a new understanding of today, time and space.

science is about facts…

philosophy is about values…

Can facts explain values?

does the fact that the earth is 93 million miles from the sun
give us values?

but what are values? a value is justice or honor or beauty or creativity
or fairness, faith, fun, love, pleasure, respect, wisdom are a listing of some,
some of the possible values we can have…

science cannot tell us about values because values aren’t facts…
you cannot create a fact about fun or a fact about love or a fact about respect…

a value is a theory… we have action and we have theories…
we need both in order to have a successful completion of any activity…

action without theory is mindless and theory without action is impotent…

we act in some fashion… we build a tree house and we say about that
experience, it created pleasure or it create self-respect or we might say
happiness or we might say peace or optimism or meaningful work or learning or
inner harmony or growth or determination or we can use any other VALUE word to
describe our experience of building that tree house…

this description of our house building is not about facts…
we used 17 cords of wood and 13 bags of nails to build our tree house…
that doesn’t tell us anything about building a tree house…
or how we felt about building that tree house…

values give us some emotional idea about our building that tree house…
we felt pride at building that tree house or we felt at peace while building
that tree house…

values are an emotional description of events…

is justice an emotional event? is equality an emotional event?

my wife is always telling me to describe how I feel about something whereas
I usually give facts… it cost me 50 bucks to build the tree house and it took me
13 bags of nails… but I won’t give any type of emotional response to the
building of the tree house… I won’t give a value to building that tree house…
and the fact I won’t give an emotional response to something, pisses off my wife
no end…I normally won’t give an value description of something, I will give
a fact about something… except IQ45, I’ll give you value descriptions of that fucking
moron…anyway, values seem to be an emotional description of an event…
or I could just be really wrong…

science gives us facts…

values give us some emotional response…

and we need both to successfully accomplish and to describe both…

a value is a judgment about something… a value also can give us the why to
something…I built that tree house to give me some peace…
I needed to learn some skill… with learn being the value here…
building that tree house gave me some self respect…
building is the action and the value word can be learn or peace or
self respect…

so let us take another example… the GDP went up by 1.2% last month…
ok, we have the fact, what would be the value? the Gross domestic product
went up and that created …what value word would be appropriate?
what would be an appropriate emotional word to describe a 1.2% rise in the
GDP? what word would give us a why? or what word would tell us
what that means to America? relief? but is that a value word?

all this about value words is tricky stuff…as philosophy is tricky stuff…
because a value word like honesty can mean different things to different
people… to one person, honesty can be or mean something different then
to another person… my idea of honesty is different then my wife’s…

let us say, hypothetically of course, let us say while in Vegas I went to
a strip club, of course this is hypothetical… I never would do something like that,
anyway, I went to a strip club… I didn’t tell my wife about his visit, why would I
given this is hypothetical, now is not telling her being honest… I just never volunteer
this hypothetical fact… my wife would say I am being dishonest by not telling her…
but I didn’t lie to her… I was completely honest with her… I just left out the hypothetical
strip club… and what judgment would you make? honest or dishonest?

this value judgment is at the heart of philosophy…going to this hypothetical strip club
is fact, but what value would you put on it? what emotional response would you make about
the visit and not telling my wife?

science would say, Kropotkin gets this physical response when seeing tall, beautiful
women but science can’t give us a value judgment about this visit or if I am being
honest or dishonest about my visit with my wife…this hypothetical visit…

that is the value of values… they complete the facts given…
for facts can only get us so far and values get us the rest of the way to
some sort of answer about events or people or life itself…

the average human being lives to 70 years of age… fact, I think,
anyway this fact doesn’t give us any value to this information…
it doesn’t tell us anything outside of the fact the average human being lives
to 70… we must supply the rest of the needed information with values,
both about the why and the emotional content of being able to live to 70…
living to 70 with crippling physical aliments is not my idea of quality of life…
I wouldn’t live to 70 if I was in so much pain as to make my life not livable
or bearable…I would make a value judgment as to whither life is livable or not…
this emotional response to a fact is as important as the fact itself…

let me think some more about values and facts… science and philosophy…

judgment and truth… a rather good name for an autobiography…

anyway, what are values and what are facts?

and you get to the heart of philosophy and science…

Kropotkin

so we have values… but some values come into competition…
for example, one of the primary values for liberals is justice
and one of the primary values for conservatives is security…
how do we resolve this conflict when one side is pushing for
security and the other side is pushing for justice?

this is a common issue within a society or a culture…
how do we resolve conflicting values? or as William Barrett
put it, conflicting goods…

a group of people want certain values to be a primary goal and
another group wants other values to be the primary goal…
this is reflected in business wanting to maximize their profits
at the cost of hurting their workers/producers…

this is reflected when businesses want to open up wildlife
preserves or national parks and turn them into money making operations and
people want to save and maintain those wildlife preserves or
national parks like Yosemite…

these are conflicts of value that engage parts of or the entire society at large…

the answer in this conflict of values becomes or SHOULD become
the values that prevails really lies within the answer to
the question which is, what values are the values we belief in
AND we should act upon… and the goal determines that… this is why,
in part, why we should create a goal is because the goal decides what
values become the chosen values and we begin to act upon those values…

ok, so let us start from the beginning… we have values and by creating a goal,
we can then know what values are needed to accomplish those goals…
the goal helps us know what values we need… if the goal requires us
to pursue justice, then that is the value we need or if the goal requires us
seek security, then that is the value we seek… the goal decides the value/values…

the Greeks valued arête and that was excellence… now at first this value was
meant to belong to a soldier and the goal was to create better soldiers…
so by having this value, arête, we would have better soldiers…a worthy goal indeed…

the medieval man goal was to reach god and for them, the best value was faith…
that was the value they needed to reach their goal…

the goal and the value reinforces each other…

today, we have values like greed and lust…

what would the goal be if we have greed and lust as our values?

