Entries tagged 'cat:Philosophy'

Entry created on 2024-09-19 (edited 2024-09-20) author:steeph (338) cat:#100DaysToOffload (40) cat:Beliefs (2) cat:Humanity (1) cat:Ideas (5) cat:Philosophy (4) cat:Religion (1) cat:Thinking (3) cat:Writing (4)

When I made the resolution to write blog entries more often I thought tzopics to write about would come up and suggest themselves from everyday life, thoughts and things I hear and read about. Especially because I don't impose any rules on what is worth publishing and what isn't. I was right. Topics to write about come up all the time. But I didn't expect my idea of what I deem worth writing about to change so much that I feel shy about writing about anything. It is something I should have expected because it happens over and over. I've published shitposts with a sentence or less, then tried to only write interesting things for a while, then nothing for a long time - over and over. I think it's like a cycle I go through with varying speed. But I don't always intuitively know at what point of the cycle I am. But now that I try to write here regularly, I notice the periods where I don't write anything because nothing feels interesting enough. I intend to not care about whether what I write about is interesting. But I keep forgetting that I intend to not care.

Sometimes I think about a topic that can not be explored in a simple blog enty; or a single book; or by thinking about it for a year or five. Whenever I get into a conversation related to such a (often philosophical topic or one essential to human coexistance) I get a boost from new input, other view points, relativisations or new idea. I might feel intrigues, challanged, disrupted, supported or something else; and from the new input and the thoughts they lead me to in the following days and weeks I get a little bit closer to being able to write a book about such topics. But I would never.

The more I advance into society acting as a normal human being the more people talk freely to me about their beliefs, fears and ideas. And the more I get exposed to ideas that could be described as outside of my world view. And the more thoughts that I categorise as philosophical get fueled by foreign ideas. It's not often that I genuinely think about such topics deeply enough to get to have new thoughts, ideas or even beliefs. But most of those times has been in the last couple of years. Second most times were when I was around 16, 18, maybe 20 years old and talked to friends about pretty much anything freely and naively. I wasn't afraid to to weird out others. If they took offense by my thoughts and ideas (I didn't practicve having beliefs until much later, I believe.) I'm sure they henceforth avoided me or something. (I wouldn't have consciously noticved at the time.) Nowadays it takes the exact right situation plus a fairly large pile of motivation to steer a conversation to a point where fundamental political or societal topics (such as radical or controversial ideas) are accepted as a topic. What the motivation is may differ. I think it's good when convincing somebody of something is not part of it. But when you have ideas, that wish is hard to suppress. It usually at least peaks to the surface, be it only in the form of somebody saying that convincing somebody of something is not their intend.

This entry probably could do with a lot more structuring. It's one of those where I know that there's something that I want to say. But I don't exactly know what it is until I've built dozens of sentences. I think I'm going to just not re-write this entry and see if it makes sense anyway. I bet it will, to me.

One of my greatest desires (Good thing that "one of" can mean almost any number of desires as long as the total number of existing desires is not defined.) has always been to understand those world views that clash with my own. Experiences and beliefs that contradict what I perceive as reality, thought processes that are clearly not rational, beliefs that seem like they must have come from incomplete or wrong information and societal goals that don't line up with what I always come back to assuming to be what's best for society intrigue me. There is a lot of room in the latter, of course. And I'm not one who reads books to get the complete picture oif everybody's world view. I don't know what Nietsche really went on about for so many pages that those that made me loose my interest in reading what he had to say. I don't tend to read what religious fundamentalists on a mission tell me to read. But I peek into all sorts of stuff. I've listened to long lectures/monologues and conversations with Jordan Perersen on YouTube (before he got onto his current, rather close-minded, path of publicity work). I've listened to recordings from a weirdly praised guru (what people call a guru nowadays) and, and I give weird film, music and writings several chances before I really file them under "not for me" or "too weird for me" or "well, I'm a data hoardewr, so I'm not going to delete this, but it doesn't feel great that this is on my hard drive". Mein Kampf is much much more abstruse that most people who haven't read it believe. But it is in good company in my collection of bits. But most importantly - in my current belief - I use chances to talk to people who say things that are "out there" or contradict basics of my world view. When a clearly clinically ill paranoiac came to the hackerspace asking for help in securing his system, I was the one that bought up the patience to show a Windows user how to set up his firewall in BSD. (BTW, I really believe that I'm not trying to boast here, or something. This is just context for the next paragraph, I think.) I've spent many hours discussing spiritual topics with a person who confidently states that she does not want to trhink rationally, because rational thinking is against what she feels to be true. More than once I've ended up discussing politics with a right-wing skin head when I came for a anti-fascist counterprotest. I'm the one who stays when a (watch out, pigeonholing ahead) smelly drug addict asks everybody at the bus stop if they can do a web search for them because they wonder what colour snow is in Australia. I feel solicited when a magazine titles with "Psychology of the Evil". Because I want to understand: How other people think, how basic assumptions can be the opposite in another person's world view, why their normal is so different from mine, what information they base their beliefs on and - if it's the same information I have been exposed to - especiually how they can come to a different conclusion.

