The Meaning of Life is Malstructured

A thought occurred to me earlier today and that is "life is a metaphor". Essentially, we understand and structure our concepts about life in experiential terms of another subject.

To grasp this concept of thinking, talking, and conceptualizing in terms of metaphors I will use an example described by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By. One of their examples is love, which we metaphorically structure in different ways :

LOVE IS A CONTAINER
   He is in love.
LOVE IS MADNESS
   She is just crazy about him.
   Harry went wild for her.
LOVE IS MAGIC
   She put a spell on me.
LOVE IS WAR
   He persued for her and won her hand in marriage.
LOVE IS A PHYSICAL FORCE
   Their relationship is filled with energy.
   I was drawn to her.
   His whole life revolves around her.
LOVE IS CHEMISTRY
   Their is chemistry between them.
   Light my fire baby.

Very rarely do we discuss love in terms of an emotion or a psychological occurrence, and even then we still speak metaphorically about love. Our concepts of life and its meaning are structured and understood in a similar manner :

LIFE IS AN ANTAGONIST
   Life is a bitch.
LIFE IS A CONTAINER
   There is so much in life to enjoy.
   Life is full of mystery.
   In my lifetime I have traveled the world.
   I want so much more out of life.
   What is my purpose in life?
LIFE IS PATH
   I have come so far in my life.
   She doesn't know where she is going in life.
LIFE IS BUILDING
   This is the framework by which I live my life.
   God is the foundation of my life.
   I built my livelihood from my rugged past.
LIFE IS A FLUID
   Just go with the flow.
   I'm just cruising through life.
LIFE IS WAR
   I fought my way through life to get where I am now.
   His life is a battlefield.
LIFE IS AN ENTITY
   My children are my life.

It is very hard, of course, for us to conceptualize life as life itself. It is sort of like how physicists always try to use analogies to explain complex ideas. For example, the expanding universe is explained as an expanding balloon. Light are explained as ripples in water (waves) and as billiard balls (particles). But they never really talk about the expanding universe as an expanding universe. We have to render foreign concepts in terms of a familiar experience, such as balloons, playing pool, war, containers, et cetera.

Every human on this planet has a natural curiosity to the nature of life, its meaning, and their purpose in life. But considering we understand this peculiar concept of life in metaphors, in terms of another familiar experience, then we are subjectively interpreting life, not as life, but as something else. It is our inability to comprehend life as it is, and therefore we lack the mental capacity to objectify it in terms of a concrete experience, in which we would not discuss life as a metaphorical structure, but as it is.

This latter part is, more or less, and extension of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, in which our reality is limited to our vocabulary to describe it. For instance, if I walk into Ethan & Allen and see a light blue sample I say it is "light blue". But someone who works at Ethan & Allen, having more words to describe more colors would say they see "coral dust blue". The Philippines have a single word for purple, blue, and green. Obviously they see purple, but they comprehend it as a variation of blue and green. A person who doesn't know much about cars really only sees a car. So if a Hyundai Sonata cuts them off in traffic they might say, "Oh, that right. Just jump right in car!" But someone who knows more cars would say, "Thanks for cutting me off Sonata!"

Because we do not have a sufficient vocabulary and conceptual structure to comprehend the meaning of life, and until we do life will remain an abstract concept that we experience subjectively. Until we can objectify life as a fundamental experience that is as basic as war, spatial orientation, container, path, et cetera, then life will remain subjective to our reality. So far, life is an illusion that cannot be comprehended without the use of metaphors and analogies.

So what is the meaning of life? It is a metaphorical number (42). It is a metaphorical stick that bends (as Howard Roark bends the stick into whatever he wills it to be). The meaning of life is anything objectively concrete, except for life itself. The only objective statement I have encountered about the meaning of life was from Joseph Campbell : "The meaning of life is life."

Ancient Knowledge And The Illusion Of Progress

You know how religions are always bickering that their faith is the correct one and all others are false? Well, when modern science is placed into the criteria of "what is correct", it seems to be that of all the world religions Hinduism is really the one that fits the grand picture. Or is it the only one?