greed and lust as values only serve as values for the pursuit of material goods
and the possession of people… greed and lust really don’t serve any other goal…
for the truth is simple, the possession of goods or people doesn’t fulfill one’s heart…
greed and lust must go on being greed and lust for there is no end in sight
with greed and lust… there is no other goal then the continued pursuit of
goods/people…for greed and lust to be fulfilled, it must posses everything…
and that is not possible… this is why modern capitalism fails… as its operating
values is greed and lust and they can never be satisfied, no matter how much we
posses, it is never enough…that is the failure of our modern age… we can never
posses enough to satisfied greed and lust…as values, they fail us…
greed and lust fail because we cannot ever, ever reach the goal of
greed and lust which is the possession of everything…

this in short, why the modern age has failed and will continue to fail…
because its values can never be completed or reached as a goal…

we must choose other values and other goals… but as we have values
in conflict, such as the left value of justice and the right’s value of security,
how do we resolve these conflict?

by deciding which value is more important right now because
values like all things, must change and adapt to the current conditions…
sometimes the values we need are different then the values we pursue
because we fail to see or to adapt to the changing conditions or environment…

our values must correspond to the current conditions and environment…
our values must reflect what is happening on the ground…
and also reflect the goal that was chosen… that is why I believe
that the right’s goal of security cannot succeed because it is not rooted
in the current conditions and environment on the ground in this time and place…
and the goal to be reached by security is no different then the goals of greed
and lust as it cannot ever, be reached…we cannot ever reach a situation where
we are totally secure…the goal of being secure cannot be reached because no
matter what we do, the goal of being secure cannot be reached… we always will
fall short of being secure…

but the goal of justice, of treating everyone equally, that goal can be reached
because all it takes is everyone be treated equally regardless of position, wealth
or status… and if we achieve justice, then people can then go on and be and do
whatever they want… justice is simply a step along the way…but it can be a final
goal if we wish… that is the beauty of justice being the value we reach for…
it can be both reached and be the value we live by…justice should be the
current value we strive for and perhaps if the situation and environment changes,
we can find another value to strive for…

what value/values would you suggest for our society/ culture?
and what goal would come from these value/values?

Kropotkin

as suggested, we have values and sometimes those values
clash…we have seen the value of justice and the value of
security clash in the last couple of decades…
the pursuit of wealth is a value
and the idea that we are more then just consumers/producers is
a value and clashes with the pursuit of wealth…

the conflict between values is strong and often violent…
the clash of values between the west and the values of the
middle east have clashed for over a thousand years…

in the U.S, you have “rural” values and “urban” values that have clashed
for over a century…beginning in the 1880’s, during the rise of the
industrial revolution in the U.S… this is the watershed moment
when the industrial revolution began and that created this “rural” vs
“urban” values clash…for it is clear that events like the industrial revolution
and the Crusades create and changes values… our values change and adapt
to events just like we change and adapt to events…

and how do we resolve conflict in values? oftentimes with violence…

look at every single war or violent conflict as a conflict of values…
sometimes the conflict is over the interpretation of a value sometimes
the conflict is over two separate values competing with each other…

greed is a value and a driver of many conflicts…
thus many religions try to discourage greed…
Buddhism for example, makes greed a principle reason
for misery in the world and one of the creators of suffering…
and Buddhism is all about ending suffering, not on a
society or group or culture basis, but on an individual,
personal basis…

in Catholicism, greed is consider one the seven deadly sins…
and a value to be avoided…

I will have more to say about this in a later post…

we return to conflicting values… in some ways, we can consider
government as a means of competing value resolution…
we use government to mediate between competing values…
an impartial referee as it were…but what if, what if the government is
no longer an impartial referee… what if the government takes sides…
that is in part, what has created many of the difficulties of our society…
the government has been bribed to take the side of the wealthy and powerful
and thus abandon the economic lower classes to their fate…
thus the mistrust of the people for the government…
if we play a game and the referees make all the calls favoring one
side or the other, the players will cry foul and demand changes…
this is what has happened in America today… we no longer have fair
and impartial referee’s and America is calling for changes… thus we
got IQ45 as president…this is a sense of justice that people have…
the treating of people equally… and that idea is being violated
with the preference toward the rich and powerful against the middle and
working poor class… we are calling foul and asking for changes…
if there are no changes, then violence will happen as the middle class
and the working poor try to force the government to be equal in its
treatment of its citizens…the middle and working class don’t want
special or preferential treatment, we just want to be treated equally…
and not just be treated equally bad, but equal with the wealthy and powerful…
and that demand for justice is strong in people…
is this idea of justice innate? no, it is learned… we see injustice
and we learn what it means as we grow up… thus we often attack
kids in school we called “teacher pets”… they were treated differently…
we see injustice from an early age…and some respond with
calls of indifference and calm and others respond with calls for
violence… it is the difference between people’s nature for what they
call for…

so conflicts in values… what is the solution?

conflicting values is perhaps the major problem
in society and we must approach this issue head on…
it is the basis of and reason for government…

what is your answer?

Kropotkin

now as part of my researching idea’s, I happened to come across
a wiki article: Western philosophy and Buddhism…

very interesting article and it has lead me into some interesting
thoughts…one of these thoughts is this…

if you read about a religion, you see its focus… for example,
Buddhism is about suffering and eliminating suffering by
certain practices…and I got to thinking about other religions…
for example, Catholicism and Judaism and Islam…

what is the focus of each of these religions…
for example, Catholicism is a guilt base religion…
and the focus is to be released from guilt…

and the focus of Islam is… submission…

and the focus of Judaism is the law…

each of these have a different focus… and I now believe that
each of these is an emotional state… for example, guilt is
part of the human experience and suffering is part of the human
experience and submission is part of the human experience and
obeying the law is part of the human experience…

