To Share or Not To Share

Things can be broken down into three categories: those that cannot be given, and those that can.  In case you are thinking that I have an odd sense of counting, you might have read an earlier post.  Still, let me appease you by further breaking down the latter category.  Of those things that can be given, some remain with you after the giving, and some don't.

Some examples of things that fall into these catrgories:

• Can't be given:  Understanding, self-confidence, time (can be donated, but not given), growth, value (in one's self and in things)
• Given and retained:  Knowledge, perspectives, emotional states, energy, motivation, some opportunities (though this usually is a variant on knowledge)
• Given and gone:  Physical things, money, time (donated but not received), other opportunities (i.e. those that are exclusionary in nature)

I find the breakdown is generally thought-provoking, but the latter two (i.e. the subdivisions of "things that can be given") are what really have me thinking this afternoon.  Specifically, I find myself wondering at why people hesitate or refuse to share those things that are in the "given and retained" category. 

Sure, in some cases the reasons are clear - two people in competition, for example, might withhold information.  But sometimes I see people who don't want to share things for which there appears to be no down-side to the sharing (though of course there is - albeit a potentially irrational one):

• I am not going to tell you how to do that
• No, you cannot have a copy of this (legally shareable) electronic file
• I don't want you to have that opportunity if I can't have it too

It's pettiness, to be sure.  But I find myself wondering if it comes, at least in part, from being brought up in a materialistic society.  Do we get caught in the mindset of "if I give it to you, I have less for me"? 

Or do thoroughly non-materialistic people do the same thing...  Is it just emotions out of control?  It isn't just meanness, though.  Is it a form of jealousy?

No point.  No answers.  Just musing.

A Lament For Honesty

What strikes me as truly unfortunate about the human condition is the impractical nature of honesty.  The way (at least most) people are brought up in the love/hate dichotomy of unambiguous communication seems to be a perfect recipe for everlasting frustration.  We are told to "be honest", but also to "be kind" - and with the understanding that sometimes the two do not go together.  And when the two are in conflict, the "right" solution is ambiguity.  "Does this look good on me?"  What do we say?  Not "no, not particularly", but rather "I prefer the other one".  We skirt issues, we avoid, we redirect.

Part of the problem is that life is, by its very nature, full of uncertainty long before we ever add to it through deliberate ambiguity.  If there exist (for anyone) any absolute truths, they are few and far between under the best of circumstances.  Two different people will not necessarily agree on whether "it looks good on you" (which, by the way, is not the topic that led to this post, but merely the stereotypical example of the little white lie).  Deliberate lack of clarity blends in with inherent uncertainty, leaving us walking examples of the traditional sitcom.  (Maybe that is why we never speak honestly with each other - it would be too hard on the network executives to find things to air on Tuesday night.)

But we don't just live with uncertainty, we thrive on it.  It sustains us in the face of doubt, it salves our fear of rejection.  "Does s/he like me?  Does s/he not?"  Were it not countered by more emphatic drivers such as fear of being along and the urge to procreate, would we ever be prepared to gamble the hope of acceptance against the possibility of rejection?

To make matters worse, we are story-telling creatures.  We are natural pattern-finders, and every datum demands an explanation for why it is so, and what it implies for the future.  That we have insufficient knowledge or experience to make any such evaluation or prediction with any reasonable level of confidence seems immaterial - we create the stories anyway.  And lacking contradiction, we simply proceed with our "truth", making judgements, setting expectations, getting angry and frustrated when those expectations are not met.

The irony is that not only do we not attempt to uncover additional data to better understand, but human nature makes it intensely difficult (at least in some circumstances) to do so even if we want to.  For example: We are all insecure.  We all know that we are all insecure.  And yet, to walk up to someone and ask "what do you think about me?" is social unconscionable.  Perhaps I am in a minority of people who are curious about such things, but I doubt it.

I wonder if one cause is our tendency to view ourselves as a single thing without finer resolution or division.  In such a state of believe the idea that a person might not like something about me is indistinguishable from the idea that the person does not like me.  Yet we are all complex combinations of a great many facets - not only aspects that make up a personality, but distinct personalities that comprise a person.

Do I need you to like all of me?  Has it ever occurred, in the entire course of human history, that one person has liked everything about another (especially for all time and in all circumstances)?  Said this way, it suggests that it could be as simple as accepting that being liked is a matter of degrees, and that we can put the issue to rest by coming to grips with that. 

But it isn't that simple.  Accepting that someone can like a part of you but not all of you is one step - the (comparatively) easy one because it is something over which a person has control.  It is my mind, after all, my thoughts, and I can decide (at least hypothetically) to not be offended if someone does not accept/like everything about me.  But there are two people in this equation.  Person A cannot do much about how person B lives/thinks/behaves.  Will you reject me in totality because there is a subset of me that you do not like?  Or the more insidious version: might a single action/word/look cause you to hate/fear/disrespect me?  If I like you and want to build a relationship (of any kind), will I risk showing you something you might not accept?  Can I trust you to not reject everything for the sake of that one part?  How strong does a friendship have to be to support a dislike?  How many friendships end simply because we are unwilling/unable to discuss these things?

