evolution – William Dare

Creõ

The heart of creativity lies exactly there: the heart.

The Latin root for create is creõ, which means “belief”. The Indo-Proto-European root for creõ is cor-, which means “heart”.

It is not thought that moves man into great action, not merely ideas that imbue mind with clairvoyant insight; it is the heart. There we find man’s inner chambers flooded with ecstasy or anguish, the impetus of evolution. Necessity—who is the mother of invention— breeds struggle; we are not born adapted to this world. Struggle shapes our constitution, our capacities, and through this struggle our strength and fortitude is born.

Where there is no feeling, no passion, no pain: there is no creation. Anxiety is the greatest struggle. It is struggle internalized, adopted by the psyche, embodied by the ever reflective mind searching for resolution. It is the single source of genius. Anxiety, or more poignantly, existential angst, is the overwhelming flux of feeling much. It incarnates as a loss of certitude, a banishment of reliable logic, formalized answers. It is accompanied by a frenzied mania chasing for vivification, for illumination and elucidation. It shuns what is presented and rejects the status quo.

Creativity is the enterprise of evolution. The greater the struggle, the greater the chances for unsurpassed evolutionary advantage. Necessity alone breeds innovation: it is an impasse that can only be surmounted by a reflective mind that seeks for its answers inside itself, rather than outside itself, within the world.

Among mankind, the mind has shouldered the responsibility for evolutionary adaptation. No longer do we succumb to the necessities of the physical world. Instead we project our lavish visions of a world modified according to our liking, to our internal ideals. We have inverted the tables of evolution from a wholly extrinsic force to one that is intrinsically borne from the will to power; that is, the will to imbue our influence, our mindful vision, into the world. For the creators, the self-willed autonomous agents: Nature no longer manipulates man: it is man that manipulates nature. Humanity has stretched beyond the zenith of possibility. We become the master by programming our will into the world, by leveraging our values through information and knowledge to suit our desired ends, to manifest our will to power.

Because evolution has transcended physical constraint by occupying the multifarious magnitude of mind, our struggles are no longer physiological, but psychological. That is why anxiety is the greatest virtue of genius. It is the psychologically imposed feeling of struggle that grants passion room for creative invention, for the obdurate heart of crushing genius to reformulate the rules of the game, the laws of society and nature, to transcend the existential angst imposed by the struggle rendered from change.

manifestum philosophiae

I want to start a culture. Specifically, a school of thought. This school will operate independently from any existing cultural institution; moreover, it will remain free from the influence of any existing governmental, religious, academic, or community organization. It will be a community school ipso facto, a social organism composed of collaborating individuals. To attend, you must be a participating citizen who lives and works within the community.

The following is a preliminary framework in which this culture will embody:

This evolving draft is the culmination of all the principles of wisdom I have distilled throughout my life.

These are the core ideas embodying this manifesto: Subjective, Objective, Synthetic, Exponential, Evolution.

praefātiō

I exist. Specifically: the statement I exist posits the objective from the subjective.

Existence is paradox.

Paradox is contradiction. Specifically: Paradox is conflict.

Within the space of the present moment is duality: a priori and a posteriori: infinite and finite, divisible and indivisible, continuum and locus, composite and prime, even and odd, whole and part, totality and partiality, relation and position, dimension and point, possibility and necessity, subjective and objective, relationship and entity, essence and existence, type and population, abstract and concrete, concept and fact, mental and physical, inclusive and exclusive, spiritual and corporeal, mind and body, passion and reason, deduction and induction, wisdom and knowledge, intrinsic and extrinsic, holism and perspective, monism and pluralism, conclusion and premise, God and man, ad inifinitum. (Consider exploring the following: sufficient and necessary, antecedent and consequent, fluid and static, life and death, )

Composite is the whole.

Prime is the parts.

The greatest number is one, 1. Specifically: One establishes a subjective perspective.

The second greatest number is two, 2. Specifically: Two establishes an objective perspective.

Each subjective perspective establishes a relationship with the other. Specifically: the apprehension of a second perspective is impressive.

Being the first odd prime number, three, 3, Δ, is the most divine, the most excellent, the strongest. exemplī grātiā: triangle, logic (two premises, third conclusion), et cetera.

