BasBasBas.com

Category: philosophy

  • What If This Happened Before?

    Had a good chat over dinner tonight, with Len. It was basically about ‘more perfect systems’ for this world and how they could be put in place. My personal vision is a very interconnected world of interdependent communities that are grouped around certain core beliefs. People would live more within a tribe-like group of around 200 people as a close community, instead of the many communities we live and participate in right now (work, free time, neighbourhood, etc.). This doesn’t mean that you don’t interact with people outside your tribe, but I’m getting into specifics…

    A thing I have always struggled with, when it comes to utopic ideas, is how do you get there if you take the current society as a starting point? The last time I thought about this question is quite a while ago and I have since gotten more tech-oriented and I believe technology within the next few decades will radically alter global human culture. So probably this ‘more perfect system’ would come into place by being enabled by technology.

    What if at some point we decide that it’s too risky to use our real bodies to interact with the world, such as suggested in the film Surrogates. There are already people who are trying to call a halt to handshaking, because it’s just too risky. Imagine if in the next few decades there are more and more viruses like SARS, bird flu, swine flu, etc. coming up, constantly threatening mankind’s health. Imagine if technology keeps growing exponentially… If we could put our bodies in safe suspension and create an avatar that interacts with a world that’s just as real as the current one, but organized in a more perfect way… I thought: “that would be great! Because we would know that the virtual world that our avatar lives in is not real, so we would be more relaxed about our (virtual) life circumstances”.

    And then I thought… “but what if the reality our avatar lives in does become vital to us… what if we identify so much with that reality, that we forget about the actual reality where our consciousness lies”… And then it struck me: “what if this happened before?”

    Who’s to say it didn’t.


    “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”     – Albert Einstein

    “A wise man, recognizing that the world is but an illusion, does not act as if it is real, so he escapes the suffering.” – Gautama Buddha

  • Reading!

    Since I spend a lot of time on public transport (either traveling or in the crazy traffic of Istanbul), I get to do quite a bit of reading. At the moment I’m reading two books. “A New Earth” by Eckhart Tolle, this one I’m reading for the second time, and “The Inheritance of Loss” by Kiran Desai. I found two inspirational quotes in these books that I want to share.

    Something I find very worrying is the growing phenomenom of antitheism. While using StumbleUpon, I noticed an immense number of sites that are very hateful towards religion. Understandably so, because they feel their way of life is being threatened by religion, but personally, I don’t feel that bashing, mocking, fighting or anything else that comes out of negativity can do any good. In “A New Earth“, Eckhart Tolle expresses my feelings very clearly:

    “In certain cases, you may need to protect yourself or someone else from being harmed by another, but beware of making it your mission to “eradicate evil,” as you are likely to turn into the very thing you are fighting against. Fighthing unconsciousness will draw you into unconsciousness yourself. Unconsciousness, dysfunctional egoic behavior, can never be defeated by attacking it. Even if you defeat your opponent, the unconsciousness will simply have moved into you, or the opponent reappears in a new disguise. Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists.“

    Very wise words. I really admire Eckhart Tolle’s works and can keep reading it over and over. If you really want to grasp the full meaning of his words above, go check out the book.

    A New Earth, by Eckhart Tolle The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai

    On my way to Bulgaria, I figured that Eckhart Tolle’s stuff might be a bit heavy for a 10+ hour journey and I’d need some novel to read. I found some novels in my apartment (left by previous inhabitants) and found an interesting one about life in Nepal around the time of the Nepalese independence movement in the 80s. I picked it up and took it with me… On the third page or so, I came across this marble of beauty:

    “Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? Romantically she decided that love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself.” 

    Taken from Kiran Desai’s “The Inheritance of Loss“. Haven’t quite formed my opinion about it, since the print in my version of the book is quite small and it wasn’t ideal to read in a bus on a Bulgarian bumpy road (and at night), so I had to put it away.

