i have a new bit where i connect a few big words and big concepts together in my head on my way to work and then google them on my phone when I'm at the front desk when nobody's around. there's always somebody with some thoughts on it, a paper on it, a book about it, etc: you just need to know the right words to summon them up. my latest ones today are "necropolitics of homosexuality" and "queer phenomenology".

i've been having a slow-motion crisis of faith that i still have no resolution for. it's a crisis of belief in all its forms. i haven't talked about it much outside my own head and it's ourobouresque so bear with me.

i don't know what truth is. i don't know where morals come from. i don't know what's real. i know there are methods of figuring out what's true, but functionally, they all feel no different to me. there's a whole chain of thought you can go down about perception, is it the same as reality, etc, but I'm not smart enough for it. i don't understand the difference between the physical and the mental. if thoughts are electrical impulses in the brain, it seems like everything is physical on a certain level. are numbers physical? are morals physical?

i get twisted up about a lot of silly stuff like this, but when you keep questioning things you end up with the silly questions at the end. i have a bone to pick with the kind of assumed that try to evade the silly questions.

my problem is with science, and the problem is that no matter how i slice it up, i have to rely on faith to use science. i'm not capable of understanding everything out there. even if science was able to perfectly represent everything in the perfect infinite future where everything has been reduced to its most basic principles, there'd be no way to know it all in one head. there's no way to verify everything you hear yourself. you can't replicate every study you see on the news. at a certain point, you have to trust that the person telling you that X is X is correct. for everything that you can't personally verify and see with your own eyes, you have to rely on trust (not even getting into the perception vs reality can of worms).

so functionally, what difference is there between the belief that i have in something established scientifically to be true, but which I have no way to verify, and some belief made by something else? and how do you scientifically establish a moral, anyway?

i just go round and round about it. i'm only knowledgable enough to get myself in trouble