The number three represents change, as delta, Δ.

Given two points, any third point may be deduced. Specifically: given an infinite series of points, the existence of any two points establish a third point. More precisely: Presented with a third, the established relationship between any two exclusive subjective perspectives establishes an inclusive objective whole. The triangle signifies this inclusive relationship, Δ.

I.

terminus a quo: all “matter” exists as static energy. Specifically: “matter” is equivalent to static energy.

Energy is present totality. Specifically: energy is the existing universe.

Energy is an indirectly observed quantity. Quantity is an assigned value, a symbol denoting a numerically assigned point of magnitude or multitude.

Energy is observed as a transference, a change, Δ, in state, between objects.

“Matter” is an object that occupies space and possesses mass.

Space is the n-dimensional extent dictated by underlying structures within a boundless continuum in which objects and events possess a relative position and direction. Specifically: Space is context.

Mass is a quantitative measure of an object’s resistance to change, Δ. Specifically, the greater the mass: the greater the inertia; the greater the gravity, ergo the greater resistance to change.

II.

terminus a quo: the universe exists in perpetual flux. Specifically: the natural world exists as continual change.

Flux is change.

Change is exponential. Specifically: change is signified by increasing returns. More precisely, change: progresses or regresses, increases or decreases, expands or contracts, develops or diminishes.

Where there is no change, there is equilibrium. Specifically, the absence of change is: homeostasis, preservation, status quo, routine, habit.

III.

terminus a quo: all life, all living organisms, exist under a single axiom: “Self-preservation”. Specifically: the preservation of body and/or mind. More precisely: the preservation of the living organism’s body or mind; genetic or psychological information. “Self-preservation” is homeostasis.

“Self-preservation” is the product of evolution. Specifically: the ability of an individual organism to adapt to its natural world. More precisely: the capacity of an individual organism to adapt to the context in which it is presently situated.

Adaptation is evolution. Specifically: Adaptation is flourishing. Ergo, evolution is flourishing.

IV.

The ideal culture must embody two axiomatic principles: “Know thyself” and “I know that I know nothing”.

Combined together they form paradox.

Paradox is conflict, contradiction. The presence of paradox produces the elemental state of the evolutionary life: synthesis.

Synthesis is creation. Specifically: understanding, resolution, harmony, union, learning.

V.

Regarding the first axiomatic principle: to “know thyself” requires apprehension of self. Specifically: acknowledging the extent or bounds of your individual subjective consciousness. The subjective consciousness is finite part.Thus, terminus a quo, “know thyself” is finite knowledge. It exists in parts and i through action, through experimentation, through testing of your self, your reactions.

Regarding the second axiomatic principle: “I know that I know nothing” requires apprehension of world. Specifically: the extent of the general objective world. The objective world is infinite whole. Thus, terminus a quo, “I know that I know nothing” is ignorance.

Thus, the synthesis of the first two axiomatic principles is paradox.

VI.

The process of mental evolution, termed “learning” or “education”, will embody a key tenant: “praxis“. More precisely: a posteriori inductive experience and a priori deductive reflection. Specifically: action and reflection, empiricism and theory, experimentation and hypothesis, divergence and convergence, doing and thinking.

Praxis embodies two features: “novel experience” and “meditative reflection”. More precisely: broad stimulating exposure and deep introspective thought. Specifically: gathering new sensation and establishing existing memory.

VII.

Synthesis is a process that individuates conscious experience, holistic phenomenal consciousness, individual subjective perspective.

The external world provides the parts. The internal world provides the whole. The process of synthesis occurs through reflection.

Synthesis is a product of the will to power.

VIII.

Will to power is a manifestation of the first axiom: “self-preservation”. Specifically: will to power is the manifested intention to “self-preserve”.

Will to power is the driving mechanism of the process of synthesis. Specifically: synthesis is a result, a consequence, a corollary, a conclusion

Will to power is produced through a conflict of intention: through struggle, through frustration, through challenges, through obstacles, through pain, through confusion.

IX.

Conflict is exists either externally or internally. Specifically: the phenomenon of conflict exists a posterior experience or a priori thought; body or mind.

Conflict of intention achieves synthesis through active inquiry, through inquisition, through curiosity, through wonder, through asking questions.

