Ondas

Essas ondas que me batem no corpo e que saem de mim, e ondulam num meio sem princípio e sem fim - vejo no seu ondular o fim de carregar. Carregam mensagens do que é ser, e do que é ser assim. São mais do que o mar onde ondulam e onde se vão - são a essência e o contexto da colisão. Da colisão entre nós, entre qualquer coisa tenha voz - a voz de todas as coisas, num meio sem fim, sendo ela própria o fim.

Consciousness and Despair

I try now to remember, reader, something like the emergence of consciousness in my otherwise selfless body, and how I dealt with the familial feeling of despair - call it suffering or dread or death - which has been so passionately fed by myself to myself in particular, and by Nature to Man in general. About this, I have to say that, for me, the birth of consciousness and the beginning of despair are somehow fused into one another, for what is consciousness if not the awareness of the mismatch between what is and what could be, between the apparently unlimited capacity of Man to imagine fresh, creative and sublime realities, and the consistent failure of Man in producing them? The optimist reader might say that consciousness does not only come with such heavy weights as dread, but that it can come - and often does come - with sparks and glimmers of what is good and beautiful. First, it is quite alright to be an optimist and I do like optimists, being myself one of them. Well, to be frank with the reader... what I am is really a kind of rational pessimist, who cannot help but to dream of becoming an optimist, knowing perfectly well that the dream reveals his personal desires. So yes, let us then assume that along with the qualities that we, Man, in retrospect observe in ourselves to be ugly, there are also qualities that are, a priori, redeeming and maybe even good. I do want to talk about such qualities, and I am sure to reflect upon them later on; but my goal right now is to define the problem, and any problem, by essence, has to be expanded on the basis of negative points which we care to at least ameliorate, if not completely solve. This implies that such valued things as we call good and beautiful, bold and brave, can only be understood against a background of those qualities in Man which are unworthy of praise and, beyond that, maybe even worthy of condemnation - although both types of things are unforgivingly and undeniably human features.

Reader, let me just state the problem is that the propensity of Man to imagine realities that go beyond what is and can be operational in the world, and his immediate, natural impulse to build such realities exactly as he imagines them - and to the most absurd level of minutia! - inevitably puts him face-to-face with limitation and impossibility. It is not the fault of consciousness that she came into being with the capacity to fantasize and with the tendency to thrive for the fantasy, and that the laws of nature, by nature of being laws, exclude the infinite dream and the utopian. Hence, the first strikes of impotence make themselves feel on consciousness, to be followed by a fervent fury - a very conscious and rational fury, at that - born from trying and failing, over and over again, to bend reality to conscious will. Consciousness then comes to the conclusion that although she has the power to choose to act in the world as is, she does not have the power to realize her own particular fantasies in that world, as if the fantasies were made of a different substance from all other things that obey natural and mathematical law. Consciousness then wishes that she did not wish - and can we blame her for that, reader? - but also that it cannot do. This is precisely when despair comes in.... Despair is the feeling ensuing from the conscious and rational conclusion that although consciousness determines herself in the world, in the sense that it has the power to define herself by acting in that world, she cannot change the world as fits her fantasy and she cannot choose not to be that way. Dread is the feeling of absurdity, meaninglessness and stupidity towards reality itself, felt by consciousness when she looks unto herself and reasons about her situation. And it is here, at this point, that she has to decide either to engage in the world as is, or stay idle with respect to it. In either case, she knows that it is a choice and that she cannot not choose.

Bird's Eye View XVII

The drama of life is laid out as a series of collisions between me and disasters. I bring with me the scars of all collisions - their regularities and irregularities, their deterministic and chaotic nature - which are precious remnants of the past and future.

Bird's eye view XVI

No sailor of the seas has ever chosen its profession - to exist is to sail, and that is reality. No sailor of the seas has ever chosen its aim either - no a priori one seems to exist. To exist is to deal with the fact that you are a sailor, and that there is no set-in-stone aim to sailing.

Any sailor needs to conceive a model about the sea in order to navigate it. To know absolute nothing about the sea means certain death; to presume to know too much is to ignore the volatility of tides. The mind of the good sailor then has to exert a delicate balance between ignorance and fundamentalism - it has to be able to know something about the tides in order to escape death, but be open and flexible to feedback from nature for the exact same purpose. This mind ceaselessly walks the treacherous psychological rope between death by order and death by chaos, rigidity and fluidity, the freezing powers of ignorance and the all-consuming powers of certainty.

The ideal of science will live on.

A lot of my colleagues are rationalists and materialists, meaning that they believe rationality should be the driving force behind science and humanity, and that everything in the world can be reduced to matter. One of them actually believes in "Postmodern science", which advocates rationality as the driving force, but states that any scientific theory is an interpretation of scientists that have a political, philosophical and social agenda.

My personal viewpoint, which I gathered from history, psychology and philosophy, is that there is an element of science - the creative, intuitive element - that is inextricably related to irrationality, and that by trying to reduce everything to rationality and matter you automatically cut down one of the most productive mechanisms of scientific discovery. Popper already realized this, making sure that metaphysics is not removed from science, since it might be a first inspiration to a falsifiable model, in opposition to the then prevalent logical positivist view. Regarding "Postmodern science", this is for me a rejection of qualitative differences between interpretations - every interpretation, or scientific model, is equally flawed and tainted by corrupt politics, and no single one has more value than any other. The scientific ideal - the curious, honest pursuit of understanding the world we live - is reduced to a political and sociological war between scientists. Having killed the ideal of science, we have no way to improve it (improvement only lives as long as we qualitative distinctions live),  nor to inspire others to do better, nor to give science the strength and open-mindedness it needs to help humanity as a whole - it is death of science.

Carl Sagan put me on the journey to becoming a physicist; Richard Feynman taught me that to have a childish curiosity about nature is what drives science.

As far as I am concerned, I will never let their scientific ideal die; even if it means putting my current and future job in jeopardy.