Perspectives on the Meaning of Life: Existentialism

This is a part of the Perspectives on the Meaning of Life series.

Existentialism says each man and each woman creates the meaning of his and her life; meaning cannot be determined by a supernatural god or an earthly authority. Existentialism says meaning must be created not discovered. Thus one is free to define meaning on an individual level. In seeking meaning to life, the existentialist looks to where people find meaning in life, in course of which using only reason as a source of meaning is insufficient.

To the existentialist, existence precedes essence; the (essence) of one's life arises only after one comes to existence. Kierkegaard coined the term "leap of faith", arguing that life is full of absurdity, and one must make his and her own values in an indifferent world. This interpretation of the concept is often related to the insistence on the absurdity of the world and the assumption that there exist no relevant or absolutely good or bad values. However, that there are no values to be found in the world in-itselfdoes not mean that there are no values: We are usually brought up with certain values, and even though we cannot justify them ultimately, they will be "our" values. One can live meaningfully (free of despair and anxiety) in an unconditional commitment to something finite, and devotes that meaningful life to the commitment.

Albert Camus explores the implications of Existentialism in The Myth of Sisyphus. In the essay, Camus introduces his philosophy of the absurd: man's futile search for meaning, unity and clarity in the face of an unintelligible world devoid of God and eternal truths or values. Camus compares the absurdity of man's life with the situation of Sisyphus, a figure of Greek mythology who was condemned to repeat forever the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll down again. The essay concludes, "The struggle itself...is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

When Seasons Greetings go Wrong!

In honor of thanksgiving, I decided to play with the social conventions involving greetings. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Sasha Fierce: Happy thanksgiving

me: no thanks

Sasha Fierce: Huh

me: i reject your seasonal greeting

Sasha Fierce: Uhm

U cant

Reject it

N why wud u

me: yes i can

Sasha Fierce: ..

Why wud u

me: just to b a prick

duh

me: happy thanksgiving

Laura Atlas: you too Grahamers!!!

me: no thx

Laura Atlas: sorry lol

me: happy turkey day

Arnold Peppercorn: back at you

me: no thx

Arnold Peppercorn: alright

fuck off then

trick

me: happy thanksgiving

Max Dunbar: you too

me: no thx

Max Dunbar: fagot

me: go fuck yourself

i am rejecting your seasonal greeting

Max Dunbar: i'm rejecting your rejection

me: oooh

does this mean i HAVE to have a happy thanksgiving now?

damn u for bringing me joy on this solemn day of indian massacre

me: Happy thanksgiving!

Ricardo Santiago: Thanks gm. Happy tofurkey day to u too

me: tofurkey, are you serious?

Ricardo Santiago: Yeah man. I'm going to have it for the first time today...

me: u vegetarians don't deserve this holiday

i retract my 'happy thanksgiving'

Ricardo's new status message - Happy Tofurkey day everyone!

me: ...

Learning from MMORPGs

MMORPG's may have more to tell us about ourselves then we realize. Already, social scientists have been studying how people interact in these games. Since the interactions between MMORPG players are real, even if the environments are virtual, psychologists and sociologists are able to use MMORPGs as tools for academic research. Sherry Turkle, a clinical psychologist, has conducted interviews with computer users including game-players. Turkle found that many people have expanded their emotional range by exploring the many different roles (including gender identities) that MMORPGs allow a person to explore.

Economist have gotten in on the act too because many MMORPGs feature living economies. Virtual items and currency have to be gained through play and have definite value for players. Such a virtual economy can be analyzed (using data logged by the game) and has value in economic research; more significantly, these "virtual" economies can have an impact on the economies of the real world. One of the early researchers of MMORPGs was Edward Castronova, who demonstrated that a supply-and-demand market exists for virtual items and that it crosses over with the real world.

More recently, in World of Warcraft, a temporary design glitch attracted the attention of psychologists and epidemiologists across North America, when a" disease of a monster began to spread unintentionally—and uncontrollably—into the wider game world. Blizzard had implemented a new dungeon which included a spell effect called 'Corrupted Blood'. It was a spell that did damage to you, and if you came near other players, the spell effect passed on to them. The spell was intended to exist only in one dungeon, but there was a bug and it got out. Players went back into towns and were spreading it to other players.

Blizzard got calls from the CDC - the Center for Disease Control - saying: "Hey, what's all this about the disease in your game? We want to look at the simulation data - it might help us in a real-world situation." The Center for Disease Control used the incident as a research model to chart both the progression of a disease, and the potential human response to large-scale epidemic infection.

The Clock Puzzle

The Problem: If you look at a clock and the time is 4:20, what is the angle in degrees between the hour and the minute hands? (The answer to this is not zero!)

The Answer: 10 degrees. First, some basic math: every minute on the clock is 6 degrees (360 degrees divided by 60 minutes = 6 degrees per minute). Although the minute hand is directly on the "4" on the face of the clock, the hour hand no longer is. Why? The hour hand was directly on the "4" at 4:00, but at 4:20 it's already a third of the way into its journey from the "4" to the "5." Every hour, the hour hand moves 30 degrees (five minutes). Since it is exactly 1/3 past the hour, the hour hand is 1/3 of the way into its 30-degree trip, which is 10 degrees past the "4" on the face.

