“I see this as expression of a mother’s love for her child
and not a statement that women are for breeding only.“
Of course, you are completely correct,
but today people are amped up to find
something offensive everywhere.
Ridiculous.
In fact, this is way more than a mere expression of love.
There’s no other meaning of life but life itself.
Whatever meanings each of us might find do nothing but contribute to ‘life’.
And what else is life but a perpetual tomorrow?
For a group of autonomous agents to coexist in a limited space,
they need to behave in a coherent manner.
For that coexistence to survive in the long run,
those agents need to behave cohesively.
To maintain their autonomy while bearing in mind
the limited nature of the space in which they need to do their thing.
Riding bumper cars is great fun!
But have you tried to get anywhere driving like that on a real road?
“All governments suffer a recurring problem:
Power attracts pathological personalities.
It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.”
Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse:Dune
“How can Orson Scott Card be so bigoted, but the Ender’s Game series is about empathy and acceptance of others?“
– “Circle of Empathy. If you’re inside the circle, you are worthy of empathy and it applies to you. If you’re outside the circle, you are not worthy of empathy and bigotry towards you doesn’t count because you don’t count. If you’re ever baffled by how one person can be forgiving and accepting towards one group and turn around and be rabid dogs towards another group it’s because in their emotional calculus the second group literally doesn’t count as “deserving”.
Does it make sense? No. Do humans make sense? No.“”
– Card was young when he wrote Ender’s Game and for what it’s worth I think it reflected his real views on the world at the time. He’s since spent decades of his life in a high control cult that has told him constantly that gay people are moral failures.
I think there’s a chance that Card is actually closeted from remarks he’s made on the subject and fear of discovery has made him feel he has to be even more dogmatic on the matter.
I grew up queer in fundamentalist churches. I’m always going to think of people like this as partial victims, even if it would be easier to just hate them. Brainwashing is real. It’s not just something you shrug off because you’re an adult.
I love his Ender series and think it’s beautiful. It doesn’t actually matter to me what he personally believes because his work is saying something else.“
Discussion found on Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/14mmmu0how_can_orson_scott_card_be_so_bigotted_but_the/?rdt=42921
Alive in a living context.
Try to imagine a single living organism.
Forget about ‘where did it came from’. Forget about ‘what does it drink/eat/breathe’.
Now, does the existence of a single living organism mean that life is present? When attempting to answer this, pretend no observer is present…
‘Life’ is ‘wide’ word. It covers a lot.
From ‘life’ as a phenomenon. That thing studied by biology.
To ‘life’ as an ‘individual experience’. That thing cared for by medicine. Human, veterinary… By the way, how do you call a person who takes care of sick plants?
Am I making any sense here?
My point being that life is both a phenomenon and an experience.
As a phenomenon, life – as we know it – needs a certain environment. And a ‘push to start’.
According to what we presently know, life may appear, on it’s own, in certain conditions. We don’t know, yet, which are those exact conditions. Nor exactly how it happened. Only that it seems possible. And that’s enough for me.
If certain conditions are met, life – as a phenomenon – is possible.
Furthermore, if life as a phenomenon has established itself in a certain environment, life as an experience becomes certain. Each individual organism living in that environment experiences its own life. Regardless of whether a particular organism is aware of its being alive or not.
Shared Awareness
Life, as a phenomenon, is a ‘process’.
Individual organisms become alive. One way or another but always as a ‘continuation’.
Each generation of individual living organisms live by the same rules as the generation before it. Each ‘child’ generation follows in the footsteps of the ‘parent’ generation. A ‘blue print’, a genetic blue-print, is passed over from generation to generation. OK, let’s pretend we haven’t yet learned about genetic variation…
Each individual organism continues to be alive for as long as:
– It remains ‘functionally whole’. A human can continue to live, at least for a while, without any limbs. But not without its head or heart. Well, you understand what I mean.
– It continues to exchange substances with the environment in which it lives. Which means that the individual organism is the entity controlling which substances get inside and which substances are ejected from its interior. OK, we need to breathe so we inhale microorganisms and pollutants ‘on top’ of the air we need to survive – and some of them make it into our blood-stream – but it’s still our lungs which absorb oxygen, eliminate carbon dioxide from the blood and leave nitrogen alone. I’m sure you get my drift.
This ability of even the most basic/primitive individual organisms to interact with the environment – along the rules inscribed in their genetic inheritance – allows us, conscient observers of the phenomenon, to consider that individual organisms, while alive, display a certain degree of awareness. They behave as if being aware of the difference between oxygen and nitrogen. As being aware of the need to breathe. As being aware of the fact that too much carbon dioxide in your blood is something to be avoided… And so on.
Fast forward from bacteria – individual organisms which are able to extract specific nutrients from a broth to, say, chimpanzee. Who are very picky about food. When there is plenty enough to choose from…
There is a certain commonality between these two very different kind of organisms being able to feed themselves, right? And if we, humans, pretend to be aware of (some of) our our actions… how do we name this ability of our fellow living organisms? Their, our?!?, ability to choose?
Together?
