Merg pe bicicletă, printre mașini, de la 16 ani.
Am început prin a face naveta între Giulești și Drumul Sării. În fiecare zi, pe aproape orice vreme. La prima ședință cu părinții, directoarea liceului s-a luat de maică-mea: „Cumpărați-i doamnă un abonament pe ITB. Nu vedeți cum se chinuie săracul pe bicicletă?!?”.
Abonament aveam. Nu de aia mergeam eu cu bicicleta…

Să revenim la zilele noastre.
Trebuie să recunosc că, de ceva vreme, folosesc bicicleta doar pentru curse scurte. Și doar pe vreme frumoasă.

Numai că, indiferent de lungimea cursei, aproape de fiecare dată ajung acasă extrem de ‘confuz’.
Și asta indiferent de mijlocul de deplasare. Pe jos, cu mașina, cu bicicleta….

Când merg pe jos, mă întâlnesc cu tot felul de … care încearcă să se strecoare, pe două roți, printre pietonii care folosesc trotuarul.
Când merg cu mașina, trebuie să feresc tot felul de cascadori care se strecoară pe carosabil.
Cînd merg cu bicicleta, trebuie să mă feresc de tot felul de ‘grabiți’ care încearcă să mă ‘împingă’ pe trotuar. Ca să ajungă ei mai repede la primul stop. Unde e deja coadă…

„Chiar dacă am vrea să…” spune foarte multe.
Că, de fapt, persoana respectivă nici măcar nu vrea!
Și că, în subsidiar/subliminal, nu-i pasă că se dă de gol.

Cu alte cuvinte, piste pentru biciclete… la anu’ când o înflori bostanu’…

Dar, dacă stăm strâmb să ne gândim drept, la ce ne trebuie piste pentru biciclete?

Pentru că așa e în vest?!?

Din câte știu eu, mai sunt câteva diferențe între București și capitalele din vest unde se practică biciclismul de pistă.

Vremea. Vara nu e chiar atât de cald și iarna nu e chiar atât de frig.
Banii. Ăia chiar au bani pe care să-i arunce pe pistele pentru biciclete.

Mai sunt și altele dar astea sunt cele obiective. Pe care nu le putem schimba cu una cu două.

Și atunci? Ce facem? O lăsăm cum a căzut?

Nu! Facem ce e cel mai ușor de făcut.
Dacă nu putem schimba vremea și nu putem face rost de bani peste noapte, schimbăm ce putem schimba.

Ne schimbăm pe noi!

La începutul anilor ’90, când traficul era mult mai lejer decât acum, noi, șoferii, eram mult mai agresivi unul cu celălalt. Nu prea se respecta prioritatea, nu ne lăsam unul pe celălalt, ne înjuram… ne mai luam și la bătaie… că doar venise libertatea!
Între timp, ne-am cam lămurit. Am mai condus pe afară, ne-am dat seama că e mai bine – pentru toată lumea, dacă ne purtăm politicos unul cu celălalt…

Pasul următor ar fi să extindem pactul de ne-agresiune.
Ne-am învățat să nu-i călcăm pe pietoni. Iar pietonii s-au învățat, în mare parte, să meargă pe unde trebuie.

Așa și cu biciclii! Cu motor sau fără.
Nu ne costă nimic, atunci când suntem la volan, să-i tratăm cu respect pe cei care au doar două roți sub fund.
Nu ne costă mare lucru, atunci când suntem în șa, să-i tratăm cu respect pe cei care n-au cum să vadă în jur la fel de bine cum vedem noi, de la înălțimea bicicletei/motocicletei/trotinetei.

N-are rost să intru în amănunte.
Cei mai mulți dintre noi știu să folosească cel puțin două dintre cele patru vehicule despre care e vorba aici. Unii dintre noi chiar pe toate patru.
Nu e cazul să vorbesc aici despre măgăriile specifice pe care ni le facem unii altora – și toți pietonilor!

