Happiness and the Asymptotic Relationship

I, for one, hate weekdays. I hate weekdays because I can't play any video games on weekdays. This restriction isn't even the result of parental pressure or decree, as such things typically are, neither is it because I don't actually have the time to play video games. In fact, this year I find myself with more time rather than less, even though I'm taking 6 AP/MSTC classes this year as opposed to the four I took last year.

No, the reason I can't play video games during weekdays is that I am entirely incapable of keeping time when I play video games, and before I know it the sun is rising again outside. This problem stems from the fact that when I play games like Deus Ex Human Revolution, games that allow a great amount of player choice and decision when it comes to how to tackle a level, I am driven by a compulsive need for perfection. Every point in a plan must be executed to perfection: no getting caught by guards, no falling from top of a building to the streets below, no falling to the streets below and getting caught by guards.

Let's try that again... but cleaner and quieter this time...

As one might imagine, perfectly executing a plan is very hard, if not close to impossible. There isn't just a possibility that something might go wrong, there is a certainty that something, anything, everything will go wrong. And when something does invariably go wrong, instead of trying to escape the sticky situation I've gotten myself into organically, I'm more inclined to turn back the clock by loading a saved file of my previous progress and redoing the entire segment until everything goes according to plan. Like this, the process of completing a single level can take about two hours. But I do it anyway, because I am driven by a compulsive need to execute everything perfectly, until i do, a small part of my mind nags me until I finally do get it right. The problem though is that that mistake still happened... I'm just pretending it didn't. It's easier to pull stuff like that when you can basically go back in time and erase your mistake like some digital demigod.

Quite recently, our AP English class was assigned to read "Gooseberries" by Anton Chekov. The story follows Ivan Ivanovich and his friend Burkin when they are caught by a storm and decide to stay at their friend Alehin's manor for the night. Ivan Ivanovich then tells the story of his brother Nikolai Ivanovitch, who decided after living a dreary life as a government employee to become a country gentleman with a big estate with gooseberry bushes on his property. Why gooseberries? Because... symbolism. Nikolai eventually gets his manor, though it's hardly his dream manor. A stream runs through it, through the water resembles coffee more than it does dihydrogen monoxide, and there are none of Nikolai's dream gooseberry bushes. It took him years of scrounging and hoarding every copeck and it even resulted in the emotional destruction of a rich widow Nikolai married but had no love for and possibly even her suicide to make this dream possible for Nikolai, and here he is with a farm that doesn't actually meet his vision of his dream manor. 

"But no matter!" Nikolai exclaims, "I'll plant gooseberry bushes myself!" And so he does, and later he invites Ivan Ivanovitch to see what he had built. Over dinner Nikolai has gooseberries from his own bushes brought to the table, and popping one in his mouth, declares how delicious they are.

The gooseberries are actually sour and unripe. And herein we come to the symbolism. When Nikolai declares how delicious these gooseberries are, when they are exactly the opposite, we come to a key observation by Chekov. Nikolai has to lie to himself that the berries are in fact delicious, for what was anything he had done worth if these berries were not what they had been in his perfect world? Just like it would have destroyed Gatsby's ideal world and fantasy to acknowledge the futility of his endeavor, it would have destroyed Nikolai's ideal world to acknowledge that in fact the gooseberries he so wanted to believe were delicious were, in reality, distasteful. The gooseberries symbolize Nikolai's efforts to hide the truth, to instead indulge in a lie that let him continue to believe that he lived in his ideal fantasy. The difference between me hiding my mistakes on a video game and Nikolai hiding away the truth from his own sight, though, is that I can erase my mistakes. Once I start up that saved game and start playing again that mistake practically never existed. It is vanished forever from the game's memory, and eventually it would pass from my memory as well. Nikolai can't erase reality though. He can't do away with the fact that his stream is an aesthetically unpleasing brown, or that the gooseberries he eats are sour. He would rather believe that the truth is congruous to his fantasy, that the gooseberries are sweet. 

Herein we come to happiness and the asymptotic relationship. Happiness is like a hyperbola, approaching what is called an asymptote. An asymptote is essentially a line that a graph of a function will come ever closer to but never touch. Like a hyperbola, we can come close to true happiness, but to do so necessitates forgetting about the ills in life. Approaching true happiness can only happen when we hide from our view the imperfections of the material world, choosing instead to focus on our ideal metaphysical reality.

