own significance hardly differs from that which the soldiers painted on canvas have of the battle represented on it"

We would do anything to find significance in our lives, in ourselves -- does this not itself indicate the underlying aesthetic gold? Giving rise to the world, and the unbelievable beauty it contains? Our creative, spiritual nature? Does our insistence and desire for purpose itself not indicate a true purpose: that of creating purpose? Humans, the meaningful animals?

Self-awareness is the modern currency because we are inundated with and seeped within and hyper-attenuated to recognition of ourselves; we are hit with how wrong our worldview is, in an ever-adapting and rapidly changing scope and field of focus, the eventual result in my estimation is that the ability to regale the tale of simply Being will eventually become the key currency; we will see technology usurp every other facet of our life, and consequently be forced to burn away with all our superficial aspects, cherishing our original gift to begin with: the miraculous and inexplicable nature of our own being.

Slavoj Zizek, the misunderstood Hegelian-Marxist philosopher, made a fascinating observation vis-a-vis capitalism in noticing that the strongest proponents of capitalism are not selfish and are instead in a way religiously devoted to the ideals of capitalism. Where this originates, is in our own desire and constant pursuit of self-annihilation. Self-annihilation, I would argue, is our modern boogeyman, whereas our heroic ability for Self-preservation, for the pursuit of our own Being and becoming, is a continual lifeforce that is itself miraculous and inexplicable.

Heraclitus, the Ancient Greek mystic, posited the fundamental nature of reality as flux, constant, fleeting change. It is from this that Aristotle would build the viewpoint of all of physics as being relations, an idea that Alfred North Whitehead would base his metaphysics on. But let's leave the books to the side and think this out.

It is easy to make the case that we can never know the-thing-itself truly, that our perception of the world is different to the-thing-itself (and all our understanding of perception, cognitive bias, personality, seems to support this). What does that mean? That: The world as we experience it originates from the the-thing-itself, which we'll call Reality.

Now -- is how we think and behave at all guided by the processes of evolution? Clearly: the very nature of reproduction, identification of adaptations in human, this shows us that how we think and behave is impacted by what we call evolution, which itself is not a thing but a process. So through modern science we know that at least something about us is shaped by this process of evolution. The implications of this run deep: That our neurology and brain structure, for example, evolved, with lower parts of the brain being more ancient and higher parts newer, and if we know that our neurology impacts our perception, we know that our daily perceptions themselves are guided by this process of evolution. Does this, not, then, extend to every facet of our being? That is, that everything we can identify within ourselves as seperate aspects of ourselves (belief, emotion, thoughts, action, so on) would themselves be in some sense shaped by evolution?

So -- this continual process of evolution, which itself is 'the change in heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations', is itself affecting every aspect of our biology (as being the process by which these characteristics changed over successive generations): physical, mental, neurological (if they are not all construed the same).

When we come face-to-face with the immediacy of the moment, we come face-to-face to the world as we experience it. Through modern science, we know that even this unique world that you are constantly experiencing is itself formed by the physical characteristics of your brain which itself is formed by this continual process of evolution.
If I'm being tedious, forgive me, trying to be specific to highlight something: Where, exactly, do you exist in this image?
This is where the fundamentally spiritual descriptions of reality from ancient Buddhist and Hindu traditions come to meet the fundamentally materialist, scientific descriptions of reality that we've been building up since the days of Plato, in a perfect circle, in a beautiful manner.
Which is to arrive at the same, self-annihilating conclusion: That *you* don't exist. How could *you* figure out that *you* don't exist?

The Buddhist account is straightforward (though hard to grasp): In becoming aware of your breath, you in time learn and see that all of your thoughts are automatic, that they are just happening, that everything about you is just happening and that as such you are not any of the things that are just happening (they are the figures on the projector, the movie you are watching of your life) whereas what you are is the awareness underneath (the screen upon which the movie places itself, awareness of the movie, qualia as modern philosophers would call it). If you are not your thoughts or any of the things you do, and are the awareness of that, there is no cohesive 'you' to speak of,  the fundamental underlying awareness is itself impersonal and common to all of consciousness, it just is, and it is all the same in all of us, leading to the necessary realisation: All is One.

Science and logic has, through a path up the mountain starting on the other side, reached the same pinnacle of a conclusion. What is your brain? A complex organism, yes, a physical thing with physical characteristics that itself is in constant flux from a variety of constant changes. Your brain is never the same one second to the next. No physical thing remains the same: a chair itself is defined by constantly changing characteristics (density, viscosity, any measure you can think of). As Heraclitus would say, no man crosses the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man. The philosophy modern science is quickly lending itself to necessitates that there was really no 'man' to speak of, rather a constant flux of characteristics that appeared to us as a 'man'.

Why and how did this appear to us characteristic of qualia itself emerge? We have no clue - the hard problem of consciousness - and this problem is itself analogous to the problem of why it is that we developed self-identification with our thoughts in the Buddhist spiritual perspective -- the Buddhist perspective would itself admit that Enlightenment, Self-awareness can never be achieved, willed, thought, made to happen for there is no thinker, doer, to make those things to happen in the first place, yet how the delusion itself appeared is the big mystery.

The materialist account of reality is a comforting blanket just as the absence of thought is a much-sought nirvana from action in the Buddhist context. Both philosophies end up running from the real questions. It's like we discovered that we didn't have to ask the question in the first place, that you can just opt out of the game of thinking about or for yourself, the purest self-annihilation! In discovering the beauties of nonthought, of meditative bliss, the Buddhists manage to opt out of life itself. The modern scientific viewpoint, in denying free will (Robert Sapolsky comes to mind), or handwaving the hard problem of consciousness away (Daniel Dennett) and this new union with the spiritualists of the East (Sam Harris), has successfully, totally, annihilated the self for the Self, we've bit down on the juicy apple that Nietzsche correctly analysed as the death of God (which Heidegger reworked as the death of metaphysics). The exact endpoint for both trees of thought is that self-awareness itself is simply a mistake. Denial of Life!

What do "you" do after you reach Nirvana, Enlightenment (que the: there is no you, to reach Nirvana) -- what happens to this physical person that we all perceive as having a unique personality and will and being, what happens to the appearance of that, then? Harmoniously, apparently, will the Enlightened Boddhisattva use the faculties of thought. There it is, that's where to press down: Harmonious. Enlightened state. The proposition that all of experience is mere illusion, that all our self-identification is just an illusion, that the highest state of being is 'enlightened'. The ultimate form of the Yogi in Tantric Buddhist thoughtlines is beyond all conceptions, pure awareness, no thought, an implicit moral denigration of any form of thought, self-identification, self-Being.

It's a moral-driven desire for Death. They experience Nothingness, thoughtlessness, Death, and they go 'this is good, this is what everyone should do'

For a mentality transcending Duality, the mentality itself reverts back to expressions of Duality (the veil to unveil all the other veils of Maya), but likewise originates as a manifestation of wanting to avoid thought, the instinct for self-annihilation. The Enlightened view is total detachment from the world, and in exactly the same fashion the scientific view is that self-awareness itself is a weird byproduct of evolution, that our freedom is illusory just in the Buddhist sense. I would argue that both are true but mistaken: That all they posit is a simple statement of fact: That things are what they are. That this does not itself tell us anything of our concepts as we use them of freedom, the self, personhood, individuality, and that in attempting to define these things out of existence, we've created a philosophy that will always necessarily first deny all other philosophies, and then deny itself, lending itself back into nothingness, a comforting return to philosophic death. That in our linguistic hang-up around the semantics of Self-identity, in trying to define the Self, we have failed, given up, and concluding therefore that the Self doesn't exist, ignoring one very crucial point.

And it's really simple.

All of us, after we are done reading for the day, will go about our day, thinking of the people in our life and what we want to do and what we should do and what we're worried about and what we think of this and that and so on. Well I'm sure we act like we don't, but we do. If you don't, great, but as the Buddhists necessarily concede: the realisation of nonthought is itself at best random or determined, and is itself meaningless (as negation of meaning, and all other concepts). In a state of pure awareness, you are a vegetable. As you are living, you are dealing with, living in, interacting constantly with, the objects and creations of thoughts. As Hegel would put forth, every experience of self-awareness and the world is itself already mediated by the structures of thought. The adherents of the meditation-based Enlightenment practices are hoping for momentary glimpses into nonthought, whereas the depth of the philosophy calls for the total annihilation of the continual creation of self-identity, utilising thought and identity only harmoniously (they can never define this as a method or a system, for it is on the other side so to speak, but they sure do think it is good and they will certainly set up temples, cults and ways of thinking that will indoctrinate everyone into this Sisyphean task of not being themselves).

The argument 'that you are not your thoughts' is basically the pernicious root of this philosophy, it usurps the realm of the subjective to non-existence (by first, ironically, dealing with its existence, how clever that an individual would make the statement 'I don't exist'): Presupposing a you that is in every sense constructed by, through or with the use of thought, to construct a denial of thought. This is the very nature of a life-denying philosophy. Does it actually matter -- in the sense of how we deal with the concept of meaning? Obviously not, for any denial of meaning itself cannot lend itself to creation of new meaning, any advent of thought from an a priori stance that nonthought is good will fail. That is why no method to Enlightenment is possible, but also deeper than that, why Enlightenment can never be considered good.

Here is what I think is happening: That the cleverest people of the ages would, through all their thinking, be struck (lightning bolt style) with the miraculousness and the inexplicable nature of Being: you know those moments where you suddenly realise you are alive, can do anything, that dizzying sense of freedom that Jean-Paul Sartre loves? Yes, that; and that in being unable to define it, explain it, conceptualise it, without being able to put it in a box, they defined it out of existence. In those moments between sleep and wakefulness, before your brain has quite fired up all the relevant neural processes, where you are kind of just aware but not really thinking, consciousness hanging on by a limb so to speak, there's your much desired Nirvana (I am sure that eventually technologically will be able to induce that meditative-zen state at will, many people whether they know it yet or not would embrace the absence of drama in favour of the calm, the nothingness of technological-meditation -- is that not what heroin does? All opioids? All benzodiazepines? Shutting down your brain, reducing all the 'chatter' to nothing?) that is the God of the East, and it's quickly become (has become) our new God too.

