Life, Existence And Being A Ghost

"Wir sind geboren um zu leben, nicht um zu funktionieren."

"Das Leben ist zu kurz um es mit Warten auf das Wochenende zu verbringen. Jeder Tag kann schön und der Letzte sein."

"I feel so non-existent.... I feel like I'm dead and a ghost."

What I've quoted above is three quotes from my Twitter timeline. They are all, in their own ways, related thoughts but, more importantly for this blog, related to thoughts and ideas I regularly have or think about. The first two, written in German, suggest that life is to be "lived" and not merely to be functional. The similar English thought is to differentiate existence from living. The first is simply being but the second is thought of as more. And as better. The second German quote above says that life is too short to wait for the weekend. Every day can be good and could also be your last. So its recommended that you enjoy and get the most out of every day by implication. And as for the third quote above... Well that interests me the most and it has since I first read it. For what exactly does it mean? Even the person who said it does not seem to know. But it seems negatively related to my first two quotes.

As far as the first two ideas go my instinct is to critique and reject them. "This day could be your last," its said, as if that were some kind of motivation to do something good, worthy or fulfilling. But if I knew that this day was my last I wouldn't do anything. And knowing it was would be the major motivator in that fact. The fact I'd have one day left would guarantee I did absolutely nothing on that day. Because being brutally honest with you I'd be damn happy that it was. You see I see life differently from very many other people and often I imagine that these people don't think very deeply. I may be right or wrong about that, of course. I think they just swallow ideas such as that "life is for living not existing" without really thinking about them or doing the hard work of asking what they mean and if it is experientially true. This, I take it, is the most important truth of all, the truth that you feel.

And so I ask myself why the fact this might be my last day should matter at all. It would matter to me merely, and with relief, because it would mean for me that the burden of this fleshly existence is finally being removed from me. Yes, that's genuinely how I feel overall about life and one can only be honest for there is no wrong answer here - just your answer. When people say to me that life is for living and not existing or, in German, um zu leben, nicht um zu funktionieren, I sort of think I know what they mean but I don't really. Perhaps I've only ever existed and never lived. And, if that were true, how could I be expected to know the difference anyway? The difference here is one of experience not book knowledge. Its not a matter of facts but of having lived. And, whatever you might say, its somewhat arrogant to imagine that everyone's experience about life, or thoughts upon it, are the same as yours. But, and this should function as a warning here, its also dangerous to think that you are the only person feeling like you do or that no one ever has before. We all walk individual paths. We must for we are individuals. But we are the same species and can share and have things in common and we need to remember that. "You are not alone" is both true and not true at the same time.

So you can take it that I'm not buying any feel good horse bollocks about "life is for living" without a heavy dose of experience-funded cynicism. Life, in many respects for me, is for getting through and I have earned the right to think that having struggled through forty seven and half years of bullshit to get to today. That individual struggle earns me the right to talk about life as I have lived it and experienced it. Some of this may be relevant to you and some may not. But, I repeat, there's no wrong answers here anyway. So be bold enough to think what you really want to think and say what you really feel. 

As I've said before, I have come around to the view that life is less about external circumstances, which is the obsession of the masses, and more about internal ones, which seems to me to be either ignored completely by people or brushed over with lip service. Without going into details its fair to say that as the world sees, a world all about possessions and status, that I'm pretty much as far down the pile as you could get. I am in many respects a hermit. I don't fit in and rather than struggling to do so I choose to accept my fate and not do so. I don't own very much. The money I have is inconsequential. I have no friends and the vast majority of people I speak to in a day are online. If I couldn't get online I might go for days without talking to anyone at all. And yet, in a way, none of this really bothers me very much because, as I say, life for me is not about externals. Its about internals and these internals are things I've struggled with too ever since I was really even an adult.

I have not known a lot of peace in my life and this is because I've had to deal with internal trauma for a lot of it. Perhaps now you understand why superficial, external things mean so little to me? Its because what good is stuff or status when you are fighting against your own mind and feelings? They are no use and of no help. Your own mind is literally something you cannot escape and to fight against yourself is probably the hardest battle of all. There is a history of mental health issues in my family. My mother and her twin sister suffered from various maladies and to a certain extent still do to this day. This has for them been a lifelong battle throughout adulthood. Every day for them can be full of surprises and not the nice kind. Imagine waking up and immediately you feel afraid. They don't have to because it has happened to them. Its happened to me many times too. Both of them suffer from a fear of traveling and my mother recently took a short break away with a friend. She was as white as a sheet waiting for her friend's car to arrive. For some people simple things are major hurdles.

But unless you know someone like this I imagine that it would never even occur to you. We all have a tendency to think that everyone else thinks like us and I've written about this before. The truth is that some people do and some people don't. We are all a strange mixture of shared thoughts, feelings and emotions. We each have our areas of experience and areas of lack of experience. I remember once having a panic attack in the street near where I was living. My first impulse was to speak to someone and I saw a neighbour from across the street who I had seen many times before. I still remember the look of complete fear on her face and I can only imagine that I must have looked like some crazed axe murderer walking towards her from that look on her face! I just wanted human contact as a means to get control over how I was feeling but for her it seemed to look like something terrible. 

We hear a lot today about people with mental health problems but it is not usually in a positive connection. Maybe its because someone has been killed or there was "a crazy person" on the bus or in the shop or in the street. Very few of these people are in any way dangerous and, of those that are, most are more likely to be dangerous to themselves much more than anyone else. But, for those who don't understand about the many forms of mental health issues that abound today, it can all just seem dangerous and threatening - as the unknown usually feels to most of us. It is striking that it is in the most developed nations of the earth that mental health is the biggest issue, as if modern society had created its own casualties. And I must be honest in saying that I think it does. I'm probably one of them for I find a so-called modern way of living to be utterly crazy and contrary to more natural means almost to the point of total frustration sometimes. This is not just as a matter of its physical circumstances but also in relation to its guiding philosophies. How can it be promoting of good mental health, for example, that we are all in theory competing with each other for wealth and prosperity? It seems to me that if you wanted to make some people sick that's the first thing you would do.

"Life is to be lived not just experienced" we are told though by the prophets of superficiality. I'm not sure they would say that if their "experience" was as dark as it is for some people. Life, for them, might be more something to be escaped. "Living", whatever positive spin that is being given, seems more like a fabled Never Never Land, a thing which some people say they have but which, for those with dark personal experiences, seems false and unreal. And, indeed, if "living" is merely about having stuff and earning money to buy the stuff and maybe having a status which gets you the money to buy the stuff then isn't it false and unreal? I would argue that the real riches such people have are never waking up soaked in sweat or never being worried about feeling deathly afraid as they board a train or carrying a feeling of dread just about the fact that you are you and being you is like an uncomfortable coat that you can never take off. For some people being who you are does not come easily.

And this is the sense I get from the quote "I feel so non-existent.... I feel like I'm dead and a ghost." For what must it mean to feel like you don't exist? It implies an absence of feeling, an inability to inhabit or enjoy things, as if everything is only observed but without being able to take part. It doesn't sound very pleasant to me but it does sound very genuine and I value that fact for I value those who speak truthfully and not in the words of conventions or cliches. But from my own experience I think it must also be somewhat contradictory for the more I have felt an outsider to my own species the more personally aware I've become just how much that makes me one of them. This entire blog started with a search to discover humanity and what "being human" is all about. Eighteen months later its still on-going but its only a sub-section of my so far forty seven and a half year investigation. I have been exploring it in words, thoughts and music. Sometimes I feel like I touch something meaningful and at others it feels like none of it matters anyway because "all things must pass". 

