The first ‘virtual’ tool invented by Man, language made it possible for humans to become conscious. By sharing information among them, individual human beings learned to speak to themselves. To think. To evaluate their activity. To evaluate themselves. Their own selves. Speaking to each-other, people have developed self-awareness.
The process is a work in progress.
Words are ‘stamps’. Images. ‘Commodified snapshots’ of the thing we call reality.
Which reality is simultaneously a word and the place we live in.
A word/concept into which – like in all other words – we’ve crammed everything we know about the thing itself. Which everything is nowhere near enough to actually cover the entire thing.
Reality, the word, covers everything we know about the thing but the thing itself, the thing we call reality, is far wider/deeper than that.
Hence the problem we’re stuck with.
We instinctively consider that words are apt representations for the things we attempt to describe using those words. Which, most of the time, isn’t exactly true. We – most of us, most of the time – consider that those of us we talk to understand the words we share in the same way we understand them. Which is never the case!
I’m not going to discuss the veracity of the above. Which is true, in the sense that this is how we determine whether an organism is alive or not. My point being that in order to perform this, the organisms – each and every one of them – need to act as if they are able to make the difference between ‘in’ and ‘out’. Besides the fact that they need to discern between ‘food’ – which is to be ‘imported’ and everything else. Which everything else must be kept on the outside.
See what I mean when I speak about the difference between ‘in’ and ‘out’?
In this sense, organisms – from the very beginning – have a certain ‘dimensional awareness’ of the world. Of their environment, more exactly. And, as things have become more and more ‘complicated’, the dimensional awareness has become more and more sophisticated. Plants act as if they know the difference between up and down, animals are indeed able to find their way when foraging.
The advent of consciousness has added a new layer to that awareness. Now we speak about ‘self-awareness’. We, conscious beings, are not only aware of the difference between our own ‘inside’ and the rest of the world but we’re also aware of our consciousness. We are aware of our selves. Our selves are aware about themselves. Our selves are able to think. To consider things.
Previous organisms have been able to react – according to ‘ingrained procedures’ which have been, in variable degrees, honed by ‘learning’ – while we are able, on top of our own reactivity, of careful consideration. Of making the difference between ‘fight’ and ‘flight’. Not only to choose one on occasion – all other ‘competitive’ animals do that on a regular basis – but also able to actively consider the difference between the two concepts. Previous organisms have been able to choose between when to fight and when to flee in an ‘instinctive’ manner. For some, granted, those instincts have been honed by ‘learning’, but their decision making process has continued to remain ‘procedural’. Very little, if any, ‘active consideration’. Very little, if any, ‘originality’.
Consciousness – our ability to actively observe and then examine/discuss our own observations – has opened a vast field of opportunity. Being able to actively observe a situation and to actively consider the circumstances/consequences before making a decision adds a fourth dimension to the already ‘three dimensional space’.
Life, per se, has no direction. Evolution only helps life to survive. To adapt itself to adaptable changes in the environment. Life, per se, has no direction. No direction and no meaning. Life, simple life, takes place in a space with three dimensions. Three parameters. In/out, abundance/scarcity, food/poison. An organism, any organism, continues to live for as long as there is ‘enough’ ‘food’ ‘inside’ it. And not enough ‘poison’ to kill it. But ‘simple’ organisms have no plans. No ‘future’. The more sophisticated among them display a behaviour we associate with ‘feelings’ – which apparently help them, evolution wise – but still no ‘future’.
Biological time is as bland as physical time. It flows according to rules ingrained in the already-existent. A star will ‘function’ according to pre-existent rules, a microbe will live according to the information inscribed in its DNA, in the context of all other ‘natural laws’, while an orangutan will be able to add very little to the above. If you consider things dispassionately, there is a continuous chain of events from the shiny stars in the sky to the orangutans roaming the Indonesian jungle. And no individual agent was needed in order to successively latch causes into the chain which led to the present set of circumstances. According to what we presently know, anyway…
Until a short hundred of years ago… When Man ‘invented’ the palm oil. When Man had purposely invented the industrial process through which palm is transformed into edible oil. When Man had used his agency to ‘improve’ his lot. And carelessly destroyed the habitat of the orangutan.
In this sense we may consider that the orangutan continue to live along a linear time – individually and/or collectively the orangutan remain unable to pro-actively determine their fate – but time itself is no longer linear. Since the advent of Man, time no longer flows according to ‘objective’ rules. According to rules contained into the very fabric of things. Currently, and ‘locally’, the flow of time is increasingly influenced by the agency of Man.
Self-conscious organisms, in order to satisfy their need for meaning, attempt to make sense of what they are living. To lead a meaningful life, they need to ingest not only portions of where they live but also as much information as possible about where they live. As much information as humanly possible…
Sloganul ăsta mi-a consumat cel puțin doi neuroni! Și cum n-am prea mulți… De câte ori citeam chestia asta – în ultima vreme a cam dispărut din peisaj – mă bântuiau o seamă de întrebări.