Mă miră însă, și ăsta este adevăratul subiect al postării de astăzi, ‘dezinvoltura’ cu care trecem dintr-o postură în alta.

Când suntem per-pedes, vedem lucrurile într-o anumită lumină. Dintr-o anumită perspectivă…
Când suntem pe roți, judecata ne este influențată de numărul acestora…. De prea multe ori, puterea motorului înfluențează și ea percepțiile noastre…

Uitând, aproape de fiecare dată, ce avem în comun!
Drumul, destinația și umanitatea.

O stradă!
Asta-i tot ce avem la dispoziție.
Epoca Ceașescu a apus demult. Nu mai e cine să dea din mână și să lățească, brusc, străzile. Asta avem, pe aici mergem!

Acasă!
Toți vrem să ajungem, întregi, acasă.
Nici unul dintre noi nu-și dorește să ajungă la spital. Sau la pârnaie…
Vorbesc acum despre marea majoritate dintre noi. Aia suficient de normali la cap încât să avem carnete. Suficient de normali la cap încât să avem voie să mergem pe stradă. Suficient de normali la cap încât să avem bani cu care să ne cumpărăm o bicicletă.

Suficient de normali la cap să ne aducem aminte că suntem oameni!
Că, înainte de a fi fost șoferi, bicicliști, motocicliști, trotinetiști, alegători, politicieni, etc… am fost – odată și odată, născuți de niște mame. Crescuți de niște bunici. Că ne-am jucat, fiecare cu ce-am avut, în nisip. Cot la cot!

Suntem în stare să ne aducem aminte chestia asta?
Că suntem oameni? Înainte de orice altceva?

Atunci s-ar putea să mai avem o șansă!

Și, dacă vom ajunge să ‘vrem’, cu adevărat, atunci vom găsi și calea prin care să ajungem la țintă.

De piste pentru biciclete nu vom mai avea nevoie… vom fi învățat deja cum să ‘împărțim’ strada în așa fel încât să avem loc cu toții!

The whole thing raises a poignant question.
We have a business here.
The sporting tournaments live by selling advertising space. To do that, they need to grab our attention.
Given the insistence with which the organizers insist that the athletes have to attend the press conferences, which is the main attention grabber? The ‘athletic prowess’ itself or the ‘big talk’ that follows the actual ‘sports meeting’?

Where conditions had been ripe:

The market had become free.
Free for more and more people to search for new ways to meet their needs.
This freedom had allowed the market to become efficient enough for more and more people to be able to satisfy some of their wishes, on top of most of their needs.

Agora had become free.
So free that politicians had to solve more and more of the real problems encountered by the society at large.
Life had become so free that states had become prosperous.

And more and more of the people were happy!

Now, the market is so free that more and more people have started to search for ‘really’ new ways to meet their wishes. Eventually, they came to be known as ‘financial engineers’. The market is no longer the place where people meet to satisfy their needs but the place where some of them accrue huge sums of money while more and more of the rest find it harder and harder to survive.

The Agora is also at its freest.
‘Political marketeers’ have taken over from the ‘the old school’ – and ‘real’ politics have been replaced with ‘give the people what they want’. Political life is no longer about solving problems. It has become a relentless quest for power.
Keeping things ‘afloat’ is no longer THE goal, only a cost.

Is this sustainable?

One of my eyes is short-sighted. Both are astigmatic.
Hence my visual relationship with the ‘exterior’ is impaired. Relative to that of a ‘normal’ person…

When I took up photography, as a hobby, there were no such things as self focusing cameras. Pictures as those you are about to see were way ‘out of range’ for me.

Because of my inability to focus a camera fast enough. And because long ranged lenses were too expensive for me, in those times.

Being conscious of my limits was no cure for my frustration!

Thankfully, technology made it possible for me to indulge in my hobby!
To overcome some of my limitations.

You cannot explore the limits of something without knowning what that something is.
You might not know how that thing works, or came to be, but you need to have at least some idea about what that thing is!

So, ‘What conscience is?’

Huh?!?

