Existence

I often wonder why not a lot of people think about thinking, or existence or don’t think about the nature of things. For me it has been a discovery of sorts. Ever since I can remember (and my memory is an elephant’s memory if you believe such tales; I wrote about it too quite sometime ago) I have always wanted to question the nature of things, not because I found them weird but because I found things fascinating. At times I wish I had the wonder in my eyes today that I had almost 50 years ago.  Now here is the catch-22; as I started to learn things became weird. I mean think about it. Here we are “Life” on a rock revolving around a small star in a helical pattern in 3D and the star itself revolves around the galactic centre in an helical form. What are the odds of that !? Closer home on this rock; what are the odds that humanity survived at all !? 

Is it really weird ? What is weird ? Wired is what is not normal and then what is normal ? None of us are normal, normal means some level of commonality by that definition all of us are weird i.e strange, unique, different, particular, I could go on listing more adjectives. None of them mean a thing unless there is some reference to base, a comparison against. Words and their meaning are relative; it depends on the context and the frame of reference. (I wish, I truly understood this when studying English Literature in high school.  My essays on Julius Caesar, the short stories and poems we learnt would have been quite different ). Anyway back to the catch-22; its the why and how (I wrote about the five w’s and a h almost a year ago). The how is answered in the pure sciences. The why is a meaningless question; there is no answer to it.  The more interesting question to ask is what is it ? What is it all !  Now a new catch-22.

imagine if you have discovered the answer to what it is. There is no way to express it as we get back to the limitations of using words. They have meanings that are based on a relative comparison to some ideal state of some idea. The properties of what it is are answered by how. There are imperial scientific experiments that tell us about the how. They tells us about patterns, fomrs, predictive behaviour etc. However if we are to ask a question of what is the form, the pattern , the behaviour etc there is no answer as the words don’t exist that explain what can be unexplained. (The dao that can be explained is not the true dao). What is basicly a question that is like a song from the 1940’s that was used in Tom and Jerry “is you is or is you ain’t”. It is a question about classification. However when there is no baseline to compare to one cannot classify. You can go down to a quantum level but the what will never be satisfied; there is always something that is beyond the existing words and if the words are created rest assured that there will be something even smaller that will need to be explained or defined.  

Now imagine existence as some sort of musical composition. No one asks the composer what it is , or what it means or what it is. One just partakes in it by listening and enjoys it. It is what it is. I cannot explain that musical composition to you any better than you would be able to me. We each have our own experience of it. That experience cannot be put into words because we don’t have a common frame of reference as explained earlier. It is what it is. A is A. 

The ethics and morality that are a fallout of A is A / It is what it is is a subject for a different post. Who is John Galt ?

C