Everything I am, I get from others. My body is millions, billions of lives great and small lending me their energy, life making my own. My mind is hundreds of ideas I've made out of thousands I didn't. Even my soul, the path I walk, my inherent direction, is something that existed before the person following it. Losing your ego doesn't make you nothing, it makes you everything.
It shouldn't surprise me, then, to realize that my personality is a synthesis of people I've met; that it is only by knowing strong, wise, good people, and mimicking them, that I've actually become at all strong, wise, or good. These are things learned. It can nevertheless be galling, socialized as we are to feel individualistic and independent of others. "Be yourself," "Think for yourself," etc., admirable though they may be in their intent, presuppose an extant and fully developed self to be; hearing such tripe as children, it's no wonder we become so confused. If one were to truly disregard all outside influence from birth, parents included, there would be nothing of humanity about them; a baby left to its own devices will grow into nothing more than an unusually intelligent and adaptable animal. The human spirit as we've developed it throughout our cultural development would disappear in a generation if no one were there to pass it on.
Where, then, does this value for independence come from?
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Know
The world is a mess; formless, shifting, flowing in and through our own attempts to understand it. To adapt to this, to move through the world and exist in it, we develop perspectives on the mess, much as art critics do on their favorite pastime; up versus down, near vs. far, dark vs. light, good vs. bad, me vs. not me. Later, as our appreciation of the world becomes more complex, such dualisms incorporate more elaborate systems to satisfy our increased ability to speculate on them; up vs. down expands and deepens into a complicated relationship with gravity; near vs. far into systems of measurement, first linear and later confusing; me vs. not me into constantly evolving social and societal models of interpersonal relationships, from family and neighbors to governments and nations. As evolution continues, and with the empowerment of our holy imagination, fantasies are needed to bring order to these otherwise randomly scattered qualities of the world. We believe, then, that the whole was assembled of parts, that gravity has some relationship to distance, distance something to do with family. We seek out patterns, any patterns at all, and declare them significant.
But lo!, our observations are not all in accord with one another. These patterns we've derived from the world, and so the perspectives we've used them to justify, often contradict one another. The mountain smokes and the ground rumbles, releasing fifty different prophets with fifty different gods to give the credit, Hades to Tectonic Shift to Crab People.
And so a new perspective is needed, one to account for all these disparate perspectives! The spiritual perspective will survey among one's options for the most obviously true explanation; the scientific will do the same, but place its premium on simplicity. These are only two examples of a class of perspectives which I imagine may potentially include others, giving priority to perspectives which are most interesting or some such, but my interest here will be limited to a consequence of the first two, scientific and spiritual, arising from the rather complicated relationship between what is obvious and what is simple. For, as stated above, as our ability to form complex perspectives grows stronger, our desire to do so grows in tandem; as we concoct systems to account for observations which are no longer obvious, like the workings of the cosmic, microscopic, mental, etc., the simplest such perspective is no longer even potentially an obvious one.
Thus do the spiritual and scientific represent conflicting drives of our evolution; the former toward forming knowledge, or stable explanations for the world, for use in it; the latter toward flexing our growing imaginative muscles, to finding new patterns among new relationships, thus overthrowing old perspectives by necessarily forming new ones to account for the previously unknown and unknowable.
A certain cynicism is necessarily born of this conflict for, as belief system after belief system is eaten away at by our mindless impulse to learn without any object but more learning, trust in our beliefs, the very perspectives that let us navigate the world at all, is weakened. Without this trust in our judgement, perspectives become academic, purely speculative; useless. That's where we entered this conversation, remember: the use of perspectives. These are tools, more or less effective at producing a meaningful experience of the world as the case may be, but necessary for doing so at all.
The presumed refusal to make use of such tools, to form and believe in ideas about how things are, is commonly known as skepticism, less commonly as indeterminacy. It is, in a woefully inadequate nutshell, a perspective on perspectives which suggests that they don't account for their own mutability; that the untrustworthy nature of perspectives is in fact a new relationship in the world which any trustworthy perspective must account for, and that this contradiction precludes the reliability, and thus utility, of any perspective whatsoever. You can never really know anything, you know.
