about me

My name is Pedro Fonseca (my family calls me Peter) and I lived most of my life in Portugal, although I felt more at home when I lived for a few months in the West cost of the US. I'm just an average guy, though I had the luck of having a superb family, full of love, gave me endless freedom. I always did what I wanted, thought what I wanted, made a lot of questions, received few answers. In general I consider myself a very lucky guy and I'm very grateful for what life has brought me.I'm average in almost all of the things I do. I like swimming, mountain biking, kayak, I'd love to hang-glide or even this, I did sailing for a month, and I'd love continue it, also to do windsurf, rappel, sky and other sports. If I were rich I probably would not be able to avoid being out all day sailing, hang-gliding, skiing, eating great food and trying to get laid. It would live a life full of pleasures (I imagine), but I also think that, in the end, I would feel I'd wasted my life, not having done anything that truly fulfilled me.Because of that I consider myself lucky that I was born poor, because it made me face many aspects of life, not so appealing at first (like studying), but that made me grow, so that, even if I'd die today, I think I would have lived a lot, I would have experienced so much, and learned and transformed myself so much... I think it was worth it already. So I consider myself lucky even for the limitations I have.On the other hand I would fancy being rich, and if someone gave me a bag full of money I would certainly keep it, I'm afraid I would neither return it nor would I give it away for charity, although I would expect from the start that my growth would be ruined, that, after I was rich, it would all be mindless fun. But perhaps I'm mistaken, for my greatest inspiration is to ride a bike in the countryside, so perhaps all that leisure would inspire me and I'd grow. Well, I'll never know! (Nevertheless, for the large majority of the human population on earth, having something to eat is the greatest priority - all other "fancies" are nothing compared with the urge to fulfill basic needs, like food and shelter)In any case I'm not hungry, and I do have a shelter, more importantly, I have a computer and internet access, with that I can look upon the world, from google maps to wikipedia, to sites of philosophers, news, I can see images from space, and I have the hubblecast, so many sources to travel, if only I had the time...

Well, I don't, I have to work, I have to gain money. I could live by investing the stock market, but I don't have the initial funds to do so. And even investing in the stock market is something that takes away more than eight hours per day on research. So...

Like I was saying, I'm an average guy in almost everything (except my enormous luck in having a good family, health, excellent girlfriend, great friends, some wise teachers, etc). I have a shortcoming and also what I consider a "good thing". the shortcoming regards people, I really don't understand them very well, I think I may have some mild variant of Asperger's syndrome (I really felt identified to Daniel Tammet's autobiography in his early school years - although I'm not particularly intelligent while he is a genius). For instance, I remember, since I was a child, seeing guys watching sports on the tv. I understand doing sports for pleasure, but seeing people on tv playing football or some competition, people whom you will never meet on your life, that will never even know that you exist, and then we cheer for one of the teams! That for me is still shocking today, I mean I understand that people feel identified with the team, I understand that they even feel the delusion that their hope end enthusiasm may magically change the result. I can imagine myself in that position, for a few minutes, not for half-an-hour, not for weeks, years, a whole life? This and many other things, make me think that I really don't understand most humans. I must lack something that is frequent in most people but not in me. Another strange thing: men look at women and they can generally assess their beauty by the size of their legs, boobs, etc. I know this because I've seen it in action: when I was a teenager guys decided to do a secret list of the most beautiful girls in the class. When it was done they asked my opinion. I thought a while and I decided the idea was stupid because you can't really compare two persons, which will have a different beauty, but they insisted, so I started to present my list, and seeing the first names on it they simply said: stop and choose from this list we have already made! I never understood why those girls were, for all the guys there, more beautiful than the others. Like Miss Universe, or whatever, I don't find the girls that go to those contests specially appealing, by the contrary. I do like Nicole Kidman, for instance, or Marilin Monroe or Regina Spektor. But it has to do with the way they feel, the way they walk, they talk, their eyes speak of worlds, just like a music, that makes me fly and feel I'm closer to Paradise. That is what I find attractive in a woman, if I'd like her leg per se, I probably would feel attracted to a corpse.