The recently deceased Italian genius, Umberto Eco, wrote in his book, Foucault's Pendulum, that life was a meaningless enigma made worse by us because we had a desperate craving to infuse it with meaning and have it all add up to something. The plot twist was that it does not. We are just left with the feeling and idea that it must. I very much go along with this thought and my life seems to be a sort of validation of this idea up to this point. This is one reason I've felt the need to cast off very many human conventions which, ultimately, buy into the idea that things MUST mean something, something overarching and over all. But the truth is they mustn't and that they can mean whatever we want them to mean. And that can include nothing at all. But, be warned, what you think and feel must have consequences for you if you do it genuinely and authentically. Life is not a game and you cannot fool yourself. That is to say you can fool yourself but it leads nowhere good.

For me, life is about being at peace with myself. I've said this before. If you are at peace with yourself I think this means you are stronger, more able to deal with things in general and more able to set things in context. I think its partly a spiritual thing, whatever that means, and partly philosophical. I have found that in life I've had to do a lot of reading and much thinking to achieve this peace. It is not won cheaply and it is not bound to happen. You have to work for it and earn it. But I genuinely believe its the greatest prize a human being can have. But then maybe that's because I have to fight for it every day. I do not know what it would be like to not struggle in my existence. I've hardly lived a day where I didn't. But, in a way, I'm not remotely sorry about that because when I look out and see people living what I regard as empty, pointless lives acquiring stuff I feel glad that my struggle grounds me. Existence itself is not a small topic but at least I'm connected to that in my existential struggles as maybe you are in yours. It is good to step back and situate yourself in some greater context. If life is for living and living is a daily argument over who has what then I find that nihilistic beyond imagining. Life may not be merely functioning but living isn't mere selfish acquisition either. It must be about sharing, understanding, situating yourself in something more than yourself. It must be about everything of which a human being is capable and can experience. 

If you would like a musical commentary on all of this it can be found on my Bandcamp where the best of my last 8 years of music is now available, a musical commentary and testimony on my thoughts about life. Its at elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com 

Something to Believe In?

I've been writing this incarnation of my blog for something over a year now. And where I used to get a handful of readers I now get about 300% more, on average. That is to say that I get three times more readers than I did at the start. Thank you very much for reading. One thing I very rarely get, though, is any comments. That's a bit of a shame but I understand and its certainly not compulsory. But occasionally I do get a comment and this blog is going to be about a comment I got to a recent blog. Since the comment was made publicly (and its still there to see in full anyway) I will quote the relevant sentences (the highlights in italics are mine) so that we are all on the same page before I begin:

We all have faith in something. Some have faith in God, some have faith in their spouse, their government, their employer, their children, their income. Without faith, what is the point of living? If I don't even have enough faith to think I will see tomorrow, why should I put any effort forth living today?

I read this comment again the other day. Of course, I was very thankful that the person concerned had made it. It is part of my understanding of the world that no person is omniscient. No person has all the answers or all the insight. Some would be extremely skeptical and say that none of us have any at all. I'm not one of those people but in my appreciation of all things human there is room for the view that we human beings are bundles of beliefs and those beliefs are situated and self-interested. One corollary of this situation is that other points of view can be informative and open our eyes to things we cannot currently see. This, indeed, is how beliefs ever change at all. Someone or something happens which opens a chink of light in an area there was no light before. And a pathway to a new belief is formed. So I was very glad of the comment. It made me think about the subject of faith and especially the two sentences I highlighted in italics, above. In many ways these three sentences get to the very heart of my own worldview. First of all, I asked myself if its really true that "We all have faith in something".

I must be honest and say that for 48 hours I've racked my brains on this one. I've been asking myself if my correspondent is right. Do I have faith in something? The correspondent gave examples - God, spouse, government, employer, children, income. I don't have most of these. I think that I have faith in none of them. But, still, there could be something that I do have faith in. My correspondent, who I respect, seems quite sure that this is the case and I want to do them the courtesy and give them the respect of thinking it through to see if they are right. My conclusion is that I don't have faith in anything but I want to be as bullet proof as I can be in saying it. If you have read any amount of my blogs, particularly the more philosophical ones, then you know that I have an affinity to existentialism, to absurdism, to some extent to nihilism. You know that I have had a great deal of thought about "the void" and the essential and fundamental problem of meaning that afflicts our species. Meaning is a problem because it is open-ended and it cannot be fixed. It is always only rhetorical. No one can force you to accept a certain meaning and it can always be re-made. Things can always be seen another way.

So what place is there for "faith" in a world that is seen like that? Faith implies both belief and trust, at least in the understanding of faith I have. I have had considerable input to my thinking from Christian sources in the past and I am well used to Christian scholarship. "Faith" is, accordingly, quite a strong word in that tradition. "Faith", for the biblical Christian, should be something to do with believing in things that cannot be seen with the eyes. It is, in some respects, believing in the impossible (that God exists, that he has acted to save creation) and trusting that, even though from some angles it seems silly and ridiculous, it is true. I do not think that every human belief comes under the category "faith". It is very trivially true that every person alive holds beliefs. It is part of our human make up to take stances and hold beliefs about the world around is. Quite simply, we cannot function as a human being without doing so. But is this "faith"? I don't think so. Its simply part of the mechanics of being a human being. I think that some people do have faith in the strong, positive, "believing and trusting" sense I use here but I don't think that I am one of them. And so my correspondent's sentence is explicitly challenged. To challenge it is to say that we don't all have faith in something. It might be worth asking yourself if you have faith in anything. And then ask yourself why and if it deserves it.

So what I'm saying here is that, yes, everybody believes things but that isn't quite faith. Some surprising people do have faith, I'm sure. I've argued many times that the seemingly anti-faith person Dr Richard Dawkins is, in fact, very much a person who does have faith. He doesn't believe in God but he is more than happy to believe in Truth (the capitalized "T" is important for it denotes a divinized concept) and in what he regards as our human truth-finding abilities. Dawkins is very much a strong anti-skeptic. He thinks that we can truly know the way things are unconditioned by our context, our humanity or anything else. I'd call that a faith and I'm sure he wouldn't like the fact. Which is a bonus as far as I'm concerned. So I think that people can have faith. But I don't think everyone does. I don't think I do. I don't even have faith in myself or in the void as some kind of "nothingness that resolves all things". Some try to make of the nothingness a mystery and it takes on God-like properties. Its either a re-imagining of God or a god by the back door. I think that needs to be resisted too. The natural processes of the physical universe and their apparent lack of meaning are not a savior nor can they be turned into one. The meaninglessness and emptiness is real and thorough-going. It can't be sugar-coated.

Now in the context of my correspondent's comment my belief that I don't have faith in anything (and since I think I don't I must assume that others have this possibility too) is important. My correspondent has gone on to say that "Without faith, what is the point of living?" So, naturally, this question addresses me directly now that I have taken up a position towards the first proposition. I can only think of one answer: there is no point to living. I think its a very great assumption, one which we then work on filling in retrospectively, to think that there is a point to living. Why would there be a point? Why should there be a point, antecedently? Why could or can it not be the case that an uncaring universe birthed things and there they are, just milling about in a physical universe of decay? I don't have faith in this because why would you? To describe things as you see them is not, for me, to have faith. But I believe it for now until or unless something comes along which opens up an alternative chink of light, another pathway to follow. To say that something has a point is to ascribe it a meaning. To create a creation myth, for example, is to put things in some order and say what they mean and how they mean it. It is simply to relate things one to another which is all giving meaning to things is. We humans, and this is the really interesting thing about the universe, are self-aware, sentient beings. We need to make meaning. But we have no knowledge that anything else does. We don't know that sharks or elephants or rabbits need meaning. We don't know that stars or moons or space dust does. We don't know that the universe itself does - even though some would put up vague arguments for its sentience. We only know that we do. But how valid is it to go forcing our own necessary meanings on everything else? This is the very absurd problem of human meaning re-stated once again, part of the riddle of what it means to be human.