The function f(x) = 1/x, where x equals the imperfections we are faced with or that we acknowledge, notice as x approaches 0 we come closer and closer to touching that asymptote (which in this case is the vertical axis), we come closer and closer to pure happiness. Can there ever be a situation in which we are entirely free of these imperfections?

Can we truly be entirely happy at any point in our lives? In an ideal world, in each and every one of every person's ideal worlds, every problem can be solved, and thus we can touch that asymptote of happiness. But the world we live in is far from an ideal world, and sometimes the gooseberries will be sour, and sometimes one will miss that crucial jump in a video game. Ultimately being happy requires us to push these things out of our sight, though that does little more than create a facade of perfection, and a fragile one at that.

At the end of "Gooseberries", Ivan Ivanovich's friend Alehin is disappointed with Ivan's story, feeling it had no bearing on his own life. Alehin is entirely indifferent to the idea that people around him suffer and that we, consciously or unconsciously, hide such truths from ourselves to remain contented. In doing so, Alehin himself engages in this process. Is he wrong in doing so? Perhaps not. While it is important to be vigilant in the struggle toward empathy, Alehin is simply doing what we as people do on almost a daily basis. We have to hide certain uncomfortable truths from ourselves or we would go mad over the weight they would have in our mind. For instance, we know people are starving in Africa, or being bombed to bits in Syria or even simply subsisting in a state of squalor right here in the United States of America. Yet our every waking thought is not toward such problems, we hide these truths from ourselves so we can at least maintain a facade of happiness. 

The world is a dark place, it can be a depressing place, and ultimately it can be necessary to ignore the imperfections in reality: the sour goose berries, the hapless guard in a game who looked in my direction at the wrong time, the problems of the world like war, starvation and disease. The necessity in doing this is a reminder, as always, that we chose the reality we live in, for better or for worse, and the gift of literature is to be able to see others as they see themselves, to quote John Green. By being able to communicate, by being able to synthesize all these worlds and grasp all these truths, we can understand, and thereby actually solve problems, instead of shoving them to the side.

The world may be a dark place, but by no means is it entirely hopeless. We may not be able to make x equal zero, but we can come pretty close. I think .00000000000000001 is a fair compromise. Until then though, I guess I will just have to wait till the weekend to play video games.

The Fault in Our Languages

It was a pleasant surprise to find out that we were to watch a CrashCourse video featuring John Green as a warm up in Literature class. Pleasant because John Green and Hank Green are part of the 1% of the internet that is not cats, business or sexually explicit material, but actual, interesting content.

The video was about how and why we read literature. Green says that literature's purpose is for communication, for communicating to people near and far, both now and forever. He states that the purpose of literature is to be able to communicate with someone who may be very different from us, who may not even speak the same language, and who may or may not even be born yet. He then goes on to talk about how we use figurative language; similes, metaphors, hyperbole and all the other things you learn in English class in 10th grade, to communicate more effectively. He also talks about how using cliched or obvious figurative language can actually be a hindrance to communication.

All this made me think about why we need figurative language in the first place. After all, one of the biggest gripes that people hold against figurative language is "Why can't the author just say what they mean?" Figurative language can be seen as roundabout and unnecessary, and it may seem that the author could be more clear about what they are trying to say about life and the world around us if they would simply write that down instead of making a reader go on a scavenger hunt.

But figurative language isn't unnecessary. Quite the contrary, it is an essential, and might I say fundamental part of communication as a whole. Humans would not be able to communicate without a lot of figurative language. And that's because of the inherent limitations of language. Any language; be it English, Spanish, Esperanto, Klingon, or something that J.R.R Tolkien came up with and wrote a book about, is and will always be unsatisfactory when it comes to actually being able to express ourselves. The reason for that is that we don't think in language. Computers think in language (languages like C++, Java, BASIC or Python), but humans aren't computers. We think in an abstract mass of emotions and memories. Transcribing that to a language is secondary.

