I, Pixel

In the course of a day several artistic enterprises will scroll down my various timelines and, at random, I will choose to partake of them. Most often these are music but, like most other people, if I know something of what I might expect from the people concerned, I usually let it pass on by unless what I am expecting in some way might satisfy my current mood. This, of course, is a terrible thing and an example of something I hate: knowing too much. I hate the fact that we think we know things, that things have been put in a box in our minds and, forever after, stay in that box and affect our judgment about them. Of course, one answer to this would be if creative people were so varied and imaginative that they could be surprising rather than creatures of habit that turn out more of the same thing again and again. That is an artistic fight I try to take on. But I cannot speak for others and their motives. More fool them, I say, if they are happy to be in the box.

However, it is best of all when something comes along that has no box, that is, in some sense, contextless and therefore innocent of our knowing. Then we can enjoy the pure thrill of appreciating something that comes with no baggage and about which we do not know too much. Such a thing came into my timeline yesterday. It was a 7 minute video called "Pixelate" and you can watch it HERE! 

                                     A still from "Pixelate"

A basic description of the video is to say that it is simply 7 minutes of ever-changing pixels. But that would be like describing the film "Jaws" as a film about hunting a shark. It is but its much more than that. From the moment I first watched "Pixelate" until now, after several watches, I've found the video to be both therapeutic and intellectually challenging. The surprising thing to me on first watch, as I enjoyed that virgin experience of the first time, something that can never be repeated, was that I started to ask questions about what I was seeing. First of all I asked myself "What does this mean?". This wasn't really a question of intention either. I wasn't asking myself what the author of the piece, Ian Haygreen, thought it meant. I wasn't asking after his purpose in making it. Indeed, I don't know the answers to these questions nor do I think I need to. Instead, I was asking myself if there was any meaning to be found in the shifting landscapes of pixels as they moved around in various chaotic patterns. In a way I suppose I was an observer observing myself observing as I did this too. I was asking myself about what I was asking of the video. And so it became natural to ask why I was asking myself what the pixels might mean.

The patterns of pixels on the screen were very chaotic and most of the time they shifted and changed at quite a speed. It became a hypnotic experience. The rather quiet and atmospheric ambient soundtrack played a part in this too, I'm sure. The effect was a kind of unobtrusiveness which could work its way into your consciousness unannounced. As the pixels shifted and changed I continued to ask myself the meaning question. I asked myself about the relationships of one pixel to another, whether it mattered what colour each pixel was. I imagined the pixels were people. Now, with these pixels representing people, it was a question of asking what meaning there was in all these people running around in their immediate relationships one to another like the ever-shifting pixels on the screen. I wasn't sure it mattered what colour the pixels were. But does it matter what colour the people are? There was a sense of ambiguity. What if all these pixels were just symbols for people? The pixel fields just changed. No one had more priority than any other one. Make them people and does anything change?

The hypnotic effect of the pixels changing, without commentary, guidance or context, became quite nihilistic. It seemed to be saying "Things just happen. Stuff goes on as it will. You can attach whatever meaning you like to these events but its not fixed or binding. Or even necessary."  It occurred to me that within the changing pixel landscapes I could look at them as if they were moving left to right across the screen. But then, with a change of concentration, I could make it seem as if they were going the other way too. And, thus, I had power over history and events. I could say in which direction they were going and I could look at things as if they were indeed doing that. The pixels were powerless to stop me. The pixels were just material for my interpretive apparatus to get to work on. And I considered once more that other things, things that might be taken to be more serious, were just the same as these pixels. The example of Brexit came to mind. To one group of people this is freedom and taking back control. The direction of travel is a new and glorious future. But to some other observers it is disaster and xenophobia and leads directly to the dark ages. Who is right? Both and neither of course because you can see the pixels moving however you want.

I started to ask myself if the meaning question I was asking was the right question to be asking at all. It occurred to me that asking the question "What does this mean?" is a question we often ask of many things, if not everything, but that, maybe, a lot of the time we should just step back and not ask it. I am aware that notable psychologists, such as the inventor of Logotherapy, Viktor Frankl, are of the view that people have a need of meaning in order to exist. Frankl's academic and therapeutic work in the area of psychology strongly suggests that people are simple meaning-making factories who generate meaning as a means of survival. Frankl himself personally survived Nazi concentration camps (including Auschwitz) while most others in his family did not so we can understand how he reached his conclusion. But, nevertheless, it still begs the question of whether we need to be asking questions of meaning at all. These pixels I was staring at could easily have been regarded as simple meaningless and ever-changing configurations. There were, it might be said, no consequences from regarding them as meaningless. But when it comes to other things we find it much harder to believe this. Yet why? Aren't the events that go on around us, the relationships we make and build to other things, equally as meaningless in the end? Why not let go of our attachments, created always by us and for us, and just see everything as pixels?