So I need to admit to my correspondent that I don't "have enough faith" for I don't think that I have any. And I don't see any "point" to life, save that I might give it myself. I see a universe of actions and consequences and I keep it that simple. Things happen and this makes other things happen within the possibilities of what can happen in any given situation at all. When things happen there are consequences to the actions. That's about it. I like to keep things simple and this is a guiding idea behind some approaches towards logic: the simpler answer is to be preferred. I think this is based on the observation that life is rarely needlessly complicated for its own sake. Whilst its not true to say that I think we humans can, given enough time, figure everything out for ourselves (such people do exist and some of them give this as a reason for not needing any gods), I do think that things largely are "up to us" to make of what we can. We are each given a mind and being human we have certain needs and requirements. You could say that each of us is given the riddle of figuring out who we are and why we are here and what we are supposed to do with it. This, to me, is a more meaningful suggestion than saying we all must have faith in something. I don't think that life is a matter of faith. Faith is the illusion of meaningfulness and, strictly speaking, life is not a matter of very much at all. You don't need to care, think, love or even really feel in any rigorous or meaningful sense to get through life. You are just going to live the years you are allotted anyway. No one says you have to take life seriously and there's no punishment for not doing so outside of the circumstances of the life you live (actions and consequences, remember?). Lives both good and bad end up in the same dowdy funeral parlor with a few people there, some of whom you didn't like, to see off your physical remains.

So "what is the point of living"? There isn't one if by that you mean something antecedent and overarching. But such a thing, should it exist, sounds very permanent and meaningful. But where is it to be found and why wasn't it signposted very well? If everyone's life has a point I would have expected it to be more firmly recommended to us human beings rather than being something we can totally bypass. I notice merely several, sometimes connected, alternative versions of what life might mean. But, like some flavors of ice cream, I'm not sure I like the taste. All we have left are any meanings that we ourselves ascribe to things and I guess that we all, in some way, however loosely, do something like that. But, for me, life is about getting from point A, birth, to point B, death, across the arid wastelands of the world we live in. It doesn't really matter very much which path through the brush you take. Everyone gets to point B in the end anyway. And then which path you took seems just a little bit beside the point. (Its worth saying, though, that of course this answer is different while you are still alive in the world of actions and consequences. For whilst you are still alive what you think and say and do takes part in that continuum, it has consequences for you. But dead people don't have any actions and suffer no consequences. That's the difference.)

This leaves me one question left to answer for my correspondent says "Why should I put forth any effort living today?" Of course, we need to see what is being said here as all joined up together. This thought flows from the suggestion that everyone needs faith in something. For the writer of the comment a life without faith would be meaningless and empty, I assume. I once, almost, used to think this way myself. Instead, now, I am a living, breathing example of the fact that you don't need to worry about this. A life without faith need not be empty even though to those who think you do need faith it will seem that way. But how could a person who thinks you must have faith see any other way anyway? Honest beliefs honestly held do color how people see things. That is the point of them. Beliefs denote what can even be seen. That's why we have them. They are the rails on which we run the trains of our lives. Sometimes we get pushed off into a siding. Sometimes we are full steam ahead. Sometimes we are held at a red light. But we are always on the rails of our beliefs. 

But to the question. Is life a matter of "effort"? Would a person not putting any effort into their life be committing a sin? I don't believe in any gods so I literally have no deity to sin against. But let's push this further to the boundary. What's so darned special about life and living anyway? There are trillions of things that have lived and will live. Most of them you wouldn't care less about. But, in our human way, as things get bigger or fluffier, we start to care. We want to save the fluffy or cuddly things but the ugly things, the unseen or unremarkable things, well, not so much. Life is prodigious. Its breaking out all over the place. Many would want to say it is special. This is somewhat sentimental and being sentimental isn't necessarily that smart. 150,000 people die every day and 99.999% of them you never knew. The point of living is to die. When you are dead how you lived is irrelevant. How you lived only matters while you or anyone else is alive. No, I'm not sure that life is about "effort". In fact, even reading the sentence makes me want to be lazy, to put in no effort. To just exist. I see the idea of effort as some egotistical notion, some notion that somehow I'm letting the side down because I didn't try. The idea of effort suggests there is some authority I need to impress with the sweat of my brow. But I don't see myself as being on any side. I have no one to impress or disappoint. I'm just me. I have been born, I'm living and I'm going to die. In one sense these three simple facts are entirely trivial. That's the sense I would bring to bear on this question. Life, in general, is not about effort. There is no one to impress and no standard to meet. In the same way it doesn't make any abstract sense to say it makes a difference if I live 15,000 or 25,000 days either. Life is in general. Life is not anything else in particular.

I'm listening to my album "The Gospel of Existence" as I write (quite by coincidence, I might add). This is appropriate for it expresses musically the thoughts I am writing about here. The track "Joining the Dots" is playing. The idea behind this track, and the album, was of a vast chaos that has dots in it. You can really join these dots up any way you like and make whatever picture you want - just as you can with the books you can buy with join the dots puzzles in them. Of course, in the books you are meant to join them in a certain way for there some god-like figure has determined what picture your dots shall make at the end. But is life really the same as that? I stand with those who say it isn't. Join the dots any way you like. All that is is really just a "Chaos without Consequence" in the end - to quote another title from the album. 

And in the end, of course, I see things very differently to my correspondent. I don't think that is a bad thing. I think it is a wonderful, marvelous thing. My correspondent, in caring enough to write me a reply, made me question and think about what I believed and helped me to sharpen it up. We all need this and it bothers me that very many of us don't see it. We sit there always being informed by the same views or those who we know will explicitly reinforce them. This is intellectual and personal suicide. Beliefs thrive on being questioned or opposed. They need to live and breathe and do work to be healthy. Any fool can sit in a cave and believe something unchallenged. So spare a thought for those who think differently from you. It turns out you need them, their beliefs and even their faith too.

Music as Identity

In my last blog I mentioned noise and noise in that blog was a kind of music. You may be one of those people who doesn't consider that noise is music but I would disagree with you. John Cage defined music as the arrangement of sound and silence so it seems to me that if you accept that noise is sound then any arrangement of it must also be music. This seems reasonable to me and those who make the kind of music I would call "noise" vary wildly in any case. Noise, for me, would extend from the abstract sound collages native to early 1970s "Kosmische" music to the glitchy "IDM" beats of Autechre to the ingrained, experimental, industrial randomness of Throbbing Gristle (and much else besides). Noise, for me, encompasses the abstract, the random, the non-standard, the unpredictable, the incoherent, the absurd. It is not merely shouting into a microphone whilst strumming your guitar with the volume on full - although it could be. Noise, in my estimation, is made by those who are very artistically involved and invested in the music they make. There is usually some overt point or purpose behind it. I would also argue that noise makers have a fascination with sounds and do not merely want to create unending variations of the same ones.

