Hmmmm. Of recent I received a mail (electronic of-course) from an old friend (read on, the required quotes are provided, if you are intelligent enough to understand where). Another one of those few things that engage my brain in a series of thoughts. A day later, I decide to write this as both, my blog as well as a response to Shivank's views on "Purpose of Life".
That my friends is another classic question. Talked about oh so often and still in ways without any conclusion. The reason is simple enough. There is no conclusion.
What particularly troubled Shivank enough to actually start this process of thoughts was :
"I feel like I am unbiased all the time.... I don't think from a definite point of view.... which .... I hate in a sort of way.... I want to be biased to a certain side... but I just cant do it.... "
Unbiased thoughts. I have managed to meet very few persons who could be totally objective. I myself am objective. But never totally. I take sides. I always cheer the underdogs. Still I think objectively. Perhaps because I make myself do so. My friend is troubled over being totally objective. I wish to be totally unbiased.
.
.
.
Aren't we both biased? Shivank, you are biased towards the side of being biased. I am biased to being not biased. Weird? I suppose not. Because we are all biased. To one side or the other. The weak, the strong, the pretty ones, the not so pretty ones, the males, the females, the socialists, the communists, the capitalists, the democracy, the anarchy, The Sex Pistols, The Ramones, music, thrash, rock n' roll, blues, jazz, techno, blacks, whites, Bush, Osama, reservations, Congress, BJP, Pamela Anderson, Carmen Electra, homosexuality, religion, God, Nature, the ones who think, the ones who don't and the ones in between... You are all biased dear mortals. Biased towards life itself.
The reason we appear to be unbiased at times is because we are biased towards a greater, more abstract topic. If you can't watch a game of football without cheering a side, you probably hold the game much higher than the competing teams. You don't feel bad about one losing is probably because you feel equally good about one having won. The game mattered more. If that did not make sense, it's probably because you are not Shivank [:P]
Moving on to another interesting topic that Shivank touched, after a brief mention of glasses being half empty or full, which actually made no sense to me, was the question of 'death':
"I was always intrigued by death.... and the reason of birth... when it all has to end anyways...."
Well, if you look at it 'objectively' now, birth is the simple process of copulation, followed by gestation, ending in the production of a new life form. Death is the simple end, or consumption of that life form. Leather, rubber, fabric, adhesive, metal put together in a factory leads to the production of shoes. Wearing them, using them, consuming them, eventually leads to the death of those shoes. Am I twisted in the head?
Let me ask you. Why is human birth and death the only talked about or thought about subject? Fine, for all you PeTA people out there, why is the death and birth of animals the only talked about subject? Ah... I forget. The theists, I rephrase, although you have got my point... Why is human and animal deaths and births the only popular topics in the regard?
The Greeks and Romans talked of human death. Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor, a stoic to certain extent, and the author of the must read "Meditations" writes in the same book :
...The body and its parts are a river, the soul is a dream and mist, life is warfare and a journey far from home, lasting reputation is oblivion...
I find his description of life as a constantly consumed substance more to my liking than other 'divine' descriptions. Why are we alive at all if it has to end? Think objectively again and you have the answer.
And what do we do throughout this pointless life, that shouldn't exist in the first place: whatever keeps you happy and alive dear, whatever (a point that will be further explored in a later post).
"I might think a bit more than them.... not necessarily in the right direction....."
There is no 'right direction' to thought. There is conventional, there's unconventional. That is all there is to it.
What I think of you, Shivank, is ... I choose to be biased to being unbiased about your philosophical ventures. Though I seriously doubt the 'state' in which you philosophised. And yes, you surprised me [:)]
That was all that was to his letter, although an equally interesting response followed by his 'Mamashri'. I'll save that for some time later. It deals with karma, which I think would complement another topic I had in mind.
I end this topic with another Marcus Aurelius, bear with the lengthy beauty of it:
Hippocrates cured many illness - and then fell ill and died. The Chaldaeans predicted the death of many others; in due course their own hour arrived. Alexander, Pompey, Caesar - who utterly destroyed so many cities, cut down so many thousand foot and horse in battle - they too departed this life. Heraclitus often told us the world would end in fire. But it was moisture that carried him off; he died smeared with cowshit. Democritus was killed by ordinary vermin, Socrates by the human kind.
