Try, fail and try again. Trial and error is the basis of evolution. But is the concept limited to biological workings? I want to divulge my own perspective on evolution and its siblings, who as a family relentlessly brings the world into states of greater complexity.

To do this, I reuse the term evolution and let this new evolution have two characteristics

1. For each version of evolution, there is a group of subjects that manifest and disappear (live and die).
2. Transcending those lives, is a concept which is made more complex by this process.

The eternal evolution

Take stars, for instance. Brown dwarves live long lives, blue giants short lives. They all explode eventually and spread dense matter that ends up in other solar systems. That is their interaction. The concept that evolves, is the distribution of elements. Our solar system is of the third generation, which means the elements we are made out of, have been involved with two stars before. Otherwise, there’d only be hydrogen and helium. This evolution of matter made life possible.

On our own planet, then, you eventually got the biological evolution, the prime example. It started out as evolution of structures: inevitably, only the stable ones remained. Then, when life was truly starting to form, producing bodies and movement, competition took over. The changes that evolution made on its subjects, varied greatly as the complexity rose. At first, you would see genes multiplying, forming two body parts where there used to be one. In time, the genetic “programming language” was extended, and changes could happen in more ways. More interestingly, they could surface as preferences, desires, feelings, things that were previously unknown and irrelevant for early evolution.

Entering ideas

A lot later, with the introduction of communication, evolution could work on ideas.  Human beings introduced complex language, and soon, the new lives  of evolution were governments, empires, religions, and art. Ideas have been growing and multiplying beside us humans ever since we started having them. At some point, they started acting on their own and having great impact on our short lives. Our ideas have long since outgrown us.

Sure, we designed them and we keep them alive; but the systems, functions and institutions of our society move us around like puppets at times. Evolution can only work so fast to change them, and the momentum of these titans is undeniable. We enter into these abstract organisms and take on roles that are different from our own nature, working for their cause because they, in turn, give us the food we need to survive. Sadly, with no central consciousness, it is hard to let these lives be subject to the ethics we ourselves live by, as they seem to exist in a more brutal environment than the one they have provided us with: our safe, wealthy society distant from nature. In time, the evolution of ideas might change this.

Other ideas stay in the abstract realm and give birth to small, curious lives. Science is one of these; like ants on an anthill, we swarm over it and add our little correcting bits, planting new seeds, resulting in all kinds of technology and knowledge.

The idea of art

The ideas I find most interesting, are those of art. It is the most broad and varied, the most changing and the most impacting of all our ideas. All art borrows subconsciously from other art, configuring it in new ways and adding as much new as the artist can manage. In effect, most art is greater than any one human being. It is the best parts of many. But more importantly, it survives them and it survives the artwork, waiting for the next artist to pledge his alliegiance to the cause of artistic evolution.

Still, what art does and has ever done, is to show us what we are. So it should have an upper limit of evolution. We like to deconstruct, and we love to rediscover old and “lost” art. The later years have seen a change in art and its expressions that is due to science’s evolution, and not art’s own. Furthermore, whereas the evolution of science brings us far beyond humanity, and into the depth of things we can never fully understand, the evolution of art would have to converge. Its evolution is to give gradually better insights, lessons and explanations of ourselves and the things we know.

But no two days are we the same. In a changing world, what we are changes as well, as we become ourselves through interaction with the surroundings. Thus, art is given more to express. Possibly, one day the evolution of other ideas will have given art the power to keep up with that change. What would that mean for us?

A whole darn lot, I daresay.

In this entry and the next, I look at the relationship between science, magic… and what we think they are. First, I reveal the ignorance of science as it does not care about first-hand knowledge and emotional experience, but only theory and description. Are not our very emotions a result of these processes which we treat with such logical indifference?

Different humans can have very different perspectives on things. In many conflicts, it’s never enough to just point out the facts and agree upon them. That’s not what those conflicts are about, and yet some people just won’t understand that. Why?

Well… fact, or information, is power. This has — naturally — given much power to information. And what is information all about? I’ll tell you. It’s about 0 and 1. Black and white. North and south. Jedi and Sith. All information is either valid or invalid. Information, the great power of our time, doesn’t care about anything else.

