Conversation with Monk

Context: I work at a radiostation at our university and we have monthly staff community hours we are required to fulfill.

CONVERSATION BETWEEN MONK AND ME

A: Oh, i almost forgot (opens laptop)

M: Why do you feel the need to type that out right now?

A: Because i transcribe my staff hours to a google doc, to keep track of them.

M: but there are so many other important things today that you forgot/chose not to keep track of originally. what is so different about this? 

A: they're my staff hours; i have monthly requirements to meet

M: this month, yes, but then they will just Vanish into the past like everything else.

A: yeah but not immediately.  they might cause a fuss at the station and it would bite my ass for like a little bit before vanishing.  i'm doing this to avoid that potential ass-biting, in case I forget about these hours; listen, it's purely a practical issue

M: what do you do in a given day that isn't "purely a practical issue?"

Practicality is assumed.

We live in an era of dreamers trapped in a duty, a perceived obligation to be practical, functional, tangible (and therefore "real"--the ultimate religious copout, a claiming to the "real").  everything should have a tangible result/object.  no one treats life as an absurdist canvas, an art portrait to create a story with anymore; we are shrewdly ends-oriented.  we are increasingly mechanical.   And I call us dreamers because I do see and feel the yearning in us for something more, something different.  We are just so entrenched in the modern belief in practicality;  i mean it's practically self-evident that we need to do practical things which have real functionality, self-evident tasks which must obviously be done (it's just the most practical and useful thing to do...see the dogmatism here?).  we dont question it, we laugh at those who do (laughing at something with great confidence and certainty is always a sign to be worried about, a sign of ideology).  i go from my job which makes money to my house which provides shelter where I watch TV to entertain myself before eating to nourish my body and falling asleep to regenerate my cells. i have sex with my wife to maintain our physical relationship and satisfy my libido.  i smoke weed to get high and forget about shit.  i only think of things to do, things which have an end.  what isn't a purely practical issue these days?  i think this is an important question to ask.   artists need to hone efforts on politics to maintain any relevance (it's the cool thing now to take art out of abstract realms and hone it in on brute, obnoxious practicality).  poetic terrorism--trapping the absurd in the relevant, the tangible.  Ironically I think this ultimately stifles the creativity we need to achieve a truly paradigmatic, "tangible" change in our current "tangible-change" oriented society.

The question also may be, why did I decide to pause and write this instead of scramble to write hours down right now like I normally would have?

perhaps that's where "I" step in,

away from the humming machine of the masses.

Understanding vs Metaphor: Science Deconstruction

A reflection during organic mechanisms lecture:

Language is evidence that we do most of our understanding through metaphors

We keep talking about how an atom is "attached" to the neighboring carbon.  But "attaching" is a contextually macroscopic concept.  We attach pieces of cloth to each other, we attach vehicles to tow trucks.  We use this term metaphorically to understand molecular phenomena.  The same goes for all of science*, and all human understanding.  Metaphors.

*Science hinges on these metaphors for explanatory understanding, but is very subtle about it.  It claims to be in the business of discovering robust mathematical laws that describe nature, and the explanatory understanding is peripheral.  But if this is true, science should not claim to understand nature, as it does so purely through metaphors.

A Comedian

I once dated a girl who would roll her eyes every time I told a joke and say, “You’re a comedian…" After we broke up, she started dating what I can only assume is a very serious man. I hear they’re very happy.

Source: http://boringoldraphael.tumblr.com/post/160348557/i-once-dated-a-girl-who-would-roll-her-eyes-every

Efficiency Impulse

Way to embrace efficiency.
(Scene that caused thought: was sitting in back seat of car on my phone, an object was passed to me I immediately flashed my phone to the hand in order to illuminate it more as I grabbed it, my friend realized this and was aware of it; also, he had a lighter, and when he put it down, he scanned the car carefully and put it down exactly on top of the center compartment of the car; the most reachable area in the car for all members to be able to grab it without having to disturb each other. I thought, how disgusting, how much we are preoccupied with efficiency (for efficiency's sake). We're just homies in a car, shouldnt we be focusing on more wild shit. Then I thought, embrace the concept)


Man's technicity impulse appeared around the 16th century (technicity as the impulse to categorize and represent the world as variables or quantities that we have power over rather than accepting phenomena/objects as presenting themselves to us 'on their own terms') when rationalists like Descartes swept philosophy and we quickly developed science and then fell into the industrial revolution etc etc. It is nothing new. However the impulse is seeping from overarching collective metaphysics into smaller and smaller cracks of every day life, and as such we could be on the verge of a massive shift to the digital (apparently already occurring with screens and next some perma-backround technology like google glass in which you experience the unique objects and entanglements in the world THROUGH the pulverizing "lens" of information processing) in which these impulses find more meaning and are in a more suitable context. This impulse is a prophecy, a foreshadowing of a new realm from within our Present aged realm, where it currently (as such) exhausts itself awkwardly (anachronistically) like in the example above where the efficiency is peripheral or nihilistic to the current backdrop of meaning it finds itself in. So we take these awkwardities as an anachronistic impulse, as signs of the future rather than a misunderstanding of the present.

Here is a question:  is this consistent with the marxist definition of man, in the sense that man has desires which he actualizes via his material environment, and we are going through this change now?  Or is this precisely antagonistic to the marxist essence, in which we are treating some hegelian geist of efficiency as central and the material realm as a consequence of it.

thoughts language and essence

ok so 2 things:
1. A language is not complete until irony disappears.  Irony exploits vagueness in terminology.

