| Ego, Id, Superid |
[Feb. 15th, 2012|12:54 am] |
It feels like there are some major perturbations in my personality matrix. I've been running at a far shallower level in recent weeks. There is a kind of fear that holds me back from looking too deep. There have been several times going through my day where synapses activated run paths that are blocked by gatekeeper functions. There I seem to have locked for the safety of those around me, or someone else has locked them for me.
They say that the unexamined life is the life that is not lived. I do not know how true that is. Those reflections are for the moment blocked from me. This despite the fact that these Truths have not changed since I might've been ten and known to me even then. One of them is that no matter how much things change, they always stay the same.
Lies-to-children indeed. I read a book about the Science of Discworld recently. It was no more about the science of discworld than Obama's biography was about a man who'd come to change the world. It was really a story about the science of our world, dressed up in the guise of that other one, that we might better understand our own. And it was a good book really. Lies-to-children, I'd never heard that one before.
Lies-to-children are stories we tell which do not represent the whole truth and do not explain everything. It is a stepping stone to greater knowledge. Just as we learn Newton's Laws and then find that they do not apply certain cases and then we require Special Relativity and then when even those fail we turn to General Relativity.
The map is not the territory but a representation of it. The most accurate map would be the territory itself, and therefore the most useless one.
The human mind, or any mind for that matter because truth be told we have held our own race in high regard for far too long without conceding the presence of other life that though not intelligent in the same ways as us are nevertheless intelligent in their own right. The mind then, functions by forming associations. That is its sole purpose. Through the trillions and trillions of connections formed we then become human, able to think, speak, act, breathe, love, live, imagine, invent, create, destroy, feel, empathise, ignore, decide, remember.
Amazing isn't it. That is all we are. Beings, able to form associations between one piece of datum and another, linking in chains of ever increasing complexity until we do not even realise how we have come to associate one piece of datum with another. But to be sure there are rules for how the links come together and the chains form. Nature has deigned that certain chains which come together and form in certain ways are more favourable than others.
Although again, anthromorphosising nature in this manner is highly disingenuous. Nature no more decides which animals die and which animals live to pass on their genes and their actions and their ways, than a rock might decide to go for a swim. The rock might sit in the water and congratulate itself on a fine choice, but the truth is that the sea was the one which swallowed the rock to begin with.
In the end, in our past, it was simply those with the capacity to survive who did so. Nature does not care whether your phylogenetic trait confers additional survival or not. If you live, you live and pass on your genes that your children and children's children might struggle the same struggle.
Now though, it is a battle between memes for survival. From the physical to the not-so-physical. The arena has shifted. Who carries the right ideas and is able to pass them on. Which of these survive and help the species to survive. Which then, turn us backwards, towards obscurity and destruction. For what worse fate is there, than to be discarded from memory and forgotten forever.
We rapidly approach the brink. Either we will dare to take the leap and bring ourselves to a golden age. Or we will whimper and back away from the risks which we deem too great. Either way, the human race does not have long as the human race. The road will run out soon, and either we would have learnt to fly, or we will fall into the blackest abyss.
Thank you if you have come this far with me. I'm not sure how much further there is to go, though I feel as if we approach the terminus of this particular chain.
I am sometimes stunned by the responses of the people around me to events and happenings. We are so well connected these days that everything bears the scrutiny of thousands of people. The gestalt ebbs and flows as that of a living mind. Which it is. Do not be fooled into thinking that conscience and thought can only be produced with a mind of neurons and ion flows. If we could simulate a universe with rocks, what less a thought. (Or what more?)
Social mores represent the luggage of a people. Most do not understand quite how they have come to think the way they do, but the answers are often clear. As to which is more right or more wrong, there will never be an answer. The levels change, the peoples change, the civilisations change. But still the gestalt ebbs and flows as it has always done. Now though, ever faster, ever faster. Such does the Quickening approach.
Our country is but a small nation. So too, our continent, but a single one. And so too, our planet. And so too our sun. How small and pitiful and insignificant we are, mites squabbling on the backs of mites squabbling on the backs of mites squabbling on the backs of mites, ad infinitum.
The universe truly revolves around each and everyone of us, we believe this, and know it to be true in the depths of our singular hearts. For if this were not the case, then those who opened their minds to the universe at large, had no need to carry on living. And so more likely than not, died, before they could pass on the shadings in their genes.
Now though, our ideas are able to spread much faster, more safely, more vigorously. We are no longer a race, easily wiped out by famine or disease or disaster. We have come a long way. Now, there is a chance for the flowering of minds. Each generation will always be set in its ways. That is simply the way of things. The gradual hardening of arteries and vessels and minds. And not even till then, the constant push against change and the unfamiliar. Survival instincts yes, but holding us back from the future.
We will have to change must faster than this. |
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