Think about it. The Hindus are one of the first cultures to invent the idea of infinity, an element that plays a huge roll in cosmology, physics, and mathematics. Consider also their incredibly large numbers. For instance, the incarnation of Vishnu while sleeping is Brahma, and Brahma sits on a lotus that sprouts from Vishnu's navel. Brahma watches the dream of Vishnu, which is the dream of the universe. When Brahma blinks a world age ends and another begins. A world age is 360 human years. The dream is divided into four stages, which are the various yugas. The first, the Krta being 4800 Divine years (1,728,000 human years); second being the Treta Yuga being 3600 Divine Years (1,296,000 humans years); third, the Dvapara Yuga being 2400 Divine Years (864,000 human years), and finally the Kali Yuga being 1200 Divine Years (432,000 human years). All together the length of Vishnu's dream is 12,000 Divine Years, or 4,320,000 human years. And that is only half the Cosmic Day! So Vishnu spends another 4.32 million years doing house cleaning (usually setting everything on fire and starting a flood) and then goes back to sleep to start the whole cycle again. Now these are immensely huge numbers. Of course, we know that the universe is roughly 13.75 billion years old (give or take 170 million years). This means that the Hindus were off by a lot (1 : 0.000628). Which is the equivalent of thinking New York City and Los Angeles are about 1.5 miles away from one another. Then again, according to the Christian timeline in which the universe is 10,000 years old LA and NYC are about 9.5 feet apart!

Okay, so we know things are way bigger than we had originally thought two millenniums ago, but certainly the Hindus captured the spirit of this idea. So? They were still wrong... or were they? It is entirely possible that the ancients knew far more than we given them credit for, and they were probably far more advanced than we think. I believe that Christian, Judaic and Muslim scriptures still captures the spirit of modern science, we just have to look beyond the dogma. Consider again how long Vishnu's dream is : 4.32 million years, which is similar to the length of the Kali Yuga (or Dark Age), which is 432,000 years. 432 is not an arbitrary number, for it crops up in other religions and in science. Here :

- In Norse mythos multiply the number of doors in Valhalla by the number of Einherjar that will pass through each door : 540 x 800 = 432,000.
- In the Bible 1656 years pass between Creation and the Flood, which is 86,400 weeks (or 43,200 x 2).
- In biology an average healthy human heart beats once per second. 60 seconds x 60 minutes x 24 hours = 86,400 heart beats per day (once again, 43,200 x 2).
- In astronomy the number of years it takes for the spring equinox to pass through all the zodiacal constellations, known as the Procession of the Equinox, is 25,920. Divide 25,920 by 6 equals 4320.

It is entirely possible the ancients knew far more about the structure of the universe and nature than we give them credit for. The Kali Yuga is 432,000 years, which would coincide with the Procession of the Equinox. Kali, being the Goddess of Death, also means "black" (hence Dark Age). But Kali also means "time", hence our link between death and the procession of time. Now, we can accuse Judaic religions for being ignorant and believing the universe is only 10,000 years old, but we can see clearly above that they understood a number far larger than 10,000 and understood the Procession of the Equinox. So why don't they just say it? Usually the best way to save information from being lost is to work it into a belief system. A king may be advised that eating pork is bad for human health, but just because the king says we shouldn't eat pork doesn't mean we will (consider the Prohibition on alcohol). But if the clergymen say it is a sin to eat pork, that is another story. The same could be said for pork as not mixing dairy and meat, since raw, unpasteurized dairy has bacteria that can spoil meat during digestion; or even tattoos, which can get infected, and people died of infections back then. It is entirely possible (and this is speculative) that ancient astronomers knew that the earth is really old, millions of years old. But who would believe that? To save this knowledge they would have worked it into their myths, the science of their age.

Look again at Vishnu's dream sequence. There are four yugas, which can be considered the four stages of sleep (not including REM). Could they have understood stages of sleep? Or is this speculative? What about something else, such as the four elements : earth, air, fire, and water. We know now that substances are made of elements from the periodic table. But the four elements could be an understanding of the four states of matter (not including the fifth state of condensates) : solid (earth), gas (air), liquid (water), and plasma (fire).

Understanding modern science requires a foundation, and that foundation so happens to be the myths of antiquity. It is easy to underestimate the scientific knowledge of myth. But dig deeper and we can learn so much more about the underlying structural comprehension of science. We consider progress as something that is correlated to time, and as time marches on progress propagates. Likewise, we assume if we go backwards in time progress is reversed. By that deduction we assume we are smarter than our ancient ancestors. But illumination of the myths show that they were right on par with us, which seems to be the very antithesis of progress and time. That being said, how do we explain why there are cocaine traces found in an Egyptian mummy? Cocaine being strictly a Meso / South American crop, unless there was intercontinental trade 2,000 years before Columbus. How do we explain the dead accuracy of Mayan predictions of Venus's orbit, which is in 0.1% error? That is unless they had more accurate tools for studying the stars 1,500 years before the telescope.