the various religions try to capture various aspects of the human existence…
the human experience… suffering, guilt, submission, obeying…
you decide on a religion based on which aspect of the human experience
you consider most important… if it is guilt, you choose Catholicism
if it is suffering… you choose Buddhism if it is submission… Islam…
Obeying the law… Judaism…,and as far as most religions go,
they are usually, usually…salvation based… so
some part of us is about being saved and so we choose religions based
on how we want to be saved… so in other words, we have
inclinations, psychological leanings toward guilt or suffering or toward
obeying or toward submission and we then lean toward the religion that
best fulfills that psychology leaning…and what about Atheist?
well I can’t speak for atheist at large, but I know about myself is
that I don’t believe in guilt or believe that suffering is key or obeying
the law is key or submission so I don’t have any psychology leaning toward
any religion and so, I don’t have a religion… so if we put emphasis
on guilt, we think Catholicism and being saved, on any number of religions,
and submission, Islam and so on…

our psychological bent decides our religion or religions…

as there are thousands of religions… what does this tell us about humans?
that we have many, many different motivations that drive us…

Kropotkin

as we have these psychological inclinations, ( we can also be taught
to have guilt and be aware of suffering and so on, so it is not just inclinations)
and we can also understand that these inclinations can also be unhealthy
for people…but any malaise taken too far can be unhealthy…
we in America have been in fear since 9/11 and it has become
unhealthy to the point where we elected a president with dementia…

so what can be done? when an individual has emotional or psychological
issues, we suggest or encourage them to see a psychologist or a therapist…
but what if, what if the malaise is throughout the entire society, the entire
culture has some sort of issue or issues that threaten to damage the entire
society? what are we to do?

let us look at some examples… greed for example… what would happen
to a society where greed is one of the primary drivers…we know
that greed has been condemned in the past, so we know that greed has
been a issue for a good deal of human existence… one of the seven
deadly sins within the Christian teachings is greed/avarice…
(the total list is gluttony, lust, pride/hubris, sorrow/despair/despondency,
wrath, vainglory and sloth along with greed/avarice)

let us look at another religion like Buddhism… greed is one of the 3 poisons to be
fought against… the other two is ignorance: confusion, delusion
and aversion is the third poison… aversion is also ill will…

so we have two distinct and separate religions developed in far different places
and both warn us against greed…yet, today we not only promote greed, we
put it at the heart of our economic system…just as greed damages the
individual, it damages the society at large… that is why both the Christian faith
and Buddhism warned us against greed…so we have a society wide
crisis because of greed, a malaise that threaten society to the point of seriously
damaging that society… once again when an individual has issues like greed
that threaten their mental state, we refer them to a psychologist…
but what about a entire society that is threaten by something like greed?

who do we listen to then?

the issue of the last century and that has lasted to today is nihilism…
the pursuit of profit has created a wholesale state of nihilism within
our entire society and threatens our society with falling apart…

who was brave enough and far seeing enough to predict the 20 and 21st
century would be centuries of nihilism? Why, Nietzsche of course…
he foresaw what would happen and he tried to see his way out of it…
he himself proclaimed his mission clearly enough. to paraphrase,
how to find morality when god is dead… as morality, thou shall not,
is based on their being a god, but what is god is dead… on what shall
we base our morality on? indeed, on what grounds shall we base our morality
on and our sense of right and wrong on if there is no god? the rise of the century
of greed came after Nietzsche and has been the basis of our society for the last 100
plus years… Nietzsche was right… the century after him was a century of
nihilism… he foresaw it and he tried to find a cure for that…

Nietzsche studied philology which is the branch of knowledge that deals with
the structure, historical development and relationship of a language or languages…
that was his major field of study… he was well read in Greek… he knew
Plato and Aristotle and the pre-Socratic philosophers quite well…
one of the key understanding about Greek philosophers as well as others
who lived in those times, was the influence of medicine…one of the key
points of all three major philosophers, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle was
the key role that medicine played for them… Socrates called
himself “a midwife” that brings about idea’s and understanding…
and he also talks about the role of a doctor within a society…
he talks about a philosopher being the same as a doctor, a doctor
diagnosis of a patient and what is a possible cure for the illness of
that patient… and Socrates felt that a philosopher should be
a doctor to the society at large… this was a trend throughout Greek
history… a philosopher should be able to diagnosis a society and
offer up a cure for what ails that society… and if you look at the
history of philosophy… that is exactly what philosophy has done over
its long and storied career… philosophers have both diagnosed society
and has offered up cures for that society…

isn’t that what every philosophers since Socrates has done?

isn’t that the role of philosophy… to offer up solutions to that which
ails society?

we are societies physician…

and what ails our society at this time is a combination of factors including
greed and fear and hate and this has resulted in the election of IQ45…

for our ailments has direct consequences because we act upon those
ailments and we don’t even understand how we act… we are blind to
both our ailments and how we act upon those ailments…

and what is the cure for that which ail us?

Kropotkin

and what does the last post have anything to do with the Enlightenment?

everything… stay tune to this bat channel… same bat time, same bat place…

Kropotkin

ecraser l’infame…

with these words, Voltaire ended every letter… for over 30 years…
it is estimated that Voltaire wrote over 20,000 letter over 60 years…
and what does ecraser l’infame mean?
end the infamy… and this means what? end the church and all its
superstitions and incredulous beliefs in miracles, all meant to allow
the church control over human beings minds…
Voltaire believed, as did almost all enlightenment figures, in god, but
wanted an end to the superstitious, ignorant and irrational beliefs that
existed in his day…beliefs that the church used to maintain control over
people…

ecraser l’infame… end the infamy…

in Buddhism, one of the three poisons is ignorance…which is delusion and
confusion…

the enlightenment was all about the development of thoughts and
idea’s that were true representations of the world…

the medieval world was about faith and reason was in the service of
faith… searching for god meant faith and using reason to find god…

with the new science of Kepler and Galileo and especially, especially
Newton… we find that the new science described the world better then
the old vision of the church and Aristotle… and this was important…
human beings found that they could explain “Nature” in terms that
didn’t include god and this was the basis of the enlightenment…
freeing people from superstition and belief in miracles…

and as it was for Buddhism… finding oneself in a world with
superstition and miracles meant the world was unpredictable
and random… living with delusions meant you were living a false
life because you did not have the “right” beliefs that are so important
in Buddhist thought…holding beliefs, not because they are correct or
right, but holding beliefs even, EVEN if the evidence is against that belief…
modern examples exists today… the belief in Chemtrails and vaccines that
cause autism and Jewish domination of the world and cabals that run the
world… false and phony beliefs that prevent one from seeing or
understanding the world as it really is…the enlightenment was
all about freeing people from these superstitious beliefs…

what other phony and superstitious beliefs do modern people have?

