Reconstructing a Lost World

I’ve almost lost sense of all that is human. It is the world that has to be reconstructed for me. I wish I had more to feel, more to know, more to say...well, to be sure there has been more to feel, but this stage is extremely inchoate, a wordless pulp, which for some reason cannot be united or verbalized. May be it is a good thing, but I do have my emotions being carried off by something unknown, to a place unknown and beyond any control I can exert upon it. A sense of fatigue looms, to hide myself from all this is the nothingness of sleep seems to be what I am most compelled to do.

And perhaps this conflict between this bombardment of this infinite almost everything at once, at once bewildering and tiring, and the contrasting but similar to it sense of nothingness can be resolved by a sense of something: a unifying order that brings all of this together and doesn’t let it slip away. It would be a world of concepts, as embodying the meanings of a multitude of words, thus reducing to some extent this infinitude. But this too must be reduced and perhaps the only way to do it is to find a sense of ‘the something’, that is, a unifying idea of what ‘something’ is, under which all meanings and things are subsumed.

Now why is a letting go, or slipping away disturbing? At one level, again, as already described, there is the sense of the unknown. But why is this sense of the unknown so disconcerting? One theory of mine is that from the sudden appearance of the hidden and unexpected in nature, which, being contingent and which we therefore fear, because we aren’t sure whether it is there to benefit us or harm us, we extrapolate this phenomena to the world of our emotions, nature turning metaphorically into these emotions (and that is why we find so many of our emotions represented in nature) and individual instances (particulars) of unfamiliar emotions therefore are feared, even as they turn up. SO basically verbalising then helps us to identify the unfamiliar and reassure us that these aren’t unfamiliar after all. Also, when we know what these emotions are, there is a formal order which is applied on to them, which can be reapplied in the case of further instances, because, these take part within the scaffolding of the order.

How then is the order reapplied? To this I would say through a rule: the rule being Identify unidentified instance y with known x, and apply adapted response z for x, to instance y. SO here there is not fear to a known response to identified emotion. But how to associate an appropriate response with x? Furthermore, considering the context is different and the emotion that appears is therefore combined with a different set of further emotions, how do we identify the emotion and how do we find out that the response that was appropriate to a different context is appropriate to this context?

A solution to the above problem would be to further subdivide each emotion into an atomic emotion and parts of a context to atomic events and things which make up a context. These are what exist and are the basic constituents of our world. This might further problematize the whole issue since one wanted to reduce the number of constituents through conceptualising them, now these constituents, being atomic and individual, seem suddenly to have multiplied! However, now that these emotions are predicable, they can now be reidentified through time, thereby economizing on the whole issue...at least...

Regaining the Past

If one’s own present has been destroyed along with all the effects of the past, and one seeks to regain the same past that has been destroyed, if one expects that same past to recreate itself, then he will land up destroying all that is in the future, merely because that past could not be recreated in the exact way in which it had existed. But if one expects a reconstruction contrary to his expectations, it is possible to build another future and therefore another past as time passes to lead us on to another present. Simply put, you can change the effects of the past and your interpretation of it, thereby re-configuring the past in your head by making amends, but you must be open to novelties. Otherwise you destroy everything.

So most ppl who take revenge, including the protagonist in Memento and the villains in the Star Trek movie, land up falling prey to these false expectations.

Money, fame or happiness? Are they mutually exclusive? (Fresh attempt to shed light on a cliched problem)

To ask this question itself is not fair. On one hand, the person whose inclinations tend more towards money or fame will lend more credence to them, thinking that somehow it’ll come with them. This way, they’ll be subtly led by the idea of mutual inclusivity to say that happiness will only come with money and fame. Taking this view to its extreme, the more courageous might just say that happiness is for the mediocre or something like that and run after the money or the fame as primary values and discount happiness altogether. This will be the mutual exclusivist view.

On the other hand, those who vouch for happiness will just say that money and fame ought to be discounted altogether and one must live in utter simplicity and austerity, because money and fame distract us from true, substantial and lasting happiness. One must listen closely to these people, since they seem to be claiming a sort of happiness stripped of all other trappings, perhaps calling us to look at a more pure and unadulterated form of happiness, a sort that can be construed as a standard for judging all other modes of it.

But then, the above views tend to assume that money, fame or happiness are either mutually exclusive or mutually inclusive. When they are mutually inclusive, happiness will be a necessary correlate of money and fame. When exclusive, happiness does not at all need money or any sort of fame. That means that happiness is necessarily not connected with money or fame at all. But one can be famous or have lots of money without being happy. One can have less money or no fame and not be happy. And one can be happy having all of them and having none of them.

Therefore, the fault I see is that happiness has been seen as being necessarily married to or divorced from money or fame. The moment you see that, the nature and puzzles regarding happiness seem to be more resolved and our real life examples of people with less money or no fame or the rich and famous being happy begin to seem more intelligible. My doubts do move towards those with no money at all being happy, but there are instances of religious beggars undergoing forms of happiness. But all in all, the question is more about what you actually pursue or are obsessed about that helps or hinders happiness.