But we humans are different. No matter what science, the INFORMATIVE study of everything, says, no matter if we consist of particles and waves chock full of information itself, we do care. When we think something is sad, we do not mean that it is valid or invalid. No, it’s sad, and that’s that! And this is proof enough for me that the world really consists of far more than just information.

So perhaps the focus on information is a bad thing for us. Perhaps we should boo on all the governments and the institutions and the companies who made it and sustain it that way.

Or perhaps, to actually make a difference, we ought to realize that this imperfect system of ours isn’t anybody’s fault, but the result of thousands of years of battle — a battle between good and bad and ignorant intentions. And that the most important thing isn’t that society molds us into brainless dolls that do the right things without really getting it. It is that we understand it ourselves and do what is right IN SPITE OF any flaws in society.

Onwards to the point. We’re living in a modern world where science dictates the development of our lives. But as I have said, science is blind in its lack of emotion. This is a potential whoop-ass problem that’s only getting worse. We’re forgetting ourselves, ignoring the parts of us that science does not approve of.

So it’s clear that science isn’t enough here. But science is about the whole everything, and we are just a little part of that whole everything. So if science isn’t enough to define us, then it sure can’t be enough to define the whole world! It even makes me wonder: if the world can produce life, with all its quirks and emotions, can it produce equally magnificent things also elsewhere? And here’s the source of my ponderings, the reason for my subject: imagine all the things that neither we nor science can see.

I’m a physics student, and throughout my studies, I have gotten to know many strange things. Natural laws that we could never have guessed, connections we could never have foreseen… and these things are the tiny building blocks of insanely complex happenings out there. As complex as us humans? Perhaps.

In the middle of our complexity, we have a consciousness. We have feelings, and we appreciate art. And science just doesn’t get it. But it’s there alright. So I can’t help but wonder: how many other things like this are there, out in the vast cosmos, that science and information can never understand, never touch?

We have a lot of new discoveries ahead of us.

The modern opinion is cynical towards the world, expecting to recieve no compassion or meaning — because after all, the universe is a faceless machine, its gears the cold logic of physics and probability. I battle this opinion under its own terms, showing that emotions like love cannot merely be explained by their apparent purposes, but must have been present since the conception of this world.

Humanity. We live and we persist because it is inevitable. In this world of change and peril, only that which persists, lives.

Our highly developed consciousness, our imagination, made us persist. Our hope in better days, in great wonder, made us persist. Because of them, we still exist to this day.

And because they made us persist, these parts have persisted in us. That is the only reason we have them. If the world had challenged us in different ways, we would have developed different abilities. In another world, we might be unable to learn to swim, climb trees… or feel happy.

So how can we think that there is any meaning to our emotions? That is, beyond their effect upon our actions, and leading us to our survival. How can we ever claim that emotions are anything else than our naive imagination of the world, our colouring of what is truly neutral, a machine?

By questioning how they are even possible.

If emotions are in us alone, then they are part of us but not of the world. This would imply that emotions come through us from somewhere else than the world we know. Which, of course, is a rather uplifting thought.

If this seems unreasonable, then the other logical option is that emotions have got to be a part of this very world, inherent in it without the need of our presence, and made possible by the very laws that govern it.

Great, so our emotions exist. That’s fine and all. But how claim that the very emotions themselves are any more than gears and wheels, pulling our strings? Love is just there because we survived when we stayed together, right?

That doesn’t matter. If I want to put a nail into a wooden box, I get a hammer. But if I lived on a planet made out of jelly, it would be no use. Likewise, if we lived in a world without love, there would be nothing we could do to stay together and survive. Our emotions are seperate from what they do for us, as the hammer is seperate from the need to nail wood.

So evolution might have given us all we have, and that explains why we have it, but not why those things work. It couldn’t have been given, had it not been there to give. All of our abilities, all of our emotions, all our imagination; they are all tapping into the big picture of all things.

So…

What is music, really?

