For today's post I thought it would be easy pickings to respond to some of my own historical thoughts that I found worthy of noting down. I won't say much more than that except to say that I haven't let this occupy much time and is a sketch more than a painting.
I was thinking about information, the steady increase of entropy, and the way life operates by setting up little cells of control. I then thought about the way in which humans order things as opposed to ameba and slime molds, fungi and such and now I have a sneaking suspicion that we are confusing ourselves that we are particularly intelligent but rather our peculiarity is the scale at which we have managed to be organized (on the city and national scales to some extent say). At this scale we are totally unrivaled, not because we are particularly intelligent at this scale but because at this scale we have no competition.
Basically every other life form can outperform us, cope with more diversity at the scales they operate, be it the viral soup of the seas or the bacteria embedded for eons in the lithosphere, its just we can make things easier for ourselves by eradicating that same diversity to make things super simple for ourselves (dumbed down) by leveraging our totalitarian control of large scale organization.
Power makes even the stupid appear intelligent, whether its a granary falling on a child hiding from the sun, a CEO giving orders to an expert within his own domain, or the ocean swallowing yet another ship.
Not really sure on this one still, it is hard to consider, but I do think that great strides can be made in interpersonal organization and that this has a great impact on apparent intelligence.
The outside world is totally unknowable, all that is knowable are the mundane images, sounds, tastes, and feelings that populate our lives, nothing is possible beyond this without changing who we are or making the unusual mundane as well.
Trivially this is true, everything we know is unfortunately known, but the way we know is particular. Within our particularity I see no reason why many things (not all) should not be able to be known. If that means that some essential aspect of the universe will always be beyond our reach then that is so, but if not it is not, and either way it does not prevent us from knowing a great deal else - the problem of time and induction aside.
To ask without question, to listen without judgement, and to act without regret.
These are aspirations to the impossible, goals that cannot be reached within this universe, to ask without question leaves no voice with which to ask, to listen without distinction leaves no sound to be heard, and to act without regret leaves leaves action meaningless in its complete premeditation.
This thought leaves open for me the nature of good questions, the nature of good judgement, and the nature of good regret. Seemingly good questions allow an encodable amount and type of information to be elicited, seemingly good judgement manages this encoding, while regret picks up on information missed due to lack of inquiry and lack of comprehension.
Hence the aesthetic is transformed completely, rather than a vacuous angel we see ourselves devoid of every bias except the ones that we see as being ourselves, quietly scanning the horizon and leaving little more than footprints on our travels except where we leave towering monoliths and stepped wells, we are totalitarian moral-artist-engineer-scientists and in our totalising we cannot help but include society in our ego.
I'm sorry for a couple of things. When I got the award for being the shyest here I consoled myself by saying that if I have something to say I say it so here goes. Please eat my cookies and let me get this all of my chest.
You guys deserve someone thinking about your feelings enough that he doesn't leave bleach all over the stuff going in the room. You're more important than the slight inconvenience of slightly more intense wiping with a lighter load of bleach. Seriously I know there are a few things like that I do that must annoy the shit out of some of you sometimes and I should set my goals accordingly. They are the first set of things I'm sorry about and its probably the hardest for a day dreamer like me to face up to.
The other thing I am sorry about is not being honest about who I am at work. As Martel said on Friday I know Joe doesn't care greatly about compounding. I don't think he cares really about the patients we're helping, and it shows when our colleagues over at Fresenius Kabi are talked of like we're playing a zero sum game of rugby where there can be only one winner. So why do I act day to day like I can do my best to save and sustain lives while the brass explicitly tell us we are trying to undercut the people who have been delivering parenatal solutions with us for so long? I'm not paid enough to be able to help the people I'm hurting so I think now I have to try to talk about us acting with some solidarity and work towards not giving everything over to a system which cares only enough to maintain control of profitability. I believe continuous improvement of our workplace and lives will come faster when we act with sincere intentions and talk plainly about our place in the world. We do enough work here that if we take greater control of it, in a caring fashion, things could change a lot for the better.
What we do here helps people feel better, and even with some window cleaners earning more than me I am going to be happy with that if I can see our work being done wisely, I have no need for the blessings of rugby fans or Wall Street.
I still feel a lot of guilt/friction between how I feel comfortable acting around people and what I feel I owe them, I owe people liberation, I owe them to be honest and to fight alongside them for eudaimonia. To speak of this is embarrassing. I think one of the big things I am learning to improve, which is a casual and energetic friendliness to my peers, will help me gain the skills to speak more freely of my beliefs. This will relieve me of the guilt of suffering my morals quietly and will let me sound the waters of my colleagues sympathies.
turnnoffyourmind
jbbartram-illu
tangentwithtanner
gummygunk
origamiaround
stormborns
