Don't think about it.

Think about it: "it" being anything.

Think about it because you have to.

Consciousness has to be about something.  It always has a direction.  Consciousness cannot exist on its own.  Consciousness is a relationship, not an entity.

Think about it.

Because you have to.

So how does this effect experience?  Dismissing the infinite reduction of defining consciousness of something as an experience in itself (are you conscious of the conscious experience of that something?  are you conscious of that consciousness too?), we see that consciousness is the antithesis of experience.  The necessity of being about something requires consciousness to be dependent on time and perception (intangible ideas are also perceived).  Experience or being or existing is an absence of time.  It is an infinitesimal pinpoint of pre-reflection.  Perception, and thus consciousness, is reflective: you are always a nanosecond behind the perceived.  Consciousness is temporal and rational and ephemeral; existence is timeless, irrational, and foundational.  Consciousness is a means; experience is an end.

I don't wish to minimize the enormous importance of consciousness.  Our ability to consume our immediate environment, chew it up and regurgitate bite size pieces of meaning allows me to shit in a toilet instead of the dirt and to communicate with pixels instead of rocks.  What I am trying to say is that the packets of information, the ones and zeros, the rational articulations of otherwise meaningless atomic relationships that constitutes the intentionality of consciousness is not a state of being.  We are so wrapped up in the creative usefulness of the objects of our intentions, we lose sight of their purpose: that our forks and knives, our two-party systems, our dogmatic deities, our investment portfolios, and our misplaced and overanalyzed personal identities should enhance being.  They are means.  The goal of these and all conscious intentions is to eliminate conscious intention; to become pre-reflective.  The goal is to be.  

So don't think about it.

I'm back but nothing I say means a damn thing.

I'm back for what that's worth.  Back in the sense that I am writing today.  The experts are in deadlock whether I'll continue tomorrow.  There is speculation, odds, percentages, gut feelings, but in the end no one knows if I'll be back. 

But never fear.  What I don't say carries the same weight as what I do say: nothing.  My words are meaningless.  My blank space is meaningless.  What you get today is what you'll get tomorrow.  Meaninglessness is perennial, omnipresent, a trusted friend.  Meaninglessness is ironically something you can have faith in; a place to hang your hat when Jesus' or Buddha's coat rack isn't quite the right size.

Why am I meaningless?  A better questions is, what does meaning mean?  A hammer is a hammer in the context of nails and buildings and people who use nails to make buildings.  Otherwise it is wood and metal.  Of course, wood and metal carry their own meanings.  So it is atoms and electrons and neutrons and other microscopic round revolving shit that meet to form hard, heavy, and cool.  And, of course, hard, heavy, and cool require someone or something to perceive it. 

Meaning is relative.  It is shared patterns.  It is tones in conflict that, if left alone, would simply be a monotonous alarm but together mark Beethoven's Fifth.  For the little black pixels that make up letters and sentences and paragraphs and pages to become a thing, a hard, heavy, and cool ideological hammer, I need some kind of nail.  And I need something to build.  

The problem is I have nothing to build.  I have no nails and no direction.  I have fingers tapping out some unknown code whose origin is still not clear.  I am not building I'm exploring.  There is no relationship to my words.  They exist as they are because whatever I am exploring (me?) exists as it is.  My words are as meaningless as my silences and my silences are as meaningless as me.  They simply exist just as I simply exist.  

Or at least I wish I could simply exist.  I wish I wasn't a description to those who know me nor a calculation to those who don't.  I wish I ate spinach and believed "I am what I am."  In the end, I wish that my meaning was derived from my being and not the other way around.  I wish what I say really doesn't mean a damn thing.

My imperceptible bond to a jolly old fat man

I love David Hume for multiple reasons: he was a genius, he was perfectly round (not that I promote obesity and its enormously deleterious effects on our health care system, but it kind of worked for a short, 18th century, ultra-sociable philosopher), he loved backgammon and beer, and he quit philosophy because he was "too old and too rich."  The thing I love most about him, however, is his understanding of cause and effect.  Essentially his thought was cause and effect did not exist (anyone that is a Hume scholar will shit their pants and throw their computer across the room at my bastardization of one of the greatest Scottish minds - a mind only one step behind that of Mark Harris.  To them I say 'shut the hell up, it's my blog.').  Cause and effect is a temporal ordering of a timeless set of events.  It is us manufacturing order and meaning.  We create the "necessary connection."