Every joy I feel, I want to share. Every good thing I discover, I want to pass on. If doing that was easy, I would be a very happy person, for I have so much to share. But it’s not easy, so I always try to refine my methods. It’s not like striving to be accepted, which is generally a bad thing. No, I strive merely to become a better person, a better friend, a better mentor. A better father.

I’ve actually thought about fatherhood a deal lately. Perhaps it’s because I’ve recently managed to form a mental image of the ideal paternal spirit: the caring, compassionate, strong, wise, never-failing fatherly role. I suddenly understood better why some religious people are so caught up in characters like Jesus, an example of such a spirit. Another example is Aslan, from The Chronicles of Narnia. Both are genuinely caring characters that you just know you can trust, rely on to make things better, who do not waver or doubt. I understand the attitudes and ideals that form the basis of this spirit, this archetype, and I want to give it my best shot at living up to the same role when my time comes. I believe I can be a good father

I guess … I guess this actually provides me with something to fight for. I’ve been a bit short on that lately. Yes, I can fight for this. A possible future. My future children. They’ll need me to be strong, so why not start towards that goal right away? They won’t want to be hearing about how I couldn’t pull myself together and become strong for them because I spent my youth being heartbroken, lonely and anxious.

I’m a goddamn genious.

Inspiration, yes. It’s what I’m all about. And from this moment on, I’ll be just a little more stubborn in my ways, a little less respectful of the society’s norms and expectations, and a deal more self-confident. Sure, with all I’ve just said, I could instead profess that, from this day on, I’ll be radically different. But experience shows that’s not the way it works. And that’s a good thing. So this is one more step, one of many, towards the future I seek. The soil beneath my feet is not mud and pebble, but dreams and inspiration, hope and confidence, love and compassion. I do not choose my way from what I know exists. I make my own way. Step by step.

This entry in other words: I started playing Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean today. I absolutely love it so far, because of the wonderful score, and I want the whole world to play it, to feel it.

Despite that and the fact that is was December 1st, though, yesterday was a bad day. I can tell the bad ones from the good ones from the very moment I wake up; on the bad ones that moment is typically two hours after I wanted to wake up, and also two hours before I manage to get out of bed. Also it’s always cloudy and gray outside. I can still feel good on a bad day, through effort, using music, movies and art. But if I venture outside I will risk interacting with other people in a manner that might make me feel at a lack of social abilities, and I might lose whatever good mood I have in the blink of an eye and exchange it with grinding anxiety. So on bad days I tend to stay at home.

Today was another bad day, with a sky covered by homogenous rainclouds. Yet it’s been quite a special day, too. Even though nothing happened. Here’s how it went:

I wake up just before 10 am, by my wristwatch ringing from atop a shelf. I let it ring for about fifteen minutes before I bother rubbing my eyes so that I can stare at the ceiling and try to become more awake. Finally getting up to turn off the alarm, I grab my cellphone and lay back down in bed. After listening to music from my cell for half an hour without falling asleep, I finally decide to get up. I turn on my computer and the lights on my christmas tree and fetch some breakfast.

Having realized it’s a bad day, I decide I need to do something pleasing. I decide to check the deviantART favourites of an artist whose work I recently added to my own favourites. I’ve realized it’s one of the best ways to find new favourable works. I find a whole hoard of amazing photos. Have an example:

So many of them are so new and unique, and unexpected! I find myself thinking things like “is Romania really that beautiful?” “Does ice really form like that?” “Do forests like that really exist?” Overall my mind feels expanded.

However, I still feel unsettled and unable to focus on doing something productive. Then I remember how taking walks has done wonders for my perspective before, so I decide to do that. But it’s not exactly Spring these days; the sun is already down, and so I walk through the darkness on raggedly ice-covered ground through a constant drizzle, with the clouds looming heavily over me. The light of the city illuminates the nearby clouds, but that light fades into merciless blackness over the forest.

