Why we live

Right now, I'm thinking that there are two reasons why people go on living: hope, it might be uncomfortable to quit.

creatures, harm,

Whenever one creature harms another, this is less than ideal.

Two things that I can now think of as causes for harm between creatures: lack of understanding, and conflict of interest. These need consideration. I think them to not be sufficiently encompassing. What about intentional versus unintentional causation of harm?

Anyway, the definition of harm needs to be considered as well. Is to withhold vital information from someone who needs it to harm them? Perhaps. If you push them out of the way of oncoming traffic with such force that you injure them, is this harm. Perhaps not. So, how to define it?

ecosystem, purpose of reproduction

In a perfectly balanced ecosystem, does any organism die of old age?

existence, struggle, self

It seems to me that every living thing in this existence has a will to go on. That every living thing is struggling to survive in this existence. Does this need to be the case?

every individual should be recognized as valuable, though they may be unable to survive in their present environment

an idealization of the system is the idealization of its components

Conflicting interests and survival

I haven't taken the time to read about the best way to keep a persistent caterpillar thing from eating my rose bushes, so I've been policing them a couple of times a day and thumping the little guys to some other location. As I do this, I wonder, "am I effectively killing them by changing their environment?"

I have had this quandary with house flies as well. Because of our conflicting interests, our struggle ends with the death of an animated entity. What does this little body, processor, and perhaps other things have in common with me? What is consciousness and am I destroying one by killing the fly? If the fly doesn't have any consciousness, then do animals? How about Coco, the gorilla who can communicate to some degree with sign language? Does she have consciousness? How about a new-born human?

So, on abortion, my stance is simple, "yes, you're killing something. We're not really sure what, but there's definitely some kind of potential which is lost. Now, this may really be the best thing, all things considered". This seems, by my understanding, to be similar to some native American beliefs. We have to kill the animal and eat it to survive. While it would be nice to live without this bloodshed, it is simply a way of life. And there seems to be a mutual respect and peace between man and beast (if such a term may appropriately be applied to the latter).

So what about the fly - and the newborn infant? How about those is Sri Lanka who fled for their lives, only to return home to land which was now privatized? This would be an instance of displacement for personal interest and obvious conflict. And, it seems to me, that this situation is very similar to my removing the caterpillars who are eating my rose bushes: my interest is bringing about potentially negative consequences on other living entities (I know, "living" needs definition).

I saw a video on youTube which showed, I guess, millions of mice on these people's farm. I mean, they're all going to die, right? There's just not enough food to go around. So maybe some consciousnesses are just born/placed/something in the wrong spot for survival or eudemonia and toasting them is perfectly justifiable. Something about this rubs my ethic a little weird, but I don't yet have a concrete explanation for it.

Anyway, more later, I guess.

Reproduction, purpose, systems

Perhaps the constituents of nature do not reproduce in order to ensure the survival of their genes, but rather to feed those who are in a different place on the food chain with their offspring.

The tree will live, whether it produces fruit or not. However, the animals which depend on the tree's fruit (offspring) may not.

It is peculiar, however, that, having produced their offspring, animals vary in their protection of the offspring. Some animals eat their young, some give their lives to protect them.

Human connectedness, systems, coersion

As I think about solutions to global problems, the way people think continues to be at the forefront of my thinking. It seems to me that we don't need better systems to govern people, we need people to think better and govern themselves.

We have these systems in place which are supposed to protected the everyday common person with an objective means of coercing those who violate the agreed-upon rules. One of the problems with this approach is that, once a person has violated a rule, we don't know what to do with them. There are those in the mass who scream for punishment according to the crime, and this appeals to the vengeance in each of us, perhaps.

But when we "punish" them, what do we, as humanity, lose?

Samba, an linux tool to connect to windows file sharing clients is one I find invaluable. I was reminded of another tool which I find valuable which has been hurt by our societal law system. ReiserFS is a filesystem, that is, it is a specification and implementation of a set of rules for just how to write the bits of data to the hard drive. There are a bunch of different filesystem types, each using different pattern of writing data and logging where they put it, indexing it, etc - each for different purposes. So this guy Reiser (along with a team of folks, but the fs bears his name, so who knows) came up with such a filesystem which does some really neat things. He's (I guess) in jail now with a conviction of killing his wife in a (I think) first-degree manner.

Now, I'm not prepared to say whether he killed his wife or not, but I do believe that society suffers because he is now behind bars. Granted, if he could be expected to go on serially killing people, then it may be a different story, but perhaps (assuming he did kill her) it was a singular act of rage (or whatever), then there has to be some better way of dealing with the situation.

Long example of a point I find simple to say, hard to do: to realize a humanity that we all affect each other. I think, perhaps, that many stand behind the auspices that it is a system which was put into place which does good and bad things, so they're not responsible.

But it was people who put the system in place, and I will argue that they did this in order to not be personally responsible for their personnally-held beliefs.

Robert Mondavi Vinetta

Really nice bottle, especially considering the limited availability of good wine below the 20 dollar point here in PA.

Very full mouth-feel. A little stand-off-ish at first entry, offering only dark fruits and mild tannins. Develops over the first glass to offer some black and red cherries, some tartness (underripe cherry style), more developed tannins, and pronounced French oak.