‘Cognitive function…’, ‘ability to tell right from wrong’, ‘self awareness’… you name it.
Rathern confusing, isn’t it?
Specially when you already had a clear idea about what the word used to mean… Or was that only an impression?!? An ilussion, actually?

Let me introduce you to my version of things.

Everything that surrounds us has a ‘discrete’ nature.

Both matter and energy are, ultimatelly, made of quanta.
Certain theoretical considerations suggest that time and space are multiple of Planck time and space units, respectivelly. Any lenght, in time and/or space, smaller than a Planck unit not having any sense. The argument being the facts that the speed of light is limited and that matter/energy itself (which fills the space and generates time) is of a discrete nature. As in ‘made of quanta’.

And this ‘discrete nature of things’ is visible at every level.

We have quanta, quarks and other elementary particles, atoms, molecules/crystals. And ‘objects’.
We have substances, membranes, cells, organisms, species. And individuals.

When our scientifically minded forefathers first tried to make some sense of what we had already learned about the world, they had come up with the notion of ‘states of matter aggregation’. Or ‘phases of matter’.
At first, there were three of them. Solid, Liquid and Gaseous.
Currently, we recognize five. Solid, Liquid, Gaseous, Plasma and Bose-Einstein Condensate. The first four are deemed to be ‘natural’ while the last is considered to have been ‘made by man’.

The main difference between them being the manner in which the components ‘stick’ to each other. The amount of force with which each of them interacts with its neighbors.
The same ‘level of internal interaction’ governs the way in which various ‘objects’ interact when they ‘meet’. Two clouds of gas interact differently than two bodies of water. Which interact differently than two rocks. Furthermore, a stream of gas interacts differently with a liquid than with a solid object. And so on….

My point being that the ‘phase of matter’ one object belongs to determines the manner in which that object interacts with its exterior.

‘OK, somewhat interesting but rather hard to follow… anyway, what has any of this to do with ‘conscience’?!?’

Given what I’ve already written, where would you put a living organism? In what ‘phase of matter’?
Is it solid? Liquid? Gaseous? Plasmatic?!? Or, given the fact that it contains all three ‘classic’ phases it’s closer to a Bose-Einstein condensate?

For lack of a better word, I consider ‘conscience’ to be a ‘state of matter aggregation’.

We’ve associated ‘being conscious’ with self awareness. With the human version of self-awareness… the one described by Humberto Maturana. ‘The learned ability to observe ourselves in the act of observing‘.
I suggest that we point our attention towards any other living organism. And notice that it acts as if it was aware of itself. It keeps its inside separate from the outside. It choses what to ingest. What of it to digest. And what to excrete. Sometimes even where to excrete. Then it passes the instructions according to which it had performed all these tasks towards the next generations.

Or would it be more suitable to consider ‘life’ itself as a ‘state of matter aggregation’? And consciousness as a property of life? As hardness is for solids and viscosity is for fluids/gases?

‘And what about ‘the discrete nature of things’? What has this to do with ‘conscience’?’

You see, I’ve just proposed ‘conscience’ as ‘state of matter’. That ‘phase’ where life takes place.
That place where individual organisms interact, among themselves and with their environment, attempting to survive. And to pass on the information contained in them.
We, humans, have taken ‘conscience’ to the next level. Our conscience is far more than the natural tendency to uphold the functionality of the individual organism. We observe ourselves in the act of observing. We set what is good, and bad, for us. We set goals.

Sometimes without being aware that our goals might hurt us.
The individual ‘us’.
And the collective us.
The collective us which makes us, individuals, possible.

Primum non nocere!

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3501646

‘Exploring what?!?
We don’t know yet how conscience came to be, nor how it works, and you want to explore its limits?
What are you talking about?’

First of all, Humberto Maturana has proposed a very astute explanation about how our conscience has evolved into what it is today. After our brains had happened to ‘accrue’ enough computing power, our ability to speak among ourselves had created the condition for us to cooperate towards the development of ‘self-awareness’. Towards our learned ability to ‘observe ourselves in the act of observing‘.