Critical inquiry or critical thinking is the process of recalling the two axiomatic principles as a means of identifying subjective theory, or latent mental assumptions, and criticizing or challenging new experience or information about the world.

X.

Recall: The more mass the more resistance to change.

Cultivating Successful Paradigms: Typological v. Population Thinking

Today I read an article in Business Week titled Why China Doesn’t Have Its Own Steve Jobs. The second paragraph struck me:

Former vice-president of Google global and president of Google China Kai-fu Lee explained on his weibo that it was because Chinese education puts too much emphasis on reciting and memorizing stuff instead of fostering critical thinking.

As the article further mentions, China’s collectivist culture or “herd mentality” wouldn’t permit the kind of narcissistic egoism that characterizes Job’s genius, and I think that’s a darn shame.

Innovative entrepreneurialism/ executive leadership requires a degree of egoism– that is, fierce self-reliance, self-confidence, non-conformity/individualism and narcissism. These qualities allow individuals to take more risks, bet on themselves more often, think more creatively and retain more faith in their individual vision, especially in the face of adverse circumstance/ opinion. I doubt don’t these people can be difficult to deal with, but their vision is inspiring and contagious.

China needs to place more emphasis on creativity, novel thinking, and the individual value of a person, their ideas and experience. America could do a better job retaining their share in these areas as well– instead we’re busy standardizing students and their thinking like China, like somehow that’s the answer to our problems. It’s a matter of typological thinking v population thinking: one emphasizes Platonic-ideals and abstracted averages, the other emphasizes evolutionary-variation and unique individuals.

The difference between Typological thinking and Population Thinking goes back to the classic distinction between a priori knowledge and a posteriori knowledge: knowing by way of axiomatic definitions, and knowing by way of experiential intuitions. This distinction manifests as deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning, relations of ideas and matters of fact, analytic statements and synthetic statements, contingent and necessary propositions, quantitative and qualitative properties, and the like.

Typological thinking is deductive and categorical in nature. Its roots go back to Plato whose philosophy codified this form of thinking by maintaining that the physical world adheres to ideas or eidos. Characterized by ‘forms’ such as the Equal and the Good and other such values and virtues, Platonism holds that there are a limited number of fixed, unchangeable ideas that underlie observable variation. The gradation and discontinuities observed in nature were explained simply as ‘gaps’ between natural ‘ideas’ (types). As a result, gradual evolution by variation was a logical impossibility for the typologist and evolution at all could only occur in steps, from one ‘form’ or type to another. Modernism of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries utilized the idealism of Platonic philosophy (Think Kant)

In contrast, Population thinking is inductive and qualificational in nature. Darwin posited this type of thinking when he introduced his theory of evolution. It maintains the uniqueness of everything in the organic world, that all animals or humans or plants possess qualities distinct to themselves alone, and that even individuals continue to change throughout the duration of their life. Each organism possesses unique features that can be described only through inductive methods such as statistic reasoning to produce terms appropriate for the average. However, statistical terms are merely abstractions and not indicative of the individuals that actually compose reality.

Ultimately, the typologist is an idealist who hold that only type (eidos) is real and that variation is an illusion, while the populationist hold that type (average) is merely an abstraction and that only variation is real.

You may be asking yourself why this is important. One word: change. Life is characterized by change, and change is absolutely necessary for the variation that facilitates evolutionary adaptation. Typological thinking treats the world idealistically, giving everything a proper place and name. But this is not reflective of reality, or the observable world. It is only reflective of our symbolic mind where ideas can persist without variation (the concept of tree does not change in my mind).

We need to encourage variation, encourage change, novelty, and creativity if we have any desire to flourish and succeed. Simply adhering to prescribed notions of ideal states and ideas will guarantee eventual failure. And in my mind, believing we have it all figured out, that we’ve got the basics down and we’re doing it all right, is a dangerous form of hubris. Success– adaptive variation–requires valuing individuals, their ideas and experience, rather than some abstracted average dictated to us from above. Statistics and science are helpful, but not with regards to possibility. In this area they fail more often than not.

