Random Thoughts, vol. 223

Hello blank page. Hello, white pixels. Hello flashing cursor. Hello keyboard buttons, symbols of abstraction. Hello characters on my screen. Hello blog readers, encapsulated as you are within the relative confines of time and space.

If a million monkeys typing for a million years could write the unabridged works of Shakespeare, can a middle-class Californian stoner with a beer, a bong, and some street-smarts craft anything of value? Anything meaningful?

There is a difference between value and meaning. Value is merely the intersection of scarcity and desire. Meaning, like melody, is harder to define. My definition of melody: the part of the song you whistle. My definition of meaning: whatever gets you out of bed in the morning. But isn't that the definition of motivation? Or is meaning the content of motivation?

None of us lives long enough or knows enough people to know for sure whether or not human nature ever really changes.

Anything you analyze deeply enough falls apart. Entropy affects even consciousness. If you define a word exactly enough, zoom into a microscope or telescope far enough, deconstruct any concept completely enough, it falls apart. I like that.

We all die in the end.

We are part of an an event we call reality, or the Universe. The cells that make up my body now did not exist when I was born, but the atoms that make up those cells were born in a star that no longer exists.

Or maybe not. Perhaps we are the work of a vengeful and jealous invisible man in the sky. Who knows? Not me. I know nothing.

Words live lives of their own. Words can provoke feelings. Words possess this power. Words can make you feel warm like an oven full of cookies on a cold, dark night. Words can make you feel sick, like bile dripping from the lips of a fresh corpse. Words can comfort like the purr of a kitten, or terrify like a knife to your throat.

The mind is a place of its own, and words are a kind of currency there (here?). Ordering and identifying, translating and exchanging, quantifying and objectifying, abstracting and specifying, logic defined by intuition.

Power. Watch this: look here. And here. See? Power.

Cause and effect? You be the judge. I am not qualified. Not yet.