Listening: nothing.
This is my newest spoken-word piece; it would be a slam poem, but it's too long and I want to perform it while improvising on the piano to emphasize the motif of "music".
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I heard Lady Gaga was part of the Illuminati.
I heard that our radio stations are actually controlled by Freemason masterminds whose object it is to ruin American morality in order to make it easier to control our spending habits.
I heard they write songs that worship youth so we'll ruin ourselves with pleasure at party schools instead of learning logic and overcoming ignorance.
I heard they attract young atheists by pointing out that all the great intellectuals were too smart for God, dropping hints about Lucifer being the good guy, the one who embraces the free will of man and rejects religious morality as a control device. They make it seem like those who are willing to sell the souls they don't believe in are the ones who rise to the top. That people like Lady Gaga and Beyonce and the Jonas Brothers and Taylor Swift are really musicians with incredible talent who are paid to sing only the kind of music that keeps people focused on money, love, and themselves. That these people are perfectly willing to do it because they still have their talent, and they can still make beautiful music in their own homes and it's a small price to pay for a release from the control structure. And that one day, because of the talent they were born with, these young atheists will walk into an office at a recording studio and someone will close the door and tell them yes, it's all true, the Illuminati want you to sing about sex on the radio to keep people from thinking about anything else. And they'll summon their courage and sign the papers because they think they'll be able to change the game from inside. And then they get their fame, and they fall in love with it and stop caring. And the atheists who do not have this mythical meeting simply go on living the life described in Lady Gaga's music: sexual, passionate, loving, intense, and inconsequential.
I heard that the Illuminati don't mind if you do believe in God. Because that makes it even easier: you follow the rules most of the time, feel guilty when you don't, listen to Taylor Swift, focus on trying to be a monogamist by listening to songs about love, cheating, and breakups, and secretly wonder whether you're doing the right thing. You memorize songs with lyrics like "let's play a love game, play a love game, do you want love or do you want fame, are you in the game?" And if that line caught your ear, made you look up, then you're already faced with a choice. Do you subscribe to Lady Gaga's affirmations of ephemeral sexuality, or do you wanna get married? Or is it both? Do you wanna slut around now and settle down later? Of course - everybody does. And look at that - 40 years later and you made your personal life your everything, and didn't get famous, and had no influence, and justified that by convincing yourself that the influence you have over the lives around you is enough to make a difference in the world.
Now, according to the theory, the Illuminati themselves aren't trying to make you believe one way or the other. They know you'll pick one for yourself. They write music that constantly reminds you of the choice: a Christian hears Lady Gaga and says "I'm such a good Christian that I don't need to go to the club on Friday, so I won't"; an atheist hears Lady Gaga and says "I'm so enlightened; I know there's nothing to stop me from going to the club on Friday, so I will". But they don't care whether you go or not! They tempt you with eternal life and they tempt you with pleasure. It doesn't matter which one you take, all that matters is that you spend your life taking it. Because the Christians focus on being strong and avoiding drugs and sex and worldly influence, and the atheists focus on being smart and living their lives and transcending the petty obligations of the Christian doctrine.
I heard they're creating a world where the faces of Jehovah and Lucifer overlook an ongoing battle between Christians and atheists, moralists and nihilists, conservatives and liberals, workers and dreamers, none of whom are doing anything with their lives but trying to become closer and closer to their ideals: THEIR ideals.
Because the Illuminati, I heard from someone, they control both sides, and your personality predisposes you to one or the other. They own Lady Gaga and they own Taylor Swift, so no matter what you believe, they have music for you to buy. And by creating this conflict, they make you passionate about "living your life", no matter what kind of life it is. Whether your addiction is drugs, sex, God, math, or pain, they get you addicted to something, so that you cannot contribute to the resistance. You are desiring, but you are not inventing. You are writing, but you are not publishing. You are thinking, but you are not acting. And you say you'll act once you get older, once you get more educated, once you acquire a position where people take you seriously. But once you get there, you don't want to do anything to risk your job, because you worked so hard to get it!