Anomy: Part II

This is a follow up to Anomy: An Epic Poem in Three Parts

Part II follows the protagonist as he brokers a deal with the Devil to get to Eden so he can eat the apple from the tree of life. This section pays homage to Faust, a classic German legend about a man who makes a pact with the Devil in exchange for knowledge. The story has been told by many authors but the two most influential works on Anomy were Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Johann Goethe's Faust.

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The tree cannot be found on a map
To find it, I must first face a trap
And with Satan strike a deal !
So to learn what he knows
To Lucifer, I will propose
For my soul, the garden be revealed !

Before I can live a life eternal,
I must contract a pact infernal !

The Devil hangs down in New Orleans
Preying on people without means
In the house of the rising sun
He plays poker in the member’s club
With Asmodeus, Lillith and Beelzebub
Until his time on earth is done.

I asked him if he knew where Eden lie,
He nodded his head and answered aye.

I said that I was here to trade
For the tree, my soul I’d pay
And the Devil responded to me,
“I think most mortals would confess
Death is never quite a welcome guest
But even fewer men seek my company.”

“To close most pacts I must cajole
Yet you eagerly offer up your soul.
Without a fight, the deal is a bore.
Besides, I’d never get the soul you supply
Once you have a body that cannot die,
For your wish you must give more.”

“Should you insist that we proceed;
You’ll have to take someone’s soul for me”

The debt I offered I could not tender,
To promise a soul I’d need a lender
I must concede the request gave me pause
To serve the devil may be too much to bear
But for all eternity can’t one life be spared?
If my means damn me, I’m saved by my cause

I told the Devil I’d give him his price,
And he said just my offer would suffice
Satan’s show of mercy was mighty odd,
He said, “Souls do me no good in the end,
I’m only interested in making humans bend
To show they are more like me than God.”

“You are young and fueled by pride
Like I was when I decided to defy
But I have seen rebellion lost.
I once gazed upon God’ face
Now I know not his embrace
But understand defiance’s cost.”

“The souls I collect will all rise one day
When He returns, their debts are repaid
But I will still be stuck in hell
And like me, your soul will not rise
Because your body is still alive
And an empty earth will be your cell.”

I’ll not let a pleasure I’ll never know
Keep me from where I need to go !
I told Satan I care not of my fate,
Even if I’m making a mistake
It is my decision alone to make
And my desire is to see Eden’s gate.

More dissuasion he did not attempt
He knew now I would not relent
No matter how much he implore me.
I swear I saw the Devil sigh
But by the next blink of my eye
The gates of Eden stood before me.

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The centerpiece in Part II of Anomy is Satan. As I wrote, I had trouble reconciling how the Devil can be evil and culpable but still a creation of God who only did what he was predestined to do. Thus in Anomy, the Devil is not a villain but a living cautionary tale--he defied God and is now stuck on earth serving as a warning to others. He's not evil as much as bored. It is this boredom that has lead him to buy souls. He recognizes that his trade is pointless as all souls will rise eventually in the second coming. Thus he only gets people to sell the souls and compromise their ethics so as to irritate God and point out that if humans are worthy of forgiveness, perhaps so is he.

Click here to view Anomy: Part III

Die Hard Riddles

The following riddles all come from the classic 90's action flick, Die Hard with a Vengeance. If you can solve them all, congratulations, you're well equipped to defend New York from terrorists.

The Problem: What has four legs and is always ready to travel?

The Answer: An elephant, because it always has its trunk.

The Problem: As I was going to St Ives, I met a man with seven wives. Every wife had seven sacks, every sack had seven cats, every cat had seven kittens. Kittens, cats, sacks, wives--how many were going to St Ives?

The Answer: Just one, you! The man and his wives and cats are not going to St. Ives, just you are.

The Problem: You are in front of a fountain. You have an empty 5 gallon and 3 gallon jug of water. You must measure out exactly 4 gallons of water. You cannot eyeball at all, it must be exactly 4 gallons.

The Answer: There are two solutions to the water jug riddle.

1. Fill the 5 gallon jug and the pour the water into the 3 gallon jug. This leaves two gallons in the big jug.

2. Empty the 3 gallon jug and pour in the two gallons from the 5 gallon jug, leaving space for one gallon in the small jug.

3. Refill the 5 gallon jug and pour water from it into the 3 gallon jug until the small jug's full. That leaves exactly four gallons in the big jug!

The second method is:

1. Fill the 3 gallon jug and pour the water into the 5 gallon jug.

2. Refill the 3 gallon jug, and pour into the 5 gallon jug until the big jug is full, leaving one gallon in the small jug.