Well the best thing that can happen for all of us is to create the technology that can give us that option on a silver platter: Enjoy nonthought, pure awareness, as much as you want for as long as you want. Those of us that choose that path will love the bliss of nothingness. In every city of every country people search for that sweet bliss of nothingness. Meanwhile, the rest of us, those interested in greatness, beauty, adventure, self-glorification and idealisation and the creation of new meaning and new ways of living and being and thinking, we'll stick to our mere illusions.

The only thing to left to do is to radically affirm every aspect of your Being, personhood, experience, individuality, sense perceptions, your impressionistic gaze of the world as someone that experiences desire, want, need, beauty, love. As questions of AI cause increasing fear, we are in an extraordinary position to re-affirm and re-value every aspect of our subjective existence and experience. If we accept that we can never know Reality itself anyway, that all our thoughts are but mere (I really wish to highlight the incessant moralisations of the materialist and spiritualist positions) illusions: Wouldn't you want to create the most beautiful illusion possible?

What I perceive is that we've all become philosophically lazy and inert, that we've denied Life, that we've robbed ourselves of our own individuality, and that continued attempts to usurp individuality in global politics, economics and culture are themselves reflections of this pernicious philosophic death. The Buddhist and the Materialists may claim that they are not nihilists, but I would argue that from the propositions they've put forth it would be mere illusion to put forth anything but nihilism, which itself indicates to their desire for and insistence on meaning. We've very cleverly refuted any explanation of life offered to us, and denied our own, and have nothing in our hands, though we still passionately insist on meaning. This is our hidden power, the beautiful gem core to the human spirit: That against the odds, against all that we know and understand, there is self-awareness, self-consciousness, thought, the experience of will, personhood, identity, and all that entails. That, despite not knowing how or why, you can and will decide to do something today, and you will think it valuable. It's terrifying to realise, don't run from it, don't deny it, embrace the freedom of your perceptions before they fleet away.

This won't be hard.

 

Taking 'materialism' to indicate any philosophy that views existence as purely composed of, or reducible to matter, we're going to show how such a view is at the core, incoherent.

 

We can observe the various processes of evolution on every level of biological organisation -- we can first-hand observe the processes of speciation, natural selection and genetic drift whether in cell cultures or entire ecosystems -- this discovery initially provided tremendous support for materialist viewpoints, but in turn actually provides a stark demonstration of materialism's incoherence.

 

The modern boogeyman in science and philosophy is the hard problem of consciousness: How and why do we have subjective experience? The so-called easy problems can explain human actions and behaviours in terms of physical systems and their functions, for example the structure of the eye and how that consequently creates our vision, how a variety of receptors and their neural correlates create physical sensations etc -- in essence, explaining human actions as the functioning of biological organisms and their processes, principally so the processes of evolution -- the hard problem is that none of these explanations (which we are still coming up with) can adequately explain why we are conscious, that is, if through entirely natural and mechanistic or random processes animal life and consciousness developed, why is it that we can individually observe and take notice of the fact that we are aware of all of this, if everything is a mechanistic, material process, why is it that we can experience these processes, when there would be no need or function to the experiencing of at all.

 

The core principle of materialism, then, relies on the key assumption that eventually, with enough Science-ing, we'll have a complete enough web of information to explain all of subjective experience as the result of purely physical processes, thus resolving the hard problem as another process of evolution. There are basically two ways to argue against this point.

 

The first is to say -- Any statement that reduces consciousness to matter is making the assumption that consciousness can be explained by matter eventually, because right now we cannot explain consciousness by matter. We currently do not know how to explain consciousness, and until we know, we don't know, ergo, we're forced to simply say 'we don't know'. Until we have the content of every physical process mapped out and understood, a complete theory of everything so to speak, we would not be able to confirm if something is or isn't material, and similarly, until we have consciousness fully understood, we cannot confirm what the entirety of it is. Basically, until we know, we're guessing either way.

 

The counter-argument to that leads into the second way to make this argument: Yes, materialism is assuming that eventually science can explain everything, but that is a better assumption than any sort of religious or spiritual framework which is, often by nature, unverifiable and therefore by structure, un-scientific. Look at how much Science has done! And given that we can verify a scientific explanation in every country and by anyone who verifies it, whereas religious and spiritual experiences are, often by nature, culturally and geographically bound (indicating biological factors as the primary mechanism) and can't be replicated or observed under a microscope. Balance of probabilities, and it seems like a better assumption that our subjective notions are essentially unreal whereas the only thing that is real is material processes that science will soon fully understand. An argument that, if true, irrevocably ends any sort of spiritual notion of the world, and an argument that has implicitly become accepted within the scientific community.

 

So here's my preferred way to argue the issue, which is to show that no amount of science will ever prove materialism:

it just feels right. Haha.

 

No seriously though no materialist account of reality will never be complete because materialist viewpoints themselves stem from a tragic misunderstanding of what science actually is. Ideas, philosophies, statements of belief, information itself, is, by definition, nonmaterial. Here's the tragic misunderstanding: if everything is material or connected to what is material, it doesn't say anything about why anything is the way it is or what to do with it or what it means, these are all, by definition, non-material ways of encoding information regardless of if that information is connected to a material process (with any sort of directionality) at all.

 

So even if we can reduce an explanation of the world and consciousness to physical processes, that doesn't actually say anything about the nature of moral experience as in the form of experience in which you consider what you should do (if anything, it is still a form of questioning you are compelled to).

 

Going a bit further with that.

 

Positing consciousness as a mechanism of evolution necessarily ties that into the larger materialist framework of explaining reality and existence as a purely material one; if reality itself is defined by matter, consciousness would exist as a byproduct of physical processes, such as in the form of evolution. If everything is a physical process it can be logically understood as the relationships and properties of that process, therefore evolution itself would be a physical process governed essentially by logical relationships, therefore consciousness itself would be a physical process governed essentially by logical relationships.

 

If consciousness is a physical process governed by logical relationships, as the observed phenomena of evolution is, if that's what fully defines us, we should not be able to do anything counter to that, but we constantly do, and in fact, whatever we the value most, runs counter to our evolutionary instincts. This is the fundamental paradox at the core of the human condition: That we live in a physical world governed by physical rules and laws that we are just beginning to understand, but that there is something more to us. Grieving for a dead person has no evolutionary advantage. Art can encode information, but there has always been better ways to encode information, the way we do art itself has no evolutionary advantage. Going through, the entire nature and scope of subjective experience itself, has no evolutionary advantage, it shouldn't be happening as a result of purely physical process but it is ergo there is something more than just the physical.

 

Some form of materialism could be argued here in the notion that consciousness could still emerge in a distinct and disparate way from the physical whilst still remaining fundamentally physical.

 

That still puts us right back to the hard problem: how can subjective phenomena itself emerge and exist, especially in counter to the nature of the physical processes that it supposedly emerged from? More to the point, how would it be possible for us to pass on traits that directly code for behaviours that actually increase our own chance of death? Even if that trait increases overall survival, an individual organism itself is attempting to survive and reproduce, so it would not be able to do anything but what would increase chances of survival, therefore it would not be possible for us to have traits that run fundamentally counter to our survival without something else. Therefore, consciousness itself cannot be a purely physical process nor can it be an emergent characteristic of a physical process.

 

Consciousness itself, and therefore elements of reality itself, are necessarily nonmaterial. 

 

The works of Gödel and Tarski are elegant demonstrations of this.

 

From Gödel, we know that no mathematical system is every fully complete, meaning that in every mathematical system there are statements that can't be proven, we also know from him that the proof of consistency for any mathematical system cannot itself come from that system. From Tarski, building off Gödel, we know that no formal language or system can fully define itself but must itself be evaluated through a metalanguage, which itself can only be evaluated by a meta-metalanguage.

 

Here are the implications of those two simple proofs:

This is not a function unique to our current logical and mathematical systems, but to all formal systems, it is inherent to the structure of the system and it can't be any other way.

 

Every formal system that we can conceptualise, will require unproven but assumed to be true axioms and deductive rules off which we can make inferences and conclusions, the very nature of the system is such that a formal system can be tremendously useful in deriving conclusions from a starting set of rules, observations and data, but that's it. The tragic misstep in modern philosophy is to assume that we can derive anything causative at all from logic and science, when we can't.

 

How does that show that we can't or won't eventually reduce all of nature to a set of physical explanations?

Let's say as Science keeps developing we eventually come up with a full explanation of consciousness, of matter, of the universe, and we can encapsulate all of that information into a language or a system of formal languages. We would have defined everything, except we wouldn't have yet defined the actual language we used to define all of our explanations, therefore there is something we haven't defined, therefore our system is incomplete, and can never be complete. Therefore, no set of physical explanations will be able to define everything, there will always be some statement that may be true that is unprovable in all of our current languages, necessitating a new language, which itself requires an explanation, and so on.

 

This is an easily forgotten fact: That no language can fully encapsulate itself. This renders materialism dead-in-the-water; a scientific method can very accurately test for verifiable hypotheses, and a formal language can accurately provide deductions from a starting set of axioms, that is what they do by their very nature, but within that same nature, there are by definition and scope things they can never investigate, claim, or know.

 

We actually have two seperate things to notice here: Firstly, that even if everything was solely material, we could never confirm that, the very nature of our apparatus prohibits it, but secondly, that the very nature in which we use science and logic is itself immaterial.

 

The first claim we know from Gödel and Tarski, the second claim is a bit harder to make, but is a direct consequence.

If the world was defined solely by logical processes, there would be no way to know that, yes? So, there would be no way to know anything, despite the fact that our knowledge works. Meaning, from Tarski's proof it's clear that any formal language is defined by something outside of it that is itself undefined, so the very nature of us using logic precludes logic. Again necessitating the hard problem -- if everything can exist as logical consequences, why is there an ability to interpret that logic in the first place? -- Any explanation we come up with will fall into the problem of infinite self-regression, needing to provide an explanation for that explanation -- therefore, it would be impossible to know anything logically, however it is that we know, it must necessarily be immaterial.

 

What this very clearly shows us is that some element of how we know is itself always logically undefined. Similar to how the very nature of what we construe as valuable goes directly against the processes of evolution that affects all living organisms, similarly the very nature in which we know things itself precludes logic, cannot ever fully be defined by logic and therefore is always outside of logic.