But wait, we know things all the time, great glorious things! Huge and beautiful and wonderful things pass through our imaginations into the known and are accepted as truth, however time may crumble them down the line. Even if we can't really know, we still do, because the usage of the verb "to know" is very deceptive: it suggests, not just conviction, but that such conviction is justified. That perspectives should be stable and that, if they aren't, they can be of no use in determining Truth, since Truth, whatever it is, is plainly set and immutable. Right?
It is my belief, my perspective on this relationship between science, skepticism, and spirituality, that the question of which best pursues Truth is the wrong one to ask, since they bring the nature of Truth itself into question by their mutual existence; Truth itself is academic at this point, since contemplating it as an object in which it might presumably be included, or which may just as well include itself, precludes any hope of reaching a stable definition of what is True; without such a definition, pursuing Truth ceases to be about any such goal and constitutes nothing more than the pursuit itself. One doesn't run in circles to get somewhere, or at least not anywhere the circle goes.
The nature of this pursuit, this journey or process, is the consequence of our choice of perspective; what we do with our time is ultimately the only choice we have, and the only reason we bother forming conclusions about the world at all. We may seek out patterns to account for what is painful or what is beautiful, what is new or what is old, or a hundred other long-since accepted "realities" of life I could list for the desire to do so. This choice isn't necessarily one we make ourselves (enough digressions for one post!), but I think it must be one very fundamental to who we are as people. After all, those parts of the world we choose to focus on must inevitably be the basis for our evaluation of it, and thus all subsequent choices we make for how to live in it. And what else can we hope to call ourselves, if not the way we live our lives?
But lo!, our observations are not all in accord with one another. These patterns we've derived from the world, and so the perspectives we've used them to justify, often contradict one another. The mountain smokes and the ground rumbles, releasing fifty different prophets with fifty different gods to give the credit, Hades to Tectonic Shift to Crab People.
And so a new perspective is needed, one to account for all these disparate perspectives! The spiritual perspective will survey among one's options for the most obviously true explanation; the scientific will do the same, but place its premium on simplicity. These are only two examples of a class of perspectives which I imagine may potentially include others, giving priority to perspectives which are most interesting or some such, but my interest here will be limited to a consequence of the first two, scientific and spiritual, arising from the rather complicated relationship between what is obvious and what is simple. For, as stated above, as our ability to form complex perspectives grows stronger, our desire to do so grows in tandem; as we concoct systems to account for observations which are no longer obvious, like the workings of the cosmic, microscopic, mental, etc., the simplest such perspective is no longer even potentially an obvious one.
Thus do the spiritual and scientific represent conflicting drives of our evolution; the former toward forming knowledge, or stable explanations for the world, for use in it; the latter toward flexing our growing imaginative muscles, to finding new patterns among new relationships, thus overthrowing old perspectives by necessarily forming new ones to account for the previously unknown and unknowable.
A certain cynicism is necessarily born of this conflict for, as belief system after belief system is eaten away at by our mindless impulse to learn without any object but more learning, trust in our beliefs, the very perspectives that let us navigate the world at all, is weakened. Without this trust in our judgement, perspectives become academic, purely speculative; useless. That's where we entered this conversation, remember: the use of perspectives. These are tools, more or less effective at producing a meaningful experience of the world as the case may be, but necessary for doing so at all.
The presumed refusal to make use of such tools, to form and believe in ideas about how things are, is commonly known as skepticism, less commonly as indeterminacy. It is, in a woefully inadequate nutshell, a perspective on perspectives which suggests that they don't account for their own mutability; that the untrustworthy nature of perspectives is in fact a new relationship in the world which any trustworthy perspective must account for, and that this contradiction precludes the reliability, and thus utility, of any perspective whatsoever. You can never really know anything, you know.
But wait, we know things all the time, great glorious things! Huge and beautiful and wonderful things pass through our imaginations into the known and are accepted as truth, however time may crumble them down the line. Even if we can't really know, we still do, because the usage of the verb "to know" is very deceptive: it suggests, not just conviction, but that such conviction is justified. That perspectives should be stable and that, if they aren't, they can be of no use in determining Truth, since Truth, whatever it is, is plainly set and immutable. Right?