2. From an evolutionary standpoint: the present is a result of innumerable micro-fluctuations reaching equilibrium with each other.  That's why we observe such a symbiosis in the present: so many clever mechanisms we are equipped with for dealing and coping with our external environment, it's like matching puzzle pieces.  Relative to the chaos at incipience, the world has reached a deeper state of equilibrium.  And this will continue until everything gets smoothed out.  So in this sense, many actants have been distilled into forms few and condensed; this is why everything seems so beautiful, and why the concept of "essences" shows up in the world.

Drugs and the Meaning of Life

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/drugs-and-the-meaning-of-life/

Extremely moving and persuasive passage on drugs and the way they should be treated in modern culture.

awesome sketch series

http://www.helpingyoumaintain.com/episodes

dude.  so righteous.

Synchronicity

Some wiki excerpts on this beautiful concept.  Following the excerpts, I will use this post as a place to collect all examples of synchronicity that happen to me:

Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated or unlikely to occur together by chance, yet are experienced as occurring together in a meaningfulmanner. 

The concept does not question, or compete with, the notion of causality. Instead, it maintains that just as events may be grouped by cause, they may also be grouped by meaning. A grouping of events by meaning need not have an explanation in terms of cause and effect.

The idea of synchronicity is that the conceptual relationship of minds, defined as the relationship between ideas, is intricately structured in its own logical way and gives rise to relationships that are not causal in nature. These relationships can manifest themselves as simultaneous occurrences that are meaningfully related.

Jung believed that many experiences that are coincidences due to chance in terms of causality suggested the manifestation of parallel events or circumstances in terms of meaning, reflecting this governing dynamic.^[8]

 Following discussions with both Albert Einstein and Wolfgang Pauli, Jung believed that there were parallels between synchronicity and aspects of relativity theory and quantum mechanics.^[9] Jung was transfixed by the idea that life was not a series of random events but rather an expression of a deeper order, which he and Pauli referred to as Unus mundus. This deeper order led to the insights that a person was both embedded in an orderly framework and was the focus of that orderly framework and that the realisation of this was more than just an intellectual exercise, but also having elements of a spiritual awakening. From the religious perspective, synchronicity shares similar characteristics of an "intervention of grace". Jung also believed that in a person's life, synchronicity served a role similar to that of dreams, with the purpose of shifting a person's egocentric conscious thinking to greater wholeness.

Example:

A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream, I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from the outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which, contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt the urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since.^[15]

(9:16:16 PM) Amro Maz: this one time

(9:16:19 PM) Amro Maz: i was at the airport

(9:16:23 PM) Amro Maz: and my mom was late to pick me up

(9:16:36 PM) matteoplix: uh oh

(9:16:38 PM) Amro Maz: so when i arrived, i went and hid behind a column

(9:16:40 PM) matteoplix: amir is FLIPPING OUT

(9:16:54 PM) Amro Maz: and every like 5 minutes i peeped out

(9:17:05 PM) Amro Maz: this one time, after one of the peeps

(9:17:12 PM) Amro Maz: RIGHT when i saw the back of her head

(9:17:20 PM) Amro Maz: she SUDDENLY turned around and looked directly at me

(9:17:37 PM) Amro Maz: later when i discussed this with her she said she "felt" me staring at her

(9:17:49 PM) Amro Maz: this i believe was an example of synchronicity
-------------------------------------

[crumpets]:

(kedzie05) man

(kedzie05) holy shit

(kedzie05) that must have been hard to watch

Amir:

what

[crumpets]:

(kedzie05) my descent into madness

(matteoplix) wtf

(matteoplix) dude fucking stop

(matteoplix) with the sn=yncrhon

(matteoplix) holy FUCK

Amir:

me?  i never noticed such a thing

[crumpets]:

(matteoplix) ok guys get this

Amir:

sep

[crumpets]:

(matteoplix) im re listening to the fly lo

(matteoplix) and as kofi typed

(matteoplix) descent into madness

(kedzie05) holy shit

(kedzie05) hahahaha

(matteoplix) i heard “descent into madness”

Amir:

NO

Camus: The Absurd Life: Three Examples

Just a meditation via various wikipedia pages related to Camus and Absurdism that I really enjoy:

 In absurdist philosophy, the Absurd arises out of the fundamental disharmony between the individual's search for meaning and the meaninglessness of the universe. As beings looking for meaning in a meaningless world, humans have three ways of resolving the dilemma.

One of the ways is:
Acceptance of the Absurd: a solution in which one accepts the Absurd and continues to live in spite of it. Camus endorsed this solution, believing that by accepting the Absurd, one can achieve absolute freedom, and that by recognizing no religious or other moral constraints and by revolting against the Absurd while simultaneously accepting it as unstoppable, one could possibly be content from the personal meaning constructed in the process.

How should the absurd man live? Clearly, no ethical rules apply, as they are all based on higher powers or on justification. "Integrity has no need of rules." 'Everything is permitted' "is not an outburst of relief or of joy, but rather a bitter acknowledgment of a fact."Camus then goes on to present examples of the absurd life.

He begins with Don Juan, the serial seducer who lives the passionate life to the fullest. "There is no noble love but that which recognizes itself to be both short-lived and exceptional."

The next example is the actor, who depicts ephemeral lives for ephemeral fame. "He demonstrates to what degree appearing creates being." "In those three hours he travels the whole course of the dead-end path that the man in the audience takes a lifetime to cover."

Camus' third example of the absurd man is the conqueror, the warrior who forgoes all promises of eternity to affect and engage fully in human history. He chooses action over contemplation, aware of the fact that nothing can last and no victory is final.