 

That also means that all of our scientific explanations, at the root, began with non-logical presuppositions -- unproven axioms, an undefined set of assumptions, and so on. So the very nature by which we know things, as well as some element of reality, as well as some element of consciousness itself, is always necessarily undefined logically.

 

The structure and function of the proposition: 'everything is material' is actually illogical; it is an assumption that, even though we can never know or confirm it, there is some universal truth of the reality of all of physical existence. We have no proof that such an explanation of truth exists, but we know that the function and structure of our logical and scientific systems can never define such an explanation, therefore, all it is, is an assumption.

 

More than that, by nature, the statement 'everything is material' is a form of interpreting what is and defining some sort of causative explanation from it, therefore 'everything is material' is a metaphysical speculation that simply assumes from the progress of science that science will eventually explain everything not realising that the very structure of the formal systems that science relies on precludes such an explanation.

 

Materialism as a form of metaphysics therefore becomes self-refuting, it collapses on itself.

The very form of the speculation, the assumption, that such an explanation of reality as matter exists, is itself a statement that is undefined logically and precludes logic, and therefore is itself not logical, but rather, metaphysical. So to claim that nothing exists outside the physical, necessitates that you use a language that is itself outside the physical, therefore disproving the very claim you seek to make. Therefore, materialism as a philosophy can never be coherent.

 

The practical consequences of this are tremendous. The subtle attitude of attempting to verify or disprove subjective, spiritual, or religious experiences, statements and beliefs is itself illogical, though nobody seems to realise it. By its very nature, science can model a given set of natural phenomena, and logic can expound a series of connections between propositions and statements, neither of them can make any meaningful claim as to the reality of your own subjective experience, or to the reality of your metaphysical speculations, or to the reality of any metaphysical speculations.

 

To claim that we should only rely on scientific explanations is itself by structure not a scientific but moral statement and therefore again self-refuting. So what we've cleverly done is, kill religion and metaphysics by philosophically assuming that science can explain everything, not realising that we've subtly turned science and logic itself into a sort of faith by using a form of belief that is itself non-scientific and non-logical. It's tremendously silly, actually.

 

Part of the confusion comes from the fact that religions will simultaneously make metaphysical and scientific claims, so when one claim collapses we naturally lose trust in the other claim, not realising that the reality of a God or a spirit or a soul is not itself contingent upon the scientific veracity of various religious beliefs, the fact that religious people made scientific claims that were wrong does not itself say anything about the nature of the religious claims necessarily.

 

So we could certainly say that a given metaphysical system shouldn't be considered seriously because they've been wrong on the science, but that itself does not say anything about the very nature of the subject matter (reality, existence), science itself cannot encapsulate those matters, so we're always going to be using some form of philosophy - a nonmaterial speculation --  itself to generate explanations for any of those subjects matters, therefore any speculation that everything is physical refutes itself, and therefore can't be coherent.

 

So this isn't me arguing for or against any specific metaphysical claim except for the claim that everything is reducible to matter, which as I've shown, can't be, as the statement itself is self-refuting and incoherent.

 

The end.

This review may contain spoilers.

Rewatched Interstellar twice lately and I am being increasingly astounded by just how bold, visionary and new, interstellar really is. For me at least, I'm beginning to feel that Interstellar is perhaps the greatest science-fiction work since 2001: A Space Odyssey, and a movie that will be remembered and studied for decades as a defining masterpiece of a genre that will only grow. 

Having seen this movie for the first time in Imax cinemas as a 12-year-old (and genuinely wanting to be an astrophysicist because of it) and seen it, damn, probably a dozen times since, I've almost taken it for granted.

There's been quiet a few articles on the science of Interstellar, and it paints a picture jaw-droppingly deep. 

This film originally started as the conceptual work of a physicist, Kip Thorne, who had spent his career attempting in part to explain General Relativity to the public. This is what he said on the film: “But the spirit of it, the goal of having a movie in which science is embedded in the fabric from the beginning—and it's great science—that was preserved.” 

Here's where the jaw drops. In designing the black hole and wormhole animations for this film, the production actually wanted to get it right (which, given that this is a major Hollywood picture, is impressive on its own). So, the story goes, Kip Thorne sent dozens of pages filled with complex equations, basically an overview on the astrophysics of black holes, that would accurately render the effects to Double Negative, the special effects team responsible for the animations. Upon putting the equations into their supercomputers, the production generated 800 terabytes of data, with individual frames sometimes taking 100 hours to render.
As they rendered the black hole, the accretion disk that they modelled produced a brilliant white glow. A necessary consequence from from scientifically-accurate and well-known equations that Thorne provided, but a phenomena they had never observed or known before.

Yes, you read that right, Interstellar was so advanced in terms of the techniques they used to make this film, that by using accurate astrophysics equations to model the black hole, the production team of Interstellar indirectly caused multiple actual, scientific discoveries!!


Kip Thorne and the scientists that work at Double Negative have already published two papers on discoveries from the modelling software they used following the film's release, with Thorne stating that "this new approach to making images will be of great value to astrophysicists".
Now of course the exact image the film shows is a variation of the animation Thorne and Double Negative produced, and yet the accuracy of the graphics is miles ahead of any other film to date, that alone cements the legacy of Interstellar. 

That is just one aspect of this film: What truly allows Interstellar to shine is the deeply nuanced and inherently philosophic meditation the Nolan brothers offer on the future of technology, science and humanity. Film is a great medium in that it can assault so many senses all at once; to that end, film is one of the most important artistic mediums we have till date especially in conveying complex moral ideas, and Nolan has used cinema as a format in a way few ever have. 

So there are a couple other themes that stand out for me.

Firstly, the impassioned defence of science, especially in the face of an increasingly Luddite-like ressentiment.


This, to me, is profound, because Nolan is giving a truly harrowing look into our future challenges, and his vision is proving true day-by-day to terrifying accuracy.
I think Nolan is deeply humanistic and strongly believes in the worth and value science provides to our society. A strongly pro-technology stand point. He is representing himself through Cooper; we feel Nolan's anger at the misinformation so vividly as Cooper sits and listens to a schoolteacher explain how the Moon landings were faked, Nolan is absolutely vivid, he is deeply concerned about the trend of misinformation and science-denial occurring right now, a prediction of the types of attitudes we would see in the COVID pandemic. 

Cooper sitting out on his porch, dreaming of the stars, 'now we just worry about our place in the dirt'. The tremendous pride Cooper takes in seeing scientific reasoning in his daughter, his love and excitement of any sort of experiment, the relief Cooper experiences at realising that Professor Brand and the rest are like him, that they too understand his language and that they too implicitly assume the worth and value of science, the attitudes of Cooper's own son Tom, especially towards Murph, and towards his stupid insistence on staying by the farm. Finally, Cooper seeing the recreation of his house, and being bored by it, a profound but subtle statement of 'onto better things'. Nolan is practically frantically yelling at us, teaching us lividly, about how it is that we've progressed till here, and how we need that progression, how that progression is good. Agree or disagree, this is the viewpoint Nolan is arguing for.

The second thing that stands out to me is Nolan's portrayal of an essentially Kubrick-like view of reality and the Universe, that itself being a Oneness-oriented view of mankind as part of an infinitely greater reality. A complex viewpoint that Nolan probably formulated over the course of years of deep reading, which he represents marvellously through scientifically-accurate portrayals of concepts like time dilation.

Without getting too abstract, the notion of time, causality, cause-preceding-effect, is itself in a sense unproven, and perhaps a perceptual illusion. On the microscopic scale, or as a direct consequence of the equations we have to describe reality, time itself does not exist and is observed and assumed after the fact. One way to look at 2001, is that of Kubrick positing the role of some sort of alien-like intelligence that may have played a role in the continual evolution of man into the stars.

Nolan takes this idea, and runs totally wild with it, presenting a totally foreign and new way of looking at humanity (which itself hearkens back to ancient Buddhist meditations on the nature of the timeless Self, on the Universe experiencing itself through humanity) -- positing (in a manner which may grow to be regarded as prophetically predictive) that our evolution is spurred by forces far greater than us, that we've been guided here, that there is a greater purpose to all of our experiences, and finally that our ascendancy to the stars is inevitable -- a viewpoint that, I think, fundamentally hearkens back to Kubrick's 2001 Robert Zemeckis' Contact and connects to Denis Villeneuve's Arrival -- a totally new way of looking at time itself. No surprise that the physicist that most closely guided this film has spent his career painstakingly explaining Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity and how that affects time as we understand it. Nolan is perhaps arguing that time as we conceive of it does not exist, that nothing is purposeless, and that a future version of humanity has been guiding us all along. 

In presenting this view, Nolan is questioning our basic assumptions of time, consciousness and evolution itself and presenting an undeniably optimistic view of reality and the future. Whether you agree with him or not, he raises the question 'what will happen?' and at once answers it with the most complex and accurate view of science on celluloid, ever, and with undeniable beauty and charm. There are many other facets to the film, I haven't even touched on the tearjerking love story that plays central occupation, indicating to me that Interstellar is itself a film worth studying and one for the ages.