Consider a billiard ball hitting another.  The second bounces of a in predictable, linear manner.  My daughter has never seen a game of pool.  To her, the white ball hitting the black ball and the black bouncing off is an isolated event.  The single case yields no connection.  It is simply an event.  It is over time, seeing numerous balls hitting other balls (yes I chuckled a little) that one develops a connection.  In other words, we create the connection and then define it.  Potential energy becomes kinetic energy following the repulsion of electromagnetic forces inherent in the balls (I laughed again).  

What are these other than words to define the unknown?  What is energy?  Force?  Power?  What is honor?  Freedom?  Justice?  What is love?  These are varying definitions of the space between cause and effect.  They are our way of placing order on the world, a world that without our order driven consciousness would simply exist.  Not change, not progress, just simply exist.  

We live in that space between cause and effect.  And it is that space that we as a medical field need to look to truly treat our patients.  Smoking causes cancer causes death.  My patient doesn't derive meaning from smoking, cancer, death.  S/he derives it in between.  As a physician I create a cause (surgical excision) to alter what I suspect would otherwise be the effect (cancer elimination instead of growth).  I define that space between smoking, cancer, death through science.  But my patient may define it through art, religion, social bonds, etc.  The point is, it's the same space no matter how we define it.  We can't forget that the meaning is arbitrary and subjective whether by scientific experiment or spiritual intuition.

Living in minutia, but dreaming in the abstract

I was thinking about what it takes to be a soldier.  To kill.  A universal morality is topic for another day (another lifetime?) but, for sake of argument, we can say that in Western society, an anti-killing morality has persisted to the point of genetic modification: killing another human being has a negative visceral feel to it.  I would like to think that I can defy the moral load on my genetics and kill in certain situations that clearly call for it.  If someone threatened my family, I KNOW that I could ravage them without thinking.  That knowledge is so lucid that in a Nietzschean eternity, I would see it as one of the few definitive points in my life.  A singular hinge of truth.

I would know all this objectively.  But would I truly feel it?  Would I be able to dismiss the fact that I killed?  I live in the minutia of my life: breakfast, work, play, dinner, sleep.  This is me.  I am these actions.  But my mind is an abstraction.  It lives in concepts and phrases.  It is global and not particular.  What happens when the minutia is in conflict with the abstraction?

It is easier with solid objects: my daughter and my wife.  A threat to them is a threat to a tangible thing.  But concepts of freedom, honor, justice are not.  They are murky abstractions of what we think we value on a day to day basis.  Shooting someone in the face is palpable; weighing the loss or gain of freedom is not.  

Let me make something clear: I am in no way judging the actions of our soldiers over the last few days.  Let me rephrase that: I do judge them but in a positive and grateful way.  I believe they did a remarkable service for those who suffered and need closure.  What I am talking about is how it may affect them; what it means to be a soldier.  Maybe being a soldier is not about the act of killing.  Maybe it is about being able to grasp the intangible in a way that the untrained cannot.  To essentially live in the dream of freedom, honor, glory, justice.  This is in no way a criticism.  In fact, it is a representation of my jealousy.  We need meaning.  These abstractions are the heart of meaning.  Living in them in them and by them seems to me to be a dream come true.  

Why should I give a shit about eternity? Part II: The passion of Buddha

So I shouldn't give a shit about eternity.  But, of course I do.  It makes me wonder if I have been giving religion an unnecessarily bad rap.  Religion's purpose is to provide purpose.  It hides the existential emptiness inherent to self-consciousness under a pillow of soft, warm bullshit.  The bullshit bothers me. It enrages me.  It blinds me to the actual value:  the ritual.  Through ritual, religion provides purpose by eliminating purpose.  The genius of Hemingway, Picasso, Matisse, Neruda was not the actuality of their creations, but the ability to commit to their ritual and give it direction.  One cannot expect everyone to possess this genius.  It may come as shock, but I am not a genius.  I can't commit to my passion.  Hell, I don't even know what my passion is.  Maybe I need a helping hand, someone to provide me with self-effacing ritual.  Maybe if I had a passion for Christ or Mohammed or Buddha, I would have eternity.  Not the 40 virgins in heaven type of eternity, but the eternity I could hold in my hand now like Matisse did his paintbrush.  Maybe religion was meant to give us passion and ritual and not dogma.  Maybe religion was meant to make us all forget about ourselves. 

And maybe we should think about this next time we use religion to create counterfeit pedestals from which to judge the "non-believers" and thus individuate ourselves that much more.

