If you're not into pondering deep or offended by my borrowed concepts (from St. Augustine, Locke, Nietzsche, CS Lewis and various others who have dabbled in metaphisics) read on. Other wise, find another blog, unmute the TV, or change channels to another universe; you won't be the first.
Many philosophers and now institutionalized patients have tried to understand the enigma of existence.
You now, why and how can there be stuff, dirt, sky, you, me and a universe without limits. Except for a few obvious contradictions, you would be smart to bet against it. There's nothing, nowhere and nobody. Simple. to believe in nothing
But the minute allow for some "thing," you get slapped in the face by cause and affect. If you walk into the house with dirt on your feet, that dirt came from somewhere, maybe a beach, maybe a mud hole you traipsed across on your recent walk. A where did the dirt originate? And by extension, the our solar system, the coalescence of matter known as our galaxy, and the big bang thing that supposedly intiated our universe, and what about God or whatever prime forces caused it to be?
Don't go there, the most direct route to madness if that's your fixation.
Instead, I start with an old analogy. The piano. A wife wants a piano and has it delivered. Because of limited square footage she had the delivery man just opposite the staircase leading to their bedroom.
Now the husband hates pianos and is angry about his wife's purchase.
He has several options, one a weird high road of denial: it's not there, and I refuse to recognize the piano's existence. Which in theory is a workable solution except that every morning when he comes down that stairway he slams into a piece of furniture that (theoretically) isn't there. What are his options?
He could continue the bruising that results from denial
He could except the existence of the piano and walk around it.
Even if he set on fire, he would have to clean up the mess or hiring someone remove it for him, he would have to face the mover's bill.
Either way, the piano is there and whatever you do with it further confirms it exists.
In the same way some people say life is just a dream, nothing real. Well then, who's dream? Even the entiriety of human consciousness is but uncomfortable case of gas inside one of George Herbert's sand worms, we're here, we exist.
Now writing to a blog audience is an exercise faith. Did people read it? Maybe not and though I can count the small numbers of people who've accessed my blog, this could all be a dreamlike illusion on my part, the fact remains. If there is a dream, there has to be dreamer.
So let's not waste our time if with apriori arguments. Stuff is, however you interpret it, and there's no way you can explain away a face in the mirror any more than that Toyota out in your garage (which really needs an oil change if you want to keep driving it). Someone tried to derail me on whether matter is a shared experience. He asked, "You see the color red and identify certain objects like tomatoes, fire trucks, and blood that share that quality?"
"Yes, " I said arrogantly tried to predict where his argument was going, "and I know that it's only red because that's the bandwidth of light that these objects reflect. So if you want to get stupid, red is every other color but red, a color not absorbed by an object and sloughed off by physics. Therefore, black is white (which reflects everything) and is the most colorful shade because it aborbs all wavelengths of light.
My friend, a patient man, waited out my high school science explanation and said, "That's not what I'm talking about."
"Then what?"
"Behind your retina and lining the back of your eyeball are rods and cones."
"That's the say I remember it."
"Well, when you perceive a ripe tomato and see the color red how do you know I don't perceive your equivalent of blue?"
I thought a moment. "Because blue is cold color and red is warm one."
"So, extend my argument to concept of warm and cold colors..."
"Okay, I see what your saying, what I see as warm colors shades of orange, could corollaries in your mind of what I would call blue and green. We can never experience another's experience."
"No fucking difference as long you and I can agree what's blue, what's red and likely to piss off our wives if combine those concepts by choosing closthes that are stylistic abominations, right. You can continue in your altered universe of blue being red and we will have no problem as long as there is a universal agreement on sets and subsets that identiy these concepts.
"Otherwise, insanity?"
"Obviously, insanity is another concept we apply to people who behave or think in ways that do not conform to the most widely held norms of humanity.
:"Widely held? That make "sanity" sound like a popularity contest, one that schizophrenics always lose.
"Forget insanity. It's a legal term for someone no longer able to consistently behave in normative ways, especially applicable when their actions might lead them to hurt themselves or other.
Stuff is, we manipulate it with tools, we derive energy and grow tissue from other the remainder of which has to flushed. It's all matter, whether stuff that can be aligned on a periodic table, or antimatter or dark matter, stuff we have no clue about so shut the fuck up about the whole matter and lets move on.
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