In studying history, only one concept has come to stand out predominantly in my mind as fact:

While the notion of ‘history’ may in its platonic ideal remain something that refers to an objective series of chronological events, the account of history by any person in particular intrinsically retains a subjective bias which narrator is inherently inseparable  from.

I’ve been working on a variety of other writing projects and have been somewhat distracted by a six course semester, but I’ve returned to discuss some of my more recent cogitations- hopefully more frequently.

My most recent revelation has been how closely place is tied to identity. It’s funny, in a textbook I read that the place where one is from and the place where one currently resides are two of the most important facts you could know about anyone. It was a statement that hit a chord with me, simple and matter-of-factly, it put down in words a notion that the process of growing older had already hinted was true.

So much of who I am, so much of my current identity, has been formed by my place of origin. It’s that sensation of ‘home’… when I come home from school, I feel myself revert back into that alter-ego, that derivative version of myself. I go out with my high school friends to the local bar, and everyone there, not matter how different, has that common denominator; we all seem to have that same mindset. Like a subliminal dialect, we are united not simply by the fact that we’re from the same place, we have an element of automatic compatibility in the way that we think- in the way that we perceive the world. We’ve lived so many of the same experiences, and those experiences have come to shape our identities. Place of origin  however, is half the story at best. Individual identity is formed not only by where one is from, but by where one has been, and by where one currently is.

I’ve noticed in my travels, that my disposition seems to change depending on the place I’m in. It’s not as though my personality does a 360, I suppose it more or less adapts to it’s environment, but new experiences, especially experiences in more exotic and foreign locations, make an impact on the person I am. The routine I assume, the people I associate with, the experiences I have; all change depending on the place where I reside. Every place I visit make an impression, and in a new place, I can become a new person.

I’ve wondered if that’s why I always feel so out of place and unsettled when I’m in transit- waiting in an airport, or flying through the air at thirty-thousand feet. It’s as though my ego is displaced, my amorphous identity is left struggling, looking for a host location in which it can grow. Aristotle said that the only way to truly come to know oneself, is to travel; to put oneself out of one’s comfort zone. The identity that one forms comes from a foundation based on origin as well as a library of experiences and travels, and the place of current existence endures as the active variable, always pushing the transition further.

Although it may not be very respectable to cite a movie as the source of my most recent introspection, I will try to redeem myself in stating that the movie was one of the best I have ever seen. Inception not only churned the creative juices of my Descartean mind, but resurfaced my thoughts on the perception of time.

In the movie, time was extended in the dreamworld; the passing of time was exponentially slower in a dream than in reality. It is a fascinating thought, and also one that seems to make sense. There have been times when I have hit the “snooze” button on my alarm in the morning and wound up in an epically long dream, only to be awoken again by my alarm, just ten minutes later. It brings to focus just how dependent time is upon individual perception.

What allows time to pass slower in a dream? Maybe it is the lack of detail required in a dreamworld- a lack of physical stimulus and confusion; maybe only so much information is required for the mind to make the connections and infer the rest, guiding itself along a path of illusion. Then again, if one has to simultaneously create and perceive the world of a dream, one could argue more effort is required- but if that were so, shouldn’t dream time feel faster than real time?

The point is that, when in a dream, one feels as though much time has passed. So,  regardless of outside stimuli, one’s own awareness and perception must in fact play a key part in defining time. It causes wonder over many things, for example-

Do people devoid of large amounts of physical stimuli, such as the blind, feel the passage of time in a slower manner? Do they live closer to the present because they are less bogged down by the processes required to interpret visual information? Or does the mind just transfer that need to process information to their other senses, making them more heightened? And what of children? Do children not perceive the passage of time in a slower manner? Is it that time goes by slower for them, or do their minds just work faster? There is no denying an hour for a child is much greater than an hour in the mind of an adult.

The real paradox that arises from these questions relates to the perception of time in physics. If time is so subjective, on what grounds can it be used as a dimension- as a foundation to which the fibers of existence are tied? It is slightly unsettling in that is seems to take the universality out of physics. To me, the subjectivity of time seems to separate all of us from one another because the only way the concept of time as a dimension and the subjective idea of time can coexist is to say that each person is a universe unto themselves, where all physics are subjective and dependent upon the perception of the individual.