Also, typological thinking creates biases and stereotypes by prescribing labels and abstracted terms to everything. Population thinking is more open and tolerant because it is reflective and observant of all variation and experience, recognizing that there is always more than meets the mind. But this comes down to man’s propensity for control, his desire for the will to power and to dominate, which has pros and cons and is situationally contingent. Because typological thinking is assertive by nature, it is good for positing and leading and commanding, but it is poor for learning and observing and reflecting. William James said:

“There can be a tendency to label something in order to negate its impact. It is easier to brush off or control what is perceived as solid instead of fluid.”

Perhaps this is why man has the tendency to label everything at first glance instead of experiencing things as idiosyncratic and unique phenomena.

What typological thinking allows for is control. When we label and abstract and standardize we delude ourselves that we’re in control, that our ratiocinations are reflective of what is. Now, it is true that this type of thinking is useful, but its shortcomings apply when forecasting into the future. This is because the physical world is in flux and ever changing. Formalized logic applied to matter is most useful within the time and context it originally created and diminishes in utility/ value as time progresses and change becomes more evident. Eventually the logical structure can no longer hold together as the premised facts of matter change so drastically they can no longer be said to be true.

(This may be a bit abstract so I’d suggest reading Axioms (pdf) as a nice little introductory piece, or if you are so inclined, check out Kant’s Prolegomena for any Future Metaphysics and Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding)

The point I want to make is that as a nation we need to relinquish the tendency to think typologically in favor of the more evolutionary population thinking. Specifically, we should do away with standardized methods of schooling that quantify instead of qualify: This means focusing on quality rather than quantity. We need to develop a system for encouraging quality teachers, not by necessarily measuring their efficiency or effectiveness. All that does is emphasis fulfilling whatever criteria we lay out. Same goes for students. I would argue that the quality of student and their thinking has declined significantly since the advent of standardized tests which resulted in teaching material and learning facts that are minimally necessary for passing or getting by.

We should value diversity. Diversity of methods, opinions, ideas, etc. Value individuals. What criteria would I require for delivering quality teachers and students? Output. Productivity. Activity. Experience. Something that indicates they are actively producing. This will indirectly indicate the aptitude and ability of the individual, as well as indicate their motivation and passions. I wouldn’t give grades, per say. I would let their work, their results, do the speaking.

However, there’s a hitch: cultivating leaders requires diversity, but their success dictates uniformity: its paradoxical.

Additional references:

Elliott Sober (1994). Conceptual issues in evolutionary biology . MIT Press: Bradford Book.^

Marjorie Grene (1990). Evolution, “Typology” and “Population Thinking” American Philosophical Quarterly, 27(3), 237-244.^

opprimere

Lots of unrefined, undeveloped rambling:

I believe that oppression is man’s greatest asset. I believe that when man is not oppressed, he has no need to adapt, no need to grow and acheive and strive and thrive. I would say that oppression is the ultimate good. Since I can think of nothing pleasing about actively undergoing oppression, I would say that it is tantamount to suffering. But like suffering, oppression presents an opportunity to tap into previously unknown potentials in order to endure and survive.

What is oppression? More or less, it is “the exercise of authority or power in a burdensome, cruel, or unjust manner”, or “the feeling of being heavily burdened, mentally or physically, by troubles, adverse conditions, anxiety, etc.” If man is to live as a truly free and autonomous being, one can argue that there is no such thing as just authority and that all authority is a burden.

The etymology of oppression? Coined mid-14c., as “cruel or unjust use of power or authority,” from Fr. oppression (12c.), from L. oppressionem, noun of action from pp. stem of opprimere. Meaning “action of weighing on someone’s mind or spirits” is from late 14c.

Oppression is nothing more than demands. Demands are the effect of some initial cause. Demands instantiate voids to be filled, or requirements to be satisfied, with a response such as thought or action. Humans respond to these voids by exercising human ingenuity, innovation and invention. These responses exist as conceptualizations, systems, meanings, or structures where they inhabit the mind and manifest as through our action.

I believe that our efforts to escape from oppression, from physical or mental demands and the duress they may cause, provide us with the ultimate salvation by rescuing us from our previously cramped conceptions of human possibility and forcing us to expand our horizons of what it means to be fully human. When we commit to escaping oppression we commit to adapting, we commit to conceding outdated paradigms and belief systems for a novel, alternative perspective.

