the joker sucks II: suck with a vengeance

Furthermore, I’m not some postmodern lunatic claiming that real truth doesn’t exist and therefore it’s pointless to speculate on the nature of it.

What I AM saying is that Immanuel Kant was RIGHT. And philosophers from his day onward have been pissed off because of it.

Kant claimed we can’t know things “in themselves”. Meaning we can’t perceive objects and nature in their true form. We can only perceive “phenomena”, or nature though the prism of the human mind. In other words, the human mind is VERY active in shaping our reality.

No one likes this.

And they don’t like it because they know it’s true.

To perceive objects and nature without the human mind would mean to transcend the human mind. OR, ceasing to become human altogether.

As it currently stands, that’s impossible and we run into many metaphysical holes when we try to speculate on that.

Now, that isn’t to say we are “cut off” from external reality. But we are hobbled by our own physical brains. The universe is seemingly infinite, but our brains are finite.

We are like a small hole in the bottom of a beach, where only one grain of sand can pass through at any one moment.

Lame example, I know. But that’s how it feels.

But my larger point is how the Internet affects all of this. Is our logical faculties, rooted in a material brain, designed to handle this shock load?

In our evolutionary development, we developed our facilities to handle immediate needs. Tools and complex communication emerged from this, leading to advanced society and advanced technologies that have seemingly advanced passed our understanding.

I often like to think that art is an unintended byproduct of this development. Literature, drama, paintings, etc. got spat out and reabsorbed back into the machinery. It became an integral part of our language.

Along came the internet and telecommunications where we are bombarded by intellectual work. Now we can’t help but see the archetypal dramatic progression written in the fabric of the universe.

In other words, the internet permits us to live in our own fantasy world….a fantasy that objectively doesn’t exist….it’s a prism on top of a prism.

Are we made to sit behind a computer?

And is it worth tearing the world down because of Jon Gruden’s emails?

These are the questions worth asking.

Ok, BYE ✋