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BergerWasTaken
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Name: Berger
Country: United Kingdom
Metro: London
Gender: Male
Interests: WHY, ethics, philosophy, politics, computers, technology and current events. I read, write and think. I enjoy sleeping.
Expertise: Thinking and brief moments of clarity. Finding problems in systems and poking them. Asking awkward questions. Fixing computers. I'll let my blog decide whether or not I'm good at writing.
Occupation: Being me.
Industry: Thinking
Message: message meEmail: email me
Member Since:
10/18/2004
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| A Note on My Writing |
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| Usually when I write on this blog I write it quickly and passionately. This means that my ideas flow out quickly and I will occasionally make mistakes. Please forgive me. Sometimes I may even omit the word 'not'. Scary stuff.
Thanks for stopping by, please subscribe.
Berger |
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| Ideas swirl around my head but nothing seems to solidify. Out of body and out of mind.
This must be what ketamine is like.
Or not.
I'm supposed to give a talk, write two essays and plan for PhD applications. All under my own steam. All must have a sense of originality. This is not undergrad anymore, this is Masters and thus I am expected to take steps mostly on my own initiative to 'getting what I want'. Indeed... what I want.
But I don't know what I want. Studying bioethics and general ethical issues is very interesting and we have good seminars. The people I study with have shown themselves to be very interesting people. But often the papers we are meant to read are so comprehensive that it's hard to draw my own conclusions and plot out my own path.
That's all good, but what about me?
Indeed. Me.
What
About
Me
?
I keep wondering if I was meant to be a creative type. Or if my destiny laid in science. Philosophy is weird like that. It's neither and both simultaneously. No doubt it has had and continues to has influence on the two. Philosophy spawned the scientific method and pre-dates it significantly. It's satisfying but I still find myself staring out the window.
Yes this blog is going no where. I'm sorry you had to read it.
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| Drinking and thinking in here, this coffee shop
Where minds are like coffee in endless flow
These are addictions I cannot stop
And where they take me I must go.
Chewing on bitter coffee grounds
I see messages in this bitter crop
Drowning sorrows and drowning out sounds
In here, my favourite little coffee shop
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| Ah ethics. No matter how much people talk about 'being ethical' they still have no idea what the hell they are talking about.
Yes, my new course focuses around the big moral choices in life - is it right to destroy embryos, is it ethical to bring children into existence, why should I bother to make other people happy? And yet when I announce my course title I get confused looks, 'well what does that mean?' Do people not understand this word 'ethics' or are they just being polite? Sort of like using confusion as a way to get me to talk more about it? What if I had said 'maths'? "Oh, maths... what is it that?"
The next question I get often is a far more sensible one. "So what job can you get with that degree?" Well this one really has no answer. I can't get any specific job with it. You see, no one's willing to pay someone a liveable wage to tell them what they should do. People are beyond content in just going with what they knee-jerkly decide is right. Or they seek free counsel from someone with no qualifications in the subject matter. We accept these decision making methods as being fine because everybody does them. A lot of people don't realise that we usually make decisions based on an emotional response and then seek to rationalise them. It's subtle but if you think about it you know I'm right.
Okay that was a psychological test. Whatever your opinion was on what I just said will have been decided automatically by your subconscious. Either you'll think "what a twat, that can't be true" and then rationalise ways in which I must be wrong in order to 'convince' yourself or you'll think "wow, that's really profound - this guy is amazing" at which point you'll think about all the other posts of mine that you have read and realise that they are all like that.
Or something.
Anyway the reason why you've never heard of anyone being an 'ethicist' is that there is no reason for us to exist. We are the stuff of dreams. Plato's dreams to be exact. This is where philosophers are kings and they make rational and calculated decisions which lead to peace and prosperity in society. Alas, individual autonomy and politics overrule this. People don't care what we think. Ethics is a pretty contentious field anyway. Attempts to apply science to ethics fails miserably. Indeed 'being ethical' is virtually a hollow term. Whose ethics? Why is that ethical? Why is that morality more preferable than any other?
