Perspectivity
Those that know me know i’m an overthinking, under-rested weirdo. I’m prone to speculate on everything from the color of a sound, the solidity of an idea, or the true transparency of light. My upbringing has given me a very skewed scope, i admit. My education has also told me that there’s no such thing as a true scope either. Somewhere through my experience i’ve come to believe that it’s good to realize that everyone’s experience is viable and changeable, and i try to keep this idea in play even as we’re volleying anything.
This type of perspective often throws people off. It’s made me think that most of the time people suspect that an opinion or idea must be genuinely believed in to even be talked about or considered. It makes me seem as though i’m merely arguing to get someone angry. Tends to place me at odds with empiricists whom are so certain that any questioning beyond their totemic library of personal [worldly?] experience is often seen as an affront to their intelligence or identity — as if my proposal is given as the one true way. And that’s it.
Said before, i’ll say again: I’m a simple man, but the ways in which i must interface with the world are becoming ever more sinuous and complex. I think that’s a healthy way to be, really! But i won’t try to sell you on it right here.
While playing the devil’s advocate, I guess my true motivation is not to be seen as the devil at all, but moreso a mere magnifying glass or means to catalyze a set of loosely formed opinions, to reflect and re-process things that might have more streamlined/elegant answers. When a viewpoint obviously stunts a person’s perspective, it might be worth nudging that wall to make sure it’s not a heap of cracked dust just ready for demolition.
How this applies to you, dear reader, i’m not quite certain. Been on this trip (and all thoughts are trips, you hippies) for most of the day and i’m merely releasing the steam before it comes out jagged.
A good example of this stance is captured in the following interview with Arthur C. Clarke, (taken from the July, 1986 issue of Playboy magazine):
ON MYSTICISM:
PLAYBOY: You write about the mind’s transcending, leaving behind, its material organic base, as you put it. Why do you regard the departure for the physical realm — leaving planet Earth — as desirable?
CLARKE: I guess that it’s just hard to imagine another direction in which to go. I hope I’m making sense. I guess it’s just pure laziness on my part — I should think of a new evolutionary outcome. But I’m very much against any form of irrationality and mysticism. I guess I’m a mystic who’s against mysticism.
PLAYBOY: What does that mean?
CLARKE: I’m so very sorry you asked that question.
PLAYBOY: Why?
CLARKE: It’s tough to explain. This universe is so incredible, and we constantly find new things out; but what we know may be such a small part of reality, if, indeed, reality is finite — it may be infinite. But one must always allow for the totally unexpected. So, in a way, talking about things that could be called mystical — well, I guess, I do try to allow for the idea that, as the famous scientist J.B.S. Haldane once said, “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it’s queerer than we can suppose.” I’ve changed the word queer to strange, because, of course, the word queer has taken on a different context. And that calls to mind what I call Clarke’s Third Law, which is “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” — by which I mean things we take for granted now, such as transistor radios, that would be totally baffling, totally magical to even a man like Thomas Edison. I mean, if he saw a pocket computer, Edison would go totally crazy. He’d spend his whole life trying to figure out, “How does this work?”
—To put it another way, a person’s perspective is dependent on so many variables (that are psychoplastic, or practically infinitely changeable) that anything you could possibly think of as being the “end-all, be-all” of is absurd.
In summation, Keep mutating those brainmeats. Don’t get too hung up on anything. Solidity is for the walls.
