making sense
“I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world.”
- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus.
If there is anything that never ceases to amaze me, it is this kind of philosophical text. How a philosopher like Albert Camus can produce a piece of writing that takes so long to understand, and at the same time is something that I have known for all my life without realizing it. As if a philosopher that lived in the first half of the twentieth century knows me better than I know myself, because the nature of his idea world is not something that just concerns him, but concerns humanity. Like in Zen Buddhism, the words are just the necessary means of transportation of the soul to the understanding that is already innate to humankind, only to be forgotten - and forgiven - afterwards when the thoughts themselves have settled.
update on this topic
Hi, I wanted to place an edit here to let whoever reads this know that this is not my idea for a robot for now. The concepts seems too difficult to capture right now, and is more something that I will devote a longer period of my time to. I am still maybe most interested in this feature of being human of all features I can think off and am always happy to discuss ideas about this.
Here on the left is a great video that I found on YouTube that is based off of the ideas by Camus on absurdity and discusses suicide. Suicide was the basis of the only true philosophical question according to Camus: Whether or not to live. If that sounds like dangerous territory, please don't feel obliged to watch the video. It is a great watch though and articulates a more positive outlook on life than it may seem like at first. Watch the whole thing if you do start it! - Love, M.
Officer Spock, as played by Leonard Nimoy.
The rational and the irrational
I grew up with Star Trek: The Next Generation. Now, I am not far into adulthood myself, but this series was of a different time. Instead of captivating your attention with all that matters so much to the story, the focus was on all of this that does not matter to the story. Imagine a shot of elevator doors completely closing after the protagonist has stepped into the elevator, now add three more full seconds before the shot actually moves to inside the elevator and lastly finish it off with unimportant elevator talk for another ten seconds. There you go: Star Trek: The Next Generation as I remember it.
One of the key characters of this slow and meaningful ride where no man has gone before was Officer Spock. Spock is a completely rational and logical being of the Vulcan race, which contrasts with the rest of the crew made up mostly of humans. Actor Leonard Nimoy explains the appeal of Spock as follows:
"Spock understands the trauma of human existence, for he is not home with earthmen or Vulcan; he can function only in the fabricated and neatly ordered society of the [spaceship] Enterprise. There, he knows who he is; he relates to his role very specifically, and this gives him a kind of cool."
I think this is the key of what I find intriguing about Spock's character and why I brought it up here. In a world of rationality and irrationality, he is the one that seems to understand. The understanding of the trauma of human existence, in a similar manner to what Camus calls the absurd nature. Of course it is not this whole trauma or the complete state of absurdity that I mean when I talk of making sense, nor do I assume that everyone feels this way. But what I do think everyone feels, is that we try to make sense of the world, in whichever big or small way possible.
absurdobot
My idea to construct is a robot arm that sorts objects into two categories. However, As things get more ambiguous, the robot gets more confused and hesitant as the audience also starts to hesitate between the categories. This to display the hard time we have when we try to distinguish between different things in the world that do not always fit into categories. Trying to place the irrational nature of the world in our human nature.