Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

Can we really talk about anything without it being a generalization, an ideal, an abstraction, that is empty of any substance whatsoever? Even when we talk about each other, it is always as a mere mental freeze-frame or portrait we are painting that has no existence in itself. Endless classifications within classifications within classifications. Try as we may, we can never get to the real thing in itself or it's presumptively self-evident being. That's how you know you're in a simulation!

For something to be absolutely real to us, it should be able to be as self-evidently conscious of itself as we are of ourselves. That's why for humans at least, the person is always realer--more present--than their body. It's the whole distinction assumed between being a what and being a who.

The difference between a mere intellectual knowledge of something and a lived intuitive understanding of it is the difference between knowing all about a map of a place as opposed to actually going there--of having memorized every detail of the blueprint of a house vs actually having lived there yourself. Living your life is thus always more of an art than a science---an ongoing experience and not just an account of certain biographical facts.

Sometimes I wonder if the 70's were really an alternative reality we fell into and only escaped with the sudden arrival of punk rock..

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In a universe as apparently big as ours, with something around 2 trillion galaxies all averaging 100 billion stars, all improbabilities eventually become inevitable.

Anti-consumerism--Only acquire those things that you would want if you were the last person on earth and had a year left to live.

Owning things sustains for us an illusion of permanence and identity as little more than just the "owner" of these things. The tragic sadness of this is suddenly revealed the moment we die, when all this stuff suddenly becomes what it really was all along--just old useless junk to be thrown away.

There is no inherent absolutivity of being--no irreducible substance or substrate underlying anything in our experience, not even the physical world. The whole experience of the "thingness" or "in-itselfness" of something is generated inside language itself where such an elusive essence simply evaporates into a network of interreferential and descriptive words and propositions. Abstractions of abstractions of abstractions all the way down. It is as if substance is the self-positing antipode to the insubstantiality of language, just as is the phenomenality or presence-making of conscious immediacy is to the non-phenomenality or meaning-making of cognitive representation.

Just as carrying a hammer turns everything into a nail to be hammered, so too does carrying a camera turn everyone into a posed object instead of a person and everywhere into a "scene" instead of a place. It all becomes about capturing and preserving moments to show others later on instead of experiencing them firsthand in their immediate realness.

It is as if having your own private and personal experiences is no longer valid, their sole value lying only in their being photogenic and shareable to others. What becomes of our life when it is no longer something happening just for us and to us? Where is the who anymore behind all this knee-jerk documentation of "having been there"? Were you really ever THERE at all?

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Probably the most uninteresting thing that can be said about anything is saying it is. It is a meaningless tautology--an immediately present image twisted back on itself as if not being present but elsewhere out of reach. Ahh but then this is the entrancing effect of language--to manufacture out of pure sensory perception a reality that goes on as if it were unperceived and "in-itself". A mere mirage of something now knowable and describable that before didn't need to be knowable and describable. A fiction of an experience as if it isn't experienced---a static and absolute "reality" that is happening totally independently of any consciousness of it or of any cognition of it.

Quotes from "Lost":

"Coincidence is not fate."--Mr. Echo

"Welcome to the wonderful world of "what the hell is goin on?"--Kate

Here I sit being a body having a thought of being a body. They are both going on at the same time, yet each somehow occurring outside of the other. They are the same, and yet not the same. How can this be?

What strange animals we must seem to the other beasts. Jabbering and hand-waving creatures balancing on their hind legs and strutting around all wrapped up in colorful plant fibers.