the belief in god…there is absolutely no evidence for the existence
of god and yet people still insist on believing, why?

because it makes people feel better about themselves…
and it shift the burden of life onto god instead of where
it belongs, on people… we must accept responsibility
for our own existence and our own life…

this is the point of the enlightenment… to free people from
superstitions and beliefs that take them away from
accepting the burdens of life… for make no mistake…
life is a burden, a very tough load to handle…
to hold a belief in god is no different then any modern
superstition like chemtrails and Jewish cabals and vaccines…
they stem from the same place which is to avoid responsibility
for one’s own life…for example, if there were some massive
Jewish cabal dominating everything, then I am not responsible
for what has happened to me… the Jewish cabal has
keep me down and away from what is rightfully mine…
conspiracy theorist use those conspiracies the same way
Christians use god, as an excuse…instead of living
in ignorance like conspiracy theorists and Christians…

live in the harsh reality of life, not in superstition and ignorance…
if you have a shitty life… it is on you, not on god or chemtrails
or Jewish cabals… you… and that is a hard reality… to accept
responsibility for our own lives…and that is the meaning of
the enlightenment… become aware of the reality of life…

and therein lies much… becoming aware…

many religions and meditations, practice becoming aware…

become aware and discovering who you are is the same
as many religions practice, such as Buddhism…

people use such ignorant beliefs as belief in god to hide their
becoming aware of who they are… it is easier to
do as one is told then to learn who you are…

becoming aware is hard work
and that is the true message of the enlightenment…
become aware… learn what it means to be human in
this current existence…practicing mindfulness
as is preached really means becoming aware…

learning a truth about oneself is much harder
and more painful then learning the truth about another…

people hang on every word about the foibles of celebrities because
it allows those people to avoid becoming aware of who they are…
it is a means of avoiding to, become aware…

religions are a means of avoiding mindfulness, avoiding knowing
who you are… avoiding the act of, becoming aware…

modern superstitions like chemtrails are a means of avoiding knowing
who you are and becoming aware…

today, modern society has a malaise that is far and wide, over
the entire society… we are avoiding the act of becoming aware…
and we are suffering from it…outward actions without understanding
who we are, are doomed to failure because they suffer from the lack
of knowledge of who we are… become aware…

Kropotkin

this modern age negates so much…values like love, peace, justice,
hope, honor… the age negates because it values profits…
and profits trumps values because values don’t bring in profits…

passion… this age negates passion… but accepts, even demands
emotion… but not too much emotion… just enough…

but passion… the sheer exuberance of passion is denied…
because passion is energy… and the modern problem is what to do
with energy… how do we harness the people’s passion, energy into
money making schemes… that is what passion is good for…
making money… and thus it loses it value…

I recall my youth… such passion… I felt this storm of energy
for women… lust it is called and it is energy unlike any other…

I spent wasted days and nights lusting and expending energy on
passion… “hormones gone wild” could be my life story…
and I only knew passion in search of bodily pleasure…

I am old now and I didn’t leave passion, it left me…
and I look back on my life… and marvel at my passion, my energy…

I wrote poetry and suffered and wallowed in every rejection
and they were plenty of those, so I wrote quite a bit of poetry…
good or bad, I couldn’t say because the poetry has been lost…
I would say, mankind didn’t miss much when they went missing…

those poems upon I expanded so much energy and passion…

how to harness that energy and passion becomes a question
for our age… for I know that young men today face a question
of passion and energy…how to manage that passion, that energy
is a question for society…

perhaps, perhaps we see art being sterile today as a result of
our stifling passion and energy… to see new art requires
the passion and energy of a young man in heat…

read the books of today, see the plays of today, see the movies and
we don’t see passion… we see techniques and techniques
don’t have passion, techniques lack energy…

I study philosophy and have for decades… I still feel passion and
energy for my chosen field of study… I write with my heart…
and that heart is tempered by reason…

to accomplish art, to accomplish greatness…
one must have passion, energy to really
find greatness, to really find what one is searching for…

today, I am old and tired… but still, on occasion, I can find
that passion, that energy… to create… art…

Kropotkin

the man of the enlightenment was just as sure of his “truth” as
the man of the medieval times, who was just as sure of their
truth as the man of the Roman period who was just as sure of his
truth as the average Greek, who was just as sure of their truth
as the average Egyptian, who was as sure of their truth as the average
… and so on into the distant past…

and we are just as sure of our truth as any who have existed…

but, we can’t all be right? can we?