The recent history of my music-making goes something like this. In the Autumn of 2013 I returned to the UK from living in Berlin, Germany. I was at a low point and the music I made then was uninspiring and formulaic. About six months later, in the Spring of 2014, I began to emerge from this malaise by experimenting with metallic sounds. In this period I was still thinking kind of melodically and I made poignant tunes that were, perhaps, a hangover from the low point I had been at. It was in the Autumn of 2014 that my musical philosophy received a fresh influx of inspiration when I discovered two now constant and abiding influences. These were John Cage and Kosmische music. It was not so much the case that I liked this music (such a thing as musical taste is largely irrelevant) but more the case that these people had ideas about what music is at all in the first place. I was struck by the fact, in the case of the Kosmische musicians, that they expressly wanted to make a new music, a music that could be theirs, something that wasn't beholden either to a tradition or to totem figures of the past. This showed that music is part of a culture and that you place yourself inside a tradition when you make it. Music becomes about identity. It says who you are. With Cage it was very much his compositional attitude, approach and ideas that were key. Music is organizing sounds and silence, nothing more and nothing less. Isn't that just a refreshingly simple definition, something that sets you free as a musical creator?

The track Discipline by Throbbing Gristle is, for some, not the easiest thing to listen to. Feel free to listen to it on You Tube if you've never heard it before. It is charitably described as a vocalist shouting over sounds. I'm not going to tell you its the greatest song ever made but that's not the point anyway. The point for someone with an inquiring mind like me is why would someone make a song like that in the first place? This leads into another question which is why does anyone make a song the way they do? Everyone who makes music has forbears and knows of other music and so its true to say that everyone has influences. But it might not always be thought that musical writers have ideas or identity behind their music when they make it. I think they do. I think the music you make says something about you, who you see yourself as, where you think you fit in, what you want to be and how you see the world. I could at this point furnish lots of examples that I think make this point but I'll leave it to you to think about my suggestion for yourself instead. 

My point in mentioning this is because I want to encourage people to think both more widely and deeply about music in the first place. At one level music can just be taken as another composition that you either like or don't like. I increasingly find this shallow and you have my influences to thank for me thinking this way. Music has long been used to influence people however and not just at political rallies for mainstream candidates trying to hook you in with a catchy tune. Even if one thinks back to more primitive times music was used, for example in cultic rituals, to engender an atmosphere and create  a mood conducive to the activity concerned. One thinks of the Dionysian feasts in ancient Greek culture where revelers would whip themselves up into intoxicated frenzy. Music there helped to achieve this and had a purpose. I think that more often than we might like to admit music does have a purpose. Its incredibly narrow thinking to regard music as merely "entertainment". Its much more complicated than that. For example, did John Lennon write "Imagine" (which I think is the worst song ever made) to entertain or to make a point? At the very least it is a bit of both.

For me music is a lot of the things I've mentioned above. It is certainly something which says something about you. The kind of music you choose to make is a choice as are the conditions that you choose to make it under. This can demonstrate if you intend to be a person who wants to "fit in" or if you see yourself as an outsider. It can show that you want to be seen as part of one culture but not another. It can indicate if you regard yourself as traditional or avant garde. It can also show if you are content to use standard tropes or want to take a non-standard approach. My recent albums have very much been trying to fit into non-standard tropes, being abstract collages of sounds, often dissonant, that require the effort of listening to them as a whole to appreciate what I was trying to do. Here we do not talk about "good" and "bad" for these are superficial judgments of likes and dislikes and these things are of no importance. There is more to be said and to be heard about music than if you personally happen to like it or not in the moment you hear it. I wonder, for example, if you ever purposely listen to forms of music that you don't like to think about why you don't like them? This is something I have done and its helped me to formulate what I think music is and what its for by doing it. I think that music is something that can be learned about and in listening to it you learn about yourself, others, and the world. The thought here, again, is that music is about much more than either entertainment or your likes and dislikes.

This, I think, is why my own music has inevitably become more random, non-standard, abstract and self-conscious about use of sounds right up to today with my last two albums, Texture and Adrift, being first and foremost sound collages. They invite you to a world outside of pop music, rock music, mainstream tropes, standard sounds, things that would sound nice on the radio or something that you would listen to at a family gathering. They are albums which demand attention on their own terms and for many that might be too big of an ask, something too jarring to contemplate. Of course, having said what I've said above, you would imagine they also say plenty about me and how I see the world. That's very true. But I'd turn that back on my readers and ask what does the music you make and/or listen to say about you and how you see the world? Listening back to my album Texture, as I am as I write this blog, I'm struck how very much like Kosmische music it really sounds. If you told me it was from 1971 by someone with a German sounding name I'd believe you. I say this not to take pride in the fact but to note how much my recent influences have insidiously taken me over. I didn't set out thinking "My album must sound like Kosmische music". And yet it does and it makes me jump to realize it. I then note that I do identify with the purposes and use of sounds that those people had who made that kind of music did. I see myself being influenced by my appreciation of the world and then writing blogs that try to influence it back.

A question occurs to me at this point: does any of this matter? Does it matter what music you make, what music you like? On the one hand, no, it doesn't. But people act as if it does. More than once I've stupidly got involved in arguments about what music is good and what music is bad. But this is absurd. No music is inherently good and no music is inherently bad. Its all a matter of taste and taste is a matter of identity. People get heated about whether you like this or that because they have invested some of themselves in the judgments they have made about things. To say this song I cherish is rubbish is, in a way, to say that you think I am. And vice versa. Music is sometimes portrayed as this trivial thing that is commercial, disposable and throwaway. These days there are stories almost every day of how it is now a valueless commodity that many people won't even pay for, either as consumers or as those who want music for their projects but won't pay musicians to provide it. Something is certainly going on there but, argument after trivial argument on the Internet shows, people are still very much invested in music and particularly in what they consider as their music. Music is a matter of identity, it is a personal and cultural marker.

So, since this is my personal blog, what of me? Well, I'm happy to keep on being the non-standard, dissonant, abstract, non-conventional person I seem eager to be. I've stopped chasing likes, follows and downloads. Believe it or not I did once try to be a person who made music people would like! Thank the non-existent gods I saw the light on that one! The music I made then was lame, insipid shit. Making music to please an audience is a hateful business. You must be yourself. Authenticity is key. Now I just think that my music is there. Listen or don't. My music is and always has been a musical statement of something more than pitches and scales and as I write I think its getting more interesting as time passes by. "Being interesting" is my musical threshold in making an album and since I make it for me then if it interests me that is the standard. All I can hope after that is that it maybe interests one or two others as well. I make music that is a journey and an experience. It is for listeners to decide if its a journey they want to take and an experience they want to have. Even if its not I hope my blog today encourages my readers to think a bit more about any music they make or listen to and that they ask themselves wider questions because of it.

My music is available at https://elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com/ 

Explaining The Void

Another day has passed and here I am having worked through another musical project. It has often occurred to me in previous times that my music is philosophical in its basis but these days I actually think it is philosophical commentary and expression regarding the subjects that I am thinking about. A case in point is my newly completed projected which, to myself at least, is known as The Emptiness Suite. This comprises my latest four albums, Absence of Presence, Engineers of A Meaningless Universe, Anthropocentric and We Are The Void. Of course, to make music as philosophy is not a straightforward business. When one philosophizes with words one utilizes language which, it might be argued, is much more precise in delineating terms and communicating ideas. But is it? I have read much philosophy written in books that was dense, stodgy and often incomprehensible so it is not as if, in using words, clarity is assured. 