Furthermore, there comes a point where language becomes incapable of expressing the definition of things outright. My favorite example is the color red. The only true way to define red is the wavelength of visible light that is red, but that fails to capture how we experience red, the emotions we feel and what we think of and what we associate with red. But this extends to emotions as well, how do we define happy? Sad? Anger? Envy? There is no one way to define these things, so we can't truly talk about emotion with language alone, and if we can't talk about emotion with language alone, we can't truly capture the essence of a thought in language. Simply put, language by itself; letters, words, clauses, sentences, are mere shadows of what we think.

This is where figurative language comes in. We need figurative language to actually be able to convey these thoughts, or get as close to actually conveying them as we can. Figurative language goes beyond language by itself, and through figurative language we don't just hear what the author thinks, we can understand it. Figurative language resembles that abstract mass of our thoughts because like our thoughts, it too is abstract. When we try to understand figurative language, we grasp at ethereal gossamer threads, fragile and almost incorporeal. Figurative language compares the world we know and perceive to the world the author is trying to show us, and because of that, it not only shows us a topic, but it goes beyond language and expresses thoughts as emotions and memories as well. So while figurative language makes literature mindlessly difficult at times, without it, literature is entirely meaningless.

For example, would the message of Crime and Punishment be anywhere near as effectively communicated if we had not experienced Raskolnikov's guilt over his actions and his need for redemption? Would it have been more effective for F.Scott Fitzgerald to simply talk about how humans struggle against time and society and inequality of opportunity, instead of telling the tale of Gatsby, who longs to repeat the past with his advantages from the present?

We need figurative language to bypass a barrier that comes with the inadequacy of language. I mentioned computer languages earlier, and computers do think in languages. We can write code in languages like Java, C++, Python, or what ever strikes your fancy, and any computer will be able to process and understand it. And yet humans cannot do this, we cannot feed a human a sentence in the English language and expect them to understand it the same way another person does.

The reason computers think in languages is because they all think the same. There is no ambiguity between computers, no complicated emotions to convey, nor thoughts that transcend form as humans do. Computers perceive logically and uniformly. Humans are not nearly that simple. We all perceive the world in different ways, we all think in different ways, and ultimately language alone cannot communicate to people of infinitely many worlds, infinitely many backgrounds and infinitely many ways of thinking. Figurative language is the language of thoughts, and using figurative language we can come to understand the thoughts of another person, whether they be near or far, family or strangers, alive or dead.

The Slant to the Truth

It is easy to talk about the truth as if it is some universal aspect of life that people must embrace, lest they become deluded; to an extent this is true, the truth makes itself known, despite our best efforts. People cannot hide or erase reality, no matter how much we yearn to do so. And we do yearn to change the reality we find ourselves in, we can look to Jay Gatsby as an example. Always chasing after that green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan's dock, trying to escape his reality in favor of his ideal fantasy, which he found in the past. He desperately tried to, "beat on, boats against the current." Gatsby aims to ignore the truths of his reality, that his world was not perfect and that he could not make it perfect. We tend to call this denial.

This is not some phenomenon unique to Gatsby, at some point or another in life, we ourselves will come to lie to ourselves, whether it is about money or a relationship or grades; we have and will continue to lie to ourselves at various points in our life. That is what came to me when I read Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway.

Throughout the story, the central couple avoid talking about some operation (which i only just found out is an abortion... apparently I'm dense and this was obvious to the rest of the class. I actually thought the operation was trepanation.) Though this operation drives a wedge between the couple, neither truly want to discuss it. Further we have the symbolic white elephants. The symbol of the white elephant originated in Thailand, where the king would give white elephants to people he didn't like. This was because it was obscenely expensive to own a white elephant, both because they are picky eaters and also sacred and must be worshiped. Gradually the meaning turned into a gift that the recipient doesn't want.  We may also consider the common expression "the elephant in the room", which is to say, "the blatantly obvious thing that everybody is thinking about but no one wants to talk about." Taken together, the white elephant symbolizes our aversion to being told the truth.

