Things That Are

Did something else, that crazy little thing called laundry. Now I’m back, and now I’m going to review some ‘principles’ for my own inestimable benefit. Yes, it’s a list. First item: go back to square one. Some people do this, although most don’t. For whatever reason, usually because they already know the answer. Square one is where you BELIEVE you have opened your mind, recognized and allowed for both your ‘usual assumptions’ and your many BLIND SPOTS; that the canvas is blank, and that you are going to paint on it without prejudice and without bias. Unless those are the same thing, in which case you only have to watch out for ONE of them. And you forget, if you ever knew, that you are HUMAN; and ‘square one’ is a rather BUSY and complicated place. Square one is where honest, well-intentioned humans THINK they start. And because they ARE honest and well intentioned, and HUMAN, they start from the point of view of a ‘normal’ enquired; equipped with the NORMAL paraphernalia of human life and thought: language, ready-made and conveniently VAGUE; a belief in ‘the self’ and ‘I am a person’ and all THAT kind of thing; the usual, incoherent, unfounded, but oh-so-human faith in ‘choice’, ‘agency’, the ‘mind’, all those things that can only exist in a context of good old Cartesian dualism. What, ME? … a ‘dualist’? … oh, no, you see (have I mentioned ‘oh, no, you see … ‘ yet?) I just KNOW what I am and in any case I am OBJECTIVE (no human Is objective) and IMPARTIAL (no human is impartial) and I cannot be FOOLED, even by myself (all humans can be fooled, ARE fooled almost all the time, and are most often fooled BY THEMSELVES). EVERYONE is naturally a dualist; it goes with the territory. And EVERYONE is, whether they realize it or not, don’t care in the slightest, or are sincerely convinced that they’re NOT (i.e. have fooled themselves into THINKING that they’re not), a subscriber to the physical and logical impossibility known as ‘objective realism’. We believe, as we look out through our eyes, that we are seeing THE WORLD. We aren’t. Doing EITHER of those things. The eyes are a one-way conduit. What we see is a HIGHLY MANUFACTURED, in fact a totally ARTIFICIAL ‘creation’ in the brain BY the brain, and NOTHING ABOUT IT corresponds to the ‘actual way the world is’ … EXCEPT for the fact that the two are close enough ‘in synch’, IN A FUNCTIONAL SENSE, that actions BASED ON our ‘artificial environment’ have allowed us to survive this long.