20100221

Sunday, February 21, 2010

I do my best thinking when I am going to sleep. So many profound thoughts have been forgotten because I didn’t write them down before falling asleep, or just upon waking, for that matter. If only I could hook up something to my brain that would record my thoughts while I was I am in that state, I would have a much more detailed and complete account of my thoughts. Maybe eventually that technology will be available. Maybe I should be the one to pursue inventing it.

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I was thinking about my conversation with Billy Rodriguez (a family friend) today, about Hume’s ethics. He mentioned a statement made by Hume about the impotence of reason in dealing with moral judgments, presumably in defense of religion, in response to a previous post I had made quoting Hume about sense experience being more reliable than the testimony of religious scriptures.

I made a pretty extensive explanation of Hume’s ethics to him, but that may have not been the best response. I don’t like to feel as if I’m intellectually bowling people over, or putting a heavy burden on them to sift through my writing to find the meaning, but I feel like that’s what I do too often. I would like to be more concise, but there just seems to be too much to say.

Anyway, the background information on Hume’s ethics may have been helpful, or even necessary to understanding the context of his statement about reason not relating to moral judgments, but I did have a new thought about it, which I didn’t state in the original reply.

If reason were truly impotent in determining ‘right’ from ‘wrong’, then we’d have no cause to assent to religious propositions about moral truth. We could accept some moral judgments and reject others, but not because they come from God or some religious authority. To reach this conclusion, we have to reason that God, or at least that religious scripture, is the source of moral truth, and use reason to defend that claim. Dismissing reason as playing some part in moral judgments would surely make the ability to determine moral truth or falsity impossible, as it cuts off any hope for justification as to why a statement is true or false.

20100220

Saturday, February 20, 2010

School is great. I could live in school. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if I end up doing something like that, turning into one of those lifelong academics. I wish I could do more now, but soon I’ll be able to. I go to shore duty and that should free up some more time for study. It’s not like I’m not studying a ridiculous amount as it is, I’m just not doing it in any particularly organized manner, and not for college credit. It’s all good, though. It seems like most of the classes I’ve taken, I’ve already been prepared for. Hopefully I can keep that going, at least to some extent. I suspect that there’s virtually no way that could be for medical school, but at least I can prepare as much as possible. Right now, philosophy is dominating my life, but I don’t see any reason why I’d have a problem shifting gears. In fact, philosophy is giving me a better faculty with which to understand everything else. It really is the paradigm for everything else—the philosophy behind it. The threads in the blanket of philosophy stretch out to every possible space they can reach, like life itself expands to the extremes of its own ability to survive.

I’ve been listening to Richard Dawkin’s The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. It’s very well put together, and the way it presents arguments is much more sophisticated and well put together than those in The God Delusion. I want to go back and revisit that one again as well. I’m planning on setting up another blog for book/literary reviews here: http://literaphile.blogspot.com/. And I’ll pour out some extensive thoughts on those book there, but The Greatest Show on Earth gave me a couple ideas I wanted to mention, because they tie in to a couple subjects I have been thinking about quite a lot lately. The first one came to me during a treatment of DNA, and how it is self-replicating. Mr. Dawkins talks about how someone being eaten by a tiger might at least feel some solace in the idea that they were being sacrificed to one of nature’s great beasts, and similarly with an anaconda. He even quotes Blake’s Tiger, Tiger during this segment. But, the he says that dying from the common cold just seems so “futile.” “But, it’s all futile,” he says, because DNA just has to replicate. It doesn’t care if it does it by the tiger eating you or the cold-virus making you sneeze. I don’t want to delve into evolution and DNA. I rather think Dr. Dawkins does a fine job of it in his book. But, I do want to compare the idea of DNA being a self-replicating chemical machine to the idea of nanobots. I am sure that this is not a new analogy, but, when listening to the audiobook, that was the first time it had crossed my mind.

A self-replicating nanobot world might end up being something very like a DNA world, as nanobots found better ways to carry out their replication and provide themselves with the resources they needed to replicate. I don’t think there’s much probability to the fear that self replicating nanobots could devour the entire world because they would be quite limited in their functionality. I really haven’t done the research or have the knowledge that I should on nanotechnology, especially since it’s an emerging industry and shows promise in being such an integral part of the future, and the futurist movement. But, that’s a subject I’ll have to elaborate on later.

Another idea I want to use in my political writing concerns Mr. Dawkin’s discussion of the reason why trees grow so tall—because they have had to compete against one another for sunlight in the forests. He talks about how growing taller costs the trees more valuable energy and resources, and that it would just be better if the trees could settle on a rule to grow to a certain height, and not grow any higher, they would save themselves from wasting a lot of energy. This would make a great analogy for the way our society works, and how, if we could just agree not to take advantage of each-other in competition, we’d save a lot of energy, and prevent a lot of suffering. More elaboration on that to come as well.