I’m not in a lonely mood, so that doesn’t repel me. I enter the forest and choose paths I haven’t gone before. And then, whilst slipping downhill on the icy ground, my mind lectures itself and says: “honestly, already the emotion of this experience is far stronger than many of your childhood memories!” I realize the truth in that as I look at some mist rising above a nearby lamp post and notice that I can smell the forest. That makes me smile and gives me hope. Not all memories come from my childhood. New memories can still be created, memories that might even surpass those. I feel I’ve discovered something wise, but then I also think of this quote:

“It’s far easier to write a hundred essays on philosophy, than to practice one single principle.”

There you have me. I’ve philosophized a lot about different things the past years. Now I feel I know quite well what’s right. But that does in no way mean that I follow that philosophy. I used to think myself capable of it, but that is an overestimation. I always try to follow the wisdom I believe in, and through that I might one day manage to practice some of it. But I am merely human, and humans are bound by habit, routine and psychology. It makes the road long. Excitingly, life is, too!

The road I walk on treads close to an open stadium where, seemingly, a match of ice hockey is being played. I stray from it and walk and among the dark trees on the other side until I meet a river. I follow the river to a crossing covered by so much ice I’m not really sure what’s ground and what’s river. When I reach a small nearby lake, I’m far from the nearest lamp post. I walk out on a long wodden pier and gaze into the surrounding landscape. Two words come to me: ‘bleak’ and ‘depressing’. Better can hardly be said about the sight of it. Even the hundreds of crows, now nesting in the forest, are hiding away from the cold and the dark. Still, what I think is this: “There’ll be a new Spring next year, just you wait.”

Walking back, I find myself feeling soothingly detached from the world. Or rather, from my own routines and common emotions. I walk past buildings and places where I’ve walked several times a day for over a year, but my mind is not at all set like it usually is when I walk there. No, right this moment, due to the unusual atmosphere, the world is another. I keep my eyes on the sidewalk ahead of me, to keep from slipping. But the ice on the sidewalk sparkles as if to entertain me. And I am entertained, and pleased. I get to live in another world for a moment.

Back home, I feel inspired and so I write this entry. After it’s finished, I prepare some dinner, and then I watch Edward Scissorhands for the first time in many years.

Look at an object close to you. Pick it up, examine it. What do you see?

And what more do you see?

What does the object mean to you, beyond its mere shape and surface? Our heads don’t know the world when we are born. We gradually learn how to understand it, how to chop it into pieces our psyche can comprehend. So how is it you really interpret the object; what tools are used, and what is the object decoded into, in your head? And your heart?

Okay, so it’s not always that easy to know. But you do have a special decoding process. It’s unique to you, and it’s been fine-tuned throughout your whole life. And it’s in no way limited to individual objects. We all live in the same physical world, but to each of us, everything means something else than to everyone else. So when we think of what the world is, the decoded version is all we know, and that’s what we think the world is. That is not a correct image of what the physical world truly is, but it’s not fiction either, so what is it exactly?

It’s your world.

Many things in the total physical world will never exist in your own. In today’s society many people know about most of the world, but we will never truly understand and feel all there is (hopefully!). We will only ever live in a slice of it. We all have our own separate laws of nature, our own beliefs, truths, ideals, and feelings. And it’ll all be true — per definition — in our own world.

Because of the size of this physical world and the amount of people on it, it can contain numerous individual worlds whose truths are pure contradictions (even ignoring religion). And we may often catch ourselves thinking: “what is right?” Which is because we so often assume that we all live within the very same world, and that all truths are common. The question might even send us into an existential crisis: “have I had it wrong since the beginning?” We might end up being someone else than we were, thinking like that. It’ll mean we’ve effectively changed our own world into something else. It’s possible and perhaps even for the better sometimes, but generally, it’s not necessary.

There is no one universal truth, no one true common world all our minds live in. We all have our own take on the world. In it we’re never misplaced and we’re not mistaken. We can shape our own worlds and decorate them however we please. We can fill our worlds with happiness, or we can fill them with sorrow (and then I don’t mean what happens, but how that affects us and makes us think). Neither is more true nor more right. For what is right and true is also a part of our own world.