Recently I had a talk with somebody who I know also tends to explore different various extremes when pondering over questions of humanity, the coexistance of different types of beings (brains, humans, species, things). To my surprise they drove the converation to question many things that I assumed as given necessities of human wellbeing. Without being specific (for reasons the beginning of this entry may or may not have explained well), I was presented with reasoning and detailed explanations of thought preocesses that lead to conclusions that contradict several of my core beliefs including the assumption that humans generally consider well-being (happyness, satisfaction) as something that is desireable, if not the main goal of the human existance. I like to believe that many things were said against the sayer's belief in order to breaden the listener's horizon or field of thinking. But the fact that I don't know what ideas were shared out of a liking for open-mindedness and free thinking and what parts were shared out of conviction powers many of my late-night trains of thought since then.

Maybe (very probably) I'm interacting with people who would fierely disagree with me, if not hate me, if they knew my political opinions. I'm in contact with so many different people for work. The fact that we get along on a professional level despitze our differences could be food for thought in itself. I am glad that I don't know their political views because it would distract me way too much to try to understand where they're coming from or why they're so wrong while believing the opposite to be true. But I cherrish those moments in which I'm led to undertand parts of the reasoning behind world views that are very different from mine withoput feeling like I'm being guided or steered to such an understanding. I don't want to risk being manipulated into a realisation without taking all the necessary considerations into account.

I think the main reason why I wanted to write this entry is because my mind is still blown over the fact that I could now probably (in principle) rationally advocate for a genocide for the benefit of humanity.

Life is just the accumulation of memories.

Entry created on 2024-07-24 author:steeph (338) cat:#100DaysToOffload (40) cat:Life (5) cat:Lucid Dreaming (11) cat:Memories (2) cat:Philosophy (4) lang:en (186)

This is not really a philosophy that I live by or use to form my conception of what my or anybody's life is. But I find the thought that everything that happened in the past is only part of reality in the form of a resedue in our memories interesting. That isn't really true. If I break a cup that I use every day, I cannot use that cup to drink tea from. And if I build a house, I can live in it in the future even though the action of building it and all the experiences I made during that time is nothing but a memories. But applied to activities that don't transform part of the physical reality in a specific and definite way, it has some truth, and realising that gives me a curious feeling.

Somebody asked me once, after I gave an introductory talk about Lucid Dreaming, if what somebody experiences during a dream is somehow more real than a dream or still just a dream. I've answered in a way that I thought as honest but was maybe not a clear answer. I said it's still a dream and what stays after the dream is nothing but the memory of it. That's not wrong. But had I taken the time to give a longer answer, I should have also explained the context in which I consider this to be the case. Regular dreams are usually incredibly volatile, especially for somebody who doesn't pay much attention to them and doesn't even try to remember them better. For most adults that's how they remember the majority of the few dreams that they remember at all. Most lucid dreams, it is often said, are a very positive experience. People who train to become lucid dreams mostly consider a lucid dream a success that comes way less often than they wish. These circumstances alone make a lucid dream easier to remember. Some see the memory of a lucid dream in a different class from non-lucid dream memories all together. But of course there can be lucid dreams that you don't remember for long, or you forget the details after a while, or you don't recall at all after waking up (How would you know?). If you don't consider a dream special, it will fade more quickly. If your head is full of other pressing thoughts, if you're depressed or are currently very worried, and if you don't write them down, the memories of a dream will fade quicker. In my experience, given enough time, the memories of lucid dreams will fade into the same jumble of vague memories from long ago, which might be correct or complete or not at all (which doesn't correlate with the sense of how correct or complete they are, btw). That isn't to say that they weren't worth the effort I've put into.

All of that is also true for waking memories, though, isn't it? Yes, we keep much more of what we experience while awake because the short term memories are functioning a lot better then. But years later, what's left is a fading memory unless it is a special memory to you in some way or you do something to keep the it alive. And the jumble those waking memories fade into is the same where all the dream memories go. So, the more small, unimportantant memories accumulate, the more likely it will become that a dream memory is confused with a waking memory. I believe that, to a certain extent, this may be normal. To an extant to which it is not concerning, I mean. Did I see a deer in the northern fields where you usually keep away from two years ago? Or did I only dream that? Deer have no relevance to my life, nor have those fields or anything that seeing a deer north from the village would imply. So I don't care. This is something else than believing that what you dreamed last night to be true minutes or hours after waking up. That could become an awkward day at work or worse. It is also something else to come to the wrong conclusion from a reality check when you're awake. What I believe to be normal to some extent is the confusion of basically irrelevant memories.