It is naive to think we are better than our ancestors. As Foucault said (and I paraphrase) : "The ideas of one age are no better than the ideas of another age. They are just different."

The structure of the Universe :

Yes Is More! A Changing Metaphor For Architecture

Yes Is More is the motto for the Danish architectural firm Bjarke Ingles Group (BIG), which follows an evolving series of precedents in mottoes from the last century. A brief evolutionary account will suffice :

Less Is More (Mies van der Rohe)
Less Is A Bore (Robert Venturi)
I'm A Whore (Philip Johnson)
More Is More (Rem Koolhaus)
Yes We Can (Barak Obama)
Yes Is More (BIG)

Each of the above metaphors and metonyms represent the respective Zeitgeist of each. For instance, Modernism was about the paring of ornament and reducing architecture to its most simple and basic austerity. This was seen as progressive as it was a break from past historical precedents which had dominated architecture for centuries. Since less ornament is progressive, and progress is good (more being metaphorical for good), the metaphor Less Is More arises. So Venturi's Less Is A Bore counters this Modernistic rationalism. Subsequently Johnson's I'm A Whore is honors Venturi's Less Is A Bore and breaking from Modernism, while adopting classical forms and shapes. In Johnson's metaphor he is being a whore by "working" (flipping tricks) with multiple architectural styles (clients). More Is More is relaying the honesty of architecture to architecture itself and the designer being conscious of this ontological aspect of design. Rather than allowing less to represent more, more should represent itself. So the more and more we build, the more and more entropy should follow, likewise equilibrium and organization. Progress is progress, and nothing less. Obama's declaration Yes We Can embraces the optimism of the new era, and is, likewise, metaphorical to progress.

BIG's metaphor adopts all the above, being a whore by saying yes to rules, requests, and constraints; being progressive by saying yes and, consequently getting more; being ontological by allowing yes and more to represent each other; yes in embracing optimism; yes in order to not be a bore.

I am curious if we will one day see Yes Is A Bore, or No Is Yes... or even You're A Whore!

And The Verdict Is... We Just Love Death!

Humans don't change. That is about the only thing I can say with almost sincere confidence. Some would argue that this is not so and that they know someone who has changed. For instance, recovered alcoholics. But most addicts of any kind usually find another addiction that is more "healthy". Tobacco chewers often start chewing gum (which is why every baseball player in the dugout chews gum). Some fill all their time with their family, in which obsession turned from a substance to children, which is seen as a good thing. The fact still remains that the addiction / obsession changed forms. But the underlying mental necessity of attachment did not.

One thing that has never changed throughout human history is our love and addiction to violence, death, and suffering. (Faces of Death, need I say more? I will.) This masochism is rooted very deep within us all. Although we don't actually watch people getting slaughtered in mass numbers like the Romans, we still have a more "civilized" form of fulfilling our love of death. That civilized mechanism is called a television, which allows us to spectate actual or fictitious pain of others at the center of our homes (newspapers and the internet are alternatives). Some would claim they don't watch such sick forms of entertainment, but realize that we all do. Whether it is watching the news, Law & Order, Lifetime Channel, medical shows, et cetera. The latter is probably one of the strongest amongst us. The band Tool uses this idea in their song Vicarious, in which "Vicariously I need to watch things die! From a good safe distance." From a political stand point, as Neil Postman so elegantly puts it, we are "amusing ourselves to death."

Not only is it entertainment, it is also one masochistic form of humor. I recall seeing a book on a display table called The Little Book of Bunny Suicides, which depicts comical illustrations of bunnies killing themselves. Not only did I find this book humorous, I stood aside for a while and perused another book close-by to see if others would be drawn to it. They were. And all found it hard to put it down. But none bought it, probably remembering the stance social concerns have on such a book.

But even the horrors and excitement of the Roman Colosseum still echoes today with backyard wrestling, boxing, professional wrestling (fake or real), dog fights, cock fights, and the likes. It is necessary for us to see things suffer. It makes us feel dominant. It makes us feel alive. Some take this too far and start raping and murdering. Some prefer to be safer and enjoy hearing about how horrible their ex-girlfriend's life is (something I am guilty of).Others like to be in the middle and watch it happen on TV or in books (something I am definitely guilty of). No matter which part of the spectrum you lie in, we are all guilty.

Our love of death may not be Roman, per se, but we still love death. As Private Joker once put it : "A day without blood is like a day without sunshine."

The New Defense : What Should I do?