Why should I give a shit about eternity?

I've totally figured out immortality and I'm going to share it with you.

You're welcome America.

John Logan pointed it out in his new-ish play "Red" about Rothko and some random guy who bitch at each other about the nature of art, change, and death (excellent play).  In it the random guy talks about Matisse and how fierce the colors of his later paintings were despite the fact that he knew he was dying.  And when he was to ill to paint, he took some scissors and made collages.  He made collages until he died.  That is immortality.

It certainly would be wonderful if this blog were dipped in titanium and bolted to the White House steps for eternity.  But why should I give a shit about eternity?  I'll be dead.  I won't care who reads the immortalized yet under-recognized genius of this blog.  Nor will I care about the millions of lives this blog will save through it's brilliant insight into the human condition.  Again: I'll be dead.

At this moment, Matisse doesn't care about his paintings nor his fame.  Matisse's a sense of immortality came from passion and the consequent loss of self.  Painting wasn't about creating a personal image.  It wasn't about demarcating a past or impregnating a future.  It was about a ritual.  The dipping of a brush into paint, into canvas, into self.  The ritual eliminated self-consciousness.  Death, illness, body, identity were meaningless.  And when the ritual became impossible, he developed a new one.  Death meant nothing.  That is immortality: not that something is left behind, but that you don't care if it is or not.  Immortality is now.

Should I Jump?, or Rocks Sure Have It Good

Like I said the other day, I'm constantly hunting for methods to create purpose (i.e. meaning) in my life.  Methods to the madness.  Better yet, methods to the meaninglessness.    I firmly believe that I create the meaning in my life.  But creation is irrational and exploratory not logical and systematic.  In other words, I don't know what I'm thinking when I create meaning.  I kind of dick around until something fits (what a fantastically inappropriate way of saying that; so inappropriate, I can't bring myself to delete it).

So I get frustrated.  Nothing except my daughter adequately fits a satisfactory sense of purpose in my life.  Much comes close, but there is always some microscopic failure that I cannot articulate.  I try and fail.  I try.  And fail.  However, no matter how many times I fail, I can't stop.  I require meaning like I require air.

There is a sadistic piece of me, albeit barely perceptible, that unconsciously fantasizes about the demise of meaning in my life.  It's like the itch you get in your feet when standing on a ledge: what if I jumped?  What would really happen?  The irrational (stronger) part of my brain insists on the existence of meaning.  The logical (weaker) part of my brain knows meaning is just a conglomerate of distinct fragments of bullshit glued together on a background of nothingness in my brain. My life will eventually end in meaninglessness.  Any thoughts of immortality are a joke.  (What do you think about your great grandparents?  Probably don't make a meaningful impact on your daily life.)  So why struggle with it so much now?  Why cling to the impossible?

I do not want to lose that which is meaningful in my life (see Babies and Suicide).  I wonder if there is something in between?  An intensity of being.  An existence with an imperceptible self.  A purposeless now.  I wonder if there is a way to be a rock.

I am synonymous

It is clear that we require meaning. Our lives need significance, import, substance, usefulness, value, essence, and consequence.  We need powerpoint and bar graphs and collectibles and little paper awards signifying our significance.  Because in the end, if there is no point, then what the fuck is the point?

We make this meaning up as we go along (existence before essence).  I decide that what I say or do or think has value.  Or I decide that some god gives it value.  This means I also decide when it is meaningless.  When it is futile, pointless, empty, hollow, purposeless, insignificant, and incomprehensible.

Or maybe I decide that it just is.  That what I say or do or think is just what I say or do or think.  It exists as it is.  

But I can't just 'be', can I?  I have to abide, continue, endure, happen, last, prevail, and survive.  I cannot be, I can only become.  Inactivity and complacency are existential impossibilities.  

So I ask myself, what the fuck am I talking about anyway?  What does it all mean?

The meaning of life redux

I've been listening to The Meaning of Life from the Teaching Company (I have listened to and forgotten hours of academic material through them). Something Professor Garfield mentioned hit a cord with me. He said that Nietzsche's vision of meaning in life is turning one's life into art. In other words, letting aesthetics guide your motivations and you will find meaning.

This strikes a cord with me for the reason I mentioned yesterday: there is an irrational, incalculable, illogical, intangeable aspect to our perception and understanding. Our sixth sense is an ill-defined "art". What Nietzsche is telling us is that there is no rational explanation for meaning. It can not be sculpted with language or calculated with numbers. It is that whatever that we see when we are not trying to see.

