first blog post

hm.
I don't really expect anyone to be reading this, so if you've stumbled upon it, welcome, and thanks for reading.
I don't envy you...

mostly, I just needed a place to get down some thoughts, because I don't really have anyone to talk to about them. specifically, tonight I've been pondering on kierkegard. soren kierkegard is a danish philosopher from the 19th century. he is considered to be one of the first existentialists, although his work took place well before the term existentialist was coined.

so that no one wonders, I'll state from the offset that I'm neither religious nor atheistic. while I find christianity and most religion to be filled with hippocrites and people who use it for their own personal gain, and while I acknowledge all of the various logical contradictions and lack of evidence for the religious dogmas, its still difficult for me to conclusively decide that there is no god, no afterlife, or no anything besides what we know and experience day to day.

its very rare that I feel like a religious person has anything new to tell me, or even anything worth saying. kierkegard, on the other hand, has a philosophy that really speaks to me, which is particularly surprising given the almost christian fundamentalist character of his beliefs.

he'll have to forgive me if I don't do his theory justice, but the basic idea is that it is utterly impossible to know conclusively whether or not there is a god, whether jesus is his son, etc. it draws a distinction between objective knowledge, which is the goal of science, and subjective knowledge. to kiekegard, one's faith is a personal choice - something completely subjective. kierkegard taught that it is up to every individual to determine what is right to believe and the purpose to which one should live their life, and that once they decide, they should live those beliefs fully and passionately.

I feel like there's something very profound here, but not at just the most superficial level of it. sure, you can believe in what you want because there's no reason not to. but what's more than that, a tenet of his belief still holds true today. with everything we know about molecular biology, psychology, philosophy of the mind, and even the best theories on consciousness, we are still cripplingly unable to describe just what it is that subjectivity actually is. we know that when you feel sad, that certain chemical signals are queueing something in your brain. but what does it mean that you are feeling it? I'm not talking about your body feeling it, but you youself. if you were to say that the rain fell onto a rock, and then you were to say the rain fell on you, you would mean something entirely different and unreconsilable by the two statements. there are something like 3^76 atoms in the universe, and each one of them can experience any range of things, and yet for you and your insignificant self to experience something is something of a different texture. its something special, and entirely unexplainable, by both philosopher and scientist.

it's frustrating to have such conclusive knowledge about the objective world, but to still be fumbling around, knowing very little, in our own personal subjective worlds. and this is where kierkegard's real profundity comes into play. if we know nothing about the stuff of subjectivity, then who are we to really say that there isn't a god? who's to say that there isn't a world of stuff, made from the same stuff that our subjectiveness is made of. for that matter, whatever the subjective is, maybe it isn't dependant on the objective flesh body that it attaches to. maybe in the subjective stuff world, your subjectiveness is freed when you die, and goes to a heaven, or to go live with your ancestors, or whatever. maybe it does whatever you believe it will do, according to your religion.

I'm not saying I believe any of this. what I am saying is that we have no idea, again for emphasis, no idea why we have a subjective mind or what subjectivity itself is made of. science, being of an objective viewpoint, seems incapable of telling us. so perhaps its just as good to decide what you believe in for your subjective life, and just live it, and live it passionately.