God Inside My Head
Eternity is Pretty Big After All
I’m hesitant to apologize for not having posted more, for all sorts of reasons; but I’d still like to note that I’ve had a lot of things worth writing vying for brainspace lately. They tend to lose out to more immediate concerns or tinkering with Linux, though, due in no small degree to the fact that most of them are derivatives of larger ideas, themselves recursively so. In the end, I have a couple of things I could spend my time on: aforementioned more immediate concerns; or an inclusive, exhaustive extrapolation of everything. The former takes a little less time, and so there you have it.
Actually, it’s that nature of ideas that is the topic or motivating theme of the writing-worthy bits. The more I try to extract some kernel of meaning from this maelstrom of sensation I call a life, the deeper and more fundamental my lens is drawn. Take that as far as human cognition can, and you (at least, I) find yourself (myself) in a simply terrifying place. Nothing here has any intrinsic worth except as a function of information processing, which—at the end of an orgy of deconstruction—is the only relevant noun or verb: people and stars and weather patterns and planets and TV sitcoms and weapons of mass destruction and zero-point energy and blogs all simply shift information from one place to another, mashing them together or spreading them apart. Atoms and thoughts and people and energy are all different levels of the same thing: information.
This is not revolutionary nor epiphanic. Whatever words or other depictions are used, everyone who might ever read this (and everyone else) has felt something like this, or will. This feeling that there’s a context larger than you and everyone else that might make all our machinations paltry and infinitesimal. And the writing-worthy bits involve digging into all of this, just to sort through things for myself, and as such don’t seem conducive to blogging—thus the drought. But, as we exist as an economy of information, I wanted to throw one piece out for commentary.
Freedom’s Just Another Word for…
Along the way of pondering this stuff, I started worrying more and more that I would find as definitive an indication as a human can perceive that there’s no thing I can do or be that is any better or worse than any other thing, and that there’s no point in holding in any positive regard any of my ideas or beliefs or their associations with anything else. My love, my hate, my fear, my aspirations, my naiveté, my family, my future, my knowledge, my perspective, my humor, my deficiencies—all worthless. It’s one thing to assent to the idea in an abstract, academic way; and quite another to incorporate the idea in living. To be honest to the thought, if I thought it were the truth, I’d need to live it, and I find that a horrific eventuality.
Again, not terribly revolutionary nor epiphanic. It occurred to me, though—by random if by any means—that the popular menu of deities provides a nice reframing of that nature of things so that people may get on with their lives without worrying so much. Imagine if, at these limits of apperception, you found that the only thing that mattered was everything. You could easily find a path and a personality and all the other things you might need in a practically (if not theoretically) infinite warehouse of information, and no matter your course, it would all matter so long as you understood it as a part of that valuable everything.
There is something more in this than a homogenous field of information; but, well, I don’t have the tools nor the time nor the space to lay it out any better. When I have the time and/or space, I will give it a hardier heave. I’m not certain I’ll ever have the tools, though. Yet, even in this necessarily simplistic cast, you might imagine why tying bombs to your children and sending them into a mall makes sense. You might imagine how stealing peoples’ organs and selling them makes sense. You might imagine how indulging your petty obsessions or idolatry or prejudices makes sense.
But, really, does it make sense? Is there anything else that fits the bill, other than a pantheon of omniscient players? You’ll say “science” does—someone will—and I won’t disagree categorically; but I find that people invoke “science” as this nebulous collection of handwaving and mystification and not as the effect of systematic inquiry. If you say “science”, I’d appreciate a more specific application. Of course, I appreciate whatever folks have to say…insofar as I can appreciate anything.
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