    Have you read any of these books? Thoughts and comments very welcome! I find books are one of the best topics for meaningful and engaging conversations! 🙂

  • Why I hate coffee (and other warm beverages)

    Although coffee has (and other warm beverages have) a particular value, there is also a downside to them. Therefore my relationship with them can be described as a love-hate relationship, moreso than a purely mutual hate-hate relationship.

    Why do I hate it? I call it The Coffee (and other warm beverages) paradox.

    When you are consuming something, your desire for consumption will decrease (unless you’re female and consuming ice cream while watching Desperate Housewives or Grey’s Anatomy).  The problem with coffee (and other warm beverages) is that although your desire for consumption decreases while consuming, the need for increasing the consumption speed increases due to the fact that the less coffee (or other warm beverages) is contained in the cup, the faster it will cool down… and coffee (and other warm beverages) are usually not so nice when cold.

    The coffee (and other warm beverages) paradox provides modern-day society with a substantial problem, which (completely coincidentally) can only be seen as a problem in modern-day western society. Based on this concept, the most logical solution seems to be to revert to a less modern (more ancient) and poorer society in which scarcity is not just an economical force, but something you can actually witness during dinner (or anti-dinner).

    If anyone can think of a better solution, please let me know. By commenting.

  • Terence McKenna – Culture is NOT our friend

    [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOy3H4yyocQ]

  • So about Ahmadinejad…

    If I could think of one word by which I could express all the thoughts and feelings about Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia University… I would probably not speak it, since I’d be too busy explaining people the meaning of life.

    It’s just a bit overwhelming really… Let’s just take some of the things we’ve seen in the last 2 days or so.

    – “Evil has landed“, very coloured headlines from US media, simply indicating how ‘balanced’ US media is;
    – The awfully unprofessional and disrespectful introduction given by the Dean;
    – Ahmadinejad reversing the terrorist issue, which I must say was a good point, but a half truth;
    – Ahmadinejad actually making good points, such as calling for a referendum and explaining why Iran opposes the US (he did not deny that the Iran was aiding “terrorists” (defined by the US, NATO & a group of UN countries));
    – The opportunity of hearing the opinion and views of a majority of the people in the Middle East when it comes to international affairs, and the way American and a lot of other international media simply refused to listen to this opinion;
    – The threat of cutting public funding to Columbia University for letting this man speak.. I have nothing to say about this;

    It just shows how caught up and fueled we are by propaganda and double-standards. The following is from an article of the Columbia Journalist: “Ahmadinejad made a mockery of the freedom of expression,” said Ari Gardner, a 22-year old student. “He took every single accusation against Iran and lodged it against the U.S. and the western world.”

    Of course, dipshit. Has Iran attacked the U.S. before? No. Has the U.S. attacked Iran before? Yes. They have a very different view about current affairs than we do. By turning this around, he points it out, but by being so caught up in this whole “War on Terror” (what happened to “ism”?) you refuse to see the point. Actually, the “war on terror” is a perfect example of Orwellian psychology. Doesn’t war cause terror? Isn’t terror part of war? How can you fight against fighting?

    The U.S. is the biggest defender of democracy and freedom, yet in the country itself, laws like the Patriot Act or other terrorism-related laws are breaking down freedom bit by bit from all sides possible. And democracy… Don’t start. The UN should have stepped in during the previous elections, because some strange things were going down. Exactly the type of things the international community sends UN observers to developing countries or former dictatorships for. U.S. democracy is run by money, friends and networks. The U.S. democracy is no better than Iran’s and I’m sure that if they could, these self-righteous, conservative, let’s-use-Jesus-as-an-excuse Republicans would love to execute homosexuals. I bet they envy Ahmadinejad.

    So now I’m probably ‘abusing’ or ‘making a mockery’ out of freedom of speech, because I speak my mind freely, which is not what some people want. It seems like freedom of speech is only extended to those that have the least necessity for it. If there was no freedom of speech, they would be the only ones speaking.

    It’s time for a change. Not through violence, but through courage and non-violence. Just look at the Burmese monks. Civil disobedience. Just stop taking the crap, just refuse. Don’t fight.

