Meaning Without a Shared Narrative

This Cato Institute 2019 poll has some telling results about the state of people’s feelings toward a meaningful existence. What does it mean to have a meaningful existence? Religion, of course, says that a meaningful existence can only happen through religion. Without religion, people seem to seek meaning through politics. Once politics is seen for what it really is – a soul-shaped cavity overflowing with fetid swamp water where dreams go to die – people are left with nothing but hollow materialistic consumerism. When that fails to satisfy the need for purpose, the meaning-wheel comes full circle and people seek a metaphysics to explain how the world works. The most popular of which currently is identity politics.

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Structure of the Mind

Consciousness and qualia are problems that are still unsolved by philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. My way of viewing consciousness and qualia is that consciousness is the process by which our brains organize the world into working models and qualia is the ‘stuff’ that consciousness uses to generate those models. For better or worse, both of these exist due to evolutionary forces. That means they’re fine tuned to a very specific sort of survival, not for any pure understanding of the world or ourselves. In order to understand the limitations of our own minds, we need to know the inner workings of how the world is organized in our minds on a fundamental level. That requires knowing the structure of our minds.

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Should LGBTQ+ Characters in Literature Always Make a Cultural Statement?

I am a heterosexual, cisgender, white male. A character in my novel “Incarnate: Existence” is a Japanese transgender woman. For some people this is probably already ‘problematic’ – I, of course, do not and cannot know the experiences of a non-white and transgender person. That could certainly be an article all in itself, whether someone like me should be “allowed” to write this kind of character, and I’ve tangentially written about this idea before. But that’s not what this article is about. I’m interested if, in general, a character in a creative work (book, movie, TV show, etc.) who is LGBTQ+ should always and necessarily be written to make a political or cultural statement, or can the character exist as they are without attempting to make a statement?

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Motivation

What drives people to do the things they do? I often wonder about this, because I have issues with motivation. I have a difficult time getting motivated to do things, even things I know I will enjoy one I begin them. Other people seem to have a much easier time getting motivated to do things. Some people are even so motivated that they can’t not be doing something. For me, I can waste days, even weeks, of time without ever feeling any strong impetus to be productive. Sure, I’ll internally chastise myself for having not done anything, but this rarely translates into future action. Thus, a spiral of depression begins, where I do nothing, feel bad about doing nothing, and that just makes me feel even less motivated. This is why my posts in this blog are so sporadic.

For the past few months, I have been in one of these spirals. I wasted a lot of time playing Diablo 3, attempting not to think about anything. It’s only been in the last week or so that I have begun peeking my head out of this mental-emotional trough, attempting to pump some motivation and inspiration back into myself. It has been difficult to do. I have the competing voices of depression and inspiration debating in my mind, the former telling me that it will be easier to continue doing nothing and that none of it matters anyway, the latter telling me that I will be happier in the long run if do those things that challenge me intellectually and creatively.

I’m hoping to make more blog posts – as well do the other things I enjoy – from now on. I hope that voice of depression doesn’t keep winning the debate.