But when philosophizing with music one faces a different task. A primary factor here is that the experience of listening to the music should engender feelings and ideas to do with the subject matter. This is the case here with The Emptiness Suite in that listeners should experience the ideas the sounds are about. One should experience or imagine an absence of presence when listening to Absence of Presence and feel themselves actually in a meaningless universe when listening to Engineers of A Meaningless Universe. When listening to We Are The Void I want you to feel in The Void. I have tried, by the use and manipulation of sounds, to make this a possibility but, of course, I cannot guarantee it anymore than someone who writes philosophy in books can guarantee that you get the point. Crucially though, it is relevant to note here that the music I have made in this suite (and more generally) is not an object, some piece of music that you subjectively appreciate as an entity. My music is an interactive and interdependent experience. How you feel in listening to it, what it makes you think and feel, is exactly the point of it. My ideal listener cannot distinguish between themselves and what they are hearing because it is all taken up in one holistic activity.

All that said, what is The Emptiness Suite about? I think that its a voyage of discovery, a voyage into emptiness, a voyage away from familiarity, a voyage away from much of the thinking that we in The West are immersed in, dominated, as it is, by all kinds of deceptive dualisms. The suite tells a kind of loose story. In Absence of Presence a malady is diagnosed. This malady is that the substance and presence we want to give to things is lacking. It is noticed that things never stand by or for themselves. They always need rhetorical backup. Things are always challengeable or even ignorable and this is worrying. We seem to want something beyond what we have got, something more firm and unarguable. But it is not to be found. This is experienced deep within us as a lack.

The focus then shifts from an implicit view from within a thinking subject to a macro view of the mass of humanity. The second album sets out to view us human beings as the engineers of a meaningless universe. This album is a comment on our activity, meaning and worth on planet Earth. As I see it, we go about building and doing and working, always only having enough to go on and do the same again tomorrow (if we are lucky) but we never build or work on anything that means something by and for itself. In the end it seems as if we are just doing all these things to fight off the nagging fear that if we didn't do something the horror of everything's meaninglessness would sink in. Everything passes away and all that's left is the fact we did a few things. We seek to increase our knowledge and our understanding of the universe through science but what meaning do these things give us? They seem unable to provide any because what does knowledge of particles mean to any of us? Its useless knowledge. We seem impotent to provide the meaning we need and so we build meaningless empires of knowledge instead to give ourselves a purpose that we cannot find in nature. The lack is there again.

And so, in album three, we become anthropocentric. In the famous statement that summarizes the Enlightenment, Man is the measure. When Man is the measure rationality is praised. This album focuses on human beings as they have become today, beings who see themselves as in some sense special or different in the universe. They regard themselves as tasked with a purpose and regard their knowledge and science as ways to objectively improve the situation of both themselves and other things with which they have to do. This is built on the belief that humans beings can have real knowledge of things and objectively understand the universe in which they are set. Thus, human ways of thinking and acting are accorded the status necessary to believe that such goals are possible. It is believed that the universe has a fixed, objective reality and that, as perspicuous beings, we have the possibility to learn what this is. Having this knowledge will, we think, make us the masters of it. I see all this as a kind of God complex within human beings who always either want divinity for themselves or to be put in touch with something more permanent or eternal than they are. It is, for me, another expression of the lack expressed in parts one and two. Human beings are never happy to settle for being just more meaningless matter in an uncaring universe. They always want to build up their part. 

My conclusion is reached in album four, We Are The Void. This is a musical expression of the idea from my last blog "Eureka!" but reinforced by some recent reading of Buddhist texts, notably the so-called "Heart Sutra". Talk of Buddhism may scare some of my readers and I admit that I myself hesitate to read the texts I have done because I am, these days, very wary regarding religious or spiritual doctrines and dogmas. I am looking for neither thing but am open to philosophical insights. And the problem with a lot of religions is that they find themselves unable to resist the urge to make doctrines and dogmas out of things. Surely thousands of years of human history has taught us, however, that ways of understanding change and that if you want to make yourself look a fool write up some document and then say that it is forever eternally true. You will look as silly as those Americans who blather on about the right to bear arms because some guys 200+ years ago wrote the 2nd Amendment. The past cannot bind the future. The future must take care of itself.

So I read The Heart Sutra not as any doctrine or dogma and not to be told "the world is really like this" (which would be a massive mistake, not least in the context of what it says) but in order to stimulate my own thinking about my own place in the world and how I see this vale of tears we call life. Much that I found there is readily compatible with the sorts of pragmatist and existentialist philosophical things I have talked about in numerous blogs. The key idea is that of Śūnyatā (emptiness). This emptiness is not one of nothingness. Rather it is the idea that nothing is one thing. It is a way of expressing the idea that everything is, in fact, a flux of interdependent becoming. (Nietzsche said much the same thing.) This is said because it is recognized that nothing is able to bring itself into being. There is always some other cause outside of itself. Everything is always related to other things and, in this sense, a subject/object duality seems beside the point. (Hence why my ideal listener can't distinguish themselves from the music: its all one holistic event.) I see this idea as readily compatible with something such as Richard Rorty's idea that all meaning and understanding is a matter of panrelationalism, the relating of all things to other things in order to make sense of them. In turn, this is a holistic vision. Everything is one. This insight is for Buddhists a way to enlightenment. It also works well with the existentialist mantra "existence precedes essence". The flux of your experience is paramount, not some magical essence that is supposedly the real you.

I think, in the terms of a centuries old Buddhism, this is a similar thought to my own about we humans being The Void that we diagnose in our life and experience. The lack we feel is at times unavoidable even though we can try to work and build and ignore the voice always waiting to be heard in our heads, the voice that tells us something is missing. It is my idea that we being the very creatures we are creates the void, the lack, that we experience. It is part of the human condition. This Buddhist idea of emptiness, of the radical interdependent flux of being, of all things, ("things" becomes a problematic designation because the Buddhist idea wants to experience a holistic flux and not see an atomistic set of objects) augments this by providing a philosophical background in which my idea can find a home. In this flux we, in our form of being, partake of it. It is, if you will, and without wanting to sound too much like a Swami or a huckster, a way of experiencing reality as a unity without objects and feeling at one with everything else. We are supposed to feel The Void. Experiencing this lack is the good faith of recognizing that there are no gods or eternal divinities for us to get in touch with (whilst simultaneously experiencing the existential rift over which we must leap if we will live). There is just the forever relatability of all things. 

I cannot but admit that this has a therapeutic effect for me. But if you find that out of bounds ask yourself why anyone at all ever asks themselves what their place in the universe is. This is a basic human question and I can't believe that anybody, whatever their answer, does it for any other reason than to provide themselves with some kind of stability, peace or comfort. So if you find it illegitimate of me here - back atcha! The important thing, I feel, is that it is done as honestly as you can. There is no cheating the person you see in the mirror.

So my story is one of people who experience lack, who can never find the permanence and stability they seek. There is always an existential lack, a not quite full enough, not quite stable enough. We try to build empires but they are built on the equivalent of sand. Each gets washed away and superceded. This, I am saying, is because we are the void. We can never fill it because our make up includes this emptiness. It is basic to us and our form of being. This, in turn, is an expression of our link to all other things in a great emptiness, the emptiness that is all things, all things that are interdependently related, forever linked in a flux of becoming.

So that was the text explaining my latest project but, ideally, it should be experienced musically. Maybe it will make more (or less) or different sense when done that way. It is basic to my understanding of life that things which are experienced are those which are, at heart, understood. Book learning, facts, knowledge, only takes you so far. The lesson of emptiness is that all is a matter of relationships and it is only by being in relationship with people and things that we can truly have any understanding of them.

You can hear The Emptiness Suite of albums at my Bandcamp which is at elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com

Eureka!

