the inward eye

As I drove up the familiar road, watching the miles tick off, I listened to my new favorite podcast, "Stuff You Should Know", where these two quasi-stoner buddies in the vein of Bill and Ted riff and discuss random various topics. Most of the podcast is them riffing off of one another which is pleasant to listen to because you can ascertain by their tone their genuine affection for one another. It gives this sense of voyeuristic pleasure listening to these conversations-especially since I can't conceive having these kind of introspective/learned conversations with very many.

I digress. The topic was "are there any really good ideas out in the world"-that's a summation but the basic gist was that the question if there was no more room for innovation to advance human history. As the two hosts playfully combatted each other on this topic, they kept coming back to subjectivism and how there's probably so much that could be achieved and learned but people are limited by the human brain/senses and furthermore by the subjective human experience. Our ways of understanding the universe is dependent and confined by the restrictions of how we are neurologically wired. This line of discussion eventually diverged into ruminations on solipsism- that our perceptions of reality are entirely subjective. We have no way of knowing what the world is truly like- we are slaves to our senses and our existence.

This also reminds me of another story I read about the other day. A man, through some genetic prank, became deprived of his testosterone and in essence, became God.

Not God in some omniscient and omnipotent sense, but as his testosterone levels depleted, his desires began to wane. He wasn't so dogged in the focus of possessing, controlling, conquering. He began to notice the beauty in the most trivial of items, kind of like the Wes Bentley character in American Beauty in overdrive. He became almost Buddhist-liberated and freed from the desires that kept him captive. His eventual dissociation from secular pleasures allowed him to feel somewhat numb from the outside world, yet strangely at peace. He no longer was the contentious, misogynistic person he had cultivated as he grew up. He changed, physically and fundamentally and though his testosterone levels have increased, his experiences marked him and his views for life.

We're all just a mess of hormones, chemicals, and neurotransmitters reacting, aren't we? There's no real truth, no real beauty, no real moral or ethical standards. It's all in our heads. What we perceive becomes our world.