| C.& C. & C. |
[Apr. 2nd, 2009|12:50 am] |
Generally I don't make posts because whatever I am thinking about really only matters to me, and even if it does matter to anyone else, I have finished whatever I wanted to do with that thought. Nevertheless, sometimes I still occassionally (while adding a few maybes and tentative words like in this sentence) make posts about things I was thinking about.
I titled this post C&C&C for Compliments, Condominiums, and Creations. Though, Creations could be relabeled Creations of Gödel.
I was walking my bike home from Camille's (not because I was drunk, but rather because I didn't have any lights on, or a helmet and I felt like it), and these thoughts came to me, in essentially this order over the course of 20-25 blocks. With lots of blank spaces of me not thinking at all in between.
1. Compliments:
I have this weird neurosis that is hard to describe but it boils down to the fact that every time I compliment a lady on how she looks, I have this mental compulsion that I am objectifying them and thus I try not to compliment women for how they look. I don't really know how this came about, I would imagine it is partly an outgrowth of historical puritanism, familial sarcasm and my own reaction to the objectifying nature of the gratification process. I think my brain has crossed the wires of good compliments and derogatory compliments, and in general finds it easier to avoid the subject by giving out few of either. I could fumble around this for a few hundred words, but I'll just stop here with the last thought of: I want to give out more compliments than I do.
2. Condominiums:
All over Corvallis in the last couple years yuppie condo complexes have been popping up. I simultaneously hate and appreciate them. On one hand, they are gross cramped quarters with no originality and exist for the purpose of keeping people close together. That is a really poor critique of them, but they just seem like these generic buildings that have no souls. On the other hand, they are far more efficient than single family homes. In 1950, the average house built in America was somewhere around 950 sq ft. In 2000, the average house was ~2300 sq ft. Families do not need that much space, it is just extra trees cut down, and extra land paved over. Houses contribute to sprawl much more than condos. But condos are not created because they are better for the land, they are created because there is more profit in them. I would love to see a block that would normally have 18 houses, have 18 condos and the rest of the block as gardens. Every single block could be a park with a building in the middle. If we are going to be stuck with millions of people in our cities, it seems like they should at least be liveable. The single family house is a greedy inefficient dwelling. I do not need this much space, I do want this many trees, this many bushes, this many birds nests. I wish condos were built for this purpose, instead they are built because you can build more of them in a lot, you can build then for less money, you can cram more people in a small area near high value businesses.
3. Creations
This sort of grew out of a conversation with Sam at the Interzone. We briefly talked about religion and then sort of drifted away from it. I was thinking about 'what is the meaning of life' and I thought that lots of people will say something along the lines of 'to have children and spawn new life'. But to me, that seems to be missing the question. An analogy I came up with was that if I create a sphere of wood and that sphere can only create other spheres and nothing else, its function is to create other spheres, but its purpose/meaning only exists insofar as it serves to further my ability to create things. Thus to me, saying the point/meaning of human life is to have children and survive and evolve mixes the function of life with the purpose of it. In this regard, there is only a point to life if there is something beyond us. As our life itself has no intrinsic purpose, but to serve our creator as a tool for expanding its knowledge. However, I do not specifically believe in an omnipotent force, so I set to finding what I was really thinking. Here Gödel came in. I know his incompleteness theorem gets a lot of action, but well, it is important and very useful. If I believe in a universe with logic and coherency, his laws dictate that even if we write down every rule for how the universe functions, there will be something that it cannot encompass. Yes, I am doing a shitty job of describing this, but essentially, the 'creator' of the universe (and more specifically human life) exists on a Gödelian level. Thus I can find meaning in life by accepting our lives and life in general as a closed discrete system, and that meaning of life, is a meta-meaning in that it is completely unrelated to our function or our existence, except for the fact that we do function and we do exist.
Hmmm. Maybe that should have been 3 different posts. |
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
generickid's journal