“The greatest consequence of the arising of self-consciousness and self-awareness in the constitution of humanness, is that to the extent that we human beings are self-conscious beings we are aware of what we do, and of the possible consequences of what we do to ourselves and to other human and not human beings. Self-awareness and self-consciousness are manners of relational living that as they are lived constitute a relational grounding for all else that is being lived. The self-conscious person lives his or her living in a manner in which a question such as, “are you aware of what you are doing?” always makes sense. The self-conscious person lives his or her being in self-consciousness as if he or she were distinguishing him or herself as an independent entity, and operates comfortably in that way. Yet, if we seriously want to explain how is it that self-consciousness happens under the circumstances that we cannot distinguish in the experience between what we call perception and illusion, and, therefore, that we cannot make any reference to an independent reality, we cannot but Þnd out that it is not possible to do so if we do not accept that languaging is not a system of symbolic communications about entities assumed to exist independently of our distinguishing them, but it is a manner of living together in a recursive flow of co-ordinations of consensual co-ordinations of doings.”
Humberto Maturana, The origin and conservation of self-consciousness, 2005
According to Maturana, self-consciousness is somebody’s ability to observe themselves ‘in the act’. To observe themselves observing. Ability developed alongside other self-conscious ‘agents’ through the use of language.
“It is not possible to understand the nature of self-consciousness without understanding the operation of human beings as living systems that exist as emotional languaging living systems: self-consciousness is a manner of living.” Op. cit.
The way I see it, consciousness – self-awareness in Maturana’s terms – is life 2.0.
Just as there are life as a phenomenon and life as an individual experience, there are also human consciousness – a shared ability – and individual conscience.
Just as there’s no way in which a single living organism might appear ex nihilo – unless some ‘outside agent’ introduces it, there’s no way in which anybody might become aware of their own self by themself.
Life – the phenomenon, once established – opens up a huge field of opportunity. Mere chemicals, entangled, ‘cooperate’ towards maintaining the life of the individual organism inside which they happen to ‘cooperate’. Evolution, the process, makes it possible for new forms of life to appear as the environment is shaped by the formerly living organisms. Or by other naturally occurring phenomena.
Consciousness, our shared ability, opens up the next level of opportunity. The opportunity for each of us, individual self-aware agents, to show/prove our ‘true nature’.
Individually as well as collectively.
The sound of one hand clapping…
While worrying is indeed a waste of time, it is also a very good pointer!
If not the only one…
The only one powerful enough to make us ‘move’!
Worry is a powerful attention grabber. Points us towards the things we feel the need to solve.
What we do after our attention has been pointed… that’s the most important thing!
Continue to worry or start doing things?
Meaningful things…
And the first meaningful thing to do while worrying is to stop.
Now, that the attention grabber had done its thing… to continue would be a waste of energy!
“Living organisms, in order to live,
need to ingest portions of where they they live.”
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…
“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.
‘Now, that you’ve reached your personal pinnacle, which do you think is more important?
Setting the right goal for yourself or reaching it by keeping on the ‘straight and narrow’?’
Well, staying on the straight and narrow is a goal in itself…
The way you put it, you’re asking me to determine which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Neither.
Evolution came first. At some point reached the ‘chicken and egg’ stage then went forward to giving birth to living offspring.
Same thing here.
Life is opportunistic. Setting goals and following rules is OK, as long as you keep an open mind about things. Keep your eyes wide open yet fully aware that nothing is exactly as it looks like.
The only legitimate long term goal is ‘sustainable survival’. The rest are nothing but ‘staging posts’.
In order to be able to do something – anything – you need to be alive. And kicking!
In order to stay alive, you need to make as little damage as you go along. To yourself – as a living organism – and to the environment in which you live. To the natural environment each living organism depends on and to the social environment which allows us, human beings, to maintain and develop our human-ness. Our capacity to generate meaning by making successive decisions.
How to achieve this meta-goal?
By following the common sense rules which become apparent as we go forward in time. Which become evident as long as we keep our eyes open….
Life and death are two strange words. Very different yet they describe the very same thing.
If you think of it, death and life are like the faces of a coin.
After all, the exclusive qualification for being able to die is to have been born… And it’s only us, languaging rational beings, who make the difference between living and dying. At the conceptual level, of course.
OK, many others are capable of making the functional distinction between a corpse and a living body. We are impressed by the mourning behavior displayed by the elephants, for example. And even more so by the chimpanzee mothers who continue to carry the bodies of their deceased babies…
But since we are the only species – known to us, humans – who uses language to relate to each-other, to think about the world and to plan ahead, I’m going to discuss here only the languaging/reasoning aspects of us making the difference between life and death.
By making this difference we actually separate the inseparable. With momentous consequences. For us – individual human beings, for the species as a whole, for the rest of the species and for the rest of the world. The world as we know it…
The origin of this difference is our conscience. Which is sophisticated enough to be able to make it and to talk/think about it. The elephants are also conscient enough to act upon the difference between a living body and a corpse. To recognize the skeleton of a deceased relative. To remember it. But, at least apparently, they are not able to speak about the whole thing. Nor to transmit over generations that those particular bones belonged to a particular individual who had been related to … As soon as all individuals who had directly known the deceased individual, all information about the identity of the corpse/skeleton are lost. For a while, the survivors remember only the fact that their ‘mothers’ used to ‘mourn’ over this particular set of bones but nothing more. Again, this is what we know, now, about the manner in which the elephants treat their dead.
Which is very different from how we treat ours. And from how we relate to matters pertaining to life and death.
We cherish life and we dread death.
We cherish our lives and we dread our death. Ours and that of our (cherished) relatives and friends.
And we are somewhat indifferent to the lives of others… To the tune of being able to dispatch animals, and plants, for food. And to kill other human beings. In war but not exclusively.
nicichiarasa 