Tag Archives: meaning

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?

our data

maggots

our data lives like insects inside our machines

you can hear the little scratchy sounds of them skittering about inside when you’re looking for a file or for some new meaning

we collect them — we store them — we trust they’ll serve us in some way

but in the end its all simply meaningless, just an unfortunate silly game

 

{ over } extended-body

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The desire to locate the self simply within a particular biological body is no longer meaningful. What it means to be human is being constantly redefined. For me, this is not a dilemma at all.

Excerpt, Stelarc discussing the redefinition of what it is to be human from Extended-Body: Interview with Stelarc