DaniSeeh

In a cemetery the other day, I saw a child playing around near the graves.

This was odd to me, because the image made me wonder:

Does new life replace the dead?

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, he makes the case that man’s form of immortality is through his children. Heirs breed timelessness. The question is, though, is this truly a form of immortality?

It would seem to be at first glance, because humankind could last nearly forever by reproducing continually. The odd thing is though, so could all other species. In fact, so long as man enjoys the taste of apples, we will likely continue to breed them. And in one sense, each apple is more alike to another apple then each man is to another man.

This is because apples are all grafted off of just a few different trees. In the wild, most apple trees bear disgusting get tasting apples. However, when one happens to grow in just the right way to create a tasty treat, we carve off parts of that tree and clone it so that we can have more of the delicious red fruit that it bears.

So in this case, it would seem that if we admit that man can be immortalized through his offspring, then apple trees have even more of a claim to it.

But this seems off base, apple trees are not immortal.

They live, and they die, just like us.

As I was listening to a wonderful album by Passenger and friends, The Flight of the Crow, I finally reached the end of the album. While the experience was wrapping up and winding down, he spoke of life coming to its close too. He said that “Life gets narrower the further you go.”

Is it true? Are our lives “bullets … fired from shotguns flying through birthdays and new years?”

Does life get narrower the further you go?

In one sense it is definitely true. As we live through each year of our life, we are also one year closer to our death. But, then again, we don’t count down our birthdays…

We count them up.

It isn’t like each year I gather around with family and friends, and sit in front of a cake with 54 candles on it and celebrate the expected amount of years I have left to live. So, in one sense we aren’t counting our lives down, and watching them get narrower, but instead adding them up and watching our life grow.

Though, there is another aspect to our life getting narrower. This is in pace of life. As we get older, life seems to move faster and faster. This is for lots of reasons, but one is that we simply have more of life already lived, so that each minute, hour, and year compiled is a smaller percentage of our life.

For example, if I were two years old, then a year would total half of my experience on earth. Whereas at my current age of nineteen, a year is only 5% of my life. For my late grandfather at the time of his death, a year was only one percent of his life.

This means that each year will “feel” faster than the last as it totals less of our life in terms of percentage. But, this doesn’t mean that it is narrower. In fact, a year of life is still a year of life. Children learn faster and their brains improve more at age one than mine at age nineteen, so in one respect a year of life for a child is actually much more experientially than my year.

Not only that, but each year of life a person should grow in virtue and wisdom, and hence, their souls should be larger and fuller. By this logic, if you are a better man at the end then at the beginning, than the end of your life is not narrow, but massive and wide in comparison to the start.

The other day I was sat in an oral exam pondering the topic before me, which happened to be whether or not discovering truth made one more virtuous. Now, my initial reaction was: “of course!”

But as I let the thought pervade and fill my mind further, it became more ambiguous. This seems to be the case with many thoughts, that the more one thinks about them the more hazy they become.

Is truth enough?

Is it necessarily good? How do we get it? Do we need to? These were the questions flooding my mind. Plato claims in the Phaedo that learning is recollection. If that is true, then it would seem that discovering truth would be good.

Just like an amnesiac recovering his past life is a joyous occasion, us rediscovering our lost selves would naturally be a happy occasion. But, with some men this can prove to be a stumbling block.

For an example, let’s look to Alcibiades. He was a man swamped in truth, he had Socrates himself as his tutor. Yet, he used this truth and power viciously, and caused significant damage to many people’s lives in Athens.

The truth did not make Alcibiades virtuous. So, is truth-seeking a virtuous action? If so, Sherlock Holmes should be one of the most virtuous characters of all time… But he’s not.

Our dear Sherlock is a drug-addict and a bit of a sociopath, who can’t function properly. He discovers truth all the time, but he is not a paragon of goodness.

So perhaps truth in itself is not enough to satisfy, we need more. We need beauty. We need goodness.

