Quotes 11-7-2013
by Miles Raymer
“We need to wrap our minds around the fact that as human beings we are inherently limited in our ability to reason and to discover things about the world. These limitations do not give us a license to arbitrarily ‘go beyond’ reason and evidence into religion or mysticism. On the contrary, they are reminders that nobody has final answers and that the quest is open to all people who are willing to use their brain intelligently. Our limitations also give us a reason to cut ourselves a bit of slack for not getting life exactly right, for failing here and there, as human are bound to do. This is why the eudaimonic life is always an imperfect and incomplete project, all the way until the moment of our death. But it is by far the most important of our projects, and one for which sci-phi is far better equipped to help us along the way than simple common sense, political ideology, or religious mysticism. We are social and (somewhat) rational animals, and we can reflect on how to employ our rationality to improve our lives and our societies. Seems like the meaningful thing to do.”
––Answers for Aristotle, by Massimo Pigliucci, pg. 286-7
“I put the anger in the dress the color of sky. I put it in there so much I could hardly stand it––that she was about to die, that she would die unrecognized, that none of us would ever live up to her example, and that we were the only witnesses. That we are all so small after all that. That everybody dies anyway. I put the anger in there so much that the blue of the sky was fiercely stark, an electric blue like the core of the fire, so much that it was hard to look at. It was much harder to look at than the sun dress; the sky dress was of a whole different order. Intensely, shockingly, bluely vivid. Let her go? This was the righteous anger she had asked for, yards of it, bolts of it, even though, paradoxically, it was anger I felt because soon she would be gone.
She died the following morning in her sleep. Even at her funeral, all I could feel was the rage, pouring out of me while we all stood around her coffin, crying, learning on one another, sprinkling colors from the dye bins into her hands, the colors of heaven, we hoped, while the rest of the town went about its business. Her brother rolled in on a stretcher, weeping. I had gone over to see her that morning, and found her, dead, in her bed. So quiet. The morning sun, white and clear, through the windowpanes. I stroked her hair for an hour, her silver hair, before I left to tell anyone. The dress request had already come in the day before, as predicted.
At the studio, under deadline, Cheryl led a seminar on blue, and sky, and space, and atmosphere, and depth, and it was successful and mournful, especially during the week after the funeral. Blue. I attended, but mostly I was nurturing the feeling in me, that rage. Tending to it like a little candle flame cupped against the wind. I knew it was the right kind, I knew it. I didn’t think I’d do much better than this dress, ever; I would go on to do good things in my life, have other meaningful moments, share in the experience of being a human being in the world, but I knew this was my big moment, and I had to be equal to it. So I sat at the seminar with half a focus, just cupping that flame of rage, and I half participated in the dyeing of the fabric and the discussion of the various shades and then, when they had done all they could do, and the dress was hanging in the middle, a clear and beautiful blue, I sent everyone home. Are you sure? Cheryl asked, buttoning up her coat.
Yes, I said. Go.
It was night, and the sky was unlit under a new moon, so it was up to me to find the blue sky––draped over us all, but hidden. I went to the bins, and listened for the chords, and felt her in me. I felt the ghost of her passing through me as I mixed and dyed, and I felt the rage in me that she had to be a ghost: the softness of the ghost, right up next to and surrounding the sharp and burning core of my anger. Both guided my hands. I picked the right colors to mix with blue, a little of so many other colors and then so many different kinds of blue and gray and more blue and more. And in it all, the sensation of shaking my fists at the sky, shaking my fists high up to the sky, because that is what we do when someone dies too early, too beautiful, too undervalued by the world, or sometimes just at all––we shake our fists at the big blue beautiful indifferent sky, and the anger is righteous and strong and helpless and huge. I shook and I shook, and I put all of it into the dress.
Of all people to take back? How impossible to understand that I would never see her again.”
––”The Color Master,” from The Color Master, by Aimee Bender, pg. 179
The above quote by Massimo seems optimistic and intellectually honest, for it is only with the use of reason, science, and logic that our primate brains (evolved over thousands of year for survival) can even hope to come upon properly justified true beliefs. We humans are apparently, at least to some degree, good at this given that humans have sent men and women to space. WE must be doing something right. At the same time and implicit in Massimo’s statement is the inherent truth that it seems also of the highest importance to frequently remind ourselves that we are biologically driven creatures who are given toward irrational thinking, which can not only lead us to form false conclusions, but to make important decisions based on those false conclusions that could greatly harm us. For example, fear of the “out-group” lead the US and the Soviet Union in the middle of the 20th century to perform thousands of nuclear tests in the atmosphere to the point of potentially harming the ozone layer until both countries agreed to limit testing and thus the risk of destroying our planet. Though reason and science are critical for living a good life, it seems important to remember that often times our logical conclusions are biased by our own emotional states, which is often times beyond our control and not at all rational. It is our own biological limitations that we must overcome, and we can only do this if we teach most humans how to reason well, to do science, to know themselves and their biological states, and then to create an environment filled with proper variables, with rewards and consequences, to check our biological drives and irrationality. Perhaps then will we find the good life for us all?