Why Fear for the Future of Humanity?

Sometimes you hear a phrase come up a disproportionate number of times in a day.  Yesterday, that phrase was "All things in moderation."

Surely I am not the only one who finds this expression to be subtlely disturbing. 

(Though in defense of the species in general, I will acknowledge that several years ago I heard someone express the following hope-inducing variant:  "All things in moderation, including moderation")

My Brain Has A Skip In It

While I am not normally one to quote others, this one (attributed to Einstein) has been running through my head for a while now.

Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results

My Vendetta Against Spiritual Prostitution

Growth and value come from investment.  It is often not fun, rarely easy, and generally time-consuming.  But the worst part is that the investment never seems to be providing a return while you are making the payments.
So how do you know whether you are buying something worth having?  Simple:  If you are paying via the monetary system, you are getting scammed. You can't buy this stuff with money - it is literally impossible.

Why?  Because there is a big difference between knowing and understanding, and a bigger difference between understanding and doing.  Doing is the only coin of the realm when it comes to things that matter.

That didn't make sense?  Okay, try a thermodynamics metaphor.  The basics of the heat engine are that you use the energy from hot stuff to produce useful work.  But you can't use all of the energy to do work - some of it has to come out as waste heat at a lower temperature (i.e. a 100% efficient engine is a physical impossibility - this isn't my doing, blame entropy).

Tying it back:  Time is the hot stuff.  Money is the waste product.  Disturbingly ironic is that all the useful work, i.e. the life experiences and lessons that people have and (sometimes) learn, is generally thrown away as irrelevant, while the least Useful part is coveted, stashed under mattresses, and generally worshipped.

How did we all get tricked into that way of thinking?  Wish I knew.

So if doing is the only coin of the realm, what is the value of knowing and understanding?  Understanding is occasionally convenient for deciding what to practicing doing when you don't have enough time to rely upon trial and error.

Knowing, on the other hand, is almost entirely self-defeating.  In theory it would be good for guiding a person in working on what to understand, but in practice it mostly just makes you feel good - at the cost of fooling you into thinking that you understand.  Kind of like a mental opiate. 

Knowing, ironically enough, can be purchased with money...

Ins and Outs

So this came about in a conversation last night:

Perception:  How things affect someone
Cognition:  How someone affects things (including ones' self)

Thanks, A...

Philosophic Counting

So I am driving to the store, and I ask myself the following:  How many numbers are there really?  Don't laugh, I am sure Wal-Mart has that effect on lots of people.

Now I am not talking about integers and reals, rationals and irrationals.  I am talking about numbers that matter... philosophically.  And I conclude that there are two: "one" and "many".

It is no big epiphany that 0, 1, and infinity are all just variations on a theme.  Plenty of people have toyed with this idea before.  To have everything is to have nothing, inside of nothing resides the whole.  This is basic circle stuff - go around far enough and you reach the beginning.

But beyond 1 and before infinity (or between 0 and 1 if you prefer) is the middle.  It's where you find things like "2", and "some", and "most".  As a database geek, I can see the utility of the concept, but as someone who is not currently a big proponent of the primacy of duality, I'm kind of hoping that at some future point I am going to have to come back and revise this post.

Where Truth Fades

There is this Fire in my mind
Bright and warm
Sparking, threatening
Mirrored of a thing quite kind
But that mirror holds sharp edges.

I hold the image dear to me
Like it's real
Like it matters
If the real Fire could but see
Would it condemn the illusion?

And what of my own disgrace?
Unthinking
Habitual
Lines of errors to erase
The hidden cost of fantasy

Are we so truly alone?
Does Fire dream?
Do I appear?
Are the answers best unknown?
That mirror holds sharp edges too.

One may be the loneliest number...

...but frankly I am just not convinced that two is the only alternative.  But before going on, I am not talking about relationships.  This isn't even a metaphor for relationships.  It is about existence and systems of logic.

That said, I should back up and tell the truth.  This is all about relationships - just not the kind that one normally thinks about (and for those of you who know me, yes, it is killing me to have ended this sentence with a preposition).  It is about relationships between people, sure, but it is also between the self and the universe, the self and the self, the self and the other self, the self and a hearty cheesesteak, the self and "bemused indignity", the self and...  Well, you get the idea.

Having "backed up" for the sake of that last paragraph, let's back up a little further.  Once upon a time, various philosophical treatises suggest, there was a time that was before time.  This is back before there were things.  Sure, language is terrible here, because I could have said "Once in the future, there will be a time before time" or somesuch.  But what I'm getting at is this:  Let's consider the universe absent from the preconceptions of the human condition.  I have no doubt that I will go at great length on this point in future posts, so suffice it to say that any further reference to "before", "after", "during", or "time" itself is purely an artifact of language.

