Saturday question #30: Impossible
Written on September 5, 2009 in Saturday Questions & with 19 responses
Tags: impossible, philosophy, saturday question
Welcome to 30th edition of Saturday questions.
Since I'm planning to give y'all a quick surprise later today as I'm really in a great mood, this will be a short one.
Define impossible.
What is impossible?
Is there impossible?
How do you abolish impossible?
How do you bury your impossible?
I'm sorry if this reminds anyone of Chicken Soup For Soul, because I really want to know your answers to this and I bet you want to know other people's answers, too.
For previous Saturday questions, click here.
19 Reactions to Saturday question #30: Impossible
Pravila za komentarisanje:
Something cannot be impossible because to be impossible means to be nothing. Therefore, impossible is nothing! And nothing is impossible!
Tough question, but I'll give it a shot.
Definition: that which is not possible.
On a personal level, it would be "impossible" for me to say, run 100m in under 10 seconds. No way, no how; just not physically possible.
On a broader level, it is impossible, at least objectively speaking, to go back in time to change anything, or to be human and never make any mistakes.
Yes, impossible definitely exists! The first example I gave is definitely an impossibility for me (and for the vast majority as well), although obviously not for someone like Usain Bolt and a much smaller group of others. In terms of the other two examples, I'm pretty sure they are still impossible for us all.
Can't and wouldn't want to "abolish" impossible and not necessary in my opinion to "bury" it either.
Better to focus on what CAN be done rather than what can't. No point wasting energy worrying about things that can't be changed or over regretting things that have already been and gone. Learn from it, try not to be too harsh on ourselves or others and move forwards.
Anyway, mistakes are necessary because they enable us to learn and grow through life. Finally, someone once told me that we don't necessarily get "wiser" as we get older, we just end up making DIFFERENT mistakes...
Straight away a lyric from john comes to mind "limitations are set only then can we go all the way"
I think this lyric shows that all possibilties are achiveable within impossiblity.
I know this is going off on a bit of a tangent but being 17 and only discovering music at 16 i've really been going deep into myself trying to figure out my position in the universe in the last year.
One thing i came to realise was that life and the possibilty of life existed before life. Everything that we are made from existed before but came together and changed into life. This then made me think about how people think of themselves as seperate from the rest of the universe because we can move thorugh it at our own will, when really we are all connected physically to the same universe and are a part of this universe.
Then i thought that maybe we are the product of the universe trying to figure itself out and thats why we think and evlove and get smarter because then we get closer to figuring out the universe. The emotions we feel are illusions of the energies and conflicts that occour withing the universe.
By the way i'm not saying this is true whenever i find myself looking deeper i come out in the end with nothing, but I WOULD REALLY LIKE PEOPLE TO REPLY on what they think of what i have just said. People who listen to frusciante are usually intelligent as i'm sure his music has an effect of bringing out the best of people at least thats been the case with me.
I can't explain but what I find the most interesting in what you said, it's that you seem to say that music brings you to try wto figure out your place in the universe (or that it made you want to listen to music..., but anyway the two seems linked).
About your conception of the universe, it's interesting and it doesn't enter in collapse with my own conception, but on the other side it's quite abstract or I cannot understand exactly what you mean (I can't speak English very well).
Some background information to explain my point,
Last year in october i bought john's album curtains on a whim i had all the chili peppers cd's and didn't own any other cd's by any other artists. When i listened to it for the first time it struck me just how beautiful music can be and that they're was a lot more to it than just sound or entertainment. I then found myself getting lost in the lyrics and come january i bought the emyrean on pre-order and listened to it on my own in the dark. Over the next week i stayed up every night listening to it as it unvealed itself in all it's beauty. I saw wierd things in my mind i cried and felt like i was litterly going through all the ups and downs the album captures. Later in the year i read john's story on what the emyrean was about and that was what i felt about it.
Since then i have collected as much music as i can afford from all different artists in differnt genres and bought a guitair. I feel as though pre discovering music i was completely unaware of my life and the things that mattered. Music helps me deal with my reality as i'm depressed most of the time but it makes me feel like i have a friend and am part of something that doesn't have any real physical existance.
I'm not sure really where music really fits in the universe but i know that it's definetly changed me completely inside though i'm still not the person i will be. My explantation was that we are as much a part of the universe as a rock or electricity, that we are alive as part of the universe to try and figure out what it and we (as we are the same thing) are.
I hope that helped you understand what i was trying to say and will welcome any more peoples opinions on this even if you think i'm crazy!
p.s do you think john or the other peppers have been on this website?
Impossible is that that can't happen in a real context. In a real context, 1 != 2. That's the very first example of impossible, but there's infinite impossible things, as well as infinite possible things. However, the impossible infinite is "bigger".
Some things are just not possible. Due to laws of physics, or social context, some things cannot happen no matter how hard you try. This doesn't mean it's not worth a try, because you never know if it's really impossible, but some things just cannot be and admitting this is a great step on one's mind evolution.
It's one of those HUGE questions that is very difficult to answer in a succinct way. I like and agree with your comment that while some things are just not possible that it doesn't mean that we shouldn't still try. I was trying to capture this idea when I said that it's better to focus on what IS possible that what isn't. The example I gave about running a sub-10 second time in the 100 metres, was a fairly silly one I admit, but was just meant to signify that some things ARE just objectively impossible. However, it shouldn't in any way stop us from running if this is something we love to do.
