This is from my tumblr account ([link]). I think I'll start posting some of those posts here as well.

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Unless I’m free writing, I try to make a point not to write anything in this blog unless I feel that I will be able to fully articulate what I wish to say. But today I feel like rambling. Maybe this whole blog is a collection of ramblings anyway. That’s usually what I think when I read previous entries. Nevertheless, I do try to keep my less organized thoughts restricted to other journals and such.

Life is all about balance. It’s full of collections of interactions between forces and opposing forces. Our conscious lives, collectively, are juxtaposed against each other and our environment. I feel like I’m always missing ninety-five percent of the life that goes on around me. As if I don’t possess the depth of awareness or the necessary faculties required to process the information around me. Perhaps ‘feel’ isn’t the best term for it. I more like suspect it. It is something between sensing and understanding more objectively one’s overall inadequacies as a human. Do I simply want to be a god then? Maybe. But really I think I want to understand—everything.

Of all of God’s abilities, it is His omniscience of which I am most envious. However, it would be meaningless to me to suddenly stumble upon an infinite amount of true knowledge, even if I understood it fully. What I want is the process of discovery. By extension, I want the necessary faculties required to discover and comprehend everything. So I don’t want to be God; I want to be God-in-the-making.

Life loses its meaning for the individual when the individual ceases to find happiness. I’m not talking about happiness as an abstract unit. I mean the process of searching for and acquiring happiness. If an object is the subject of happiness for an individual, at what point is he said to be truly happy? If any given moment is infinitely divisible, then at precisely what moment, or for exactly what duration of time is he said to be happy? Is it at the moment he acquires the object? Is it while it is in his possession? Is it while he is still questing for it?

Maybe it is all and none of these. It may perhaps be said that the individual is truly happy at whatever moment the object of happiness is fixed within his consciousness. It may be while he is searching for the object, or when he acquires it, or as he possesses it. We can see then that happiness is a separate thing from that which makes one happy. It is improper to say that X is happiness. Properly we should say, I achieve happiness through or in association with X.

Happiness is a subjective process of consciousness. If it is happiness which gives life meaning, then by extension, all meaning of life is individually a product of a process of consciousness, or awareness.Also, meaning is then entirely subjective, although it may be associated with externals. This causes me to wonder two things: 1) If the meaning of life is a product of consciousness, and life—as I will define it in a later essay—is merely consciousness itself, then the meaning of consciousness is to be conscious or aware. Since one cannot be aware of nothing, consciousness must be consciousness of something—necessarily the external environment. How then is meaning derived from consciousness of the external environment? Which leads me to my second query, 2) How are happiness and meaning related to or associated with both each other and the environment.

The answer to the first question is too complicated for this post. Suffice to say, I have an upcoming post which will explain partially why I believe the term ‘life’ is synonymous with consciousness. Also, realize that if that is the case then the previous logic implies a materialistic teleological purpose for consciousness—the purpose is to merely exist. But if the existence of consciousness implies a process which is capable of understanding relationships of things within the environment, then there is a lot of room for meaning to be derived from externals. (So don’t get too nihilistic just yet)

This brings us to the second question: If meaning and happiness are to be derived from essentially mechanical events (the environment, the human body, human neurophysiology, etc.,) in what way does this occur?

I’m not going to answer this right now, because, frankly, I don’t know. But I have an idea that the answer may lie somewhere within the ideas surrounding the definitions and operations of pleasure, pain, and will (I will not discuss will here, as I have not yet thought it out fully).

How might one define ‘pleasure’? Shall we call it all that is good and joyful? Or all which elicits a sensation which is positively experienced? I think, because of my belief in subjective meaning and also because there are different degrees of pleasure, that it is more proper to say that pleasure is all things which are perceived as positively stimulating or associatively good in contradistinction to what is individually taken to be negatively stimulative and/or associatively bad or evil. This leaves much room for ambiguity, but I fear one may not be able to distinguish it more exactly than this. The main problem is in finding—even on the individual level—that line of demarcation between pleasure and pain. I think the key is in context. If an experience of pain elicits an association from which intense meaning may be derived consciously, then the experience will be interpreted pleasurably, even if not immediately.

Unconscious associations may even come into play here so that the person may not know exactly why a painful or negative stimulus is interpreted pleasurably. This is the case with individuals who interpret pain as sexually stimulative. There was a study (and if I can find the source I will post it) which demonstrated that adults who were spanked as children were much more likely to enjoy painful sexual practices. Psychologists believe that as children, the subjects’ brains associated pain with love. This seems to make sense. A parent may, for example, spank the child and then hug them right after. What happens in the brain is similar to the experiment known as Pavlov’s dog. The parent elicits pain in the child; shortly thereafter, the parent hugs the child which causes the child’s brain to release several endorphins associated with love (such as dopamine and several beta-peptides). The association goes:

pain—> hug—> endorphins

Pain creates love creates endorphines

This tells the brain:

endorphins = love (the brain already knows that these two are associated)

pain = love

therefore when pain is elicited, release endorphins

Eventually, as the patient ages, the association with love disappears since the brain skips that stage and moves directly to the ‘therefore’ stage. Consequently, a person may have a desire for, take pleasure in, or may attach meaning to something, even though he may not be aware of the reasons why.

I haven’t thought out the rest of this argument. Maybe I’m just full of bullshit anyway. But this is all part of a larger experiment I’m doing with myself. I have several ideas about life and I’m trying to unify them. In another essay I’ll go deeper into some of these problems and show how this post is related to some of my other ideas.

So put that in your pipe and smoke it. Or whatever.

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