Weltanschaung

The Philosopher’s Stone

zenothestoic@protonmail.ch

Tag: Identity

  • I am not Gay

    I am not Gay

    Nor multicultural, nor multi gender, nor am I trans….and, odd to relate nor am I a bigot or a racist.

    What I am is thoroughly sick of having all that thrust down my throat wherever I go and whatever I do.

    I was wandering around WordPress today and was conned into thinking their collection of posts under the heading “Identity” might be about “consciousness” but instead was  bored to find they are pushing the same old stuff as almost everyone else on the internet.

    Just because I am what has traditionally been labelled white and (so far as I am aware, heterosexual – but who knows?) does NOT mean that I loathe anybody or everybody who was not born as I was.

    I just don’t want to see rainbows everywhere I go, whether in the windows of Peter Jones in Sloane Square, at my local bank, or in the pages of the Guardian.

    Why can’t these people just keep a slightly more muted profile like the rest of us manage to do?

    Look, I am pretty minority myself. I had a grandfather who was Yiddish if ever I saw a Yid. How much more minority can you get than that? His distant kith and kin were doubtless showered with Xyclon B and shoved in gas ovens all over Europe.

    But I really don’t need to shove that down your throats.

    My old man was diagnosed as schizophrenic and or bi-polar. How minority is that? But again I don’t want to bang on about it and bore you to tears.

    As it happens, I have every sympathy with people who feel they are hard done by but despite a cracking education and (at one stage) lots of money, my life has been pretty damn minority too.  And not in a good way – I have spent 63 years as a glum misery. I think that counts me in as a minority and I feel pretty persecuted by it I can tell you.

    Perhaps it would have been better if I had been born a member of the 22nd gender or been gifted with multiple reproductive organs from 8 to 10 of the apparent choices out there.

    I don’t care what anyone does with their sexual organs, I don’t care what their skin colour is, I don’t care who or what they worship. I don’t care what they wear, what they snort, what they eat or drink, or think or say. They have every right to do an be all of that provided they do no harm to others.

    Let me be quite clear: I wish none of you any offence. But why can’t you just get on with your lives quietly like the rest of us?  What is the big fuss?

  • If God could be killed, it’d be dead already

    If God could be killed, it’d be dead already

    I have been following  Qualia Research Institute and Qualia Computing.  My attention was recently caught by an article on  personal identity views.

    I quote from the Abstract:

    Personal identity views (closed, empty, open) serve in philosophy the role that conservation laws play in physics. They recast difficult problems in solvable terms, and by expanding our horizon of understanding, they likewise allow us to conceive of new classes of problems. In this context, we posit that philosophy of personal identity is relevant in the realm of ethics by helping us address age-old questions like whether being born is good or bad. We further explore the intersection between philosophy of personal identity and philosophy of time, and discuss the ethical implications of antinatalism in a tenseless open individualist “block-time” universe.

    I believe that you may well have to have a tendency towards existential anxiety to be interested in such matters. I have that and I am interested. However I am also wary of endless thinking, endless philosophy.

    I have no qualm with “thought experiments” per se ( which have lead to many scientific breakthroughs) but I believe the matters contained in this article are fruitless in terms of speculation unless they can be tested and acted upon.

    I like these guys, I like what they have to say. But I would like to see some action. I would like to see some progress towards the “Abolition of Suffering“.

    I therefore responded as follows on their website:

    While I am interested in your article and indeed in your website as a whole, has the time not come to cease to speculate and to actively progress and investigate how to measure and improve qualia?

    You and I and everyone around us (or most of them) are living as “closed individuals”. I do not believe anyone other than a mystic or tripper has witnessed any other type of existence.

    And once the meditation or psilocybin trip is over, even those individuals return from unified consciousness back to the state of “closed individual”.

    So what needs to be done to eliminate suffering?

    Can the beneficial effects of psilocybin be prolonged indefinitely? Can some other method of increasing our joy and decreasing our pain (permanently) be found?

    I am not sure that any of the theories you describe above represent any law of physics. I am not sure that any such theory gets us any further forward.

    We need to take practical steps and hope that these will confirm or refute such theories.

    I am done with theorizing. I want progress.

    Perhaps I should become a psychonaut.

  • What am I?

    What am I?

    The question “what am I” is the most important avenue any sentient being can enter.  It is not a question we can currently answer but we have been trying for as long as we have existed.

    The first difficulty is that this is a true “rabbit hole” and once entered you are unlikely to emerge or find any definitive answer. Because the answer at present is “I do not know”.  Even for that unsatisfactory conclusion, you have to take a detour down every possible scientific avenue of enquiry we are currently pursuing or have ever pursued.

    The questions which naturally follow from this one deseptively simple enquiry do not end.  At the macro level it inevitably leads to the BIG question: “what is reality”?

    Until and unless you discover the nature of reality you will be hard pressed to try and answer the much smaller question “what am I” since it must be self evident that we are a mere subdivision of reality.

    Unless you are a single, lonely solipsist.

    So you have to take in physics and its derivatives chemistry and biology.  Not on a professional level but as that of an enquiring layman.  You have to consider cosmology and particle physics. You need to know what our current state of knowledge is.  What is our universe? How big is it? What is it made of?

    You need to know that we are made of the same elements as everything else in our universe and that all that “stuff” out there (and in us) was created within stars.

    You need to consider “consciousness” because that apparently distinguishes us from the vast majority of “stuff” out there. It allows us “self awareness” which can usefully be defined in this context as the ability to ask what we are in the first place!

    My current reading is Our Mathematical Universe by Mark Tegmark .  It is fascinating and easily understood by the layman and those not versed in mathematics.  It is well suited to someone of a more philosophical than actual scientific bent.

    It is telling me that I am a mathematical structure and so is the rest of reality. It is one man’s theory of the ultimate nature of “what is”.

    It is one of numerous such books I have read on my journey and there will be a great many more.