Humans don't hate the truth. Quite the contrary, we hate being lied to, especially to our face. But at the same time we dislike being told truths that we find disagreeable. This is what Emily Dickinson wrote about when she wrote "Tell all the Truth but Tell it Slant". When Dickinson wrote "The Truth must dazzle gradually / or every man be blind" she referred to this very aversion of truths that we don't like to hear, the hard truth. We can't accept some truths because to do so would cause pain to ourselves. In our minds, acknowledging something gives that thing more power over us than if we exile it to the dark recesses of our minds.

Gatsby can't acknowledge that going to his ideal world where he has his money and Daisy loves him and has always loved him is impossible because to do so would leave him empty, he would have climbed the social ladder for naught in the end, and to acknowledge that would leave him powerless. Better to pursue a dream always just out of reach, coming ever closer to it but never truly reaching it; rather than acknowledging the futility of such a pursuit.

It is why the couple in Hills Like White Elephants can't bring themselves to really think about this procedure that weighs on their minds. Because to acknowledge it would be to obligate them to do something, and that meant change, one way or another. And change hurts, change is a hard path to walk, essential as it may be.

We can't acknowledge such unpleasant truths because to do so makes life harder, it makes life more painful. It forces us to relinquish control of our fate, and it abruptly tears us from the world we build for ourselves to face stark reality. Sometimes, its just easier to believe in something we may know to be false, even though we don't want to know it. This is what causes people to spend wildly out of their means, to find solutions at the bottom of a can of beer, to cling to relationships already dead, to ignore the world around them and pretend that for one moment the world is what we make of it, not what it makes of us. We prefer our facades to our truth.

Ultimately this calls to mind a section in my favorite video game, Dishonored. About midway through the game, you start a mission called "Lady Boyle's Last Party", in which you are tasked with assassinating an aristocrat funding a tyrannical regime. The mission takes place at a large party with the city's aristocrats in attendance, with no expense spared in a lavish mansion. The mission takes influence from the Edgar Allen Poe short story "Masque of the Red Death", and the two share common themes. In both, the elite try to hide away in their lavish bastions, they try to forget the plague that rages outside their doorstep, the truth knocking at the door.

They forget their own mortality, they have forgotten that death visits all equally, regardless of class. But it was easier to pretend that it was safe and everything was alright in their mansions, to pretend that for a moment the plague didn't actually exist, that they had control over their own fate. It was more painful to acknowledge the plague and the flaws of the world, as well as mortality, rather than give the truth absolute power over the aristocrats.

Whether it is Jig or Gatsby or Lady Boyle or Prince Prospero, people don't like unpleasant truths, and will go to great lengths to maintain their own ideal fantasies. It is another reminder that we choose the world we live in, by virtue of perception, that we desperately cling to our perception of what was and what ought to be when all else fails and our perception is the only thing remaining.

 "Strange, how there's always a little more innocence left to lose." -the Outsider, Dishonored (2012).

Oops...

In hindsight, I should have probably introduced myself and this blog before I dove into my first post, possibly scaring the reader with strange and possibly incoherent insights that I thought sounded cool in my head.

Sorry.

My name is Neelav Dutta. I like to think I am a bit of a lot of things, but in reality I'm probably only a bit of some things. I like video games, so much in fact that it is my goal to relate most of my blog posts to video games. If you have read my first two posts, then you know I am currently failing in that regard. Again, sorry.

But I also like art as well. I like it because it represent something more than mathematics or science to a certain degree. It represents the fruits of the human endeavor, our drive to enact our will upon the world. It represents what was, is and will be, but even more importantly it shows us what can be; and ultimately through art we can move past our own perception of the world, move past the world we create for ourselves and be able to know Truth. We need art (and when I say art I'm counting literature) because the Truth, as John Green said, resists simplicity. The Truth can never be reached by our own perception alone, rather we must realize that our world isn't the only world, that everyone creates and inhabits their own world by virtue of perception, and only by seeing these worlds so different from our world can we overcome ignorance. That is why we need art.

That's why I have created this blog. Sure, I'm getting a grade for this in English class, but it would be easy for me to simply write entries that satisfy the requirements of the assignment, nothing more, nothing less. But that's not what I'm going to do. Ultimately, what I'm interested in is overcoming ignorance, which is why on this blog I will write about what truly resonates with me in class, and I will write about what resonates with me in life.

