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where am I?
2005-04-07 - 10:12 p.m.
Where am I?
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Urgently need to do more work. As always. Which somehow makes it seem less urgent, which is bad, because, it kind of is urgent. Just like it always is.
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I have to figure out some way that I can both work and live. At the moment it feels like I'm doing fairly poorly at both.
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A thing about diaries, this diary too, but maybe all diaries. If I have a place where I the diary is a place where I can be completely honest, to begin with, I get very excited about it and start telling it all sorts of truths that I would be scared of anywhere else. Then people start to read it and they not only don't hate me, they like me for my courage and honesty. And then, then I start to become as conservative with the truth in the diary as I am in real life. Then I realise it's happening, so I try to change it. For a while it works, then it seems to wear off... there seems like there's a certain "normal" level of dishonesty toward which I gravitate.
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Could it be that this level of dishonesty is actually good, in some way? I'm not sure. I mean, why is it there?
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Oscar Wilde, somewhere, one of the plays maybe, anyway, Wilde says somewhere that all moral decisions are really aesthetic decisions. I've been thinking about a way that that might be true.
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Life, the evolution of life into ever more complex forms and ever more complex ecologies... is the process whereby over time the reverse of entropy occurs. Entropy is where meaningful structure breaks down into meaningless and random structurelessness. If you bake a cake, this thing has a structure, it has a shape and a meaning. If you leave it in the garden for a week and look at the result, that's entropy. And entropy is a law, the second law of thermodynamics, I think it is. Ok, but we are an emodiment of a movement in the opposite direction to entropy. Simple, but meaningful structures, like the amoeba, interact with each other and with their environment to produce more elaborate structures. That's evolution. That's also communication and... thingy, theorising. That's what our brains do as well. It's the same thing that's happenning with the internet, with books, with... there's a movement against entropy. And, ok, here's the thing; meaningless complexity is just... stuff. If you throw a handful of sand onto a black sheet you'll see a distribution which would be very time consuming and complex to catalogue, but which lacks any kind of... sense to it. It's senseless complexity. But meaningful complexity is always beautiful. This is what I'm thinking. Our aesthetic sense is actually an expression of some deep-rooted... instinct or something like it or affinity, that's a better word, an affinity for those things which are moving against the tide of entropy.
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So, given all the above, what is our moral sense for? If we imagine that our moral sense is there in order to... ensure we act in favour of the elaboration of systems full of meaningful complexity, what we're left with is... all moral choices are in fact aesthetic ones.
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I'm not sure how clear that is. It's clear in my head which is, I guess, something.
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"I'm not gonna cry today
I will not shed a tear
Even if some milk is spilled
I won't dilute my beer" - Loudon Wainwright III
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