On Statistics #4

What have we learned so far? The career field of actuarial science has been shattered with the view that statistics are worthless, the youth of today is without direction, the majority anyway. Also, the universe is an interesting specimen, coincidence or not, and also that being the best doesn't mean being perfect, it means being the one that people like and the one that does it successfully, without blatantly obvious vice or other unattractive qualities.

Where to go from here. Perhaps I shall use this time to circle back on previously dabbled-in topics to attempt to clear any confusion you may have, or perhaps to satisfy your appetite for more of my choppy, tangent, odd, lofty trains of thought.

One thing I'm going to note hear, which you may have thought of already, is a massive contradiction I have consciously, though not necessarily deliberately, created for myself. I say that Earth is nothing but a tiny, insignificant dust speck floating blissfully through time and space. I know the Earth revolves around the Sun, we aren't a rogue planet, but our galaxy is moving in a certain direction, don't know exactly which way though, and I believe (I could very well be mistaken) that our solar system is moving towards the center of The Milky Way, towards the black hole in the middle. With that cleared up, Earth doesn't matter. Anything we ever do or say or hear or create, experience, fathom, change or think about will be forgotten, dismissed, lost, destroyed, engulfed, utterly obliterated. We are dust in the wind. Nothing lasts forever, not even the earth and sky. However, I talk about how important it is for one to realize the full potential, their self-worth, to actualize themselves in the greatest and purest form that they can be. Well, if absolutely nothing matters at all, why worry about what to wear, to go to school, who your friends are, to put your seatbelt on? Why take the time to consider other people in your life, to learn, to laugh, to love. Why do it? It's all just too much trouble, isn't it? We're all going to die, eventually forgotten by everyone, and they too will eventually die, and any mention of them ever will also be lost forever, and ultimately a cataclysmic event of which we can only imagine will happen, and destroy everything. It's a conundrum really. We matter not, yet we take the time and energy and make things matter. We make things matter more than other species known to us. We make life an emergency! You have to be to school at 8 o' clock or else you will die in a fiery explosion years down the road after you're fired from another dead-end job because you failed such and such a class, which was probably the result of the teacher not liking you because you were always late, not that you weren't capable of learning anything! AAHHHH!!! Everything has to be on time, everything has to be this way or that, the answer to this question is this, the color to wear on Tuesday is blue, the correct term for popcorn is poppycock. We have within ourselves something that we have yet to discover in the universe, at least to the same severity of which we possess. Consciousness. That word carries such weight, the weight of which I can only begin to describe. It's such a simple concept, being aware of oneself. We are all aware in one form or other. When we are awake is when we generally think we are most aware of things. When we are awake, our brains are working. The brain is simply a fascinating thing. It is a ball of mush in your skull that gives you the ability to learn, expereience, feel, love, hate, experience any other emotion ever, it makes you aware of yourself, those around you. It allows you to smell, hear, taste, touch, see. It may allow to do more than the traditional five senses, which is also an interesting concept. The brain though, physically speaking, strictly looking at what the brain is made of, you find things that all occur other places in nature. If you look other places in nature you will find things that are in your brain in an inanimate state. In fact everything that is in your brain can be found in an inanimate state. So, we have substances, and they are inanimate, incapable of thought, feeling, or experience. We have these inanimate particles in our brain that have arranged themselves in such a way that causes them to be animate. WTF. How does that happen? If you take an assortment of car parts and throw them together, does it make a Transformer? Nope. I just don't get how this happens. If you go deeper into the matter that makes up our brains you end up, obviously, at the atom. Go deeper into the atom you end up with subatomic particles, and now with people at CERN finding different particles and smashing particles smaller than the proton or electron together......well, I just don't know. What the hell is happening? Quarks? What are those? Why are those? What about them constitutes their existence? And with such a lack of understanding it only further confounds us when we know that the stuff we observe such things with is the same stuff we are observing, the only difference being how it is arranged. We have gained consciousness, some more than others mind you, through a series of chemical reactions and electrical impulses. With these household reactions we form thoughts. What exactly is a thought? Why do we have them? We have billions and billions and billions of connections and cells, and somehow withing these cells we hear things in our head. I often think back to when I was a child, when I didn't know nearly as many things as I know now. What did I think in? I would say most often I thought in smells, tastes, feelings. I didn't often know what to think of things or how to describe them, so I just sort of catalogued them, and then pondered them later.

It is a strange condition we find ourselves in, the fact that we are anything at all.