Confusion

How are you going to make sense of the world?  I would offer to you three alternatives.  

1) Assume no prior knowledge or fiduciary framework within which to base understanding.  Attempt to come to some Cartesian method of deriving meaning by challenging assumption, discovering personal truth, and incorporating the whole into a unified framework of understanding into which everything must fit.  The universe is assumed to ba able to provide all the answers to anybody willing to search for them through the medium of science and deduction.

2) Take on somebody else’s beliefs and assume them for yourself.  Be it your parents, your friends, your colleagues or a religious figure you choose to follow, make the decision to defend their beliefs and take them on by proxy, even if you do not understand them.  Such a stance is that of children who would denounce smoking because their parents tell them it is ‘bad.’

3) Admit that there are certain things we will never understand.  

The first option seems to be the most logical, but in fact it requires a certain degree of faith.  To set out on a reductionistic exploration of the world, sure of the fact that everything is able to be explained eventually requires a considerable degree of trust in the linearity of the universe around us, and of the fact that every law or relationship discovered here holds true for the rest of the universe.  Given as this has already been proven to be false, and that in addition there may possibly be infinite universes even if we work this one out, there really is no way we can ever know for sure whether the way we understand our reality is actually right or not.  We can only know how often it seems to hold true in our immediate experience.  In addition, no one person can ever understand comprehensively the entire picture.  The understanding of modern science is shared collectively between all the minds currently undertaking research, and as such no one person is ever going to have the experience of understanding the whole of the scientific view of the world.  At some point we have to trust that fellow scientists are correct in their practice and their findings.  The problems in using this method to make sense of the world become obvious.

The second option seems like something we should leave behind at childhood, but in fact most of us will do it to some degree for the rest of our lives.  There is a sliding scale of trust in others’ opions, from trusting that the doctor knows more than you do about your body, to dying in a war because somebody in government tells you it is the right thing to do.  Within science, researchers cannot each undertake all the work needed to understand a principle so they must trust each other to the extent that they can base the next level of reseach on a base of research that other people have done.  We must ‘stand on the shoulders of giants,’ scientists do not redo all of the experiements ever performed in the canon of science to satisfy themselves before progressing.  At every point that we interact in society we must decide how much we trust the opinions of those around us, but there is no reason why we should take those opinions as our own unless they happen to be so convincing that for us they constitute the most irresistable truth available to us at that moment.  People who spout second-hand opinions on matters that they do not well understand rightfully end up embarrasing themselves; there can be no shortcut to wisdom.

The third option is of the hardest of all to hold, though it contains elements of the other two paths.  It admits that there is some determinable truth in the world, without believing that everything is necessarily understandable.  It recognises that other people have greater insights into some areas of life than we do, but without blindly accepting their conclusions as our own.  It does not seek to build understanding into the gaps where none is obvious.  It does not have to come to an opinion where one does not naturally present itself.  The third path is one which commits to having integrity through holding no belief for the sake of it, as though there must be a truth or an answer or an opinion somewhere.  It is only possible to truly believe anything is if you come at it without desperately striving, in the same way that you are unlikely to find a meaningful relationship if you are constantly searching for the perfect partner.  Archimedes only solved the problem of the king’s crown, discovering the principle of displacement, when he stopped searching and took a bath, allowing truth and insight to take him by surprise.  Some things are too complex to have an obvious handle for understanding.  We belittle ourselves and the magnitude of the world when we try to pretend we can fit everything into our comparatively tiny minds.

Memory and the Value of Experience

As every experience is converted to memory by leaving the present, and retreats away from you on the conveyor belt of time, time experience folds inwards on itself, so that when you look back at what has gone before, the gravity and magnitude of your experience seems comically belittled.  The time spent abroad, the painful marriage, the student years, they all shrink down in the memory to become mere snapshots, pictures simply painted in the colour of yearning or regret.  Occasionally a smell or other sense will break open the impermeable layer that lies between you and such experiences, and allow you a more visceral remembrance of the time gone by, but for the most part our experience, once confined to memory, fades to a shadow, to the facts.  The tumultuous experiences of the early years become childhood, the present and intense joy of a new relationship becomes an ex, and so the formative experiences of our lives become points on the checklist of memory, littered with lifeless snapshots and brief records of conversation.  The point then becomes what the point of any experience is, if not to enhance the meaningfulness of future experience, because experience, once converted to memory, most often breeds yearning, wistfulness, anger, and regret. 