It is my belief, my perspective on this relationship between science, skepticism, and spirituality, that the question of which best pursues Truth is the wrong one to ask, since they bring the nature of Truth itself into question by their mutual existence; Truth itself is academic at this point, since contemplating it as an object in which it might presumably be included, or which may just as well include itself, precludes any hope of reaching a stable definition of what is True; without such a definition, pursuing Truth ceases to be about any such goal and constitutes nothing more than the pursuit itself. One doesn't run in circles to get somewhere, or at least not anywhere the circle goes.
The nature of this pursuit, this journey or process, is the consequence of our choice of perspective; what we do with our time is ultimately the only choice we have, and the only reason we bother forming conclusions about the world at all. We may seek out patterns to account for what is painful or what is beautiful, what is new or what is old, or a hundred other long-since accepted "realities" of life I could list for the desire to do so. This choice isn't necessarily one we make ourselves (enough digressions for one post!), but I think it must be one very fundamental to who we are as people. After all, those parts of the world we choose to focus on must inevitably be the basis for our evaluation of it, and thus all subsequent choices we make for how to live in it. And what else can we hope to call ourselves, if not the way we live our lives?
Monday, May 7, 2012
Misc(4)
I've been giving much thought to the concept of empathy, trying to develop it as a skill rather than a proclivity. I have determined, through trial and error, that it is the ability to accept another human being (or fish, if you will) as a determining factor in self judgement. This involves the investment of the self in an uncontrollable other, a supreme letting go; this, indeed, would be rather detrimental as a compulsion.
You are (if only in my head) an invaluable Devil's Advocate.
-----
It recently occurred to me (credit to HBO, of all things) just what a complex and interesting character Saddam Hussein was, both in life and politics. When I first remarked on this, my mother felt compelled to remind me that, when captured, he was hiding in a hole like a coward, the implication being that he had his bad side too.
-----
First off, as to religion. Or God, if you will. If you assume the realm of spirituality to be that of intangibles only, then all things basically spiritual become dependent on Man for any kind of existence, just as anything hypothetical is limited to the scope of an intelligence capable of theoretical speculation. God and all His angels, unknowable and undefinable, should cease to exist entirely were Man to do the same. Indeed, before Man's coming, they could no more have existed than the theory of relativity, evolution, or any other structuring we use to explain the world around us.
-----
On reflection, I think probability must be considered an area of philosophy, assuming that a mathematical foundation does not necessarily include a subject in the sciences.
To explain. Science is the formal representation of the existing natural world. Mathematics could be said to be a science of intangibles, but only insofar as letters are intangible representations of sound. Mathematical formulae at least correspond to the concrete relationships of physical bodies to one another.
Philosophy, on the other hand, is speculation of an intangible world. Morality, ethics, utility, (the question of) existence: all abstractions dependent on the creative mind. And, while some employ scientific methods in their reasoning, none ever follows these methods all the way to a measurable quality of something in the physical world; while the weight of a notebook might be employed in determining its utility, the notebook's utility could never reasonably be the basis for determining its weight.
Such is the case with probability, a field wherein a remarkably complex arrangement of equations may be used to conclude the value of an abstract concept: the future. Baring practical assumptions to the contrary, no single event ever exists with a probability of 1 until it has actually occurred. And once it does occur, it is better suited to the realm of statistics, what I would consider the scientific counterpart to probability.
-----
Truly, it's not surprising that a belief in the afterlife should inspire one to dread the end of their current one.
To begin with, one assumes the possibility that their death will mark the beginning of an eternity of pain and suffering. Further, that there are standards one must live up to in this life to avoid the pain/suffering option; what these standards precisely are has been a subject of debate for millennia, so one cannot be sure of which to follow. Only that your final exam consists of a single question with 74 possible answers, each one true in its own textbooks, 73 of which blow the test.
Is it any wonder that planning to skip the final is such a consolation?
-----
I sat before a mirror.
A simple thing, that. Though it was something of an occasion for me, mirrors being a rarity in my childhood home, I am never the less certain that such is a common enough event for the average person, perhaps even as a part of a daily ritual. To arrange their hair just so, or to apply makeup; in short, to see what they are, so that they may change what they see.
