Analysis of a modern day common song

Changing from the philosophically-scientific tone of previous posts, I am now going to discus a song by The Academy Is...

It is not particularly critical of society (there's one deep line in the entire song) and, if I think about it, this post exists mostly because I like two lines in the song and the video is kind of different. What I mean by that is that it contrasts a sunny and cheery setting with nostalgic music. Usually, with a song like this, a scene with the singer standing in the rain or on the board of a cliff or at least falling on his knees while screaming his lungs out is a must. Here he seems so very detached as if everything is kept behind a mask. Though there is the whole "falling into the pool, I'll let myself drown because my life sucks bou hou hou" part which ruins the concept a tad bit, but overall it's a nice video and the rewind timeline is actually pretty cool (yes, I'm a sucker for non-linear, non-traditional timelines...I think it spices things up and keeps you awake during a movie or video in this case).

Now if I look at the lyrics, there are mainly 3 points of interest. Starting with the most shallow of the list (and ironically the reason I chose to waste half an hour of my life talking about this song), there are two lines in the song that just sound really good and flow nicely:

I am no gentleman, I can be a prick
And I do regret more than I admit

I am not going to analyze the consonants, vowels or rime scheme. This is not an English class so I can afford to just say that I like how it sounds and end it there.

Next, there's this other line with which they actually end the song (yes I know it's also repeated in the middle, but I find that it has the biggest effect at the end because the music fades and emphasis is put on the lyrics). I find it's a really cute imagery, even though they're talking about bugs. Though even that could be explained through the fact that the guy feels so small and unimportant in the girl's eyes that he compares himself to a fly.

I'll be with you wherever you go, through the eyes of a fly on a wall.

Finally, the one deep line in the song which is actually quite interesting says: Take the pain out of love and then love won't exist. Now this could be interpreted in a couple of ways.

1. The guy is a masochist and can't imagine his life without pain in the sense that love without pain doesn't exist (yeah yeah, I know what you're saying...not very likely). But actually it does make sense. When you're in love, you make yourself completely and utterly vulnerable in front of that other person and sooner or later you will get hurt whether intentionally or not, for the simple reason that we're only humans and nobody is perfect.

2. In order to be able to enjoy love to its fullest you need to overcome obstacles (hence the pain). Because if everything goes too well and there are never any arguments, at one point you start taking the other for granted, you forget to put effort in your relationship and you just end up drifting apart (I feel like somehow there's a flaw in that argument, but I'm too lazy to look for it right now).

3. I can't think of a third explanation but I'm sure there's something...

So there, I voluntarily made an analysis of a song. The world must be coming to an end. Maybe the Mayans messed up their calendar and the end of the world in not in 2012. Maybe, maybe...There was a saying that went somewhere along the lines of "Avec des si on metterait Paris en bouteille" which means with ifs we could put Paris in a bottle. And now I am rambling. Ok after this huge description/analysis here's the actual video:




You were the only face I'd ever known.
I was the light from the lamp on the floor,
and only as bright as you wanted me to be.
But, I am no gentleman, I can be a prick,
and I do regret more than I admit.
You have been followed back to the same place I sat with you drink for drink.
Take the pain out of love and then love won't exist.

Everything we had, everything we had,
everything we had, everything we had is no longer there.

It was the only place I'd never known.
Turned off the light on my way out the door.
I will be watching wherever you go,
through the eyes of a fly on the wall.
You have been followed back to the same place I sat with you drink for drink.
Take the pain out of love and then love won't exist.

Everything we had, everything we had,
everything we had, everything we had is no longer there, longer there.

You saw for yourself, the way it played out.
For you, I am blinded.
For you, I am blinded, for you.

I am no gentleman, I can be a prick.
And I do regret more than I admit.
You have been followed back to the same place I sat with you drink for drink.
Take the pain out of love and then love won't exist.

Everything we had, everything we had,
everything we had, everything we had.
Everything we had, everything we had,
everything we had...

I'll be with you wherever you go,
through the eyes of a fly on the wall.

Psychobable

Not necessarily the most interesting or captivating ideas and it's a bit too optimistic and esoteric for a cynic like me (not to mention that she sounds like an actor giving a monologue and her voice really starts getting on my nerves at one point), but I love the way she describes reality and how our brain functions to interpret it. It kind of pulls you out of your conscious mind for a while and gives you a glimpse of how the world could be seen differently. We already know that we are limited by our senses (we can only see or hear a small portion of the stimuli available in the universe), but this video also makes you aware for those 18 minutes of how your brain limits your view of reality and just how trapped you are by those neurons and those synapses. Then again, I don't know if always seeing the world as Jill Bolte Taylor describes it in this video is better than the way we usually see it. Probably not, since you can't read nor speak. But it's a good way of expanding your understanding of reality, not to live like this, but to at least experience it once in your life. I guess the general purpose of this video (as far as I see it) is to show us that the realm of possibilities is not as narrow as we might think and that the mysterious and bizarre world we see in particle physics IS real and it's all around us. And this has to be the longest introduction for a video ever, so I'll just shut up now.

