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Of late, in my conversations with people, the topic thread of optimism/pessimism and its relation to fulfillment has been revived. I've always wondered about optimism: if a self-proclaimed optimist generally believes in favourable outcomes, does that inherently mean that they believe the world to be a shitty place? Therefore, would a pessimist know the world to be a happy-fun place, but expect the worst? Because both optimism and pessimism stray from some sort of consensus of reality, the expected consequence of the opto/pesso must also pass comment about their personal reality, no? Or is personal reality only an expression of expectation? In which case an opto is such when compared against the average norm.. DANG, I can never quite say this the way I mean. While I'm confused, I may as well bungle through another thought that pops up often... re: DNA... I'll need a new paragraph here. For the sake of argument, I won't consider animals sentient here (whilst I do consider them so in real life, here it'll just muddy the proposal)
* Humans are sentient beings (with some distribution error)...
* Sentience is determined by us, so therefore it is a soley human trait (necessary and sufficient)...
* Environmental reality determines the conditions for successful micro/macro recombinative recreation...
* Sentience, on some level, is our awareness of and prompts our reaction to, our environment (nothing new here)...
* Sentience is nought more than a focal point of biological processes, which are in turn founded upon (and yet mysteriously disobey) thermodynamic principles (again, those principles being terms we cocreated in forms in which we understand them, we need some remedial metaphysics classes badly)...
* Sentience, or human intelligence, is arguably the cutting edge of evolutionary biology (wherein we are learning to control our details through control of our inner/outer environments)...
* Consciousness is a necessary condition of sentience...
* Consciousness (what is it?) is indivisible, and the thin edge of the evolutionary wedge...
* How is consciousness experienced fluidly (in terms of temporal procession, what joins one moment to the next)? and is it? would it still be consciousness if it could be served episodically, like in Slaughterhouse 5?...
* Could consciousness be the thinnest of contemporary enviromental connections, made confluent by memory and co., but otherwise a connection of gossamer proportions?...
* So then, is consciousness just a playground structure for DNA in function, the proto-lab of all that determines successive reproduction? To exact the premise: consciousness both determines and is determined by DNA. All our sentient and executive biological functions serve ourselves MORE and GREATER than our Selfs (if that makes sense). Genetic memory, then, is responsible for everything and is determined in a spatial/temporal 'moment' of infinitely small porportions (right NOW... etc.). Therefore, is your consciousness a 'hologram' or 'impression' (for lack of better words) of your culminative biology as it exists momentarily? You are both more and less than you thought you were. Where this gets really interesting is how singular conscious beings interact: Reality, here, is a weapons-development and testing arena for micro-organic transcendence. Crazy. This may sound trite and obvious to some, but I think, if you wallow in the questions a bit, they get more fascinating than the potential answers. It's kinda nice to be able to think of consciousness as function for a change.
followup thoughts, again, hardly new stuff, but hey...
-is our concept of Time sufficient, or is it a biological trap?
-say we're 10% thought, 90% swampy, briny, tendon strung, walking ponds. don't all we want to be able to do is push that to 11% thought, to 12%+?
-this guy's got a lot to say: Embryos, Galaxies and Sentient Beings
-as we enslaved/coopted organelles to work cellularly and thereon to create multi-celled creatures (greater than the sum..), i believe humans have the desire to recapitulate the same on a macroscopic degree: the city as body, for example (body politic?). i also believe that this (dare I say evolutionary) desire is where we got all scrambled up about God. we are trying to create God, he is destination. in that regards, historical religion has made significant contributions towards approaching God: unifying and standardizing languages, code of law, commonality, allusions to personal transcendence etc., but all through allegory (so dangerous) rather than actual professed intent. if only we could unstick ourselves in mortal time, and see it all with different scope. like how a geologist or astrophysicist must be attempting to understand it all.
-what authority can we trust to shape our future?
-with such pressure to optimize ourselves, to get ever quicker (existential impatience), we miss out on slow processes. when was the last time you performed a pedestrian task trying to go as slowly and thoroughly as you could (brushing your teeth, a walk to the dep)? i've tried this a few times, and it's a surprisingly interesting device in reawakening experiential levels that may've been occluded or sent into exile (ie. great trick for coping with depression or burnout or desensitization). it is more than just smelling the roses though: The Art of Slow, like any art, is a practice, not an accomplishment. Your body becomes vessel again, and not constraint. I want to write a lot more about this.
FUNNY! as i was lummoxing through the above vagueries, a trio of aged Germans came up to ask me where DNA Records was! That works on so many levels... The only thing funnier than German sterotypes is Germans.
Isabel told me last week that I've been very arrogant as of late. I wish I'd replied with something like, "I'll tell you when I'm being arrogant." Instead I said "oh."
3 comments:
it wasn't just any old "oh" ;)
Hi Tom, Rogering here. As provoking as this post was and wasn't (mostly was), I should say that I must oblige the contrarian in my physical and sentient being: Thermodynamics is the rule...how do you think biology mysteriously disobeys it? I have two guesses. The first, most obvious, is the whole entropy thang, but this is a common misconception. The entropy loss (gain in "order") in creating a human is, believe it or don't, greater than compromised by the disorder generated in water during every chemical reaction. I know, sounds crude, but it is mathematically true by S = K(ln)W. Same goes for cities, but here the energy consumed in masonry alone is bind moggling. My second guess is that you are hinting towards the randomness of ordered chromosomal combinations during the generation and distribution of gametes (embryos and galaxies...)? But only a guess...and if so, again I think you are wrong: the division of chromosomes during meiosis is utterly subject to the rules of thermodynamics which, despite the inherent dependence on probability (which remember can only be applied to future events) abide the zeroth law. But then the zeroth law is a human derivation of the physical world. So? So are shorn testicles. They still bequeath DNA in just as sticky a solution. Juice is juice is juice. And by the way, in China they say "menzo" as a salutation, meaning "go slowly"...
balls, i said in my post "energy is consumed", and by the first law of thermodynamics I get a big fat F, for: smoke a Fatty and Fuck off, For I'm going to sleep.
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