I’ve been troubled for a while about someone I care a great deal for. I couldn’t see why, if we were in love with each other, that we couldn’t be together. I couldn’t accept that we were just “wrong” for each other when I knew that you should always be with the person you’re in love with.

It’s an embarrassment, with my love for logic and as an implementer of it in programming, that the most fundamental of all logical arguments has eluded me for so long: a conditional. It is true to me, rationally, that IF we’re in love with each other, THEN we would be together. It’s the discrepancy between what I interpreted as real and my rationality that has caused me so much pain. I was forced to accept something that went against what I considered logical, what I considered right by my own concept of morality. The epiphany is that we do live in a rational world, and my conditional IS correct but my interpretation of what I believed to be true was incorrect. IF we’re in love with each other, THEN we would be together. Put it in its contrapositive form for clarity: IF we’re not together, THEN we’re not in love. After I figured this out the pain went away immediately. It wasn’t about trying to accept the disparity between my mind and the world anymore. In fact, it wasn’t about accepting anything. It was merely seeing what is. The world we live in is rational and facts are not accepted, only known.

Animals were given instincts to use as tools as survival. Man was given rationality and a thinking mind in order to survive. It’s the use of Man’s ability of abstraction that has lead to every great achievement we have today. It is when our rationality coincides with the logic of the natural that we create, invent, and live. When something “just doesn’t make sense,” it is the duty of the individual to check his or her premises to have their concepts coincide with what is fact. Man is fallible, but adaptable if willing to think logically rather than rely on emotion. To not think rationally, as I’m guilty of and what I see frequently in others, is to spit in the face of what has made this species more successful than any other on Earth. Our power of analysis is what makes us human, to not think is to be devoid of humanity. “I think therefore I am” might be better stated, in this light, as “I am, because I think.”

The bastardization of feelings is remarkably prominent in this society. We see it in the media, hear it from friends, and attempt to use them to justify ourselves. “Follow your heart.” “Heart, mind, and soul.” “I know they’re not right for me, but I love them.” Feelings of the heart and thoughts of the mind are in no way mutually exclusive. Feelings are auxiliary functions of thought. Emotions, when used alone, are no more effective than a tank of oil with no machine. Emotions are a moral compass and logical, rational thought is the Magnetic North. They’re meant to inform you when you go off track. Emotional reactions without rational thought is like a spinning compass, going from wild, hedonistic joy to incredible lows. It is by knowing what is right through rational thought, what is north, that true happiness can be obtained through moral clarity.

I believe this is one of the first rises I’ve had to the philosophical free fall I’ve been experiencing for three years. However, I’ve been known to change my mind.

Hooray for worthless blogs and hypocrisy.

I was wrong.

What makes humans different, what makes us remarkable, is our passion.  An unwaivering resolve to learn, to discover, to create.  To obsess over things that transcend biological imperatives and nurture the sustained joy of following something we truly love.  It’s a rarity to see in a world seemingly content to pursue one simple, hedonistic event after the next; a meandering path from one transient smile to another.  The lack of passion is a resignation from our species, of what it is to be human.

Any contempt I hold for the majority of the population is merely a reflection of my inability to actualize my thoughts.  My concentration dwindles even when I’m passionate about my work.  There is nothing more dehumanizing than being lost.

Not to say I don’t miss my family and friends, I do.  But the actual yearning for the location just isn’t present at all.

Home has become whatever small piece of land lies beneath my feet.  I carry my perception of home with me and its transitory permanence is both comforting and exciting.

I’ve met a few people I really like around here and the less quickly I judge people the more I learn from them.

I haven’t been this happy since I left Durango.  Each day gets just a little bit better.

It started when I was reading “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” but it could have just as easily started in an introduction to philosophy class, wondering why we thought the Earth was flat (and why we now think it’s round), or any other sort of thought dealing with facts, or truth.  The question is “What is the nature of truth?”
To put it kindly, my knowledge of philosophy is horrible.  I found myself thinking about the question fairly extensively and I came up with truth is subjective and is only valid when it yields some sort of perceived results or convincing indirect results.  The results that can’t be perceived that are regarded as fact are due to an extension of what Stanley Fish calls interpretive communities, or trusted groups of people that tell us results occur and are believed by us.  This view puts truth within the individual and leaves room for religion and superstition to be treated as truths but also opens up a plethora of unsolvable discrepancies between facts.  This quick-n-dirty theory is essentially just a poorly thought out Pragmatic Theory of Truth, but it seems to work in my mind so I’ll regard it as true, for now.
So on to math.  Mathematics seemed like an easy place to start with truth since I believed it was the poster child of pure logical abstraction.  However, the more I thought about math on a conceptual level the less satisfied I became with my prior disposition.

Math as a Language
Parallels Between Mathematics, Linguistics, and Rhetoric

It was George Orwell that introduced (to me, that is) the idea that our thoughts are constrained by our language.  In his book, 1984, Orwell’s dystopia enforces a language called Newspeak which consists of only the most basic elements of language.  This was done in order to make thoughts unapproved by the aristocracy “unthinkable.”  His idea was limit the language, limit the thoughts.
If stripping a language of its superfluous vocabulary results in a more narrow scope of thought, it would seem that extending the vocabulary of a language would result in deeper and more meaningful thought.  The problem I have with this is that all new words introduced into a language has to be defined by the basic elements of the existing language (excluding nouns of external objects which can be defined by interaction and sensation).  A language is built from fundamental experiences that are universally shared and from these simple building blocks we construct more complicated symbols that are used to more accurately describe experience.

