On living

What I’d think about life if I thought about life

There is no «real» virtue, honour, morality or beauty. I’m convinced that this enumeration goes on forever to show that Reality, at least in relation to us, is no more than an empty set, in any way of conscious existence: we don’t have a way of not being ourselves, and we are little more than an aggregate of mental realities, call them ideas if you like: Language, traditions, signification, narratives, association of concepts, perceptions, impressions, feelings, stimulus-response associations, sensations, memories, morality, thoughts on virtue, predispositions… things that cause some sort of experience, and are in a way made up: they don’t exist outside of the mind, outside of that unique experience each of us have.

Whatever idea of reality we construct in our mind, we build it with made up tools, in a made up place, so it’s an invented reality. It’s composed of perceptions, impressions, logical deductions, narratives, whatever, but we “create” those things ourselves.

So it turns out we can’t compare our made-up reality to a real Reality for many reasons: we don’t have anything outside of our mental experience, so what do we compare it with? And they may be essentially different. Take Kantian time, for example: to us, time is one of the pillars of reality, but probably there isn’t even an analogy to time in the real Reality.

There’s actually a little relief in the fact that, having constructed logic in our minds, which is the closest thing we have to something that doesn’t make mistakes, according to it I exist because I’m having some sort of experience (Descartes dixit), so there is a set of things that exist, which may or may not include more than me as an experiencing entity. That’s Reality. Assuming you also experience stuff aside from me thinking that you do, which I have no guarantee of, you also exist. Reality now contains two thinking entities, yay.

Actually, people are much like ogres, onions and pies; they have layers, and after removing all the layers, you find… nothing. Well, nothing except experience, the act of being conscious, which I guess is what constitutes our fundamental essence, what separates us ontologically from others. But spiders also have that, so it’s not that awesome.

So what now?

Fine, we are inevitably ignorant, and also inevitably existing and experiencing, from which we deduce many good and terrible facts of life. You can live your painful puny little life in contemplation of fate, meaninglessness and the absurdities of existence, which you’ll inevitably take for real according to your invented reality. You can be like Ruth.

You can create the meaning of honour and find it dishonourable to accept a meaning other than the Real one, and upon finding out that it’s impossible to accept something that’s not there (Real Meaning), end your life for honour. Which will only make sense in that personal construction, because “making sense” is a thing only in our minds. You can be like Terry.

You can also spend your life taking Terry’s sense of honour, but instead of trying to reach Real Meaning, decide to simply get rid of all fake meanings we are made of, and consequently be very sad about how inextricable from ourselves constructed meanings are. You can be like Bob.

Or, if you ask Nietzsche, you can create your own invented, imperfect, Matrix-like meaning. Although he actually said transvaluation. It’s not real, it’s not complete or fully fulfilling, but as opposed to Real Meaning, it’s there. Like Bob realized, you’ll find that you already live in Matrix, but since it’s made up, you can, to some degree, work on editing it to your convenience, which would actually be editing your idea of convenience to match your experience. We usually call that “learning a couple of things about life”, which is just changing how we interpret our experience and how we take that interpretation.

You can be yourself.