Of course, you could say that’s taking it a bit far; perhaps beyond moral, or beyond the limitations of the human psyche. And you’d be right. Because there are limitations to what your own world could and should be. Where the limits are, depends on who you ask, but more importantly it depends on what you’re capable of. Your world has got to reflect your own identity (preferrably including your conscience). And most of the times it will, if you’ve never thought about it. I’d say it’s even possible to find your own identify by realizing what your own world is like. But you might also change your own world to something that’s not you (however paradoxal it might sound, I still think it’s possible), and that might be bad for you. But personally I believe that most of us can live in many different worlds without this problem.

And as if things aren’t complicated enough: nobody can live isolated from everyone else, so there are a whole lot of other worlds we’ve got to pass through each day of our lives. There can also be collective opinions shared by many different individual worlds, and there’s also this monstrous, shapeless, vague lump of billions of individual worlds that one can choose to put to represent the common mind of the whole world. In short, this is a whole science (which has probably been science’d lots of times already).

Today it’s been windy with a few scattered showers, otherwise sunny. Wind of these proportions are rare here in Oslo. Any wind at all is rare here. It felt reminiscent of home in many ways. And when I finally went out to get some groceries, countless old feelings rushed through my head. The sound of the wind, the humid smell and feel of the air, the changing light from small clouds blocking the sun and countless other impressions pulled strings in my brain that led way back, and all sorts of related feelings and half-memories popped up. I felt feelings I’d felt during similar weather back in my childhood, and I could picture it, but all pictures were general and possibly even generated in my head, and not specific memories.

Lately I’ve done this a lot with dreams, too; when I’ve had a dream worthy of writing down, I always get all sorts of flashbacks from other dreams while I’m doing that. Each flashback is related to a specific mood in a part of the dream, and then other flashbacks show up based on the same mood or even on a different mood in the dream of the first flashback. It’s very odd and otherwordly and I love it. The feelings I sense in dreams are always the ones that are furthest from ordinary feelings. And I find that the more the difference, the more interesting a feeling is. It always feels like sitting in a cave and getting to see an image of the outside world. Which is part of why I like these feelings. They shows me things, feelings, perspectives, that I’d forgotten. Part of the outside of my current box.

In each and every mood there’s another world, another way of thinking, another way of living, a separate meaning of life. And experiencing it all is part of my meaning of life.

Which, I coindidentally realized, is also why endings are my mortal enemies. An ending means the destruction of such a mood. I always need to find a perspective that hides the fact that it was an ending in order to deal with them. I hate the idea of the “emotional world” shrinking due to endings. Luckily, there are also always new beginnings. In the long run, this means that the emotional world will become something entirely different after a while, which does agonize me. But that’s the way of this world, and if you don’t manage to keep up with the change, then you yourself will end along with your own past moods, all alone. So the trick is to accept change and never stand still.

In fact, this just gave me a different perception of a human life. For one can always argue that if you change, you’ll eventually lose all you used to be and no longer be your old self. But you’re still you, so if you’ve become another person, which you is the “canonical” you; the old of the new? I say, you’re never the exact same person at two different times. Your mind is like the bank of a river, and who you are changes constantly like the flow of that river. Or more accurately, let the river be a long pool, and let time be the length of that pool. The water in the pool is you, but your personality — what others would call that which really is you — will depend on where one stands along the length of the pool. If the pool is long enough, you might be able to isolate different sections of the pool which represent completely different personalities. If we lived for hundreds of years, perhaps we’d change over and over, practically having lived the lives of several different people, except we’ve kept memories from it all (or perhaps not). All in all, what I’m saying is, a life doesn’t consist of being one person, but of being an infinity of transitions from one person to another, all melding together into a body of water that is the whole you.

Sometimes, if feels as if one’s attitude converges towards cynicism. There’s always someone able to thwart your hopes with due right. But what if there is a seperation between fact and feeling, and what if cynicism is just one of many emotional perspectives?

