Month: October 2013
You are a conscience, you are not you
Neurons, atoms, chemicals that’s what makes up the earth, the universe, the sun, the stars but do they make up us? The idea of a soul or some kind of ghost like self within our physical body of mass, is not a new one, nor is it dismissed as insane. But I just can’t believe it. I mean looking from a realism perspective I must assume that everything in existence is observable, in some sense. Now I don’t mean that everything that exists can be seen by the naked eye, in fact I am not discriminating against the other senses at all. As smell and touch are equally as ‘true’ as site. What I mean is what is deemed true in existence is what has sensory observability, e.g planes, birds, stars and pasta. Arguably various scientific theories such as the multiple universe theory suggest that our finite senses don’t allow us access to observation of everything, I mean I can’t ‘see’ numerous universes, but if enough substantial evidence was posed in favour of such a theory then I would consider it potentially correct.
So back to the original preposition, do we have a soul? When looking at ourselves in a materialist sense, I.e a bundle of biology, it proves no more ludicrous to assert ourselves to obtaining a ‘soul’ than to conclude that my radiator has a soul since both objects are no more than a combination of atoms functioning in a specific way. Of course our brains are far more complex than a radiator but does that really progress to the resultant conclusion of a soul? Of course not, where is the evidence that complexity evokes the need for a soul? Well I guess our ‘conscience’ our dillusioned sense of free will and ‘spirit’ I shan’t discuss free will, as I have in a previous post. But the concept of a soul, to me, comes under the same category as the sense of free will that is that they are both ‘illusions’ our conscience or moreover just ‘conscience’ is as a result of billions of neurons and the atoms they are made up of creating a persistent illusion of ‘self’ I am no more a being than a radiator. Infact ‘I’ do not exist. No one does. We are all just complex constructions.
That may sound somber but surprisingly it isn’t all doom and gloom, it means we can never die because there is no ‘we’ and any sense of ‘death’ is just a break down in the atoms and neurons that have created the embodiment of a highly complex structure. It also means that the possibility of existence is almost infinite as it relies on no more than a collection of substances. For example if programmed correctly, with the right atoms and components it would be possible to make a fully functioning ‘human’ with just as much rights as any other natural biological person. To conclude we are no more advanced than artificial intelligence, and we have no say, in anything, even the perception of a ‘self’ is formed from biology. We are not. But conscience is.
To anyone feeling lost.
Nothing within you is ever lost. If you ever feel like you’ve lost who you are, you haven’t, it’s just fallen apart. All the bits are there, but they’re not together so they’re not functioning properly. It’s like a jigsaw in a jar. It can begin perfect, all pieced together but a little knock to that jar and the pieces fall apart, some might remain in clumps and that’s what remains of ‘you’. You might remain kind and caring and opinionated but loose confidence and personality. You haven’t lost it, they’re just not pieced together yet, but they will be. The jar is your skull, containing your brain, all you need to do is get the pieces together, get them functioning. But you’re never lost, gone, empty. You’re always there you’re just not always working as a unit. All it takes is combing the pieces into a more confident you, a more content you. It can take time, but during that time, don’t loose hope, hope isn’t something that relies on a jigsaw piece, it’s external of the puzzle, and it’s what’ll fix the puzzle.
I know I’ve been absent for a while, sorry, I also know this isn’t my usual type of post, again sorry.
Does the future exist?
It’s not a question I’ve pondered on a lot, that is until recently, I’m not sure what triggered me to even consider such a question I guess maybe the way in which we use our language to label almost everything. Everything including things we don’t understand or can’t claim to be ‘true’ I.e. God, love, pain etc. We can’t define these things and they are certainly subjective.. Are these traits applicable to the idea of a ‘future’?
If one doesn’t believe in any form of divinity or destiny then surely one must accept that the future doesn’t exist, for to exist it would be predetermined. For example one might claim that the future is say in two minutes time from now, the present. But to say with certainty that the future exists would rely on the concept of a greater being that had already put it in place. Something that had determined that there is going to be a ‘in two minutes time’. But surely if ‘in two minutes’ time is already determined it isn’t the future at all, because it is already ‘there’, it is currently, presently existing. Therefor it is ‘present’ but just not present in our current time.
Another argument is that we never experience the future, only the present. It is impossible for anything or anyone to ever exist in the future, because the present is inescapable, therefor the ‘future’ is unobservable by any of the senses, it is also, as expressed earlier unexplainable by definition. Or is it? A way of defining the future could indeed be ‘things still to come’. Although things still to come are in my opinion a continuous set of ‘presents’. However the ambiguity of the ‘future’ surely allows for interpretation, although ‘events yet to come’ are unanimously almost entirely ‘unknown’ why not label it with a word ‘future’ allowing future to vaguely assert a more conclusive concept. Although the future is arguably ‘nothing’ and never will be this doesn’t mean it can’t have a word to it. A meaningless word but nonetheless a quicker more efficient way of expressing ourselves.
Catching smoke. 