The human mind is an enigma. You can think about an issue for years, decades, and make little progress forward. But then, one day, seemingly for no reason, something clicks. At that point the mental thorn in your side, the niggle that wouldn't go away, the itch you couldn't scratch, becomes resolved. 

Such, for me, has been the issue of the apparent meaninglessness and purposelessness of the universe. Throughout the course of my life I've tried out various solutions to this question but none satisfied. There was still, appropriately enough, a hole at the center of my thinking about this. This hole is a meaningful symbol for what, more generally, might be described as The Void. The Void is where our existence is located and where we have our being. Its best expression is space itself, vast and inscrutable, a vast nothingness which reduces everything within it to just some more inconsequential detritus. It is impossible to place yourself in the context of the mass of space and imagine you are anything important or necessary at all. You just are. Remember that next time you imagine your views matter so much or that things around you must take notice of you. You are literally nothing special.

People, for as long as they could think, have wanted to ascribe some meaning to this vastness. Often they have wanted to ascribe some overarching purpose to it or give some reasoning which explains why everything is and how its all of a piece, a oneness, and to give it some reasonable basis for being. But people have always failed in this and this is why other thinkers have explored its emptiness and what that means for us as thinking people. But this is a clue to where we should be looking for answers. The Void is often conceived as everything out there and, in a spatial sense, it is. But this void of meaning, this void of understanding, is not out there. This particular void is inside each one of us. My "Eureka!" moment is realizing that, actually, we are the void. We have an absence of presence, a presence and substance we try to give things with our descriptive schemes in our role as engineers of a meaningless universe.

For what is it that creates this void of meaning and sets up the questions to which we can find no satisfying long-term answers? What is it that means that all we can ever do is relate things one to another, both giving them context and allowing them to fit into a map of our understandings and beliefs? It is us, us as the universe has given us life. This form of life of ours which must make meaning, must understand, must hold beliefs, it is this which creates the void that we cannot fill. It condemns us to relate things one to another in some great mental act of dexterity so that we can even survive. We must believe things. We must hold what we regard as understandings. Things must mean. Without these operations we would die. They animate us and give us purpose. And so its not some void out there that needs to speak to us and explain itself (and that's good because it never will). The void is in us. The Void is us. We are the ones who create the problem we then cannot solve. Just by being the beings we are. With this form of life we condemn ourselves to explanations but never to an explanation much less the explanation.

And so I ask myself "What is our form of Being?" and I reply "Chaos giving expression to itself." And then I ask "What is my existence?" and the reply comes back "A partaking in my form of Being." All our questions find an answer not out there, not from some God figure, whether personal or metaphorical, but in us, in our form of life, who we are. This form of life offers us up meanings but never the meaning. It gives us beliefs but never the truth. It proffers knowledge but never that thing beyond knowledge in which all talking and thinking would cease because, finally, we have found something that could speak for itself. If there was something (and it would be divine in the truest sense) that could speak for itself then we would have found what human beings have always searched for: something beyond their creative self-understandings with which they could get in touch and about which there would finally be no words, the thing that was not just another thing to relate to something else. But we don't have that. We never will. There are no divinities and, much as we would like it, no God substitutes either. All we have is a void we cannot fill but must, nevertheless, keep trying to.

Given this background, my mind wanders. I think about the Transhumanist agenda I've been interacting with for a year now. Transhumanists want to "improve" the human form of life and they think of this primarily in physicalist terms. So this means they want to stop bad physical outcomes like disease and illness and, eventually, even death itself. Obviously, overcoming death, that decay until life becomes impossible for an organism, is no small task. After all, the laws of the physical universe seem to be that all things decay and die on a long enough timeline. So Transhumanists are happy to go with extending life significantly as a starting point. But I have a huge problem with this and its there in a play by a French existentialist called Jean-Paul Sartre. The play is called No Exit. In this play there are but three characters and they have died. They are in a room and they, so the play seems to suggest, must spend their eternity together. The play focuses on their relationships (which in life were complicated) in this scenario and ends with the comment "Hell is other people".

This comment needs unpacking. Sartre is not saying there, at the climax of his play examining the idea that you would be in the public gaze for all eternity, that everyone else is a shit. That may or may not be the case from your point of view. Sartre's point is more that a life in the gaze of others that does not end is not a life in which people can be themselves. Its like this: imagine you yourself in your public life. You are constantly aware of other people in these types of situations and your behavior is molded to this scenario. You wouldn't do some things in public that you would do when you are home alone in your own place and you imagine no one is watching you. The point there is that the gaze of others changes your behavior and your consciousness of yourself. You often hear a related complaint made about social media where some people act like asses and are then told that they wouldn't act like that if we knew who they were. Exactly! The gaze of other people affects your behavior. Public CCTV cameras (of which the UK has amongst the most in the world) work on the same basis. You are being watched and its affects you. And so you become a socialized version of you and not the you you are by yourself. So why is Hell "other people"? Because it would be to act out that socialized, bad faith version of yourself that is a performance for public consumption forever.

And so how does this relate to Transhumanist dreams of radically extending life and to my "Eureka!" moment? I think its because the Transhumanist understanding of the human being, by which I mean the human form of being, is not adequate to the task. Primarily thinking of us as biological organisms in need of a pep up is not, I think, good enough. Its like thinking of us as a car and saying that if we had a more powerful engine we'd be a better car. Well, we might be. Or you might just ruin the car you had in the first place. Crucially, to my mind, such understandings do not take into account who we are and how we live in terms of our life and existence. And it needs to. Instead, it focuses quite narrowly on the perceived downsides of being physical, that we can be hurt, that we die, and says that if we could solve these things then, somehow (and this point is largely assumed and not explained) things would be better. One thousand years of you is better than eighty years of you, right? Really? Is that what being you is about? Are you just meat that needs to avoid hurt? I think that Transhumanists, either wittingly or unwittingly (and some seem more tuned into this consequence of their thinking than others, to be fair) want to actually supercede a human form of being for a post-human form of being. They want, I think, to head off into the "we are become gods" direction. They want the end of human being.

And this is the problem when, as I see it, we are The Void. Wanting to live forever and cure all diseases is just another way of trying to escape what fate has given us. (And being fated beings is yet another aspect of our being.) This is not to say that we shouldn't try to escape. Its not to say that we shouldn't do any of the things that Futurists or Transhumanists want to do. Its merely to contextualize it. It is, as Richard Rorty said, just one more way to try and escape "time and chance". Its another effort in the on-going plan to escape being human with all its flaws and failures, its pains and struggles. It doesn't, I think, understand or even examine what human being and human existence is at all. I don't think it is to glory in the physical flaws like some masochist to say this. But I see this as the real essence of humanity (in a descriptive and not an actual sense). The human being is the suffering animal, the animal that is aware but never sure of what it is aware. It is the animal that always lacks something. And knows it. It is the finite animal who can see death from almost the beginning of its days. It is the animal that wants and needs and desires. And knows it. Behold, it is become The Void.

I don't think that we will ever become gods. Far too much in this chaotic universe is out of our control. It seems that Dr Stephen Hawking is convinced we will kill ourselves and that some man-made disaster is inevitable at some point. There are many foreseeable future scenarios for this but its just as likely that an unseeable one gets us too. We don't have eyes in the back of our heads. But even if this didn't happen there is too much going on out there for us to control it all. Even the most arrogant of people wouldn't think we could account for everything (another human failing, incidentally). So I do not think that a divine life will ever be something we can approach. Indeed, I think that the urge for divinity is internally generated and part of this form of life that we have now. It is a way to fill The Void with meaning, as we must, as we are impelled by our existence as an expression of our form of being. We are more than biological organisms. Even if you do not think we are in any sense "consciousness" you can at least admit that we have a consciousness. This, too, is part of our being, part of who we are. And its who we are that concerns me when I read philosophers telling me that to become who you are is to find the most meaning that we can in life. 