I saw the pixels here as representatives for other things. I saw them in ever-changing relationships to the other pixels around them. This made me replace them with other things and wonder if anything had really changed. Life just goes on, I thought. Existence takes its path of least resistance always being in relation to other things yet never having any necessary binding relation to other things - unless we make it so. Nothing has to mean anything. Meaning doesn't work like that. It is plastic and some other, contrary, meaning can always be ascribed to the same events - just as I made the pixel stream change direction. (It's not even clear the pixels were in a stream actually so maybe I created the connections between the pixels and made them a stream too.) I slowly became a pixel myself and realized that that could mean both everything and nothing.

Pixelate was created by musician and, apparently, filmmaker, Ian Haygreen who is on Twitter @IanHaygreen

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 

Embracing Randomness

Music and Life are two different things. But in many ways I find them to be intertwined. Perhaps this is just me. I think something about life or I concentrate on the tortuous path of my own and music seems to either mirror that or come to be the means through which I express or interpret it. I make electronic music so perhaps this is natural. Something which always attracts my focus, and about which I have written before, is randomness. I am still convinced that many people find randomness threatening and devaluing of things (because they need an "author" and have an authorial view of the world). And I am still equally convinced that such thinking makes no sense and is stuck in its ways, unable to see that there are other ways of seeing. Of course, we all have our truth and we all see the way we cannot help seeing. We have each lived specific lives which lead to specific beliefs. But some of us, hopefuly most of us, realise that these things are not a must but just the contingent ways our own lives have worked out. We recognize that others have lived different lives and see things differently because of that.

There are many ideologies in the world today and many are not pretty. They are authoritarian and harsh. They tell us that things must be a certain way and often include compulsion in things or in us to make this so. People like to impose things on the world and say "So it must be!" I try not to be one of these people for I do not think that the world is a certain way and I have no interest in imposing anything on it. I think that the world just is, that it has motors of its own that cause it to keep rolling along, and that we are, at best, tangential to these facts. Human beings are creatures who are constantly over-egging their own importance in a universe in which, to be blunt, we aren't important at all. Our world and even the universe itself did not need human beings or their made up gods to come to be and to be as they are. We are in meaningful senses just one more cosmic accident and, it is not unforeseeable, yet more cosmic accidents will take us away as easily as they created us.

A person who thinks this way, or, at least, this person who thinks this way, can't then, I think, think in too strict terms. People's art comes from their appreciation of life and so, in music, similar thoughts tend to prevail. And yet, from time to time, I still wonder what others find threatening in randomness. In my music I have, many times, come across the notion that I have become set in my ways. I am, so I say to myself, once more just doing the same thing over and over again. I am using the same tool or the same sounds or the same process. And this bothers me. I feel that such things, when they happen, are constricting limitations in a world full of possibilities - if only I could think of them. Randomness is, in some sense, infinite possibility. I am often frustrated with myself because I will have some tool and use about 5% of its possibilties before discarding it. We are, as people, creatures of habit, as William James said, and it is easy to slip into habits and rely on them as safety nets. But I want to scream out loud that the world is not a place to be safe in. To be truly alive is to always be on the edge of disaster, to feel that there is something to lose.

Randomness has a bad reputation. When people think of randomness, and I speak musically now for a moment, they think of a random mess or incomprehensible noise. Randomness certainly can be this. It is random, after all. But take a step back and consider the following pictures. 

These landscape scenes were, in genuine ways, created at random. Certainly, no intelligence was behind their creation. (Theists may disagree.) We may say, in creative terms, that no creator created them. But I'd be willing to gamble that most of my readers, if not all of them, find these scenes stunningly beautiful. This should then act upon your thinking to question your notion of what the results of randomness can be. Things can be stunningly beautiful and inspirational at random without the hand of what some regard as a necessary author to give things meaning or beauty or importance. Indeed, I might go further and suggest that it is ONLY the random things that can truly do this. Such things are detached from others and we can get lost in what is before us without the static of who did what and why. No one created those landscapes. They just came to be. All by themselves, prey to the unthinking hands of a million random forces. It is a mystery why we find such things beautiful and I certainly cannot explain it. But that doesn't change the fact that we do.