I suppose this suggests that in many ways, the universe does revolve around an individual. To each his own- the world I see exists in its exact specifications only to me. The passage of time, height, width, dept, the way the world looks, tastes, smells, sounds- it is only my universe. To everyone else it is at best a shadow to the world they perceive. Still, laws of physics seem to behave similarly enough in all of our individual universes, so maybe we aren’t truly separated. Maybe we do not live in our own true universe, maybe we all just have our own filtered version of the same thing.

My pondering may seem inconclusive, but the concept highlighted is the need for an explanation of how time can be at once so concrete and so indistinguishable, particularly when the subjective interpretation of the “passage of time”, is a factor that goes to define the concept  of time itself.

So what is there to be said of time? Nothing?… everything?… does time even exist or is it just a requirement for the perception of the individual? How could something so subjective work plausibly in a universal model for physics? Can it at all, or are we just universes unto ourselves? Maybe it supports the concept that time only exists to humanity as a linear progression, but not so to the rest of existence. Time travel may be impossible then- if the future always exists just as the present and the past, we are not going into the future but only having it be revealed to our minds.

Whatever the case, the question is drawn. What is the relevance of time?

      We can decant life in a bottle, and give birth through a glass jar, so don’t tell me we can’t too make gold out of sand. From water to wine, maybe Jesus was just a scientist ahead of his time. Everything living and nonliving exists as but an arrangement of atoms, and particles even smaller, whose bonds can no longer repress human hands. No wonder we exist in a time of fiat currency- all that is tangible can be synthesized. Even paper money has surrendered to numbers on a screen- binary illusions telling us what we need to believe. Machiavelli would be proud; the only measure of wealth is power, the only requirement for enforcement is fear and collective beliefe in a particular illusion.

Haven’t You heard? God is dead.

     What will become of us when become completely unrestrained? When we are not only the creation but the creator as well? It doesn’t take one long speculation, to get a notion of something ominous awaiting the one’s who decided it safe, to peek into Pandora’s box.

As I watch the neighborhood crazy, she wheels an empty baby carriage down the street.  Talking to herself, she sees nothing in the way that most “normal” people do, yet manages to get on in the world on her own. People stare at her, confused by her normal attire and outward appearance, and her contradicting mental disarray. They avoid talking to her at all costs because once she gets talking, she’ll waste her breath for hours on words that to them are little more than mental jumble- Stories that seem to have no point, sentences with little connection in any traditional way. They avoid the devil of the malfunctioning conscious, they fear her even. She is a disturbance of the pooled conscious- social normality- pop culture even. She is the glitch in the system that shouts, “It’s all related! Everything is everything and everything is nothing!” Can’t they see it is not a glitch but a check on relativity, a part of the universal mind just as everything else–I can’t watch, I understand her and that’s what wrong with me. I can see her in myself.

I am in the midst of finals- none of which are philosophical in nature, thus I have been neglecting my cyberlife. However, I will throw in a random snippet of advice as it pertains to the situation of a good friend of mine:

Not all times are good. We are so tied down by the past and so focused on our current predicaments that it is hard for us to have faith in the unpredictable nature of the future. One should take the time to think- What would I be if my whole life was a good time- If I never had a bad experience? This thought is a null one- good and bad, as Aristotle says, are relative concepts. Each is dependent on the existence of the other. Without bad times, you would never even be aware of good times, and would most certainly not appreciate them. It is the truly horrible experiences in our lives that make us truly appreciative of the best experiences we have. So love the good times and be thankful for the bad. Without bad experiences, we would all be rather dull, ignorant fools.

Time is life. Time is the factor that has me reeling, because when I die, do I not slip away from all these projections in time? Do I not slip away from time itself? How is a soul to exist in time without a body? Without something to tie it into that series of pictures? And what can exist without time? Because isn’t existence nothing more than a repeated impression playing out through time? My fear is that time is what sustains my soul, my essence, and without it my soul can simply not exist. My fear is that when I die, so does my soul’s relation to time, and thus I dissolve into nothingness.