Poetry I

Set 1

Pt. 1

The great addicts love the deepest

They feel it deeply on the lowest levels of their soul

They live relentlessly with a realness to the risqué, a liveliness for the carnival crowds and the sounds of the music upon the people’s heart

It is their hatred of themselves, the tortured artist within them

That runs out forth from them in boundless expressions of anger and vitriol

They hold up the positive, economic love

They destroy and break down with the thumping of their feet

The dark loves

The love of the night

The love of evil

The thrill of violence

The crackling joy of the whip

And the mysticism of the gun

The addicted lover, jumping endlessly

And the tortured muse, crying so

There is a darkness in the deepest love

From which they run

A stable screen, colourless and gray

Even their colours, the faintest

Of them all

Colourless red, no apple bites

A calm blue, no ocean storms

A violet indigo is missing

The deepest cushions of velvet

Silk, flower, fire, and the lover’s cry

These are the sounds and smells I love for

Calm and free, my lover’s whips hit me so

But without fear I bound forward to

Without regret and with a smile

I look fondly upon my mad lover’s crackling whip

 

Crackling whips

The lover’s mad laugh

Trickling joy

And my lover’s charm

Trembling hands

And the shaking of the gun

Cackling joy

And the lover’s shadow

Upon the pale moonlight

I laugh madly

 

Senseless experience

Within the wildness of nature

Indeed, the God of the Trees

Makes a devoted poet of us all

The birds stamp us with a song to sing

We walk through

Staunchly logical and loyal, calm and cold, awake and aware, the foreseer’s eye

And in nature’s great confusion

Do I find myself endlessly so

Expansive universes, in the vision of the leaf

In a raindrop I saw God dancing endlessly

Within the dropping of the night, I saw the Devil defeated

And with the rising of the sun

The White Horse makes it ride

With the wildness of nature,

And the quiet of my soul

God whispers the loveliest poem

With my heart

I seek to find

That loveliest poem

In every lovers eyes and in every fighters kill

That loveliest poem

Oh it haunts me so

 

Pt.2

my dear, I'm living cold and alone,

Marshmallow clouds floating by

And baby, as the cars race on by

I'm ready, to lose my mind

I'm ready, a trip to the other side

 

Dance with Apollo as daylight breaks!

Nothing timid, we fight on for streaks of alien embrace!

 

You know what I would say to you

Riding my bike all the way to the deep blue

A fortified mind with the help of a friend

Green pastures as Lucy arrives

Sun-baked skies as the angels fly

 

My lover’s charm was a gilded sparrow

So fine it flew up, we lived on the hill

She was an angel, radiant and light

She had the power to make you go

I had to let myself go, float out through to my angel’s charm

 

Yeah my lover had a humour, to let me know

She could be so cruel, when the nighttime came

Red eyes, menacing frames, don’t let her know, she’s so cold

Spare my heart, baby, fly away as the sparrow does

Like an angel’s kiss, gently let me go

 

Dreams and desires, running with my dreams and desires

Lover's lullaby, floating along on my lover's lullaby

 

My lover rides off

The night sets upon me

Wolves with a low-key growl

And off sets the whip

 

Pt. 3

We talking curses of love

Hearing bout flights of doves

Seeing the shadows of ghosts, hidden coves

Raving and rolling, fighting and fucking, in fields of strobe love

 

Great is that of darkness

Timidly frames, cursed lips

Lurkers in the sigh, the lynx takes flight

Upon sadness tombs I rested

Remarking on the implacable lightness

 

The lightness of being is unbearably so

Unerringly so do I run the path

Fortunes and valour, my way to sow

Summer’s burning days, light and taking flight

Darkness’ cold embrace, holding me deeply in the snow

Never letting me go, risking it for my right

 

The blossom of the butterfly

Marks the flight of the eagle

The screeching cries, rallying us all

From the forest deep do the spirits come

From places unseen, deja vu as our eyes set

By day the phoenix burns

And by night the phoenix rises

The implacable giant rests deep by light

To find deep within, a fierce roar upon the night

Life is unbearably quick, rebelliously do all our memories slip, vainly cold hands grasp for the tightness

The young child has no clue

Slipping by and past and through

No clue as the tears drops from Ikiru

Sleep sets, the day is over, your dreams are done

Falling upon and around you, concealing you back into the deeps, into the recesses of your mind

Folded lines of traumatised tiredness, a tiredness so deep it rebels against itself, fighting a fierce fight, like the unbearably small light

Burning through existence

Fighting like hell

Burning through the darkness of the night

Ablaze and with flames

Burning wildly, madly, loudly, destructively, orgiastically, defiantly, with a fierceness so great

A fierceness so great, barbarically

Righting itself into itself

The Snake eating itself

Dragons burn and women moan

But the mind annihilates itself

Orgasms at its own fulfilment

The mind is the beautiful mirage of dreams

The harbinger of darkness

The mind creates for itself

The darkness of the night

A Muse, a canvas, creative grounds

Fertile self expression

The mind creates darkness

To bring out its own light

The Wisdom of Laziness and Silence

It was years ago in a University statistics class that me and my friend Jacob fell out of our chairs howling in laughter at the apparent insanity in Bill Gates saying that he 'loves to hire lazy people'. We did impressions of Gates hiring people so lazy that they would destroy his company, and we found this hilarious.Jacob and I have often laughed about that day, but the inherent gem of wisdom in Gates' statement remains clear.

Silence, in the Ancient Spiritual sense, is the eternal abode the Self finds from the constant chatter of the thinking mind. Silence is the eternal resting place, the rare, unique, fleeting feeling of just being.
Laziness, as a beautiful corollary, is the ability to be, intentionless, to approach everything with a beginner's mind. The kind of 'fresh eyes' approach characteristic of flow-states, the one we can all instinctively recognise without naming.

Indeed, silence and laziness are two sides of the same, joyful, Zen coin.

Imagine a rope that pulls itself tighter onto you the more you push against it; that is what stress and worry is like when you are learning anything. In Martial Arts, like Muay Thai for example, the exemplar of those that can perform vs those that can't is your ability to just do the movement, to not think about it too much. 'Everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the face', as wise old Mike teaches us. Similarly, when playing piano, as any piano player knows, if you think too much about playing the keys, you won't be able to play them -- you need to be able to just do.

We don't really understand a language, or a concept, until we are able to understand it instinctively, intuitively, to apply it without effort and thought, or to 'think in it naturally', spontaneously. This simple piece of wisdom can be applied to anything;

The Necessity of Metaphysics

Metaphysics, root meaning being "what comes after physics", is in the most abstract and broad sense, the study of Existence itself.
What is being offered here is not an argument for any particular system of metaphysics but to point out the necessity of metaphysics itself, as a contrast to all viewpoints that denigrate or deny metaphysics, more specifically the argument presented is that any attempt to do away with metaphysics is necessarily an application of metaphysics in some form itself, and therefore an incoherent argument.

In essence, we cannot do away with Metaphysics as much as we want to, so we should get to work in establishing and advancing Metaphysics.

Given the attempts to relegate metaphysics to 'mere subjectivity', Alfred North Whitehead's quote "Every scientific man in order to preserve his reputation has to say he dislikes metaphysics. What he means is he dislikes having his metaphysics criticised" rings true.

Godel's Incompleteness Theorems

Our argument starts with Godel's Incompleteness Theorems and their subsequent philosophical implications, but it should be noted that the specific way you interpret Godel's Theorems can lead to vastly different results -- this is most clearly seen by the fact, following the publications of his result, Godel's felt that it validated his stance as a Neoplatonist that believed in an objective reality, and yet solipsist and existential positions (read: reality is unknowable) often cite varying interpretations of the Theorems -- so we must first outline what these ideas are carefully before coming to any conclusions from them.

Godel constructed a mathematical equivalent to the Liar Paradox: The statement 'this sentence is a lie' is a paradoxical statement, for if it is true that the sentence is a lie, that is a direct contradiction. Here is how he did it, in simple terms.
Mathematical expressions derive from axiomatic truths, which are essentially truths we assume to be true for the sake of argument, and their manipulation through rules of deduction. From a given set of axioms, using rules of deduction, we can write theorems that demonstrate a statement as a logical consequence if the axioms are true. Arithmetic as we commonly understand it generally assumes (out of many possible constructions) the Peano Axioms, a concise list defining a small number of primitive symbols and how they relate to each other, allowing us to phrase any expression of arithmetic as a logical consequence of these axioms. These theorems are proofs that can be established for any mathematical expression, for example Bertrand Russell

proved through the use of Peano axioms, the expression 1 + 1 = 2, in Principia Mathematica.

Godel, through the Godel Numbers, assigned every symbol of the Peano system to have a natural number. Using Godel's Numbers, every natural number can be represented as an expression of mathematical symbols converted to natural numbers, and likewise every formula can be represented as a string of Godel Numbers. The twofold brilliance of this is in that it allows us to not only represent mathematical formulas, but also statements about formulas, as strings of Godel Numbers, allowing us to make statements about arithmetic, within arithmetic. This is crucial to Godel's Theorem.

(An example of a possible Godel Numbering convention that can be used) Now we know that every provable statement in a formal system must either be an axiom itself, or be derived from the axioms from the application deductive rules. Baked into the definition of a proof S is the structure wherein which a string of mathematical symbols is related via deduction rules to express S as the last statement. Knowing this, we can even give mathematical proofs a Godel number, meaning we can use natural numbers to convey the rules of natural numbers.

Now for a formal system to be consistent, it cannot prove a statement and its negation, otherwise you can prove every statement in that language. Godel's brilliance came in showing us, mathematically, that every consistent system will have statements that it cannot prove, otherwise the system would be inconsistent. Godel did this by encoding in, with Godel numbers, a statement that informally translates to 'this statement is not provable', which cannot be proven either way. If the statement is provable, it negates itself, a contradiction, therefore the system is not consistent, whereas if it is unprovable, the system is not complete, meaning that there are statements in the language of that formal system can not be proved or disproved within that formal system.

It is important to note that Godel's Theorems simply state that any formal system can either be complete, or consistent, but that it cannot be both. With Godel's statement, it was proved that if any sufficiently complex and effectively axiomatised formal system will have statements that it cannot prove, otherwise it will become inconsistent. On its own, despite consistent misinterpretations, Godel's Theorems don't necessarily mean anything, all it does is highlight what was at the time a novel feature of all formal axiomatic systems that fulfil certain criteria (being complex, consistent, and effectively axiomatised).

That's it.

A common misconception is to think of Godel's statement as 'true but unprovable', but a truth-value cannot be defined within the system, simply because an 'unprovable formula' can't be represented arithmetically, it is like trying to imagine 'nothing', that's the whole point. Formal systems such as Peano-arithmetic are 'first order languages' that are incapable of proving everything, so second-order languages need to be used to effectively evaluate them. In the context of a first-order formal language such as arithmetic, it makes no sense to describe what is, or isn't, true, as the formal language is only capable of describing the logical consequences of a given set of axioms.

How, then, does any of this relate to metaphysics?

Tarski's Undefinability Theorems

Godel's work is inherently mathematical in nature, as such you cannot immediately derive any philosophical conclusions from it. On the other hand, Polish logician Alfred Tarski, provides a corollary to the Incompleteness Theorems that relates heavily to 'Truth'.