On your mind, on my mind, on everyone's mind

In response to my earlier post on the human brain, here are a couple of videos that, although they don't answer my question, they do vaguely touch on the subject (not to mention that they're highly interesting and the speaker is quite charismatic). And I think that they have brought the answer to one of my existential questions: what to do with my life. The answer: from now on, I shall study the phenomenon of phantom PMS! Or maybe not...



Hmm synesthesia...well I always thought every number had a personality. Does that count?



So to summarize:
- art and creativity are genetic malformations of the brain
- the only thing that separates us from another human being is our skin...literally.

Quote of the month

credit: http://nnoik.deviantart.com/

Continuing a bit on yesterday's topic, this month's quote talks about the extremes of freedom:

"La liberté, surtout quand elle est le rêve du prisonnier, ne peut supporter de limites. Elle est le crime ou elle n'est plus la liberté."

Marquis de Sade

And even though it strays from the topic (yes I know I'm very bad at staying on topic, just deal with it), here is another quote from the Marquis de Sade which I love due to its "screw the world" type of tone (despite everything he stands for, I actually like the Marquis de Sade...or in any case I like the attitude he takes when it comes to standing up for his beliefs):

"Ma façon de penser, dites-vous, ne peut être approuvée. Eh, que m'importe! Bien fou est celui qui adopte une façon de penser pour les autres! Ma façon de penser est le fruit de mes reflexions; elle tient à mon existence, à mon organisation. Je ne suis pas le maître de la changer; je le serais, que je ne le ferais pas. Cette façon de penser que vous blâmez fait l'unique consolation de ma vie; elle allège toutes mes peines en prison et j'y tiens plus qu'à la vie. Ce n'est point ma façon de penser qui a fait mon malheur, c'est celle des autres."

I think, therefore I am...or maybe not.

Lately I have been thinking about the concept of freedom and just how free we actually are. I remember talking in a previous post about Jean Paul Sartre and how he says that men are free and that freedom is their burden. In a sense that is true. We do always have a choice, even a slave that works on a sugar cane plantation. He can choose to obey his master or to rebel. What limits our freedom are the consequences of our choices which are not the same for everybody. But in a way you could say that the bigger the consequences, the more important are our choices because they reveal our true nature and how much we are willing to sacrifice.

However, that aspect of freedom is not really what I want to talk about. This post is not dedicated to freedom of action or freedom of speech, but to the freedom of thought. And the limits here are more subtle and much more insidious because most of the time we are not even conscious of them. What I'm trying to say is that without even realizing it, we are the ones who limit our freedom of thought, firstly, through our personality and who we are and, secondly, through socialization and our adhesion to social norms and values. No man is born free for the simple reason that we come into this world in already made cages that we spend our entire life refining. We are trapped by our perception of the world and it is very difficult to extend ourselves beyond our boundaries when each new day that we are alive and that we come into contact with society we only add new bars to our mental prisons. In a way, we are all chained in Plato's Cave but none of us will ever be able to break free and see the Sun.

An atheist who cannot find within him the power to believe in God, how can he fully comprehend a christian who would give his life away for his beliefs? How could one walk in the shoes of the other when, in order to do that, he would have to change his beliefs, thus changing who he is. Aristotle said that "it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it". True. You need to be open minded in order to be able to reflect upon points of view with which you disagree. But can you fully comprehend them in that case?

No matter what we do, we are always biased. And ironically, as we grow older, we accumulate more and more biases. Which leads me to ask myself. Traditionally we see old people as being wise due to their life experience. But what is wisdom? Is it real knowledge, or is it just an extensive accumulation of societal norms and values which have been embedded in rational and empirical arguments? Because our culture, our society, our friends, our parents, our idols, our experiences, our hobbies, they all limit our ability to think freely and creatively. In 1984, George Orwell even explores the idea that language can limit our thoughts and therefore our freedom. Of course, some people and some experiences can on the contrary broaden our horizons, but that is only possible because our mind is so closed to the real world to begin with.