I know little enough about that. I could see what I was and, for my innocence, I could perhaps do so better than others, but I held no aspirations toward changing the figure who stared back at me. He was an absolute, as permanent as the mirror between us, and he defined me. I could no more lie to myself about what he was than he could look on as I rose and walked away; such was our bond.
I stared. What was it in me that could give rise to such a creature as this? What was I, that such a face looked back at me? Eyes which pierced and, amusingly, seemed to see more than I did. A frown, reflecting my own contempt, but showing also a trace of disgust I did not feel. I read pride in that face, but not pride in what it saw.
Such was my use for mirrors. Others might use them to see and, seeing, change what they saw, but I could use them only to know. And what I knew then, in that face, was dissatisfaction. It did not matter how my appearance might change, for it was not my appearance which gave rise to the dissatisfaction I saw.
Slowly, my hand rose to the face in the mirror; gently, I pushed.
I never felt the cracks.
-----
I often find myself suspecting that all this drama which occupies my mind, that which could be argued either as a backdrop for my real life or as the reality for which my external life is mere scenery, is nothing more than the elaboration of chemical interaction. This theory is not entirely without justification, particularly with regard to depression. I often find myself, having settled a troubling issue, remaining in the black mood it supposedly inspired, as though out of habit. Conversely, it is often the case that an hours-long depressive state is relieved, not through any mental resolution, but by the introduction of caffeine or adrenaline into my bloodstream.
Does this make all my internal monologue pointless? Am I so powerless before my own body chemistry that I must lay hands on it before I can hope to achieve anything? I think not. One thing I've learned here is how to handle depression. Not so much how to be rid of it, mind, as how to cope with it. How to be depressed without letting it cripple me. This is, admittedly, a useful skill; indeed, if I aspired to being nothing more than functional, my task would be complete. If, that is, I do not count abstract or creative capabilities as necessary to function.
I found a new cure for depression today, something as effective as caffeine or adrenaline, if not more so, but much more subtle: personal interaction. No matter how bleak my mood, a few words exchanged with another person, even just casual pleasantries, diverts my attention from my own problems and, so, makes them disappear.
-----
Your first thought was wonder, that you could notice the sticky feeling between your face and the ground through the throbbing in your head.
Your second thought was suspicion, that both of these feelings had to come from somewhere.
You opened your eyes then, and thought fled for a time, replaced by the simple absorption of your surroundings: darkness, irregular brick walls, trash cans (yours?), a cat licking something from the ground. It came to your then, slower than it should have, that this was an alley. Then you noticed, with the same frustrating slowness, something else, near the cat. An ambiguous blob, at first, a form without significance, though you easily recognized that it had blonde hair with red streaks. From this, the absurdity of finding hair by itself in an alley, you grew to recognize that the thing attached to the hair was a body. "A young girl," you thought aloud, though the cat seemed not to care one way or the other.
Your next thought was relief, for the presence of the girl explained what hair was doing in an alley; this, up to the moment, was the most distressing consideration you'd had.
Sitting up, thoughts started coming faster, and with them, questions. Why was there a girl lying in an alley? Why wasn't the cat scared of the girl? Was it her cat? Then, realizing that you existed, you began to wonder why you were there to see all these things.
Your last thought was deja-vu, thsi feeling that you had seen this girl, this alley, even this cat once before. This thought was cut off, however, by a voice from behind you. You never thought about where the voice came from, or who it belonged to, or even what it said. You certainly never wondered why you were so quick to climb over the girl, or what might be waiting at the end of this alley; less than anything else did you wonder where you were going. You were no longer composed of thoughts, but rather of the overwhelming drive to run away.
-----
This stuff feels vaguely Baton Rouge Ish, like stuff I wrote between bouts of paid insomnia and occasional naps.
You are (if only in my head) an invaluable Devil's Advocate.
-----
It recently occurred to me (credit to HBO, of all things) just what a complex and interesting character Saddam Hussein was, both in life and politics. When I first remarked on this, my mother felt compelled to remind me that, when captured, he was hiding in a hole like a coward, the implication being that he had his bad side too.