It has been classic infantile dependency throughout history for humans to find someone else to blame besides themselves. Usually this is done through a number of defenses that transfer the blame to a higher authority or to some controlling mechanism. The former is usually accomplished by blaming the government or parents or God, and good example is the Nuremberg Defense : "I was only following orders". The latter is achieved by blaming something that would involuntarily and indirectly control you. This one has produced some of the most ridiculous blaming schemes in history, such as "Marylin Manson made me do it" or the classic Twinkie Defense, or just plain ole' fashion defect by mental disorder / disease.

But now we have a new defense, and thus far it is the trump card of trump cards : the "What should I do?" defense, and it has comically and explicitly played into South Park, and has recently been making its way into other shows like Criminal Minds. "What should I do?" alleviates the blame from the accused and onto something implicitly vague. In fact, no one or thing is being blamed in this defense. Incredibly, the accusation itself deteriorates almost completely simply because the question has no answer.

Are we ready to face this defense in court? Can the prosecution work its way around this defense as they had to in the Manson Trails or in Nuremberg? Or will it produce a minor sentence due to the nature of the defense's ability to alleviate the blame from the defendant, as it did for Dan White with the Twinkie Defense for murdering (though ruled as manslaughter) Harvey Milk and George Moscone?

Of course this defense would never hold up well in court, just as the Nuremberg Defense didn't go over well for the Nazis on trail for war crimes. But it does make for a good defense in the case against spouses / significant others, employers, parents, professors, friends, and landlords. This defense echoes the ideology of Charlie Manson : "Nothing is right, nothing is wrong. There's nothing to blame. There is only Now. Now, go out and kill some piggies for me." (That last sentence is only implied). Welcome to society's era of the figurehead, where the Man Behind the Curtain has yet to be revealed in whose to blame... even though there is no Man Behind the Curtain and the magic is only in your mind.

Do You Know What You Are Asking For?!

Recently, and I mean in the past decade, there has been a large, and I mean large, demand of people (usually white people) for a "return to the past", to the "golden days, and "back to nature". Do you realize what you are asking for?!

For instance, milk, which has recently become popular to drink raw, i.e. unprocessed and unpasteurized, from the cow to the glass to your mouth. Sounds great, it is a return to the traditional way of consuming milk without all that unnatural treatment. It's natural! It's also natural to get diphtheria and typhoid fever too from drinking non-pasteurized milk. That was why pasteurization was invented, so we no longer had to suffer from those diseases. This ideology of "returning to the past" is on par with the Tea Party movement : it propagates and augmente the recent tendency of American culture to regress from the progress we have made. And for people who are so obsessed with anti-bacterial products (bacteria, which so happens to be a natural occurrence) prefer to drink something that can and will get you sick. Not to mention that the FDA has made it illegal to sell or purchase non-pasteurized milk. It's a bit like moonlighting moonshine, but far more whimpy.

Also like the Teabaggers, this idea of returning to the past (or regressing) and to nature is similar to the Conservative idea of "small government". It is really only, as Bill Maher has pointed out, small government where they want small government. It is not some all-encompassing criterion under which all standards, regulations, laws and unions will abide; it is small government under an arbitrary microscope; hence why they do not ask for small government when it comes to the military. Same with returning to the past. Let's drink something that will cause diseases that pasteurization remedied 150 years ago... well, why don't we also do what we did 150 years ago : own slaves and allow women no rights! And while we are at it, let us embrace the idea that the earth is flat and that lightning is the work of the gods. It's return to the past where they want a return to the past.

The ideology of returning to nature is emphatically ridiculous. Yes nature is a self-sustaining system that is beautiful, but nature is one awesome monster. It is because of it's destructive ambivalence that nature is so beautiful. Everything evolved to survive, and a lot of those evolutionary moments were apart of a need to reproduce sexually, which required beauty. The night sky is only beautiful because it is a dance of destruction, where stars burn at immensely hot temperatures and explode, celestial bodies bombard one another, and galaxies collide. In nature and in the heavens the only way anything is to be created is to destroy something else. That's life.

To return to nature is to regress the human race from the habit of living, i.e. playing golf, going to farmers markets, taking kids to soccer games, making money; to survival, i.e. staying alive long enough in order to have sex and pass on your genes, which entails avoiding being eaten or getting a scratch that might get infected and consequently die from. Nature is the true dog-eat-dog world. The entire propagation of life rests on the cycle of killing, eating, and dying. That includes vegetarians as well : vegetarians kill plants and eat them in order to continue living (get over it). They even kill thousands of rodents, nominally every harvest season when farming equipment kills the communities of hundreds of rodents thriving in the crop fields. Life cannot propagate without death, which is a long recognized and honored fact of life by the Native Americans.

