Yet There Is Method In It

I had a really odd dream last night. It was probably caused by thinking about philosophy

• Dreamed about stuff (the usual – having psychokinesis, etc) then I experienced a false awakening
• I then thought it would be useful to record my dream imagery in the previous dream. (I had a gizmo to do that, apparently.)
• I then wondered if I went into this dream, when I awoke I might not be about to tell for sure if I was dreaming. (Of course, this thought occurred inside a dream.)
• I then dreamed about thinking about Plato’s cave.
• I started to prepare to enter this “dream” state from my “awake” state, then I woke up again.

The only question: am I dreaming now? Ask me if I have psychokinetic powers. If I say yes, I am definitely dreaming!

Anti Citizen One

Either one does not dream at all, or one dreams in an interesting manner. One must learn to be awake in the same fashion: — either not at all, or in an interesting manner. FN

There is something that I find existentially baffling: people who quit their job upon a lottery win. I ignore the not unrelated issue of attempting to play a lottery in the first place, for now. Quitting after getting a lottery prize rather implies that the primary reason for them having a job was the financial benefit and also they would rather not being doing the job at all. It reminds me of arguments against prostitution: “sex workers would not be doing it except for the pay, therefore it is bad”. This argument then applies to these lottery winners (who worked in information technology). It seems people who have jobs they would rather not do are wasting their time in a form of slow suicide. Or perhaps Camus has warped my fragile little mind. A third possibility is they were pursuing a private passion (family life for instance) that was merely supported by their jobs. They can now focus on that more fully. In that case, working long hours at a hated job is slow suicide…

The antithesis to the lottery quitters might be people who voluntarily live on less than they earn, or who choose to work part time because it provides sufficient income. They perhaps realise that happiness is mostly independent of wealth (except I will admit, the case of lack of wealth or resources causing starvation).

Anti Citizen One

People are unconsciously fairer and more generous when they are in clean-smelling environments, according to a soon-to-be published study led by a Brigham Young University professor. ScienceDaily

I finished reading Mere Christianity by C S Lewis. Well written but the ideas are not worth analyzing on this blog. (“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” LW) But there are two points of interest that made reading it worth while. Kierkegaard fans might like to read the final chapter of “Christian Behaviour”. It is like a pro-institutional version of SK (yikes!) and he references the verse speaking of “fear and trembling”. Nietzsche fans might like to read the chapter “The New Men”, where he claims the “superman” is in fact a Christian. He uses one similar expression by likening Christianity to lightning, perhaps a distant echo of Nietzsche calling the superman “lightning out of the dark cloud”.

Anti Citizen One

PS Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion contains better arguments FOR god than this! (among other things…)

“Ubi non accusator, ibi non judex.” (Where there is no police, there is no speed limit.) [Roman Law, trans. Petr Beckmann (1971)

Wow another year as slipped by since I previously posted on the philosophically aware TV series Babylon 5. I am determined to finish the series of articles, that I envisaged when this blog was started. Previously I had discussed the Manichaean good vs. evil theme transitioning into a conflict between order and chaos. Order (represented by the Vorlons) emphasised being and identity (“Who are you?” “Why are you here?”) while their anti-thesis (the Shadows) sought for becoming through chaos and conflict (“What do you want?”). I intend to explore some possible answers to the questions which are used repeatedly and are probably a reference to the method of Platonic dialogues.

“Who am I? What am I doing here? and Where am I going? Those had to be the very first questions we began asking when we became sentient, and we’re still asking them.” JMS

Why are you here?

Answers to this teleological question might by categorised into appeals to objective standards or relative/personal valuations.

Turhan: Why are you here, in this place, in that uniform? Was it your choice or were you pressed into service?
Sheridan: It was my choice.

Delenn: I come to serve [the Truth].
[later]
Delenn: I was meant to be here.

The objective standard is in this case the “truth” or whatever “meant” her to be there. Sheridan’s answer perhaps comes an underlying existential answer of personal choice or interpretation. The third alternative is to not make any choice at all:

Turhan: It has occurred to me recently that I have never chosen anything. I was born into a role that was prepared for me. I did everything I was asked to do because it never occurred to me to choose otherwise.

Included in the more esoteric answers are:

Kosh: We have always been here.

This idea underminds the possibility that one can be somewhere other than “here”, possibly referring to apparent reality. I am reminded of Wittgenstein in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:

5.621 The world and life are one.
5.63 I am my world. (The microcosm.)

Or to transcend the immediate problem of that question, it might be possible to take refuge in companionship or in language itself (“How charming it is that there are words and tones; are not words and tones rain bows and seeming bridges ‘twixt the eternally separated?” Nietzsche)

[Loren mentions he has spent approximately one million years at the bottom of a pit.]
Sheridan: Why are you still here?
Lorien: I am waiting
Sheridan: For what?
Lorien: Someone to talk to. You’re the first one to make it this far.

I quite like that one.

And to take a strict mechanistic view of the situation, which while almost certainly true, is rather unsatisfactory in terms of ethics. But humans seem to seek after meaning beyond the the blunt response:

Sheridan: Why am I here?
Lorien: You were born.

And we still keep coming back to the question “why are you here?”

Man has gradually be come a visionary animal, who has to fulfil one more condition of existence than the other animals : man must from time to time believe that he knows why he exists; his species cannot flourish without periodically confiding in life ! Without the belief in reason in life !
Joyful Wisdom, Nietzsche

Pressing on.. Anti-Citizen One

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
Umberto Eco

I recently finished a long term personal project: an audiobook reading of Nietzsche’s Joyful Wisdom aka The Gay Science. The running time is about 13 hours and much longer than I expected. It partly explains my lack of blogging!

Curiously the first chapter and appendix are both collections of poems. It is rather odd for his reputation to thing of him being a poet. The book is also valuable (to me anyway) as it was written just before Zarathustra and acts as a kind of preface. I think I understand some of the metaphors better than before.

One day I might do a selection of highlights but for now I need a rest from it!

AC1

I’ve got 50% of people with me, and 50% of people will never be with me. Tracey Emin