1. Existence and Reality
2. Fiction
3. Sex
I've long been victim to existential crises, the all consuming kind. It would happen for months at a time where I couldn't go more than a few hours without the perilizing fear of my own mortality. I sometimes wished I was religious to asuage this fear, for some sense of assurance. But by my third big bout I also ran into the problem of sentience, that as far as I know no religion explains why I am experiencing sentience. This is in fact some decent evidence for solopsism– why am I experiencing sentience, and only this sentience and not more.
The world is as real as it is in my mind, which is perceived by the senses. As I gathered from a youtube video, spinal catastrophism (a book) explains the power of thought to change the outside world. Your mind has an internal world constructed from what it perceives of the outside world. Then, like a physics model, it can predict the consequences of actions. It will construct a world in which you make a sandwich and you are content because you are full and another world where you don't make the sandwich and are hungry and sad, and then will take steps to mold the exterior world to the interior world, just as it molds its interior worlds to be a better predictor through continuous feedback loops.
Lately in my mind I have been living out many worlds. Many ridiculous fantasies where I spend my life in a tower or venture through the wilds. I conjure worlds which I am not a member of. Every imagining is an act of worldbuilding. All of this is to justify me saying that I am a deer, in some world. In some world that is equal in status to the empirical world perceived by my senses. I feel like a deer, I act like a deer, I put on the ears and tail and it makes my happy perhaps I can retool this more properly when I'm more sentient.
---
I've long perceived the world through an empirical lens of logic, of cause and effect, and mathematical language. I preach the religion of the axioms of statistics. Axioms are beliefs as unfounded as religion. Dig too deep into anything and you get to the fundamental question of existence. I was always drawn to math because of the deterministic nature, that there is some correct answer, even if the answer is no solution. There was an answer to every "why," down to the Z-F axioms that tell us that 1+1=2 in a convoluted, unnatural way filling up the first 100 pages of Principia Mathematica. I was always the type to ask those questions. In creating this page I rediscovered my website from back in first year of college, where I say that I wouldn't use something if I didn't know how it worked. It brought me to endeavor to read Principia Mathematica in my first year, and take notes as I thought necessary. I got maybe 20-30 pages in? It was quite gruelling. But I longed for certainty.
Since then I have abandoned such rigor. I took a miserable course in real analysis taught by a professor who did little more than echo the textbook which wasn't much clearer than Principia Mathematica. Since around then I stopped caring about proofs. I still feel its worth it to show a decent amount of proving in classes, but I'm more than happy to just take the method at its word these days.
I once said that "we live in a vibes based economy" after I got kicked out from busking at the Lucky Flea by some loser twink with a moustache because apparently busking "just wasn't the vibe of the event." I've lately been falling into more of a vibes based world view. I don't rely so much on rigor, and I take things more in their fuzzy feelings. I say I am a deer because I feel like I am, the same way I feel that I love someone and so I love them. These are my new axioms that underpin my perception of the world.
There's also been a fog pervading my life lately. I act less like a mathematician and more like a neural network in training. Still experimenting, not fully having figured out the rules. I try a door that I need my card for, that I've always known I need my card to unlock. I get off the bus and walk the route I walked yesterday before remembering that it does take longer than my normal route, and I found that out the prior day. I think about me trying to teach my cat to rub her head against mine (well actually she normally rubs against the corner of my glasses) in order to get a treat. She learns, but she forgets when I'm away. Even when she does remember she doesn't always do it immediately. Logic is something unnatural imposed on the animal that we all are. There is much to say of the deer in the headlights. We travel the same paths we know, that is natural, that our instincts tell us. That we are guided upon. Then man comes along and lays a boundary across the land. Often tranquil, but with the occasional projectile. And we do our best to continue on our same paths, but we are struck by the machinery engineered for brutal efficiency. And then they get upset at the stupid animal that fucked up their car.
I hope that one day we will see roadkill as a sign of the barbaric ways of the past, the way we look back on medieval torture and old social codes. That we brazenly mold the world to our symbiote, the car, with no thought to its other inhabitants. And when we do strike them, we leave them dead and decaying on the side of the road to be picked by scavengers. Noone to remember them but the passers by who catch a glimpse for only a second. That is how that creature will be known to hundreds, more than it ever was in life.
“And God,
please let the deer
on the highway
get some kind of heaven.
Something with tall soft grass
and sweet reunion.
Let the moths in porch lights
go some place
with a thousand suns,
that taste like sugar
and get swallowed whole.
May the mice
in oil and glue
have forever dry, warm fur
and full bellies.
If I am killed
for simply living,
let death be kinder
than man.”
― Althea Davis
---
Man this whole writing/philosophy thing is hard. I have to like, think and shit. Damn.
I believe that the fundamental purpose of fiction is to illicit emotions. This is not true for everyone, but this is it for me. The abstract thought of a scenario is easy to rationally say "damn that sucks" or "wow that would be really sweet" based on things we know, but our