I really need to get working on writing these books, and I think I will be able to do that during the deployment. I hope I am not on the watch-bill for deployment, but it doesn’t look too promising. I’ve just been too excited to get back and get off of the USS VANDEGRIFT, finally. It’s been a long time and I’ve been through too much bullshit there, too much time spinning my wheels and not moving nearly as fast as I should have, thanks especially to several people who just can’t bear to see someone else do well because it would make them feel worse about their position in life. But enough with that negativity…

It’s time to reorganize, refocus, and make another push.

20100101

Friday, January 01, 2010

2010 is the year it all turns around. The past two years were a rumination process, really. I went through some difficult trials but it all radically altered my perspective. I’ve been doing some reflection on it all lately. Before, despite my success, I was sympathetic to an egomaniacal, individualistic outlook. I was vying for a right-wing libertarian lifestyle, out-of-hand rejecting any collectivist notions that I suspected of harboring or defending a lifestyle of dependency. Much of my life relates directly to my relationship with Liz. My humanity took her, and while, at the time, I believed that my example of independent strength and will, along with my financial support, was more than enough to enable her to be independent and strong as well. But, I overlooked or underestimated the psychological underpinnings of her tendency towards dependency. And, I can compare this on a global scale, to my attitudes, and popular attitudes about the lower classes, the homeless, the mentally ill, the disabled, many of the elderly, or the socially and economically disadvantaged in general. And, my change of heart was much to the benefit of personal relationships.

Although, during this period I did turn-off my self-confidence and turn-down my spirited mission for personal progress and to make a contribution to social progress, but this was, however subconsciously, induced because my overconfidence and self-importance was not in agreement with the character of my self-proclaimed purpose: Kaizen, betterment of self, inspiration of others, influencing social improvement. The ripples can make waves, and I have long known that my influence does fashion the course of history, and influence the whole of it—potentially influencing great shifts in direction. However, as I looked to this idea as a source of inspiration, I resorted to a form of solipsism, exalting myself above the majority of humanity and becoming unsympathetic to their barriers to self-actualization. When I was studying Buddhism, I read that when the bodhisattvas reach Nirvana, they then return to the suffering world to enlighten others, bringing them to Nirvana, with a goal of bringing all beings to this state. During the time of my life when I was coming into my own independence and exercising my abilities to the fullest, I felt like a Bodhisattva who had reached Nirvana, gotten a taste of the power of full self-expression, but while reveling in the power it afforded me, I had forgotten about everyone else. Well, that’s not enlightenment. It makes sense that the bodhisattvas have to come back, because leaving the world behind, or dominating it, isn’t enlightenment—it isn’t productive or positively powerful. It’s much easier to get one’s self to the point where they are fully self-expressed and engaged in self-actualization, than it is to get someone else there. And that is, in my case, as I suspect is similar to all humans, because of my tendency to overlook or be unsympathetic to any foreign psychological condition, obstructing any possibility for relation. And, relationship is integral to mutual inquiry, connection, and experience.

So, the last couple paragraphs, on this page, literally, and in my life, metaphorically, have been a development of how independence and personal power, when worshipped as the highest of all virtues, are not conducive to social excellence. This might seem straightforward and easy to understand for a child: Selfishness simply favors the self over all else, including family members, future generations, and humanity itself. It’s short sighted, because the current span of a human life is little more than a century, at best.

There is something to be said about the positive ideas I retained from that time period, which was from about 2005 to 2008. I learned how to be myself, to trust myself, and to know that I was capable of accomplishing much more than I ever seriously imagined myself to be able to do. Sure, I had heard it from my parents and teachers and people who loved me, but this was the time period where I really tested it out, and found that it was certainly true: I was powerful. And, I doubt if anything worthwhile—as far as goal-reaching and self-actualization goes—could be accomplished without an embrace of self-confidence a healthy development of one’s ego (“one’s ego” is redundant), because, without being aware of my own ability, it would surely be difficult for me to use it. So, contrary to Zen, total annihilation of the ego is not conducive to social progress, at least at this point in our technological development. I use “ego” in the sense of self-opinion or consciousness of one’s own personality, rather than the pejorative meaning—selfishness. To be self-expressed and self-actualized, a person needs to be aware of their self. But, the lesson I have learned here is this: I live for others just as much as I live for myself. If I become unbalanced or out of agreement with my core in my conscious approach to goal-fulfillment or goal-selection, I will return to balance, perhaps against the will of my ego.

Perhaps the ego is more a tool of the base of self, which is not fully expressed in conscious thought, than I previously considered it to be. Maybe the subconscious mind is not a tool to be used by the conscious, but the consciousness wielded by direction of a deeper, fuller, more stable, and interconnected purpose lying in the subconscious.

I have some more thoughts on how religion ties into all of this as well, and some plans I have for the future, concerning religion, writing, personal relationships, and business. But, I will write more about these later.