As I have been meditating on choice, I began to wonder continuously about how decisions are given meaning. For example, does opening and closing a door constitute a choice? Since the “choice” that is made is literally having no effect on anything, it is difficult to consider it a real decision.

What qualifies as a choice?

Imagine for yourself an office, with branching hallways, desks distributed throughout, and plenty of office supplies to fiddle with and enjoy. Now, you mess around in this office for an hour, rearranging desks, tossing pens around, and generally making a mess of the place.

Did you make any choices as you interacted with that environment?

Pretend that there are no other people in this office, and there will never be people again. Think of the office as devoid of life, and devoid of law too. If we imagine this office in a world disconnected from ours, where there is no law and where nobody cares what is done to the office, then did you really make any choices in destroying it?

Perhaps not.

Now instead imagine that as you walk through the office a narrator commands you, saying: “walk through the left door.”

In this situation, if you walk through the left door, you obeyed the narrator and made a choice. But if you walked through the right door or refused to move at all, you disobeyed him and you still made a choice.

This hypothetical scenario appears more like a choice already. There are two distinct options that have immediate results: you either obeyed the narrator or you did not. Whereas rearranging desks and the like seems more like playtime, and less like a choice. Throwing the pens had no result other than the interaction with the environment it entailed.

So perhaps a command is indeed required to make a meaningful choice, and if this is true, one can logically infer God if one believes in free-will. In order for humans to make choices, they needed a Commander to move their choice with meaning.

While discussing free-will the other day, someone accidentally made a very intriguing point: that in order for humanity to be able to make a choice, God had to also allow us to be able to make a mistake.

In other words, in order for us to be able to make a choice, we had to be able to make a wrong choice. But, is that true?

Do there have to be wrong choices?

At first glance, it would seem false. I mean, in many situations there are multiple options that seem to be neither better nor worse decisions. For example, whether I drink milk or water, I am not making a wrong choice. But, I could be making inferior and superior choices perhaps.

So, just because I cannot detect which is superior, milk or water, does not mean that one is not indeed superior. Water might be the healthier option, to illustrate. And that would force one of the two decisions to be the “wrong” option.

However, the thought behind the right and wrong option seems to go a little deeper than mere superiority and inferiority. It seems implied that a command is necessary in order for a meaningful choice to be made. That God had to tell Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit in order for them to choose.

As I have discussed in the past, I believe that there are meaningful and meaningless decisions, and that choices that lack any meaning may not be choices at all. If indeed choices that lack meaning are not choices, then it seems proper to discuss what provides a choice with meaning.

In one of my favorite YouTuber’s videos, he uttered this frequently used and unforgettable phrase: “All writing is rewriting.” Now, in context, this was being used to ridicule a viewer who was complaining about having to rewrite his novel.

But, of course, this prompted a question in me:

Is writing rewriting?

Practically speaking, this is true for most writers. The majority of people who sit down to draft their masterpiece will have to redraft it over and over again in order to achieve anything worthwhile.

However, this statement is secretly a blanket statement. That innocent little “all” at the beginning of the sentence transforms it from an observation of a mass occurrence into an all-encompassing rule.

And once you’ve gone from observation to rule, defiant little exceptions almost always start arising.

For example, some of the most gloriously written speeches are improvised. They never had to be rewritten. It is unlikely that Jesus, to illustrate, sat down and edited his parables at any point. But regardless of your stance on Him, everyone can agree that the parables are well-told stories.

Perhaps that is not all that is meant by the sweeping declaration “all writing is rewriting” though. Maybe another interpretation of the statement is just as valid.

What it might really mean is that all writing is merely rewriting what came before. That there is nothing entirely new and fresh to be said. Perhaps it is saying that we writers are simply combining the same twenty-six letters, couple thousand words, and couple hundred plot elements to make seemingly fresh material.

In that case, it seems quite true that all writing is indeed rewriting. We are only rewriting what came before, but it still is beautiful.

Words can be fickle friends.

They often destroy our communication, like when we utter phrases we do not mean, or babble incoherently while attempting to impart meaning.

