Misc.

Most of the time, the chronological moment of an epiphany does not line up with the time at which it would be most useful. The moment of recognition either precedes or follows the time at which the knowledge could most effectively be applied to one's existence. I suppose this lends credit both to memory and to integrity, and the importance of cultivating skills in each. I only hope that I will be able, to the best of my abilities, to accurately and honestly quantify and weigh those many, many things which can't actually be quantified or weighed, yet which clearly deserve attention. Perhaps this - our inability to quantify those things which we feel the most intensely - is why we again and again try to create different devices for the measuring of things: clocks for time, scales for weight, books for record, certain gestures for certain meanings, and so on. Strangely, none of these things - time, weight, record, or literal meaning - are as important as the unmeasurable; the weightless; the undefinable. The things that I most could use some kind of an accurate scale for are those very things which resist being measured and weighed altogether. There's no way to put a mark on a wall to indicate one feeling, or another mark on the same wall to indicate another feeling. Nothing would be appropriate and nothing would do that feeling justice or clearly indicate the ways in which it is different from all other feelings. Even if there were a way, there would be no way to gauge which is superior to the other. Because of this, I think human beings flub quite a bit; but I think there's something quite beautiful in this fact. It's as if mistakes are evidence of things that can't be as easily explained by biology, and although this should be frightening it is somehow encouraging. If we don't understand everything, we're on the right track. That is, if we don't understand everything, then we still have a right to be on this track at all, because a search for understanding and meaning is noble even when it is futile. Some mistakes are caused by too much eagerness and serve as evidence to the human will. Some are evidence of laziness that exists against all logical realizations discouraging laziness. I can only hope to grow less lazy and only be eager when it is appropriate. What is it that makes us choose to remember some days over others? Some moments over others? Some feelings over others? Surely there is no equation that we could produce that would explain any of this, and yet we seem to know what matters most when we see it or feel it. Sometimes only in retrospect, and not when the knowledge is most useful, but things can't be perfect in a world that does not come equipped with demarcations.

On mind, language, trajectory, and car-wrecks

When I was a kid I used to play a game where I would walk in a straight line until I hit something - be it a wall or an obstacle of another kind - and then I would turn around at whatever angle it seemed the laws of physics would most support, as if in fact I were an object without any movement of my own but only able to be moved by the force of my impact with other objects. I would do this again and again, like a billiard ball, until I tired of the game. It would be interesting to look at language or the mind in a way that considers every concept about the world as a single trajectory, perhaps represented by a symbol, that acts very much in the same way -- that moves in a straight line, influenced by nothing, until it encounters something which changes its course (perhaps another belief about the world). Perhaps every element of language or every belief about the world has a set trajectory until it encounters another moving about on IT'S set trajectory, and then certain laws determine the way in which these two trajectories change when they hit one-another. It would be entirely formulaic, and although it would look like chaos from a distance, it would be entirely algorithmic. This seems to some extent to be how the mind works, leaving out the propensity for error that seems to (arguably) make the mind something other than algorithmic. It has - if you will forgive the oversimplification - a framework that functions in cruise control until more facts are given to it. And yet there seems to be a lot that goes on within the brain that happens not just because of the facts available to it, but in spite of them (the most obvious example of this being mistakes themselves - yet it seems that even mistakes function in a somewhat predicable manner, or at least it could be said that frequently the way we go about trying to rectify our errors is predictable, and so what we ultimately glean from those mistakes is predictable once we are aware of what the mistake is). The element of randomness seems mostly illusory, and phenomena within the brain seem inclined to function in cruise-control until they encounter other vehicles, if you will, that also are set to cruise-control. Two cars running in cruise-control still obey the laws of physics when they hit one-another, despite the fact that the resulting crash or pile-up is not as orderly as the mode of operation of each vehicle prior to the crash.