Can randomness in music be approached the same way? I think so. For while there is no inherent beauty in the landscape scenes and it is a useful mystery as to why we find them beautiful, we know that we do find them beautiful. The same can be said of looking at the stars in the sky and many other things. If you ask yourself the question "Why is something beautiful?" it becomes very hard to explain it in terms of something deliberately done. It becomes easier to explain it in terms of "Things have just worked out that way". Randomness, and an appreciation for it, I think, helps us to do this. It is in letting go that we find ourselves more at peace and more at one with all the other things. Wanting control and to be in charge is, certainly for some purposes, a necessary and useful thing. But I don't think it is when being creative or wanting to understand things. You have to be able to let go and let things fall where they may. Musicians of all kinds speak of the good fortune of "happy accidents". I think this is a recognition that not always being in control and saying how things should be is a good thing. Put simply, the wonder is not our's to command and the ability to control doesn't mean that control is where it's at. Control is but a tool, one to be used in the knowledge that we are very limited creatures. It is human to remember that so much is beyond us - and should be!

My Electronic Oddities Podcast for this Friday (6th May) is to be about music made only with modular synthesizers. Some, if not much, of this will incorporate randomness. Indeed, in most modular synthesizer formats randomness has been embraced as a principle and there are various modules whose sole purpose is to provide random voltages or to randomize sound. These ideas please me even as those landscape pictures above do. They put right in the middle of music made this way that I AM NOT GOING TO BE IN CONTROL OF IT. I think this is a good thing and it reminds us of our place in the order of things. We are not controllers, we are just more things that came to be, things that can create and see beauty in things. I think the more that we repeat this to ourselves the better people we will be. 

I reject the modern notion that we can be in charge of everything and create the universe we want rather than the one we got and are constantly in receipt of. I see the notion that we should take charge, in its grandest sense, as a striving to be gods. But we are not gods. We can only become less human by wanting to be them. Randomness and, to some extent, the abstraction that often goes with it, is a reminder to me that things are fine just how they are, however they work out. We should be at peace with that if we can be. We are not gods. We should be content to find beauty in things, even things like pain, misery and finitude, for this is a random gift of our existence too. These were our lots, the things randomness assigned us. And we are not so poor after all if we can see things as they appear to us not as things that someone deliberately made for us but as things that just are. This is an anti-authorial view of the world and also an anti-authoritarian view. It is one in which we recognze that life is flowing past us and through us all the time. It is not fixed. It just is, constantly flowing. I like music that mimics and represents this. It is like a therapeutic reflection of life, the stream of consciousness that we all are.


www.mixcloud.com/DrExistenz 

Musical Conundrums and Annoyances

I recently returned to Facebook after about 5 years not using it. Before you rush to add me though please don't bother. I'm not using it as the friend adding exercise that many do. The fact is there are a number of interest groups on there which are useful to be a member of and its where other people have decided to congregate. Sometimes Mohammed has to go to the mountain. However, the problem with the mountain is that it draws all and sundry to it. The breaking news is that there are other people in the world and they don't think the same as you. Now I am, as you may have discerned from reading previous blogs here, a person who appreciates a certain measure of independent thought. However, if anywhere is going to demonstrate that there are lots of people happy to go along with "what everyone else thinks" then that place is Facebook. Nowhere is this more true than with the subject of music.

Everyone, I imagine, thinks they know what music is. Music is all around us and probably most of us hear some of it every single day. But let me ask you a question: can you define as precisely as possible exactly what music is? Have a go now. I will wait.......

Got a definition that you think works and applies to every single thing that could be called music? OK, on we go.

More than once this past week in casually reading posts in synthesizer groups on Facebook I have come across people who say "music" when what they actually mean is "melody". They speak as if "melody" and "music" are interchangeable synonyms and the issue here is that they just aren't! "Melody" is something that may or may not be present within music you are listening to. It is not equivalent with music. So when someone makes a synthesizer poll asking what people do with their modular synth and the first option is "use it musically" I start to wonder what they mean by "musically". It turns out that what they mean is "does not use it abstractly or to make random noises". Because for the poll writer this seems in his mind to be a non-musical use. For him music is equated with being a matter of melody and something all about pitch. Music, for him, is what you do when you take pitches and put them together in a deliberate and pleasing way. Is it just me that finds this both a huge misstep and an incredibly narrow definition of music? 

John Cage defined music as "the arrangement of sounds and silence" (I paraphrase) and this seems to me a much better and much fuller definition of what music is. I have taken it as my own and I hope the now dead Cage will not mind if I do so. Even that very brief definition I find to be staggeringly deep and profound. This is not just because Cage includes absence of sound in his mind-blowingly simple definition of what music is. Its also because he doesn't necessarily infer that this arrangement be deliberate and the result of the actions of a person. Music is not necessarily, within that definition, something someone writes. It could be something someone sets up the conditions for, like building an experiment and seeing what happens when you do, or the arbitrary juxtaposing of sounds, the making of a collage. (Cage did both and I have unashamedly copied him in doing so.) Imagine someone who takes a paint brush, dips it in some paint and then flicks the paint on the canvas. Now imagine a musician doing the same thing with sounds. For Cage, that is music (just as for Jackson Pollock with paint it was art.) For Cage the disinterested, fart noise making noodling of the modular synthesist unconcerned with pitch and the blowing of the wind are "music". For they are both an arrangement of sounds and silences.