‘OK, I can accept that.
But we still don’t know exactly how it works. How the brain ‘exsudes’ consciousness!’

Well… do you know exactly how a computer works? Or how your car transforms fuel into energy and transports you to work and back?
Does your lack of detailed understanding prevent you from using a computer? Or from driving a car?

Does your lack of detailed knowledge about how things work prevent you from understanding – and accepting, the fact that the things you use have limits? That you cannot ‘overstretch’ any of them?

‘?!?… It’s my mind you’re talking about, dude!
What do you want to say? That my ability to understand things and to act as a rational human being is limited?!?’

Yep!
You got it perfectly.
In one go…

If you want to read some more about your limits, please help me to overcome mine:

Change can either be inflicted upon you or effected by you.

‘Change’ as in ‘something you need to overcome if you are to survive’.

We, humans, are the first to be in this situation. The rest – from the humble sub-atomic particles to our cousins, the great apes, experience change only as being inflicted upon them.

Gravity pulls together a huge cloud of gas and dust until it becomes hot enough for the fusion reaction to transform it into a star.
A supernova becomes so hot that gravity can no longer keep it together. It explodes and releases the heavier elements needed for planet building.
As it cools down, the second generation nebula is again pulled together by gravity.
A smaller star appears, this time ‘entouraged’ by planets.
On one of those planets, conditions are ripe for life to appear.
Wind and frost erode the mountains. Water carries the debris into ravines. Micro-organisms transform the debris into soil.
Vegetation – starting with the blue-green ‘algae’, which are actually cyanobacteria, have transformed the atmosphere into what it is today.
Animals have evolved into their present state by eating plants – at first, and then each-other.
Fungi have added their contribution towards what we witness/enjoy today by digesting whatever they ‘perceive’ as being ‘food’.

All of the above mentioned ‘change’ has been ‘inflicted’ upon those who bore it, by the ‘changing factors’, according to ‘natural laws’ implicit to the nature of the ‘changing factors’.
Gravity pulls because…
The blowing wind and the freezing frost who had broken down mountains did change the face of the Earth because it was in their nature to do what they did.
Plants, animals and fungi, together, have transformed the planet into what it is today as a consequence of each of the species doing what it was natural for it to do in order to survive. None of the species, nor any of the individual members of those species, had ever done anything ‘on purpose’!

Until we, the ‘naked apes’, have become ‘conscious human beings’.

We continue to have a lot of change inflicted upon us, of course.
Inflicted by factors outside our species – the current Covid pandemic, for instance, or by ‘agents’ amongst us. The first example which comes to my mind being the plane high-jacked by Lukashenko – the ‘last European dictator’, because he wanted to arrest a dissident journalist who happened to be inside.

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My point being that we’re the first who effect change. Who do it ‘on purpose’.
Which very ‘purpose’ makes us responsible for the outcomes of our actions.
For no other reason than the fact that it will be us who will suffer the consequences of our own ‘edeavours’!

It’s our consciousness which instills purpose into our actions.
Then our very same consciousness should better become responsible towards the consequences engendered by our purposeful actions.
For no other reason but the simple fact that it’s our own survival at stake here!

Having an unlimited supply of flour might be helpful but never enough.
What you really need is bread!
Which also demands yeast, skill and some work thrown in for good measure.

Same thing about the relation between money and happiness.
If you’re not wise, and diligent, enough, no amount of money will ever be enough for you.
Nor will it bring you any closer to happiness.

Not because I’ve noticed how easy it is to be successfull as a con-artist. If you have what it takes, of course.
Far easier than it is to be successful as a bone fide entrepreneur, for example.
No, this wasn’t exactly news.

I’ve got the blues when I realized how many people are OK with this!
Without even beeing aware of it…

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If you need to dig deeper, you might want to read Aja Raden’s The Truth about Lies, 2021.