If you have any first-order language (such as natural numbers supported by Peano axioms), you can also have an 'interpreted first order language' where by statements in the language (for example 1 + 1 = 2) can be evaluated as 'True' or 'False'. With Godel Numbers, you can 'encode' these statements, such that you can have a list of possible statements (representing formula), and a subset of statements that are evaluated as 'True'. The question is, can you define within the first-order language (arithmetic in this case), a formula that defines all 'True' sentences? Tarski proves that you cannot, by using reductio ad absurdum, which is showing the logical contradiction that this ensures. To express all 'True' statements would require a Godel number, for a number that is not the Godel number of a true sentence, and yet by being a Godel number, it is a true sentence, a clear contradiction, therefore no formula in first-order language can define all 'True' sentences.

The common informal way of summarising the theorem is succinct in saying 'arithmetical truth cannot be defined in arithmetics', or more broadly that no language can fully represent itself, that to interpret a language in any meaningful sense, it must be done from 'outside' of that language through what Tarski terms 'a metalanguage'. Consequently, this 'metalanguage' must be richer in some sense than the original language, and recursively, this metalanguage too can only be evaluated by yet another meta-metalanguage.

Metaphysics and Logic

Out of the plethora of possible metaphysical conclusions you can derive from this, one of the key relevant conclusions is simply that truth cannot be reduced to any sort of logical or formal system. This much is clear, and is itself a devastating dismantlement of the 'hard' Logical Positivist group, that grew out of the assertion that 'only statements verifiable through direct observation or logical proof are meaningful in terms of conveying truth value, information or factual content'. This entire Philosophy falls apart (and is not considered seriously in Philosophic circles unless in modified forms) precisely because the nature of logical proof is such that it can never be meaningful or provide 'truth value', and that ultimately 'logical proof' itself must stem from the picking of key axioms.

What I mean to say is, the very structure and nature of Logic and deductive reasoning, and consequently the form and structure of the Scientific Method, is such that it cannot render any picture of 'value' or 'meaning', nor can it define 'truth', none of which is problematic because it isn't trying to. The argument here is not that we should take the

metaphysics already provided for us, but that some form of metaphysical reasoning itself is necessary in order for any form of 'data', 'deduction' or 'logical proof' to have any intelligible use.
The argument that metaphysical claims are not verifiable is itself a supposition that doesn't speak to what we should do about metaphysics, the nature of metaphysics, or even the nature of truth. In essence, it is a meaningless but true observation -- why should they be verifiable?

One clear example of this is in the choosing of geometric conventions: Euclidean geometry is what use to measure 'real-world things', whereas an infinite number of non-Euclidean geometries exist that are all totally logical and self-consistent, but are not as 'practically useful'. Are these non-Euclidean geometries 'untrue'? The question makes no sense within the context of the geometric convention, the geometry itself is necessitated as logical inferences from starting axioms, and a variety of such axioms can be used for different purposes, therefore none of these geometries are 'true' or 'false', but rather, they can be useful or not, for different purposes. Those purposes themselves, how would they be defined, if not in some metaphysical sense to begin with?

Scientific theories themselves are frameworks that can encapsulate observable data and attempt to disprove themselves through verifiable hypotheses. Meaning to say, scientific theories framework can never establish and define 'truth'-- it must be done from some sort out of outside perspective, a form of metalanguage, whether that occurs in the form scientific consensus, religious dogma, or some form of 'critical thinking and reasoning', in fact creativity itself can play a crucial role in leading to the synthesis of new scientific explanations -- in all these cases, what takes primacy is not the logical or mathematical process itself, but also the interpretative process that necessitates the logical/ mathematical process.

Meaning, we are engaging in metaphysics in relationship to science, maths, logic, religion, and just about everything else, all the time, any way, but most of the time we aren't even consciously aware that is indeed what we are doing. Any form of axiomatic presupposition is going to be some form of human-driven thinking or reasoning process, it's not just that metaphysics is necessary in interpreting the use of scientific results, but that our metaphysics structures science itself, in deciding axioms, in outlining the limits of what we can interpret from logical results, and in defining why we use science.

I would further make the claim that metaphysics, being necessary to science, must have a reciprocal relationship with science. Metaphysical

claims are the root of ethical as well as claims of meaning, use, value, and so in that sense Metaphysics must in some sense inform the structure, nature and direction of scientific innovation. Likewise, though, metaphysics relies on an interpretation of the world, this interpretation itself must be adapted to modern scientific advances and to the ever- growing increase in human knowledge, though as we well know from looking at any sort of arcane belief system, that science generally evolves faster than metaphysics. Returning to Whitehead, even if Metaphysics is constantly changing, constantly wrong, and constantly uncertain, that doesn't mean we shouldn't use Metaphysics -- if it did, by the same token logic we would need to rid ourselves of any sort of established form of assumption or truth in the Sciences as well, a clearly untenable solution.

Ergo, Metaphysics, and the cultivation and establishment and advance of Metaphysics, is vitally necessary.

Diagram of Tarski's Undefinability Theorem
Diagram of Godel Numbers
Description of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem

Many creative issues are directly born from the confusions of language. Physicist Richard Feynman best illustrates this in referring to how the label 'bird' does not in fact capture the actual bird, that when we say 'that's a so and so bird from so and so family', those 'labels' themselves are not true per-se, but rather, they are useful conventions, but they are just as 'true' as any other names or conventions we could use. That is a tautological statement, one that is obviously true by definition, and yet its implications are often overlooked.


Structure and form is often a limitation. If you think you must write in a particular style, for example, that inhibits your creativity such that certain expressions are always blocked off from you. The beauty and magic of science lies precisely in the fact that science constantly seeks to disprove itself and root out biases out of a recognition of the inherent faultiness of the human brain. Different belief systems, perspectives, are heuristics that are useful for coming up with generalisations and actions, each heuristic is by definition and structure a limited, finite way of organising data, so each one is necessarily 'wrong', that is how the human brain (not consciousness, the brain) works, all the work in computational neuroscience lends a lot of credence there.


So a lot of the best music comes from overcoming styles; from making music in a way that hasn't been made before, where novelty itself becomes creativity, which really by nature is not replicable because it is always new by definition. So if creativity is new ways of looking at things, which for the time being is a useful definition, creative progress necessitates that we are always invalidating whatever we used to know, or whichever way in which we used to look at things, for increasingly better 'ways of looking'.


The best example of this is the scientific method itself. Stephen Hawking describes the scientific method as so:


"Any sound scientific theory, whether of time or of any other concept, should in my opinion be based on the most workable philosophy of science: the positivist approach put forward by Karl Popper and others. According to this way of thinking, a scientific theory is a mathematical model that describes and codifies the observations we make. A good theory will describe a large range of phenomena on the basis of a few simple postulates and will make definite predictions that can be tested. ...


If one takes the positivist position, as I do, one cannot say what time actually is. All one can do is describe what has been found to be a very good mathematical model for time and say what predictions it makes." - Hawking, The Universe in a Nutshell, p. 31


So scientific progress itself is a sort of game, in which we get to choose which observations we take about the world, and come up with ideas on how those facts relate to each other in a set of rules and relationships, and we can test our ideas by coming up with hypotheses and coming up with experiments to see if we are wrong or not. As such, the nature of science is creative! Scientific theories require for us to be able to creatively imagine how we think something works, before we can ever get to the stage of finding evidence for or against our hypotheses. The process of selecting facts and hypothesising about their relationships is itself boundless and without real rules or structure, 'whatever works' is the mantra -- it doesn't matter if it came to you in a dream or when you were doing yoga, as long as your model works according to the scientific method.


The very nature of experimentation and discovery is such that you won't know if your theory or postulation is right or not until you find evidence to support it, otherwise there wouldn't be a need to find evidence for it to begin with (logically). This is a crucial factor that people overlook when it comes to creativity. Creativity is deeply involved in the sciences in the form of intuition, we intuit ideas and explanations before we can 'know' them or establish them from the facts, so real creative progress and innovation is always inherently a leap into the unknown, an advent into new knowledge, a mysterious declaration that is inherently uncontrolled.


That's why creative insight just happens, not as the direct result of a logical process (otherwise we could easily automate it) nor from simple one-to-one sensory-to-human relationships (otherwise we could likewise make creativity an entirely mechanical process), but rather, it just happens. We can come up with different explanatory schemas to better understand creativity, but none of those can, yet, capture creativity. In that way, creativity is the last vestiges of the SOUL; a mark of an individual expression that irreducibly unique and irreplaceable or replicable.


Regardless of wherever or whatever the origins and explanations of creativity, it is where the artist and the scientist find themselves in union. Science can have an increasingly complex and precise methodology, but it cannot have a definitive, all-embracing structure to automate scientific innovation itself. In an analogous way, art can be increasingly technical and form-based, and yet it cannot ever replace the unique sparks and

moments of creativity that guide all artistic innovations. Creativity is, in a sense, the lifeblood of the human spirit, the ways in which the Spirit expresses itself, how the SOUL expresses itself in the face of the Unknown, therefore if there is anything that can be considered 'Holy', 'Creativity' must be in part due to it, or from it, or perhaps, it.


Perhaps that's what Nietzsche meant all along.

Fundament to many schools of (traditionally) Eastern thought, is the concept of non-personal, constant, Awareness of the Self

Though we primarily associate these concepts with Eastern schools of philosophy, most notably under the umbrella term 'Buddhism' (which can include many disparate world-views), variations of these ideas have existed in every culture. 

 

The easiest way to understand the Spiritual conception is through Indian 'guru' Ramana Maharshi. Maharshi, raised in India, had at the age of 16 an experience he would call akrama mukti - sudden realisation, from which point on he lost all interest in school or anything to do with his 'former life'. Maharshi ran from home, and spent years living in temples and on the mountain in states of prolonged silenced, until he eventually developed a large, devoted, 'fanbase', whom he actively taught and worked with. 

 

The central premise for the Spiritual conception, and the reality that Maharshi lived out and his students aspire to, is the viewpoint that the 'self' as we perceive it, is illusory, and that what we really are is the backdrop of pure awareness upon which we experience 'self', 'ego', 'thoughts' and all other sensory experience. Maharshi would call this the abiding Self, which is always present, but we are generally unaware of it. 