Sometimes we say exactly what we meant, and still our words fall deafly. We meticulously craft our sentence down to each particular particle, and our listener still misunderstands our message.

And yet, we are dependent on these clever communicators.

Humans cannot avoid words.

We love, and hate, and cannot do without them.

They are our only passage into another man’s mind. Words have deftly defied us, and secured their position as rulers in the kingdom of conveyance.

But they are fragile. They too rely on us to speak them into being. Our utterance is their only existence.

However, there is a Word that is not weak. A Word that is unbreakable. The Word that was, is, and will always be uttered. This Word is worthy, is whole, and is true.

If we lean on this wondrous Word, we can confidently declare our future in Him. We can know that there will come a day when our words, too, will not be weak.

When even our words, our human words, will always reach their meaning. They will not break. They will not bend.

In class, we were discussing Aristotle's Poetics and story structure.  We talked about plenty of exciting topics, but one that we discussed was the idea of beauty disappearing when one draws to near to it.  In other words:

Is beauty best seen at a distance?

This question applies to everything beautiful as far as I can tell.  This happens when one begins to examine the plot of a story too closely, when one approaches a painting and stares at it from three inches away, or even when one picks out a tiny portion of a song and listens to only a note or a few notes: the beauty of the subject being admired begins to dissolve.

If you get too close, the glorious song becomes a dull note, the painting appears as brushstrokes on a canvas, the story is rendered into nothing but implausible words about events that never occurred.

In order to see the true beauty of a piece, you must examine more than mere technique, you must back up and see its whole.

You can't see the scope of a painting by looking at a single stroke of the brush. You can't feel the emotion of a song in a single note.  You have to look farther, not closer.

Sometimes, of course, it is worthwhile to examine technique.  Looking at the structure of your favorite story can help you determine how you should structure your own tales, and listening to a note over and over again teaches you how to match it with your own voice.

Just make sure you back up every now and then and appreciate the art for more than technique, for more than notes, for more than brushstrokes, for more than words, but instead for its entirety.  Enjoy the story by losing yourself in it.  Enjoy the painting by forgetting that it is one.  Enjoy the song by sinking into its embrace.

Things are incredibly malleable, almost everything seems to be changing constantly.  The grand poet, Ovid, observes this in his Metamorphoses, a work entirely devoted to change.  In it, people are constantly morphing from one form into another, and he uses this mechanic to tell hundreds of tales from mythology.

The question that this changing arises for me is this:

Is change good?

After all, God is usually thought to be an unchanging being, and this is a part of his perfection.  However, we seem to be beings that change constantly.  Our direct experience of this earth is an altering one, continuously consistent only in inconsistency.

However, change seems to be a good thing to a certain extent.  Improvement can only exist where change is present, and impermanence grants an appreciation that cannot be gained in any other way.  Change creates growth, and we can only appreciate certain things when we live them inside of time.

As the Zen Buddhist monk, Thích Nhất Hạnh, said: "Without impermanence, life is not possible. How can we transform our suffering if things are not impermanent? How can our daughter grow up into a beautiful young lady? How can the situation in the world improve? We need impermanence for social justice and for hope."

He goes on to conclude that due to impermanence, we learn to love what we have in the moment.  Without change, we would not appreciate what we currently have.

However, God is able to appreciate all things as they happen, as they were, and as they will be, for He is outside of time.  He does not need impermanence to appreciate, and if we loved perfectly perhaps we would not need it either.

We do live in a changing world though, so it is possible that we are meant to, or possibly only could, appreciate moments when we know that they pass.

This is why must adhere to the famous philosophy of Horace:

"Carpe Diem."

Seize the day.

More than only the day though, seize every moment!  Seize every instant you have with the people you love.

I witnessed a girl dancing ballet tonight in a football field under the gorgeous stars. She danced in a way that brought a bit of joy into my heart, but I caught myself watching her shadow more than her.

Why?

Sometimes we spend our time chasing shadows, when we should have been spending it chasing realities. However, this doesn’t mean that the time spent following the dancing shadows was useless.

