Christopherscience Posted February 5, 2016 Posted February 5, 2016 [i refer to myself in the second person and first-person-plural in journals and in thought] (something to listen to while you read: your choice) (Creepy music) (Bittersweet music) This is my zombie madness. Don't expect a mentally healthy, rosy, outlook. These are my dark thoughts, after all. The cold, eternal, dark... Journal entry: 2/4/2016 1:05 PM I had another zombie nightmare. Why is it always zombies? I tell myself that it has something to do with conformity. This time it was at a mountain lake with a swampy characteristic and a large central island in the bowl of the mountain. There were two people I was watching scraping zombie teeth against a rock, seeing if simply getting cut by a tooth would cause infection, both young men were daring the other, trying to gauge what would happen, seeing if the other might turn. Meanwhile there was a rock conveyor that was making land fill, expanding the island. However the island was made mostly out of driftwood, and when a rock (slightly smaller than the old woman meteor, and sharper, and whiter, like a shark’s tooth) reached the top of the conveyor (and hung, for a moment, like the Sword of Damocles) it dropped, crashing into the island – all the driftwood sank and dispersed, dredging up the undead. The survivors of the island panicked, now that they were no longer safe in their mountain lake hideaway. They tried to swim to the shores but the waters were thick with zombies. No one survived. I spent some time in the dream as one of the survivors, the rest of the dream was in third-person. As a survivor, I hesitated to enter the water as the zombies crawled up the raft and flotsam/debris which other survivors were quickly abandoning. There is nowhere safe in these zombie apocalypse dreams of mine. Not underground, not in the mountains, not at sea – nowhere. They will swarm and hoard you until you are the last man alive. And then you will die and become mindless. The dreams recur sometimes, but they all have the same theme. The first was in Jr. high school. The magical amulet of the locker room didn’t dispel the hoards and I ended up getting surrounded and bitten (then going to a zombie school dance with a blonde zombie). Hiding underground worked in one dream, surviving off of mushrooms, but the species died and there wasn’t enough to eat without the sun. The hills and mountains have continued to fail to stop the hoards. Being at sea doesn’t work because the zombies float, like bloated corpses. They are slow but they will always surround you, and fighting only exposes you to their infection sooner. I understand the metaphor at play here; it’s too obvious to ignore, and my subconscious is not giving me an escape – these are the people all around me, mindless cannibals, that won’t stop until everyone becomes... one of them. I’m surrounded by mindless people no matter where I go. There is no escape. No escape. Freedomain Radio was not an escape, no bastion of hope that could clear a path through the innumerable hoards. There is no cure. I think that in one dream I even caused the outbreak and was one of the first to die. I’ve become a zombie on a few occasions. Starving to death underground was the longest that I lasted. … The Last Man is coming. And if we don’t do something soon, there will be no survivors. I am not equal to the task of ushering in the superman. To believe that I could be the superman gives me hope, but hope is the enemy – last of the blights upon humanity hiding at the bottom of Pandora’s Box. [end of entry] Strangely, a lot of zombies are irrationally exuberant. Hope... Hope is what makes people think that there's a heaven - the ultimate in wishful thinking. The "realm of pure reason", divorced from cold, hard facts; Platonism - surrounds me. The undead deny the fact that they die, even though they fester, and rot away humanity (in these nightmares). The denial of death is central to the mindless hoards. They infect people with their ignorance. ... I fail to see how they... No... That's not true... I know exactly why they ignore death and act like their rotting away doesn't matter. Every philosopher tries to overcome radical skepticism; Cogito ergo sum; life is absurd, embrace it [ignore the dissonance by being consumed by it]; there is a higher realm and revealed truth, believe; the wonderful thing about man is that he is a bridge; truth at any cost, Socrates?; empirical, often reductive, "sciencism"; noble lies, all of it. The noble lie is infecting people, like a brain disease, spread through the mouth. They will not accept the leveling of death; the absolute nothingness that awaits all things. They "create" for themselves "meaning" - ex nihilo nihil fit. The universe is meaningless (the referent "universe", not the word "universe"). "What is the meaning of life?" is a syntax error - a question wrongly asked... And, yet, it drives people onward in the search for a wild goose or red herring. Everywhere around me people are walking around like they were above the laws of thermodynamics - perpetual motion machines. There is a leveling, an obliteration, that you can ignore, but which will hunt you down, surround you, and drag you to your death - and it is an immutable feature of existence. The