    Holy shit, two police officers just came into my office… No idea what they were saying, it was in Bulgarian.. Something about “preventive” and “computers”. Maybe reading 1984 spooked me, but damn that’s scary when you’re typing a post like this. Wooh! Adrenaline rush, haha. I don’t know where I was going with the post, but I guess this is a good ending.

  • Babel

    small_su_logo.pngWe are all familiar with the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. As I was walking the street, I suddenly realized that the interpretation of the metaphor, as it has been explained to me, is still too simplistic. For the people who are not very familiar with the story, I’ll give a short recap. The purpose of this recap is also to help you understand my thoughts, because I’m not very sure I know the Babel story perfectly.

    So basically, once upon a time in the old world, all people speak the same language. This makes it easy to cooperate. So they decide to build a tower into the skies and go have a cup of tea with God. After a while (they get pretty high, I guess) God decides he prefers the dead to the living and will have none of these people in his kingdom. So what does he do? He magically makes people speak in different languages (that’s right, languages haven’t evolved over thousands of years either, God made them). So now, these people can’t cooperate anymore and they abandon the tower and spread throughout the world. That’s the story.

    I believe this is a spiritual warning. We must not try to ‘be’ with God through material pursuit. This is exactly what we are doing; we’re creating a new Babel. The biggest group of people who speak English live in… China. We’re all adapting to the Latin alphabet and the English language and are cooperating to redesign the world to make it fit our needs. For me, the metaphor of ‘God’ means the sum of everything, all life, nature, matter, energy, ecologies et cetera. So we use our intelligence and capacities to act out of harmony with ‘God’ which I interpret as the all-encompassing ecology. The more we act out of harmony, the harder it will strike back. Maybe next time ‘God’ won’t divide us, but destroy us. The warning is there in the story of the Tower of Babel.

    So how do we avoid this destruction? Simple. Get down from the fucking tower and let’s stop acting like Gods. Some people say that we can rape this planet, because “God created man in his own image”, unlike animals or other life. So we get to make the decisions about other life, like God does. Well, let’s turn this one around now and get more philosophical. I hate antitheism, because I dislike angry, arrogant atheists, they are just as bad as any other fundamentalists – because that’s what they are; fundamentalist atheists. However, I believe that “man created God in his own image”, because we have very limited minds, we cannot understand infinity. We don’t know what it’s like to be more intelligent than we are, because you’d have to be more intelligent to understand this in the first place. So God’s depicted as human, because that’s what WE are. We think we are gods, because we depict God as a man.

    Let’s make a list of the elements I know from the story of the Tower of Babel and compare them to current society.

    Babel

    Modern day society

    One language

    Moving towards one language (English / Chinese)

    The Tower

    Our quest to create our own world

    Splitting up in different languages

    Ecological disaster, scarcity, famine, war (sorry)

    Motivators: greed, vanity, dissatisfaction with what we are given.

    Greed, vanity, dissatisfaction with what we are given.

    Mass cooperation

    Globalism


    I bet there’s a lot more. I think I’ll read the story, because biblical stories or fairy tales are good vehicles for philosophy. Have a look at the work of Daniel Quinn for instance, he writes stories to educate about ecology.

    The art depicting this story always shows that they got pretty far with building the tower, so either God is slow and didn’t understand what was going on until they got pretty close, or he’s a sadist. Or maybe God’s not a man… Maybe God is the force of the universe, or the force of nature to be more context-specific. If we pollute, there is no immediate repercussion. However, the more we pollute and the more ‘advanced’ (in our eyes) we become, the harder nature will strike back in the future. I think this is what the tower symbolizes. It shows what happens if we live in disharmony with all that around us, because of vain and greedy mindlessness.

    I don’t propose to tear this tower down right now. That would be crazy. We have a long way down first, so let’s start walking. Downstairs we can live in peace, together, in one united world.

    Check out all the other religious traditions with the same metaphor.

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