And what's more, what is the real world anyway? Is there such a thing as absolute truth when there is not one single person alive or dead who is able to perceive it in its entirety? No matter what we do, from the instant we are born, we will always be closed to certain aspects of the world. And therefore, if we are limited in that which we believe in, we are limited in our actions. So even in the purest anarchy, which Proudhon considered to be the epitome of liberty, there is no true liberty. And the irony is that it is not another human being who cuts our ability to act, but we ourselves who set limits on our liberty. Of course, in that case, one might wonder if it can still be considered lack of freedom when we are not conscious of it. But then we fall into a question of semantics and I really don't want to get into that.

Wings

Credit: noirclair.deviantart.com

Thank you. That’s all I can say. And you will surely run away and never come anywhere near me after this for it will finally expose me for the nutcase I really am, but I have to say it. We broke up about a year ago (who am I kidding? A year and 13 days…not that I was counting, but we broke up on January 1^st so it’s kind of hard to not keep track), but I had a really hard time letting go of you and my feelings for you. I don’t know how important I was for you (probably just another girlfriend in the pile), but you occupied a very important place in my life. You were my first love and that made you (and despite everything you still are) special to me. You made me feel more alive than I had ever been. Needless to say, once I came back to Canada I started dying little by little, closing myself a little bit more everyday, suffocating under the days that passed by and only kept alive by your emails which after a while became more and more scarce. This cycle culminated in that New Year’s Day when everything ended and even though I fully agreed with the logic of our decision, my entire body somehow felt numb. The next day, for the first time in my life, at 6 AM I found myself wide awake and staring at the ceiling. You came to talk to me on the mess. You told me you made a stupid mistake. Hahaha, I was such an idiot to feel hope at those words. “I dyed my hair red!” Right. Stupid me. Months passed by, schoolwork piled up and I managed to forget to think about you. It somehow became more bearable. But whenever I was at parties, whenever I was hanging out with friends, whenever I felt lonely, my mind inevitably turned to you. Ha, I remember last May when you had that on-off relationship with that girl. You weren’t really dating, but you were so close to actually replacing me and it felt like we were breaking up all over again. I just couldn’t stand it. Now don’t get me wrong. I got over you six months ago. But there was still a link that pulled me towards you whenever I felt lost, like I somehow couldn’t let go. And now you tell me you have someone else in your life. I have finally and officially been replaced. By all means, this should have plunged me into a deep depression, but after the first awkward hour or two, I just felt….free! It’s like you reached out and cut the cord that tied me to you when I couldn’t. You compensated for my weakness and now for the first time in a year I can look around me and see the colors in the world. I can see the possibilities in front of me. I can wake up in the morning without having to wonder what the use of getting out of bed is. So thank you, you who have broken my wings and have finally given them back to me. Thank you for bringing me back from the dead.

Old friends

Everyone has a special place where they go when they feel down or when everything just gets too overwhelming. Whether it's a shopping mall or a park or just your own room, it has that magical ability to calm you down and make you feel safe.

For me that place is a library, as dorky as that may sound. There's just something about the concept of a room filled with shelves and shelves of books that you can just pick up and dive into, that's soothing and comforting. The minute you walk through the door, your troubles and anxieties fade away and then it's just you and the pages. There's a strange feeling of promise, of understanding and of excitement that runs through your veins. No more deception. No one there to judge you. No one you need to please. Sometimes you don't even need to pick up a book and read it. Just going through the seemingly endless shelves, looking at the titles and the summaries is enough.

A library is something that you could always come back to because it has no beginning and no ending. You don't need to train in order to use it, there's no effort required and the first time you walk in, it feels like you've spent your entire life there. You will also never be able to read everything that it contains so you will never run out of possibilities.

Did you notice that a library never feels cold? It's a place where you can be alone even when hundreds of people surround you. It's a place that blocks any thoughts and feelings that are not calm and peaceful. It's home.

Endless Questions

What is a human being made of? Fundamentally I mean. If you go deep down to the basic elementary units of homo sapiens sapiens. What would you find? My answer would have been matter. Atoms. Neutrons, protons and electrons. Quarks. Photons. The same subatomic particles that make up the rest of the universe. But if this is the basis of what we are, then why are we different? Different concentrations? Different mixtures of these basic particles? Could be very plausible. After all, no two people have the exact same DNA.

But that still doesn't answer the initial question. What are we physically? You could say it's our atoms, but then again there's that theory that says that after 7 years each and every atom we had initially, has been exchanged by another identical one. So as we go about our day, we exchange a carbon atom for another, we leave an electron and pick up another one passing by, we exchange phosphate groups, so that after 7 years, there's nothing left of our original particles and then the cycle starts all over again.