This very simple and, for me, profound point seems lost on most people. I'm amazed how many people don't get it even when it is explained to them. They are stuck in a world where "music" is a tune. But its not, not simply so. Some music is tunes. Other music is textures, atmospheres, noises, noise, sounds. Cage himself once stood inside a chamber at a university which was designed to block out all sound. It was meant to be a completely silent place devoid of any noise at all. He discovered that even here he could hear the sound of his own bodily processes, his nervous system, his heart beat. Nowhere on Earth is completely silent. Sound is always with us, a symphony that never leaves us while we are awake. Cage had what I would describe as a fascination with sound and it is one of the things that I hope I have learned from him. Sound is fascinating. I am drawn to musicians who seem similarly fascinated with sound and not just, narrowly, with pitch and tunes. Another great musical area, one often overlooked, is timbre, the kind of sound that is being made. Pieces of music that focus on timbre as opposed to pitch are very interesting to me as are instruments which focus on an ability to change the timbre of a sound. This is why I like synthesizers which are in many respects made to be able to do this by design. Its why in the 40's, 50's and 60's there were people fascinated with magnetic tape. They found they could take one sound and make other, new sounds by manipulating it. Such a focus on timbre strikes me as both thoughtful and intimate. It speaks to me in ways that a tune could never do.

Whatever music is about I think that one major thing about music is its ability to convey two things: meaning and emotion. Each of us dislikes a lot of music. I think that we do that primarily because the music we dislike does not speak to us either in a way that makes any sense to us or in a way that communicates to us. We would say that it does not speak our language. Each of us approaches music differently of course. Some of us do it cerebrally and with much thought. Some of us will have technical insights into the making of music or have specific knowledge about things used to make it. But most of us are just listeners. We don't care who made it or how or with what. We just know if we like what we hear. We are all in the same position there, equals with tastes and preferences.

But have you ever thought what determines why you like what you hear? You like this piece of music but not that. Why? Doesn't it all seem a bit unexplainable and arbitrary? Isn't it the case that in the end even if you can say why you like something its not really an explanation for why you liked it in the first place? Its a retrospective justification for a decision you made somewhat instinctively. I find this both strange and fascinating. To me it seems something to do with things deep within us that sense emotion and ascribe meaning to things. For example, I like the dance track "Hideaway" by Delacy. You may know it. I don't know why I like it though. I can describe its pulsing beat and its lush pad sounds that swell but is that really an explanation? It doesn't tell you how it makes me feel. And that's the really powerful thing about it. It hits some pleasure center somewhere inside me I can't put my finger on. What I'm saying is liking music is not necessarily a rational decision. And it doesn't need to be. We humans are not rationality machines. We are bio-chemical organisms fed as much by emotion as reason. We are fed and informed as much by environment as logic. This is just one reason why it is monumentally stupid to think that you can logically depict good and bad music. Music does not admit of logical description or categorization. How you feel isn't logical and may not even be reasonable.

Thanks to the Internet I am fortunate to have some interesting conversation partners along the pathways of life. Often within passing conversations something is said which starts off a chain of thought. As someone interested in music, noise and sound I know of a few other people similarly interested and its interesting for me to observe their views on what they are doing. Recently in one conversation someone said to me that they thought most dance music was shallow, for example. Now I agree with this and I think that, for the most part, its meant to be. That is the point of dance music. (Surely the banality of what is now called "EDM" is its reason to be?) But then I went past the initial thought (something that's not always done!) and thought again. Surely the best dance music tracks actually break through that barrier? Surely the best dance music tracks are those which encompass and enshrine the meaning of a whole special moment that happened? Every time you hear this kind of dance track it in some way re-enacts that special moment and reincarnates it again for as long as it plays. The best dance music tracks, I thought, are those with that ability to bring some moment, feeling, emotion, sentiment, to life and fill it with meaning - just as the ambient, pioneering 70s electronic music it came from did. But that, to me, seems to encompass a number of things and not merely just a sugary pleasant repeating line of pitches. What makes a dance song great might well be who you heard it with and where you were as well.