Using the basic building blocks of language we can begin to construct logical arguments.  In rhetoric, an enthymene is a starting place for a chain of logic in which you leave off the first step because it’s self-evident or universally agreed upon.  It creates an implicit premise which allows a starting point for the syllogism to be constructed upon.

Mathematics is built entirely from axioms and postulates.  Axioms, in particular a subset called logical axioms, are statements that are taken to be universally true (self-evident) and therefore create a starting point in which a system is built.  Extremely complex and useful systems arise from these simple axioms, but at the very base of any theorem is generally just a few fairly simple axioms; they’re the Newspeak of mathematics.

I’ve heard all my life mathematics described as “the universal language.”  It wasn’t until very recently that I started to see just how much of a language math really is.  Its basic building blocks are its core vocabulary, its rules are its linguistic syntactical structures, its theorems are its rhetoric’s syllogisms.  English, French, Spanish, and math.  Ambiguity comes with language; I think it would be hard to find someone who would argue that any language is perfect (by what measure would you define perfection in the first place?).

Math Abstractions
Abstracting the Real as a Way of Modeling our World

The real power of mathematics is how we can model fairly complex ideas through a more simple abstraction or model.  Nothing is a perfect cube, but l^3 will give us a great idea of the volume of a cube-like object.  We have done this for nearly everything in the macroscopic world.  Modeling from simple stationary objects  to fairly complex equations modeling speed, acceleration, waves, vector fields, population changes over fixed resources, and a myriad of other models we have abstracted from the “real” to put into our ideal frameworks.
I should say right now that I am in no way dismissing or critiquing the usefulness of these techniques and my argument against it wouldn’t even be considered weak.  Inane, useless, and vacuous come to mind.
It doesn’t FEEL right.  Something doesn’t sit well having to use an irrational number to define something as simplistic as a circle.  Doesn’t it seem odd that a circle, a fundamental shape, is IMPOSSIBLE to precisely describe in the language we created to specifically deal with such calculations?  Pi is the easiest example, but what’s probably used even more than pi is Euler’s number; seen everywhere from stuff as simple as compounding interests and population densities up to complex numbers and probability theory.  Even the Golden Ratio is irrational!  Though these are abstractions, which makes irrational numbers legitimate in mathematics, it feels as though these are warning signs that our original axioms in which these abstractions are derived from do not describe the natural world correctly.

A classic example of abstraction weirdness:
1/3 = .333…
2/3 = .666…
3/3 = .999…
?

The last statement is actually correct, since .999… is precisely equal to 1.

Abstracting Too Far
Leaving the Physical World

Anyone who has taken even rudimentary number theory knows that mathematics can stray far from the physical world and create its own little universe.  Amazingly, within this universe of pure abstraction, we can sometimes “get back” to the physical world through either manipulation of unreal systems or through interpreting the systems differently (for this think of control theory or Nyquist).  While these methods have proven to be very useful, they go outside of the realm of what is natural which nature, by definition, doesn’t (we’re still trying to model nature right?).
The main example that I think of when I talk about going outside nature while still staying within our artificial constructs is imaginary numbers and the complex plane.  These simply do not exist in nature and are a pure abstracted result of the system in which we created (those pesky negative roots).  They’re incredibly useful though, and manipulation can yield “natural” models and results.  I believe there should be a way of circumventing this abstraction to stay within the realm of nature while still arriving at the same results.  If nature does it naturally (duh o.O), then why can’t we create a system of describing it that stays within the confines of nature as well?

Problem from the Start
The Fallacy of  Axioms

To tie this rant up, I think the problem we have in describing nature using our current system of mathematics lies in the a posteriori nature of the original axioms.  Math, which has been described as a purely logical system, is based on postulates created by “self-evident truths,” or more simply, universal observations.  With observation you bring bias, and I think there’s the possibility that we’re running into so many mathematical problems describing quantum mechanics  partly due to fundamental axioms which were created based on observations of how we THOUGHT the world worked.  The macroscopic implicit truths don’t translate well at the atomic level and perhaps we need to heavily modify or even  abandon our language in which we describe these natural occurrences for a more concise one.
So…?

I know I don’t offer any sort of alternative here.  Hell, I don’t even know what one would look like.  I’m just questioning things I’ve never really asked myself and nearly everyone who I’ve talked to about this has intrigued and interested me more.  I’m also aware that this isn’t set up as a logical argument at all and any attempt at organization was self-serving (my thoughts meander way too much).

I guess I can summarize everything fairly well with one question:

Is mathematics truly the best possible system for precisely describing the natural world?

