16/09/2024

Some presume that we are open to be understood. When it comes to gaining something, a skill or item, we want what we want. Plain as and we can see it for what it is. But much to our eager confusion, when that which we wanted is well within our reach, we are not whole, full or in the least finally happy. The transient joy that accomplishment brings only makes space for the next series of hopes to filter through and set.

It’s enough for me to want, in order to have. Consider yourself a wanting machine. I wouldn’t need to program you much to enjoy that which you have, in so long as I have told you to want what you want. Very rarely does face value match the mechanism through which things happen. It seems plainly obvious when considered. The wirings of a computer don’t equate the final product, that which appears on screen, however much that they afford it.

If we cannot trust that there is this causal link in the first place, we end up screaming into the void and watching nothing change. In wanting as an effort to obtain things, we helpfully misguide ourselves into believing that the getting placates the want. Even further, that we are getting anything at all. We are happy to act as if one leads to the other. Extending this principle, that which I view in front of me is a helpful farce as is relevant to interaction with the unknown.

What else is helpfully obscured this way? Is all? To take a step outside of ourselves may purely be a thought experiment. We might understand ourselves as the effect trying to work backward to the cause.

When I view the monitor that displays readings of my brain, have I exited this cycle? Am I viewing the objective display of that which constructs the experience I am having? It does not seem likely. Not unhelpful, but unlikely. We interestingly enough produce a simulated control panel for interacting well enough with to do what we wish. That is the world around us and our conception of self.

Under these ideas, the understanding that “those pieces produce me” may totally miss the mark in terms of objectively representing that which causes me. But, as mentioned before, they are good enough. Good enough gives workability. Good enough affords predictability. Through predictability we are given understanding. Having an object of reference, that is relatively stable through time, gives us the focal point to attribute explanation, consistency and limit. We might not truly know ourselves, but we have enough.

This separation of experience and the true, now held by scholars of consciousness, has been visited many times. Hume lends a tonic to what is evoked when reflecting on this separation. You live through and off of assumptions. Enough assumptions for your whole world to fit into. Your knowing feels as true to yourself the same as it is truly an assumption. Suspending judgement on things for their lack of philosophical grounding wastes time and befriends anxiety. Sanity is found when you sit in the comfort of your knowledge.

The journey through scepticism, returning upon normalcy, is just one of many examples where enquiry eats itself. It becomes better not to question more than is knowable if any good result is wanted. See what you see, and no further.

words for spare parchment