In the same conversation the person concerned did not want to produce "shallow" music. Shallow, I guess, was regarded as a negative in this context but it need not be. Good musicians, musicians who think, will have purposes to what they do and will be trying to inscribe feelings and meanings into their work. Perhaps what the musician meant was that they want to feel like what they made means something. This is certainly what I have ineptly tried to do. I imagine that my music only really means what it means for me to me though. What it means for others will be up to them, who they are and where they are, literally and figuratively speaking.  The strangest songs mean the strangest things to the strangest people exactly because its a nexus of things that provide that spark of meaning in the first place. But, coming back to Cage, this is why sound itself is so interesting to me. As I write now I hear the tapping of my finger on the keys but also the faint whirr of the fan inside my computer. Outside somewhere in the distance I hear the sound of something I imagine to be a cement mixer. A car is now coming towards me and will go away again producing the Doppler Effect which is the effect produced by the change in the frequency of a sound wave relative to your own position. This is the background music to this blog. I hear it as a background symphony because I have that framework of understanding. But you may just hear it as noises or not even notice the sounds at all. What sounds are there with you now that you hadn't noticed until you actually listened?

In the last 3 months I have inadvertently made two separate projects of music. One was 4 albums long and one was 3 albums long. One concentrated on the sound of a particular synthesizer and was aiming to showcase a kind of grungy, metallic, distorted synth sound. The other was willfully and deliberately abstract, an exercise in a bricolage of textures. Both of them were focused on timbres. Pitches were irrelevant to me and I barely even paid attention to them. (Cage's statement that "disharmony is only a kind of harmony that you haven't got used to yet" ends the conversation regarding talk of "dissonance" in music as far as I'm concerned.) There are a few melodies and some tunefulness but if you listen for that you will largely be disappointed. It is my feeling that the timbre of a sound can communicate something that the pitch of a sound cannot. Does an F sharp make you feel happy whereas a B flat does not? Perhaps not. But sounds themselves, their timbres, can. You hear the sound of running water, it means something to you. People talking in a bar? It conveys a message. One of my recent tracks is a whole load of recordings of trains and the sounds they make put together as a track. This isn't an original idea but it is, I think, a powerful one. The end result sounds to me like music. It feels like an experience of sound and a journey. This, to me, is what music is. This is why I am so interested in it and why my only criterion as a musician myself is to make something that is interesting to me. Music should be interesting.

I have this crazy idea. The idea is that music should not be something that you graze, something that is entirely bent to the user's will and taste. I have the crazy idea that music should challenge, educate and inform the listener. This idea holds the hope that listeners are not just cows who want to unthinkingly chew grass for their whole lives. This idea has the hope that listeners are people who want to learn, be informed, and maybe even change. This idea is the hope that people can still be curious, can still be open to new experiences, can still be so vulnerable as to allow themselves to be challenged. It is the hope that music can be a means to communicating things, maybe even things that you don't want to be communicated. Its a crazy idea, I know. But its why the music I make is what it is. That music is my communication.

Is anybody listening? Can anybody hear?

My music is at https://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.

The Gospel of Existence

In the beginning was the absurdity and the futility filled the void and the nihilism was forever. Everything that was in the beginning was emptiness. That which came to be was meaningless and the meaninglessness was everywhere. Nothing came to be that was not without meaning. In this meaninglessness was life and this life was the futile absurdity of Men.The meaninglessness fills the void and the void is nihilistic without end.

There came billions of beings out of the void. They came as witnesses to the futility of life, to testify to the nihilism so that all might comprehend there was no meaning to be found. They came and were not always well received as Men tried to avoid their experience and pretend otherwise. But those who did receive this testimony got no benefit whatsoever from the knowledge. They learnt only of the absurd, futile nihilism of their existence and of their fate: to come from the void and return to it.

Our futility became flesh and dwelt in the void and we saw its emptiness, emptiness that could only be an empty eternity in the void. Many testified to its purposelessness and empty promise. Nietzsche testified about it saying "God is dead and we have killed him!" Of its emptiness and futility we have all received, time after time. For hope was given through the naive beliefs of Men but the futile absurdity of life was given through the nihilism of the existence we all share. No one has ever seen eternal meaning and the void reveals the futility of it all.

Point A to Point B

And so we reach the eve of Christmas (or the first day of Christmas in some countries such as Germany where I used to live) and my last blog of this Advent. At times I've found it hard to write another blog and there was a wobble in the middle of that time where I thought I might run out of things to say. But I got through that and the topics kept suggesting themselves and then inevitably feeding into new ones. I only say something about things that I have something to say about. Where something holds no interest for me I leave it alone as not worth commenting on. Life is short and time is in limited supply, a supply that is always running out, so use it wisely is my thinking. Twenty four blogs in a row is quite a task to set oneself but I have enjoyed the challenge which took up quite a bit of my time. I took to the task seriously and when I write I always try to get what I want to say just right and to check that any facts I might relate at least have a source. My blogs may come across as just someone's thoughts but they are usually produced in interaction with other things, especially books.