My existential fear of the unknown is constantly pulling at me. What if my soul actually does go on? What if it is part of an eternal cycle, constantly recycled by the the miraculous repetition of particles throughout the universe and even throughout parallel worlds? If it does I have no recollection of this eternal phenomenon- so memories must lie not in the soul but in the body, I will still die to the person that I am today. Even if my soul goes on I will loose all recollection of myself as I am- if this is true, then I mourn for all of the people  my spiritual half has made whole throughout the perpetual existence of time and space- I mourn for the death of their physical selves and I mourn for their lives that my soul does not recall.

Nihilism has begun to influence my take on things as well- maybe for the better, maybe it doesn’t make any difference, but it is a concept that seems to connect in my mind. I think it’s because the true Nihilist attempts to radically live in the present. I know I don’t achieve this concept in its entirety because I am not one to fully embrace all the suffering that comes to me as it comes to me- although I don’t avoid hard work, perseverance, and physical labor.
This concept of “radical living in the present” however, intrigues and confounds me because to me the present is not a time or place that can be conceivably achieved; on the other hand, some can certainly get closer to it than others. I think back to author, Tom Wolfe’s account of Neil Cassidy driving Further closer and closer into the present- the Speed, the Acid, the loads of drugs- maybe Ken Kesey wasn’t as crazy as they made him out to be; maybe the Pranksters, although killing brain cells and risking death, were actually in a way living closer to the present then most “ordinary” people can understand.
    It seems that the closer we get to the presumably unreachable concept of the present the closer we get to the evolution of mankind. A type of evolution that only logistically seems to lead to the Universal Mind. Similar to what the acid generation of the sixties spoke of when they described a group mind, in Wolfe’s book described as “staying on the bus,” in which there were degrees of experience in which all members seemed to know exactly what each other was thinking and were at the same time all thinking the same thing.
I believe, whether or not this particular example can be held as sufficient proof, that the Universal Mind could be the next step in evolution and I believe that this phenomenon could occur in only two ways. The natural way would involve years of evolution of the human brain until electronic signals break the barrier of time that separates our minds from the present. In such an instance it is unclear to me whether we would continue to exist with physical bodies, although it seems quite unlikely. It appears that we would either be absorbed into a large body of energy and that we would loose all qualities of individuality, or we would come close enough to the present that we would still retain just enough of a physical form to separate some part of our individuality and still be a participating part of the group mind. 
Then there is the second way that the universal mind could be achieved. The second and more likely way, is already visible in nonliving things and is the result of none other than technology- the communication of computers. It is much the same as a network of shared computers all knowing the same information at once. This technological means to the Universal Mind will likely beat its natural occurrence or speed up the full affects of the naturally occurring Universal Mind by a significant degree. It is not completely fanciful to imagine a world where numerous high speed computer chips could be embedded into the brain, allowing a person to process complex information in fractions of a second and send mental pictures, information, even experiences to other people wirelessly with little more initiation than wanting to share that information with a particular person.  Currently, much slower, but still similar themed technology is visible in the increase in speed of communication due to technological advances in social networking online.
The question with the technological route toward the Universal Mind however is- will the implementation of technology into the evolution of mankind affect every characteristic that is attributed to the human psyche? While with the natural evolution of the Universal Mind traditional themes of morality and virtue and a tie to nature may exist, the implementation of technology may result in the destruction of all characteristics that are traditionally attributed to humanity.
The difference appears to lie in love and human understanding. I base my concept in evolution toward the Universal Mind not only on the concept of the mathematical limit of the present but also on the natural inclinations of human beings. We naturally reach out others who share our interests and seem to see inside our inner man. We look for people who connect with us on a higher level than what we see in the physical world- people who we feel can touch our souls, friends who know what we’re thinking and feeling, and lovers who connect with us on more than a physical level. Do these inclinations not blatantly display that we look into each other for not only sameness, but also differences that we can respect and absorb into ourselves? We look for people to connect with us and who also excel in other fields, so that though one may not be particular good at one talent, one might have a friend who is and who one can lay claim to.
 We are looking everywhere for universal oneness. Hopefully we will take the long road and not the technological shortcut because all we need is knowledge, love, and the pursuit of the present, and when both passages to this evolution are weighed I realize that I am yet to meet a computer I can spiritually relate to.

