We had a movie night tonight after class. I voted for Kill Bill, but Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind won the vote, which is a wierd coincidence because Tracy just mentioned it yesterday. Anyway, I have some thoughts.
I nearly cried this time I watched it… I don’t really remember how I reacted the first time. I talked to Niamh on the phone about halfway through, and she was in a good mood which made me really happy. But anyway…
Some time a bunch of years ago, I realized that the more you get to know a person… not by talking to them necessarily or anything analytical, but just by being around them… the more you get to know a person, the better a picture of them you develop in your head. And after a while, you feel like you can predict what they might do in a given situation or what they might think. You never really know the whole person, but the more you are with them the more you know.
So the thing I realized is that you have this picture in your head of them… but what is in their head? Aren’t they made of the same sort of stuff you are? You have this mental picture of them, but we ourselves are all just mental pictures in a way. We are what we think, what we decide, what we remember. So in a way, you develop a piece of them inside you. The more time you spend with a person, the more of them you have in yourself. In a very real, scientific way.
And this relates to my paper which I linked to on Tuesday. If you read that paper, I talk about how organisms are really models of their environments which are created by their environments through evolution. Instead of us creating models of our environment, our environment creates models of itself.
And if you look at people the same way, we don’t create mental pictures of people, we are all ourselves mental pictures of this greater thing, except each of us is like a different snapshot of the same place, and we all share our polaroids with each other, copying little bits of things and sticking them in our own.
If this is starting to sound kind of wishy-washy and theological and wacky, it’s because it is. There’s more truth in that sort of thing than most analytically minded people want to admit. But the fact is, I am growing to see that a lot of things I regarded as absolute truths were in fact just perspectives on a thing which can be viewed any of a number of ways. And if you want to say things like:
“We were created in God’s image”
“You’ll be in my heart.”
“We live forever in each others memories”
When I was 16 I would’ve thought you were just mistaken. You were ascribing absolute truth to something which was really “just” a social construct. Something which seemed to conflict with the much more palletable hard sciences.
But now I would say that each of those things can stand on as firm and as rigorous a foundation as f=ma. There is strong evidence for each, and they are on strong philosophical footing for me.
Anyway, what all of that boils down to is that the people I’ve spent a lot of time with over the past few years and before: you were definately with me tonight.