My subject in this final blog of this series is intended to be a bit of a "what have I learned?" type of thing given that I have written twenty three blogs before this one. As I sit here now, writing, I wonder if anyone does learn anything from what I have written. This is not a vanity thing. As I've grown older I've become much happier to be in the background, which I kind of always was in life anyway. Popularity or even being known I treat very warily. Better a few dedicated readers than hundreds or thousands of false friends. My ego would, of course, loved to be stroked by the notion that some people have had an insight or two from things I have written. Why would anyone share their thoughts with others or in public unless they hoped to communicate something to someone else? We are social beings and that social element is always within us as a potentiality even if we become private people.

The over-riding idea that sticks with me from the series of blogs I am now completing with this one is the idea of a human existence as a matter of something that goes from Point A, birth, to Point B, death. Writing things down and having to explain them, as I have been doing, can often clarify things in a person's mind and such has been the case here with me and this idea. I have found it interesting to muse, as I've written the various blogs that interacted directly with this idea, how people's views might change depending on where they are along that continuum - or where they perceive themselves to be. Of course, the two might not necessarily marry up since we never know how near to Point B we actually are until its too late. And then, in my mind, we don't know anything at else anymore. For me this points up yet another factor regarding being beings in time, as we are. It is that your perception of time, and your perception of your place in it, affects your views on many things, not least, in the context of these blogs of mine, of yourself, your life and your existence.

It is a truism that many people have what are commonly called "death bed conversions" to some religious faith or other. As they see the doorway out of life opening and the fabled tunnel of light before them suddenly all that has gone before takes on a new context. This, to me at least, is very understandable and, indeed, practical as a general approach. I very much think that we should assess things from our current point of view taking into account our assessment of our current circumstances. For me, there is no necessary consistency in or through life and most of the consistencies we seek or value are usually faked in any case. Life is a very false business. Even the very idea of a consistent character or personality or identity is merely a convenient idea we dignify with our assent, a fiction we believe for its utility alone. I am who I am but every attempt to say what I am is a falsehood for the truth is I am everything you say I am and everything you don't say I am. Maybe it is better to say I am a collection of possibilities and opportunities?

Point A to Point B is, of course, a brief description of the road we are all given to travel, a way to describe how we come from nowhere and go back to it again, briefly passing through a world of sense and sensibility, struggle, chance and change where, suddenly, everything seems so important to us. But is it? Really? The challenges of things like the absurdity or nihilism of the existences we briefly have possession of (if it is true to say we have possession of them at all) produce, at times, a very real sense in me that life is just a performance without any real stakes. To some this will seem an immoral thought because they will be so wrapped up in the imagined seriousness and consequence of life. But I ask myself constantly if anything real is ever really at stake in life. We come, we go. Stuff happens in the middle, but so what? And this "So what?" has real force to me. You do need to explain to me why what you think matters actually does. The world is full of pain, injustice and struggle. Real people do hurt. People die. But every being that has a Point A gets to Point B. And at Point B what went before is rendered irrelevant. All pain ends. All suffering ceases. All punishments stop. You can be sure this thought has comforted many suffering people.

So, for me, I come around to a view that some before me have seen. For Martin Heidegger, a serious German thinker of great depth and detail, it was our "Being-toward-death" that sets the stage for our whole lives. We are beings who know from the formation of our first thoughts that we are finite. We are immediately and definitively set within a terminal boundary. And that cannot but change everything for us. Even though we can think and dream of various forms of eternity and, sometimes, in ecstatic moments, feel as if we can almost touch them (as I have looking at a clear blue sky on a sunny day), it is a dream forever out of reach. And yet (this is the paradox) we are and were always part of the story of that eternity for it is all around us and flows through us. That eternity is a void of nothingness, the on-going history of the energy that makes up the universe (thought of as physical not spiritual energy). The universe is a story that no one will ever tell for no being will ever be bigger than the universe to tell it. But it is a story we are a tiny part of. Our problem is that we want to hold eternity in our hands and we cannot.  

We are reaching that point of the year where most of us experience that feeling of an end and a new beginning. This is always an emotional time for me as I get caught up in the collective thought. As I get older its increasingly a recognition that, even though whilst young we think so, we are not immortals. And I don't think we should be immortals. We are physical beings and the physical things must pass away. As Nietzsche highlights, decay is as much a part of the physical world as growth. Birth and death are both alike physically natural processes. I am skeptical of those who want human beings to "technologize" their way out of life's physical downsides. This is not because I think people should suffer or die in pain. Its because physicality is a foundation of the human. Humans are those who suffer, who struggle, who need to make sense of it all in a universe that doesn't allow them to. To some, this will sound perverse, an inappropriate masochism. But I think the Transhumanists and Futurists with their shiny, trouble-free futures are the ones who need to re-examine what it is to be human and ask if what it is they are trying to create is not a new being entirely. Humans are born, humans suffer and struggle, and humans die. Change too many of the conditions of their existence and what you've got isn't human anymore. And humans are, fundamentally, mortal, vulnerable.

