The Icarus Website

For dinner tonight, I ordered a takeaway pizza from Domino's Pizza. I learned something interesting.

My body was quite hungry and I was looking forward to eating the pizza. When the delivery man rang the bell, I rushed to the door and it was at that point that I was happiest. The eating part wasn’t what I had anticipated. The ingredients were not that tasty. Don’t get me wrong it was still nice, but I wasn’t as happy as when I was anticipating the moment.

It required a conscious intellectual effort for me to look back at the experience and realise that it was all rather absurd. It’s almost as if I sensed that I was not supposed to look back. Perhaps we are programmed by nature to forget things that make us question the logic of our existence.

I then started reflecting on this more deeply, and realised that perhaps that is what nature intended. I mean if the highest point of pleasure was at the end, there would be less incentive to continue. By making the climax the anticipation stage, nature is cleverly encouraging a never-ending cycle. Such a cycle is beneficial to the genes.

I’ve also learned that the rawer a feeling is, such as physical pain, the more likely we are to forget it. That is why when we feel a high degree of physical pain, at that instant we tend to be surprised at how horrible it is. Physical pain and pleasure are experiences nature wants us to forget quickly, and there is a reason for it. If we remembered how pleasure felt, there would be no need to seek more. Nature (the collective genes) wants us to continue our lives. Memory tends to be selective and it seems to be there to help us learn from our past encounters so that we are better equipped to deal with future ones. Memory has an evolutionary function.

Have you ever thought why we can be bored of some things and not other things? For example, sitting on a desk all day can be boring even for only one day, yet we eat and drink every day, and never get tired of it. Again, it is because eating and drinking are necessary for the survival of our genes.

My love of humanity is only matched by my hatred of the genes.

'...man is free, in so far as he has the power of contradicting himself and his essential nature. Man is free even from his freedom; that is, he can surrender his humanity.'
~Paul Tillich~

I cannot pretend to myself that something is what it is not.

Why I cannot be in a relationship

Premises: I choose not to be selfish. I choose to reason logically.

What does it mean to love? Does it mean satisfying your wants more than those of your lover, or the other way round?

IF it means satisfying the wants of your lover more than your own, then you would react in the following way:

If your lover deserts you willingly and decides to be with somebody else, you would be happy for your lover and not be jealous (since by being happy for your lover, you are satisfying his/her wants and not opposing them).

On the other hand, IF to love means satisfying your own wants more than those of your lover, then you would react in the following way:

If your lover deserts you willingly and decides to be with somebody else, you would be upset and jealous.

Which way would you react?

Assuming you are upset and jealous, then you are selfish. However, such selfishness is needed for a human relationship to survive. That is what nature intended. That explains why you may feel good if your partner is jealous when another person flirts with you. It feels good not only because you feel special and needed, but also because it helps to cement your existing relationship. You feel good at the prospect of reassuring your partner that you love him/her. This arrangement is beneficial for the human genes.

Therefore, any relationship between two human beings is doomed unless the two are both selfish.

Since I choose not to be selfish, I cannot be in a relationship

I've just finished reading a book on Free Will by Thomas Pink. It concludes that there is no convincing argument to show that libertarian freedom is impossible in principle. 'Nobody has actually established the truth of causal determinism. Any causal influences on our action that can be traced back to our desires, and perhaps even further to environmental or genetic factors, seem in general to be merely that: influences...Provided such causes do merely influence us without actually determining how we act, they leave enough room for freedom'.