Cum se taxează consumul de Coca-Cola? Îți pune un contor în gât? Cum adică ‘consumați’? Ce suntem noi? Mașini care funcționăm cu Coca-Cola? ‘Rece ca gheața’?!? Da’ ce, sunt mort? Mă îmbălsămez singur?
Cel mai tare mă rodea un fel de curiozitate. Persoana care dăduse aprobarea finală pentru folosirea acestui slogan… știa să vorbească limba română? La un nivel adecvat pentru a lua o decizie de genul ăsta?
‘Savurați Coca-Cola rece ca gheața‘…
A fost un brain-storming și participanții au ajuns la concluzia că publicul țintă nu se simte confortabil auzind cuvinte de genul ăsta? Că publicul țintă nu savurează? Doar ‘bagă în el’? „Consumă”?!? Iar rolul reclamei este să vândă, nu să ridice nivelul publicului țintă….
Mi-am adus aminte de chestia cu Coca-Cola imediat ce am citit ‘proverbul’ de mai sus…
Care proverb se adresează direct ‘consumatorilor’… celor care fac consumație în birturi! Cei care ar trebui să știe că un stagiu suficient de îndelungat sub masa de la birt te duce direct pe cea din spital!
I’ve been watching this, on and off, for three days now. And I still can’t make up my mind. Whom to admire more.
The one who performs what he believes to be normal. And somehow manages to include, into that normalcy, the negative feedback he is been dished out by the most powerful agent in his world. Or the other one. Who pursues his side of normal. Who finds in him to investigate when he realizes the two normals don’t fit. And the courage to make amends.
Thank you Elvis Naçi for this conundrum. I’m a better person now. Now that I’ve stated my impotence.
Regardless of our individual beliefs, it would be rather naive to consider there’s nothing but the here and now. Internet wisdom
What have you done since graduating into awareness?
Worrying about tomorrow?
Welcome to being a human. And how do you assuage your fear?
Put your faith into an exterior agent? Trust your fellow humans to bail you out if necessary? Make sure you’ll never depend on anybody else but you?
Each of these three strategies presumes differently about what happens outside yourself.
The more responsibility you transfer to the outside agent – currently known as God in certain circles – the more serene your life. You don’t have to change anything except putting your faith in the outside agent of your choice. If that works for you. Only by transferring the ultimate responsibility to ‘the outside’, no matter how hard you continue to do whatever you were doing before the epiphany, you embrace the fact that your fate is determined outside of you. If you expect your mates to do ‘the right’ thing, you must prime them first. You have to behave in a manner conducive to ‘community’. You and those around you. The community itself has to behave as a community. To make sure you’ll never depend on anybody else, you need to know everything that might happen to you. In fact, you have to know everything.
Each of these three strategies, or any combination thereof, mandates that there are things happening beyond here and now. Beyond what each of us might know and control.
We make history. We write history. We read the history we wrote about the things we’ve done.
Then we keep ruminating about what we (don’t) learn from and about history…
Are we nuts?
But is there anything to be learned from history?
Yep! What happens when we fail to learn from the mistakes which keep shouting at us from the history books our ancestors had written for us. Had written to warn us…
Some people argue that ‘truth lies somewhere in between’ while others maintain that ‘truth is where it is, not somewhere in the middle’.
Well, both sides are right.
Truth is, indeed, “where it is”. The problem being that ‘that place’ is ‘out there’. Not necessarily ‘out of reach’ but definitely out of anybody’s realm. Hence finding ‘that place’ needs a collective effort. In this sense, the truth is, indeed, somewhere ‘in the middle’. In the middle of our converging efforts, if our efforts are honestly targeted.
On the other hand, truth is not ‘somewhere in the middle’. In the sense that truth is not something we can negotiate. We can indeed pursue truth individually but we cannot negotiate the results.
We can settle for a less than perfect truth, if we’re not able to reach ‘the absolute’, but it must be a workable version, not a lukewarm mean. The result of our quest, even if ‘only for a while’, must serve the goal we’ve been trying to reach! If we settle for something only because that something titillates the ego of the majority amongst us… then our efforts have been wasted!
Allow me to conclude that the truth is not somewhere between us but above us. It makes a lot of sense to thread carefully when trying to reach it – lest we stumble during our quest – but we nevertheless need to broaden our perspective. Lest the truth remains hanging just outside of where we’re looking for it.
“Denn selbst muss der Freie sich schaffen” Hence the free must define their own nature Richard Wagner, Die Walkuere
In my previous post, I related to ‘life’ as a living creature. I described life from the inside. The perception of a living organism. But what if ‘life’, as a phenomenon, is how meaning is created by the environment where the process takes place?