But can we even say that there's a particular carbon or hydrogen or oxygen atom out there that is solely ours? I read in a book once (I think it was "First you build a cloud" if I remember correctly) that we are more like a wave than a structure by itself. Meaning that we are not so much constituted of individual particles, but by the links and the bonds between them. A wave is a vertical movement of particles and as it travels towards the shore (thus it travels horizontally), it constantly changes particles. But the movement that it confers to each new acquired particle is identical to that of each and every previous particle. Therefore, a wave is an independent entity with no material constitution. It is merely a repetition of patterns and movement. And that's what we are as well: a repetition of chemical reactions and bond formation. Nothing stays fixed and the only thing that stays constant is the pattern. In a way, we are like a dish that constantly recreates itself, but never changing the initial recipe.

So then where does our consciousness come from? What is so different between me, a cat and a lamp? Why can I think this very instant, the cat can only follow instincts and the lamp can't even move? Well you can say that the lamp is a solid and therefore cannot move even if it was conscious. Ok fine, what about water or mud then? They certainly have the capacity of movement, but they don't unless something interacts with them. Maybe it's like the formation of atoms. An extra proton and electron makes up an oxygen atom with completely different properties compared to nitrogen. So more is not only quantitative, but also qualitative. However, since a 25 story building is by far bigger and has more matter than me, but that still doesn't give it the ability to move or think (at least as far as we know), we could say that it is the complexity of the structure and not its size that brings about this fundamental difference.

However, that still doesn't convince me. A computer can be fairly complex but that doesn't give it a consciousness. In Western cultures, we associate consciousness and the ability to think with the brain. But animals have a brain or some sort of a nervous system and you don't see dolphins or dogs inventing the theory of relativity. What part exactly of our brain makes us different? And what is it about the brain that makes it so special to begin with? After all, it's just a bunch of chemical reactions that conduct an electrical current. Any house has a hellish amount of wires going through it plus whatever appliances we plug in and since here in Canada almost everything runs on electricity, in what sense is this different from a human brain (putting aside the fact that our brain has a lot more "wires" than a house)? What about our brain enables it to coordinate an entire body, all the while helping us interact with others in society and letting us reflect upon our existence and discover the world that surrounds us?

When I was in high school I learned in biology that a human being is made up of cells and in chemistry that the basic building blocks of matter are atoms (which then make up molecules). But these two views seemed contradictory and somehow I was missing the link between them. Then I took a course in molecular biology and finally, upon studying the cell, I found out that cells are made up of molecules and thus atoms, and the connection between the two was made and these different views of the world were reunited. In the same way, I am now trying to relate the physical existence of the brain, which is that of molecules, chemical reactions and electrical currents, to the more esoteric, but nonetheless real existence which is the consciousness and the ability to form thoughts.

Somehow, I feel like the consciousness is to the brain what virtual particles are to a proton in physics. But at the same time, I have a hard time believing that this reasoning can go beyond the level of a metaphor since there's no Uncertainty Principle for objects as big as a brain (hell, even a cell is too big to fit in the Uncertainty Principle) and therefore that excludes the possibility of a virtual particle for the brain. And even if it were possible, the only resemblance between a virtual particle and a conscience is their lack of material existence and nothing more (though, now that I think about it, some virtual particles have mass so even that doesn't hold true).

On the other hand, the exchange of virtual particles makes up a force and therefore has the power to pull particles together. So maybe consciousness is an exchange. One of my chemistry teachers once told me that energy was represented by movement (as abstract as that may seem...and anyway I was never fully satisfied with that explanation) and I always thought that the formation of thoughts was actually a connection that was made between two neurons. However, how those connections are formed I have no clue. You could say that they are influenced by our outside surroundings and the signals that we collect through our senses, but then could you say that the only difference between an ordinary person like myself and Einstein is our experiences? Somehow I find that doubtful since there was nothing extraordinary about the life Einstein lead. Then can we say that some people are predestined to be geniuses? Is it in our DNA? But then how is that expressed in our phenotype? Because DNA is useless unless it's expressed in some sort of physical form, be it a protein or an eye color. So then how is the DNA of a genius expressed? Does he have a bigger brain or more neuron connections?

I can't give any definitive conclusions on this topic since all I can do is come up with hypotheses. However, this is what I find so fascinating about the human brain. We can see it, we can touch it, we can cut it up in pieces, we can put it under a microscope, but even with all that, we still know less about it than about subatomic particles which can only be studied through collisions in a cyclotron and through an analysis of electromagnetic traces on a sheet.