Kropotkin

become aware… said the Buddha…

become aware… said the enlightenment…

becoming aware is art…

mindfulness is about becoming aware of who we are…

discovering that we human beings are about values

is becoming aware…

all the truth is, is simply about becoming aware of something…

you say, this is truth and I say, you have become aware of it…

does that mean the truth is innate and has existed since the beginning?

no, truth can be found as well as created…

because as the environment has changed, the truth has changed…

as we change in response to the changing environment, our truths change…

all that is solid melts into air because we are not the same people in time…

time is just one moment and then another moment and another moment…

a process… that goes on…and changes and waxes and wanes

and hides itself in different forms but it is still at heart, a process…

look at yourself in the mirror…

that is a snapshot of one moment in time…

the truth of being human is the process, the changing of who we are

from birth to death…

today, I believe this truth

and tomorrow, I believe a different truth…

that is just part of the process of being human…

Art is simply capturing a moment in time…

becoming aware of that one moment in time…

and the process goes on…

today, art is stale and repetitive,

movies are simply recycle plots from yesterday…

music sings the same old song of love and despair…

the word…repeats itself and we get the same old story…

how do we renew art?

how do we get art to speak to us again?

by becoming aware…

by looking, with brand new eyes…

by remembering…

art is never the finished product…

it is simply a process that goes on

and we record the process

and it is new and aware…

you want the truth…

become aware…

Kropotkin

Art is passion turned into awareness…

art begins with passion… that passion is not art until
until it is organized in some fashion…the act of passion…
of crying, of screaming, of joy… is not art until it is organized into some
fashion…I feel some anger… that is not art until I somehow represent
that anger in some fashion and in some media…

I take something inside of me and try to represent it outside of me…
that act of representing something is the act of organizing something…
I can represent my anger with a drawing of a big red angry sun…
for art to be… it must be by taking a passion and converting it by
some rational act into art…the choice of picking the medium for
the passion is rational and the choice of color and of design is rational,
on some level…choice implies rational…

we don’t necessarily create art with our every choice… but we do
create our lives with passions turned into choices by our rational choices of
medium and possibilities…

now it occurs to me, that we make our live choices as we make art choices…
we start with passion and that gets turned into action by rational choices made…
choices like what medium do we use… art, science, philosophy and what language
do we use and what possibilities do we accept and don’t accept…

the way we create art is the same way we create our lives… we begin by
passion and convert that passion into rational choices which determine
our actions…if we understand how art is made, the choices decided upon,
we can then decide how we make life choices, the same process is involved…

Kropotkin

of late, because of back problems, had the last couple of day off…
I then spent the time, studying for example, I jumped ahead and began
some studying of the 20th century philosophy… about a two century jump…
and I also listen to a Walter Kaufman lecture on tape from 1960… very interesting
stuff mostly about, so far, Kierkegaard and existentialism with Nietzsche and
Sartre coming next…so I have filled my mind with a whole lot of stuff…
and I am sorting it out mentally… this is interesting but not very important
and this item is not very interesting but is very important… I am busy sorting…
of what is and isn’t and their various relationships to each other…this very act
of sorting is philosophical in nature… the act of connecting, of trying to
understand relationships between idea’s, of sorting idea’s…

the only conclusion I seem to be able to draw is… the connection between
art and a culture does tell us, something about the culture and its “health”…
the relationship a society/culture has to art does tell us something about the
state of that society/culture…I would say, we are a nihilistic culture/society because
we only value beauty for its monetary value, not for being beauty itself…

if it can’t make money, it is rejected… denied, forbidden…

thus goes our society and thus we proclaim our nihilistic basis…

I might have more to say about this later, but I am still sorting out and
trying to make sense of all the new knowledge I have… and that is philosophy…

Kropotkin

life is a series of experiences and sensations…
the question becomes, how does one derive meaning from experiences?

for example, one might say, that the meaning/purpose of a human being is
to worship god…

ok, let us work backwards… what experiences do we have that lead us to
the “believe” that our purpose/meaning is to worship god? …

the basis for our belief that our meaning/purpose of human beings comes
from revelation, the bible… we derive our understanding about
our meaning/purpose from authority…but we want to know what
experiences lead us to this belief that our meaning/purpose is to worship god?

there is no experience that I can think of that will lead me to
the conclusion that our meaning/purpose is to worship god…

we have faith and we have authority but no experiences…

so let us look at an experience…and do as Husserl suggested,
which is to bracket it…which is to say, make no judgments
about the experience…

I see a black and white object… it has a handle…
it is square… it has knobs on it…

I have described my experience with an object…
but what object and can I can any meaning/purpose from that object?

I offer up three possibilities for what I described…

One, a car…two, a stove… three, a refrigerator…

now most people would dismiss the fridge from the start?
but why? for most people, refrigerators are not square but rectangle…
experience gives most people an understanding of a refrigerators and
refrigerators are not square… thus experience gives us one means
to solve our little problem…

so we have left, a car and a stove…
I could say, I see a grill… does that help?

to answer my question, one needs context… did I see my object
outside, on the street or did I see my object in my kitchen?

and therein lies the problem with understanding experiences…
they need outside context to make any sense of them…
you just can’t explain an experience and have it make sense
without some context…

let us say, I will describe another experience…

I experience a round object which is attached to another round object
that reached to the ground and attaches to another round object…

the object is waist high and is flat on top…it is brown…

the roundness seems to be about three feet around…

it is the table I am writing on… but now, does that experience
help give any meaning to what I am doing or even to anything else in life?

no… it requires something else to give it context… what is that something else?

by the way, the above answer is… the stove…

so how do we get meaning/purpose from experiences?

Kropotkin

so I asked earlier, how do we understand experience? and does experience
give us meaning/purpose?