In many ways, dream memories and waking memories are more similar than I thought for a long time. They are the same in some ways. A lot of the apparent differences can be explained by the lack of short term memories while dreaming or during the process of waking up (which can be both at the same time). So, are lucid dreams just dreams of which fading memories are the only thing that remains? Yes, just like your last night out, your holiday in Japan, all the films you've watched and podcasts you've heard. And no, just like everything else you experience, a lucid dream re-shapes and re-inforces neural connections and thus influences how you think, how you experience things from now on and what you will do in the future.

Consciousness

Entry created on 2024-07-15 author:steeph (338) cat:#100DaysToOffload (40) cat:Consciousness (1) cat:Philosophy (4) cat:Science (6)

Consciousness is such a heavy topic that, even if I keep clear of actually trying to address the so-called hard problem, writing anything on it feels like I'm over-stretching my copetence in both science and philosophy. But I've decided to be confident enough to type out some of my thoughts an how the subject is discussed.

The topic interests me on an academic hobby level. Consciousness in dreams especially is something that I've read and thought a lot about and experimented with over years. Really explaining the nature of the brain-tingling that a good philosophical chain of thoughts gives me would take a lot longer than I'm prepared to spend writing this entry and would probably produce enough related sentences to write a book about it. Suffice it to say I'm interested - among other things - in how experiences and thereby people's realities change when input is filtered differently by the brain that processes the input (more of less or differently consciously).

One reason why I find it hard to structure thoughts around the topic is because of the definition of consciousness. There is none that encopasses all the cases where it is regularly used with the assumption that the meaning of the word in the context it is used in is clear, or obvious. That is OK in principle. And I've decided to do thew same here and not define it in any way, for simplicity. But when discussing the topic academically, when writing a paper on a related subject or when writing a book on it (with an academic target audience or not), a definition that prefaces the presentation of any concept or theory is necessary to allow for a productive discussion. Without a definition on such a varied subject interesting things may be said on it. But it's complicated to impossible to discuss them in a structured way or to do epirical reasearch on them. In other words, they lose some very important possibilities of being useful above entertainment. That is probably why a definition usually is brought forth in such publications. But not always. Introducing a concept on most other topics doesn't require the author to first define what they think the field of research actually is about. But such a requirement inheres - in my opinion - in discussing the subject of consciousness; something that can be experienced by somebody who agrees to the fact that they are experiencing it (according to some definitions) but who at the same time argues that it (according to some definitions) may not exist as a distinguishable state. I've seen a panel discussion once where two of the participants discovered their diverging definitions of consciousness in regards of what they wanted to talk about that day halfway through the discussion, which lead them to agree to every seemingly contradicting statements based on the assumption that they each other were the expert on what they were talking about. That was a funny and useful one compared to other panel discussions that muddle ideas and thoughts on the topic by mixing concepts that are not reconcilable with each other.

I'll leave it at that for now because I don't want to actually say anything about consciousness before producing a formal definition, which, in confusion over different views on what consciousness is, I'm not prepared to do.

Film: I'm Thinking Of Ending Things

Entry created on 2022-08-14 author:steeph (338) cat:Death (7) cat:Films (16) cat:Philosophy (4) lang:en (186) top:Films (13)

I like this quote from the movie: Other animals live in the present. Humans can not. So they invented hope. It's something I can think about.

I like the movie in general for breaking with storytelling conventions in an artful way without being so hard to follow that I just want to switch it off sighingly while exclaiming: "I guess it's art."

I may not understand the metaphors, which no doubt are plentiful throughout the movie, and therefor may not even understand what it is about or what Charlie Kaufman wants to say. But it certainly holding plenty of opportunities ready for letting the viewer get carried away by the movie's discussions about essential questions that are probably part of anybody's life at some point. I certainly got carried away to musing about all sorts of things several times. The discussions between the both main characters are often poetic and their course often takes on unexpected little turns. There are many things in that movie that I've not seen done well prior to this.

CW, in case you want to watch it: Suicide, Depression, Death and touching other unpleasant topics here and there

There's one other thing that I like about this movie: Parts of it are the most dream-like scenes that I've seen in any movie, as far as I can remember. I've been yearning for more accurate representations of the phenomenological idiosyncrasies of dreams for a while. Depending on the genre, filmmakers have tried different approaches, used many different effects and took advantage of technological innovations, as the were made, to depict dream scenes. Turns out all you need is a flatbed editor (or scissors and some tape or whatever editors used initially).

"I'm Thinking Of Ending Things" was the Charlie Kaufmann film that made me look up who wrote it. I've seen two movies of him before. But now I also know his name, somewhat his style, and much more of his work.