Second glass opens more to offer some orange and a little bit of yellow fruits, with a developing nutty character which is probably most dominantly pecan. Lots of French-style grenache/syrah dark-cherry flavor. Tannins holding up nicely.

desire for relationship, self

So, what is this unfulfilled desire for someone else, this unrequited love? It seems to be something portrayed in film and theatre for many years. It is, if I may be so bold, a common theme to many productions, if not considered a fundamental concern of the human condition. So why does this occur?

I find it interesting to consider the rarity with which someone claims to be broken with desire for someone they've not met. This is rarely attached to those who appear in movies, for instance. One may say that they are attracted to someone they have seen, perhaps in a movie, but they rarely demonstrate profound desire for these individuals. So there must be a requirement of some kind of human interaction.

Perhaps this is, then, a problem of hope. If you have no hope that you will ever have the something which you desire, then you either don't develop the stuff necessary to have this kind of unfulfilled desire or you find a way to deal with your conviction that it will never happen. Either way, no emotion/feeling/whatever exists where there is no hope. So how does this hope develop? It must come from experiences where the one party feels some kind of satisfaction with a particular interaction and wants more, and, as more interactions take place, they feel the satisfaction of this further hope.

Then, of course, as the story goes, the satisfaction stops when the other individual is no longer willing to give what the first desires. Like being fed just enough to be kept alive, and then having the food source disappear, or become unsteady. Problem is, the thing doesn't die like an animal starved of food. It goes on as, well, a ghost or zombie. Refusing to let go, yet not really having enough for life. And both parties suffer. Well, sometimes.

So, there has to be some way to do this well - some piece of understanding or substance which allows the desirer and desired be free. Perhaps this is self.

Self, with respect to other people, is one I have a hard time with. You have to have it to be attractive to others, it seems, yet too much of it, and you don't really care about them. Or is such a definition of self necessarily flawed? Does one necessarily give something of one's self away when one desires another? This would seem to be the case. How common is it to see someone who has loved/desired/something and been shot down, only to never love/feel/whatever again. By some definition of self, they would seem to have gained an epitome of it: they have themself, and that's all they need. Then, at the other end, you have people who continue to pour themselves out on others, are constantly broken, and are simply a mess, looking for anyone who will give them... something. Perhaps they expect to get the stuff of personal satisfaction from some interaction with someone else - someone to tell them "you're alright". Then, of course, if you can really persuade them, then they feel good about themself and quit caring about other people's input, and people have a hard time feeling "close" to them.

Uh, so, um, I don't know. I guess self needs a better definition: a better way to approach this thing of relationship with others.

uniqueness, identity

I guess I had in mind to write something about the way I was feeling, and set about to add a blog to my facebook. Turns out you can only reference a blog somewhere else. So, I've gone through this rigor and now I have a blogspot thing. As I set up the account, I was asked what domain name I wanted [whatever].blogspot.com. I picked becomingguru, as this is a name I found to be available on gmail (so I assumed it to have some uniqueness), and it was a representation of my feeling at the time. Turns out, it's taken. So, my hope for a piece of uniqueness in the world is dashed.

I have had this type of discussion on occasion. Once, the problem was refined to something like: if two people of exactly the same genes could be plugged into the matrix, so that they could, in fact, effectively be at the same place at the same time, would they do all the same things. If they did, would they be the same person.

So, now, the problem presents itself as an identity problem, perhaps. I have no idea how to solve the above problem, by the way. So perhaps there is some other way to approach it. If people have consistent desires (I know, big assumption, and needs definition too), then maybe we can make a claim about wanting to be unique, and therefore, this uniqueness must exist. This is problematic to argue as well.

But, even if we believe that such desire can be an argument for uniqueness, can we be sure that we really want it, or more important, is uniqueness important? I had a discussion with a friend recently who suggested that we are all just playing roles and fulfilling functional roles with one another. This suggests that there is a set of qualities which stand at your person-to-person interface, which define your interactions with another person. You have a handful of interactions which you can call on and get particular results. If this is the case, then someone with the same method signature can be dropped into your place, and your world will go on without you. I find this suggestion to be depressing. She feels it to simply be "the way things are"

So, back to the problem of identity, and why people like people. I find it interesting to consider a posited interaction: "Do you like that person?" "I like what they do for me." We would all (I think) say that this would be considered a shallow relationship. Yet, is this not exactly what is proposed by the "functional relationship" suggestion? Most people would consider this relationship lacking. For some, I guess, this applies to all relationships and causes the anticipation of life to simply be bland.

I continue to hope, however, in some kind of self. Something which makes me different from you, and gives me substance beyond what I have or can do for you. I hope that you have this quality too, so that, as we grow and change and communicate about life, that there is something of someone else which I can really touch. I want you to be something, perhaps so that I am not alone. I'll have to think about that one. And I want to be something to you.

If we're all just performing functionally for the things we want, then we're all just rats being taught a maze so that we can get the food at the end.

And I guess there are a lot of people who believe this, cognatively, anyway. But I think that it's no way to live. If there is any desire, if there is any truth, then there must be self. Self to drive the desire, self to recognize the desire, self to realize the fulfulment of desire. How can there be fulfillment of desire without self? If I am only driven by external forces, how can I feel anything internally?

So, I guess I've arrived at a claim to answer the question of the title: we must be unique - not because this is in itself useful, necessarily, but because we have to have it to be human.