So, as you can see, I'm kind of weird in my social skills, not because I'm so good that I'm above certain feelings and stuff, but because I really can't comprehend them, it is a defect I have, and, try as I might, and can't get over it.

The good thing I do have, and connected with the bad thing, is that I am quite an independent thinker (this was allowed by my very permissive upbringing and also y this defect in interacting with other humans). Unlike Tammet and many others I'm not a good thinker, not specially bright, nor knowledgeable, which makes my independence quite useless (I'll never say anything that's worth hearing). However, these two things together - not being terribly smart and being very independent thinker - brought me problems. The main problem is that I'm almost always helplessly confused. From the start I've asked things like: what is the meaning of life, what shall we do with our lives, why are all these stars and worlds out there?, etc. Of course, my parents bought me books, hoping that I would find some answers there. I read the books, many books (well, not so many), and they taught me about the life of stars and galaxies, planets, the evolution of life, a little bit about the brain, and many other things, but never the answers I was seeking. Finally I went to the university and took a philosophy course. After a few years there (I spent like 8 years doing that course - it should have been made in four ^_^) I realized nobody knew the answer. It was like Gorgias said: "Nothing exists. If something exists, it cannot be known. If something can be known, it cannot be said." That was it, I could finally give it a rest, I was not crazy, I had not a profound deficiency that, in some way, led me to ignore the meaning of life. Actually nobody knew, or at least no one could actually convince everyone one else about what was the meaning of life. Actually, no one could prove the world actually existed. The only thing, if you really were prone to doubt everything, that you could be sure of, was that you, in this particular moment, exist. But, alas, you don't even know what the word "exist" implies? Does that mean you exist in flesh and bone, or are you perhaps built in a simulation, or something else that we don't have even the concepts to describe? Well, fuck it, we simply don't know, no one knows. Thank you very much Descartes, Gorgias and all skeptics for that. Now I feel more secure, I'm not crazy, and I can start to look out, to search, not for the certain, but for the most plausible.

The most plausible thing of all, in my view, is that life is a journey through many mysteries. I find both science and art, in this perspective, the accumulation of victories in the long journey of humanity through these mysteries. The achievements that man makes in his search for what is real are registered in these two areas and are, for the rest of us, ways of unravel reality through others' achievements. It is like Einstein or Klimt were all these endless years looking for an answer, but these guys were geniuses, and then, after a while, they sort some of it out. And then they have brought that forward. Klimt shows the energetic bursts of energy (the oriental Chi perhaps?) of men and women, and their connection, in a Kiss. Einstein showed how what we feel as gravity is, in reality, a deformation of the geometry of space-time, and how time can be stretched, how a minute to someone in some context can be compatibility with millions of years going by in a different context (like getting out of the planet and returning a few hours later only to find out that millions of years have passed). Quantum physics and all their interpretations, the astronomical view we have of the place we live in, as well as the microscopical image... all these things are like flashes of light that, pointing to the unknown, grasp, once in while, something out of the vast mysterious night. We know almost nothing of who we are, where we live, how things work. But we have gone a long way, we have discovered many details and we are building a more detailed picture of the world we live in, of who or what we are, as we go along.

So one of the most mysterious things for me, is to understand why aren't people excited with science and art? Why don't people fight to see the latest development in astrophysics. Why do we teach children how to read instead of teaching them about galaxies and proteins? The world is a marvelous place, full of mysteries and adventure, full of diversity and enchanting events all around. And yet we bring our children stories about the turtle and the hare. Ok. What is the point - stultification in large scale? And what about tv? There are excellent programs out there, but they are so few, and almost never on tv, instead you get soaps and what passes for news.

I really don't understand our education system nor the mass media. It seems we all got allergy to wisdom. As if, perhaps through school, we have associated the contact with reality (knowing) to being disciplined (obedience, which is also taught in schools). By that association we may have lost our main inheritance: the love for understanding what is really out there.

However, I must say that I have teached philosophy for a few years and I was almost completely unable to show the beauty and value of science or art. Kids like their mobile phones, Hi5s and Facebooks, and anything that will get them laid (thee boys) or social status (more the girls). After that, it's like its not even there. I don't get it, I don't think I ever will!

