...ramblings...

Over time, humans have tried to put their fingers on what made them human; what constituted their being or what represented their consciousness. They tried to separate themselves from their environment. Eventually this led to realizing that the body was itself part of the environment, and the distinction should be made clearer. I assume that once the vital functions of the heart became apparent it only seemed necessary to attribute their feeling capacities in that direction. But that was just the beginning.

Basically, after countless levels of stripping down the human anatomy, we have identified so many different factors that affect the way we think, reason and perceive. Anger, fear, love and hate all indicate chemical changes in our bodies and can potentially be introduced into a person externally; we take medications that affect our mood, drugs that affect our personality and lose it all in senility.

Yet with all this information around, I find scores of people referring to their selves as constant things; as the rocks on which their experience has been built. Some will describe a process called finding themselves, I'm not sure if that is meant to be taken literally, but however it is taken, it seems to imply this recurring theme of one personality per person, and one 'way' or set of 'truths' per subjective experience.

Being born in a postion that left me susceptible to the shackels of organized religion, yet having just enough access to the right information, I'm luck to have barely emerged as an amalgamation of humanist values and the nagging desire to know the truth.

I've spent the past few months in heavy introspection. I've denied myself the comforts of philosophical convenience in an attempt to find the least biased way to look at life. I move away from anything which sacrifices logic to please the mind's desire for harmony; I move away from any kind of philosphy which, in desperation, jumps the final step and heads directly to the resolution. I've stripped myself down to the most basic components, trying to find out if there's anything more to my existence besides these overwhelming urges for sex, food, warmth, social acceptance, etc. I have attributed anger to chemicals in my bloodstream, I understand intelligence to be sophisticated pattern recognition, and any personal qualities directly linked to either of these. People are products of their environment, they say, yet 'they' turn around and blame deviants for being deviants and want these people to be more like them. Serial killers have siblings too, yet not all of them turn out the same way. Does this mean that the environment really doesn't affect your development, and that people are really every bit responsible for who they are? No. It simply means that your environment is not your continent, state, municipality, or living space. Your environment is your experience.

I would not be who I am had I not experienced every thing I have experienced. I am a record. A template. A memory store of an organism's existence. A biological hard drive with a large disk space and simple recursive algorithm to make decisions based on previous observations.

There's a lot of truth in what Pascal believed about atheism; that when you cease to believe in a supreme being, life ceases to have meaning. Well at least its true of me. And to be completely honest, the only reason I keep my humanist views is to avoid being a failure of evolution. The way I see it, I have failed to integrate into a society which I have been constructed to adapt to. By rejecting the values of society I'm being an unstable organism and I pose a threat to the survival of the race(if I start breeding deviants like myself who refuse to integrate with the social process). So I am a secular humanist because if I wanted to be a crazy person, it would literally make me a failure of evolution to produce a worthwhile addition to the population, so whilst I feel like life is pointless, I might as well add contribute positively to it, lest I make my pointlessness even more pronounced.



And sorry for making you read all this - that's if you actually did read and didn't skip to the last paragraph . Let me know what you think, so I may think what you know. I'm off to bed now, I need to be up in an hour.

 

No not really, it's been a long, slow process. Honestly I wouldnt trust it very much if I'd arrived here through tripping(I'm still quite young), but I'd probably have arrived at the same conclusions anyway.

 

I realize that being a secular humanist incorporates me into a subgroup of the population, and is precisely the reason I am one. It's the closest thing to civility I'd like to identify myself with, yet I'm only doing this because my only alternative would be to regress into the depths of my mind and become a selfish manipulating person looking out for my own interest. And I see no reason not to do this, except for the fact that I would be completely alienating myself from any kind of meaningful social interactions... leaving me a free agent acting independently of the goals of any section of society. I'd like to believe that there's a part of my design which enables me to stay attached to society even with these enormously antisocial tendencies.

Since all my logic comes from biological analysis, it would seem to me that if after all my thinking I went on to become useless to the society in which my(allegedly optimum sized brain was engineered for), I would no doubt be a biological failure, and nothing would distinguish me from (no offense) a mentally incapacitated person or an undeveloped fetus. I'd like to think that all this thinking hasn't corroded my innate biological purpose, otherwise I havent made any progress as an evolving organism. That would make me an evolutionary dead end.

I have this strange feeling that there is some kind of higher organism behind all these evolutionary processes(nothing like any gods I know about), so even if I cant find any meaning in this life, I can just participate in the mysterious process just to see where it leads...