Love of Lights

Around 15 to 17 was a peculiar age for me. It was in this era that I truly felt alive. I had opened up to self-reflection, ambitious thoughts about the future, sincere thoughts about the present. I guess my bildungsroman years really came to fruition between 15 and 17; it perhaps was the pinnacle of my adolescence. I'm 19 now and I can feel my adolescence waning away, and with it a sense of being alive, and this worries me. My worry is that I no longer feel the way I did between the ages of 15 and 17. I don't mean to say I'm worried because I feel like a different person; that would be ridiculous. I'm perfectly aware that people change. What I mean to say is, I'm simply feeling less. About things, towards things, towards people. I have thoughts and emotions and opinions, but they feel like simulations; I feel an awful lot like a robot character, traipsing through life, watching, consuming input, ejecting output. I have a very good life. I have friends; I go to u...

Bertrand Russell describes philosophy as the intermediate space between theology and science. Theology dogmatically deals with the questions that often seem unanswerable; science deals with the factual and the mathematical, and often yields what appears to be true knowledge. Philosophy, the middle "no-man's land", dabbles in both, often grasping at the unanswerables, but using reason and science-like thought to try and answer them.

One of the arguments for the claim that we are not our bodies but are something else is that the body and the external world is objective and publicly accessible, whereas the way we feel, what it's like to be who you are, is subjective and private -- only you have privileged access to your mental states. Invoke a little bit of Leibniz's law here, and you have to say they're two different things because they have different properties. Invoke a little bit of Descartes' method of doubt there, and you conclude that you are essentially the mind (a thinking thing, a res cogitans), because you cannot doubt that you think (ego sum, ego existo; cogito ergo sum), whereas you can doubt all the other things. I'm not convinced by this though. I don't think the external world or the body is necessarily publicly accessible in the way that people often assume it is. I agree that a lot of it is -- we can see birds, we can see people's skin, we can touch the bark of the tre...