And?
You boarded, you set sail, you've made the passage. Time to disembark. If it's for another life, well, there's nowhere without gods on that side either. If to nothingness, then you no longer have to put up with pain and pleasure, or go on dancing attendance on this battered crate, your body - so inferior to that which serves it.
One is mind and spirit, the other earth and garbage.
That my friends is another classic question. Talked about oh so often and still in ways without any conclusion. The reason is simple enough. There is no conclusion.
What particularly troubled Shivank enough to actually start this process of thoughts was :
"I feel like I am unbiased all the time.... I don't think from a definite point of view.... which .... I hate in a sort of way.... I want to be biased to a certain side... but I just cant do it.... "
Unbiased thoughts. I have managed to meet very few persons who could be totally objective. I myself am objective. But never totally. I take sides. I always cheer the underdogs. Still I think objectively. Perhaps because I make myself do so. My friend is troubled over being totally objective. I wish to be totally unbiased.
.
.
.
Aren't we both biased? Shivank, you are biased towards the side of being biased. I am biased to being not biased. Weird? I suppose not. Because we are all biased. To one side or the other. The weak, the strong, the pretty ones, the not so pretty ones, the males, the females, the socialists, the communists, the capitalists, the democracy, the anarchy, The Sex Pistols, The Ramones, music, thrash, rock n' roll, blues, jazz, techno, blacks, whites, Bush, Osama, reservations, Congress, BJP, Pamela Anderson, Carmen Electra, homosexuality, religion, God, Nature, the ones who think, the ones who don't and the ones in between... You are all biased dear mortals. Biased towards life itself.
The reason we appear to be unbiased at times is because we are biased towards a greater, more abstract topic. If you can't watch a game of football without cheering a side, you probably hold the game much higher than the competing teams. You don't feel bad about one losing is probably because you feel equally good about one having won. The game mattered more. If that did not make sense, it's probably because you are not Shivank [:P]
Moving on to another interesting topic that Shivank touched, after a brief mention of glasses being half empty or full, which actually made no sense to me, was the question of 'death':
"I was always intrigued by death.... and the reason of birth... when it all has to end anyways...."
Well, if you look at it 'objectively' now, birth is the simple process of copulation, followed by gestation, ending in the production of a new life form. Death is the simple end, or consumption of that life form. Leather, rubber, fabric, adhesive, metal put together in a factory leads to the production of shoes. Wearing them, using them, consuming them, eventually leads to the death of those shoes. Am I twisted in the head?
Let me ask you. Why is human birth and death the only talked about or thought about subject? Fine, for all you PeTA people out there, why is the death and birth of animals the only talked about subject? Ah... I forget. The theists, I rephrase, although you have got my point... Why is human and animal deaths and births the only popular topics in the regard?
The Greeks and Romans talked of human death. Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor, a stoic to certain extent, and the author of the must read "Meditations" writes in the same book :
...The body and its parts are a river, the soul is a dream and mist, life is warfare and a journey far from home, lasting reputation is oblivion...
I find his description of life as a constantly consumed substance more to my liking than other 'divine' descriptions. Why are we alive at all if it has to end? Think objectively again and you have the answer.
And what do we do throughout this pointless life, that shouldn't exist in the first place: whatever keeps you happy and alive dear, whatever (a point that will be further explored in a later post).
"I might think a bit more than them.... not necessarily in the right direction....."
There is no 'right direction' to thought. There is conventional, there's unconventional. That is all there is to it.
What I think of you, Shivank, is ... I choose to be biased to being unbiased about your philosophical ventures. Though I seriously doubt the 'state' in which you philosophised. And yes, you surprised me [:)]
That was all that was to his letter, although an equally interesting response followed by his 'Mamashri'. I'll save that for some time later. It deals with karma, which I think would complement another topic I had in mind.