The two sides are the stereotypical overly logical “Left” side and the other the creative, spontaneous, adventurer “Right” side. Throughout college they both coexisted symbiotically, with Right dominating the early years and Left dominating the more recent ones. Very recently (within the last couple months), I have somehow managed to polarize them to their extremes. Perhaps it’s my upcoming graduation that did it. That the act of deciding things that will affect the rest of my life has split my mind in half; each entity fighting for control of the future. What felt like an infinite amount of options and the feeling that there is always time to do things dwindles down to only a couple of life routes. I think I’m starting to see that “sometime you’ll be able to do that” just isn’t true, and the two parts of me are struggling to gain dominance before I make a choice that loses one of them forever.

I had a dream, either last night or the night before, in which I figured out everything I really had to do in life. I awoke with a huge smile on my face and the solution in my mind. Not a simple one, but the correct one. I was going to write it down, but I was tired and how would I ever forget something so significant?

So until I remember what that solution was, or even if one really exists, Right seems to have regained its personal residence in my head for the time being; residing uncomfortably in its old chair that it has grown much too large for.

It was only a couple days ago that I was able to snap out of this self-induced emohaze. To have complete closure on this part of my life and as a tool for organizing my jumbled thoughts, I’ll put in writing my conclusions about where we’re (humans) are headed.

Nature as a fundamental necessity for human life

I’m fairly sure this is self-evident. We depend on nature for food, shelter, oxygen, raw materials… pretty much everything that pertains to our survival.

Disparity between modern society’s way of life and the natural balance

While our dependency on nature is inherent, we have created a system (agriculturally, technologically, philosophically) that separates us from nature in almost all aspects of our daily lives. We are living outside of the “rules of nature,” so to speak.

Our “mastery” of nature is showing adverse effects. Global warming, overpopulation, pollution, disease, etc. By removing ourselves from the processes of the natural world which governs a species’ population, we have created a whole new set of problems not experienced by any other species on this planet.

Future of Mankind

So we get to the other side of the equation stated in the title. From the above conjectures I think there are 2 possible outcomes. Please note that these are only based on what I have said above. I think the most probable future is one of explosions and mass destruction. Us having nukes is the equivalent of a drunk 5 year-old playing with a grenade.

Anyway.

Our separation from the basic state of nature will continue while our reliance on the natural world for raw materials will increase

Of the two, I think this is the most likely to occur. Looking at our history shows that this would just be a continuation of what we’ve been doing for thousands of years. Having more babies, living longer, taking more.

Of course this way of life isn’t sustainable and will eventually result in a complete collapse. I don’t believe that the human species will be extinct, but I do think the world population would be irrecoverably reduced and we’ll be forced to return to a state of nature.

Technology will become advanced enough in which all aspects of human life will be sustainable and our reliance upon the natural world will completely disappear

This is a much more optimistic outcome (optimistic in that we’re not almost completely wiped out, take it how you will). Perhaps there will be a day where the human species can be sustained completely void of any interaction with nature. Think of it like a self-containing bubble on the moon, except on Earth.

This is the outcome that I didn’t consider very carefully at first because two improbable things have to happen for this to work. First, our technology will have to become more advanced then I can comprehend. Additionally, it has to become this advanced before we mess up the world so badly there’s nothing left to recovery. But considering the rate technology is advancing and the ingenuity of mankind, maybe there’s a chance this could happen. The second thing is we’d need to eliminate our natural tendencies, most importantly our biological imperative to procreate. Sustainability cannot be achieved with the population growing the way it is (or would be, since I assume it will be even worse in the future). I was even more shaky on this at first, since I love the outdoors and being in it. It’s not that far fetched though, and really is just a continuation of our alienation from the natural world.

Either way…

No matter what happens, the truly freeing thought is that it doesn’t really matter what happens since it’s so far in the future. Do what you can for the living now. Do your best to help reduce the destruction of the planet. Creating a better life for everyone comes from the small contributions of a lot of people.

I’m writing this because my good friend, after many drinks and a good hour of hearing me rant about how there’s nothing uniquely human, said something which I think is pretty profound:

“Curiosity is the one redeeming factor of mankind.”
-Theresa

I give her credit for the quote even though I believe she said she heard it from someone else. Hell, I don’t even remember if those are the right words.

Besides the point.

The point is that curiosity doesn’t fit into my dreary outlook of the human species as a bastardized form of monkey. It’s the fact that we ask the questions: Who? What? Where? When? Why? and How? that makes us uniquely human. We question everything. What we see, what we hear, events that are occurring today and events that occurred hundreds of years ago. We obsess over information. People have spent their lives trying to find answers to things that are completely irrelevant to survival in any way. The quest for understanding, whatever it might be, is what nature has granted us as the next step in evolution.

I had forgotten all about Theresa’s quote until last week.

A classmate I have in Spanish is an aerospace engineer. One time before class, in an uncharacteristically serious conversation about future careers, she said she wanted to work on spacecrafts used for exploration.

“Exploring for what?” I asked. “Anything.”

It seems to me of all the undertakings humans have tried nothing epitomizes our curiosity more than deep space exploration. People throw their money, time, even lives at this quest for understanding of something that essentially has no relevance in our daily lives.

It’s done because we’re curious. We want to know, we want to understand.

This our gift; this is what justifies us as a species.