A touch of absurdity can help to wrap your mind around reality

There's a quote I recall from the introduction to Oscar Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest in the Norton Anthology the first time I encountered the play years ago as a college undergraduate in an English Literature survey class. Something to effect:

Oscar Wilde's play held a mirror up to Victorian society and it died laughing at itself.

One way I've conceptualized comedy, especially satire, is as a kind of soft cultural version of Karl Popper's falsification principle. When applied successfully, it can change the way you look at the world by leading you to reject, or at least question, the status quo.

I was expecting this article to suggest something similar. It maybe halfway does?

According to research on the ‘meaning maintenance model’ of human reasoning, surreal and absurd art can be so unsettling that the brain reacts as if it is feeling physical pain, yet it ultimately leads us to reaffirm who we are, and sharpens the mind as we look for new ways to make sense of the world.

Reaffirming who we are and making sense of the world in new ways sounds somewhat paradoxical. I suppose it implies a gradualist model of intellectual growth.

Of course, comedy and ridicule can also be deployed to reaffirm the status quo. But I've always found subversive humor more intellectually engaging.

Camus famously said that the only serious philosophical question is that of suicide. My impression is that some people see existentialism and the absurdist core of it as an almost nihilistic outlook on life, but I don't agree. Accepting that life is absurd, built on chance and completely lacks reason has for me been the only secular help to accept the random winds of fate that knocks your life over every now and then.

One of Camus best texts in my opinion, not only because of the beliefs expressed but only because of it's welcome brevity and concrete language compared to some other philosophers, is "The Myth of Sisyphus". Instead of painting Sisyphus as a suffering prisoner, he paints him as an absurdist hero with ideals that every human should aspire to.

Like the obsessive cleaning of surfaces in "Jiro Dreams of Sushi", Camus states that "we must imagine Sisyphus happy": the struggle in itself is the meaning. And to my understanding, there's the core of existentialist belief: lacking any God-given, external purpose, we must accept our absurd position, and our individual responsibility to push our stones up the hill, and find happiness doing it.

"Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

Skimmed the piece but it reminds me: it seems there is a thin line between a psychotic and a mystic. But yes, once you expose yourself to a certain level of crazy and/or you come to see how everything appears insane and/or you see the mirage of necessity of it all, the rest of life feels like a gentle breeze. From here on out: detachment, joy, and peace. Nothing hinders you. Even more so: Your capacity to ground yourself in what-you-are - meaning, the unconditioned you, as gooey as that may sound - is proportional to the capacity that you can play life with lightness and humor. Although, that's not to say you won't suffer, you certainly will. But your conceptualization of suffering will be reconfigured and be understood as a sort of "good" thing - a necessary process for the evolution of your consciousness, if you will. As naive as all the above may sound.

The unpredictability of a message is a measure of its information content.

wow, this jumped out at me:

"Another showed that people who felt socially isolated became more defensive of their broader national identity."

that sheds some light on how the pandemic is emboldening so may people in this particular way.

Psychological experiments typically seem to feature really small sample sizes (often composing readily available students) and yet have what seems like a lot of unearned significance attached to their results, compared to what claims about drugs have to undergo before they are taken seriously.

>According to research on the ‘meaning maintenance model’ of human reasoning, surreal and absurd art can be so unsettling that the brain reacts as if it is feeling physical pain, yet it ultimately leads us to reaffirm who we are, and sharpens the mind as we look for new ways to make sense of the world.

This paragraph reminds me of the famous quote from Agent Smith in first Matrix movie:

> But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery.

I think this could be part of the Flynn effect.

I think abstraction in media changes the population, as it grows so do IQ's

You can see this in whole countries. But causation vs correlation blah blah blah. YMMV

Lost me at “Mulholland Drive” is a good movie.