tecknow | Entries tagged with philosophy

I need to get back into the habit of writing things more than a sentence at a time, this is an avenue for that but I don't want to turn this LJ into a swirling vortex of negativity. I've decided to try for a middle road where, in addition to venting about the crazy crap that happens to me at UTD I'll also write about why it bothers me and what I think should have been done instead. If I succeed this will sound a lot like an amateur philosophy of teaching statement, so I understand if it is tl:dr for most of you.

Here's an example from today:

( Grading and Student Confidence. )

We shape ourselves to the people we love. Some people lose themselves, but even to the fiercely independent, love means growing together with someone. In the eyes of the people we care about is reflected the self that we believe, or at least want to, believe in, or a faith in the world we wish were our own, or a dream we wish to serve and preserve. In their face is real empathy. Their joy is our joy, their sadness is our sacrifice, to help them or because we cannot help them but must watch them be sad alone.

As time, and circumstance, and friendship press us together, grooves in our thoughts form to respond to them, shaped around their faces, their bodies, their voices, their smells, the feel of their bodies, the taste of their feelings. Deep enough to cut us sometimes just by existing, deep enough hopefully to allow them in some way to fill a missing place in our own lives. Deep enough that their dreams, and their feelings, might be reason enough alone to chose one path over another. I've always thought it was very dangerous and foolish, not to mention outside of the rights of a person, to compromise on their path in life because another path offers the company of someone, anyone else.

And sometimes they leave, with good wishes or bad, or sometimes no sentiment at all. What happens to the traces they left on us then? the person is gone, but our place for them is not. Their voices, their faces, their gestures, live on inside us, ready to pull at who we are, but never again to be invoked by their owner. With their match gone, do they cease to have meaning, do they cease to have purpose? Do they become a burden of past experience that no one new can ever share?

Sometimes, if we aren't careful, we can realize suddenly one day that someone else has started to slide into grooves created by someone else. Their laugh, their smile, their speech, reminds us of someone else and the walls between memories, while probably not gone, become transparent and soft. We respond to them because someone else conditioned this response in us. Is this bad? Should it be resisted? Can this be allowed? Can it be good?

If we are not careful to remember, sometimes we forget who left an impression on us. Running our fingers over the convoluted valleys, ridges, pits, notches, and grooves we come to think of the shape as ours alone, and forget that it is the result of a lifetime of contacts, scrapings, checks, pets, and embraces, and life becomes filled with a chorus of feelings whose origins we can't remember, phrases that come to mind we-can't-remember-why, and smells that send us careening into moods without memory to tell us why.

And sometimes we can't forget. Sometimes someone cuts us so deeply that their impression is left indelibly on our selves. For good or ill all that touches the parts of our lives that they touched reminds us of them. Holding a though or feeling in our minds reminds us of them. Sometimes, you don't know who these people are until they are gone.

Other times, all you can do is hope to make the stay as long and sweet as you can, and the break as painless, and hope the part of you that leaves with them is not too much of your heart.

Current Mood: contemplative

I lie here, on my bed, in the heat, my knees drawn up, my laptop resting across my legs, burning them through my shorts. I stare out my window at the pale gray of the new day at five in the morning and I contemplate.

Every night before I go to bed, questions, challenges appear in my mind, sometimes for minutes, sometimes for hours, I am bombarded. Explain this thing. Justify that thing. Who are you? Where are you going? What are you becoming? I try to answer these challenges to he best of my ability, and most of the time, at the end of the gauntlet, battered and bruised, I can rest, for at least a couple of hours. The questioning does not stop, but I know that I have argued, and that I believed what I have argued, and I have, if not no doubt, than something other than doubt to hold on to.

From this struggle come reflection, consideration, and awareness. I cannot imagine such things coming from anywhere else. I cannot imagine a mind free from the questioning, as judgment and reflection are among the greatest of the human powers and to surrender their source is to surrender humanity.

Sacrificing judgment for belief in the authority of another, believing in the superiority of another's judgment over one's own, then, is a great affront to humanity, if you believe in god, a sin, if not, a falsehood. To know that there is wisdom in the words of any sage or prophet is one thing, to accept their word over your own thoughtful deliberations, another. To take an action or accept a circumstance "because it is god's will" "because the computer says so" or "because someone told me to" when you could not justify taking that action or allowing that circumstance on your own, without external validation, is foolish and repugnant to me. As soon as such reasons enter your thoughts, let alone fall out your lips, you have ceased to be a thinking being, you have surrendered your judgment, and thus, at least partially, your humanity.

