On Any Given Day
I write too much, I fear. I hope the quantity doesn't affect the quality, and if I were to read this, I'd not want to catch up. I write a lot, and a lot is too much to publish. Maybe I should just keep some or all of these to myself. The problem is that I really want to share something in each post, but it takes some background to get to it, and wild tangents and other things get mixed in. At least I get credit for writing; I wonder if my teacher will ever want to read it. The song of the title is by Carbon Leaf, from the album Echo Echo (the only album of theirs I currently own). It is very relevant to the topic I mean to discuss.
It's not a true freewrite because I am guiding it with a topic, but it is a true freewrite because this topic came up while I was taking a walk on this beautifully cloudy day that was just slightly too cold for my jeans and Oxford style button-down shirt, which made it perfect for walking up the hill slightly through the orchard to throw apples at the water tower, which makes a sound that can only be described as the sound of a water tower colliding with an apple. Other things can sound like that, but it is the base sound, in the same way as a color resembles a primary or commonly known color. I was thinking about the topic, and it stayed in my mind, so I'm writing what's on my mind. I'm going to try to avoid tangents, though, just like the one on which I most recently traveled. I'll keep the paragraphs short for the people with the fake disease (ADD). No, I'll keep the paragraphs in contextual length. Wax or wane your attention span to match my writing. That's a tangent.
At the Berkshire dining commons during that experience I described a few posts ago, I saw two girls walk by whispering and giggling to each other as they returned to their table of friends. They shared something there. They were elevated by the other person above the rest of the people in the group, taken aside, whispered something. They shared something there. I started wondering about the completely objective view of life: that's just a series of synapses reacting to an input processed from an output which was the result of another series of synapses. Can it be more than that? It must be more, because it's sentient. What about sentience elevates it from the rest of nature? I suppose the recognition of itself separates it, but that might not be considered significant. On a low level, the hardware and firmware of the brain performed an operation, which resulted in the output that was interpreted by the other brain. I suppose that's all there is to it, except we've named that transaction, because it has significance other than its purely natural function. That applied significance is what was shared. Somehow it matters to us, and somehow its meaning is universal. Is that merely the product of a society built on interpretations of complex sets of low-level functions, or could it have another origin? Sentience is so hard to deal with because it is the highest level of consciousness logically possible, so we have nowhere to elevate ourselves to in order to examine it. We're always bound by the box we're studying, although we might be able to study every aspect of it from the inside. We can water everything down to science, but science does not explain the meaning of these things. It's like the seven layers of networking, except computers are still finite state machines—humans are infinite. It's like the seven layers because on the lowest level it can all be explained, but the connection on the higher levels cannot, as it is purely symbolic. Does that make any sense? I'm expressing it in my own terms, on my grounds, so I can understand it, but my goal is to describe an ideal well enough for any reader to understand it.
Feedback on philosophy is always appreciated. Peace out.
It's not a true freewrite because I am guiding it with a topic, but it is a true freewrite because this topic came up while I was taking a walk on this beautifully cloudy day that was just slightly too cold for my jeans and Oxford style button-down shirt, which made it perfect for walking up the hill slightly through the orchard to throw apples at the water tower, which makes a sound that can only be described as the sound of a water tower colliding with an apple. Other things can sound like that, but it is the base sound, in the same way as a color resembles a primary or commonly known color. I was thinking about the topic, and it stayed in my mind, so I'm writing what's on my mind. I'm going to try to avoid tangents, though, just like the one on which I most recently traveled. I'll keep the paragraphs short for the people with the fake disease (ADD). No, I'll keep the paragraphs in contextual length. Wax or wane your attention span to match my writing. That's a tangent.
At the Berkshire dining commons during that experience I described a few posts ago, I saw two girls walk by whispering and giggling to each other as they returned to their table of friends. They shared something there. They were elevated by the other person above the rest of the people in the group, taken aside, whispered something. They shared something there. I started wondering about the completely objective view of life: that's just a series of synapses reacting to an input processed from an output which was the result of another series of synapses. Can it be more than that? It must be more, because it's sentient. What about sentience elevates it from the rest of nature? I suppose the recognition of itself separates it, but that might not be considered significant. On a low level, the hardware and firmware of the brain performed an operation, which resulted in the output that was interpreted by the other brain. I suppose that's all there is to it, except we've named that transaction, because it has significance other than its purely natural function. That applied significance is what was shared. Somehow it matters to us, and somehow its meaning is universal. Is that merely the product of a society built on interpretations of complex sets of low-level functions, or could it have another origin? Sentience is so hard to deal with because it is the highest level of consciousness logically possible, so we have nowhere to elevate ourselves to in order to examine it. We're always bound by the box we're studying, although we might be able to study every aspect of it from the inside. We can water everything down to science, but science does not explain the meaning of these things. It's like the seven layers of networking, except computers are still finite state machines—humans are infinite. It's like the seven layers because on the lowest level it can all be explained, but the connection on the higher levels cannot, as it is purely symbolic. Does that make any sense? I'm expressing it in my own terms, on my grounds, so I can understand it, but my goal is to describe an ideal well enough for any reader to understand it.
Feedback on philosophy is always appreciated. Peace out.
posted by Andrew Hills at 8:13 AM
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