A large part of the world has gone blind. Cynical. Bitter. Cold and depressed. There are a whole lot of people who concider themselves to be “honest” or “truthful”, and all they know and tell is misery. All of the things that are wrong in the world – suffering, selfishness, abuse, brutality and corruption. I sense we’re in a pessimistic period where noone trusts their own governments. I wouldn’t say it’s bad to be critical, but it’s funny how we’re never happy with it and how we always see the bad sides of all actions taken by the controlling forces.
Many people have a perception of the world as a rotten apple, full of corruption and only negative sides.

It’s so strange that we never wonder WHY we think so. Why are we unhappy with the world? It’s because we imagine what would be better and we want it to be that way. Most humans on the face of this planet wants the world to be a better place. Doesn’t that mean, symbolically, that we have a core of goodness?

Regardless of what you feel about that, we still have these thoughts about better worlds. And even if we go that way or not with the actual world, aren’t the thoughts a good thing by themselves?
Think about the music you like best. It’s likely to have some sort of overworldly, wonderful atmosphere. Wouldn’t you call this music a positive feature in the world? Well, humans made it. The same goes for all stories, books, movies, tv-games, all philosophy and all thoughts, even all fantasy. I think many are forgetting about the humans behind all of it and the effort and feeling they put into it. There are so many humans in the world wanting goodness and making goodness. These people you don’t hear about frequently. But they don’t mind. They’re not seeking fame or power.

Media is all about bad things. Bad times and unexpected actions are often all that’s etched into history. Somehow it’s what people want to hear and see. Might be an instinct that makes us more alert of danger. Although this might come in handy, it’s utterly misguiding. In a world of this size, there are enough bad things to cover your whole area of vision every day of the year. I’d say the focus on the corruption is the real corruption, a mental corruption.

Yet, we know bad because we know good. If we only knew bad then we wouldn’t be so unhappy, because we wouldn’t know any better. Our discontent shows there must be a contrast in the world, there must be good. And everything that’s just the slight inch better than bad is man-made. You might say nature is good and not man-made, but tell me, is nature really that good if there’s no human there to say so? We humans have a really flexible mind. We come from a nature in which your own good is the only important issue, so where the heck did all these ideas of better worlds where everyone’s happy come from? Hard to say, but based on this I’d say we humans are the most good being on the face of this planet.

As I said, we have flexible minds. We have a broad spectrum of feelings. The discontent shows that the spectrum extends far into much better feelings that we have in the world today. And all the good we have created proves those feelings aren’t just a trial version, we can have them and use them like any other feeling.

The problem is achieving this. There are so many dimensions in the world – transitions that can be made from one state to another. But how do you move through these dimensions? Heck, what muscle do you use to move in the fourth space dimension? That is impossible, but emotional dimensions are different. You can open your mind and make it follow other habits, thoughts and feelings, but you can’t be taught how. You have to find the right muscle yourself. When you do, you might eventually realise how you’ve been standing still your whole life, maybe in a puddle, maybe at the edge of a cliff. Things you took as granted were impossible become accomplishable, you manage to see things a different way, outside the box.

I feel I have moved though several dimensions like this. My view on most things has changed, I am able to see every side of issues. I see this a a great achievement, but I also see it as unfair for those who are stuck in fixed dimensional positions, unhappy with the world, their life, or just about anything.

I don’t care much for the physical world. My position in it is not important to me – I don’t want wealth, fame or power. I want happiness, contentness and good feelings. That enables me to keep a distance from any corruption. The last thing I want is to make more of that. I won’t take advantage of others for my own good because I don’t need to do that to get what I want. I am free to choose how to take on the world. Although, I’ve already made that choice.
I will do what is in my power and ability to spread goodness. I want people to realize it’s there, and enable them to take their deserved part of it. I will not make anything big out of it, because it can’t be done that way, at least not by me. I will do my best to influence those around me and anyone in need.

Strangers are not really less than friends to me. I want to give everyone the same chance. If someone I don’t know asks for help, I will provide it if I can. I will try to answer any question and share my experience and thoughts wherever I feel they can help, given that my assistance is accepted.
However small my influence will be, anything is more than nothing and it does make a difference. Dragons or not, I see no reason to give up on this world.