In last week's episode, we talked about
David O'Reilly's game, "Everything,"
and the interconnectedness of it as one item
in the larger set of all things which we sometimes refer to
by the nickname everything.
Let's see what you had to say.
AstroGoose, Cynthia Lee and a couple of other people
pointed out the relationship that this thought
has to Eastern philosophy, which is a huge and varied tradition
that we only really talked about insofar as acknowledging
that it is Alan Watts' background and his interest
in what he's best known for.
And I think, yeah, one thing that's worth pointing out
is that the five philosophers that David O'Reilly lists
in the credits of "Everything," which
is what we used as our kind of rubric for the episode,
does not present a total and complete portrait
of philosophers struggling with how it is that everything
is or is not interconnected.
That is a small subset of one tradition
and that there are many other traditions, including
Eastern philosophy, that deal with these questions.
But as AstroGoose points out, there
are a lot of synchronicities and even direct influences
between those many traditions.
I mean, I would just check out their comment.
It's a great one.
This is stuff that I don't know a whole ton about.
I kind of only know about as much
as you see me talk about on "Crash Course Mythology,"
but I do know that Schopenhauer was greatly
influenced by the Upanishads--
I think is how you say it.
I think I'm pronouncing it correctly,
but yeah, I mean just to acknowledge that, yes, this
is a huge part of this conversation
and another source for this kind of thought.
Diana Watson points out the kind of radical empathy
that you see a lot of children have for objects--
wanting their stuffed animals to have
a good time, the sadness for a balloon,
and other related things.
And Vladislav Gerasimov asks whether or not
that is radical empathy or a kind of anthropomorphizing
of those things- giving them human emotions
or human desires when it's not really necessary
or is not the case, rather.
And I think this is sort of at the heart of, I think,
the question that we're trying to get at, which is, is it
possible for a human being to step out
of the human experience and to appreciate the kind of being
of a thing and either its experience, which is going
to be completely unlike any form of experience
we're familiar with, its desire--
again, completely unlike any form of desire
that we're familiar with--
or its existence-- its novelty, rather--
without referencing back to the way
that we view the world and the way that we exist in the world?
And what happens when you try?
I mean Vladislav's question was, radical [INAUDIBLE]
mind see things without necessarily giving them
human emotions and human qualities,
which is why it's pretty much impossible for us.
So I mean that's that's the self-help problem that we
get stuck in with a lot of this tradition--
that it always loops back around to being a good person who
is able to have insight and who is able to like act effectively
as a human and not necessarily appreciate
what Donna Haraway might call your kin, the objects that
are around you that you sort of have a relationship with.
And the worthwhileness of that struggle
I think is something that seems to be a pertinent conversation
in philosophy right now, so yeah, whether possible or not,
not sure, but it seems like it's something that a lot of people
are talking about.
WebPixies, we will solve that problem right now.
Kayla Jeanson characterizes the radical empathy that was
suggested in the episode as exhausting,
and to be fair this is essentially one of the things
that Ian Bogost gets at in his book--
that to try to find within ourselves the meaning inherent
in or a connection to the multitude of things that are
around us-- my iPad, my coffee cup,
my weird little fidget spinner--
how do all of these things feel?
Man, that's hard.
That's tough and is probably going to be unpleasant,
and that is why, I think, that one
of the things that he suggests is being open to something's
novelty as opposed to being concerned
about its interior existence.
And I think one of the things that might be worth considering
is not a radical empathy for literally all things,
but an attempt to appreciate what
might be the hard to understand experience of the things that
have an importance in our lives, and that is the kind of batting
with the weight on--
empathetic batting with the weight
on that I think we're trying to get at--
is that, if there is some thing, if there
is a thing that is impactful, what
does it mean to attempt to empathize
or appreciate-- empathize with or appreciate it in a way
that you have been sort of forgiven previously
for not doing.
Again, results of that--
who knows?
But maybe a worthy exercise.
I'm going to put all these things away now.
equationsofmotion talks about how certain portions of this
line of thought can be applied to the study of physics and how
there is a lot of unlearning that happens--
that you have these ideas about processes or objects out there
in the universe, and you kind of have to abandon what you think
is true about them in order to--
or abandon what you assume about them in order
to fully appreciate how it is that they work,
and what they want, and what their processes really entail.
And I think this is really interesting, especially given
the conversation that we've already kind of had
about and anthropomorphizing things
and whether or not that--
this kind of unlearning and then anthropomorphizing
that equationsofmotion talks about, like how it's helpful
and in what degrees it may help us understand things
from a human perspective versus as the things themselves,
but maybe in the end it doesn't really
matter as long as what we are getting
is this kind of appreciation that equationsofmotion
talks about-- that if the end result is still
this interconnectedness and it is still
this wanting to work with, wanting to understand that--
how we get there maybe isn't that important.
Please consider that if you're a weighted companion cube
is an expression of the fundamental essence of being
found in all things that, if you destroy it,
you may also be destroying a part of yourself.