Professor Richard Rorty, now much missed after his death in 2007, had a saying that the agenda of the technologists, it seems to me, is very much following. It is, as Rorty said, just "another human project aiming to escape the time and chance" to which human beings, supremely, are fated. This doesn't mean we shouldn't try to relieve suffering or stop pain or cure disease. We should do all these things because to be somewhere between Point A and Point B is not to be at Point B where things cease to have consequences. And those perspectives can be very different. But I think a focus on this, a focus on escaping our fate, is to focus on trying to not be human anymore as opposed to understanding what is at the heart of humanity itself: we are not gods. Of course, we want to be. As I said above, we want to hold eternity in our hands. But consider the rest of our fellow inhabitants on this tiny rock in space, the animals. They suffer and die as we do but they do not have the consciousness and mental abilities that we do. You may say that we have evolved an extra burden but, in many respects, we are as they are. And they are, in their ignorance, happy simply to live and die, to have been. I think that we should be too. Its the old adage about it being the journey and not the destination back again.

For what is at the heart of this human struggle to live and die? It is that everything essential we have has been fated. We chose nothing about the fact that we exist. We were, as some say, "thrown" into existence and are then expected to make the best of it. An essential aspect of the human experience is that so much of it was (and still is!) out of our hands and I think that is something to come to terms with. The trouble is that we are, in so many ways, determined to either narcotize ourselves against these disturbing facts in a "go with the flow" life of bad faith or, in a show of hubris, to imagine that we can engineer our way out of them. (As I write now my song Existenzkrise - "Existential Crisis" plays. I chuckle.) Things will of course change in our future. But we are still humans and its my view that we have barely begun to understand what that even means yet. I have spent all year on this subject (quite by accident) and yet even though I have thought and written much it seems that I'm still in the starting blocks.

I guess that the struggle to be human and to understand what that means is a journey we all take that one day just gets snuffed out, a process to which we are fated that comes from the void and goes back with us to it.

C'est La Vie!


PS: Of course, it does not escape me either that all this trying to escape our fate is very human too. In that case, perhaps the primary human trait is that we are fated to futility. What better example of The Absurd do we need? Nevertheless...

There is Nothing Necessary About The Human Being

Earlier this week I wrote a blog about what I called "human exceptionalism". I could also have referred to "speciesism", it later occurred to me. The term would have done equally well for the phenomenon I was talking about. But it occurs to me that I can go further in my thinking than I did in that earlier blog, a blog which asked why we find it relatively easy to denominate some beings as lesser beings than ourselves and then commit atrocities upon them. The direction that we can go further in is that one which asks us to address human beings as a species in themselves. We can do this whilst at the same       time recognizing that our species, the human being, is just one of millions that this planet has produced, the vast majority of which have been and gone again, vanished from the planet that once gave them birth. Indeed, a wide spectrum view of life on Earth, if not elsewhere in the universe, seems to suggest that life forms in general have their time and then they vanish, a cosmic version of Andy Warhol's "famous for fifteen minutes".

Outside of the pride and ego of the human consciousness there is no reason to think that we, the humans, will be any different. But due to the way we have developed, and the higher brain functions that have come along with it, we can imagine other futures, ones in which the humans survive. Indeed, some imagine futures in which the humans become the first creatures to leave this planet and colonise others, heading out into the vastness of space. As time passes by there will certainly be an increasing urgency to do that and a scenario somewhat like the plot for the film Interstellar may arise. This is because space, that still, quiet, unchanging void, is actually none of these things. Things are changing in space all the time, constantly. Its moving. Its just that this change occurs over such unimaginably long periods of time that our tiny species, that lives for a few decades, never really lives long enough to notice the difference. One of the changes that will have occurred in what we would call the far future is that our sun will have grown in luminosity to such an extent that the heat it gives off will terminally threaten our existence. 

And this is what the universe is like. Its a dangerous, changing, chaotic place. From a universal perspective what are human beings but just another form of life? What are you and I but just individual examples of this "just another form of life"? You and I are as an individual ant is to us. Or a worm. Or a slug. There is, from this perspective, nothing special or remarkable about us. There's no reason to want to treat the humans differently to the worms or the slugs. We can be sure that the rest of the universe, in all its physical processes, will not spare us over them either. It would also be quite easy to imagine that other forms of life on other planets would not share our high regard for ourselves as well. Indeed, from an alien perspective we might not even be the dominant form of life on our own planet because who knows what they might see with their eyes? Perhaps, for them, the insects are king. Or the rats. My point is that our vision is uniquely human-shaped. We are prepped and primed by our human form of life to value and prefer human things and to weigh things to human advantage. But no other form of life is.

