Remusings

What is a conspiracy theory? Political Psychologists define it as "attempts to explain the ultimate causes of significant social and political events and circumstances with claims of secret plots by two or more powerful actors". There are a few important elements that form part of this definition. Firstly, conspiracy theories seek to provide an explanation for political and social events. Secondly, they rest on the belief that shadowy powerful actors are executing secret plots to manipulate socio-political dynamics. Thirdly, they are generally based on a number of deductive errors in reasoning on the part of their proponents, whereby singular events or data points, that have no rational causal relationship, are linked together to form a narrative. In essence, conspiracy theories are based on connecting information nodes (which may or may not have an observable correlation, i.e. tendency to occur together) without any empirical evidence that proves a causal relationship betwee...

Last night, I had a dream, in which death was not what it seems. I saw a world in which the deceased, instead of diminishing completely at death, appeared to remain in some form within this reality plane. They could be seen, as they had been until the moment of death itself. They could be spoken to and heard, even touched and held, as if they had never left. Yet, this state of post-death non-being, this abstracted state of in-between, lasted only some time, maybe a few days or a week at most. After which, the deceased slowly faded away, not to be seen, heard or touched again.  I received no indication, in my dream, as to the exact nature of what this phenomenon means. Was it that the deceased actually remained on earth, even in a physical form, for just a little longer? Or was it more likely that it was an edifice of their former being, created out of their memories that dwelled in the collective minds of those who knew them? Were these memories somehow ossified into existence, as ...

Breathing - the act of taking air in and out of our bodies - is an activity intrinsically tied to being alive, yet most of us live with little conscious awareness of its existence on a daily basis. The reality of being alive can be defined by the act of breathing itself. Breathing in and out in a steady rhythm signifies that there is life within a body. When one places the finger under the nostrils of a corpse, one is seeking the feel of the breath as the telltale sign of the presence of life. However, despite the vital role of the breath in the phenomenon of life, one can feasibly spend an entire lifetime without ever noticing that one is breathing. In lives lived such, if ever this awareness does arise, it might only be when when one finds oneself gasping for breath, after a hard workout or maybe in the unfortunate situation when one is drowning underwater. In the absence of breath, breath is quickly recognized as the most important necessity for life. The human body is an orch...