Confusion!

What the fuck?

What are their never any answers?

I understand now why a lot of the great minds were depressed (seriously.. check out their pictures - those aren't happy faces); because they had the intuitive ability to arrive at the Truth.... the abstract truth not the concrete truth... but when they got there they realized that there really was none. That the truth that they had been striving for wasn't anywhere to be found and that their reasoning was really all circuitous and pointless. That they couldn't really believe in anything except the truth that there was nothing to believe in.
I think this might be Nietzche's point tough honestly I've never read it and am biased against him because his famous one liner is "God is Dead."


I am reading about John Nash in A Beautiful Mind, for instance. He wasn't born schizophrenic, but he developed into one after he was thrust into the world of mathematics (not to blame math for his disease) - a world of concrete formulas, of axioms, of assumptions that are necessarily taken for granted and adopted as fact if bigger, deeper, humanistic, economic, militaristic problems can plausibly be solved. John Nash was brilliant because he never assumed anything to be true. When he was taught a principle that some greater mind had established as fact, he didn't take for granted that it was true. Instead, he figured it out for himself and made his own proof. Then, when he had mastered these "proofs," when he could recall mathematical axioms and formulas and constants like pi and avagadro's constant etc.etc, he sought to delve into unknown fields where their were still unsolved problems and solve them. He was on a quest to shed light where there was darkness.
He later came to believe that there were martians telling him what to do (I haven't gotten to that part yet).
In other words, he became schizophrenic.

Schizophrenia

1.
a severe mental disorder characterized by some, but not necessarily all, of the following features: emotional blunting, intellectual deterioration, social isolation, disorganized speech and behavior, delusions, and hallucinations.
2.
a state characterized by the coexistence of contradictory or incompatible elements.

3.
Any of a group of psychotic disorders usually characterized by withdrawal from reality, illogical patterns of thinking, delusions, and hallucinations, and accompanied in varying degrees by other emotional, behavioral, or intellectual disturbances. Schizophrenia is associated with dopamine imbalances in the brain and may have an underlying genetic cause.
4.
A situation or condition that results from the coexistence of disparate or antagonistic qualities, identities, or activities.

I think "the coexistence of disparate or antagonistic forces" best sums up the disease.
If this is the definition of schizophrenia then the whold nature of the world is schizophrenic.
I think that the world in which we live breeds schitzophrenia in people and that we are all schizophrenics and that those who are labeled as schizophrenics are done so because their behavior is indicative of the fact that they refuse to accept a reality that doesn't even exist in the first place.
We all accept reality, they don't. Maybe because of genetics, maybe not. I think it is probably a nature/nurture thing, although I should note that I am REALLY biased against genetics.
(this is a digression, but someone I know, for instance, always thinks that he/she is sick. I think that he/she is making himself/herself sick and that genetics has nothing to do with it at all.)

When asked how someone as brilliant as he, with a mind as brilliant and discerning as his, could have possibly believed that aliens were directing his motives and actions, John Nash responded:

"because they came to me the same way the answers to my mathematical solutions came to me."

So how did his mathematical solutions come to him? They came to him through the sequential process of...
1. learning about established mathematical truths
2. proving for himself that they were true using other mathematical truths
3. using those same mathematical proofs to solve problems in fields in which there were unsolved problems.

so, we canarguably assume that he came to his theories about aliens, a product of his schizophrenia, which is defined as believing that the "coexistence of antagonistc forces" is reality by...
1. learning about the established truths about reality
2. proving for himself that these truths were real using other established truths about reality
3. using those same conclusions about reality to attempt to shed light on questions about reality that he had.

When the "reality of reality" failed to adequetly answer his questions, he became schizophrenic.
This is because there is no established reality. It is subjective.
All of the great minds seemed to realize this, yet all of them established their own truths about reality, and "great philosophers" like John Stuart Mill and John Milton attempt to use the very existence of and potential for learning about those truths to justify Libertarianism, which denounces the suppresion of any viewpoint for fear that it might contain even one iota of a truth, that of which might not even exist in the first place.


note that how John Nash developed schizophrenia is only my opinion. Maybe the acceptance of subjective abstract truths is really our own individual shield of schizophrenia. When we each, individually "hold these, our truths to be self-evident" then we have something to fall back upon. We have an end goal in sight.

So what, if any, should this end goal ideally be?

For Aristotle it was Happiness.
For Christians it is Heaven.

I believe it is heaven.

keyword believe.

which is an abstract thing.

but a necessary thing.

I think.

again, it seems, that the surrendor to love, which is also an abstract thing, it the only thing we can do.


peace!