being for itself or mindfulness

being mindful takes great concentration. you can (and maybe should) be mindful in nearly all of your actions. i have to exercise my brain muscle in nearly every interaction to remain mindful. i have a ton of stuff going on in my head; that does not lead to clear thinking! the brain didn't evolve to multitask! so when dealing with stressful situations i let my emotional self drive the bus and she is a terrible driver. but if i can go back to listening to my breaths, slowing them down then refocusing to the at hand experience, i can sort it out much more quickly than if emotional ruby is terrorizing the proverbial streets.

i learned something interesting today about how the mind works. and it relates to math and philosophy! i learned that the adult brain is still incapable of negating nothing! you must have something to negate! in being and nothingness, sartre starts out by considering a temporal process of negation. a guy walks into a cafe looking for his friend, pierre. "in order to comprehend Pierre's absence, [...] requires a negative moment by which consciousness constitutes itself as a negation." (63) sartre goes on to say that one must posit in the mind that "I am conscious of Pierre not being here." nothing does not exist in the world as something tangible. nothingness is a lack of the presentation of a tangible object to consciousness.

sartre's idea is applicable to understanding interactions of humans. since the mind cannot comprehend negations as anything less than the object and a concept, when you are directing someone, err suggesting something, using negations or negative iterations are counter productive. to say "do not yell at me" is actually planting yelling, then the annihilation of yelling in the brain, which is one more step than the brain needs. it would be easier to internalize "please use your calm voice with me" as a directive to get what you'd like accomplished.

to be mindful takes energy and practice. try being mindful of negations for a week. when you catch yourself slipping into DON'Ts, instead redirect the behavior towards the end goal you're seeking.

descartes proof of god

        In the Third Meditation, Descartes gives us the causal proof for god’s existence, but throughout the Meditations, Descartes has not put to rest the paradox of the concepts of error and god. If error exists (through humans) and humans are creature that god (the all good, all knowing creator) created, why then is there room for error? Firstly, Descartes clears up the idea of a deceptive god; god can not deceive us because every type of deception is an imperfection.  I personally believe that the term “imperfection” is ambiguous;  I think that the mind can conceptualize words like this in a relative way through negation. It is clear and distinct how god is perfect, and the opposite can be said from that. Descartes proves that the infinite, omni-benevolent idea of god is the root cause of his idea of god. Indeed, he seems to presuppose god’s existence to prove god’s existence, but he must to support the sufficient means law of all things. So, god, in all of its perfect-ness, gave humans their facilities and from our facilities we can makes misjudgments because we do not have all of the pieces needed to make the proper judgment. Error comes from the misuse of the perfect faculties that the perfect god gave us. There are two parts to judgment ; the faculties of intellect and will. Intellect serves as the ability to perceive to form ideas and make judgments on them. The ideas presented to the intellect are neither true nor false. The intellect serves a passive function as a warehouse of ideas of which we pull from to further qualify other ideas. The second perfect faculty god gave humans was will. Will only affirms or denies ideas presented by the intellect. The ideas presented can be a mix of new information and ideas from the warehouse of intellect, ready to be iterated with the new ideas and for the will to choose to affirm or deny the new idea. If the intellect is presented with ideas which are already misjudged by the will, or are not presented in their entirety, the will can misjudge them. This is not god’s fault; god is perfect and bestowed onto us perfect faculties, it is my incorrect use of my free will that causes error. “…extends in general to every case where the intellect does not have sufficiently clear knowledge at the time when the will deliberates.” In the last paragraphs of the Fourth Meditation, Descartes further substantiates god’s perfect-ness and why that leaves him null of responsibility for error, although he created humans with free will, which can lead to error. Descartes says that god gave him the ability to agree or disagree with ideas, presented to his intellect, and when he chooses to agree with something when he does not have the clear and distinct knowledge of truth, is an imperfection in him and a misuse of those perfect faculties. He prescribes man a method to always avoid error from this logic: restrain your will to only pass judgment on ideas that are extended to the intellect with the clear and distinct quality, since everything with that amount of clarity is something (not nothing) and everything with thing-ness came from god.

sartre's implied being

to counter my unproductive reading habits, i carry around with me, Being and Nothingness. i read it while i am  trying to forget my worries. it is easy to get lost in sartre and feel like something else matters.  i am not far into this piece of grandiloquence work. i think i have reached the fiftieth page and turned back twenty pages to reread. for the last four years. when reading heavy philosophical  texts, i still underline and highlight like a college student. 

here are a collection of lines that i think i may comprehend. 

“being is. being is in-itself. being is what it is.”^{(page 29)}

as sartre sets out to exhaustively iterate consciousness, it seems rather endless and undefinable because of consciousness’ necessary coupling with being. to begin, sartre states: “all consciousness is consciousness of something.”(page 21) this statement can be sorted out by comparing it to similar statements, ‘all smelling is the smelling of something,” or ‘all seeing is seeing of something’, since, nothingness has no flavor, odor or visual object-hood to taste, smell, or hear, there must be it’s opposite, something, to have these sensible characteristics. (note: using any ownership on nothingness [or ‘it’s’] is logically impossible but the nothingness i am referring to here is representation of the lack of somethingness.) i suppose further one might add that the somethingness that consciousness could have a vagueness to it. does this statement imply that by having consciousness, other things exist? perhaps, but sartre only implies clearly that being is objective. being cannot be subject because subjective truths already imply that something exists. sartre is trying to state that being is objective to us because we are always already thrown into being as such. further, being is a phenomena, it presents itself to being and in this way also presupposes its own existence. “it is that which escapes, that which by definition will never be given, that which offers itself only in fleeting and successive profiles,"(page 22) sartre states, a statement which reeks of sartres’ phenomenological predecessors, like husserl, who postulated that very idea in Being and Time. (my little piece on the application of phenomenology to video games )

“consciousness is a being whose existence posits its essence,”(page 24)

a thing cannot lose its essence without ceasing to exist, and the essential nature of a natural kind, such as water or gold, is that property without which there is no instance of the kind.” the concept of subject that has consciousness is interdependently connected to the concept of its essence. they are inseparable.

“the primary characteristic of the being of an existent is never to reveal itself completely”(page 24) another way to think of this is by placing something as close to your eye as you can, without touching your eye; the eye or mind cannot evaluate what it is in front of it. or,  if you were to blast a note from a trumpet directly into an ear; although you might recognize the first note of Taps if it were not so close to your ear, the note would feel more like pain and less like a B note. when things are too close to our senses they cannot be revealed entirely. the essence of being is something that one can never experience, since it is inseparable from consciousness, and to begin with, one cannot separate themselves from their consciousness.

“any judgment about being already implies being,” to which Sartre replies, “it is not necessary to pass beyond the being of this meaning toward its meaning.”(page 25) this line of reasoning reminds me of the skeptical cartesian cogito. by using the faculty of judgment one is already engaged in an act of being. the reply that sartre offers is confusing but here is my understanding:

being as two statements: BEING FOR ITSELF

                                      BEING IN ITSELF

“it knows no otherness; it never posits itself as other-than-another-being." (page 28) 

it's getting better all the time

in the pursuit of bettering myself and the world, i made these thank you cards and sent them today.

 i want to believe that the more good you put out the more good you can receive. plus, i swear i sleep better at night knowing i am being grateful. there is something unique and wonderful about feeling gratitude.