Archives for posts with tag: Experiment

Where there’s a way
There will be a will!

An open wound will be ‘colonized’ by various organisms.
A mixture of water and flour will develop a ‘froth’.
A naive person will be swindled.

A healthy immune system will, eventually, take care of the infection. Successfully or not…
If in the hands of an experienced baker, the mixture of water and flour will – eventually – become the starting point for a delicious sour-bread loaf.
The previously naive person, once swindled, might learn something from the experience.

Life is nothing but an added layer of opportunity.
The pre-animated world is about strict rules. No variation, except for that brought about by happenstance.

Life is also about rules. But way laxer than those governing the pre-animated world.
While the pre-animated world is about nothing more than mere existence, life is about surviving in the given conditions. About evolution. About change.

And here’s the catch.
Pre-conscious change is also mainly about happenstance.
Darwin’s evolution is driven by minute changes at the DNA level. Those which are helpful are perpetuated while those which are harmful either kill out-rightly the organism where they have appeared or restrict its ability to ‘give birth’.
Nota bene. Darwin’s evolution was about “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
In his understanding, and in the real world, evolving – biology wise – is done by the species. Not by individual organisms!

Conscious change, on the other hand… is driven by individuals!
Happenstance continues to be involved, heavily, but the main drive comes from ‘want’. From individuals willing/wishing to ‘make a difference’.

Is this a good or a bad thing?!?
It is a fact. Neither necessarily good or bad. Just a fact.
The outcome, evolution wise, depends on how the social organism – the cultural species – digests the experience.

For a while, I was convinced we were living in a virtual reality.
In a reality of our own making. As I mentioned earlier, ‘vir‘ is a Latin word. “Man”. “Hero”.
Hence ‘virtual’ literally means ‘man-made’. ‘Manufactured’.

Now I’ve realized we live inside an experiment.
We are both the objects and the agents of the intersecting experiments currently active.

We call them ‘lives’. Our lives…

We happen to be born.

Then we start exploring the world our parents – and all their ancestors, have prepared for us.

At first, we’re like sponges. We absorb, unconsciously, everything which takes places around us. Some according to what our parents had in mind for us, some not.

After a while, on our own and/or under our parents’ supervision, our attention starts to focus. More and more of the things which are stored in our memory are learned. Increasingly a consequence of focused labor and less and less a happenstance.

Almost simultaneously, we start adding our transformative efforts to those already effected by our predecessors. Minute at first, more and more significant as we become more experienced.

At some point, we reach something called ‘maturity’.
That’s when ‘play’ ceases being a legitimate manner of learning for us.
We are allowed to continue playing but only for recreational purposes…

At least we’re still allowed to explore… but from now on, we’re expected to do it in a serious manner. According ‘to plan’, that is.
From now on, wandering is considered to be a sin!

‘You’re an adult, for God’s sake. Act like one!’

I’m sure most of you have experimented things. Either as an experimenter or, mostly in school, as a learning apprentice.
How many of those experiments had been ‘blind’? As is neither you nor anybody else present had any idea about what was going to happen?
And how many had a more ‘modest’ goal? Just to convince the ‘students’ that the ‘theory’ was valid?

If you think of it, the second sentence covers quite a lot of ground.
From the second grade teacher pouring water over some sugar ‘Look, it has disappeared’, to the scientists anxiously watching the gauges at the CERN laboratory…

A few short generations ago, people had to decide whether that plant was edible or not. And had developed methods to accomplish that task. They survived, right?
Nowadays we design new plants/animals and ‘cook up’ fancy snacks to be sold in supermarkets…

During our parents’ ‘watch’, Popper had come up with a test for what belonged to the realm of science – and had to do with ‘reality’.
Nowadays, we brag about being able to create VA. As in virtual reality… Enhanced virtual reality, even!

Nothing good or bad about all this.
For as long as we keep our eyes open… and, at least one of them, focused on the ‘hard’ reality… that which makes us possible!