Where does oppression take place? It can occur to the mind and the body. I believe civilization has capitalized on the venture of oppressing the mind. Nature imposes its own form of oppression. Natural, or environmental, oppression, was much more of an issue in the past due to our failure to capture the nature of cause and effect as well as our frail ability to leverage physical laws to alter or overpower the course of physical phenomena. Throughout our evolution, however, we’ve managed to innovate and invent ways of overcoming the oppression of natural physical constraints.

Body and mind are inextricable, so that what oppresses the mind manifests simultaneously in the body, and what oppresses the body manifests simultanesouly in the mind. In this way, as man alleviates physical oppression, he simultaneously frees his mind. But where does that leave the mind?

All life wishes to not only survive, but thrive. Existence depends on ensuring a continuity. Life does not want equilibrium. Life wants the power to create its own equilibrium, to impose its own balance, its own demands, on the world.

The oppression that occurs in the mind originates from abstractions generated and perpetuated by culture, from power relations vying for authority and dominant influence. What are these abstractions? They are belief systems, language, meaning, conceptions like truth and law, etc. What are these power relations? The forces generated by competition between opposing ideologies. These forces present themselves as the will, or the emotional driver reinforcing every form of action.

Culture is a conglomeration of these abstractions and power relations. Culture shapes and programs individuals with the systems of abstractions and relations necessary for navigating, acting and reacting, within the culture.

Culture produces individuals and these individuals produce new physical boundaries that expand or contract oppression.

Was man ever a blank slate? There was never a garden of eden. The first oppression was natural environmental oppression. Out of human’s adaptation arose social relations and ultimately oppression.

Does scarcity drive oppression? When there is plentitude, is man oppressed? Only when social oppression continues to persist.

Oppression forces you to make a choice between fighting to anhiliate and overpower the oppression or acquiescing the mind and body under its force. One is active, the other is passive.

Education is oppressive. This oppression, when actively overcome, is positive. When this oppression overcomes, it is negative.

What is value? What determines value? Does all value maintain an equivalent price? Is value determined by emotional attachment? Utility? One can say that anything that is useful possesses an emotional attachment, since our emotional reflexes arise from deep primal impulses to survive.

What is value? Clearly utility has something to do with it, but then again, hardly anything at all. One can agree that just about anything can be useful to someone at sometime, but not someone at just anytime or all the time. So value has something to do with utility. Is art valuable? It produces an emotional response that aids in your well being. Love is valuable because, in some other degree, it does the same.

Because we cannot use every useful thing all the time, we must consider how we use our time. In this way we establish a hierarchy of values that serve us according to the proportional time we spend in any given activity.

Some abstract, qualifiable values are information, experience, feelings, thoughts, and I’m sure the list goes on, but these seem to be the most basic.

Evolutionary Economics: Organic Analysis of Economic Growth

Abstract: This essay explores whether it is possible or desirable for present-day economic theory to incorporate biological or evolutionary insights of the type suggested by Alfred Marshall but not fully embraced by him.

If the study of economics is to function as a progressive system that guides and explains the behaviors of men as free and creative agents, it is necessary to examine the study in an open and dynamic way that emphasizes the growth of knowledge and qualitative factors as the prevailing force of change and progress. Early on Marshall (2009) discovered the inherent error with rational mechanistic economic systems when he said “economics, like biology, deals with matter, of which the inner nature and constitution, as well as the outer form, are constantly changing” (p. 637). Whether Marshall knew it or not, the problem between statical and biological theories is fundamentally a philosophical one. This essay will explore this problem, delineate its philosophical roots, and build a case in favor of evolutionary economics.

The central thesis of this essay argues that neoclassical economic models operate in the outdated modernist paradigm that utilize rational closed systems which are, as a result, authoritarian and unsustainable with respects to free market innovation and evolution. The argument presented here is that economic models need to shift away from quantitative measures emphasizing ideal equilibrium states and towards a post-modern conception that accounts for freedom and change. In this way economics will reflect nature accurately, i.e. men are individual and free agents acting interdependently within an evolving economic landscape. This will provide holistic and sustainable model for interpreting progress by individuating agents according to inevitable qualitative changes within an economic system.

