Philosophical Interludes, Emotional Quaaludes: Some Reflections
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/07/08
I used to walk in a local cemetery, reflecting, thinking: Feeling.
Side note: Thinking or cognition bears what are termed cognitive biases, which means distortions for evolved effect, emotions don’t get this moral judgment, as cognition is compared to an abstraction of a rational actress. They aren’t perfectly logical, thus biases or distortions relative to it.
Emotions distort reality’s impressions on us. These seem like biases relative to those impressions. So, similarly, ‘cognition’ seems akin to feeling as it’s invisibly graduated, apparently continuous to conscious life. Here’s a thought: Thinking is, in some sense, emotion, especially because of the deep coupling and the dominance of emotion in our lives. Language merely gives approximated punctuations to these “feelings.”
So, thinking doesn’t necessarily seem like thinking to me, the subjective experiences are more akin to feelings. But that’s a bias relative to some abstract of the Rational Mind (TM) following the Laws of Logic. Yet, we don’t consider emotions “biases.” And we don’t just cogitate like a computational mechanism, more fuzzy – less clear. Arguably, emotions are primary. They just happen. Thinking may, in and of itself, may be an epiphenomenon, and what we call thought may merely be, in a currently extended sense, another facet of emotion – itself a surface reflection of intuition.
Anywho, it’s important to ‘think’ on death. Its momentary affliction at the end. Cemeteries are important reminders of what once was or rather who once was; and I didn’t even grow up in a particularly old town.
One of my favourite interviews was with an older woman named Bays Blackhall. An intelligent and funny woman dedicated to the history or heritage of Fort Langley. She is dead. But she left a mark. My role is archival. I am an archivist or a librarian of people. I do this work individually to outlast me and for analysis for others who will have tools to analyze human character with unprecedented tools in the future.
Another side note, those “tools” will have their own ‘motivations’ or subjectivities, analytic plans, and valences, eventually. At first, they’ll have a character satisfying to our egoistic sense of cosmic centrality. The human will be the measure of all things in them, and then this will be diluted, including valences and thought structure patterns. My bet: It happened elsewhere in Nature based on an extension of the Drake Equation, which I’ve given in other writing — and a grade schooler is perfectly capable of interpreting it, accurately.
Evangelicalism had an increasing influence on the quiet character of the small town, in my opinion, based on experience. And not all for the bad. For some people, as with Wagner Hills, the farming for the recovery from substance misuse is helpful. I have emotional misgivings with the use of church doctrine in people at a vulnerable point in life. While at the same time, I respect the individual choice of people to select a path to sobriety as long as evidence-based methodologies are incorporated too.
It’s something about the tawdry certitudes of the Evangelical faith and the obvious oblivion facing us. It’s a sort of pathetic reach — a dry heave hoping for relief — of a junkie with substance or proper medical care. The juxtaposition of church and cemetery was an accident, and also a reflection of human choice too.
It occurred to me early in life wandering through town, almost aimless. A promise of a forever in light of a brief finite seems like a good bargain to gamble one’s life. Specially when the apparent grotesque eventuality lay six feet before us, death is simply there. How do we relate to it? It’s this fear of the Vacuity driving the belief in the faith.
What are the options, though? It’s not that bad. We have many options. And infinite bliss or torture are only two and the torture one seems somehow intuitively less likely than the other options. Everyone seems to believe in an all-benevolent God. That means more bliss than unpleasantries in some sense. And some add all-just to that too. A just God may give second or Nth chances for recovery from wicked ways. So, I must leave myself thinking on this: God is benevolent or benevolent and just. So, we get the goods, eventually. That’s okay, I guess. God becomes an ally and friend for sin-drinkin’ alcoholics.
Oblivion is a baseline, almost a default. It’s a ‘from whence you came you shall return’ deal. A roundtrip from inchoate nothingness potential to disintegrated nothingness dispensed— pretty straightforward. I won’t experience anything, wasn’t bothered by oblivion before I got here similarly.
That was a minority of the town growing up. In fact, the only people who I knew who were mocked was one local atheist. And my atheism merely comes catalogued as a simple premise in a North American context: A rejection of dogmatic notions of a solely personal God interpreted by many through the books of the New and Old Testament.
That mocked atheist was one of a tremendous number of generic old guys. The rest felt Heaven-bound. And why not? They’re Christian after all. But what in the hell is Heaven? It’s a bit like the Sims game with cheat codes. A design your own perfection tailor-made world. Heaven, if it’s customized by definition, then it’ll be the best by definition — best by definition becomes best for that person, so becomes the best in all likely possibilities.