In the eyes of many, the value of experience is primarily to allow develoment of self image, and to give a wealth of memories which can be relied on when circumstances are different; consider as an example the infirm, elderly man sitting in his chair all day reminiscing on the past.  I would suggest that since our memory of experiences are always belittled and insufficient copies of what actually happened, then to hope that a sufficient wealth of experience will allow us to lay back and enjoy the recollection what we did in earlier days is misguided.  Life can only be enjoyed in its fullness, for better or worse, in the present, and as such any experience we have should primarily be so that the future present can be experienced with more breadth and fullness.  To travel, undertake a new activity, or meet with friends should not be seen as an opportunity for accumulation of memories, or of photos, which are essentially the same thing, but as an opportunity to change the perception to allow future experience to be more full and vivid.  It is a misconception that the drive for success in sports is to do with achieving the highest accolade, ensuring that it need never be reached again since the memory, and the knowledge of the achievement provide vicariously for this need.  In actuality it is the sensation of success which provides the joy, and as such sportsmen, businessmen, and adventurers who attain feats far beyond the dreams of the average individual must continue to drive in the direction that feeds their sensation of being alive.  Think of Ranulph Fiennes still breaking adventuring records in his late 60’s.  One of the biggest lies you can feed yourself about the nature of memory is that any one experience can justify a period of boredom or inactivity.  In a period of doing nothing, the memory of the previous present will more often than not only make the current present seem that much more bitter.

This is not to say that there is no value to memory.  Memory performs many important functions, but most of these relate to teaching us lessons from the past which we can use to make our future present better.  Memory as pure nostalgia is largely useless in that it gives us any benefits in the present.  Reminiscing about shared memories with a friend is very different to sitting alone thinking about the past.  The first case falls under the category of an experience which is enhanced by those memories having been laid down in a previous present shared with another individual.  Reminiscing on your own is rarely an enjoyable pastime, as the memory serves to create or catalyse any new experience save for either a yearning for an unrepeatable past or a regret for mistakes or hurt in times gone by.  With nobody to share these things with, like Christopher McCandless found, the value of them is diminished, with somebody with which to share them, the memories become aids to better new experiences.  That is the difference.  Your experience in the present and the memories it creates should be the stimulus for new and more fulfilling experience down the line, since the memories on their own are bound to disappoint. 

Your Personal Fetish

Look at your photo albums.  What do such annals of experience represent.  Each photograph is a snapshot of a time and a place that you have personally been a part of, in a way which is so much more vivid and real than any photograph can portray, and yet we all snap shutters and confine swathes of our visual life to a proxy memory.  Is there a sense in which we feel we were never really there if we don’t have a photograph, hard evidence that we were?  

Whan an individual dies, they carry all their memory of place, time, and people with them.  If they chose to record nothing, tell nobody anything of their lives, and take no photographs, then to all intents and purposes, they never really existed.  “If a tree falls in a wood and nobody hears it, does it make a sound.”  Time carries on, birds sing, plants sprout, and everything is the same as it ever was.  But even if we do record our lives, take photographs, perhaps attain fame and become the star of films, magazines, and the collective culture, our story is still destined to die out somewhere along the passage of time, when the last photograph has crumbled, the last people who remember you die out, and society finds new icons to raise up.  Why then are we so insistent on making a record of our own lives; of fetishising our own existence?  Even if people do remember us after our deaths, we will not be there to experience our posthumous fame, and as such we might as well look to the span of our lives and forget how we are remembered after it.  The Roman emperors, in a bid for historical immortality, had their faces put on currency, their figures frozen in marble, and painted into frescoes, and yet most of us have far more images of ourselves in circulation than any emperor was able to muster.  None of this will matter when we die, the knowledge that we will be remembered after we die is only of any value to us whilst we are still living, when we could find many more positive ways to gain gratification.  Christopher McCandless, the American who went on a personal pilgramage into Alaska in the attempt to find peace and happiness, scawled out as a last message before he died of hunger, “Happiness is nothing if not shared.”  His personal realisation that in many ways his life had no meaning when not thrust into the fire of society is common to all of us who feel the need to ensure other people experience our humanity, either through our personal contact, or through spreading our image in the medium of photographs, writing or music.  

Photographs represent for us the need to be cemented into society, to prove we exist, to prove to ourselves as well as to others that we have experiences, that we love, we hate, we feel.  We are incapable of trusting our own memory, or of accepting how hugely insignificant our lives are to the world at large, and to the passage of history, and as such we fetishise our own experience.  Part of our frustration at society is that it does not realise  quite how important we all are, that the grand story of your life that you live out and annotate with photographs will never be as important to me as it is to you.  That’s just the way it is.