Here Goes Nothingness

What I say here has been said before by others in better words and has probably already been thoroughly refuted by some bureaucrat with an overly large vocabulary and a will to destroy dreams. Kant says that the only way metaphysics are possible is through the system he proposes and he leaves leeway saying that you must destroy his thought or come through it if you ever hope to go into the future of the mind. He was of course destroyed several times over and passed through just as many times I'm sure. The full extent to which he has been used and abused is outside of my reading range currently, I will assume he is horrendously outdated by modern standards of excellence, but still admired for how thorough and beautiful his system is. I will try to use as few passages as I can from him so that others who read this don't require a knowledge of the book to understand the meaning of this paper. Kant made the same mistake most everyone besides Astrophysicists and Science Fiction writers make, that is he doesn't take into full account how brilliant the generations afterwards will be. Sure, there will be billions of men who come after us who are complete and total jack-asses by most meanings of the word but there will be enough men(and women of course) amongst them to make great leaps forward.

"Yet the differences are internal as the senses teach, for, notwithstanding their equality and similarity, the left hand cannot be enclosed in the same bounds as the right one (they are not congruent); the glove of one hand cannot be used for another." Kant says this in the First Part of the Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics in § 13 second paragraph. I added my own emphasis of course because it drives my point home quite a bit. Having not yet established a point, I suppose I should get it out of the way. Just because it works for you and everyone you know every time, does not mean it will work for every one all the time. It doesn't mean it won't work for everyone, it just means that all things holding, it doesn't have to be real. But this has been established by smarter men than I too. I'll go a bit further, just because the glove fits you just right, doesn't mean the glove will fit others. We have gloves that go on both hands these days, they're ambidextrous and sometimes tailor made to fit just your two hands right. What does this have to do with metaphysics? I propose that we should be our own tailors for our existential dealings. Kant says this too, but does not realize the full scope of it. Now, if we want a good firm fitting metaphysics we will have to have it tailored especially to our likings, but most modern day men(yes, yes, I know, women too, but I enjoy the sound of it this way, bear with me) doesn't have the time to do such trivial things so they buy a ready-made ideology from a New York Times Bestseller, something Oprah suggests to them, they had it bred into them by some church, or a plethora of other such means and ends. Now this is sad for the human individual, but it works. Do you know why it works? Because if you force a man into a mold and tell him it is all encompassing, he will believe you, if you do it right. Just as in cults and other brain washing ways a man will not know he is trapped till he is already on the outside or someone shows him the fatal flaw of his ways. Even then he has to believe that what he is seeing is true and real, and we return to Plato. After all these years, we still haven't gotten very far into the mind yet we still try. I should rephrase, we have gotten VERY far into the mind, but we keep traveling deeper seldom at times leaving the essential bread crumbs to get back. I know this all seems like a tangent of an idea, but it will make sense eventually, at least I hope it does. If Kant is to be believe we can not have a true rational psychology, a complete cosmology, or total theology I agree to an extent. We have come so far with our slow gradual steps that we now have the ability to monitor thoughts as they are forming in the brain. Do you realize the implications of this? We can, with the full certainty that modern science allows us, tell where thoughts come from. Kant would be pleased. There's a slight problem though, where my thoughts come from and from where yours come from is not the same. There are a few amalgamations of the brain that do well to show where most of our thoughts come from but the maps are only true for a percent of the population, not a whole. Kant would think it a terrible world to live in, one where the maps you buy of the world around you only work half the time. I'll give it to Kant, perhaps there is no true objectivity if his system is not in place. There is another mistake a lot of men make, they always look for an ultimate answer, THE one truth that pulls everything they've been raving about together. There is no one truth, there are several truths and at times they too are false. Bringing back the maps, a map of Europe will show you how to navigate Europe, but it will not show you Asia. It won't show you every fine little detail of Europe either. Things change it's life I'm sure if we tracked it down far enough we could affirm our flawed logic that there was one ultimate beginning but what good would it do us? It would perhaps end a few religious battles but it wouldn't really enrich the lives we've built for ourselves here and there will always be skeptics. So why is it then that we obsess with these things that are out there? I'm not advocating Pantheism mind you, just keep that in mind.

We(and I do say we lightly) philosophers are the loneliest men I know. We create these wonderful little worlds all by ourselves and then invite others to come enjoy it in hopes that they claim it to be the next great truth. There is no harm in building gloves that are ready made to fit most anyone, but we must always be mindful that there are those that the gloves don't fit, but that doesn't mean we should acquit(Jesse Jackson eat your heart out) their ideals. We've built these wondrous worlds that envelop so much of our lives to the point that without culture and society, our brains are practically worthless. Neuroscience has shown that our Cerebral Cortex's are pretty much useless without society. Do you know what that means? I don't fully know what it means but I know that it shows well enough that we have grounded ourselves into the world we've made, for better or worse. Sure, we could all go out and be animals of the wild once more, but we've tasted better lives and we shouldn't go back. Is a rational Psychology possible? I think so, even with Kant's little world intact I think we could make a map of the mind that fit most people. Most mind you, not all. Kant might say that's not a true rational psychology though, I think it's true enough if we made enough maps to cover every variant we've found. It will take a long time, but from there we could map out the true correlations, the few things that do seem to hold steady throughout, but I think it may not be too many things.