Now, the Illuminati probably don't exist. Lady Gaga might just be a talented singer who grew up in New York and got lucky enough to sign a record deal. But does that mean, even if there's no one behind it, that pop music and religion don't still have this combined effect? That this really is the way we live our lives? And if so, what do we do?
I say we fight simplicity with diversity. Don't be part of a category. Don't even use nouns. When somebody asks you if you're religious, don't just say "yes" or "no", explain yourself. Say you believe in God because of Pascal's wager. Say you don't believe in God because you think evil can't coexist with benevolent omnipotence. Say something other than "Methodist." "Catholic." "Atheist." When they ask you if you're straight or gay, tell them about the Kinsey scale. When they ask you if you're liberal or conservative, ask them what issue they're talking about. Stop simplifying yourself. The only word that accurately describes you is your name. When you escape from categories, you escape from categorical methods of control.
And if you can, learn how to make music that sounds like you, so you don't have to sound like someone else.
Showing posts with label math. Show all posts
Showing posts with label math. Show all posts
Friday, January 29, 2010
Saturday, October 24, 2009
I Am Not Just A Stubborn Atheist
Listening: "Après Moi", Regina Spektor.
I've been debating a lot. Religion, philosophy, government; anything. I think now that my MIT application is due in (gulp) seven days, my body expects some intense stress; since I'm procrastinating the essays I have to write, I'm putting the stress into argument. People don't like it. The same form inevitably arises: I present an outlandish idea that my outlook happens to support, and my opponent starts attacking the whole of my philosophy. I guess that's normal, but the fervor with which they deny my ideas is so uncomfortable. The common theme among their objections isn't even a certain syllogism: it's a worry. They're worried that I think I have everything figured out, and so I won't be able to deal with anything I haven't already considered. They each think I have some rule that I apply to every problem: Paula thinks it's a refusal to apply rules at all (which she insists is a rule in itself), my mom and my sister Allie think it's just a half-baked agnosticism, and my other sister Melissa thinks it's a dependence on logic. They all insist that there are things outside of the domain of logic, or that logic is as fallible as any other human invention.
And there's the question. I always start to answer it by asserting that mathematics is completely objective: even if you don't have words for "two", "three", and "five", it is still true that the concatenation of "II" and "III" is "IIIII". And that would be true even if no one existed to count objects. Why? Because mathematics is universal, rather than particular. You apply particular problems to it, like "How many apples are there in a uniform grid of apples whose sides number 6 and 4?", and get answers with units: "24 apples". But six sets of four things together always contain twenty-four things; we write that statement shorthand as "6*4=24", a statement without units. Of course "6" and "4" don't exist by themselves. They're hypothetical; they're symbols. The whole beauty of mathematics is that manipulation of symbols can mimic exactly the much messier manipulation of real objects, and thus the mathematician can solve a physical problem in the abstract. If it doesn't work, all it means is that his system of symbols didn't represent the situation exactly enough.
So did humans invent mathematics? Not any more than we invented fire. Invention is the application of a truth into a method to solve a particular problem. Writing "4+6=10" is a method. "4+6=10" is a truth. So while the human application of a mathematical truth to a situation might be prone to human error, mathematical truth itself is flawless.
The same is true of logic. Take the basic modus ponens syllogism: "The belief that a certain fact is true, combined with the belief that the same fact implies a second fact, causes belief in the second fact." (Or, in short: "If A is true, then B is true. A is true. Therefore B is true.") Notice that I wrote "belief" and not "knowledge". "A" doesn't have to be inherent, or empirically demonstrated, or even popularly accepted. If somebody believes A, and the implication from A to B, then he believes B. In that way, the application of logic (that is, discourse) is subjective. In fact, misapplication of premises to syllogisms is the idea we know as "fallacy". But the truth of the relationships among different kinds of syllogisms, just like the relationships among different kinds of mathematical operations, is inherent.