Turning your head to re-examine past experiences is liable to yield previously unnoticed aspects.
Sometimes important ones…

Many people attempt to convince us that evolution is about ‘the survival of the fittest’.
Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is, 2002, aptly explains that ‘evolution is not as much about the survival of the fittest as it is about the demise of the unfit’!
Have you ever heard about the guy?

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Evolution, the phenomenon, is driven by small alterations in the environment.
The individual organisms which cannot cope with the alteration do not survive, The surviving ones – the ‘siblings which find it in then how to cope, thrive because of the relative abundance of specific resources. The species survives.
If not enough of the individual organisms are able to survive the alteration, the whole species disappears. The odd survivors might mutate – or not, and establish a new species. Or not…

The current alteration of the environment in which we, humans, need to first and foremost survive is COVID-19.

The difference between us, humans, and the rest of the species subjected to evolution being our ability to purposefully communicate amongst us the information we have been able to gather. NB, ‘communicate’ doesn’t always guarantee ‘honesty’.

Viruses – simple strings of genes, also known as pieces of information, which had happened to evolve into their present form, have no motivation. Furthermore, it’s impossible to determine the full motivation of those who spread misinformation about anything – or even whether they are fully aware of the consequences of their actions. Hence, I’m going to ‘glance back’ at COVID using a purely evolutionary eye.

I’ll start by letting you in on something I witnessed earlier this morning.
Waiting for the traffic light to change, at a crosswalk, I overheard two guys talking about the virus. The older – by some five odd years , was trying to convince the other that ‘This thing is nothing but a scam. There is something out there, indeed, but the numbers are too small for it to be as dangerous as advertised by those who want to herd us into submission’. Both were close to my age, 60, but there was a marked difference between them. The ‘denier’ was more opinionated – a more sure of himself, but was carrying his age a lot worse. And you could read on the face of the other one that this was not the first time that he had heard that… and that he knew how useless it was for him to tell anything. Anything to the contrary, of course.

It was then when it hit me. I had almost the same sensation as when I first listened to Deep Purple’s Space Trucking….

People die of this thing. The weaker the earlier. Some will survive. The species still has a future.

Yeah… only our awareness has added another layer on this evolutionary mess. It’s not only our individual immune systems which fight this infection. The health care systems organized by the communities take care of the sick ones. The sanitation systems take care of the dead. The ‘Big Pharma’ have already provided us with ‘weapons’ to fight back. The governments attempt to organize the whole survival effort.

This whole thing has veered way off from our classic view of evolution.
‘Passing through’ is no longer a matter of individual prowess. Or luck.

It has become a matter of cooperation.
Or a matter of dis-information…

Going forward, two scenarios can be imagined.

A few of us survive the actual disease, enough of us get vaccinated and we reach herd immunity. Sooner rather than later. We learn our lesson and life goes on, with some adjustments.

The ‘COVID is a scam’ scenario gets enough traction to convince a sizeable proportion of the population to refuse the vaccine. Periodic bouts of the infection prevents us from regaining a modicum of normal life. More and more people will start resorting to ‘strange behaviors’.
So strange that I don’t even want to imagine.
The worst being the fact that whenever in ‘dire straits’, people are more inclined to accept various forms of authoritarianism.

Do you feel compelled by public pressure to wear a mask and take the jab?
You consider this to be ‘dictatorial’?

Wait till the next wave of infection crashes over our heads!

And why have so few of us heard about Ernst Mayr?
‘Survival of the fittest’ plays better into our ‘confirmation bias’.
‘We’re still here, then we must surely be doing something really well. Luck has nothing to do with it and nobody has ever given us any free lunch. Everything we’ve achieved was due solely to our own efforts! None of us needs anything from anybody else!’
Anything which contradicts this dearly held conviction will be met with a strong opposition. Denial, even.
At the subconscious level, of course!

‘I refuse to wear a mask’ not as much because ‘I don’t care about your fate’ but because I don’t want to acknowledge that I need your cooperation towards our mutual survival!

Me and my broken promises… what on Earth made me bring motivation into discussion?!?