Chaosmos is something I am not too well versed in but I've been told this is similar to the ideas I preach, that's fine, I'm okay with being the echo of greater minds from time to time, it's hard being authentic anyways. Chaosmos is the idea that the world constantly recreates and destroys order amongst itself. I don't agree with that entirely, but they have a lot of good points. I think WE(not just philosophers this time, but everyone) create the order. The universe is big, and it follows a few fundamental laws that we probably don't know yet, but the variants that can exist are probably mind boggling, but these few laws will probably always exist. Think geometry like Kant did, you can't have a triangle with four sides. It's just how we've defined triangle, we set the rules too rigid, and that's fine. A lot of people need to know there is order in the world or they go insane like Nietzsche.

Then there are men(last time I'm going to say women are implied too) like myself who are just fine floating in the abstract. The way I see it, if we look at chaos long enough will notice patterns another way to word the idea is, if you look for something hard enough you'll find it even when it's not there your brain is a wonderful machine after-all and can draw connections for you if you'd like. Who cares if the connections are valid, we've drawn the line, now pick a side. Most of us live privileged lives or completely squalor lives, what I'm trying to say is that some of us are better friends with misery while others know the habits of happiness. That doesn't mean either are wrong, it just means that they don't always come bearing the same outlook on life or the same vocabulary to define themselves. I've created a rational psychology for me that works nearly perfectly and I've also made a wondrous cosmology, though it is severely lacking but if I told it all to you it wouldn't do very well, because it's pretty centered around me not you. Kant's world of thought is centered around him, just like most every other Philosopher's and as we've been over his model may fit a lot of people, but it doesn't fit them all.

I believe the next great leap in human conquering of stuff(this includes God/nature/whatever you want to put inside), because that is after-all what we do, will be artificial intelligence. Those few men among us who study every field they can get their hands on, they notice the true patterns but we've all branched off into our own little worlds that to interlink them is a terribly troubling ordeal. If we could link all the branches together, we'd have a wondrous cosmology and psychology. Hell, every field would be greatly benefited, but we should be wary not to create a malevolent God, since that would be what we were essentially making. We conquistadors of life will surely rob ourselves of life once more, we pretty much always have so let's not make the same mistake forever. The fullness of the collective human knowledge is immense and incredible so much so that we must often at times learn the same mistakes constantly before they're pervasive enough in all the fields to where we know better.

I'm proud of myself for the fact that it's not until this late into the writing that I mention drugs, but I mention them in the same vain as Artificial Intelligence and those maps I talked about. Some drugs will show you the edges of the map that aren't on the paper, other drugs will just draw a new map altogether. I think it should be up to you to decipher the good from the bad. A friend of mine says that you can't have true free will until you drop acid, I don't agree, but there may be some validity to his statement. Just once in our lives we should all have to look deep into the eyes of chaos if only to show us that there's a pattern if we look for it, but that finding it is a lot harder than we think. Drugs are an easy way to view that Chaos, Astrophysics is another, and at times I think politics is yet another. Drugs are not the answer but for some people they are the tool to get the answer.

Kant believed in working towards totality and so do I, for if we don't work as if there is an ultimate answer than there is no much use in our work. We're going from different directions but still we strike at the same problems. Though we may come up with different answers through our different answers we can derive ourselves a better present life. Bringing back the map idea we should decide just how far out we want to map and how far in we should map also. I guess I slightly do agree that we can't have a complete as in absolute forever and always Metaphysics but I believe that we can start small and go out near infinitely. We just need to know where to start or where to stop. I once got into a discussion with classmates about various topics of philosophy and they all kept trying to find the initial starting point of our fallacies. I would warn them that this was a never ending slope but they would not believe me, most every argument ended without deciding much of anything. You as a person and we as a collective must decide where to draw the line because nature and our predecessors did not. I'm not saying draw a line to cut things off like Kant did, I'm saying we should first identify the problem, then decided just how far back and how far forward we wish to go. I can accept forever forward, but not forever back. Once we have established a firm starting point we should work to fix the problem from there. I do hope this image is portrayed well, it is clear in my mind but I worry it is befuddled on the page. Sometimes the line should be drawn at now, fix the problem now, the past is done and cannot be undone, yet. Oh no, I think I'm agreeing with Kant again slightly. The best way to word this argument would be: Though there is no true objectivity or no true absolutes, that does not mean we cannot instill both for the purposes of solving a problem. A changing absolute is not as uncommon as you'd think, a constant variable in one equation is not present in another. We must know where to draw the line.

I am mortal and I have not died to my knowledge, so I can not speak on Theology with any great certainty. All I know is that I am here and I will make the best of it. Whatever that means.

This paper ended up being much shorter than I thought and a lot more encompassing than I hoped, it is probably a jumble of thoughts and is perhaps terrible but it is my sincere hope that you pulled something useful out of this. For every folly there is a lesson and life will teach the lesson to you an infinite amount of times until you learn it. Your lesson is not my lesson, your Nietzsche is not my Nietzsche, and thank some omnipredicate being your life is not my life. Not everyone is a talented geographer or tailor though, so most have to buy their ideologies pre-made. Don't insult them or belittle them, they did the best they could it's up to those who can graft their own world to help specially tailor the others. You don't have to, because nothing is absolute, but it's just the nice thing to do. I'm young and not nearly as educated as many I have met, but I have an earnest will to try take my arguments with a grain of salt or not, this is what I have to offer you so far.