Yesterday, I published two pieces,"Severance, The Substance, and Our Increasingly Splintered Selves" in the New York Times, and "If You Ask "Why?", You're a Philosopher and You're Awesome" / "The Penumbral Plunge" in Aeon. If you receive The Splintered Mind by mail, apologies for hitting you twice in quick succession.
The Aeon piece remixes material from The Weirdness of the World and some old blog posts into what one reader called "a love song for philosophy". It's a 3000-word argument that the our species' capacity to wonder philosophically, even when we make no progress toward answers, is the most intrinsically awesome thing about planet Earth. Philosophy needs no other excuse.
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Imagine a planet on the far side of the galaxy. We will never interact with it. We will never see it. What happens there is irrelevant to us, now and for the conceivable future. What would you hope this planet is like?
Would you hope that it’s a sterile rock, as barren as our Moon? Or would you hope it has life? I think, like me, you’ll hope it has life. Life has value. Other things being equal, a planet with life is better than a planet without. I won’t argue for this. I take it as a starting point, an assumption. I invite you to join me in feeling this way or at least to consider for the sake of argument what might follow from feeling this way. Life – even simple, nonconscious, microbial life – has some intrinsic value, value for its own sake. The Universe is richer for containing it.
What kind of life might we hope for on behalf of this distant planet, if we are, so to speak, benevolently imagining it into existence? Do we hope for only microbial life and nothing more complex, nothing multicellular? Or do we hope for complex life, with the alien analogue of lush rainforests and teeming coral reefs, rich ecosystems with ferns and moss and kelp, eels and ant hives, parakeets and spiders, squid and tumbleweeds and hermaphroditic snails and mushroom colonies joined at the root – or rather, not to duplicate Earth too closely, life forms as diverse and wondrous as these, but in a distinct alien style? Again, I think you will join me in hoping for diverse, thriving complexity.
Continued open-access here.
5 comments:
Yes, I think philosophy is important. *Awesome*, on the other claw, is pretty well worn now. The term, in itself, has meaning. Yet, when it replaces traditional responses, such as you are welcome to a thank you, it sounds impersonal and insincere. Or, more directly, if I place an order with a server at a restaurant and that person mutters *awesome*, while scurrying away, something is lost. Or, if I should report to someone close a stroke of good luck, and they flash back, 'awesome', there is doubt and disconnect. Awesome is rusty, worn thin, or worn out, as implied earlier here.
So, no, I am probably not part of your core audience. This follows, and comports with previous comments I have made. The non-word, UM, is in some way also obsolete. But, I first heard it, I think, in a Humphrey Bogart movie. Well. Illustration, for effect: If someone fell to their death, while taking a *selfie* on the edge of a cliff, would you utter: awesome? I don't think so. As we regress into excess, exaggeration and extremism, there are troubling issues.
The term, awesome, struck another memory. If you recall.There was recurring theme material, at a university, for which we both had affinity, association and love?. Just jogging memory, here. I found the topic, 'yawnsome' then, but of course, I was only getting involved in philosophy. Before, I was mildly interested. Later, when the blog format became formulaic, therefore, repetitive, I dropped out. There seemed to be little creative thinking...certainly, nothing beyond an acceptable norm. l don't insult anyone...if I can help it. Um is not a word, You know what I think of awesome.
I think that Locke’s account of personal identity understood in terms of memory, is a good explanation of why “reincarnation” is not very promising for survival of death.
If you can’t remember having been Napoleon, then whatever the metaphysics of souls, substrates, etc., you might as well not have been Napoleon, to put it crudely.
Paul: Yes, fair, "awesome" has been overused and lost some of the power I still want from it. Let's try to think of the term before its overuse!
Understand your points well...I think. Will offer this comment on an old allegory: Once we go down the Rabbit Hole, it is hard to get back. Rabbit holes are gates to infinity, and, we can't get here from there. Infinity is not hell, in my view. It is nothingness. Infinitely worse.IMHO. Written like a true philosopher? Maybe, maybe not. I just do the best I can..."Go ask Alice"...Jefferson Airplane, waaaay back. Maybe, you will write/say/present something on excess, exaggeration and extremism, some foundations of my idea(s) around contextual reality. I think, only think, we built our own "rabbit hole*, and plunged, headlong, theredown. oops...
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