kingtycoon | Science & Health

Very tedious conference call! Everyone's favorite.

So here's where I am on things . Things that don't merit consideration but which I focus on incessantly & with a glimmer-eyed verve. The initial thought came to me while I was working on the healing magic spells for my game - And I'll probably post about that a little, here. But this is the thing. Let's imagine, you and I, let us imagine together, there's a Wizard a magic Wizard & he can turn you into anything at all. He could turn you into a pillar of salt or a gorilla wearing a crown. Whatever. Any old thing. But then there's a different magic wizard who can wave a wand and make you Well. Healed & whole, perfect. So the question is what's the difference between being well & being transformed.? You might not see it right away, so I'm going to delve a little into this, this concept that is eating up my thoughtmeats at just this moment.

It's got a name - you now what it's called. Dasein right? The thing-in-itself. Here's something really weird that happened. Saturday we were walking down the hill to go to the parade - our annual observance of the year - The Parade is a big deal for me and young Agatha. We have not missed it in her life. Still. So walking straight down through little italy and she's called out by one of her school chums - a kid from her school & her parents are there - we walk down the hill together and I make conversation with the parents. One's the engineer at a factory, we bond over working at factories, the other is this german artist and she's talking at me in a little bit of the old Deutsch, and I'm still Sehr Schlecht aber ich leibe spreche Deutsch - anyhow, she starts immediately talking to me about her time in London and this whole bit about Heidegger! Like, I imagine it's extra great to be European in this sense that maybe instead of Cavaliers basketball random strangers will want to talk to you about Martin Heidegger. Mainly she was interested in how he was a Nazi and how that's a problem, but I... Look I accept that political opinions are a matter of fashion & that these things rise & fall in terms of their acceptance in the world - which is not at all comforting to anyone, but nobody should be comfortable if they've studied enough history. No one is ever safe!

Now, I'd been working on devising this magic system about healing & I was thinking about how I'd distinguish it from just other types of matter transmogrification - how are they different? And I came to it - the Dasein, the Thing-In-Itself. Identity & selfness are manifest in healing and subverted by transformation.

Then I thought a lot about health & its relationship to self-identity - to being. I think it's the right lens for looking at this notion, the self. Because we have this holistic identity that encompasses past & present, that is a manifestation of not just our physiology but of our historical and expected physiology - of our thoughts, perceptions & thoughts about these things. So there's a whole cumulative self that begins to form around these germs. Now - don't get me wrong, I'm extremely skeptical about metaphysical claims, I strongly doubt that there's an innate soul that anyone has - and yet, there is some continuity of the self that does not seem to respect physiological change through time. My father is aged and now his mind is aging he's lost his puissance & power - and he's strangely comfortable. He was a very capable man, professional-ish athlete canny and quick, clever & charming and now he's muddled and weak and I can't conceive of what it must be to become this other self - it seems like a great break in that continuum of self - and yet, and yet - there's the slow decline the steady accumulation of weaknesses & infirmity. You have to suspect that you're getting older that you're losing your power - and yet, and yet - there's another sense of who you are, and were. I wonder about this - which identity is the real one - the physiological self, the present moment, the historical or remembered self? Things change, perceptions are altered.

I was dating a lady I knew long ago, when I was young and a plump young man and I'm the same, now, as I was then, and I'm a fine specimen of middle-aged manhood - I'm built the same as I ever was actually, I'm not any littler or bigger in the guts than I was when I was young - still can fit into the old marching band uniform! And yet, I was a fat kid and now I'm a correctly sized adult - That's strange isn't it? Context of self identity - but that's all external, and external is external to this conversation, as much as it can be - because it's the mirror that others hold up that we respond to. I'm a big tall strong man - but that's purely contextual, there's plenty of people taller and stronger than me. If I were a player of the Cavaliers I'd be purely middle of the pack - though I'm 99th percentile in the world overall. It's this context or a lack of moderating contextual changes that creates a self.

So your broken self is cured - let's imagine magically cured as if by a wizard - how would you be healed? What's your best version of yourself? I think on this and am confounded. Diseases & ailments & age & death & what's the self in between these thoughts?