Musings

Not yet in St Andrews, but feeling philisophical so what the hell.

Suppose you want to blow up a rock. No good reason, you just have a stick of dynamite and want to blow something up. There are two rocks in front of you. One is very large, the other is smaller. The stick of dynamite would blow either one up. Which SHOULD you blow up? Who cares! The size of the rock makes no difference, neither, probably, does the type of rock or its history. The rocks are so far away from human you probably couldn't tell one from the other looking at pictures. So, rocks are all the same. Rocks shouldn't matter, and it shouldn't matter which rock you blow to smithereens, or even if you blow multiple rocks to smithereens. As far as we know, the rocks don't mind.

So what makes people any different? Becuase we are a single species we have a level of common empathy, but take that away and how is a human different from a rock. "Thought" and "awareness" and "consciousness" and "life." Rocks may have something just as special which we do not know about. Even if we did, would we start saying that blowing up rocks was a crime? Perhaps killing is a bad example because we have a perception that killing is the worst crime and should only be practiced in self defense when no other recourses are left (I think this must be something like the argument for imprisonment being more humane than torture. Would you rather go through an almost normal life missing a hand, or spend your entire life rotting away in prison? But that's another subject). Still, what makes "the greatest happiness for the greatest number" valid? Sure, it sounds good. But WHY? Why not "the greatest happiness for me?" That's almost patriotic! But seriously, we don't say, "we should treat rocks in such a way that the treatment of each individual rock does the most good for the world's population of rocks as a whole." And on a fundamental level, what is the difference between a human and a rock? If an advanced species arrived and wanted to make a wall out of us, what could we possibly say to stop them?

I listened today to a David Lynch lecture at Berkeley on i-Tunes. He is terrible. He didn't have a speech, didn't answer the questions asked, did so incoherently, and used the words "beauty" and "consciousness" every sentence. His talk was on transcendental meditation, how to become so one that you reach a different state of consciousness. My question is: what is consciousness? Is it different from the mind (in a western sense) or being, itself (in, perhaps, an eastern sense)? What makes us so sure we have a consciousness? We think, and we see that thinking is centralized in the brain. But to think of the color yellow I must first have seen the color yellow at some point, so couldn't I argue that I "think", in a sense, with my eyes? Then blind people are retarded, and dumb people are cripples! If I'm being blunt and politically incorrect I might as well have fun with it. In which case everything we do that helps our body expands our conciousness--a good diet, sleep (which I will lack in the morning), excercize, occasional indulgence, sex, etc, etc etc. Why is mediation special then? It's our age's spiritual diet pill. Sure, maybe it helps, but only supplementarily. Like sleep. I'm about to take my supplement.