Whether we swim in the seas of Bentham’s utilitarianism
(sacrifice for the good of the many), or John Locke’s forests of natural laws
(for the good of the one) or rattle around in Kant’s canyons of rights (for the
good of reason), one thing is equally familiar from such trespasses is that the
philosophical bent of morality relies on the construct of the human mind and
its relation to mortality. There are circuitous paths that devolve within, into
productivity, entitlements based on goodness, humility, greed based on badness,
yet all such paths ultimately stare at the same fate, death!
So in this entropic climate of living, why has the human
train of thought so evolved into this form of attribution substitution away
from reality? Everyone is exercising they’re purposed thoughts into productive
creation of personal wealth to the detriment of any and all. Yet everyone knows
that the common fate lurks closer at each passing second. The finite in the
seemingly infinite is the reality and all else is a substitution of that
reality.
Oh, I don’t mean to be morbid about the whole thing, but
what fascinates me is the human mind in general and how it behaves against the
odds. Human life is entropic, a linear progressive chaotic event with only one
ending. We might consider freezing, brains, heads, or even whole bodies to
resurrect later, but the whiff of the soul once gone can only return in the
minds of the Nuevo-riche, pseudo-intellectuals. For them the world will go on
forever and if it does not then it must be somebody’s fault.
What then makes us substitute for reality reality for this
pie on the land? This collection of “somethings” that eventually is strewn to
the wind as “nothings.” What makes people who they are? What makes a tyrant a
tyrant and a seemingly benevolent master an ill-begotten hiding in the shadows,
monster? For, if all fate is conjured up as blackness or as light, it still
remains an “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.”
The precept of this underpinning is enormous. It gives some
direction, some meaning to life. The enormity is so overwhelming to the most
intellectual of all brains, that even it cannot fathom the consequence of such
an inevitability, even with all probability projections and all theoretical
conjectures laid out, even Einstein bluntly stated, "As
I have said so many times, God doesn't play dice with the world." By “world” did he
also mean the people that inhabit it? Of course he did! So if the world
according to this genius is not to be trivialized with the game of chance, then
why do we continue on this path? Humans by nature are survivalists and that is also their detriment.
We are perpetually rolling the dice in economics,
masquerading cleverer and clever themes of minute asymmetries to exploit
fortunes and hiding those gains from the necessary taxes to keep society at its
best. In medicine we also throw caution to the wind in search of a probability
function that points south when all needles say “north.” None of the heretical,
probability and correlative massages soothe the reality of what is and how to
fix it. But through it all one certain fact remains constant that life will
terminate for all and that is a 100% surety. No Confidence Intervals or mean
errors or z scores needed here!
http://youtu.be/d4o13isDdfY
Authors, and so
many of them that I have lost count, write about the immortality of the human
being. Some conjecture the Von Nuemann’s self-replicating machine what will
co-evolve with the human DNA and create a whole new species that will inhabit
another planet when we as race start to spill over earth’s capacity, or press
the dreaded button and evict ourselves into oblivion. The hubris that is human
intelligence has a remarkable capacity of substitution. It substitutes where it
meets a dead-end. For in mathematics, which is the language of life, there
cannot be an absence of a solution to this conundrum of extinction. For
example, Andrew Wiles solved what seemed impossible to solve for many decades; Fermat’s last
theorem. And yet every hour 3 species on
the planet go extinct and nearly 1.5 billion have laid down themselves as
fossils in the sediment on this earth’s mantle, and we continue thinking, and
continue to exploit asymmetries for personal gain at all levels.
On the other hand, if we are to comprehend this
inevitability, then what are we to do about it? Charity, real compassion and empathy towards each other
would be a good start. And we might stop trying to substitute meaning for
reality.
True we are living in the ocean of Biggish Data. Even though
we have Femtophotography that takes 1 trillion frames per second and all the
data-warehouses will, by 2020, have 8 exabytes of data that is
8,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. What are we to do about this vast empire of
digits, logically and truthfully? What is apparent is the manipulation of a
biased selection of this data to prove a personal viewpoint. The heuristics of
the limited mind to get ahead is to manipulate the minds of the others to gain
access to the legendary place of self-importance. But what happens then?
Eventually the ruse is unearthed by a smarter mind and all things revert to the
mean, so to speak and life is roughed up just a little in passing.
I come back to the premise of life. The existential preface
must consider the inevitable postscript and the potentiality beyond before
contemplating action.
Is it right?
Is it just?
Is it good?
So,
Live in Grace.
Live in Harmony.
Live in Peace!
Truth has never been told in better words than these...
"There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow.
If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come,
it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come—the
readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows what is't
to leave betimes, let be." ~ Shakespeare
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