I end this topic with another Marcus Aurelius, bear with the lengthy beauty of it:
Hippocrates cured many illness - and then fell ill and died. The Chaldaeans predicted the death of many others; in due course their own hour arrived. Alexander, Pompey, Caesar - who utterly destroyed so many cities, cut down so many thousand foot and horse in battle - they too departed this life. Heraclitus often told us the world would end in fire. But it was moisture that carried him off; he died smeared with cowshit. Democritus was killed by ordinary vermin, Socrates by the human kind.
And?
You boarded, you set sail, you've made the passage. Time to disembark. If it's for another life, well, there's nowhere without gods on that side either. If to nothingness, then you no longer have to put up with pain and pleasure, or go on dancing attendance on this battered crate, your body - so inferior to that which serves it.
One is mind and spirit, the other earth and garbage.
10 comments:
Commenting to remind you of it :)
Man. I just read my entire blog again. This is probably the one post that makes the most sense to me. [:D]
Whatever happened to your philosophical ventures? [:)]
Lost in the times of travel and varied lives. One day dude, on day my friend, we shall go back to our roots and dig up what were. How stupid or innocent, should we have gone ahead and grown up?
Have to let the flow take over for now I guess. Getting tired of fighting it :P
If only we could help it! [:)]
This comment deals with three separate things that I wanted to say, all uncorrelated.
I am exploring your blog a little at a time. As I said before...systematic thinking is a cultivated taste for me; I preferred to read your fiction pieces and left the others because I summarised them under the heading "debates he has had". Debates never interested me for their own sake; quite early on I grasped that almost every conviction I saw around had an opposing point of view; it was pointless, and the art of reasoning did not appeal to me.I had to develop it as a tool of defence...and it is then that I realised why mankind developed logical thinking:D
Enough rambling. I'd just like to point out that the "biasedness towards unbiasedness" can be taken another step backwards - i.e. "unbiasedness towards biasedness towards unbiasedness". So if the purpose of the post, and your mail, was to convince your friend that his unbiasedness was biased (so that he could feel better about being unbiased) it won't make a very convincing argument.
In general, there are many separate ideas that you deal with. It raises interesting questions, but the only connecting link between the ideas is that they were all mentioned in your friend's mail.Arguments are systematic; but the piece is shockingly lacking in aesthetic appeal. A reader derives pleasure from the ideas being explored, not the way they are expressed. Just a general trend I have noticed in most of your pieces.
An illustration.
How do you know that all of us are biased? You say we appear unbiased because we are biased towards a "greater objective". You have given no proof of its existence. Chalo let us assume it exists - say in the case of the football game, you hold the game above the teams, and that is your "higher" bias. But I can similarly claim that there is a greater "unbiasedness" that is behind this bias - simply that you rank biases equally (I'm making a circular argument) and you have no means of refuting me given your assumption that there always exists a bias.
(You have no means of refuting me because I am making "claims" just as you did.)
This post, and blog in general, are not about debates. The use of logic throughout is to serve an explanation to my "claims". I start with one that makes sense to me. In this case it happened to be human biased-ness. [:)] If you have any interesting reasons for why you believe that humans are unbiased creatures and how this unbiased-ness explains some of the phenomena that we see all around us, I am more than ears. If you are simply questioning why biased-ness and not unbiased-ness, well, the answer is that it seems sensible to me and explains a lot of things. But yes, it is a claim.
From the cursory look that I have had, it seems to me that most of your non-fiction posts are about you putting forward your point of view as opposed to a (usually conventional) point of view. For a long time, it sufficed for me that both your claims were equally "right" - I did not really need to run through the details of your argument, because your skill at using logic did not interest me. I called them debates because I could visualize most of them as actual conversations comprising of opposite points of view.
About the unbiasedness - I see no reason why I should need to believe that man is inherently biased, or inherently unbiased. If you do see such reason, I would be curious. Otherwise - what point in making a assumption?
Your interpretation of inherent bias seems to me an alternate way of expressing the need for beliefs.You either need to believe in each team, or believe that no team is important. That turns your claim into the claim that man needs to stick to some belief. So Shivank needs to believe that he should be biased, you need to believe that you should be unbiased...So basically your claim turns into that poem I wrote, long ago..."Boxes" But that was my point of view sometime ago. A new article contesting it should come up soon.
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