For an outside observer, there are three stages. Pre-biotic, self-driven and meaning-driven life.
Life, as we know it, cannot exist on the surface of the Sun. Or on the surface of any other star. But neither can life exist without the processes taking place inside the stars. Without the energy being radiated by the stars and without the atoms being ‘cooked’ inside them and spewed out during the last stages of their ‘lives’.
Having said that, the rest is simple. Where ever conditions are ‘right’, atoms get together in such a manner that ‘structures’ become ‘alive’. Those structures become organisms and display the characteristics we’ve come to associate with life. In this stage, the only ‘force’ which drives the process is what we call ‘evolution’. Species cease to exist as they are no longer able to weather changes in their environment and new species arise along with the advent of new opportunities. And, at this stage, a second ‘disturbing agent’ starts to influence the environment. Living organisms, in order to live, need to ingest portions of where they live. To excrete the by-products of their metabolism. And they leave behind ’empty carcasses’ at the moment of their death. For example, the oxygen we breathe in is the by product offered to us by the plants which live at our side. And the fertile soil those plants ‘eat’ in order to provide us – the oxygen breathing organisms – with what we need to survive, is the consequence of previously living creatures.
In the third stage, that where ‘meaning’ becomes a force to be reckoned with, the changes perpetrated to the environment cease to remain ‘natural’. As they used to be during the second, self-driven, stage. In the third stage, an increasing number of changes to the environment are driven by purpose. Are purposefully staged by agents acting according to the meaning they have found.
Individual organisms, working in concert, for a while, organize themselves in such a manner as to be able to keep the inside it, the outside out, to ingest what ever they need to survive from outside and to excrete the byproducts of their living. Also known as the by-products of their metabolism.
In order to perform the above, the individual organisms use information gathered by their ancestors and transmitted over generations. Which information has been shaped in time, through an evolutionary process, in order to remain useful for the currently surviving organisms. Which said shaping has happened through the natural culling of the individuals bearing information no longer fitting to the then existing natural circumstances.
For life to continue, individuals living at anyone time must engage in reproduction.
For ‘man made’ things to happen – for anybody to do anything – three requirements must be met first. ‘Circumstances’, ‘determination’ and ‘opportunity’.
To serve a meal, the chef needs ingredients and tools, willingness to do it and a hungry client. To engage in an act of terrorism, the terrorist needs a certain set of circumstances, the ‘determination’ to do ‘it’ and a ‘trigger’.
Is it far-fetched to compare these two things? Feeding people and killing them?
From a ‘deterministic’ point of view, there’s no difference between deciding to serve a bowl of pasta and deciding to deliver a bomb. The consequences are, obviously, completely different. Supporting life versus taking it away.
There are more differences. Nobody has yet seriously considered banning restaurants and everybody hates terrorism. When subjected to acts of terrorism! Otherwise…
Meanwhile, PKK continues to remain a terrorist organization!
So… Just as food tastes vary enormously, so does various people’s interpretations on what constitutes a terrorist act. The first constant being the fact that food sustains life while terror tends to make it difficult. And the second one being the fact that both restaurants and terrorist acts are community based phenomena.
A restaurant depends on the people who deliver the goods, on those who operate it and on the paying customers who keep the business afloat. A terrorist depends on those who help and facilitate. And a terrorist depends on the rest of the community turning a blind eye towards what’s going on. For no matter what reasons! Until they realize how foolish they have been…
‘But who is a terrorist?’
That’s a very good question! There are up to three types of ‘associates’ in any act of terrorism. The ‘direct operator’, the ‘first hand facilitators’ and the ‘people behind’. While it is quite simple to understand the roles played by the ‘direct operators’ and by the ‘first hand facilitators’, things become murkier when it comes to the ‘people behind’. For some – including for me, the current Iranian leadership are among the ‘people behind’ the Hamas terrorist organization. But what about those who, willingly or unwittingly, make it so that whole communities become ‘restless’? Restless enough to generate terrorists and careless enough to turn a blind eye towards terrorist acts being prepared in their midst?
My point being that just as nobody becomes a celebrity chef overnight, it’s almost inconceivable that anybody might engage in major acts of terrorism without being helped by some and noticed by many. And just as a chef has to be talented to become noticed, a ‘direct operator’ needs to be in a ‘particular’ state of mind in order to operate. But just as an untalented cook is, eventually, ‘set aside’ by a run of the mill community, a willing ‘direct operator’ ends up, literally, being embraced by a ‘triggered’ community. Or is eventually ‘sent away’ by a normal one. By a properly functioning society!
Just before starting this post, I heard somebody commenting on Antonio Guterres’s words: ‘Even if he will not have to resign, he won’t get another mandate’… Now, as a coda, I feel the need to share that comment with you.
nicichiarasa 