But when you look into the mirror what do you see? 

The Worst General in the World

Its not at all difficult to find. I found it yesterday so much that I'm sitting here now typing out this blog. That's how much it has animated me. I can immediately think of at least 4 or 5 examples just from conversations I happened to stray across or take part in yesterday just watching my Twitter timeline scroll by. The subjects weren't necessarily remotely related and yet they were by having a common bond, a poisonous thread, running through them. Its a thread that is insidious and, to my mind, dangerous. Its a way of thinking, a lazy way, a closed-minded way. But what has this to do with generals? A lot when the worst general in the world is generalization.

Think about it and I'm sure you'll very easily be able to come across these generalizations in your own conversations too. Maybe it is someone asserting that ALL the people from this country or that are dangerous. A favourite one right now in my part of the world is Syria. Maybe you take part in gender debates. In that world lots of statements are made, and beliefs held, about men and women. It often seems that activists hold many generalizing statements to be true. They even have hashtags for it #notallmen, #allmen, etc. I find it somewhat enraging. Another area where the generalizations occur is black/white race relations. Here generalizations are held on both sides. To some whites all blacks are crooks, thieves and criminals. To some blacks all whites are racist descendants of slave owners who want to kill them. The point to me is not which side you take but how you think.

So let me be clear. Wherever you come across the generalizations and whatever debate you are watching, reading or taking part in, I'm not here to take sides in any of them. Of course, I will have my opinions just like everyone else. Having opinions is something people do. And people also decide which things in their world they think are important enough to have opinions about. It is true that something some other person thinks is vitally important you may find to be barely important enough to think about. That's allowed. Each person has their own set of attitudes and beliefs and, as far as I can tell, this is how it should be. Mandating people to believe the things that you happen to believe is called fascism and is generally thought to be a bad thing.

But human beings are also persuasive beings, social beings, communicative beings. And one aspect of belief, and holding beliefs, is that they can (or, should be) able to change. I'm not sure how many people in the real world have views about beliefs and how they work or have mused on patterns of thought. But, as one who is interested in philosophical discussions, I have. In my thinking about that I have come to be persuaded by a pragmatic view of beliefs. This view, briefly, is that human beings cannot help holding beliefs in normal circumstances and that this is just something they do. In order to hold beliefs they would normally be able to give some kind of justification for why they believe something and how it fits into their overall scheme of things. And a current belief, or a new one, must have some way of attaching itself to other things you believe. But it is also the case that over time these beliefs can change. There is a sort of mysterious open-endedness to holding beliefs. They modify over time. Beliefs are things we feel justified in believing and can provide reasons and evidence for. It may not satisfy someone else but it satisfies us in some way that we can explain.

But there is another aspect to beliefs. And this is that they can be questioned. Beliefs are not absolutes. That is why they are called beliefs. But the problem with many of these generalizations I see every day, generalizations that make a lie of the world and demonize people by treating them as a member of some (negative) class rather than as individuals in their own right, is that they are beliefs that are unquestionable. They are shibboleths for their holders. ("Shibboleth" is from a story in the Bible where one side used "shibboleth" as a password because their enemies could not pronounce the word correctly. "Shibboleth" thus served as a way to detect their enemies much as some beliefs do today for various social groupings.) I do not believe that ANY belief should be beyond question. Beliefs are not things that are beyond question. Beliefs, on the contrary, are things which should always be in question, in doubt, up for debate, things to be further refined, things that can change.

This is why closed-minded people really frustrate me so much. It is not that they hold beliefs and find certain things to be true that I don't agree with. I expect that. People's views of the world are molded, at least to some degree, by their own experiences of life. But I'm not sure the generalizers think that. They seem to think that all people should think what they think and that it is some moral failing to think otherwise. But this cannot be true. Its simplistic and, worse, closed-minded to think that way. I really do see it as a new anti-intellectualism at work today in, it must be said, first world societies. In these societies debate is not driven by justifying your beliefs, conversation with those who take a different point of view (which may well influence yours) and the simple act of persuasion by giving good reasons for why you think what you think. Instead, we see ranting and raving, generalizing hashtags and the splitting of societies into a million subcultures, each with their own beliefs, attitudes and shibboleths. Beliefs are much less likely to be open to question, able to last a meaningful debate or withstand good natured questioning if you hold on to them tightly as badges of identity in your cosseted ivory tower. But it seems that that is what some want to do. They are, incidentally, probably not very good beliefs if they can't be questioned either.

So what do I want? I want people to be viewed as individuals and not members of some class be that men, women, black, white, arab, jew, etc, etc, etc. Call me naive if you must but I think we are all people first and foremost. I think our humanity is much more fundamental than any of the differences we can make up, and the generalizations that are made of them. I think that what we share is much greater, and always will be much greater, than what divides us. But I also think that in many first world places today people have become masturbatory and inward-looking. They care more about their own identity, which may be based on a few cherished and unchallengeable beliefs, than the mass of humanity and the good of all. There are Twitter accounts, Tumblrs and Facebook pages dedicated to the stupid, unchallengeable beliefs of others. Feel free to go and read some to educate yourself about the anti-intellectual corners that people will willingly back themselves into.

For myself, I find myself always wanting to challenge those who put their own identity first. Not only does it seem egotistical on their part but it also always seems based on silly generalizations, ones damaging to human polity and social cohesion. I tend to do this generally but if you're reading this already trying to work out which side I take in various debates then you've probably missed the point. The point is that yes we all have views. But they should be open and debatable. There is no place for shibboleths, not when people's lives depend on it. And in many of these debates they ultimately do. When presidential candidates judge people based on their country of origin, when races judge and condemn other races based on skin colour and when one gender categorizes another gender based on lazy sloganizing these are not issues we can just pass over as "the way of the world" or with some such other lazy epithet. How we think matters and we have a duty to ourselves, for the health of our own beliefs, but also to everyone else, as fellow human beings, not merely to believe whatever we want to but to do it in ways that make sense of others too. A private belief is a contradiction in terms and, in my view, a terrible belief. The more light you can shine on it, the better it becomes. 

In closing, I'd like to mention one last conversation I took part in last night. It was with a shepherd on Twitter that I follow who tweets his daily shepherd's life. He put up a picture of his three beautiful sheepdogs. They sleep in pens in his barn and the picture was of the dogs in their pens which looked somewhat like cages or prison bars. This ruffled the feathers of a few of his followers who (I generalized!) seemed like town dwellers not used to the outdoors and country ways. For them, dogs are pets who live in the house. The shepherd seemed a bit exasperated with this response and pointed out, as calmly as he could manage, that these are not pets but working dogs. He explained that two of them don't even like being petted and stroked that much. So they work outdoors all day and then go back to the barn at night. 

What struck me about this little exchange was that, for most people, the limits of their world is the limits of their own experience. And they never look any further than this. This is where the beliefs are fostered - within the safe world of "my experience". My point is that we need to make an effort to understand the experience of others too. We also need to be able to explain ourselves and our beliefs to these people too. This benefits not only us but them as well and, by extension, everyone. I hope you would agree with me that a community that can discuss its beliefs and experiences one with another is much better than one in which everyone believes what they like and keeps it to themselves. The first would seem to me to be a much better, and safer, world to live in. And that's what we want, right? You will never foster peace and harmony based on division and difference. The nasty generalizations I see in discussions online every day are based on the latter and not the former. They are based on keeping to your own version of the world and refusing to interact with others. Identity trumps the multiplicity of reality. 

