the nervous animal:
such is the nature of the human being, an animal born with fear, nervous from the very start. fear of what? it is said some of our fears are irrational but could we ever be completely rationally afraid? perhaps it is just not possible.
we have several words that imply horrible, dreadful things but, if we are lucky, and nothing truly bad has ever happened to us, can we really think about these things with any clarity of thought? we have only a hint of what they entail. this is to argue the case that only someone who has actually done or really experienced something can truly think about it. the rest of us live in a dimmed awareness of such things.
but fear remains, it is connected to our thought, it swells when we consider bad possibilities, when we worry about our future, it can lead to irrational panic attacks when the impossible horror seems either totally possible or real already.
a girl walking in the forest alone, she keeps looking behind her, it just goes to show state of mind. perhaps she is scared of getting lost and looking back to get her bearings straight, perhaps she is scared someone is following her and she is all on her own. indeed, a lot of nerves are about travel and other people. given that it is a universal truth we are socially anxious animals, easing others' nervousness is a skill.
there is in human nature an urge to explore and to create. this is in itself a dangerous thing, not everywhere or everything is safe. once we have made mistakes, we are nervous whenever it seems they might happen again. could we ever be so aware of danger that we can avoid the whole learning by making a mistake thing?
CLEARCHARGE
Showing posts with label human. Show all posts
Showing posts with label human. Show all posts
Saturday, April 14, 2012
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Change and Time and the Human Being
change and time and the human being:
from the perspective of any observer, things change. because things change, this gives rise to the concept of time. the primary sense in which this is evidenced is in our eyesight. this is something obvious we can think about, the field of our vision is ever changing, ever moving. this does not prove that all things change however, and we cannot assume it, perhaps there are parts of reality that simply do not, and therefore are without time itself yet still very much real in space. it is a great part of our consciousness that the sun rises and sets and days and years pass, indeed perhaps we overemphasize this natural cycle, chiefly because we can see it. however there are things that cannot be seen, we cannot easily think about yet, but they change nonetheless too.
what is a human? a mind with a body, that principally can see his or her interaction with a 3D physical construct. because of his or her mind, a human can think, process its movements within this construct, and even wander off into abstract thought! also a human has emotions tied in as well, which can explain his or her actions. can a human think clearly about real things that it cannot see or hear? everything is connected, so perhaps he or she can. what is consciousness and what are our senses? does one gradually become the other? the power of abstract thought is that it can consider all the possibilities that could be true of reality. the crazy person does not get very far, perhaps. we hope eventually that the truth will fit, will work so to speak, and drive the solution to the puzzle of life and the universe.
i think it can be said that not everything changes as much as everything else. this may seem obvious but actually can be quite a nebulous concept. they have different "speeds", different "distances", in the way they change. we might suppose that some things change so fast or move so fast that we cannot keep up, we cannot think about them properly. some things seem to be out of our control. it's like a part of life was born at 360 mph, and that dangerous too! we might hope to find a few "safe" courses of action which we could repeat. allow me to express something i think is mistaken. we must stop thinking of time as an endless mutation that can never return, as a linear one way passage on the mathematical x-axis to infinity. just as it is night now and the sun will rise again in the morning, and blue will be blue and red will be red forever, time is not a one way trip to oblivion, as you would think in a paranoid moment. posit that things revert to their starting point. but though it is highly unlikely, what if time were an infinite loop, somehow everything reverted to its original state at the start of time, at the same time? what makes this impossible?
consciousness is a volatile substance, and we can forget easily. assuming it always existed, everyone must wonder what it was at the start of time. lack of knowledge is an anxious making condition. everyone still worries about their future, that hasn't changed! we can only conclude the state of nervousness on the first day of time must have been extreme!
CLEARCHARGE
from the perspective of any observer, things change. because things change, this gives rise to the concept of time. the primary sense in which this is evidenced is in our eyesight. this is something obvious we can think about, the field of our vision is ever changing, ever moving. this does not prove that all things change however, and we cannot assume it, perhaps there are parts of reality that simply do not, and therefore are without time itself yet still very much real in space. it is a great part of our consciousness that the sun rises and sets and days and years pass, indeed perhaps we overemphasize this natural cycle, chiefly because we can see it. however there are things that cannot be seen, we cannot easily think about yet, but they change nonetheless too.
what is a human? a mind with a body, that principally can see his or her interaction with a 3D physical construct. because of his or her mind, a human can think, process its movements within this construct, and even wander off into abstract thought! also a human has emotions tied in as well, which can explain his or her actions. can a human think clearly about real things that it cannot see or hear? everything is connected, so perhaps he or she can. what is consciousness and what are our senses? does one gradually become the other? the power of abstract thought is that it can consider all the possibilities that could be true of reality. the crazy person does not get very far, perhaps. we hope eventually that the truth will fit, will work so to speak, and drive the solution to the puzzle of life and the universe.
i think it can be said that not everything changes as much as everything else. this may seem obvious but actually can be quite a nebulous concept. they have different "speeds", different "distances", in the way they change. we might suppose that some things change so fast or move so fast that we cannot keep up, we cannot think about them properly. some things seem to be out of our control. it's like a part of life was born at 360 mph, and that dangerous too! we might hope to find a few "safe" courses of action which we could repeat. allow me to express something i think is mistaken. we must stop thinking of time as an endless mutation that can never return, as a linear one way passage on the mathematical x-axis to infinity. just as it is night now and the sun will rise again in the morning, and blue will be blue and red will be red forever, time is not a one way trip to oblivion, as you would think in a paranoid moment. posit that things revert to their starting point. but though it is highly unlikely, what if time were an infinite loop, somehow everything reverted to its original state at the start of time, at the same time? what makes this impossible?
consciousness is a volatile substance, and we can forget easily. assuming it always existed, everyone must wonder what it was at the start of time. lack of knowledge is an anxious making condition. everyone still worries about their future, that hasn't changed! we can only conclude the state of nervousness on the first day of time must have been extreme!
CLEARCHARGE
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