How Do I Know What I Know?

I'm not sure where knowledge goes or anything. I guess it's basically memory, but a little different, like i know how to type but I don't "remember" it. But I guess I can treat it as the same thing.

Nobody knows exactly where memory is stored in the brain. The brain doesn't have a "hard drive." In fact it seems that memory is stored all over the organ; perhaps memory is stored in the part of the brain that percieved it. A computer's memory is finite and knowable. Even on a huge hard drive you can quite easily count the ammount of data it contains to infinite accuracy. The brain is the opposite. We can't define a specific or discreet boundary for our memory, so in some ways it's boundless and infinite. We find there are many layers of our knowledge and thought. Some of our knowlege we are consciously aware of, but most of it is deep in our subconscious. An experience can bring out knowledge we didn't know we had, drudging it up from the bottom of the cool swamp of our subconscious.

Our knowledge  comes in to our brain through our senses, primarily. Reading, hearing people talk, watching things, or percieving things originally for ourselves. But, perhaps, there is an undercurrent between the cool pools of our subconsciouses, an underground resivour we can all connect to. There is some human knowledge that we all seem to be born with. Some kind of memory passed down from our ancestors, from the monkeys in the trees, from the first muddy fish that sloshed on to dry land. The boy in the road knows that stealing is wrong and he knows what other humans are and he knows that if he prays they will hear him. His father told him that but it seems like there's something in his head that was there when he was born, that's part of the swirling and vast consciousness he, like all of us, came out of.

Or not. Maybe we're all just seperate with none of this spiritual crap.

10/15 Our Meaning

This question is kind of ridiculously vague. So what is the question even? It's just two words. actually it's not a question. What I'm going to take it to mean is what is the meaning of us, our species, humans.

That question implies that there is a meaning, which is itself questionable. It's like this: When you're making a computer program, before you do anything, you have to tell it to "include" a bunch of other code and programs for what you're saying to make sense (true story; im in computer science ONE!). So this question only makes sense in the context of the general human assumptions that:

1. Meaning exists.
2. We have meaning.
3. We can know our meaning.

So first off, what even IS meaning and how do we know it exists? I'm not going to go to the dictionary for this. Actually I will....

"the end, purpose, or significance of something"


Actually that doesn't really help. "End", "purpose," and "significance" are all equally human and equally questionable synonyms for the original word. When you can't really define something it's best to look at what it does, and what the actual function of the concept is. So what does "meaning" do for us? Well, when something is meaning-LESS, we feel like we shouldn't bother doing it. Something without meaning shouldn't bother to exist. As in, there has to be a reason for something to exist for it to..... bother existing. Ok wait.

Cause and effect, which makes a lot of sense, says that EVERYTHING that happens has a CAUSE.

I just said that we don't do things that are meaningless. Meaningless things shouldn't bother existing.

If everything that exists has a cause, why would it not also have a meaning? How could you possibly distinguish between meaning and cause?

Well meaning means that something has a goal at some time in the FUTURE. That it's going to do something. That there's a plan to its action. But ultimately, in the universe, I don't think we can distinguish between an event's cause and its implications and effects. Although cause and effect flow forward through time, I don't think it's really two distinct concepts; it's all part of the same event. So the meaning of anything, then, is the same as the cause, and the same as the effect; it's all implied and tangled up in the same event which we can only faintly distinguish from all the other events ever. So an event's meaning is implicit in its very existence.

I got confused, so I'm basically saying that everything has meaning. Or that nothing does. I don't know.

WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW??

There are a lot of things that make us human. We build buildings and wear clothes and communicate meaningfully and come together to form things greater than ourselves. But one thing that's really intrinsic to being human is that we all, in some way, somehow, believe in God. I'm not talking about having a religion or anything like that at all. I  don't even mean that we all believe in a soul or a supreme being or anything. There are atheists out there, and there are people whose religions are so twisted that they aren't really religions at all. But everyone believes in something at some time in their life. There's something subtle but important and indescribable that we all believe in simply by existing. It's the belief that there is something beyond absolute nihilism and meaninglessness, in a way similar to "I think therefore I am." And no matter how much this innocent belief in meaning is bastardized and stomped on and used to control people down to their very souls, it will always remain. Today God is everywhere and nowhere. In a way we've lost God, but when you think about it that's not so bad. Religion has been a vehicle for control since its inception. People want to find answers and those people who provide them answers are the ones they will trust and who will easily and viscously manipulate them, into anything from slaughtering other humans to building giant stone triangles. So the downfall of "God" as an institution is not so bad. Of all the things I think have gotten worse with modernization, God has gotten better. A lot more people feel the freedom to find their own meaning and spirituality. And although a lot of teenagers today are waking up and realizing that what they've been worshiping all their lives might be a lie, that's just how it is. It's the truth and more people are starting to realize it. Today we're finally starting to make the distinction between the God you find for yourself and the God other people force in to your head. And that's something we hadn't been able to talk about for the first ten or fifteen thousand years we existed.

Was Candide's punishment deserved? (according to annie this is the question this week)

I'm not really sure how to judge this. Candide was written in 1759 (I totally knew that and didn't look it up on wikipedia just now.) So not only was that an entirely different time, but the book really takes place in a fantasy land. It might have been normal for this kind of punishment to occur in 1759, but I think this is an exaggeration of even the harshest punishments. It's also an obvious plot device used to set in motion the entire rest of the book. So was it deserved? Absolutely not. Not only is it ridiculously harsh, it's stupid to even punish him for such a normal and healthy act. There's not even any real justification offered. It's assumed that it's because Cunegonde is so high status she's expected to not do anything, ever, with any man until she's married. But then why isn't she punished at all? This is a really weird question when I think about it and if Annie's wrong about what the question was this week then I'm going to feel dumb.