Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Questions

What is the meaning of life? What is the purpose? Why the big deal about being born, crying and laughing, loving and hating, living and dying? Why are there relationships? Why are they so important? What is so unfathomable about solitude? Why must I need someone else?
What exactly is meaning, if I am searching for the meaning of life? How do I define meaning? Understanding? Truth? What is truth? What is reality? Is it confined to what we perceive? Or is it something other, our understanding of which is necessarily imperfect? Is meaning abstract? Is it tangible? Is it a mathematical equation that will crop up on running a MATLAB code? Can it be encapsulated in an equation?
What is my reality? Who am I? Am I just defined by how I act towards others? Is my identity dfefined only by my actions? What about thought? Am I defined only by my thoughts? Do I exist only because I think?
What does it mean to think? Who is thinking? Is the neuron in my head firing at so many times a second thinking? Does it know it is making me happy or sad? Does it have an inkling of the questions I am asking? Does the brain have an idea? Can I exist outside of my thoughts? Can I exist without my brain? I don't think during sleep; don't I exist in sleep?
Who is this I? Why do I keep saying I? What does this mass of cellls and tissues have to do with me? What prevents me from taking a scapel and dissecting myself to see what I look like? Why is this I so important? Why do we never hurt our 'I', but somehow always manage to hurt our 'we'? What is it that makes you different from me? Why are your thoughts your own, and why are my thoughts my own? If this I is embodied in a physical form why can't I take it out and keep it in a glass jar forever?
Is I abstract? What about thought? What about meaning? How much of it is captured in the alphas and betas of science? What prevents me from writing the Schrodinger equation for everything? Can this everything reside in an equation? Can this be a computer program, with an input and an output, and we merely players, chips in the Turing machine? Is there a tape running somewhere with a pattern of 0s and 1s that tells me everything about everything? If not, why am I studying science? Why am I looking at alphas and betas and trying to decipher meaning, if meaning doesn't reside in them? What does meaning, truth, reality, consciousness, life reside in? What are these words, and why are we so obsessed with them we write blog posts about them?

Signing off...

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