A New Book

I find it easier to write letters instead of long detailed stories or papers. Most of the writing I do any more is for conversations between two or three people.  These are people that I have stayed in contact with over the decades. Once, every now and then, a new correspondent arises.

When I have drafted a letter, I frequently grasp the guts of what I set out and retool it to become a blog post like this one. As I have been engaging a friend on the topic of life with God I have gone running back to a philosophy texts.  I have landed on a new book. Right now, I am reading Blackburn's book called The Big Questions. In the section I am looking at he is working through what philosophy thinks about consciousness.

At the end of the 19th century, based on Descartes comments there were philosophers who thought our mental nature constituted the ghost in the machine. Our hands, eyes, etc., transmitted information the material brain which then relayed the information to our spirit, soul, ghost, whatever and then it relayed back to the body what to do. This is dualism at its most mystic/religious. What we mentally conceive of as who we are, our personality, our morality these philosophers said was to be found outside of corporeal being in an unknowable ethereal essence.

If there is no God or god or divine or spiritual river than this is nonsense. The question then becomes where do we draw any conception of right and wrong from? Is morality relative? Is morality a farce?

When you are looking up at those stars it is scary to go down these rabbit holes of thought. We want there to be very clearly defined right and wrong. We want existence to be defined and knowable. But we face so many examples of dubiously defined wrong, say Jean Valjean and the stolen loaves of bread taken for the starving children. How do we come to a base for a moral code without having to create a god to set the ultimate rules in place? You know those ultimate rules; do not steal, do not kill, do not fuck somebody else’s partner.

Moving beyond right and wrong the real frightening part is that we are merely an aggregation of molecules bound together for a very short period on the cosmic scale, that in span of eternal space and time we have no meaning whatsoever. Why is there life, why do we live if there is no purpose? If humanity is merely a fungus on a spare rock in the universe why do we struggle and strive, why is that force to accomplish something so strong within us.

I don’t know the answers to these questions and sometimes I feel so lost. Don’t read this to be defeatist or implying a sense of depression because neither is accurate. Up until my last breath I will keep trying to figure this stuff out. I swear.