I’m calm now, very calm compared to the same me that was 10 years ago. My life is now peaceful, happy, and serene. This gradually occurred to me after I turned 30. I still maintain this blog, albeit sporadically, because it is a testimony to my emotional and personal growth. I now sound so full of platitudes and cliches, like a proper adult. The philosophical writings that I once thought was so brilliant now—when I think of them, if I think of them at all—seemed so childish and amateurish and were all based on the misguided understanding of Nietzsche. Who am I to comment on the philosophical questions that tenured professors who studied those questions all their lives don’t have the answer to? And besides, besides Nietzsche, I have only read one book by David Hume, one book by Rene Descartes, most of the works by Plato, most of the works by Aristotle, most of the works of Karl Marx, most of the works of Sigmund Freud, most of the works of Marquis de Sade, most of the works by Kierkegaard; a few selective readings of Ayn Rand, Dostoevsky, Jean Paul Sartre, Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Julian Jaynes, Carl Jung, Solzhenitsyn, Marcel Proust, etc. And this list does not include the living authors and many other non-idealistic novelists that I’ve read, such as Hemingway, Flaubert, Stephen King, James Joyce, etc., and many other required readings from undergrad. (who wasn’t forced to read Foucault?)
While they may seem much more than the average person would ever read, they are far too few compared to a tenured professor of philosophy.
I enjoy reading, and that’s why I’m writing.
So who am I to tell you that Nick Bostrom’s argument whether we are living in a simulation or not is, though seemingly airtight in logic, so embellished, so full of mathematics (it seems to be the trend nowadays that every branch of studied endeavor is filling itself with mathematics, due to “physics envy” perhaps?), is nothing but an improved, modern version of Thomas Aquinas’s proof on the existence of God; that fundamentally, there is a categorical error, as Kant remarked in regards to the teleological argument in Quinque Viae, that is, there is a leap of faith between the immanent and the transcendental, that is, why does there has to be a non-simulated, original, “real” world?
Why this assumption of an unmovable mover? Always. Why? Why this first un-caused cause, the first who simulated the simulation, which simulation then simulated the simulation, ad infintum?
Because it’s a false question. The world is neither real nor simulated. The world is concocted or constructed by our logic, rationality and limited scope of human reason (Hello Friedrich Hayek!) and the world is perceived according to our meager, provincial, limited, human—all-too-human mind, so let’s follow the logic of Jacques Derrida and dismiss the question altogether as being framed in the wrong dichotomy.
Similarly, the world is neither meaningful nor meaningless. The world is neither benevolent nor malevolent. God neither exists nor doesn’t exist. Like the definition of a smooth manifold in which we have taken the set of all infinitely differentiable functions from the manifold to itself and then called the set of all derivatives of all such functions at any point, (now why did I just give you as anaolgy something from differential geometry, perhaps just like the philosophers such as Nick Bostrom, it’s simply the easiest way to convince you my reader that I am smarter than you), so we have defined the world according to our rational order, we have imposed in the very definition of the world what we constructed. The world is my idea. The world is my will.
And whenever we construct such a world order according to my idea, my will, my rationalistic, idealistic philosophy, there are certain axioms, first principles, if you will, that, sooner or later, need to be realized, actualized, unearthed, obviated.
And because of its axiomatic approach, which is unavoidable, as shown by Godel, then there are questions that can never be demonstrated, proved, and the easiest way to prove that such things exist is by self-reference (transform all statements into Godel numbers, assign a substitution function, self reference the substitution function, etc. etc. … )
If I ever think of those problems at all. If I still cared.
Perhaps I’ve always been like this, and I was just never made self-aware.
And it is true that having children changes you. Almost all my energy is now spent overseeing the growth and the well being of my children, for whom I’m willing to give my own life. And it is a great feeling, a sacrificial feeling.
I love talking about my own feelings. Logic, facts, rationality be damned. I don’t care about logic. I don’t care about facts. And what is rationality after all, nothing but the mere epiphenomenal representation of my emotional state.
The world is so much more colorful without facts, rationality, and logic.
A Submissive East Asian Woman's Dreams and Fantasies 