Consider the sum total of existence - every aspect of every possible thing that exists.  I don't mean "physically exists", because this is the sum total of existence independent of the human condition, and so the concept of a "physical thing" doesn't make sense in that sum.  In fact, if I use words that imply physicality, space, and so forth, they are, like "time", an artifact of lanuage.  Sorry - we are stuck with English for now.

So in the sum total of everything, there are "things" that one might logically group together.  If the consciouness considering the grouping is the consciousness of the grouping, a convenient word for said grouping would be "me".  If that is too much to type, we could abbreviate it as "I".  And traditionally, we would then refer to everything that was not that grouping as "not I".  Nothing original here, mind you.  While the words were different, I read this stuff in a book on Kabala.  Apparently people have been thinking about this for a little while now.

So if you follow down the usual path, there is an Everything that has chosen, for the purposes of entertainment, to categorize itself for the purpose of regarding itself, and it does so by establishing "I" and "not I".  Convenient stuff there, leading to a concept called Duality.

Now this Duality thing (gonna stop the A.A. Milne capitalization scheme now) has led to all kinds of interesting and useful stuff.  Aristotalian logic, for one.  Another would be True and False (okay, I lied about the capitals) - and its evil twin of "right and wrong".  If you want to go all "out there", you might even propose that such a division has manifested itself in nearly every aspect of human existence.  We live in a universe populated by duality-based measures.  Left and right.  Forward and back.  Love and fear (yes, those are the correct opposites).

But...

Suppose we did not limit ourselves this way.  Imagine the following.  I am made up of a combination of all kinds of things.  What kinds of things, you ask?  Sorry, like the Tao, there is no describing them in concrete terms, for any concrete terms I might use would already presuppose the existence we are used to.  Let us just call them things, and I would suspect that I am made up of an infinite number of them.  But because I don't have enough time to write down a long list like that, let's say that infinity (for this context) goes all the way up to four. 

So I am made up of things A, B, C, and D.  But those are not all possible things, just my little infinite set - the proverbial integers in the set of all numbers.  And let's consider some other set, perhaps representing a friend of mine (or perhaps someone I don't know at all, or perhaps that chesesteak): A, E, F, and G.

So here is the question of the day (after only ten paragraphs, we get to the point):  What if there was third option that sat between "I" and "not I"?  What if there is a "partially I" option?  What does this imply for the universe around us?

There certainly seems to be a lot  of similarity between me and other people I meet.  We share common forms, common ways of thinking, deciding, laughing, moving...  Why, I even share certain traits with non-people.  Animals are too easy, so let's go a step further.  Considering me as a physical object (which I only say for the sake of metaphor), I would decompose into a set of atoms that are strikingly similar in proportions to that of, say, a tree.  I have solidity similar to that found in rocks.  I can be abstracted just as can be a storm front.

So if there are aspects of "me", components in that sub-collection of stuff from the totality of everything, that are the very same as found in, say, "you"... well, we may not be as distinct as we are used to believing.  For myself, I begin to wonder if "I" and "not I" are not really distinct states, explicit categories into which all things fall, but rather archetypal poles of a spectrum of me-ness.  At one of that spectrum sits the Self, that which is precisely what I consider myself to be, how I know myself.  And then expanding out from that is a continuous range of things that, while they are not "me" in totality, are only less me than Me. 

And at the other extreme rests the opposite pole.  What is that?   Simply put, I cannot know.  Not "don't know", but "can not know", for by its very definition it is that in which I share nothing in common.  Consequently I cannot conceive of its nature, composition, etc., for I have (literally) no shared experience by which to relate it to anything I have ever known, thought, experienced, or conceived.

And if I were in a geometrical mood, I might propose that all things that I can know of would share different parts of me, they would "reside" at distances away from me (if I measure such a distance in terms of the degree of overlap that we share), and in different "directions", i.e. because they differ from "Me" in different ways.  How many ways?  An infinite number (such as "4").

So practically speaking, it begs the question: so what?  To each his/her own, and so for some there is no relevance.  For myself, it suggests that for everyone and everything with whom/which I interact (let's call it Dwinkle), I might ask "what are the portions that overlap"?  What commonality can I draw upon to better understand that Dwinkle?  What aspects of Dwinkle are there that I not only "don't know", but in fact "can't know"?  And for those parts that are the same, does that encompass the channels by which we might share/communicate?

And if for each case, I ask myself "what is our commonality?" - how will my worldview change?  Will I focus less on how I am at odds with my surroundings, and more at how we are an interconnected system?  Will I find reason to inherently value and respect the world around me?  Would the world be a better place if I did?  And what if others did too?

An Initial Post

The obvious purpose of the first post in a blog should be to give everyone a sense of what kinds of things might be found here... so I clearly won't be doing that.  Likewise, it would be a great place to explain the name of the blog.  Also not going to happen; after all, if you are the type to get fixated on that sort of thing, I can think of few more joyful endeavors than to force you to figure it out for yourself.

Well, that about does it then.  No point in being verbose.  Plenty of time for that in other posts...