Imagine, for a moment, that humans had never come to pass. This is a live scenario because the fact that humans did come to pass is not to say that they had to. Evolution is a blind process and has no purpose. Neither is any divine figure guiding it. So our species did not have to be. It is contingent. It just happened because it could, because earlier versions of us survived that became us. And, who knows, some contingent event may yet wipe us out in one fell swoop. If that happened who in this universe of ours would miss us? No one would. Our planet wouldn't. The universe wouldn't. Both would just carry on. We are not necessary to everything else that exists in order to give it some meaning and purpose. Indeed, as far as we know, meaning and purpose are things unique to our species. When a dog sees a ball we do not imagine it asks itself what a ball means even though the dog may link the ball with play through memory. We do not think that the cat that sits purring in front of the fire is asking itself about its purpose in life as it purrs. We as humans have a tendency to think about things by analogy to ourselves. This is perhaps understandable. But it can also be somewhat arrogant and its certainly wrong-headed.

There are those among us who like to accentuate the progress our species makes. Five hundred years ago, however, there were very powerful bodies who thought that our planet was the centre of the universe, then thought of as God's creation, a place he made for human beings, his finest achievement and pinnacle of his creation. But our growing capabilities shattered such notions and now we know we are but a pinprick in a vast void. We are not in the centre of anything. Indeed, there is nothing special or remarkable about us or our solar system. We just are, one of billions like us, lost in the anonymity of it all. And yet the notion that we are somehow different, special, persists. Perhaps we may regard this as but the ego necessary to survive. It can be imagined that if you thought of yourself as nothing special and had a kind of species-based lack of self-esteem that this would be to the detriment of our primary evolutionary purpose which is to exist long enough to multiply. And maybe this is so. But does this mandate the ideas of some who see us as future lords of the universe and, worse, lords of our planet right now? On what basis is a human being lord of anything? 

So what I have a problem with here is a speciesist egocentrism that we humans possess. I want to see we humans as but another animal, something as contingent as bees, sharks and those horrible crawly things that come out from under rocks. We had as much to do with our existence as they did. We are largely as powerless in the face of an uncaring universe as they are. We live and die (so far) as they do. In short, we share very much in common with all other living things on planet Earth. But I don't think we have the required humility that that should entail. And that becomes a problem when you start to regard the planet that birthed you as your own species' bank of resources such as we clearly do. Of course, there is little, at this point, to stop us. "Nature is red in tooth and claw", "survival of the fittest", "might is right" and all other such vulgar notions spring to mind and do so because there is a grain of truth in them. But we can, perhaps, turn the argument of those who think humans are special and different back on them. For if this is so then maybe, just maybe, we have a responsibility to use our specialness, our special powers over and above those the rest of this planet's inhabitants have, for good.

It is not impossible to imagine that our increasing technological knowledge will bequeath us ways to extend our lives. We even have members of our species, the Transhumanists and Futurists of which I have spoken earlier in the year on this blog, who are actively looking at how technology may both extend and transform our lives. But, if this is so, then surely some of these technologies will be useful for the rest of our world. It would be a very solipsistic vision of the future if it did not. We, as humans, have always, up until now, been biological beings that lived in a biological world. This presents problems to be sure (disease and decay being just two pressing ones) but it also constitutes the only situation of life we have ever known. We appreciate the fact of sun and rain on our skin, the feel of the wind, walking across a grassy field, interaction with other animal species, and these sensations engender feelings and emotions and constitute part of what it feels like to be a human being. Any future iteration of the human consciousness, whether that be as some kind of robot or even as a computer program, must account for this if we are to retain any link to our past human development. So I would argue that the human future is not just about preserving a personal human identity, or even a collection of personal human identities. It is about preserving our world in all its biological variety. 

Another way to say this is that as we destroy our world we destroy ourselves, piece by piece, tree by tree, hedgerow by hedgerow, field by field, river by river, sea by sea. Of course, things change over time. But changes have consequences and there is all the difference in the world between things that happen and things you cause, perhaps by not thinking it through or even not thinking at all. We recognize the difference in human thought between an accident, something unforeseen and something done as a deliberate act of vandalism. My argument here is that we, as a species, have some humility, recognize our contingency and how bound up we are with the planet that gave us life and even now sustains us, and use the advantage our evolution has given us to make the world better for everything that lives here. Because, in the end, helping others is really just helping yourself. Its a recognition that you are truly not an island, you're part of a bio-system, a circle of life, a community of life. A life without everything else this planet holds would not be a human life at all because we do not and have never existed in isolation. 

We may think we can throw off such notions and that our ingenuity can prosper us even whilst everything else is sacrificed or fails to survive. Should that happen then it may yet be, as some say, that the "human beings" were only a phase and the post-humans, beings who once were us, take our place instead. If that did happen it would be yet another demonstration that the universe doesn't need us and that all things must pass.