philosophical mathematics
The sun is shining and I realized that if I had to choose between reading and walking as the sole activity for the rest of my life, I would choose walking. Perhaps it's because I am not enjoying the books I'm currently reading, and when I went for a walk after lunch I followed a path bounded by blinking red roses on one side and shaded by swaying cherry tree branches above. For a few moments I couldn't see or hear another person, and it was as perfect as one could hope.
I might also choose walking to escape my thoughts, which used to be systematic, circuitous, and incredibly depressing. No matter where I started, my thoughts would boil down to the unanswerable Why and the impossible boundaries of the infinite universe. If the universe is infinite, how can it grow bigger? Isn't infinite already boundless and the biggest possible? It used to make my head spin, and it started the summer I was eight years old.
Nowadays I can step out of the loop and just stop thinking, but it also means that I don't do much heavy philosophizing or have much deep conversation about the meaning of life. Sometimes I feel shallow for abandoning the difficult issues of life, but mostly I appreciate the wonder of the utter randomness around me-- movement of clouds, the motion of birds as they hop in grass, and the peaceful geometry of treetops.
4 comments:
I would choose walking, too. Hands down. Although...I did pick up my comment on the rest of this entry from some very interesting reading. I have been known to question life too deeply and think in overly abstract terms. What helped me let go of the negative side of that came from the quote of a controversial guru, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. I can't remember the exact wording, but it was something to the effect of, "You do not watch a rose bloom and ask, what does that mean?" Sometimes being quiet enough inside to observe life clearly renders irrelevant some of those weighty philosophical questions that plague us.
For whatever reason, a lot of philosophical considerations that other people find depressing don't bother me at all. You find infinity depressing, while it has no emotional quality at all for me. It's not even all that interesting to me, perhaps because I just think of it as another axiomatic mathematical abstract, like irrational numbers or negative integers. Things like the extinction of the human race, or the end of life on earth, or our very dim prospects for peace, prosperity, and freedom don't bother me much either, though that involves a certain amount of fatalism.
Conversely, some questions that seem not to concern most other people are warrens of doom that I approach with great caution. To me, the question of identity is as daunting as the question of infinity is to you. And as time goes on, and both my reading and personal introspection increasingly point to identity as an illusion, an exceedingly thin veneer laid over a collective of mental processes at varying levels of conscious visibility, I find it harder and harder to avoid questioning my own existence -- not in a physical meatspace sense, but whether the personality I think of as myself exists only to the extent that I consciously or unconsciously ignore the accumulating evidence that it does not.
To approach it from another direction, I can never really know you, nor you know me. We observe each other, and we incorporate those observations into our memories -- in a manner dictated by our existing memories, no less -- and form a symbolic shorthand representation of each other. When I think "Susan", there is a certain collection of ideas and memories and emotions that go with that label, but once that collection is formed, it exists independently of you. If you ceased to exist right now, that collection would still exist in my mind, and in that case, it raises the question: what is that collection? My mental Susan is plainly not the "real" Susan (and a lot of what makes a good friendship interesting is the continual discovery of the ways one's mental image fails to match the real thing in surprising and interesting ways), but what, then is my mental "Eric"?
Plainly, thanks to the invisibility (by definition) of the unconscious mind, my conscious conception of myself is not my whole self, but on the other hand, it is the only self I know, just as my internal "Susan", is in fact the only you I know. Yet in the end, however much more detailed it may be, my internal "Eric" is no more me than your internal "Eric". The only real difference between the two representations is that mine is always saying "I, I, I" in its internal monologue, constantly affirming its own existence and identifying it with my physical, sensory point of view. Yet if "my" thoughts were not my own, but were broadcasted into my head from outside -- a popular delusion among schizophrenics, incidentally -- there would be no subjective difference at all.
And of course, schizophrenia, with its attendant symptoms of depersonalization and dissociation, is in many ways just the failure of the mental mechanism that holds everything together with its "I, I, I".
So if the boundaries of I and you are a little fuzzy when examined closely, is there a real boundary at all? When we clone plants by cuttings, we conventionally refer to the original plant as the mother and the cuttings as daughters. In any event, no one disputes that the end result is separate plants, even though they started as a single organism in a much more obvious but not very different way than animal young originate from the immortal germline. All of us have a common ancestry to begin with, and the boundaries between our minds blur through the exchange of ideas. Am I part of you in the sense that ideas that originated in my brain now live in yours? Am I this posting, in the sense that ideas that started as brain chemicals and neural connections have been translated into UTF-8 text coding?
In the end, it seems that self exists only because we have evolved not to look too closely at it, using it as a convenient fiction to organize the activities of the meat in which it (partially) resides.
And that bugs the fuck out of me sometimes.
It may amuse you to know, by the way, that the talk page connected to the Wikipedia article on Infinity is much, much longer than the article itself -- though it is still finite. That said, it could still be added to, as well. ;)
Feeling shallow for abandoning the difficult issues of life is a natural part of the process of coming to terms with existence. Experiencing what we can is more meaningful than trying to know what we can't.
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