Essentially it comes down to values - what people find to be 'ends', i.e. what people aim for and ultimately consider worth having. If you have values about having a family then you will try and maximise the wellbeing of your family. If your values are world peace then you'll try to help that along. Ultimately these things cannot be justified to a scientific degree. You can put forward an argument and try to convince people to agree with you but there's no way to prove that having a family is a good thing or being happy is a good thing. My seminar today showed that you can't even prove that existing is better than not existing. All you can really do is make some good points and hope that people agree with you. That's what I think ethics is. Something is ethical when the moral majority agree with it. It's whatever's acceptable. That's all.
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| When you have aspirations, how do you deal with the fact that there's always going to be someone out there who is better than you? Apart for a very select few for whom that statement isn't true, how do 99.9% of the aspirational cope with knowing that no matter how hard they try they'll never reach the top?
Admittedly right now I feel a little depressed. Having been here now for over two weeks and met a lot of other postgrads I'm starting to wonder if my desire to try and break into academia might just be an expensive end to a five year pipe-dream. 'Studying philosophy?! Why?' I would ask my past self if I were to appear to them in some sort of ghost-of-philosophy-future moment. It's true that I have learnt new things and revolutionised my thought process since taking it up and investing my time, money and life into it but to what end?
I was having a discussion with some new PhD students. Funding is sparse they were telling me and the level of knowledge retention that the other postgrads have is really quite shocking. This is experience will be a completely new challenge for me in a completely new style of play. For anybody who understands Premiership Football, I feel like the equivalent of West Brom coming up to the Premiership. In the lower league I was amongst the best. I had cultured style and considerable attacking force. Now everything is different. This is where 'the big boys' play. This is a sort of university where you cannot rely on eloquence to win arguments, or even kudos, and this is where lower league rules no longer apply.
It would be wrong to say that I feel disappointed. I surely don't. Lessons haven't even started yet, I'm yet to actually engage with any of the lecturers here in a serious way. However I already have doubts. My first piece of work is due in next week and it needs to be finished even before the first lecture in the course starts. He's asked us to write a 600-word 'note' on why we disagree with a certain philosopher's article. Taking this to be something anecdotal I've attempted to go with my gut feeling and stay true to how I interpret the question. However in conversation with another postgrad he mentions using a Kantian line of enquiry and is taking a far more critical approach. So which is right?
I just wonder now if this has all been a waste. When I went for a Masters it was because I seriously considered becoming an academic, writing papers and doing research. What if now I'm not even up to it and I've wasted even more time and money on a qualification that will get me no where? I'm not lost - I know exactly where I am - I just have no idea where I'm going. And that's a significant difference.
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| I haven't written properly here for over a month. It's been hard to think about something to write. I've read some other people's blogs and observed the horrors, trivialities and tribulations of their lives shroud over mine. I mean there have been plenty of times when I felt like saying "oh what's the point anyway?" and either posting just that or nothing at all. Sitting here now writing about the irrelevance of nothingness seems itself to fall into it's own trap, a sort of contradiction of fractal proportions.
See I'm not even sure that made any sense to anyone other than me.
Blogging to me has always been a sort of therapy. I believe the psychological term is 'social support' - talking through your problems with someone else. In this case the other person is, well, me or some fictional character named 'blogosphere' or 'you'. Still I never assumed a real audience and throughout this blog's evolution I was always taken aback when I got a new comment, eprop or subscriber. Like talking to God it's nice to know that there is actually someone listening.
I have such admiration for professional bloggers, the likes you see on the guardian.co.uk website - even if they have other jobs they get paid for sharing their thoughts on something that happened to them in the past week. For Charlie Brooker, for instance, he has made a mark for himself with his unbridled cynicism of just about everything. Combine that with some masterful wordsmithery and he's made himself a career which spans every important medium.
This is something that appeals to me more than, say, worldwide success or fame. I don't know what will happen to me but right this blog post has already grown tiring and hard to write and feel it has grown tired of me.
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