Life Is The Aftertaste of Living

Lately I have been feeling a block to write here.

It is not because of the lack of ideas. I have plenty. But I don’t feel any of them to be useful to anybody, including myself. It occurs to me that the biggest motivator for me to write is not just to say something conceptually interesting, but it also needs to address an issue, either myself or someone I know is facing. Strangely, this revelation connects some seemingly unrelated things that I have been thinking lately.

In last year my thinking has trended aggressively towards a triad of physicalism, empiricism and naturalism. For example, how I make sense of human existence and consciousness. I don’t think it’s a change of my stance, but it just became an explicit conviction now I’m well aware of.

Without repeating too much of my previous posts, in short, each of our being can be thought of as layers of mechanism. These layers help regulate issues in the maintenance of the largest existence as a whole. For example, our emotion in fact helps regulate and signal our bodily function, or our consciousness helps regulate our emotion, or our normative consciousness (often manifested as what we call meanings, values, purposes) helps regulate the consciousness, etc. It is a bottom-up construction. The upper layers supervene on the lower layers, yet all layers are one.

One day I stumbled across an idea in philosophy called Quietism. It takes a stance to view philosophy as merely a mean of thinking, and it cannot contribute any positive thesis. My gut feeling tells me that I am far from such stance. But it feels very similar to the distinction of a priori and a posteriori knowledge. It helps me re-position when and how I should approach my thinking. Any thinking (i.e. my amateurish philosophising) is only good as reaction to or sense-making of the day-to-day, not the other way round to proactively or positively guide the day-to-day out of no basis.

It’s not about not thinking about life at all, like the questions such as: “what do I want from my life”, “what should I do for the rest of my life”, or “what kind of person I should meet and stay with for my life”. They are still valid questions. But it would be better if we substitute the word “life” with “living” while thinking of an answer. Such that we don’t forget all the moments in the living. Using an algorithmic analogy, it means to collect and analyse past data, in order to make judgement for action from this moment onwards, that extrapolates future data points, which when evaluated as a whole we will have been feeling satisfied all along (the tricky tense here is intentional to express the temporal sense).

For readers who want to know: What do all these mean? Life is the aftertaste of living.