A return to the past and nature entails living in a world where it would be easier to get a woman than it would be to get food, which is usually the case for African tribes and, hence, the high percentage of HIV and hunger. Some men would think it would be great to be able to live in a world where getting a woman is easier than getting food... right, so long as you can live long enough to reach puberty (usually a 1 : 40 chance against) in order to enjoy the qualities of sex. But even in that case you will only be able to enjoy sex for about ten years and then die from scurvy.

There is a reason for progress and advancement of civilization, not to ruin your false ideals of a simpler way of life, but so we no longer have to endure the hardships of nature. Drink your raw milk and eat your organic produce, but don't think for a minute you are returning to simpler times and reconnecting to nature. It is because of anesthetics that we don't have to endure the natural pain of child birth, and because of vaccines that we don't have to face the possibilities of disablement from polio. It is because of gasoline that we don't have to pay high prices for bread because the grain was also bought to feed the horses we (literally) worked to death to get around NYC. Just know what you are asking for when you ask for a return to the past.

You can't get much more natural than this :

Don’t Ask What Your IPad Can Do For You… Ask What You Can Do For Your IPad

The point of technology has always been to serve us, and so technology always existed as an extension of our selves. Marshall McLuhan makes the perfect summary of how this medium works : “The wheel is an extension of the foot. The book is an extension of the eye. Clothes are an extension of the skin.” Essentially, when our own biological selves do not suffice we create a medium, that is, an interactive technological interface, as an extension of our own bodies to suit whatever it was that our own selves were lacking. How might this work? Well, let us take the book as the example. Our DNA is the coding of how to duplicate certain amino acids and nucleotides that are crude copies of certain data, i.e. how to process proteins in chicken or fibers from wheat, or the color of the eyes and skin, or the rate at which the pinkie toenail grows. When this data was not sufficient the evolutionary process developed brains to store extra data that could not be stored in a genetic sequence. The primitive part of the brain holds instincts, emotions, and anything that is more or less built from genetic sequencing. When this was still not sufficient the brain was enlarged and developed the ability to acquire and remember learned information. This information was usually how to throw a spear or what a saber tooth tiger looks like and to stay away from one. Eventually society developed to a point that there was more information than could be passed down through oral tradition, and so came the advent of written language. The book itself is an extension of the eyes, a direct interface that correlates with a process similar to the eye. The content of the book is an extension of the brain and of memory. A library can be thought of as an extension of the Collective Unconscious.

Well, needless to say the process of creating books could not keep up with the amount of information being generated. So we developed computers and digital memory. The computer is not “like” a brain, but rather is an extension of the brain. As the screen is an extension of the eye, the keyboard is an extension of the mouth, the mouse is an extension of the fingers, and so forth.

McLuhan adapts an old saying by Winston Churchill : “First our tools are adapted to us. Then we adapt to our tools.” We don’t think of ourselves adapting the computer, but we have. We originally communicated information to another mind by verbally speaking the information. Then we were able to communicate across long expanses of time and distance through writing. If you are reading Shakespeare, then you are encrypting the information of a mind centuries old and across a big ocean. Now we can do so even faster, and even to other planets, with digital media interface. But we had to learn to read and write in the interface of the book, and how to encode that data. Today we have to adapt ourselves to read and write in the computer’s interface.

Most of us find the computer second nature, and that is because the adaptation of ourselves to the tool was provided early in life, say around the same time we learned to read and write. For a good majority of us, that is anyone over the age of 30, the smart phone and all its components is a stockpile of the Blinking 12 phenomenon (that is, when the tool is provided but no one knows how to use it or simply doesn’t want use it, much like setting the time on a VCR, in which case it usually just blinks 12:00). But the Blinking 12 phenomenon only exist for the generation that has to adapt to the tool at a point when the brain is less likely to program such abilities for second nature. It is the younger generations, those 20 and younger that are more applicable to program and retain such media interface, such as a smart phone or IPad as a useful extension of their selves. Welcome to the dumbest and most useless technological generation of the 21^st Century. Your tools won’t adapt to you anymore, you must adapt to them. To do the reverse is to become obsolete.

We were the parasites to our tools and fed off of them. Now they feed off of us. Maybe this is what advertisement is telling us : Adapt to our product or be useless.