-----
First off, as to religion. Or God, if you will. If you assume the realm of spirituality to be that of intangibles only, then all things basically spiritual become dependent on Man for any kind of existence, just as anything hypothetical is limited to the scope of an intelligence capable of theoretical speculation. God and all His angels, unknowable and undefinable, should cease to exist entirely were Man to do the same. Indeed, before Man's coming, they could no more have existed than the theory of relativity, evolution, or any other structuring we use to explain the world around us.
-----
On reflection, I think probability must be considered an area of philosophy, assuming that a mathematical foundation does not necessarily include a subject in the sciences.
To explain. Science is the formal representation of the existing natural world. Mathematics could be said to be a science of intangibles, but only insofar as letters are intangible representations of sound. Mathematical formulae at least correspond to the concrete relationships of physical bodies to one another.
Philosophy, on the other hand, is speculation of an intangible world. Morality, ethics, utility, (the question of) existence: all abstractions dependent on the creative mind. And, while some employ scientific methods in their reasoning, none ever follows these methods all the way to a measurable quality of something in the physical world; while the weight of a notebook might be employed in determining its utility, the notebook's utility could never reasonably be the basis for determining its weight.
Such is the case with probability, a field wherein a remarkably complex arrangement of equations may be used to conclude the value of an abstract concept: the future. Baring practical assumptions to the contrary, no single event ever exists with a probability of 1 until it has actually occurred. And once it does occur, it is better suited to the realm of statistics, what I would consider the scientific counterpart to probability.
-----
Truly, it's not surprising that a belief in the afterlife should inspire one to dread the end of their current one.
To begin with, one assumes the possibility that their death will mark the beginning of an eternity of pain and suffering. Further, that there are standards one must live up to in this life to avoid the pain/suffering option; what these standards precisely are has been a subject of debate for millennia, so one cannot be sure of which to follow. Only that your final exam consists of a single question with 74 possible answers, each one true in its own textbooks, 73 of which blow the test.
Is it any wonder that planning to skip the final is such a consolation?
-----
I sat before a mirror.
A simple thing, that. Though it was something of an occasion for me, mirrors being a rarity in my childhood home, I am never the less certain that such is a common enough event for the average person, perhaps even as a part of a daily ritual. To arrange their hair just so, or to apply makeup; in short, to see what they are, so that they may change what they see.
I know little enough about that. I could see what I was and, for my innocence, I could perhaps do so better than others, but I held no aspirations toward changing the figure who stared back at me. He was an absolute, as permanent as the mirror between us, and he defined me. I could no more lie to myself about what he was than he could look on as I rose and walked away; such was our bond.
I stared. What was it in me that could give rise to such a creature as this? What was I, that such a face looked back at me? Eyes which pierced and, amusingly, seemed to see more than I did. A frown, reflecting my own contempt, but showing also a trace of disgust I did not feel. I read pride in that face, but not pride in what it saw.
Such was my use for mirrors. Others might use them to see and, seeing, change what they saw, but I could use them only to know. And what I knew then, in that face, was dissatisfaction. It did not matter how my appearance might change, for it was not my appearance which gave rise to the dissatisfaction I saw.
Slowly, my hand rose to the face in the mirror; gently, I pushed.
I never felt the cracks.
-----
I often find myself suspecting that all this drama which occupies my mind, that which could be argued either as a backdrop for my real life or as the reality for which my external life is mere scenery, is nothing more than the elaboration of chemical interaction. This theory is not entirely without justification, particularly with regard to depression. I often find myself, having settled a troubling issue, remaining in the black mood it supposedly inspired, as though out of habit. Conversely, it is often the case that an hours-long depressive state is relieved, not through any mental resolution, but by the introduction of caffeine or adrenaline into my bloodstream.
Does this make all my internal monologue pointless? Am I so powerless before my own body chemistry that I must lay hands on it before I can hope to achieve anything? I think not. One thing I've learned here is how to handle depression. Not so much how to be rid of it, mind, as how to cope with it. How to be depressed without letting it cripple me. This is, admittedly, a useful skill; indeed, if I aspired to being nothing more than functional, my task would be complete. If, that is, I do not count abstract or creative capabilities as necessary to function.
I found a new cure for depression today, something as effective as caffeine or adrenaline, if not more so, but much more subtle: personal interaction. No matter how bleak my mood, a few words exchanged with another person, even just casual pleasantries, diverts my attention from my own problems and, so, makes them disappear.