The problem I run into is this: I rely on logic. Where other people evaluate arguments based on their religious convictions, or their emotional reactions, I evaluate them based on their merits: whether they are fallacious; whether I believe their premises; whether their forms are valid. And life makes sense to me, doing that! And yet faith, which is supposed to be such a desirable virtue, consists entirely of denying a conclusion that you would otherwise believe.
Now, when people say that spirituality is outside of the domain of logic, there are two different ways to interpret them. One is that they have been convinced, by their younger selves or by a religious compulsion, that their beliefs are simply not to be challenged; that the only way to protect their beliefs, and the happiness that rests upon them, is to deny all attempts to undermine them.
The other is that spirituality is a way of dealing with the emotions that come with being human that cold logic can never be: logic can help you to understand, but not to feel better. And so we adopt religion, superstition, unsupported categorical assertions. We trust people despite the knowledge that they will fail us; we love life despite the knowledge that it will end. These things fly in the face of logic, but we accept that and agree to integrate a contradiction into ourselves in order to balance logical understanding with emotional contentment.
By breaking out of the first interpretation, and adopting the second, a person may not even change his actual system of beliefs: the important thing is that he understands them and is not afraid of challenges to them, because he does not rely on them. He knows there's really no deep meaning in the frequencies that comprise music, but he listens and plays anyway because he loves the way it makes him feel to imagine the meaning that could be there. The judgment he develops throughout his life fine-tunes his ability to decide when this kind of escapist placebo is appropriate.
Maybe my sisters are right. Maybe I've spent so much time defending the merits of atheism that I haven't stopped to consider the fact of my own emotions' control over me. But I will say this: If the world is the same for everyone, and yet we are all predisposed to different personalities, then our beliefs ought to be correspondingly different. So now I'm searching for something to believe, to accept in the face of contrary evidence, and it better be something good.
I've been debating a lot. Religion, philosophy, government; anything. I think now that my MIT application is due in (gulp) seven days, my body expects some intense stress; since I'm procrastinating the essays I have to write, I'm putting the stress into argument. People don't like it. The same form inevitably arises: I present an outlandish idea that my outlook happens to support, and my opponent starts attacking the whole of my philosophy. I guess that's normal, but the fervor with which they deny my ideas is so uncomfortable. The common theme among their objections isn't even a certain syllogism: it's a worry. They're worried that I think I have everything figured out, and so I won't be able to deal with anything I haven't already considered. They each think I have some rule that I apply to every problem: Paula thinks it's a refusal to apply rules at all (which she insists is a rule in itself), my mom and my sister Allie think it's just a half-baked agnosticism, and my other sister Melissa thinks it's a dependence on logic. They all insist that there are things outside of the domain of logic, or that logic is as fallible as any other human invention.
And there's the question. I always start to answer it by asserting that mathematics is completely objective: even if you don't have words for "two", "three", and "five", it is still true that the concatenation of "II" and "III" is "IIIII". And that would be true even if no one existed to count objects. Why? Because mathematics is universal, rather than particular. You apply particular problems to it, like "How many apples are there in a uniform grid of apples whose sides number 6 and 4?", and get answers with units: "24 apples". But six sets of four things together always contain twenty-four things; we write that statement shorthand as "6*4=24", a statement without units. Of course "6" and "4" don't exist by themselves. They're hypothetical; they're symbols. The whole beauty of mathematics is that manipulation of symbols can mimic exactly the much messier manipulation of real objects, and thus the mathematician can solve a physical problem in the abstract. If it doesn't work, all it means is that his system of symbols didn't represent the situation exactly enough.
So did humans invent mathematics? Not any more than we invented fire. Invention is the application of a truth into a method to solve a particular problem. Writing "4+6=10" is a method. "4+6=10" is a truth. So while the human application of a mathematical truth to a situation might be prone to human error, mathematical truth itself is flawless.