 

No other way to splice it. 

 

Alan Watts, in a very Westernised way of attempting to communicate these concepts, would phrase it such that the 'self' we experience is the movie, whereas capital s Self is the movie screen upon which the movie plays. 

 

Whenever spiritual philosophies (or philosophies in general) are popularised, they get distorted and watered down. 

 

The origins and root of the spiritual conception lies in the Buddhist viewpoint that desire is the root of suffering. More so, attachment to the illusory self, to what Maharshi called 'the 'I'-thought', is where we suffer. 

 

Definitions become important here, and where things get tricky, and where nearly all spiritual philosophies get distorted, is in what the 'cure' is. The cure, as expressed by the thinkers mentioned, is no sort of conscious process or practice, no method so to speak, for any method and practice would only exist to further reinforce the divide between the observer and the observed, would consequently only increase thinking and therefore make the problem 'worse'. 

 

Rather, through the incredibly simple yet difficult process of self-enquiry, by being Self-aware, we can see through the mind, and through continuous Self-awareness, we have Self-realisation. 

 

But 'self-enquiry' and 'Self-aware' take on highly specific meanings here: The subtleties Maharshi attempts to communicate, is in being aware of 'self' as the illusory self of thoughts, desires, and attachments, and being SELF-aware is to be aware of the abiding Self underlying all of existence. 

 

See, it is the Spiritual conception that the primary cause of misery and discord in the world is our attachment to the mind, to the thinking self, to the illusory phenomena that is called 'Maya'. In realising what we truly are, which is Awareness itself, we can be free of all our attachments and desires and abide in what the Spiritualists call 'samadhi'. The permanent state of Enlightenment (or Self-awareness), is what they call 'sahaja samadhi', though it is not something to achieve, it is simply something that happens. 

 

All Spiritual schools of thought fundamentally point back to the magic mantra (and praise) of Silence: To let your mind be at rest, to be totally silent, to exist not as your personal self-identity, but to simply realise your inner state of perpetual awareness. This 'perfect quiet of the mind' is the state of Nirvana, Bliss, Enlightenment that all spiritual schools are fundamentally cultivating, and is the end of all misery in that viewpoint. 

 

Though you can expand and say more, those are the key principal tenets of the Spiritualist way of looking at life. 

JUNE 26, 2024

When Morrison shot to the top of the billboards in 1967 with the incendiary, counterculture, psychedelic Break On Through (To the Other Side), he single-handedly revitalised poetry in the American consciousness, and created the archetype of both the modern rockstar, and the modern rap-star. More than that, Morrison re-invigorated the Dionysian tradition of expressive poetry and dance, a long-lasting contribution that will secure him in the halls of music and artistic history. 

In 1966, Morrison was living on the rooftop of his friend's house, filling out notebooks with song lyrics, living on a 'diet of LSD and canned beans'. Alongside Ray Manzarek, John Densmore and Robby Krieger, Morrison formed The Doors, named as a homage to both the 1961 psychedelic novella The Doors of Perception, and as tribute to a quote from the 18th century English poet, William Blake. 

 

"If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."

- William Blake 

 

By the end of 1967, Morrison and The Doors had their first studio-released single, Light My Fire, which spent three weeks at the top of the Billboard charts. Rushing to the top of the American music scene, The Doors put out three groundbreaking albums within two years. Morrison would tragically pass away at 27, having released only six studio albums, but in that incredibly short space of time from 67' to his death in 71', Morrison permanently transformed music. 

 

Morrison wasn't just a rock star, though.

 

He was the first, real rock star. Morrison's concert brought a stage persona and a sense of wildness that didn't exist even in the heydays of Elvis Presley. Morrison would be viciously drunk, high or inebriated, and would rage off into shamanistic dances and spoken word poetry riffs that had never been done before.

(A compilation of Morrison's more controversial stage moments) 

 

These concerts themselves would go on to change the music scene totally. It was at one of these early concerts that music critic John Stickney invented the term 'Gothic Rock', and it was at these same concerts that a young Iggy Pop would be inspired to get into music and form the seminal hit band The Stooges, which in turn would become the template and inspiration for modern rock and punk movements. 40 years after Morrison's death, sociologist Andy Bennet would term Morrison as the 'prototypical rock star' in his book Remembering Woodstock. 

 

Outside of that, Jim Morrison directly inspired the lead singers for Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Velvet Revolver, Danzig, the Cult, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division and The Banshees. On top of that, a number of the most commercially successful modern musicians, including Lana Del Ray, Skrillex and Tame Impala have paid direct homage to Morrison. 

(Lana Del Ray's dark American aesthetic was partially inspired by Morrison, who she references by name in this song) 

 

But to focus solely on who Morrison directly inspired would be to miss the profoundly understated impact Morrison had on American music. 

 

Without Morrison, Iggy Pop, the father of Punk, never gets involved in music. Without Morrison, Lana Del Ray (who, according to Rolling Stones, is 'the greatest American songwriter of the 21st Century') wouldn't have the dark American aesthetic that she is known for. Without Morrison, gothic rock and all of the prog-rock offshoots don't exist.

 

Morrison's music created an emphasis on dark, poetic lyricism, that in turn gave rise and brought commercial success to the prominently violent and hedonistic rap imagery and lyricism we see dominating charts globally today.

 "If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel."

Jim Morrison - prologue to Wilderness 

Morrison grew up on a diet of philosophy, poetry and literature. For his 18th birthday, he asked for the complete works of Friedrich Nietzsche, and as a film student at UCLA he devoured the works of William Blake and Arthur Rimbaud among other literary influences (including the Beat generation poets), he lived his life passionately attempting to bring back the 'aesthetic, intellectual way of life' as he understood from Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. By his own words, he was a poet at heart, and he brought those poetic sensibilities to the forefront of American music and consciousness. 

(Morrison's 'Ode to Nietzsche') 

More to the point, Morrison saw within himself a poète maudit: a French term coined by Paul Verlaine in 1832 to describe the emergence of the French Symbolist poetic movement -- a movement of, in Verlaine's words, 'accursed poets - the race that will always be cursed by the powerful ones of the Earth'. The poète maudit lived lives of rebellion and decadence, aiming for 'a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the sense'. 

"I SAY ONE MUST BE A SEER, MAKE ONESELF A SEER. THE POET MAKES HIMSELF A SEER BY AN IMMENSE, LONG.
DELIBERATE DERANGEMENT OF
ALL THE SENSES.
"

Arthur Rimbaud

Morrison was so deeply inspired by this sentiment that he carried a copy of Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters wherever he went, and even wrote the author, a professor of French Literature at Duke University by the name of Wallace Fowlie, to thank him for his English translation of Rimbaud's works. 

 

In the years following Morrison's untimely death, Fowlie deeply examined the works of Morrison and found in them the same poetic and literary genius as that of Rimbaud, publishing Rimbaud and Morrison: The Rebel as Poet to make that exact point. Since then, a number of literary critics have evaluated and analysed Morrison's poetry as worthy of serious consideration outside of his music altogether, bringing forward a long forgotten yet beautiful style that in turn 'changed America's literary landscape in the 1960s to create a new poetic renaissance / genre'. 

(Morrison's poetic lyricism, psychedelic sounds, and overall hedonism are beautifully captured in this recreation of a Doors concert in the 1991 biopic The Doors) 

 

Morrison's form of progressive rock may not dominate the charts today, but Morrison brought forth a dark poetic sensibility inspired directly from a deeply intimate knowledge of literature and history, which in turn brought music forward by giving pop and rock music a strong emphasis on expressive lyrics on top of good instrumentation, for this alone Morrison can rest easy in the laurels of music history. 

Jim Morrison
JUNE 29, 2024

Hello everyone 

 

The purpose of these 'free-forms' is to abstractly explore ideas, conceptions and strands of thought, without any pressure to 'turn it into something' or to have a 'completed work' from it -- I've been journalling my ideas and thoughts like this for years now (truth is, I don't remember a time where I was not writing daily), so I thought it good to share it too. 

 

My basic ideal is to be a philosopher and an artist in the truest sense of the word, and to try and find the truth of things through writings, science, and art. In that regard, I'm also re-enrolling in university, and making various forms of art that I'll share as completed, and also conducting deep research on a number of topics to build into a corpus of work. 

 

These free-forms are basically the footnotes to the journey, for all those who are at all interested; I'll outline rough sketches of ideas that I will later turn into papers and essays for publication. The biggest thing here is I want to help in creating new ways of art and understanding the world, as a response to the philosophical crisis of meaning Nietzsche predicted. 

 

Nietzsche is frequently misinterpreted. Nietzsche is also inordinately influential; the postmodernist forms of deconstruction do not exist without him (even if the postmodernists disavow Nietzsche, they are forced to react to him all the same); Jordan Peterson and conservative-Christian viewpoints fundamentally similar to Peterson also hail from Nietzsche's writings (especially the influence of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the 'modern ways of constructing Christian meaning'), not to mention the massive influence Nietzsche has had on all of psychology if only through Nietzsche's influence on Freud, Jung, Adler, Frankl. 

 

So in line with that, I want to understand Nietzsche properly, truly. 

 

I'm currently doing a deep, careful analysis of Nietzsche's work, starting with The Birth of Tragedy, with reference to all the materials and philosophies that Nietzsche himself is drawing from. Nietzsche is studying the artistic legacy of the Ancient Greeks in The Birth of Tragedy, so I too am learning about their art. I'm reading through Bulfinch's Complete Mythology, Jonathon Barnes' Ancient Greek Philosophy, and a copy of Greek Tragedies. I also have on my reading list, the task of rereading through Aristotle and the Socratic/Platonic works, and of course Homer's Iliad and Odyssey with commentaries. Pythagoras and the influence of the Egyptians seems key here, Nietzsche must have also been inspired by modern literary interpretations of the Ancient Greeks (Goethe and Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost just to start with), so delving into that will probably become important. Understanding Schopenhauer and Kant properly will be key here, as Nietzsche himself would admit to their influence, it's regrettable that I sold my copies of their works, I didn't care much for them when I first read their works (especially Schopenhauer).