-----
Your first thought was wonder, that you could notice the sticky feeling between your face and the ground through the throbbing in your head.
Your second thought was suspicion, that both of these feelings had to come from somewhere.
You opened your eyes then, and thought fled for a time, replaced by the simple absorption of your surroundings: darkness, irregular brick walls, trash cans (yours?), a cat licking something from the ground. It came to your then, slower than it should have, that this was an alley. Then you noticed, with the same frustrating slowness, something else, near the cat. An ambiguous blob, at first, a form without significance, though you easily recognized that it had blonde hair with red streaks. From this, the absurdity of finding hair by itself in an alley, you grew to recognize that the thing attached to the hair was a body. "A young girl," you thought aloud, though the cat seemed not to care one way or the other.
Your next thought was relief, for the presence of the girl explained what hair was doing in an alley; this, up to the moment, was the most distressing consideration you'd had.
Sitting up, thoughts started coming faster, and with them, questions. Why was there a girl lying in an alley? Why wasn't the cat scared of the girl? Was it her cat? Then, realizing that you existed, you began to wonder why you were there to see all these things.
Your last thought was deja-vu, thsi feeling that you had seen this girl, this alley, even this cat once before. This thought was cut off, however, by a voice from behind you. You never thought about where the voice came from, or who it belonged to, or even what it said. You certainly never wondered why you were so quick to climb over the girl, or what might be waiting at the end of this alley; less than anything else did you wonder where you were going. You were no longer composed of thoughts, but rather of the overwhelming drive to run away.
-----
This stuff feels vaguely Baton Rouge Ish, like stuff I wrote between bouts of paid insomnia and occasional naps.
Sunday, May 6, 2012
Misc(3)
Power vs. Freedom. Mutually inclusive or mutually exclusive? A tentative definition for power could be, simply, control; likewise, freedom could tentatively be defined as the state of being uncontrolled.
And yet, on closer inspection of the relationships inherent to these concepts, one realizes their contradictory natures.
Power: control. Power over something is equivalent to controlling it. However, power cannot exist without something to be controlled. An old proverb asserts that knowledge is power. this is true, and is in fact a good way to characterize power in practical terms (if skill is included in the realm of knowledge). However, knowledge, like money and a gun, fail to confer power without some external element to be3 effective on; without something to be bought, or shot.
The stated definition for power could, however, still be valid, so long as certain assumptions are made: namely, that only external elements can possibly affect the self. In this case, one need only refine the definition of power to be control over that which may affect the self; this way, in the hypothetical world with no external influences, one is just as powerful in practice as in a world with external elements, to the extent that one is never affectable beyond one's own will.
So, in the world of perfect self-control, the issue of power is settled...but just for speculation's sake, let's consider the nature of power in terms of self-control.
The relationship between one's will and actions is a tricky one, which I have previously uncovered in greater detail. Here, it will simply be assumed as true that one's actions are, to one degree or another, controlled by both their conscious-will and their unconscious-will, and that the unconscious-will is also one of the influencing factors of the conscious-will's decision making process.
In this context, self-control could simply be stated as the dominance of the conscious-will in all actions, either by the majority of its influence over that of the unconscious-will, or by the complete removal of the unconscious will as an influencing factor from all decisions. Here, the role of freedom comes into play: by granting control entirely to the conscious-will (which is, for all intents and purposes, the self), one is free of the power of any other influencing factors, internal or external, including the unconscious-will.
Before making too much use of the concept of freedom, one should first elaborate on its nature. Defined as the state of being uncontrolled, it, like power, hold up until the element of self-control is considered. Logically, if the self does not control one's actions, any number of external influences would. Lacking any such external influences, however, one could scarcely be said to exist. Even one of extremely weak will could still assume control of their body if all external competition were removed. But, if any possibility of control, in any form, were removed, one should most likely exist in a state of either brain death or decomposition. So, parallel to the nature of imagination, complete freedom renders one inert.