The best thing I ever did in my life (from an admittedly small selection of things) is live in another country. It opened me up to so many new people, new views and new attitudes. Perhaps that's why I'm writing this now. But the experience has stayed with me. And the conviction that what we see is only skin deep. But we are so much more than what we can see. Let's have a little understanding, the ability to share and the vulnerability of having to accommodate others in our beliefs.

What is the Meaning of This?

Today's blog is about the subject of meaning and its a fairly "stream of consciousness" type of a blog. As I write I am just back from my daily exercise which is my chance to blow some cobwebs out of my mind and loosen up my gradually aging body. It happens quite often in these times that thoughts come to mind and coalesce in ways that are fruitful and many of the blogs you see here are a result of such times. This is going to be another one like that.

So if you have been reading this blog at any time during this year you will know that my grand subject has been human being. I have been asking myself what it means to be human, where humans might be going and what the difference might be between a human being and the possible technological beings that we might become in the future. There has also been a strand of that which concentrated on consciousness. I have found it all greatly stimulating and it has brought me forward in my own thinking and inspired much new music from me that led me down new paths.

It was a couple of weeks ago, however, that it finally dawned on me what this was all about though. It was then that I realized that the great question here, perhaps the greatest question of all, was the question of meaning. Read back through some of my earlier blogs if you like and confirm this for yourself. It further dawned on me at that time that the question of meaning had really been the question that has animated me from my earliest days as a thinker back when I was 8, 9 and 10 reading biblical stories or The Odyssey which I read aged 10 at school. There was always a sense of wonder with me (a naive sense of wonder, I might add) and that has probably not served me very well in the long run but it has meant that I wanted to try and get answers to the questions that have animated my life.

Fast forward to a middle-aged man with 35 years more reading and experience under his belt. Meaning, why things mean, how things mean, what things mean, have come to be the central questions of my existence. Perhaps they are, in various forms, for everyone. Not everyone confronts these questions of course. Some try to hide from them or run away from them, scared of the possible answers. But I take a more prosaic and present view of things. Life would be hell if I didn't try to work out some answers. My thinking and reading this year have brought some progress for me it seems. At least, it feels that way. And as those writing about consciousness know very well, how things feel is very important to we humans. This, too, is something else caught up in all the "meaning" questions.

So what of "meaning"? Why do things mean? This, it seems to me, is a problem of consciousness. Neuroscientist Christof Koch sees consciousness as a feature of complex enough systems, systems, for example, such as the human brain. Koch himself does not limit the possibility of such consciousness to the human brain alone. He conceives it is possible that machine networks, if complex enough, could also become conscious. He also suggests that other animals with brains not so different from ours could be conscious - if in not quite the same way or to the same extent. For my purposes here the relevance of this is that with a developed enough consciousness comes the problem of meaning.

For with a consciousness such as ours, one that is self-aware, aware of its surroundings, able to extrapolate and problem solve, able to refer back to previous events and project forward into future ones, meaning floods in. Why is this? It is because meaning-making is a matter of relating things one to another, a matter of contextualizing things with other things, a matter of giving things a situation, a matter of relating and relationships, of networks. It just so happens that the universe bequeathed to us consciousness, quite blindly, and, in so doing, meaning flooded into our lives and all the problems that go with it. Meaning is what happens when conscious minds start going about their business. It is what happens when you take one object or idea, something that means nothing at all in itself or in isolation, and then relate it to something else. Or anything else. It is in the interactions of things and ideas that meaning is produced. As beings with a developed consciousness this was something we just couldn't help doing - the making of meaning.

In recent centuries our great thinkers have had problems with meaning though. Some wanted to try and fix meaning, believing that in so doing they could get things "right". Time and time again that project has failed but there are still those who believe that there is "a way things are" that could fix meanings. I am not one of those. Others have seen a problem with "nihilism" which is the lack of meaning. This issue is tied to the first inasmuch as by their constant failure to fix meaning it seemed to some that there was no fixed meaning to be found. I don't think that there is but I also don't think this should be cause for despair. Coming from a different angle, there were others who said that the problem wasn't that there was no meaning but that, instead, there was too much! These "poststructuralists" argued that the issue wasn't a lack of meaning but that there was so much it could never be fixed. Meaning was a matter of the "play" of many different meanings.

It seems to me that if you follow my basic ideas above of how meaning arises at all then it is no surprise that meanings are not fixed. It seems to me that if I am anywhere close then it would be impossible to fix meaning in the first place. For if meaning is simply a matter of relating things to other things then there are as many meanings as there are things to be related and in as many ways as you can relate them. In that, context may sometimes guide but it can never be determinative. We would still end up with as many meanings as it would be possible for people to have in any given scenario. It would seem that the poststructuralists were on to something with their ideas of a superfluity of meaning.

This, of course, brings its own issues. How is such a superfluity to be controlled? After all, we all need meaning and meanings for things but we all also need to live. In this I find something that the recently departed neuroscientist Oliver Sachs said deeply relevant. He wrote that "Each of us … constructs and lives a ‘narrative’ and is defined by this narrative." I find this to be intuitively and reflectively true. Sachs is here saying that we all build a story of our lives as we grow up and develop, one that gets added to every day with each event, thought, idea, that happens. This comes to be the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, about our circumstances, our possibilities, our past, our future. This forms a major context for all the meaning-making that we will do in life. It becomes the borders of what things can mean and acts as a stabilizing, if also sometimes an imprisoning, force. It is the boundaries of our thought. But these are not to be thought of as hard and impervious boundaries. The boundary can sometimes move and new meanings become possible. It is a movable border but a border nevertheless.

One corollary of this is that things will not mean the same thing for everyone. Nor, if this is right, should they. Difference is in-built into this understanding of things and is something to be negotiated rather than denied or avoided. We will tell completely different stories about ourselves and live individual lives and this will add to the list of possible meanings that can be made. This in turn speaks to an amazing plurality of lives and of meaning-making that often scares those who want to fix things or find a "way things are". There is no "way things are". And this is why there can also be no gods. Gods are used to try and fix meaning. They are there as guarantors of "the way things are" and act as a kind of über-context for everything. But there is no über-context. The universe did not come with meanings attached. It merely blindly created beings for whom things must mean.

This is what is bequeathed to us: to make things mean something useful to us, something that we can understand and live with. That may be a struggle but we cannot avoid it unless we die or go mad. I hope to study meaning and its making further over the coming days and weeks. There are those, such as Nietzsche or Foucault, who studied how things mean in more detail, for example, by using "genealogical" or "archaeological" techniques - but upon knowledge and its meaning itself. Nietzsche did great studies into the history of morality, something he saw as a problem, whilst Foucault, amongst other things, studied the history of prisons, sexuality, the treatment of mental illness and even scientific knowledge itself. None of these things, or their meanings, are givens. The idea of the "given" is one that those who want to fix things one way (and its always their way!) would like us to have. But following the path I have that seems crazy and to be rejected. What intellectual studies such of those of Nietzsche and Foucault have shown us is that no knowledge and no meaning is a given, Rather, it is all created and with a very specific history that was necessary for its formation. We would do well to remember this.

So we are in a world of play, the play of meanings. We are free to make ours to the extent that our lives, and the stories we tell about them, allow us. Meanings do not come with things so the idea of an "in-itself" with a meaning attached is silly. The meaning comes in the relating of one thing to another, in the activity of our conscious minds.