Otherwise, it doesn’t sound like much of a haven of perfection. Heavenly perfection must be much like happiness, bound to individual psyche. But why do some of the most obnoxious believe that they are entitled to such a place? Why does God need to birth and then sacrifice Himself to make life’s access to the otherworldly Holy Land possible?
As far as I could tell as a kid, it’s because it doesn’t exist. Trust in its existence ends in accordance with the degree of evidence of its existence. It’s people telling one another hypotheses at that rate and ones seemingly exhibiting a lot of wishful thinking. Good act good; bad act bad — give them their teat, ignore the rationales.
What about the opposing place?
Hell, more directly, if I am a bad person in some manner, then I went to the right place based on a God not taking responsibility for flaws made by the manufacturer Himself. Ruh-roh, he would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for that darned Stray Canadian (TM). Ergo, I can sit in eternal torment with a sense of divine justice beyond the transcendent. Which is a clever means by which to devilishly say, maybe, that’ll destroy the gods based on self-contradiction shown by a creation.
And if that were the case, and in its flawless logic this’d be true, I’d be a Saviour figure in hell, then. I’d be a hero there, rockstar.
Make sense?
Nirvana, another option, I suppose. Good stuff, I made it to eternality. The Buddhists, if interpreted or reinterpreted as an otherworldly state of existence rather than a differentiation in state of mind here, were clever introspectionists — almost as good as they are breathers and sitters.
Reincarnation, this one wholly depends on the eventual reincarnated existence itself relative to one’s own existence. It’s like the American Dream or the similarly termed ‘Chinese Dream.’ It seems to involve the same delusions. Perpetual improvement in each iteration of generations on mean. It’s dumb, delusion.
“What do you mean, Scott?” Good question, y’all. I already answered it, re-read.
Reincarnation seems great only as a Labrador. Those critters are perpetually happy. Or dogs generally, or even a cat, they seem innately self-sufficient. They’re the ultimate feminist — feminine powered independence with claws. I’m all paws and claws for that shit — count me in!
How about a black hole? That’s another great idea. Maybe, a black hole in which the physics work out in such a manner so as to simulate a universe inflationarily internally or something fun like that. You get your own mini-universe! It’s not a simulation, by the way, because it’s internally mapped as real, thus natural or Nature–first-order.
There are some silly minxes and poltroons falling out of salty Utah. Members, who look, and do not speak, like me, of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. This may be the only universe in which I am not a member of that religion and choir. Mormon being a new Jesus faith, has a not bad style of afterlife, at least one of their three. I took a bunch of their Institute classes and witnessed something like 4 of their baptisms too, even someone attaining the Melchizedek Priesthood. Let’s say you’re Jewish and Muslim and find it silly, even absurdist, that’s a good point. Sit on that feeling, that’s how others view Judaism and Islam.
Now onto the modernist or contemporary version of a redemption metaphysics, the possibility of the realization of Digital Forever. This is magical feeling, again grounded in fear, but combined with hubris.
Even much freethought is not — free, seems.
Digital resurrection, a second chance for a not you, like an accidental beam up in Star Trek, the signal scrambled as two and atomic-accurate representations of the two become one, then distinct, and continue their worldlines a ways away. Science magic: Scotty may have beamed two up, lad, but it’s not my fault. It’s like warp speed.
Why not warp space in the immediate locale of a ship to such an extreme extent so has to coax curvature-wise the ship in any 3-dimensional coordinate-space direction while travelling extraordinarily fast to artificially travel faster than the speed of light relative to other objects in nearby space relative to one another? Tremendous energy, but not infinite, for an object to traverse intergalactic gaps in shorter time: perpetual slingshot.
And if the pantheists, panendeists, panentheists, holopanentheists, holopanendeists, superduperfranticdeisticalists happen to be correct, then you exist as part of god, now, so any death would merely amount to a transform from one state of a piece of god into another state of a piece of god – great! One is always with god. One is part of the divine whole.
And to the agnostic afterlifers, it’s all part of the veritable mystery at any rate. Or it could be Platonic in which one returns to an all-changing reality, or it’s an ever-present eternal perfection. Or if some spirit realm, again, you might be talking some annoying pricks like mediums, but you get the benefit of not having to deal with the desires of the flesh as much. You continue.
It may run down to Glenn Gould’s hypothesis, where Afterlife means some place more probable based on the statistical odds. Wherein, the states of absolute non-existence in the terms of one’s worldline is a state of 1 and the states of an afterlife are functionally infinite, so, we remain left with the probabilistic argument in favour of an afterlife and, given the above, more chances of a good one compared to oblivion, though the likely outcome on the evidence is nothingness, though, too. So, we’re back to stage 1, but with a probability argument simultaneously in favour of an afterlife. So: Either absolute Vacuity, or a bet of functional-infinite to 1.
Something to ‘think’ about.
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