Sunday, July 19, 2009
Recently, I have been intensely addicted to the internet.. I just can't stop surfing the web!! It's like it's been just introduced to me or something, and my sucky data quota is fast disappearing. I have exceeded it almost every month and it hurts my pocket, what am I going to do??
I tried putting it down to boredom, but even when I'm doing something, I keep thinking about it: eg ebay auctions, blogshops, email.. my life has turned electronic. Look, now I can shop online, entertain myself online, study (bullshitbullshit) online, read news online, socialize online, geez it make me wonder what the internet CAN'T do!
To illustrate how bad this is, I am awake at 5:45am and finding excuses to stay online (thus my reaason for blogging). My emails are checked, no one is online, read all blogs on my bookmarks list, I should really just turn off my laptop and go to sleep. But noooo, here I am, blogging.
Anyway, apart from my ravenous appetite for web access, life has been quite nice. I have a pretty set daily routine, my moods are constant, everything that has happened to me is so-so, I am more or less happy, my whole situation at the mo can be summed up in three words: not too bad. There you go, an update on my unexciting normal stable state of existence.
Coming back to my ridiculous reliance on the internet, I just googled "existence" to find out if it was spelled "existance" or "existence" and I came across this confusing, but with a good point, article. Let me copy and paste the essence of it:
"How do you define your existence? This is the most important question you will ever have to explore. Yet so few actually do, or they define existence by characteristics, ‘I am this or I am that’ but that is not existence, those are just additions to existence. Others will say ‘I am’ and then stop there, as if that is sufficient, even though they may not know exactly what that ‘I am’ is. Others will expand that statement; a famous philosopher once stated, ‘I think therefore I am’ rebutted by yet another as ‘I am therefore I think’. In most cases the ‘I am’ is left unexplained. It just is and that is the end of that....Defining your existence then comes down to a choice. Do you take what is alterable or unalterable as who you are?...[For example] Witnessing a bird in flight is the action of consciousness. Knowing what that bird is, or commenting upon it, is the action of mind...[or] When you are having a dream the same witnessing occurs, as you can see and know the dream, but you cannot access your mind functions to control it...[this] demonstrate that consciousness and your mind functions are two different things." http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/4-6-2005-68186.asp
I've drawn from that and also come to the conclusion that existence and consciousness are two entirely different things. Being conscious simply means being present, perhaps like a person in a vegetative state. They are awake and the can see/hear/breathe/have reflex actions, but do they really exist? Maybe that's why we consider mercy killing to help them cross that fine line between mere consciousness and existence. Existence is actively making choices that defines you and the path that you go down in life, so "I think, therefore I am".
Side track: What of inanimate objects though, how do you choose (for example) a rock to be either conscious or in existence? Maybe I shall just say they are present, to make things less complicated for myself.
So maybe these few days I have been conscious, but not existing. I just take things as they come, in other words, I just keep breathing. And instead of waiting for some momentous event to happen to me, maybe I should be making things happen FOR me... EUREKA!!! That's my epiphany for the month.
Now, if only I could pull away from the computer...
p.s: haha well that was a good waste of time, and I shall go to bed now. Night!
~sallo
5:38 am
