Today's soundtrack is Cannibal Corpse: Red Before Black. Its cover looks as though a 14-year-old goth did it for a commission on Fiverr. The meth-addled protagonist on the album art brings to mind Ms. Tweedy from the film Chicken Run, yelling "No chicken escapes from Tweedy's farm!"
I do like the album itself though.
This evening, I'm reading the first chapter of Plato's Podcasts, a book by Mark Vernon. The book is purportedly an introduction to the great philosophers from a modern perspective. It's another one of those books that I picked up on sale in the mishmashed "last copies" section of Indigo. This is the kind of book I can never resist: it seems like an accessible way to crack open a topic that I find daunting, so I've been looking forward to starting this one.
Chapter 1: Pythagoras and the Search for Meaning
As humans, we all need to find meaning in the things we see and experience, but we live in a society that mocks the search for (and attribution of) meaning. The recognition of meaninglessness is referred to as "the disenchantment of the world" (1). Some philosophers say that life is meaningless. Plato is one of the philosophers who objected to this. He cited Pythagoras' love of science and math; Pythagoras believed that science reveals meaning. He loved geometry. Pythagoras is said to have found the link between mathematics and music theory. He liked the absolute truth of maths. Plato says that math is "a deeper way of seeing the truth" (6). Bertrand Russell is quoted as saying that mathematics "possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty [...], like that of sculpture" (6). One of the arguments for math showing us meaning is that math is not created; rather, it is discovered. All of the laws of mathematics are already in place in the universe; we simply discover them. Eugene Wigner describes math phenomenon as being unreasonably regular and effective (7). Thus, it is absolute, and it is already in place; therefore, some say that we use mathematics to explain things that are beautiful, like music and symmetry, giving their beauty meaning. Some say that the regularities and predictabilities of math are evidence of a universe created and ordered by a higher power, though others of course disagree. The universe is meaningful; we can use science and math to discover its meaning.