Continue reading “Evolutionary Economics: Organic Analysis of Economic Growth”

Intelligence: Novel Enterprise & Life Outcomes

Intelligence should be reconsidered. Adaptability should be the measure of value.

“….more intelligent individuals are more likely than less intelligent individuals to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel preferences and values that did not exist in the ancestral environment and thus our ancestors did not have, but general intelligence has no effect on the acquisition and espousal of evolutionarily familiar preferences and values that existed in the ancestral environment.” -Satoshi Kanazawa, The Hypothesis from The Scientific Fundamentalist: A Look at the Hard Truths About Human Nature

According to the Savanna Principle, The human brain has difficulty comprehending and dealing with entities and situations that did not exist in the ancestral environment. As a result, “more intelligent individuals should be better able to comprehend and deal with evolutionarily novel (but not evolutionarily familiar) entities and situations than less intelligent individuals.” According to The Hypothesis, the most intelligent among us should be most apt to engage in experience and adapt to entities that yield novel insight. To reiterate: this doesn’t mean they are best suited for dealing with the familiar entities that shaped them in past history, but that they are more capable of dealing with novel contemporary entities. That is, they are able to comprehend and deal with new challenges previously unpresented.

Fascinating really. Darwin said in one word or another:

It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

I believe intelligence should be reconsidered. Adaptability should be the central measure of value. Call it intelligence, but being able to respond to change should be the hallmark for mental progress.

I just read the article titled Why Intelligent People Use More Drugs posted in this series. Their conclusion:

People – scientists and civilians alike – often associate intelligence with positive life outcomes. The fact that more intelligent individuals are more likely to consume alcohol, tobacco, and psychoactive drugs tampers this universally positive view of intelligence and intelligent individuals. Intelligent people don’t always do the right thing, only the evolutionarily novel thing.

The safe bet isn’t always the best bet, which is why people of stellar intelligence take risks. They push boundaries and explore the unknown. They are curious and desire to understand the farthest frontiers of experience. In this way they are more prepared for the changes to come.

More thoughts later.

Freedom and choice.

What is Freedom?

The question of freedom poses itself when explaining why people convert to god. If a conversion towards god is a result of a lack of responsibility for accepting and exercising our freedom, we must define and determine the nature of freedom as it relates to sentient volition- or free will

The notion of free will supposes an inherent ability to choose. The choice lies in the decision to act or not to act, as well as to choose among alternative actions. Ideally, this choice is autonomously made. However, to what extent are we autonomous? Is there such a thing as freedom of choice? Or, are actions mere precipitations of mechanical chain reactions?

Answering these questions requires the exploration of the science or philosophy of mind.

Continue reading “Freedom and choice.”

Is Life Really What They Say It Is? Life or Bleak Beginnings.

Ebbing and flowing. I stare off, too encumbered to think anymore than necessary. I don’t need to question why, although I spend all day thinking about the answer.

Do I have to lie to myself to get by each day? Is life really what they say it is? Meaningless and void. My personality, my will, all a product of evolution. I am not me, I do not have free will, I am the result of unbelievable chance. Matter in the universe totally coincidentally organized to a place that is now my current condition. My thoughts are not mine. I am merely matter that has evolved. I am the result of chance reactions. I can lie to myself to instill meaning behind my actions that lead to my circumstances and the current circumstances that man has faced throughout history… but it’s a lie. Me thinking it’s a lie is meaningless. Knowing anything is meaningless. Why do I say this? If this life is how they say it is, a freak evolution in the course of time, defying all odds- but maybe not- or anything that would cause matter to stray in disarray, what is the point? Who I am? What I am doing here? Is it enough to accept that by chance we arrived to a point where we dissect the very fragments of space and time we’re composed of? We turn and pry and poke at matter and energy and calculate predictions with Godlike accuracy. If we are just matter… where is it in the laws of nature or the evolutionary scope of man that he questions what he is? Does a rock question its origins? Do we, composed of trillions of seemingly innate molecules, as more organized states of matter, have any greater place in space and time? If my thoughts are motivated by mere molecules simply happening by chance, programmed to respond from a long line of genetic codes that have been constantly victimized and molded by chance circumstances and mutations, am I void of a will? Do I even have a choice?

