Tag Archives: humanness

a reflection on reason

reason

Does everything happen for a reason?

We created the concept of Reason. Reason does not exist outside of the human mind. In Nature there is cause and effect, but that is definitely not the verySame thing as the human concept of Reason.

We make up the Reason that we’re here. We imagine, develop and cultivate a purpose in our life — or we simply live. And we can interpret the things that happen in our lives in a retrospective fashion as having a Reason — but life as we know it is far beyond anything we can dream up. Its a bigger dream than we can imagine. And everything happens in an unfathomable and entirely meaningless way. If you tune into the pulse of it all in a way that goes beyond research and words — well — you can just feel it, this chaotic tendency of Nature, of the Universe.

We invent Reason. Reason — like laughter and science and language and porn and technology and religion — is a delicate belief system that human beings leverage to make sense of the Universe and its rather wildly unpredictable events. Reason helps us cope and move beyond the horror of our ultimate destination in life { which is, of course, death }. Reason is a beautiful thing, actually. Reason brings a subtle poetry to life. Reason is the search for meaning. Meaning doesn’t exist.

Originally posted as my reply to the Quora question Does everything happen for a reason?

a theory about thoughts and feelings

Body 4

contrary to what popular scientific, mainstream belief tells us — i am convinced that we think and feel with our entire body

thoughts and feelings are not simply
processed in our brains

to think that our brain acts like some strangely mechanistic one-hour photo development lab for the way we experience and relate to the world is extremely preposterous, but this is the only way we as human beings can understand it because we are incapable of thinking beyond our current, known toolset

its got to be far more complicated than that, dontchya think?

we hate to admit it, but we’re far less advanced in our understanding of ourselves, each other and the universe than we’d like to be

we tend to oversimplify everything

because we know how to design and build machines that supposedly think, we also believe we can figure out the mysteries of the mind and the way everything in the universe works, but why bother?

i mean, don’t get me wrong, its all super-interesting to learn about — or at least to theorize about and then test to see how close we can get to some level of commonly acceptable belief system around these rather intensely amazing phenomena in life

and we don’t like to admit, i guess,
when we don’t know or understand something

but let’s just be fucking honest, now, okay?

maybe if we just accept the knowns and the unknowns — and if we also fully accept and appreciate the existential sense of being human and experiencing the world within the given found systems we’ve inherited — we might be far better off

let’s stop trying to explain everything to its ultimate, inevitably science-bled death and just enjoy it all, let it all soak in, and then see how we can live in a more interdependent and inclusively healthy and happy way together as a living, breathing collective organism of humanity

we think with our entire bodies

we feel with our entire bodies

and we also collectively think and feel as little batches of social presence in different pockets of the world

 

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

i guess we could do both

we should do both — both investigate and examine the world and try to figure it out while also enjoying the experience of these sometimes ungraspable areas of natural phenomenology embedded within our human experience

as long as we remember to come back to this sense of enjoyment, too

i guess then we don’t necessarily need to club every little thing to death with the Big Data stick

after all, i don’t think its our job as human beings to necessarily be able to explain everything in the universe — that’s a rather big and impossible job, right? 

it is, however, our purpose to live and breathe and enjoy our existence, to live a little and enjoy each other, and to potentially leave a few stories behind for the alien race that will eventually come down to Mother Earth and inevitably take us all away beyond the sky

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