It seems that time spent on shadows can be productive. It can bring joy… and sorrow. But realities bring both of those too.

Just make sure you don’t turn your realization of the nature of the dancing shadow into another shadow to chase. Look back up at the beautiful ballerina instead, and watch the dance as it unfolds.

The ballerina is still more wondrous than her shadow.

She deserves your attention more dearly than her byproduct. The dance only gets to be watched once, and then it wisps away as surely as the shadow when the light is flipped off. So seize your time with the ballerina, instead of her shadow, and watch fervently.

We crowd ourselves so frequently that sometimes we forget to look up.

The clouds above us are beautiful, made for us, entertainment more than the mind can comprehend.

They are so gorgeous I can understand why so many people thought that they were heaven.

Staring up you can see them, so close and so far. They are like ice cream or cotton candy, captured for an instant up there just for us. You can almost touch them.

So we tried.

They never stop moving, but we tried to catch them. We envisioned angels with harps sitting up there, and built metal tubes to shoot us up amongst them.

But the angels weren’t there.

Dante told us that the angels were the stars, forever dancing in the sky, little balls of light performing for God.

So we went there. But we couldn’t find the angels waiting there.

So we gave up, and made angels of ourselves. The glory wasn’t given to God anymore, but to us, and to our choices.

We thought we could make ourselves angels, but we can’t. We aren’t angels, and we aren’t devils. We’re only human.

My friend, Eric Hawkins, was telling me a joke the other day that he had heard from Bo Burnham, a comedian. This is how it goes:

'The Squares lived happily, in their square houses, in their square yards, in their square town.

One day, a family of Circles moved in from the west.

"Get out of here, roundies!" shouted one of the Squares. "Why?" asked on of the Circles. "Because this is a metaphor for racism!"’

This joke is a bit disturbing, and not even because of the racism(though that too, of course. Always treat circles kindly). I find this joke a bit unsettling because the storyteller is intentionally undermining the myth narrative and throwing the literal truth in our face.

Are myths true?

I believe that they are, even more so than accurate stories. Myths communicate more than mere surface truths, like who was elected to be president of the US in 1924(Calvin Coolidge, by the way), they actually treat us to deeper truths about life.

This may be why this joke is funny… Or at least has a surprising ending. It is surprising because we are not used to the characters in a story breaking the myth world and speaking the literal truth. The reason why the storyteller chose to tell that story was to illustrate racism, but we don’t want the story to tear itself apart by telling the literal truth.

What we really desire in a story is a more secret truth. One that we cannot find elsewhere. One that can only be told to us though myths. This is the sort of truth we are seeking, and that is why we should be perturbed when stories like these break down the convention.

This type of breaking the fourth wall can get dangerous. Some art has to do it, but once you do you cannot easily return. So make certain to learn the harder sorts of truths, and don’t stick to the simple, boring, literal ones.

As I was sitting in the shower(which is where I, like most, do my best thinking), pondering choice, this thought popped into my head:

What kinds of choices are there?

I mean, there seem to be irrelevant choices, like the cup-lifting I discussed before, and relevant choices, like who one marries, and there also seem to be external choices and internal choices.

Allow me to explain:

An internal relevant choice might be deciding who one shall marry, as previously mentioned.  This decision was made in ones head only, but it actually impacts the external reality in certain ways.  For example, if someone decides that they want to marry a girl, they are likely to do things such as take her on dates, buy flowers for her, et cetera.  This is not directly what he chose, and he is making other based upon the significant internal decision that he made.

An external relevant choice would be, for example, that person buying flowers for his girlfriend.  This decision directly affected the outside world within a reasonable period of time of making the choice.  And so I would coin this term as an external choice.

An internal irrelevant choice would be the decision, if one were named Stanley, to start thinking of themselves in their head as Stan instead.  This has no meaningful impact on the world or really even their life.  So it is irrelevant.

An external irrelevant choice would be, for example, lifting and placing a cup in its exact same position.

There are probably plenty of other types of choices, but at least these four seem distinct to me.