Recently I’ve been trying to entertain the idea that there is no God. This concept is so foreign to my inner being that when I look for reasons to do something, apart from knowing there is a purpose and a plan and perfection behind it, everything is for nothing. Lies? What is reality? Who can prove it to me, or themselves, any more than what they are willing to accept? I cannot run from the reality I swim in every day that needs answers.

Why does man create? It’s not for survival. You don’t need to create to survive. You need to do whatever you can, but you certainly don’t need to create. Why paint? Why build monuments? Why is man so hungry for power?

I look around and I see meaningless. I see people who are sick of the lies they swallowed. Everyone thinks they’re going somewhere. That they have it figured out. They need to in order to move on. But is anyone any closer to substantial understanding? People accept delusions, deceive themselves by settling for cheap answers, and continue delve into this world of matter and molecules that we create as a playground for itself. We are the molecules organizing molecules. For what purpose? There is none. We are a bubbling, frothing, chance reaction of minuscule matter in the universe that’s miraculously persisted to churn on. Somehow the random and unorganized matter managed to find a way to organize, and produce more organization, and even predict patterns of organization and devise ways to see into itself and ask about the origins of itself, only to arrive at the conclusion it was all a random chance. The fact that order exists at all amazes me. Laws?

Do I have a soul? Is that what resides within me?

Do the laws of the universe create life? Do the forces that act on all matter inevitably lead to reactions causing organization that begets more organization? And begets organization to the point where the molecules begin to question themselves and their intent? Organized states of matter drawing from the universe around them that produce something out of nothing? Ideas? Truth? Philosophical concepts and laws to live and govern by? I would rather say we are gods. If we are not, we are made in God likeness. A consciousness exists within us that is more than the resulting whole we’re composed of. If we were solely matter, we would be no more relevant in the scheme of time than dust in the wind. Our experiences would be lies. Lies would be lies. There would be no right or wrong. The evolutionary reaction would persist until it fizzles out. All of these thoughts, however personal we make them, attached with sentimental penchants to make it worth understanding, are nothing. Do not convince yourself they are more than the reality you accept them to be. You swallow lies if you think you are worth more than the ashes that construct and guide these inclinations. If there is no real meaning to life, and everything is meaningless- aside from the lie you’re convinced it to be- than knowing this is meaningless. Getting to the bottom of anything, the truth about something, knowing everything- is pointless. You will not be any better off.

I suppose people, once they’re convinced that there is no origin, no God or purpose or real plan, they can begin to make life whatever they want it to be. They are masters of their fate. The opportunity chance has given them allows them to be a god for a brief moment in time. They infuse their decisions with the illusion of meaning, deciding and believing in a fabricated existence. They declare their own laws and morals and philosophies to be paramount to anyone around them. Even if they’re tolerant, they’ve arrived at the conclusion that everyone can believe whatever they want because there is no meaning, and they are right because they believe it to be so. This is called existentialism. This is the current state mankind has found for itself. Because there is no truth, and all is relative, everything is debatable. True meaning is vapid.

Is there a God? If he is, why are we separated from him? If all that is can be measured and calculated before our eyes, where is this God? What is love? What is faith? What is honesty? What is truth? What is compassion? What is empathy? What is kindness? What is a will? Are they mere reactions? behaviors? patterns? How can these things be measured? Is right and wrong measurable by a definite scale? If not, why do be place faith in such things as hope?

If God is real, why would he allow people to suffer? Is it his will we suffer or, like a father’s love for his child, does his heart break to see us struggle? Does he pain and weep when he sees us scrape by in life, accepting pathetic answers for help instead of looking to him? Does he want to know us? Does he even care? Did he make us for the insignificant novelty of it all? Little beings hurting, hurting others, suffering to survive, questioning life and existing, crawling through life on their hands and knees to spread themselves over as much material or immaterial gains as possible, only to find themselves on their deathbed with the cold reality that it was all for nothing. The suffering, the joy, the relationships, were for nothing, and they slip into oblivion. Or do they find themselves in other place, confronted with answers to the questions? Are they blinded by the radiating perfection of a just God who they’ve reserved as an afterthought? Does this God accept them to a place they never wished to seek? Does a door open to those who don’t knock? Is there a place where a relationship with a perfect God exists? A God who you never desired to look for or know? Where would a perfect justice place the blame? On God or us?