While this concept comes up most often in regards to organized religion, military thought, and political movements, it can actually be completely separated from religion altogether. If you happen to believe in god, most major religions remaining today affirm the existence of free will, or at the very least say that each person is put on the Earth for some reason. Each person has a path, a lesson to learn or a purpose in life. If you believe this to be true, then it is not unreasonable to argue that placing more stock in the judgment of some outside authority than in your own might be a betrayal of this purpose or path. If you are too complacent accepting the judgments of another, then you might miss your personal lesson entirely.

If you do not believe in god, then there is no real reason to sacrifice your own judgment; a true atheist has little if anything else to go on. If there is no greater power dictating what is right and wrong, then the individual is the greatest power, any sacrifice of personal judgment casts doubt on your belief in this idea.

I am not saying that organized religion is wrong. If you question your steps and find that other people walk your path with you, then you are very lucky and I am happy for you. I only offer the warning that you tread carefully and make sure you do not follow others off your personal path, or that you do not follow a path simply because it is well traveled.

Since surrendering judgment is surrendering humanity, a sin or a falsehood, the greater sin or falsehood is to tell another that their judgment is inferior, that their path is not as great. It is all right to share and explain what you believe and why you believe it, it is natural and inevitable to look at others through the lens of personal belief, but I cannot and will not accept he belittling of another person's humanity in the form of preaching, evangelizing, moralizing or in any situation where they are told that their judgment is inadequate when it is concerned with what is right and wrong for them, explicitly or implicitly.

I do not claim that this is The Truth, and I wouldn't wish this world view on anyone else, but it is what I believe, it is how I analyze myself and how I feel about others and their actions. It is not immutable or eternal, but right now, for me, it is.

What society needs most right now is what we have trained ourselves not to become. What society needs right now is more people with their eyes turned inward, not seeking some image of what they should be, but open to the quest for who they are. It's never over, and you can't win. I guess that scares a lot of people off.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Jars of Clay-Rose Colored Stain Glass Windows

Gebo is the Norse rune for 'gift.' For those who, despite or perhaps because of recent media popularization of the term, do not know what a rune is, a brief and inexact explanation. A rune, like any letter, can be used in combination with others to make words, but it is also a word in and of itself. Where b and c and d have no meanings in and of themselves (outside of report cards) the symbols called Gebo, or Tyr, and Kenaz all have both phonetic value and symbolic meaning.

The concept behind Gebo is an interesting one; it represents a debt that is entered into for the bond that debt creates. This debt may exist only for that purpose and the one who is owed may not expect or even wish to be repaid. This gift could just as well be a promise as a present.

When you think about it, bonds created through imbalance are what hold the universe together. An atom which receives an electron from another atom is then drawn to that atom so strongly that they create a new substance in the joining. These atomic debts form some of the most powerful chemical bonds known.

It is interesting to note that Gebo is the first rune in the Norse alphabet to symbolize any kind of connection between people. Because it is first, it could be argued that the Norse saw it as the lowest form of bond. While this might be true, concepts found at the beginning of the runic alphabet could also be seen as foundational. While these bonds may be simple they are strong, and they must be understood before any others may follow.

All too often, people forget that their word does create a debt. When I say that I will do a thing or cause a certain thing to come about, I am creating a debt where the commodities are my own integrity and a bit of my free will.

This debt, this imbalance is as much internal as it is external, and it has nothing to do with the person to whom the word is given. Giving my word is like making a statement about the future, and carries with it the same burdens as making a statement about the present. If that statement is true to the best of my knowledge when it is made, then even if it is later proven to be false, I cannot be faulted for making it. If I learn that a statement I made is false I must make every effort to inform those to whom the statement was made or accept responsibility for it's affects on them.

If a statement is known to be false at the moment of its utterance, or if the speaker learns that it is false and then conceals this knowledge, this person is lying. Likewise, one who knowingly and willfully through action or inaction causes their own word to go unfulfilled or who does not inform others of a change in circumstance before the promise comes due or at the moment of change is lying. I am not willing to make a liar of myself, thus, promises create a debt of integrity.

