people will always remember how you made them feel, long after they’ve forgotten the particular information you’ve told them (read this in a blog post, so true)

If everything is determined, then I think there’s a superhuman part of us that can tap into the causal calculations and predict what’s going to happen next. This is why we sometimes dream of things before they happen.

If everything is determined, then I think there’s a superhuman part of us that can tap into the causal calculations and predict what’s going to happen next. This is why we sometimes dream of things before they happen.

There must be absolutes. Because to say there are none, is itself an absolute. Or, maybe it is to speak, is the only untruth. To not say anything at all, is truth.

My metaphysics informs my ethics; what I think is informs what I think should be.

The rules and values are arbitrary, yes. Maybe they are conditioned, or socially imposed, or even just an illusion. How we got them does not matter. It only matters that we do, in fact, have them. And that “fact” need not even be true in the material sense. So long as it is true phenomenologically. For our philosophies need only be humanist. Because when we say “our” we are referring, of course to ourselves. Here is where I make my first assumption, and it is a metaphysical one: assuming that “we” are what we experience, or at least this is what we our concerned with during our lifetimes.

Now, why it matters that we do, in fact, have rules and values, even if they are arbitrary. Like the rules of any game are arbitrary, but there is still a way to win and lose. Chess, for example, has rules. The knight moves in an L-shape, the game is over when the king is “checkmated,” and so on. Now, arguments about why the rules of chess are as they are would be fruitless. In practice, it would be ridiculous for a player to spend mental energy thinking of “why” the rules are as they are. Instead, he must devote all his psychic powers to his next moves and defenses, if he hopes to defeat a formidable opponent.

Samely, there are rules to life generally. You must drink water to survive, sex creates new life, and so on. This may seem obvious, but consider that it just as easily could be otherwise. Our material (or what appears to be material) universe is mostly predictable and only slowly dynamic. This is what Hume discusses about being thankful for the order of the universe. So my philosophy is this: remain thankful for the order and the phenomenological nature of the universe, and play by the rules to win the game.

We were born into prison, bondage of cause and effect, we cannot break out of the time and space that we were born into, so that we will only experience the few causal reactions that are determined by the space and time to which we were appointed, and thus the short, subsequent period thereafter which would be our lifetime, turned out to be a prison, relative to the vast expanse of the rest of the universe that we cannot experience (unless we live many lives).

Now that god is dead, and we are morally bereft, these new values of the Ubermensch must be motivated by a love of this world and of life.

What if it’s all true? Everything that anybody’s ever believed or known is true, simply because there was a reason for it. If the truth is just whatever is. So that whatever is, is true, whatever it may be.

My consciousness is connected to the material world. It cannot exist without the physical. Is this true?

The concept of not having something seems to me so fickle; so too with the concept of something having not yet occurred (future), or having already occurred (past); time and space are very thin veils between what there is here and now.

Everything is a choice. Sitting still is a choice. Not choosing is a choice. It is the nature of a spatial choosing thing that, in time, it is always choosing—every second affecting matter somehow. What we do affects what is—ourselves and everything else.

Choosing is what we call action by a thing with will. For everything else it is just acting. And everything is always acting.

You should be guided by appearances for practical purposes; all you’re refraining from is making truth claims about those appearances.

The absurdist claim—life is nonsense—seems to me an arbitrary value judgment: for is life not also plenty of sense? Think of how much there is still between us and absolute chaos. Do we not then have some order and sense about how we might live, albeit not the whole picture. But history has sentenced people to death with much less than a whole picture, so might we get along and live with the puzzle pieces?

Too simple a way to view our life: certainty and uncertainty. Why must that scale be the only place where we find meaning? Do we not find meaning in uncertain art? The mathematician might say we feign artistic meaning. But by what justification? By his maths?

When I ask myself, “What should I do?” My next question is: which one of me is the “I” referring to? Or, from which of my moral frameworks is the “should” derived? Then there seems to be a morality of moralities. A decision framework for selecting one of many decision frameworks. A higher order morality that chooses which morality to apply in each situation. But does this cause an infinite regression?

People have names for the same reason that books and songs have titles. We like to be able to call it something. Even though, as Sartre notes in Nausea, “Things are divorced from their names.”

Names of things don’t really make sense. Form doesn’t match function; the physical thing isn’t represented in the sound. Except maybe in the case of onomatopoeias.

Nietzsche writes in Zarathustra:

“My brother, when thou hast a virtue, and it is thine own virtue, thou hast it in common with no one. To be sure, thou wouldst call it by name and caress it; thou wouldst pull its ears and amuse thyself with it. And lo! Then hast thou its name in common with the people, and hast become one of the people and the herd with thy virtue! Better for thee to say: ‘Ineffable is it, and nameless, that which is pain and sweetness to my soul, and also the hunger of my bowels.’ Let thy virtue be too high for the familiarity of names, and if thou must speak of it, be not ashamed to stammer about it.”

There seems to be a hierarchy of meaning from names: highest, there is the kind where we do not name it at all—this is what Nietzsche recommends. In the middle, is a diversity of names that allow for some differentiation—this we do with books and people. We say this book is non-fiction and its subject is automobiles; that person is a mechanic and a deist. We say as if this nomenclature is exhaustively and perfectly descriptive; though it comes closer than the lowest, it is not perfect. And the lowest, when we have one name for a diverse thing.

We have one name for love, as if it were describing one thing. We bring our “love” to the herd as if we had it in common with them. We say, I am in love! As if it means the same thing. And we set parameters, guidelines and expectations that are the averages of other loves, most usually those loves proximal to our time and place.

So too with justice. Justice is a general concept, but surely its applications are ad hoc. Not to mention that there are competing justice models and we have not agreed on just one. So that it is most appropriate when someone says, “That is just!” The most appropriate response is: “What exactly do you mean by justice?”

Surely love and justice are general concepts with Forms of which there are many different conceptions. Just as I am, and my identity is, something like a Form with many different renderings in reality.

Let I and love be ineffable. Caress it and pull its ears!