 

This is a big project that will take some time, and the plan is to continually publish works interpreting Nietzsche with respect to the source material as I get further along. Exciting! 

 

The next big thing is reading Dostoyevsky and the works of literary critic Mikhael Bakhtin; primarily because Bakhtin places a massive emphasis on what he calls The Carnival: The magic place where social order devolves into the free expression of ideas through both humour and chaos. It's a truly fascinating idea, and matches up incredibly well with Nietzsche's concept of the Dionysian way of life, as well as my own readings of the Bacchanals (which were Dionysius' roaming parties) of Rome and Greece and the 'liberating effect' they supposedly had, which again matches up remarkably with what both French poet Arthur Rimbaud (and his group of Symbolists, including Paul Verlaine) and rock n roll star (& poet) Jim Morrison were aiming at (and seemingly successful in). Another sort of side connection would be the fall of the Roman Empire that Italian director Federico Fellini often depicted in his later films, but really I think expressions and variations of this idea, feeling and convention could probably be found in all cultures, the type of comparative mythology that Jung and later on Campbell were aiming at. Fascinating! 

 

Bakhtin claims that Dostoyevsky best personified an understanding of the Carnival and re-introduced that concept through what he calls the 'polyphonic novel'. The Carnival is exactly similar to ideas of 'the international lounge-room of concepts' I've been working through, and my viewpoint that philosophical perspectives are unique life-forms, and that what we are missing is exactly that sort of 'airport lounge', the cosmopolitan platform where social, economic and political divisions aren't important, and there can be a free flow of ideas and information. I don't know if we have any good sources of that in the modern age. 

 

Also gonna do a breakdown of the Existentialist school, especially in regards to Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre and their difference; they both responded to the 'philosophical crisis' with tremendous strength, and even conveying those ideas of freedom and affirming existence to the public is a worthy goal. 

 

I'm really interested in the intersections of a couple key thinkers. I think Wittgenstein was doing something fundamentally similar to Kant in outlining the limits of language, unfortunately I read Kant years ago, so I'm getting copies of A Critique of Pure Reason and Wittgenstein's works. 

 

The other philosopher I deeply need to understand is Hegel. I've only had cursory reads of Hegel before, he is hard to understand, but the influence he has had on politics is insane. Marxist thought is a direct application of Hegelian theories, interestingly though the atrocities committed by the Soviets seem to have happened, in part, because they were trying to 'fit events' in line with what Marx predicted would happen, their quotas and 5 years plans are evidence of this. In a similar way, Francis Fukuyama used the Hegelian model to predict 'the end of history' and ended up becoming a key supporter of the neoliberal Reagan/Thatcher era. So I've ordered 'Phenomenology of the Spirit' with a commentary, hopefully that makes things clearer. 

 

The other big area of interest I have is in the world of science, specifically in understanding psychedelics and how psychedelics affect our construction of reality. With all the research I've done, I am convinced that psychedelic use in the 1960s led to a massive cultural and intellectual revolution that could, potentially, be classed as an expansion in consciousness itself. 

 

I believe another such 'expansion of consciousness' is occurring right now. My fundamental theory and treatise is that we have different forms of cognition, and that different philosophical and religious outlooks represent different forms of cognition, where we see religious debate now, we will see some unknown form of unity in the future. Historically, shamanistic use of psychedelics probably paved the way for those expansions into different forms of cognitions, and that's happening again with the way psychedelics are resurgent in general awareness and in medical research.

 

Language plays a key role here, which Wittgenstein seems to strongly highlight and emphasise. The works of linguistic researchers in the 50s and 60s links; Edward Sapir presented a theory in which he believed that indigenous use of 'spiritual vocabulary' highlighted and increased the incidence of spiritual experiences, looking further into Sapir's theories of 'linguistic determinism', it appears there is empirical evidence to suggest that language shapes cognition, but not enough evidence to support Sapir's conception. So researching modern linguistic theories will be important for my theory, as I currently have no knowledge of modern linguistics.

 

Finally, I am also of the belief and feeling that modern psychology is in a rut precisely because we've adopted a neoliberal, moral perspective in assessing mental health and mental health disorders. Normative claims are found all over psychology papers, whereas it should be strictly scientific. Replication crisis may be an offshoot of this. Narrowing the scope seems to be the answer. Krishnamurti's quote, 'it is no measure of health to be adjusted to a profoundly sick society' (I am paraphrasing) rings true here. But this is a complex idea, which is really just my opinion for the time being, so I will come back to it, with more time and reading. 

PHILOSOPHY
JUNE 27, 2024

Money is ruining pure science, and pure art. More to the point, historically the arts and sciences flourished when they were practiced for their own sake free of any monetary concern; in modern society we are, right now, seeing a transition where in which all art and science is assessed economically, and this in turn is changing art and science, and not necessarily for the better. 

 

See, throughout Antiquity up until the modern era of rapid industrialisation, in cultures around the world, theological and political structures would have establishments in place specifically to cultivate the arts and sciences. As such, people like Newton were given full licence to go and work on scientific endeavours all day long, and it was through that freedom to create that they were able to innovate as much as they did. 

 

Of course the religious and political structures that initially led to the proliferation and growth of these fields became deeply restrictive, eventually became more counter productive than anything.

 

I think something fundamentally similar is happening again: Industrialisation and technology led to an explosion in the arts and sciences, but now the modern economic framework has become more restrictive than anything. Now I don't have any clue how to fix that, I'm no politician, but this is something to be aware of. 

Historically, the great artists, such as Michelangelo, were directly supported by Church and state establishments

 

About science! 

 

Science is the process by which we come up with hypotheses and attempt falsify them so that we can use those hypotheses to support various frameworks and theories.

 

Historically, Science flourished in the political structures of Ancient Greece and Rome, and saw a vital resurgence under the European rule of monarchs and the Church. In essence, Science really came into being due to their being funded from Royal families and the Catholic Church. 

 

Meaning to say, the scientists that laid the foundation for what we understand today, were able to do so because they were allowed to do nothing but daydream about science all day. 

 

Isaac Newton, Henri Poincare and Albert Einstein all hold in common their practice of 'laziness'. 

 

Henri Poincare revolutionised mathematics, logic and the philosophy of Science. He extensively discusses throughout many of his works (including 'Mathematical Creation') how the process of hypothesising occurs as resulting from a creative, subconscious process. Maria Popova has written a great article going deep on Poincare's thoughts on the method of sciences, linked down below. In essence though, Poincare felt that his best work would come from days and moments of laziness. 

 

Isaac Newton, who single-handedly revolutionised the field of calculus and our understanding of gravity, had the vast majority of his most important work done in the two short years where he was engaged in 'private study' following his graduation from Cambridge. Newton figured out gravity, lounging in his garden. Einstein himself maintained this discipline of laziness throughout his life, remarking that 'he who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead'.

 

Consider this: the mathematical and scientific theories that are integral to modern technology, started off as highly abstract and impractical theories, chaos theory or abstract notions of quantum reality had no direct application for decades, and yet our understanding of them is integral to modern science. 

 

Now I want you to imagine how different history would've been, had these great minds not had the freedom to daydream and think all day. 

 

Now, over the last 100 years, we've seen more scientific progress produced than ever before, and yet at the same time another trend has developed. 

 

World War Two and the subsequent Cold War led to massive investments in science, but in highly specific ways. Oppenheimer perfectly illustrates this; when the Allied forces were in dire need of a bomb, Oppenheimer and his team were given unlimited land, resources and the time to go and do pure science all day and all night with no other impositions, but as soon as the political need for science disappeared so too did the support for the scientists. In the exact same way, the US funded NASA to compete against the Soviet Union, but since the collapse of the Soviet Union funding for NASA has fallen dramatically, with the 2023 budget being half of what it was in 1966, which is even more shocking given the massive proliferation of wealth into various other industries and the tremendous rise in wealth for the US since 1966. 

Oppenheimer (2023) by Christopher Nolan

 

Modern science is in turn dominated by the demands of big pharmaceutical technology companies and the military-industrial complex. Weaponry, medicine and commercial technology is always prioritised, the top students from the top universities are inevitably going to flow to where the money is, as such the raw amount of scientific innovation that could be done, won't be. Seriously, go look at the top scientific journals and it is obvious that those fields are prioritised first with just how many papers are released on those topics, not to mention the billions of dollars worth of funding that's been going into the military-industrial complex since Eisenhower helped create it in the 1950s, is being used to fund research that won't be available to the public for decades. 

 

It is short-term greed that results in long-term harm. What it means, is that scientists can't work on whatever ideas are most interesting to them but on the ideas that are most likely to generate profit, and so over time the standard and focus deviates from pure scientific progress into science being another form of business. The shame of this is in the very fact that many of the most consequential scientific discoveries we've had, happened as a result of spontaneous creativity, not as focus towards any particular research topic or field. That type of thinking isn't valued or incentivised nearly as much any more, leading to untold scientific advancements left on the table. 

 

This same problem is present in the arts as well. 

 

Historically, the great artistic talents such as Michelangelo, Mozart or Monet, were not self-funded entrepreneurs battling to sell their art on the free market, rather the institutions of the state and church cultivated their talent from a young age, allowing each of those talents to be fully dedicated to their art. 

 

In a modern context though, art is valued directly by how much money it can make -- but we have to ask ourselves, is that a good metric to judge art? In essence, do the number of people who like a particular artist determine that art's value? Would Mozart not be a revolutionary musician, even if he wasn't popular? Hell, neither Shakespeare nor Van Gogh was nowhere near as famous in their day as they are today. Much of what we consider great art today was, at the time, controversial, subversive, and unpopular, and yet it was allowed to thrive because art for the sake of art was valued highly in and of itself. 

Café Terrace at Night (1888) Vincent Van Gogh

Artists like Van Gogh, though revolutionary, were not popular at the time; in only allowing 'financially viable art' to be made and encouraged, we are killing a rich tradition 

 

So, think, a lot of what we considered to be great art historically, it would be nearly impossible to make or publicise in a modern context: Whatever forms of art are most effective at generating attention, or appealing to the lowest common denominator, is what will sell and therefore what will be valued, increasingly forcing artists to view their art not as genuine self-expression for its own sake but again, as a form of business. 