The same is true of logic. Take the basic modus ponens syllogism: "The belief that a certain fact is true, combined with the belief that the same fact implies a second fact, causes belief in the second fact." (Or, in short: "If A is true, then B is true. A is true. Therefore B is true.") Notice that I wrote "belief" and not "knowledge". "A" doesn't have to be inherent, or empirically demonstrated, or even popularly accepted. If somebody believes A, and the implication from A to B, then he believes B. In that way, the application of logic (that is, discourse) is subjective. In fact, misapplication of premises to syllogisms is the idea we know as "fallacy". But the truth of the relationships among different kinds of syllogisms, just like the relationships among different kinds of mathematical operations, is inherent.
The problem I run into is this: I rely on logic. Where other people evaluate arguments based on their religious convictions, or their emotional reactions, I evaluate them based on their merits: whether they are fallacious; whether I believe their premises; whether their forms are valid. And life makes sense to me, doing that! And yet faith, which is supposed to be such a desirable virtue, consists entirely of denying a conclusion that you would otherwise believe.
Now, when people say that spirituality is outside of the domain of logic, there are two different ways to interpret them. One is that they have been convinced, by their younger selves or by a religious compulsion, that their beliefs are simply not to be challenged; that the only way to protect their beliefs, and the happiness that rests upon them, is to deny all attempts to undermine them.
The other is that spirituality is a way of dealing with the emotions that come with being human that cold logic can never be: logic can help you to understand, but not to feel better. And so we adopt religion, superstition, unsupported categorical assertions. We trust people despite the knowledge that they will fail us; we love life despite the knowledge that it will end. These things fly in the face of logic, but we accept that and agree to integrate a contradiction into ourselves in order to balance logical understanding with emotional contentment.
By breaking out of the first interpretation, and adopting the second, a person may not even change his actual system of beliefs: the important thing is that he understands them and is not afraid of challenges to them, because he does not rely on them. He knows there's really no deep meaning in the frequencies that comprise music, but he listens and plays anyway because he loves the way it makes him feel to imagine the meaning that could be there. The judgment he develops throughout his life fine-tunes his ability to decide when this kind of escapist placebo is appropriate.
Maybe my sisters are right. Maybe I've spent so much time defending the merits of atheism that I haven't stopped to consider the fact of my own emotions' control over me. But I will say this: If the world is the same for everyone, and yet we are all predisposed to different personalities, then our beliefs ought to be correspondingly different. So now I'm searching for something to believe, to accept in the face of contrary evidence, and it better be something good.
Friday, August 21, 2009
Mathematician disenchanted
Listening: Justin Timberlake, "Cry Me a River"
Back in April, my BC Calc class was learning about Taylor series, and I decided to figure out whether there was a non-recursive formula for the nth derivative of a function. I spent two months (really, four weeks, because I put it down for a while) working on it, and by June I had the answer and an eight-page proof for it. I submitted it as my final project for the course, and made a presentation of it to my class. It was really impressive, by all accounts.
Fast-forward to August 11, when I had a meeting at Pace University in the city to show my work to a high-ranking professor. She was incredibly friendly, besides displaying a fluency in mathematical thought and discourse that I was beginning to believe didn't exist. She worked out two simple but diverse examples of my formula, expressed her surprise that it held for such different kinds of functions (polynomial and trigonometric, if you're keeping score at home), and said that she'd forward it to a friend of hers at UNC Chapel Hill. Most importantly, she said she'd never seen it before, which meant I might have an opportunity to publish it, breeze into college, and live happily ever after.
Except that she just emailed me back to say that the UNC professor had already known of the formula. It was impressive that I'd come up with it independently, but it was definitely not original.
And here I was strutting around in the meantime like I were a prodigious Mathematician, imagining myself opening a Priority Mail envelope to find a copy of the Whatever-Organization Journal of Mathematics with my name in the table of contents, acceptance letters, bragging rights, recognition, satisfaction.
She's still writing a letter for colleges describing the meeting and vouching that I did come up with everything independently, but I really had had the highest hopes. And now I'm a lowly peasant-child again.
Shit!
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