In response to the Five Dialogues as well as The Republic, I was both influenced and compelled to form my own views into a theory. The following is my own speculation about knowledge, it’s components, and its relation to Socrates’ concept of recollection:

All knowledge is made up of two equal components.
1.    “Vocabulary”: Concepts, experiences, verbal vocabulary
2.    “Responses” : Common sense answers to detailed questions.

Such a theory asserts that Socrates’ concept of recollection was truly one component of what is predominantly correct.

In order to understand more dense and detailed items one must gain a more detailed vocabulary or mental classification of objects in the world around us. Even if every day experiences have no direct correlation to the English language (more advanced vocabulary words), new mental classifications, or references of recollection (based on experience), are created on a daily basis; and referenced back to later in life (whether it be through memories or bits and pieces of memory shrapnel lodged in the subconscious).

All of these new vocabulary/key concepts and new perceptions/experiences of ones environment will make up the blocks in human knowledge for any particular being. The “vocabulary”, as it was just previously specified, will make up the planks of the knowledge bridge, which will be strung together by the threads of the next subject, and next component, “Responses”.

These “responses” along with the concept of common sense, are key components in Plato’s & Socrates’ idea of recollection and shows that the concept of recollection, is in part true (as to whether or not it proves the immortality of the human soul, that is still debatable); In actuality, recollection is not so much part true, but a piece of what the large truth is. Recollection is the action of conjuring questions, and using common sense to respond to such questions. The larger truth is that “vocabulary” building blocks too are required to obtain the entirety of knowledge about any subject. Maybe Socrates did not address this because he himself did not have to teach any of his questioned peers any of the associative experiences of daily life, and that the majority of them had experienced (without any assistance) the necessary building blocks for the more basic of Socrates questions on their own. In any event however, these responses, or common sense answers to detailed questions, become the glue-like threads between newer planks of experience on the bridge of knowledge.

Because Plato did not recognize the first component of knowledge (vocabulary), and only the second (responses), he based his theory of gold, silver, and bronze social classification (which is addressed in the third book of The Republic) on unstable grounds. Because of his failure to recognize the prerequisite 1st component, he put his basis for branding social class as a foundation for education, when in reality, the two component realization goes to show that education is the foundation for social class. “Vocabulary” first need to be taught or experienced before it can grow and develop through responses. Therefore an individual’s class cannot be determined at birth, but after they’ve had significant exposure to “vocabulary” and enough time to make considerable “responses” that will fill in the gaps. 

Another effect of the two concept theory overruling Plato’s recollection-based outlook, is the added elimination of the sustainability of Plato’s belief in socialism and the concept of a perfect society created by weeding out the gold children from the bronze and silver at an early age. To my theory, success from such action is impossible because “gold” needs to be based on the absorption of education and the amount of education provided; this can not be determined early in life but only after enough seasoned absorption and exposure time has gone on, and thus there is no possible way to sort out children in the way Plato proposed & described, although he too speaks passionately of through education throughout his “state”.

What is color?

It is nothing more than the eye’s interpretation of the way light reflects off of a particular surface. Without light, color would be nonexistent. Without eyes, color would be nonexistent. Color only exists relative to the person through whom it is perceived. Who’s to say a colorblind man is wrong simply because his interpretation is different from another’s? Dogs see color in a much more limited way, and snakes see colors on the infrared spectrum that humans are incapable of seeing.

The oddness of what color truly is, the infraction of light, stuns me most when I’m painting. Cadmium Red, Cadmium Blue, Cadmium Yellow; all colors I have in my palette, and all primary colors as well. They all appear so starkly different from one another, yet they are very much the same. They are all made from the heavy metal cadmium. What’s the difference? The primary difference is how small the individual particles of cadmium have be ground down. The difference in particle size of the cadmium causes light to reflect off it’s surface differently. So while all three paints are composed of primarily the same ingredients, the colors produced are vastly different.

The truth about the nature of color is truly something to ponder when contemplating what the world is, and how much of the outside world is dependent upon one’s own perception.