As you are certainly seeing I really don't understand much about society at all. I am, happily, a pariah of society, nobody knows me, and I am glad that things will continue that way. The internet is great in maintaining one's anonymity, not so much because you cannot find about who I am (you certainly can, Pedro is my real name, I almost never lie intentionally) but because, there is so much information that the likelihood of someone actually reading my page is close to zero. I feel more secure in this because even my close friends, family, girlfriend, no one reads this (and the link is available!). Thank you lord! (although I do not believe in the Lord!! ^_^)

People are dangerous, and I guess if there were many that would read what I say here, they would feel indignated, they would want to shut me down, or at least despise me or something like that. So, why do I write, if not for others?

Well, like I said before, because I think independently I'm almost always in a state of confusion. In large part my ideas are those of society. I believe in freedom, equality, science, art, love, and so on. But on many other things I'm completely at odds with society. For instance, I've always felt fascinated with religions, I really tried to get into one of those, I tried Christianity, Buddhism and a few others. But, alas, people believe in the weirdest things, without any proof, only because it fits their lives, its comfortable for them, it serves their purposes. Instead of looking for truth many religious people are just searching for comfort. As in the film "Agora", the religious spirit gets stronger through belief, whereas science's progress is through doubt.

"Synesius, you don't question what you believe. You cannot. I must."

So religion, although very useful and enlightening regarding some feelings and intuitions, is by the contrary deadly regarding both clarity and ecstasy. I include in this all the religions that I know, for even the Buddhist vision of a world endless in both time and space, is not conducive to clarity, to critical research, to freedom of thought and spirit, to true detachment from all prejudices and authority. Also, religion starts out by preaching love, but then it prohibits free love (sex, etc), and even tries to hide the beauty of the body (nudity, etc). So, instead of progressing in the spiritual scale by having more and more ecstasy and freedom (for instance by having lots and lots of sex and pleasure and going back to Eden by feeling well with your nakedness and understanding that there is no sin in love) you end up all repressed, full of dogmas and superstitions, searching for salvation in the very prison that makes you miserable, and so on. By condemning every religion in this way I am, of course, almost completely ostracizing me from the commerce with mankind. So, in my daily life I don't criticize religion this much, I do it here because I am quite sure that no one will read me, and, because of that, this is the right place to sort my ideas out. To clear everything up.

To be perfectly honest I am also not perfectly comfortable with science either. For two reasons, one is that it has absorbed too much from religious prejudice: even with all we have learned from Darwin, genetics and brain research, we still feel that we are superior to other animals. This may be true regarding our intelligence, but it is certainly not true regarding our ability to love, to respect, to feel sympathy, etc. Many animals have these qualities, I believe many species have, statistically speaking, more ability to love, or towards altruistic attitudes, than mankind in general has (individuals vary a lot). I also believe, and will try elsewhere to justify that belief, that natural man (that is, man without culture, the uneducated man, man raised in the jungle with no help from any sort of artificial concept or language) would be not much smarter than other primates, elephants, dolphins or even certain dogs and many other species. I believe that, from a natural or biological point of view, we are not much "smarter" than many other mammals. What we have developed is the ability to impart our intelligence from predecessors to successors. Whatever discoveries our predecessors made made of them have been inherited by us. We have inherited, more than genes, strategies for living and dealing with nature. This inheritance, over generations and generations, is what allows us today to look so different from other animals. More than animals we have become "artificial intelligences", we are the artifacts of our fathers and predecessors.

Now psychology will say that we are not ruled by instincts (what about aggression, possession, fear, sexuality, desire for power and dominance, etc? These are all contiguous to other primates and many mammals), many neuroscience claim that animals are not conscious. I mean, is this crazy or what? To me, this only show how easy it was in the past to very smart people, to negate that blacks, Jews, Roma, women, or whatever, were "inferior" to the white man. Intelligence can be used to suppress the obvious.