3. Empty the big jug, and transfer the one gallon from the small jug to the big jug.

4. Refill the small jug and pour all three gallons into the 5 gallon jug, resulting in four gallons in the big jug.

Drawing Hands

Drawing Hands is a lithograph by M. C. Escher. It shows a peice of paper out of which two increasingly detailed hands rise and draw eachother into existence. Escher uses a number of creative techniques to achieve his effect: the hands become more detailed and shaded closer to the palm and are simpler and more cartoonish at the wrist. This is used to both create and challenge our illusion of realism. The hands are both the object and method of creation.

The lithograph signifies mutual constitution; that is, the principle of one entity being formed by the other and vice versa (like predator–prey co-evolution). However, our minds cannot reconcile how the picture emerged in the first place. If we were to imagine that this lithograph was a dynamic work where the hands would continue drawing themselves, we could easily imagine how the work would end up looking but we could not go back in time and figure out where the first hand came from. It depicts a simple creation paradox where neither hand seems to have an origin (see the post on Terminator Time Travel for another paradox which appears to have no origin point).

In Escher's lithograph, the paradox is effective at pointing out the unreality of the image. Like many surrealists works, the image is more effective at defining how the unreal works than the real. The image we are shown does not depict the rules of our world, instead it shows us the magical rules of art--where gravity can be defied, perspectives need not add up and two hands may draw themselves into existence (many of these themes appear in Escher's other work which display fantastic but impossible landscapes). In the world of Drawing Hands, creation doesn't require an origin--like Athena springing from Zeus' forehead, it can be spontaneous. So long as both hand draws the other, we can understand how the image exists by its rules if not ours.

Music from Ghana: Bumper 2 Bumper

Bumper 2 Bumper by Wande Coal.

Anomy: An Epic Poem in Three Parts

What follows is Part I of my attempt to write an epic poem in the style of John Milton. The title, "Anomy," means a violation of divine law. The plot follows an attempt to re-enter the Garden of Eden and eat the fruit of the tree of life, the counterpart to the more-famous tree of knowledge, which imparts immortality instead of wisdom to its consumer.

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There are two trees in the middle of Eden
Whose fruits God forbade Adam from eating
A serpent tempted Eve to feast on the forbidden
So as to gain the knowledge of good and evil
And paradise’s perpetual calm saw an upheaval
Adam and Eve were expelled; Eden was hidden.

The Lord and his angels had much to discuss,
“Behold, man has now become like one of us,
He must not be allowed to reach out his hand
and take also from the tree of life and live forever.”
So man walked the earth and survived by endeavor;
From his ancestral homeland eternally banned.

The tree of life still stands in that land,
Immortality awaits to be plucked by our hand.

The providence of God, foolish tongues address:
Complaining for suffering Adam to transgress.
When God gave him reason, he gave him freedom to choose
Else he’d been an artificial Adam as he is in the motions
God gave us the faculties that birthed his rogue notions
Are we to believe his gift we were supposed to refuse?

I suspect the Lord always intended that man
Would complete the meal that Adam began;
Why else create such a fruit to tease us at all?
Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch our arms farther
Is that not why we’re here? And if not, why bother?
Our fine morning beckons and I will answer its call.

God’s command to Adam had only one pardon:
“You are free to eat from any tree in the garden
but you must not eat from the tree of knowledge,
for when you eat of it you will surely die.”
No ban on the second fruit did apply;
The tree of life wasn’t even acknowledged.

My appetite is as innocent as his
Who would have gladly fed on figs
Between Jerusalem and Bethany.
If I taste the fruit, I’ll be blameless;
Since God commanded only the angels,
Man owes him no further responsibility.

Yet I doubt divine covenants contain loopholes;
A bite of the apple would surely cost me my scruples.

One bite branded man with original sin
And now we are in blood so stepp’d in
Should we wade no more
Returning would be as tedious as go o’er;
To raise our race I alone will stoop lower
And see us to the opposite shore.

God knew our fall would inevitably happen;
He put the tree in the garden inches from Adam.
Now we toil all our days just to die anyway;
God has made us survive by the sweat of brow
But that covenant is over, his rules disavowed.
When immortality could be ours, why shy away?

So I fix my gaze upon the object of man’s fall
I am to set an Anomy, and invite disorder over all

So call me vile for ambition I share with the devil
We both gazed up at God and wished to be at eye level
But the end will be different to Genesis’ sequel
We will not flee the Lord but greet him as equal

We are but strangers and pilgrims on earth
From a better country of heavenly worth
Too long we’ve been without our pleasure dome
So I look to the future with a backward glance
To return to the garden where it all began
Our penance is over; it’s time to go home.

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This section of the poem is loaded with literary references and direct quotes from the Bible. The Biblical quotes are typically marked by quotation marks and easy to spot, however much of the mythos surrounding the tree of life comes from secondary sources like the Dead Sea scrolls. Among the literary references are full lines taken from Shakespeare's Macbeth, F. Scott Fitzgerald's the Great Gastby and John Milton's Areopagitica. There's even a Jay-Z line in there, for the astute reader and student of hip-hop.

Click here to view Anomy: Part II | Click here to view Anomy: Part III