Here's the theory: as a requisite condition of existence, one must have a controlling will over one's physical manifestation. And, while the self, or conscious-will, has a natural inclination toward this role, it may be overruled by other influences, both internal and external. Buy these terms, total freedom is impossible while in a state of existence as a physical manifestation. The nearest thing possible is complete self-control of the body, which at least grants one freedom from any will that is not their own. Complete self-control also grants one the ultimate power possible, as one is completely unaffectable by outside elements beyond one's will to be so affected.
A thought: could one have both complete control of their own actions and some degree of control over the actions of others? If one's own will took the role of an influencing factor to the will of another, and one's own will was of greater influence than another's will, as well as any other competing influences, one could essentially expand their will to direct the actions of others. And, though the decision making processes would still be centered in one's original physical manifestation, the will as it exists at the time of interaction could be conferred into the bodies of others, ruling out their own wills and directing action. This must be the appeal of power, that it grants such longevity to the will beyond its body. However, for power over others to be anything more than the vicarious will of whatever will happens to control one's own body, one must first achieve complete self-control.
-----
I actually remember writing this, sitting in front of the guard shack in a FEMA trailer park waiting for the sun to rise.
And yet, on closer inspection of the relationships inherent to these concepts, one realizes their contradictory natures.
Power: control. Power over something is equivalent to controlling it. However, power cannot exist without something to be controlled. An old proverb asserts that knowledge is power. this is true, and is in fact a good way to characterize power in practical terms (if skill is included in the realm of knowledge). However, knowledge, like money and a gun, fail to confer power without some external element to be3 effective on; without something to be bought, or shot.
The stated definition for power could, however, still be valid, so long as certain assumptions are made: namely, that only external elements can possibly affect the self. In this case, one need only refine the definition of power to be control over that which may affect the self; this way, in the hypothetical world with no external influences, one is just as powerful in practice as in a world with external elements, to the extent that one is never affectable beyond one's own will.
So, in the world of perfect self-control, the issue of power is settled...but just for speculation's sake, let's consider the nature of power in terms of self-control.
The relationship between one's will and actions is a tricky one, which I have previously uncovered in greater detail. Here, it will simply be assumed as true that one's actions are, to one degree or another, controlled by both their conscious-will and their unconscious-will, and that the unconscious-will is also one of the influencing factors of the conscious-will's decision making process.
In this context, self-control could simply be stated as the dominance of the conscious-will in all actions, either by the majority of its influence over that of the unconscious-will, or by the complete removal of the unconscious will as an influencing factor from all decisions. Here, the role of freedom comes into play: by granting control entirely to the conscious-will (which is, for all intents and purposes, the self), one is free of the power of any other influencing factors, internal or external, including the unconscious-will.
Before making too much use of the concept of freedom, one should first elaborate on its nature. Defined as the state of being uncontrolled, it, like power, hold up until the element of self-control is considered. Logically, if the self does not control one's actions, any number of external influences would. Lacking any such external influences, however, one could scarcely be said to exist. Even one of extremely weak will could still assume control of their body if all external competition were removed. But, if any possibility of control, in any form, were removed, one should most likely exist in a state of either brain death or decomposition. So, parallel to the nature of imagination, complete freedom renders one inert.
Here's the theory: as a requisite condition of existence, one must have a controlling will over one's physical manifestation. And, while the self, or conscious-will, has a natural inclination toward this role, it may be overruled by other influences, both internal and external. Buy these terms, total freedom is impossible while in a state of existence as a physical manifestation. The nearest thing possible is complete self-control of the body, which at least grants one freedom from any will that is not their own. Complete self-control also grants one the ultimate power possible, as one is completely unaffectable by outside elements beyond one's will to be so affected.
A thought: could one have both complete control of their own actions and some degree of control over the actions of others? If one's own will took the role of an influencing factor to the will of another, and one's own will was of greater influence than another's will, as well as any other competing influences, one could essentially expand their will to direct the actions of others. And, though the decision making processes would still be centered in one's original physical manifestation, the will as it exists at the time of interaction could be conferred into the bodies of others, ruling out their own wills and directing action. This must be the appeal of power, that it grants such longevity to the will beyond its body. However, for power over others to be anything more than the vicarious will of whatever will happens to control one's own body, one must first achieve complete self-control.
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I actually remember writing this, sitting in front of the guard shack in a FEMA trailer park waiting for the sun to rise.
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