What really fires me up? I was just thinking what are the things to me in life that I really enjoy, that inspire passion and get me riled up. A rather cynical little voice said, "Working out, the idea of a sports car, and uh...the nature of reality." Obviously there's more (truly), but as a function of my life right now, I've got nothing else but to think about well pleasurable things. Don't worry, be happy, right? So I'll skip the first two, since well, you don't care. Nature of reality? Oh man, I have a good time with this one. There's so many sides you can choose to make an argument with, it's a good mind game. There never is a resolution, but that's ok. Why should there be? I think it'd be awfully arogant of myself (at least) to be able to be able to describe my reality completely or completely explain my reality. But that doesn't mean you can't try, or at least get some progress goin. Why be a fatalist? I think it's in our nature to be able to decide on things, it's instinctual. We have to be able to distinguish between situations, objects, thoughts, etc... Given evolutions, we tend to classify like with like, and this breaks up our reality into bite sized chunks. It's a lot easier to understand an engine if you understand each part. However, if I know what all the parts do, do I know what they do together is the big question. If I laid out all the parts of an engine out, no one would have any idea how to put it together without any instruction unless you've done it before. Aha! I say. So if someone has done it before, I should listen to how they gone about doing it, and apply it (or the philosophy of "it") to myself. However, I run into a liar's paradox with it, as meaning, why the hell should I believe you? Maybe nobody ever truly "gets it" and understand how everything of your reality works together. And that's exactly it, maybe everyone's different, maybe it's impossible to percieve the true underpinnings and fabric of reality for different people, as I assert reality is subjective. Maybe they're just lying or at some stage of false confidence. Ok, so maybe it's not quite binary you say, either you "got it" or you don't. Well, it's gotta be a spectrum then, right? You have degrees of understanding. What constitutes an understanding for me may be insufficient to you then, or perhaps just not suited. As well, your understanding of nature/reality must change with time, as does your reality. As you can see this is getting pretty complicated. So let's go back to the engine example, and see what we can do. So we are struggling away see what parts go where, and like most people you are trying to guess their function as to what it does in reality. Some pieces are self explanatory, and some are a little confusing and vague. The question that is naturally led to, do we need all the pieces to get "the damn thing to work". As I'm sure any of you have built Ikea furniture, you're left over with a few pieces when it's done wondering where the hell do they go. Engineers routinely overbuild designs, and hey, you think reality would have a bit of redundancy? You know, like it's got to be fairly stable, consistent. I mean, I'd be scared of somehow our reality collapsing in on us in a Rejected cartoon feel. And hey, it hasn't happened yet, has it? So of all the pieces do you leave out, is it the big ones? Is it the ones that the engine doesn't make sense without? The Ikea table is missing a leg? No! So you're damn well gonna use the important ones. Ooooh...snap, well what's important? Pretty subjective, but I'd say there's a lot out there which are objective. Science has gotten us pretty far no doubt, Religeon...not so much (atheists at war anyone?), and a whole gamut of others. I can tell you what's gotten me the furthest and helped me understand reality best, my noggin. It's what you use all the time, it's the most powerful tool availiable to you, and everything else is affected by it. If my consciouness plays such a huge role in my reality, perhaps I can achieve understanding purely through it? Worth a shot isn't it? I suppose this line of thinking has led people like Immanuel Kant to try to a priori objects/thoughts. By a priori, I mean only reliant on ideas inherent to the mind, not requiring information of the outside world. To Kant logic is often a favourite, because it probably came to him so easily hahaha. But that's the issue then isn't it, because if we go back to our engine analogy, what the hells the point of just examining what you think to the most important piece for hours going to help you figure out how it all works together So what the hell to do? I dunno, but this is a brief glimpse into how I'm coming to terms with the world. If you've read all of this, I'm impressed you spent such lengths for my ramblings.