Just that setting ourselves unrealistic "goals" in any context is ultimately self-defeating, and basing our "happiness" or self-esteem upon the achievement of them, is just constructing another form of "impossible" for ourselves. It's all bound up with self-knowledge and our motivations for doing the things we do and if we do things purely out of love and without limiting ourselves, then all good is possible.
you say 1 = 2 is impossible, but everything that is in 2 exists in 1. It's just double the amount. So it's not impossible to make 2 from 1. That's where creativity comes in. You can create a 2 with 1s.
If anything, maths teaches us that nothing is impossible. For instance, it was once thought that it was impossible to find the square root of a negative number, because any number times itself is positive. But now mathematicians deal in roots of negative numbers all the time.
I'm not like a hardcore maths guy by the way, you just got me thinking; feel free to disagree.
That's just linguistics. 2 is still not 1. A brick is not a house. You can't make impossible things possible. If you do, they were never impossible.
You though the root of -4 was impossible, turns out it was possible: it's 2i. That's why I say it's worth a try: Mathematicians though the root of negative numbers were impossible, but someday some dude tried to figure it out and came up with complex numbers, which apart of being conceptual numbers have a lot of applications in almost every science. You have to try things so you know if they're impossible, possible, or impossible to you (like Sue (or me) can't run 100m on 10s, though other people that have trained more since they were younger can).
But creativity doesn't make things possible. In the best case, it discovers something is possible.
I have to say it´s not often you can read a proper debate on the web. You would expect that from reference newspapers websites like NYT, LeMonde, ElPais etc but stupidity and hate are broadenly spread over there too.
Then it´s great surprise I could enjoy this sort of collective peaceful brain effort while looking for more info about John Frusciante.
I am new to this site but will come back often ! who knows next time I have some relevent thoughts about the saturday question itself ;~)
Congrats to the webmaster and "debaters" !
a note is not a song, but what is a song but a series of notes
a word is not a poem, but what is a poem but a series of words
a thought isn't reality, but what is reality but a series of thoughts
you have to take what you've got, that's already possible, and use it to make something new, that hadn't existed before; that's how humanity and creativity has worked since we began. and since you can't travel through time, how do you know what might be possible someday.
and in any case, in an infinite universe everything has to be possible somewhere.
Don't exactly know what to think about what is possible or not.
But reading what Baro said with the 1=2 is impossible and confronting it with the end of the lyrics of One More Of Me :
Whats gone will never come back
But it exists when you think of it
And what is anything, anyway
But a series of things running through your brain
All of the fucked things you do
Are the product of whats happened to you
Whatever you create from love
Is a gift from the place which some call above
Theres only the forces of hate and love
One breaks things down and one builds them up.
I think we can say that physical things are sometimes impossible, but good and bad things are always possible.
Impossible is nothing
I don't know, maybe Charlie and Jeff are closer to the mark. Like if you're trying NOT to think about anything, you're still thinking about SOMETHING. Or in meditiation, its a given that you can't STOP thoughts from entering your head, you just recognize that they're there and choose not to focus on them at that time.
There is always a danger in stating anything as an "absolute" and therefore my initial premise is probably wrong. Impossible has to be more than' that which is not possible'. At the very least it has to be provisional, 'that which appears not to be possible', to my mind at this point in time etc...So many things are possible today that would have seemed impossible to people living in centuries past, even if they HAD possessed the ability or vocabulary to conceptualize them. Space travel and the internet are two examples and there are countless more.
The more I think about impossible it seems the more there is to think about it.. However, from Neanderthal man to the present day, human beings are still no closer to being able to fly unassisted. Maybe somethings ARE just not possible? Impossible seems to be an impossible concept to get my head around. Maybe we should just do away with the word altogether?!..
Nah, I think my original premise IS true. Impossible does = that which is not possible. Its just that this meaning itself-what is not possible- is fluid and has changed over time ( with technological advances and so on) and will continue to do so.
Sorry for confusing myself but the term IS problematic!!
What is this impossible you speak of? lol
///dynamics///
no?
no ...
between so called opposites, movement takes place yes?
yes ... thats a given dynamic, even in language and therefore
ratio so.
okay let's take it from there ... is this machine recording?
is this machine recording? --as wsb said earlier on--
///pkd///
is it impossible for jfru to like philip k. dick?
///la///
everything is by definition ... u see? it exists in words
///abolish+bury///
l.i.f.e.
philip k dick is a master in putting these dilemma's forward in language,
as is william s burroughs ...
///what is real?///
Define impossible.
--not capable of occurring or being accomplished or dealt with; totally unlikely, something that cannot be done
What is impossible?
--Events or things that seem like they cannot or will not happen.
Is there impossible?
--Certainly.
How do you abolish impossible?
--I think with the sciences progressing, the walls of impossibility are slowly closing in. I'm sure people though cloning was impossible 20 years ago. (Although it was done in the 1970's and possibly before that. I just remember the 70's sticking out from when I did research on the topic.) But these days it's been done. Who would have thought to send a space ship to Pluto? It was "impossible" do do previously, but technology has opened that door. Time travel seems impossible these days. Who knows? People that don't put their mind to things probably are preventing what seems impossible from happening.
How do you bury your impossible?
--Hum... Probably by not attempting to do something.