Enlightenment and other illusions

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Shall we live in the moment?  It’s possible, of course, to do it, but we cannot experience it.  Just from the sheer physics of it: something happens, and it takes some time – not much, but some – for the data to physically reach our senses.  Not even light is instantaneous.  Then a signal has to travel from the outer shell to the brain.  By the time we’re aware of it, it’s over.  Only those unfortunate few who are technically alive, but in a persistent vegetative state may be living in the moment.  Even then, it’s possible we’re missing some signal or other being sent out of that quiescent skull into the room, the hospice, the eternal vastness beyond, missing that faint tapping on the inner bone that indicates a thing is living in there.  As for what it’s like in that locked room, that’s a subject to be set aside for later perusal.

Right. Technically we can’t live in the present.  But awareness cannot exist without memory, even from a subjective point of view.  When you see a face, what you’re getting is a pelting stream of photons, constantly changing; you have to supply the meaning.  There’s a story of a congenitally blind man who, through surgery, was able to see for the first time.  He described it as an onslaught of totally unfamiliar data.  He could only identify what must have been his wife’s face because the sound of her voice seemed to be coming from it.  She was neither beautiful nor ugly, just disturbing; it was, indeed, hard to tell where the face ended, and its surroundings began.  It was bewildering.  Ultimately, he became blind again, but not from any physical cause.  He simply couldn’t deal with the odd new sensations.

Imagine all your senses like that: vibrating ear drums, tingling skin, chemical eruptions in the nasal passages, all prompting a deluge of neuronal activity, incomprehensible because never before experienced, yet unavoidable.  We only know what these things mean because we live in the past.

Okay, sure, you say, we need a bit of the past, but surely we can avoid the future.

Can we, now?   Let’s plan on it.

A letter to the Director

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To Mr. Benjamin Flitworthy, Director

Dear Mr. Flitworthy

I find your proposal to be ludicrous to the point of madness.  It causes me, indeed, to question your sincerity in pursuing this transaction.  To my knowledge, it has never been observed, nor yet postulated, that, as you suggested, pigs might fly.

Yours, Sir Nigel Blagh

The nature of nature

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You’re a nature lover; you find it revitalizes you, sweeps away the cobwebs (never mind the natural nature of cobwebs).  Alright, then!  Where to find it?

Perhaps you like to leave the city behind, get out where the air seems fresh.  Climb the mountain that refused Mohammad, go on a surfin’ safari, that sort of thing.  The thing is, all this artificiality gets you down, bro.  I mean like, wires, concrete, dump trucks, horns .. it just makes your head hurt.  Well, okay, not literally, most of the time, but it’s bad for the soul, right?  It’s not right, right?  It’s .. we’ve screwed it all up, the ecosystem, and we need to get back to..

To what?  The Ecosystem, the grand, immutable, capitalized Ecosystem?  Which one was that?  A hundred years ago?  Two seconds ago?  It’s a dynamic system, meaning there is no ecosystem to get back to, because we’re in it.  Now.  Maybe you don’t like it right now; that’s another issue.

The whole distinction between nature and artifice is wrong.  A Massey-Ferguson combine is no less natural than the stripped-down twig used by a bonobo to get at termites.  The mound built by the termites is the same, in essence, as the Sears Tower.  The differences we see are matters of degree, not kind.

Does that mean I don’t believe there’s an environmental crisis?  Not at all.  But it’s not Mother Nature that’s in danger.  It’s humanity, one of her least understood offspring.  The Earth doesn’t need saving; it will be just as fine as barren, acid-scarred rock as it is covered with what amounts to a thin slime of life.  Does Venus complain?  Does Mars feel inferior?  Who really cares about the current state of a lump of matter in the great nowhere?

Well, we do, because we care about the existence, or not, of our kind.  We mourn the passing of creatures we’ve never seen precisely because we might be next; we show no such compassion  for those closer to us: mice, cockroaches, wasps.  But these, too, are our kind, our mushy, pushy, boisterous, gustatory kind: living beings.

I see the value of greenery and what we call wildlife.  We’re changing our circumstances much faster than we evolve.  That’s our nature, after all.  It’s just that we don’t have much of a chance at surviving it all if we insist on seeing ourselves as apart from it all.

You want nature?  Look around you.  Cars.  Trees. Mountains.  Molehills.  Look inside that fortress skull in which you think you live.  That mushy gray stuff is as natural as sunsets and gamma radiation.