No one enters unknowingly into debt, but the will of the debtor alone cannot reverse it. Anyone who believes it can in the financial world is clinically insane, anyone who believes it can in the social world is merely doomed. If I say a thing, then only a higher obligation or unavoidable change in circumstance can release me from it, because if whim alone can change the value of a promise, then word is without meaning. Because word cannot be without meaning and a person still have value, a promise creates a debt of my own free will, given up at the moment of its making and reclaimed only at great cost.

The Norse were right, Gebo is the most fundamental of all social connections. Friendship is based on debts that aren't supposed to be repaid, and all of human society on some fundamental level assumes that a person's word is their bond. A person who expects all his or her friends to return every favor won't have any for very long. A person whose word has no meaning has nothing left to give to anyone, as they cannot be trusted or depended upon.

That I said a thing will be is all that matters, it does not matter how 'important' the thing I have committed to is, nor does it matter to whom I have made the commitment. If I fail, I am unreliable, I am untrustworthy, and I have only deepened the imbalance. No imbalance is beyond correction, but it is easier to avoid increasing them in the first place.

Lots of people seem to think I have a flair for pulling things off; perhaps this is part of the reason why.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: The oratorical rythms of my superego

Above is a quote from "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley. The 1956 radio adaptation, created and narrated by the author himself, is available at he scifi channel's Seeing Ear Theater, here.

In the world of this novel, those casted to be laborer's are trained to loath nature, books, and art. All are trained that "everyone belongs to everyone else" and people are encouraged to have no relationships that are "drawn out." People don't take holidays, they take drug trips. Ford, inventor of the assembly line, is seen as the savior of mankind, and the world is monumentally efficient.

This world removes the complexities and absurdities that make modern life so inefficient. Think about it, a person working 40 hours a week, less than two days of every seven, is considered to be working full time. I mean, wouldn't the world be so much better if what people wanted to spend their leisure time doing something productive? How much more advanced would we as a people be if all the time wasted in personal relationships, video games, recreational reading, and television could be reclaimed and put to productive ends?

Except, it never quite works that way. It's not for want of effort, so much work has gone into implanting the "work ethic" into the people of America that it can safely be said that whoever tries to do so hard must already possess it, but still here we sit, yacking on our phones and posting to our journals about our petty little lives, wasting thousands of hours and millions of dollars doing nothing.

It doesn't work because 'productive' is misdefined. It doesn't work because of the fundamental complication of humanity, the inability to understand what we really want. Something 'productive' is something that furthers your goals and agendas, bringing you closer to what you want. If you are doing something 'unproductive' it is because what you actually want is not what you think you want.

Here I am spending tremendous amounts of money and resources training to have a 'productive' skill in the eyes of society, and not a single thing about it except he promise of eventual monetary gain will bring me closer to what I actually want in life. How productive is that?

I'm not complaining, everybody here is doing it, some of them are probably even being true to their visions, what I'm saying is, why can't humanity get off it's fat, lazy, self-diluted ass and smack itself into the realization hat what it really wants it to have a fat, lazy ass?

Mr. Huxley's warning is misplaced. Mankind will not end up in such a world because we cannot live by such a demanding definition of productive. people will never be willing to give up children, romance, and the appearance of individuality because we are not driven enough to do so. I think the world of the matrix is much closer to what humanity will really end up with, with one exception, we will climb willingly into pods, have eyelid-thin screens pasted to our eyes, have our meals injected intravenously, have electrodes attached to the ends of our neurons, because we can be fat, and lazy, and pretend that just because it is not happening in the physical world, it is not real, life is always more fun when you think it doesn't have consequences. We will end up in a world like this because it is what we think we want.

We will still be wrong,
and people will still hate what they are destined to do.

I'm really tired, I wonder how inarticulate this will look in the morning?

Current Mood: cranky

The problem with systems like this is that they require some degree of egocentrism. To maintain one, the writer must think that his comments and the details of his life are important enough, interesting enough, or unique enough to be committed to writing and posted for people (sometimes lots of people) to see. Frankly, my life isn't that interesting.

Other people's lives are that interesting. The things that happen around me are that interesting, but they don't belong to me. If I tell someone about them, it is because I trust the retelling to do no harm to the person who holds the true rights to the story, because I think the hearer could benefit from it, or because I desire their view on a situation. I don't have many secrets, but I would be pretty damn upset if someone spilled MY guts all over THEIR journal, if not because of any threat to me, than because it is my story and they have taken the telling away from me.

Thankfully, this leaves us the entire world of abstraction, concepts, and analysis.
I can do that.

We'll just see what comes of this.

Tec