so, I gave the example of a table… and I offered up an experience
of that table… but to give an true understanding of a table, beyond
just a physical explanation of a table, I said, we need to understand
that table in context…so what is context?
it is just an understanding by more experience…

in other words, to give something context, we are just using more experience
I can explain the table as being something we which we use to eat on or to place
things on… as I am using our table to place the computer on and I am writing on
said table… to put that into context means we must use experience to
understand it…

we forget how much of experience we have and how much was taught us…

I see my daughter going near the stove and I yell out, “be careful… the stove is hot”
now at 33… she understands what a stove is and what hot is… but at age
two… she didn’t… she had no experience of a stove… in fact, she didn’t even
know what hot was… we have to be taught every single thing we know today…
what is a table for? she had to learn that we put food on a table and then we
eat off of the table…so putting things into context means bringing in further
experience to make sense of something…

now we might by imagination, be able to create without experiencing something
an understanding of something… but that act of creation is different then the
actual event… try to create an act of experience in your mind…
say, visiting mars or being on stage being hamlet… those experiences
in your mind is vastly different in real life… because the experience
takes in the senses like sight, touch, taste, smell and sound… whereas
the imagination cannot take those into account… my wife and I the other day,
commented on how Hawaii smells so different then any other place we have ever been…
you can take me blindfolded, drop me off in Hawaii and by smell alone, I can tell you
where I was… I can’t do that anywhere else…imagine Hawaii and would your imagination
be able to create the smell? no… putting Hawaii into context requires experience…

so when someone says, let us put that into context… they are really saying,
let us find another experience that will make sense of this…

and we are left with the question… can we find meaning/purpose from experience?

does the description of a stove tell us the meaning/purpose of the stove?

if we turn the stove on and let it heat up and we can see that from the heat,
we can cook food… but that is simply more experience explaining experience…

you can’t get to meaning/purpose without using experience…

we forget that human beings have a million years of experience
and because of that, much of what we take for granted was gained
from those millions of years of experience…my life is vastly
different from a stone age person and yet, we have experiences
in common… we were once children and we grew up and
we experienced “nature” the tree’s and land and sky and
animals and birds… we might experience them differently
because I don’t have to see them as potential food as the stone age man
did… he did things in regard to how did they help him survive…
he experienced things in regards to survival… how does that thing
help me survive? whereas I don’t have to think like that…
why? because our experiences are different… I don’t have to think
whether I am going to eat today or not, I will and so I can think about
different things…my experience isn’t tied up into survival as the stone age
man was…context=experience is different for both us…

my looking at a stove and knowing what it is for is so ingrained in me,
one might think I was born with the knowledge of what a stove is for…
and thus lies much of our thinking… we have thoughts so ingrained in us,
that we think those thoughts were born with us, and not as they were,
taught to us… we learned by experiencing them over time and that
experience has become so natural, so much a part of us, we think we were
born with that knowledge…context has become so much a part of our lives
that we often don’t see it anymore…

and now we bring back another example, I spoke of earlier…
that of becoming aware… experiences have become so much
a part of us, sometimes we forget that we had to learn everything
we know…we must become aware of who we are and how we got here…
and part of that awareness is rediscovering that we are a lifetime
of experiences and those experiences have become so much a part of us…
that we have forgotten that…

which leads us to our final question…
can we from, experience alone, discover the meaning/purpose of life?

Kropotkin

the bottom line… the bedrock notion of being human
is experience… that is the bottom line notion of being
human…we experience and then we create ways of understanding
that experience… via history or economics or science or philosophy…

we human just experience and then we try to understand that
experience…to create meaning or purpose in that experience…
requires context… which means more experience…we do have tools
that help us explain and understand experience… tools as I mentioned
are science and also math and logic… but we also have other tools,
such as imagination and emotion and values…is that action just?
let us use one of our tools to discover if a given action is just…

the primacy of human existence is experiences and how we are to
understand and interpret said experiences…the basis of human existence
is experience…everything else flows from that…we use experience
to compare, to contrast, to imagine and think about every other experience…
we can use our imagination to create other experiences but, but we cannot truly
understand without some experience to compare it to… so imagination needs
some experience to compare itself to…

what are facts? facts are simply knowledge we have about experiences…
there are 8 million people living in New York city…and that is experience
to those 8 million people but not my experience as I don’t live in NYC…
but I live south of San Francisco, so I experience living in my small town
on the Peninsula… my facts are my town has 30,000 people living in it…
but that number changes daily as people move in, move out and are born
and die… the very existence of those other 30,000 people changes
my experience of my small town…as more cars or less cars or people walking
on the main drag, in building condos on my street and blocking the street…
or coming into the store I work at…

we do feel the existence of every one as they change the dynamics
of my experiences… less people make my experience a different one
then more people… the sheer number of people shopping in my store
makes my working there a different experience…at the heart of my existence
and at the heart of your existence and at the heart of every single human being
existence is experiences… and how we make sense of and understand those experiences…

now once again, we ask, does experience gives us meaning/purpose?

Kropotkin

the question has been asked, does experience give us meaning/purpose?

once when I was maybe, 14 or 15… I read a book, the title… ummm,
I have no idea… anyway, the book stated that human beings are
who they are because of climate, the resources in the ground,
the land, if it be mountains or flat or had lots of lakes…
physical details of this sort helped determined who people are…
and I thought that this was wrong… but I didn’t know HOW it was wrong
and so I decided to spend some time studying this problem…
this lead me to the path of my spending 40 years studying various
disciplines such as history, economics, politics and of course philosophy…

so did this one event, this one experience decide my life?.. in
a very real way, it did…this experience had given me some meaning/purpose
but, in another way it didn’t… it was the reason for my search, but it didn’t
create meaning/purpose… it depends on what you mean by meaning/purpose…

meaning/purpose suggests some reason for an event…
the meaning of getting married is… to legalize the love two
people have for one another… that can be said to be the meaning of
marriage…but it is not the only reason for marriage and this
is important to understand…people get married for a wide variety of
reasons… and each marriage has its own reasons for its existence…

so let us rethink this… existence seems to be a key word…
does experience give us a reason for existence? perhaps…

in other words, does experiences give us some reason for our
existence… I live for…and that might be love and that might
be for research and that might be for eating…

what do we live for? maybe, that might be a means of understand this
problem… what do we live for? what experience do we live for?
perhaps the experience itself gives us the reason for and the meaning of
our lives…and we can take from experience whatever lessons we need…

perhaps it is this lessons drawn from experience that gives us our
meaning/purpose? it is not the experience itself that gives us meaning/purpose,
but the lessons we learn from those experiences that gives us meaning/purpose…

and perhaps there is no meaning/purpose to our lives… and we just go
from experience to experience and then we die…

the simpler explanation is quite often the right explanation…

we just have experiences and we take what we can from them and
then we have another experience and another and another…

life is just a series of experiences from which we get lessons from
and then we die… so perhaps? we get our meaning/purpose from
those lessons we learn… but what if we don’t learn anything from
our experiences? I walked into a wall today because I wasn’t paying
attention…I was on autopilot and not paying attention…
the lesson I learned was to pay attention… not a very profound
or deep or meaningful lesson to be sure… but a lesson…
one you would have thought I would have learned already…

so we return… does experiences gives us meaning/purpose?