You may want to know why my blog is called "Material and Metaphysical", or you may just want to know why there's so much purple on my blog. Let's start with the easy question. I like purple because it has the potential to be a dark, muted color or a vivid and strong color, or both at the same time, and while other colors can do this to a certain degree, I like purple more than the rest. 

My blog is called Material and Metaphysical because there are two worlds. The material world, the one we inhabit, the world as it is. And the metaphysical world. the world of our perceptions, the possibilities we see for our world, essentially us as people and the perceptions that make up the world around us. The metaphysical world is juxtaposed on the material world and by understanding both the material and the metaphysical world, the natural world and the various worlds that we as people create, we can attain a higher understanding, by this we become better, we make progress.

Welcome to Material and Metaphysical. I don't have cookies, or cake, but I have ideas, and I have a lot of them.

Raison d'Etre

The new age has brought remarkable advances in technology understanding, and these advances only continue at an increasingly fevered pace as time goes on. Today, not only do we have the technology to look at the brain, we actually have the ability to see it in action. We can see our thoughts, our emotions, our very being reduced to the simplest form of action potentials and neurotransmitters. Can this truly be what makes us human? The transmission of electrochemical signals along billions of neurons, is that what makes a human?

The brain during NREM and REM sleep. Using MRI scans the activity of the brain can be mapped, allowing us to see the inner workings of the brain.

Humans are undeniably more than simply a series of action potentials, what emerges from that series is something greater than its components. Our minds and ability to reason and think are greater than the neurons that compose them. But all this begs the question of what our purpose, our reason to exist really are. If existence is so simple as the myriad chemical reactions that keep us alive, then what about the rest? Ultimately, while our biological reason to live is as simple as pure survival, what makes us human is not survival, but what we do as we survive. Rather, what makes us human is that we don't survive, we live. But ultimately that brings us to the question of what our purpose in life truly is, what does it mean to live?

Recently, our AP English Literature class was assigned the short story "The Destructors" by Graham Greene to read as homework. The story follows a boy named Trevor, whose parents came into hard times after World War II, and as a result Trevor falls in with a group of rowdy neighborhood kids who fancied themselves a gang. Their activities amounted to little more than petty theft though, until one day Trevor suggests that they break into the house of a man nicknamed Old Misery and completely demolish it bit by bit.

Reading this story, I came across a particular quotation that struck me as rather memorable and poignant. When Trevor is asked if he hates Old Misery, he cryptically responds, "Of course I don't hate him, there would be no fun if I hated him."

Trevor goes on to say, "All this love and hate, it's soft, it's hooey. There's only things...."

This quotation struck me as memorable because it seems that Greene essentially comments on what drives humans to do what they do, he comments on our drive to do something in life. Greene seems to suggest that its not truly love or hate that really motivates people to act in the manner that they do, that passion and animus are not the true motivators of action. Instead, Greene employs the metaphor of things to talk about the world we inhabit, the material world. Trevor states, "There's just things...." This metaphor essentially states that what truly matters, what truly drives us is the material world around us, we are driven to make an impact of this world in some way, even if only it is in the form of having existed, of having lived.

We live to live, we live to do something and leave the evidence of our existence behind in the material world. We live to experience the world by doing something, that is how humans live. Ultimately that is what makes humans humans. Not neurons and synapses, but by our innate drive to live and exist and be a person. Indeed, animus and passion are not the motivators of action, our drive to action is what creates animus and passion. By existing, we become more human by inevitably experiencing these emotions.

That is why this quote was so memorable to me, because life is about what you can take and what you can keep. Our life is the sum of our experiences, our actions, and our responses. This quote is so memorable because it perfectly sums that up.

Humans are capable of a great many things. We are capable of good things and bad things. Benevolent and malevolent things. But for better or for worse we exist to do these things because that is what gives existence meaning beyond survival. This is how we live. By taking things, taking actions that leave a mark on the material world, once again for better or worse. That is our Raison d'Etre.

"Composition 7" by Wassily Kandinsky, there is beauty in the complexity of this piece, but I believe it serves as an example that ultimately we are greater than our component parts, our minds are greater than their component neurons. We transcend such a reduced model when we take actions and create or destroy, it is our actions that give life its meaning.