What is 'I'?

I wonder what it'll be like to die. It's so weird to think I'll end up in heaven or hell. Even being born again as something or someone else seems a little off to me. I cannot imagine me anywhere else than in my brain, controlling these limbs, writing these words, living with these people. All these memories should be mine. Stored in the brain that I occupy. I can't tell you what people believe the soul is, because the soul doesn't fit into my version of the universe. It's too vague. There's always a little vagary when it comes to words, but the word soul is in a realm of it's own. No pun intended.

Let me try explain my version of what most people would call the soul. In my world, the soul isn't constant, and isn't written. Chance has more influence over the development of the soul than God's grace (yes, there is a God in my universe, but he does not share power, because he is imaginary).

When I say the soul isn't constant, I mean there isn't a soul that can be stripped of it's roots in the mind. And since the mind is always taking in information and rethinking old events, it's always changing. And so is the soul.

The makings of a soul in my universe involves, firstly, the behavioral traits that it inherits from it's parents. This is totally random. There is little control in the natural world when it comes to the right set of genes. So the soul begins it's life out of a random collision. Much like how the universe began, right?

WRONG.

I actually don't know. Moving on.

Other than the random genes involved, there's also the random sequence of events that turn into memories. I don't have to explain how memories help shape people do I? I do. Ok. No matter how calm you're born, people change. The event's are always left to chance. What I mean can be explained this way:

No one chooses how they look, what sort of family they're born into, etc. Contrary to what most optimists think, 90 percent of the time, there is often no choice at all.

Choosing what you want to eat for lunch, for example, may seem like a choice. But that all depends on how much money you have, which depends on your upbringing, etc. It's not as simple as it sounds, but it's not very complicated either.

Consider this; if you clone a person, the clone never ends up being exactly the same as the person. Saying that you can't clone a soul is ridiculous though. The clone may still grow and develop a personality of its own.


There is little choice for us to make. And the 'soul' grows, just as it influences our choices.
We all make choices, but in the end, our choices make us. See? We make judgments based on past experience, etc, but after the choice is in itself a new experience.

I'm scared. I don't like using the word 'soul'. In the next post I think I'll talk more about my 'earning it' rule.

Rapture

You probably know I don't believe that all men are born equal. I believe some people are better at some things than other people. But all men are entitled to the same rights. Imagine every man was entitled to the sweat of his brow. There was this game, called Bioshock. It thought me a little bit about the whole system. Somewhere in the beginning, you hear these lines:

Is a man entitled the sweat on his brow?

No, says the man in Washington, it belongs to the poor.

No, says the man in the Vatican, it belongs to God.

No, says the man in Moscow, it belongs to everyone.

But seriously though. Maybe people should earn a living. Later in the game Bioshock you end up in an underwater city called Rapture. The people in rapture believed in the concept of earning privileges. But it all got out of hand, because there's always someone who wants to play God or be the king.

In this city called Rapture, the worlds best artists, scientists and surgeons lived together. Thriving and no longer bound by rules of the surface. One surgeon in Rapture said that with genetic modification, there's no longer an excuse for people to not look beautiful. That about sums up what was going on in Rapture. People were playing God. Choosing what race they were, how they looked, etc.

But then that same surgeon later told the story of Picasso in one of his audio journals. He said Picasso was so sick of painting perfection that one day he decided to put the nose where the eyes were supposed to be, and mix things up a little. And so, the surgeon himself began experimenting with his patients.

So you see? Removing God from society is a bad idea. It's a bit of a dilemma that only Buddhism's call for balance can solve. Keeping God as a reminder that some things should remain out of our control but not using God as an excuse should be God's use.

Maybe there is a way of solving the problem of earning a living. Instead of creating a thriving, Godless underwater city like Rapture, I think that people should migrate to other countries after awhile. Immigrants are the ones who earn a living from scratch. Sons and daughters of immigrants have to earn a living off what little is provided for them. But the next generation ends up a little too comfortable.

I'm not sure. This may end up being a terrible idea. Imagine masses of people moving to other countries. It would be bad. Very bad.

And don't worry, I'll be back with a post that's worth a comment soon enough.

Poorly Explained

There was an interesting experiment conducted. People usually ask professional tennis players how they get the ball to spin so well, and the tennis players would always explain that once the ball makes contact with the racket, the 'dip' it inwards. That seems like a completely logical idea, doesn't it? It makes sense, the ball should spin more if that sort of swing is used. The interesting part is this:

A game was recorded using high tech cameras to detect the relationship between the style of hitting and the spin of the tennis ball. It turns out that not one of those professional tennis players used the technique they said they did. Now I don't find this very shocking. When I heard about this experiment, it felt like a prime example of how language gets in the way of everything.

I watched a documentary about the history of comedy and listened as countless comedians tried to explain the techniques they used. Some said timing was everything, some said the best jokes were ones that reflected the anxiety of real life situations(I think Sigmund Freud said that), and some said being able to make people laugh was a gift. But just like the case of the 'top spin' on the tennis balls, these comedians were trying to explain something that they didnt have the capacity to explain. Sure, comedy and hitting tennis balls isn't rocket science, but maybe that's where our answers lie!

You see, the way you'd explain rocket science, or at least make rocket science appear more explainable, is by using math. And something like rocket science pairs up objective terms with math, making it nearly the truth. And I say nearly the truth, because you can actually spell out 5. It's easy, f - i - v - e.

Now, surely maths is universal, or at least more universal than morality and ethics(but more on that some other time). The small flaw that mathematics has is that it incorporates symbolism and needs language to be explained. To put it plainly, imagine if I was right about mathematics being universal, and there was a sentient race of aliens that used mathematics the way we did. One, wouldn't be one to the aliens. And perhaps 10, 11, 12, etc were symbols on their own instead of a repeatition of the numbers 1-9 in more than one digit place. Like, if the number after 9 wasnt 10(think of that as ONE-ZERO), instead it was #(just an example, my keyboard doesn't have much else to use). Sure we could think of numbers in base 10, etc. But the symbolism involved in mathematics is what keeps it from being absolutely true. Or at least absolutely truer than words.