only if we think they do…what have we learned from
said experience? perhaps that is the key…

life seems to be a random series of experiences…
how we deal with these random series of experiences
tell us a great deal about who we are…

and perhaps that is the meaning/purpose of experiences?

they tell us who we are…or perhaps, perhaps
they tell us, experiences, what is possible for us human beings…
we learn from experiences and they tell us who we are and
what is possible? perhaps that is the meaning/purpose of experiences…

the problem lies with the fact, that people tend to learn different
things from experiences and quite often don’t learn anything from
any particular experience… I heard a description of a conservative
once… a conservative is a liberal who got mugged…

the lesson the conservative learned is different then the lesson a
liberal gets because of…fill in your own blanks…

we learn from experiences and that learning is because of
environment and training and education… we have an entire
history, a background that leads us to that experience…

we are taught by our family, the state, religion, the media
and we take that learning into our experiences…

we have an experience and we often decide the value of
that experience by our learning from the family, the state,
church, media… perhaps, it is a circular experience we have…
the experience we have is reinforced by the education we received
from our family, state, church, media…and the education we received
gives us our understanding of our experiences… the two, the education
we received and the experiences we have, are bound up in some
weird fashion… so to properly understand an experience, we
must somehow, suspend our education we have received from
the state, family, church, media… to form a “true”
opinion about our experiences, we must suspend our education
and make a judgment about that experience without “benefit”
of our education…but is that possible? can we just accept
an experience without any prior knowledge or education
about that experience… I don’t think so… so we are back
where we started from…

so, can we find meaning/purpose from our experiences?

Kropotkin

in the end, there doesn’t seem to be any facts, science,
to help us understand our question, there seems to be
a value judgments…which is philosophy…

the value we put on any given experiences, must come from
somewhere… we can just an experience from our education given
to us… but they are really just customs, habits, training us to become
good little workers…modern education is not about creating thinking
or making us wiser or smarter or able to learn from experiences…
no, modern education exists to create workers and consumers and
modern education has no other reason for existence…

so we must bracket modern education and make our decisions
in light of this behavior modification we call modern education…

in the end, we must go beyond our education and our desires and
our petty ideologies to understand if experiences have any
meaning/purpose…

life is just a series of experiences…
now what do we do with that information?

Kropotkin

perhaps I am going about this the wrong way…

Einstein showed us that oftentimes, it was not about
the answers but about what the question was…

so let us change the question…

does meaning/purpose give us an understanding of experiences?

this is the path of religion… we have the answer and through that
answer, we have an understanding of our experiences…

but that would suggest that we have the right
answer and given our experiences, we don’t have the right answers…

so, our already given meaning/purposes can inform us about experiences
but it is nothing more then observational bias… we expect certain
results based on already given meaning/purpose and that
is really not a true search for the meaning/purpose of our
experiences… that simply confirms what we already know…

perhaps, it is a feedback loop between meaning/purpose and
experiences… we have an experiences and it is confirmed or denied
by our already given meaning/purpose and so we use that knowledge
to readjust that meaning/purpose and which we test against further
experiences… the one, experiences and the other, meaning/purpose…
use each other to gain further knowledge of the universe and how it works
and what is the point of experiences…they are not enemies, but collaborators…
using each other to gain further knowledge of the universe… of experiences
and what to make of each experience we have…

we use an hypothesis, meaning/purpose, and then we have
an experience and we then test the hypothesis, meaning/purpose,
against that experience…with the aid of that experience, we can
fine tune our meaning/purpose to a greater detail…

perhaps, perhaps that is the path?

Kropotkin

let further work out experience…

last night I finally got a new computer…
a dell… for about half of what it usually costs…
and it was fairly highly rated…

so, I was up until 1:00 trying to get it going…
I had forgotten how many updates they make you go through, to
get it set up…now all that time, about 2 or 2:30 hours, spent
trying to get this thing ready for use… that is experience…

was there any meaning or purpose in all that waiting… that experience?

I certainly can’t see it…it was just boring, waiting for updates to work
themselves out…

making sure the computer protection was working and getting ITunes online…

necessary stuff but there was no meaning or purpose except to get the computer
going… nothing big… but perhaps that is the point… how much of our experience
is really going to “big stuff”…How much that happens really means anything?

I go to work and stand around for 8 hours and that is experience, but most of it
is just killing time until I can go home… the trick to is to discover what
experiences are really something to understand and which are just crap…

the vast majority of life is simply crap… wasted time… waiting for something
or someone… standing in some god awful line yet again…

how much of much of my life has been something significant?
very little…I can probably count on one hand the moments that
were meaningful or had some life purpose meaning to it…

perhaps, that is the meaning or purpose of life…
to have more of those meaningful or significant moments?

some moments are joyful and some are so horrible that they drop
us to our knees in pain…how many moment of those have you had?

perhaps the question is, how do we bring back meaning or significance
into our lives… is it moment to moment or do we need to
see the full sweep of our lives to finally understand its meaning or significance?

can we hang our hat on the significance of our lives on one or two moments?

what events or experiences can we say actually gave our lives some meaning or
purpose?

look at this from an individual standpoint AND a communal, community,
social aspect…

is our lives meaning best found in individual moments/experiences or
is it best found, shared with one or more people?

the Greeks thought that we discover who we are in a community,
not individually… the making of a human being is best done in
a society, a community…now in your life, which has been true…
did you discovered yourself individually or did you discover yourself
socially, in a group, in a community?

for most of us, we learned who we are in groups socially or
in a community… I believe the Greeks are right…
which is why I believe the GOP attack on community is wrong…

it is in our response to other humans that we find out who we are and
what is our meaning/purpose…

can Robinson Crusoe find his meaning/purpose all alone on that island?
No, he cannot…he needs and we need people, community to discover
what is our meaning/purpose… it is through our response to
events/experiences in regards to other people that we learn who we are…

life is a communal event/experience…

so in our experiences can we find meaning/purpose?
or do we have meaning/purpose giving us the results of our
experiences?

which comes first, meaning/purpose or events/experiences?