 

 

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) by Stanley Kubrick

Films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, can only really be made free of imposition and economic concern

 

When we see more and more intellectual theft occurring in the arts and we see the tendency for all art to start to look and sound the same whether in film, literature or music, this too is directly due to the commodification of art that has happened over the last 100 years.

 

Ironically enough, in commodifying art and science you take away much of the value, because again most of the historic advancements that we've seen in both areas occurred when the artist or the scientist was allowed to run free. 

 

Just some food for thought. 

Depiction of Art
Still from Oppenheimer (2023)
Van Gogh's Painting
Still from 2001: A Space Odyssey
PHILOSOPHY
JUNE 26, 2024
Bougeareau's painting

"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way."

- Viktor Frankl 

This essay is a manifesto for freedom. Not the type found in economic status or wellbeing, nor that which flows from knowledge nor in possessions; rather, freedom is the most basic ability for an individual to choose how they respond to any given event. This should sound obvious, intuitive, and basic, and yet, this form and view of freedom is slowly but surely being eroded into an abstract ideal rather than as a real method and way of living. 

The beginning quote may seem to stem from a place of privilege, but perceptions can be deceiving. These words were first put into thought as as a young Viktor Frankl toiled endlessly and saw the worst of human atrocities in the Nazi camps of Dachau and Auschwitz. Even in the horrifically pale and colorless circumstances of oppression and genocide, Frankl developed a philosophy of freedom which is as true today as it was then. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Death of the Grave Digger BY Carlos Schwabbe 1895

 


One of the most noteworthy paintings from the French Symbolist movement, which was, at it's core, a representation of freedom through aesthetics; the freedom to create any type of expressive art for its own sake.

Viktor Frankl's philosophy is neither new nor unique. 

Whilst Frankl was establishing his theories scientifically in America, a French philosopher, Albert Camus, would outline and expound upon the same fundamental treatise, philosophically. Beatifically discussing how, through his experiences of the devastations of World War II, 'in the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer'. The summer in question IS Camus' concept of freedom. As he discusses in his seminal Myth De Sisyphus, outside and beyond the human tendency to control, to plan, to philosophise, remains our uniquely human ability to embrace, with full force and vitality, everything that happens to us. 

The artistic side of this human impulse to freedom is found clearer in none else than the French people Camus hails from. In the 17th and 18th centuries, many variations and schools of French art flourished with the view of creating "l'art pour l'art -- Art, for art's sake". Despite the complexities and differences between the different French art schools, what unified and made them great is precisely in their desire and proclamation of freedom as expressed through the arts.

 

 

This sentiment is most beautifully expressed in the words of French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud's bold declaration of aiming for a 'derangement of all the senses', a total inversion of traditionally conservative values in favour of bold, authentic self-expression. It is from this aesthetic impulse to freedom that the French Revolution itself occurred, most easily seen through statesman Jacob Fouché's statement that Napoleon was a "C'est un acteur usé - a servant of the French Muse" in the way that he reconfigured the state and society to ultimately prioritise liberty and the advancement of culture. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Wanderer above the Sea of Fog BY Caspar David Friedrich, 1818

But again, let's take a step back, two thousands years ago. 

Marcus Aurelius, the last of the so-called 'Five Good Emperors' of the Roman Empire, writes in his personal diary, 'if you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment'. Variations of this thought exist all throughout the ancient Stoic philosophy, as for example Epictetus' observation that 'we suffer more in imagination than in reality' and that 'it's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters'.

 

 

Aurelius most beautifully highlights this sentiment though, for he expressed it in its entirety solely in the form of private journals that he never publicly shared. Aurelius took Epictetus dead seriously when Epictetus said not to talk of philosophy, but to 'embody it'.
 
The point of all of this is not to make a comparative study on the concept of freedom throughout different cultures, but to highlight how some of the richest cultural trends contain as their nucleus, this concept of freedom. 

Intuitive as the concept may be, the rapid commodification and modernisation we see occurring globally all-over all at once, is simultaneously crushing this age-old view of the indomitable human spirit. In modern neoliberal contexts, value is assessed predominantly through economic utility and our ability to generate a profit, and in societies that extensively use social media, our self-image, identity and sense of action itself is generated through the opinions and validations of others, whether indirectly in the form of subliminal social pressures or directly through the way we construct the way we feel based off of how much engagement and attention we receive on social media. 

The fundamental idea being expressed, from Jesus to Albert Camus, is the notion that our greatest human qualities are not found in how popular or rich we are but in our ability to be totally free of such concerns. This notion is extraordinarily simple and without ambiguity, leaving no room for abstract intellectualisations -- in fact, this notion is a challenge, a defiant statement that removes from us any possibility of escape or passive acceptance of Life. This notion asks us to throw out all excuses, all rationalisations, and to live uninhibitedly as yourself, in whatever form that may be. 

For, Albert Camus states, 'outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty. A world remains of which man is the sole master."

 

 

To recognise yourself as the sole master of your world, to view yourself as free to do whatever you want, in short to recognise the fullest extents of your potential and possibilities, is inherently terrifying.

For it requires that the artist make only the art that they themselves wish to see, that the scientist be ready to state all the uncomfortable truths, for the philosophers and politicians to be ready to totally upend the established order, in short, not a life of comfort nor success nor pleasure but that of ruthless honesty, commitment and a responsibility to your inner spirit. 

See, outside the boundaries of perception, language, desire and the matrixes of success and wealth, there is a purist's love for battle itself, and that is what the free individual fervently seeks to embody. Living for the chase, in the truest sense, and yes, there's no safety there, at all. 

The free individual, whether in the form of Aurelius, Socrates or the Buddha, lives not for material rewards and the desire for pleasurable consequences, but in total acceptance of Life as it is, in total acceptance of themselves as they are, in the daily and unerring decision to passionately speak the truth and to live each day as if it is the last, with no concern for the future in an actual sense, not as a hypothetical reality, but as an end to itself. 

The Ancient Greeks referred to the spirit as 'Psyche', and in the traditional Greek mythologies, 'Psyche' is salvaged only through Cupid's Love, a love which Psyche goes to hell and back, to fight for. 'Psyche' finds freedom as a butterfly only through her eventual union with Cupid's Love. 

Symbolically and literally, our greatest heroes didn't live for 'goals', 'money' or 'validation', but to live out their own truths, to bring to song the beating of their heart. 
To do everything for its own sake, without intentions or ulterior motives, without thought and desire, done simply with the intention to do it, this is the highest form of strength. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Psyche et L'Amour (1889) 


One of the most notable paintings from the French Symbolist movement, represents the Greek God Psyche (meaning, SOUL), being 'enlightened' and 'freed' from the turmoils of human existence through Cupid (meaning, LOVE) 

Schwabe's painting
Romantic era painting
PHILOSOPHY
JUNE 27, 2024
Gravity's Rainbow cover

From when I was fourteen, my tattered copy of Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon has been a limitless friend on endless night. It's no small book, one that I've only read in its entirety once again since first getting, and yet it's a favourite of mine to constantly revisit. 

 

Pynchon's novel, like many great artworks, serves as an entirely self-consistent and elaborate plot worthy of careful reading and deep analysis, yet at the same time it can be picked up on at any page and read from anywhere without any context.

 

Now there's an excellent argument for Gravity's Rainbow being one of the greatest books of the last 50 years, and one of the most influential of the 20th century, literary critic Anthony Burgess (who published the novella that would later be adapted into Kubrick's 1971 masterpiece A Clockwork Orange) would agree, and yet this book has received a shocking amount of hate, criticism and confusion, especially so given the relatively obscure reputation of Pynchon. 

 

For a bit of context, Gravity's Rainbow follows the adventures of a US cadet as he embarks on a 1001 violent, gory, and altogether surreal adventures through the landscape of World War two. 

 

Pynchon introduces dozens of characters, multiple perspective and timeline shifts, in long-flowing paragraphs, often with no discernible structure... over the course of just a few pages, totally violating every rule of creative writing you were ever taught in English class.

 

Most of the popular media we consume, from Harry Potter to The Avengers, utilises a typical and basic storytelling structure in which there is a clearly delineated good and bad, and in which the plot progresses normally and linearly, with a simple moral or emotional message readily presented and understood throughout the content.

 

To be clear, basic here does not mean bad; I'll rewatch Guardians of the Galaxy any day of the week, the most popular forms of media are popular for a reason, they are compelling and digestible in an easy, background sort of way, similar to Erik Satie's Gymnopédie idea; but these forms of media can't be read or understood in the same way as Gravity's Rainbow, which aims at a different impression altogether. 

 

Taking inspiration from Nietzsche's existentialist deconstruction of cultures, and further taking the freeform associative writing style of William Faulkner, Pynchon is attempting to create an impression rather than a linear story; Pynchon word-vomits paragraphs chocked to the brim filled with associations, references, jokes, allusions and motifs. Through this vast sprawl of connections and metaphors, he is creating an impression of World War Two, showing us what the war was like from every perspective imaginable, Pynchon isn't attempting to tell us what happened but rather, how it feels. 

 

This book is not meant to be read literally, or rather, even taken too seriously. This book is an experience, and in that sense, it is one filled with humour, paranoia and a pure sensory barrage of ideas and creative inspiration. In that sense, Pynchon is a true auteur that has created one of the most defining works of the postmodernist literary style. 

Pictures of what happened on each page of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, 2004, Zak Smith 

 

Just as an insight into the raw evocative power of Pynchon, the above is an artwork that painstakingly represents the contents of every page of Gravity's Rainbow, to conquer up that many images over the course of a 800 page novel is not easy. 

 

So if you decide to give Pynchon a go, don't take him too seriously, he's just trying to have fun with wordplay. For those who find the length of the book daunting, Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 is a much shorter and more accessible intro into his works. For those who were a fan of Joaquin Phoenix's role in Joker (2019), Oscar-winning director Paul Thomas Anderson directed Phoenix in his adaptation of Pynchon's Inherent Vice (2016). Inherent Vice is itself both a masterful novel and film, and a great cinematic introduction to the bizarrely strange world of Pynchon. 

Gravity's Rainbow artwork

Khuzy.

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