How does this relate to medicine? Who gives a shit.

Apparently I do. What it means to medicine is that our goals may need some tweeking. Instead of the objective criteria of absence of disease, we may need to consider the irrational criteria of meaning. In other words, our patients are expressions of our art. Success is ill defined and irrational. It may not be represented by a lab test.

Pattern recognition and an identity crisis

What the fuck am I? (Too many "fuck"s in this blog? It just works so well at getting readers...) You'll definitely notice an identity crisis weaving it's way through these entries. I guess it's not so much a crisis as I am content with not ever finding out who or what I am. I do believe, however, that the search is a necessary and vital process. In other words, my identity - my life for that matter - is boiled down to a fruitless search. In order to prevent utter personal chaos, the process then has to be the goal. And since meaning is a human construct (yes, I will be serving drinks and similar bits of bullshit wisdom in hell) and a rite of consciousness (more nails in the a-religious coffin), brain-chaos-containment is meaning.  So, Aristotelian logic leads us directly to the idea that I have discovered the meaning of life: process not achievement. The world is now saved. You're welcome America (standard hilarious Will Ferrell).

But back to question at hand: what the fuck am I?  Phenomenology has us bracket our perceptual habits and start fresh (more on phenomenology when I know what the hell I'm talking about).  So starting fresh: I am atoms.  I am carbon; I am oxygen; I am hydrogen; and I am sprinkles of other molecular crap.  The table my computer sits on (I won't discuss the computer itself because I don't pretend to understand whatever magic the Warlock Jobs used to create it) is also made of similar, if not identicle, molecular crap.  So what am I in relation to it?  I am exactly that: a relationship.  When I see myself in the mirror, I am looking at the same particles as I see in a cat, or a table, or tree.  I am different because of the relationship of those particles.  I am a pattern, not a substance.

What does this mean?  I am a construct of my mind.  My brain interprets the relationships and creates me or the table or the tree.  I don't exist as I think I exist outside of my head.  So what the fuck am I?  I am whatever my mind wants me to be.

Babies and suicide

Probably an unfair title.  There isn't much literature on babies committing suicide oddly enough.  What I mean by it is I never understood the concept of suicide until I had my child.  Strange to think the concept of mortal self limitation should arise out of my blonde haired, blue-eyed bundle of joy but it did.

I always thought that if I hit rock bottom somehow (whatever rock bottom is) then, in the very least, I'd be the world's greatest stuntman or the best war photographer of the century or the first man to eat 10 gallons of cookie dough a day.  Rock bottom would, in a sense, be freeing (another topic altogether already well put together by Chuck Paluhanakanaksanahun [possibly misspelled] of Fight Club fame).  If I truly examine this, then freedom to me was no longer caring about my mortality.  My life and death was the meaningful base from which all sprung.

With the advent of my daughter, that base changed.  She added a dimension that trumped my mortality.  Her physical safety; her emotional and intellectual growth; her potential role in society; my future enjoyment in watching her grow up; her present and future dependence on me; and much, much more all represent a richer, more immediately present meaning to my existence.  In other words, although the I've always enjoyed my life and am quite fond of who I am (contrary to the self-reflective brow-beating I give myself in this blog - you hurt the ones you love), the fall to rock bottom was not truly a long one.  I was standing on the 3rd floor veranda of a beautiful summer home in San Sebastian.  With my daughter, I am standing on top of 100 Burj Khalifas ).  I'm so tall now, everything I used to know and care about is microscopic.  I understand suicide now because I could not tolerate any other view than the one my daughter gives me.  My life became richer but more fragile with the birth of my daughter.

Camus said that the one philosophical question worth asking was why not commit suicide.  It is a brilliant question that, if you truly think about it, is a difficult one to answer (the question of course being the unanswerable "what's the meaning of life?").  I say flip it on it's head: why commit suicide?  What could you have in your life that truly means more than your life?  What would die over?  (Napoleon suggested that he can make a man die over a piece of ribbon.)

Chuck: [http://chuckpalahniuk.net/]

Burj Khalifa: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burj_Khalifa]

Camus: [http://www.tameri.com/csw/exist/camus.shtm]

Philosophy and the Meaning of Life: [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/life-meaning/]

Napoleon Quotes: [http://www.military-quotes.com/Napoleon.htm]