Kropotkin

let us try this…

we know that people have perceived notions…
notions that some, SOME, people take as an absolute…
now some of those notions include this idea of god…
these people will concede almost every other notion but
this one… that there is a god in heaven…
it doesn’t matter what evidence that is presented before them…
they will not budge from their idea that there is a god…
now one who holds this opinion is certainly allowed to hold this
opinion… but these people approach events and experiences with
this notion of there being a god…every event and experience they
have doesn’t begin with the event or experiences, it begin with the
notion that there is a god… and they bring that notion into experiences
and events… they see experiences and events through the
belief of there being a god… they place meaning/purpose
first, then they see the event/experiences…they filter
events and experiences with the pre-knowledge of god…

in other words, any possible gain in knowledge from those
events/experiences are lost because one has already determined
that god is already existing in that event…

you reached the conclusion before the event/experience…

if the person has reached the conclusions before the event, any lessons
that might be learned is lost… if you have determined a conclusion…
then the event/experience doesn’t really matter because you will already have the
conclusion…

this observation bias, as science calls it, is a major problem in how we
understand things… to truly understand something, we must not
have preconceived notions…but this leads us to an interesting place…
we are becoming aware…and this is a very good thing… this is one means
of becoming aware is by thinking about our biases… what am I bias about?

yes, I hate young republicans…they are always so smug… but what other biases
do I have? what biases do you have? this is one means of becoming aware…

so how do we approach events/experiences? another question?

are we ourselves, an event/experience? and if so, how do we approach
ourselves? occasionally I must admit, I am surprised by something I did or
didn’t do… how do I understand that experience? are we still in philosophy or
are we in psychology? and is there a difference? if experience is the key aspect
of our lives, then understanding how we experience, experiences,
doesn’t that include how we experience ourselves? if that sounds confusing,
join the club…we certainly do seem to have a blind eye to ourselves in
our reaction to events/experiences…maybe this is why women will
talk endlessly, fucking endlessly about an event/experience…perhaps,
this is some means to gather evidence about how ones approaches
an event/experience, perhaps…

I have noticed, in myself for example, I cannot experience myself within an
environment… I am typing right now… I look about the room… what I am
aware of is me, looking out at the world, not being in the world but being separate from,
apart from the world… I can imagine myself looking at myself because I know what I
look like… I can see me watching myself type at the computer at my kitchen table…
but each new vision is just another perspective… I note in looking up perspective,
I see, just before it in the dictionary, various definitions of personal, personality,
personnel, perhaps the root word of perspective is person… we each have a perspective,
a point of view, my viewpoint of looking at the world…perhaps a perspective is
literally, a point of view from a person’s eyes…and our point of view
does make a difference on how we view an event/experience…

literally, our point of view of what our eyes see, makes a difference on
our perception of an event/experience… instead of writing experience,
I wrote evidence… of an event/evidence…interesting freudian slip…

our perception of an event/experience is about evidence…
what evidence does this event/experience bring us to our knowledge
of the world or our understanding of the world or our biases of the world…

we use evidence of events/experience to bare on our understanding of
how the world works…if the evidence confirms our understanding of
the world, we say yah… I am right… and if the evidence denies our
understanding of the world… we say, that evidence is wrong…
we would do almost anything to maintain our observational bias in our
seeing the world…it is far easier to say the evidence is wrong,
then to admit that we might be wrong…and then we might have to do
something about us being wrong…god forbid we admit we are wrong…

so our experiences of the world is rooted in our own prior understanding of
the world, our observation biases…we take our observation bias into
every event/experience we face… and therein lies our modern problems…

we have failed to learn the lessons of events/ experience because we have
put our observation bias ahead of, before the events/experience…
and so we miss any lessons we might learn from event/experiences…
because we are looking at the event/experience, we are looking at the
observation bias and not at the event/experience…this is why
people will often not learn pretty obvious lessons from events/experiences…
they are fixed on their observation bias instead of seeing what they could learn
from the event/experience…

we can use this to explain some behavior… we see people quite often
vote against their own interest…voting for the GOP is downright stupid
if you are middle class or below… but people still do it, why? I think
reading comments on websites is instructive… people will say, they are glad
that IQ45 is causing liberals to cry in their sleep… anything to vex liberals is
the goal which means it doesn’t matter what IQ45 does as long as it vexes liberals
and that includes treason and crimes against the American people… hay, it vexes
liberals, so it must be alright…the event/experiences of IQ45 is less important
then the perception of people against liberalism… whatever vexes liberals is
the important thing, not the crimes against America or the destruction of America…
those are unimportant because of the fixed hatred of liberals which causes
people to think it doesn’t matter what IQ45 does as long as it vexes liberals…
ever if it means the destruction of America… that is the observational bias
that people carry into this whole matter of IQ45 and the vexing of liberals…
and look at the damage it has created already… and his only win in passing
legislation is a bill that will turn the US into Kansas which is a hellhole…
a bill meant to destroy the middle and working class of America…

this is concrete evidence of what happens when people put their observational
bias ahead of the lessons to be learned from events/experiences…

Kropotkin