zombies are like Egyptian Pharaohs trying to escape their "second death" (to be erased from historical memory). After high school, Marvel Comics published their zombie universe, and I had to turn away, as I saw heroes devoured on comicbook shelves. Iconoclasm forces me to watch everything I hold dear being destroyed. Nothing is sacred, god is dead, and there are no heroes, nor villains, no ideals, and no idols. I wanted to be a scientist, a biochemist, to study life (which I had held sacred)... but, like so many people, I had no idea what science really was - skepticism an confidence intervals always lower than 100%. I wanted to be a "nercomancer" and cure death with the chemistry of life, in a sense. Life has become a machine, a simple engine, governed by principles. I studied medicine and saw gore. Engine parts... Nothing is sacred. Nothing has "inherent value". These emergent properties people take for granted (ghosts in the machine, like freewill) are illusions. They are willfully ignorant of what makes them tick, and the universe around them. Dr. Josiah Gibbs must have been a lonely man after James Clark Maxwell died. Einstein called Gibbs the greatest mind the United States had ever produced, and I agree. We've seen to the end of the universe, and it is cold and dead. People think science is something great (when they are referring to technology, in fact, not science), and they know nothing about how it destroys everything you hold dear. I am alone. Worse than alone - I'm surrounded by people who don't know and don't want to know. Zombies, who want me to conform to their way of thinking so that I can un-death myself. To any survivors out there... Survive as long as you can, your engines are failing, and whatever you do - don't feed the dead.
rosencrantz Posted February 6, 2016 Posted February 6, 2016 I know exactly what you are talking about. When I was 9 years old, our school visited a planetarium. They showed us star formations and galaxies. That is when I realized for the first time how vast the universe is and that nothing matters on this large a scale. This existential angst has been in the background of my mind since then. My way out is that there is inherent meaning. It is created by what you hold dear and what you strive for. Humans can deal with hardships as long as their goal is worthy of the endeavour. 2 1
Christopherscience Posted February 8, 2016 Author Posted February 8, 2016 I appreciate the help. I don't see a way out in inherent meaning. But perhaps I'm missing something, so what is inherent meaning? I'm working through some things - the following is subject to error: Worth while, or worthy, endeavors are a matter of value. I can't see a value which is not subjective. The lure of objectivism, for me in the past, was that the primary value was in the mind/value-setter (that minds were inherently valuable). However, it seems to me that, too, is subject to mind in question. Objectivism seems subjective; I know it sounds "bad" but what says human minds are valuable? A worthy endeavor starts in the mind, yes? And the mind is the thing that assigns worth, right? I know it sounds bad when I jump to conclusions, but... just because brains exist, does that mean they should exist? Either you assume brains are good, in order to get around the is/ought (the "is" is an "ought"; i.e. inherent value)... or there is a loop of minds saying minds are good because minds say minds are good, ad infinitum. Minds are good because minds say minds are good (plus however many steps one wants to add). Or... is there an outside standard of value and meaning or purpose (what is the correct word?). I'm not going to assume there is a god or gods to resolve that, because that just adds an obfuscatory layer that resolves nothing (but pushes the problem upon a higher realm). ... On a tangential note, the self seems like a teleological assumption. "I" means a bundle of nerves and flesh, subject to various, innumerable inputs (which "I" have no causa sui control over; there is no self-caused self in a universe bound by the laws of conservation)... I can't resolve the existence of freewill so long as the laws of conservation are in effect... It is as though I am a kind of mirror which reflects that which went into making me, so to speak. To separate me from the inputs that go into making me seems... arbitrary. Even self-reflection is subject to input. I'm not sure I create anything in a conserved universe; I am a remix, just an echo. Accepting or rejecting my fate seems inconsequential, but I am at a point where I am leaning toward accepting my fate because it fits "me" (my inputs aggregated). I tried out the mantra I remixed, "I accept my fate, unreservedly, even if it means that someday I will die." And I was very happy. I feel compelled to do things. Is that what they call choice? Feeling compelled to do (or not do) something, then acting it out? Do machines choose? Am I not a machine? I have a pump, electrical conduit, biochemical engines, etc. Holding onto freewill felt like holding onto god and other superstitions; it was an exception I was making against physics. It is time for me to close this. Thank "you" for the sounding board, and I appreciate your sentiment.
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