Many people seem to think that as man is integrated in nature he looses his appeal. Well, that is because we don't know nature. Some of us see it as some scary, uninteresting, cruel place. But nothing could be further from the truth. When you go into the jungle most of the animals are not dying (nor being born), they are happily living out their lives. Just like we are. In fact, if we try to time an animal suffers during his lifetime, we will find out that, in percentage terms, he is probably going to suffer much less than we are. For instance if an animal gets eaten he will suffer for a few minutes, a few hours at most. But how many hours has he or she lived without pain? The agonizing moments will probably be less than one per cent of his/her whole life. Now compare that with the life of a human, we, the civilized and intelligent species, consider it more "humane" to let someone slowly die, a decadent death, and we give a special name for those who don't want to suffer and those that aid them not to suffer, we call it euthanasia, and it is considered something dubious. We much rather stay alive for as long as possible, even if it is a life full of suffering and pain and reduced mobility and cognitive abilities. Yes, the intelligent species suffers much more. It does not live in the open spaces, it does not sleep under a blanket of stars, it does not make sex whenever it wants too (it's baaaad!), it can't go around naked (it's offensive!), it can't even say what it thinks in many circumstances - oh! how the great homo sapiens species shows its great superiority ^_^ .

Nevertheless, we build bombs, spaceships, submarines, antibiotics and so on. But this is not the art of any single man. No single man could discover even a tiny part of any modern invention. I wonder if we put all the six billions of us in a natural environment, if we would take out all of our culture (including words and memories) if there would be an of us, any one of us, capable of discovering how to make fire...

And yet we think we are intelligent, because we are too blind to see that we are just walking on the shoulders of an immense multitude of ants, just like us. Beautiful, working, full of wander ants, some of the ants gazed at the stars, some died for love, but their were very little, and they added up, little by little, to the pile of artificial knowledge that makes us what we are today.

So, as you can see, I can't speak about these topics with many of my fellow humans, and dogs and dolphins don't use symbolic language, so I'm trapped here. But I can speak to the wall, and perhaps I'll get clearer about all these things.

So the first point in which I disagree with science is this: I believe that there is a strong continuity between man and other animals, they are as good and beautiful as we are, they live lives full of meaning, with the same valor, and certainly there are things as interesting to watch today in our human societies as there were millions of years ago in the forests, mountains and seas.

Secondly I don't agree with science when it tries to reduce the world to a complex machinery. We are certainly a small part of the world. But even a small part of the world like Chopin has lived beyond what a machine can live. So, either we redefine our concept of machine so that it becomes full of vibrant emotion all around, capable of the most complex feelings and emotions, and then of course it would not be what we normally consider to be a "machine" (something that just "follows" rules). Or we admit that there is a lot of stuff in the universe, that we as scientists need to include in a complete explanation of the world, that do not fit the description of a mechanism. Lovers, orgasms, painters and their flights, writers, musicians, adventurers of all sorts, mystics, junkies, poets, I mean, all of this must be part of our explanation of the universe, not only how they behaved, but how they felt. To me, a complete explanation of the universe would give to its possessor the ability not only to imagine each possible movement, but each possible construct, each possible development and articulation, and each possible feeling, concept, imagery, perception, attitude, and so on. If we restrict science to the explanation of behaviors, we might feel more satisfied because it is a task easier to accomplish, but its value is also very limited.

Most of the things in which I feel opposed to society stem from a different vision of nature. In fact I believe that most of our need to feel separated from nature (superior) is because we despise it so much. By the contrary I think that nature, reality, is wonderful, extremely complex, full of diversity and endless stories of passion, endeavor, fight, courage, cruelty, compassion, love, and so on. Just as the human history is full of the same things. If we could see how magical and beautiful the life of a dear in the wild can be, how full of surprises and contrasts is the life of fish in the corals, if we could see the beauty of it, we would be very glad to be integated in such a story. For it is much more beautiful, and it is a much greater honor to be included in such a history than the stories of the bible and other holy books. This history, not only it is vaster, more real, more profound, more full of mysteries, secrets to unfold an wisdom to retrieve, it is also real and perhaps one of the greatest conquests achieved by the whole of mankind.

