I Want a New Drug

One that won't make me sick
One that won't make me crash my car
Or make me feel three feet thick

What is philosophy about? Well, I suppose it depends on what you value and how you connect with the world. Simply discovering the sometimes ridiculously strange interpretations of reality arising in philosophy made me turn around and wonder what I really knew or thought I knew. Thus I suppose it depends on the one hand whether you can 'see past' a 'normal' idea of reality, and on the other hand whether you risk taking such a drastic step.

George Berkeley's conception of 'idealism' in the form of the idea that 'to be is to be perceived' made me feel like I was on drugs (or. perhaps, that he was) when I first saw it. How is it possible that absolutely EVERYTHING exists because it is perceived? So the earth I walk on wouldn't be there if my eyes didn't look at and my feet didn't walk on it? Then where does that put me as a human being? Something akin to a holodeck in Star Trek? That we are being fed into some interface that springs up as the world around us? A wisp in a vast astral ocean?

So can I define philosophy as a drug? The BEST drug? Maybe a drug, but maybe not the best. Nietzsche is a fine example of what can happen if you throw your mind into an abyss of thought with no day-to-day life to sober you up: "If you stare long enough into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you."

In Gokarna when I had a bit too much bhang lassi, and I was laying in bed in agony trying my utmost to prevent my sanity from escaping into oblivion, I tried to make sense of the reality of the situation: my nervous system somehow changes external phenomena into some internal pattern that is made sense of. So suppose you are a river of perception interpreting patterns constantly floating by, what happens when you tip a small amount of some other substance that upsets the balance? Sometimes (if your lucky or unlucky depending again on what you value), chaos. And this implies that you have some control over what's going on around you. Or, at least, that you can disturb it. Upsetting the balance of how chemicals and synapses transfer information is enough to distort reality. Why? Because suddenly you look at things differently. Since it becomes the case that you cannot properly predict what's going on around you, you must compensate for this by shutting things out, which makes many look within. And introversion leads to dangerous questions: 'what the hell am I doing?' and 'can reality really be so fleeting that a gentle push from a foreign substance flings you into a temporary abyss?' It's about how you think and how you interpret what goes on around you.

And how you perceive and react to the Absurd.

Or maybe that's just me.

So, what is philosophy about?

It's about how you think and how you interpret what goes on around you.