As I was playing The Stanley Parable with my friend Nicholas Stillwell a few nights ago, a thought crossed my mind:

What is choice?

By this I do not exactly mean "what is a decision?" but more along the lines of "what qualifies as a choice?"

I mean, when I lift up my cup and then place it directly where it was previously lying on the desk, is that actually a choice?  I am making a decision and externally affecting my environment, yes, but it has no impact on my life or anyone else's lives.  And if I place it in the same position(yes I know that on a minute scale it is not in the exact same place) it had no real effect on the world either.

In some ways, this is actually easier to see in a video game rather than in reality because pointless discussions arise less frequently.

In The Stanley Parable, you can open and close doors in front of you if you desire, however, this opening and closing returns the doors to an identical state as they were in before.  Those doors are precisely the same, and are opening and closing in the same way every single time you operate them.

All you are doing when you open and close them is flipping a switch, moving a binary from a zero to a one and then back to a zero again.  To proceed in the game, you have to eventually leave the door open so that you can walk through it, so your "decision" has no influence on the events as they unfold whatsoever.

Are you making a choice?

In real life, the cup-lifting experience is similar to the door-closing one in The Stanley Parable.  Since the lifting and lowering of a cup has no meaning to reality, and changes essentially nothing in the world, is it a real choice?

I do not think so.  Perhaps this is why making choices is so difficult, because we actually are not as practiced at it as we have led ourselves into believing.  We really only do make a few choices a day, if even that many, that actually impact our lives and change things about the world and the people in it.

If cup-lifting is no real choice, then what is to say that any of our "button-pushing" really affects us?  Maybe monotony is comfortable because humans don't like choice as much as we think we do.

So make choices frequently, and do the uncomfortable thing.  Experts recommend making at least 8 choices a day, or so I've heard.

Over the last couple weeks, I have slowly been asking around the people that I know to see how they read and think. By this I do not mean, what is the process by which we think, or how did we come to think, but simply this question:

In what manner do our thoughts occur?

As in, how do we experience our own mental narration?

Some experience thought just that way, as a constant self-narration of contemplation, action, etc. This is my primary way of thinking. I am going to label this thinking with words.

Others think visually, seeing images of places, people, and events unfold in their mind. This is my second most common thought-life exercise. I label this thinking with images.

Still others think with sound, not with just words in their head, but with music and sound running through their minds.

Some think kinsethetically, in other words, feeling movements. Athletes learn this way, such as when one learns to run or do a black flip.

To a certain extent, it seems that words can intersect at least a little with every type of learning, though. For example, sound-based thinkers would hear narration in their mind. Words also collide with images, such as when you see the words in your mind. Language also seems to touch kinetic memory, like with feeling yourself handwriting the words in your head.

It could be that while all people have a varied thought life and some prefer specific types of thought more than others, that linguistic thought is the thread connecting all people’s thoughts.

I’ve had a constant thought project going on for the past couple years about the nature of infinity.  What is it?  What can be known about it?  Are there multiple types of it?  Are some infinities bigger than others?  If so, how many and what kinds?  Etc, etc.

It is my personal pastime, perhaps, producing persistent particulars pertaining to profusion.

So to begin, I would like to discuss what exactly I mean by infinity, and I will probably do a ton of boring blog posts on it because I love thinking about it.

When I use the word infinity, for this discussion, I do not mean either an all encompassing sequence of numbers, or an infinitely large number, though those are each a type of infinity.  I will discuss them when I talk about different sorts of infinities, but for now, what I mean by infinite is this:

Any unbounded thing.

This is the literal reading of the word: (in)finite.  To not be finite.  To have no end.  To cease never.

This could be restricted merely to numbers(which is what I intend to do for the majority of these discussions) or could mean something like the human soul, which may or may not be bounded.  Probably not.

As for numbers, I absolutely adore discussing them(though never playing with them, math is scary), so I will begin by discussing what types of infinities there are in order to make an attempt at answering the first two questions.  Though, whether they will ever be answered is yet to be seen.