This particular vision of the place of man in nature also has some consequences regarding the future evolution of life. So, although I don't have much to say regarding the knowledge of the present state of the universe (from atoms to clusters of galaxies), I do have a lot regarding which I don't agree in what has to do with time perspective: how life came to be and how will it evolve from now on.

As I said before, I think there are at least three different perspectives in which to see the universe: the space or architecture of the universe, the time, or chronological view, and the spiritual or the perspective of meaning. As I said, most of the things I have to say are connected with the chronological perspective.

In what regards the spiritual perspective, I also find my view quite different from most people I know, but I have some difficult to put it to words, even to myself. On the one hand I do not have doubts that life continues after the body dies, that there is a gigantic love that somehow influences the universe, and many other things which I find very difficult to put into words. However I do not claim to know any of these things. In fact, I don't claim that they are true in the normal sense. In fact I would say that the word true or false does not apply to them. Now, at first I would seem to be a religious person, but now I probably just seem a confused person. Let me try to clarify my view.

Imagine that you love someone. You have no doubts you love that one. You love her with all your might, with all your heart, with all your soul. You have no doubts. But now if someone says "well, I don't love her, I don't understand how you can love her or claim to love her, are you crazy?" Perhaps the answer would be: "yes, I am crazy, I love her immensely, and I don't expect you to love her, in fact, it doesn't make me any difference how you feel about her, although I love you too and want the best for you."

When I say that I don't doubt that something perfect exists, something that gave origin to the universe, I don't claim to know it because I don't know if that something even exists out of my mind. Perhaps it is all an hallucination. From a rational point of view I can certainly conceive that I am just imagining things. Just like I can conceive that in fact I am imagining the person that I love, or indeed that I am imagining that I love her (while in fact I just love the feelings that she brings, or I am just too dependent or homesick or insecure). Rationally, I know all these explanations are possible and coherent. But there's more to me than rationality. I have no doubt that I love her, not because I know it, not because I can argue it or convince myself rationally that I love her, I just do love her, and the act of loving her, the inner act of loving her, is what proves to me, in a non-rational, direct manner, that I love her. In the some way the act of living love, not the love of a person but the light of existence, of beauty, etc, proves to me, directly, non-rationally, that that supreme beauty that fills everything there is, is really there. Although, I do still think that I may be wrong, and I would agree with every skeptic that may say: you don't even know what you're talking about. If you cannot be sure that the world outside exists, that you may be the result of some simulation made by some alien civilization, how can you be sure of anything, much less of the existence of an all powerful and good and perfectly perfect being?

In a sense I am the greatest skeptic, feeling at home only with Gorgias, but the same me, in the same perspective, just looking in a slightly different direction, also sees that a perfect being cannot not exist, and, in fact, in the strictest sense, it is the only thing that exists, although we can't see it as such with our limited senses and limited reasoning. Of course I don't think the perfect being is a person! Much less a human! And I don't think this perfection is more concerned with me than it is with a rock or an atom. But nevertheless I am happy I am with Perfection and I am part of Perfection, just like you, him, her, it, and everything else.

So, as you see, the problem with my view on religion is that I think it dissatisfies almost everyone. Religious people will call me skeptic even atheist (I don't believe in anything, much less any anthropomorphic deities, in the same way I don't believe in Santa Claus), and skeptics will call me religious, even fanatic (because I profess even not to doubt). My position is as incomprehensible as Descartes', and just as couldn't understand Descartes until a few years ago, I'm not expecting a lot of people to understand me. In fact, I don't even understand myself if I see this position just from a rational point of view (in the same way I wouldn't understand the sentence "I love her" from a merely rational point of view - because it is not just a matter of behavior - it's a matter that only true lovers can understand - and even those that loved and despised it will be unable to understand it, for the ability to understand is only maintained so far as love itself is maintained in the lover's core.)

As you can see, I have reasons, more than enough to want no one to read me. And, I at the same time, I cannot but write, for I have to take all this confusion out of me. I fell like I have a ball of thread all mixed up. Now I have to unroll it all, see all the thread in a line, and only after that will I be able to roll it up again, and this time, I'll know what's inside.