and that happened.

i was listening to a radio show that just happened to be talking about single-payer health care the other day. i don’t remember getting much out of it, as i try and keep up with news stories these days, but facts just seem to sink into my brain without really leaving a mark. i feel like most stories revolving around hot-button issues i listen to go like this:

1. things are unjust.
2. they would be more just if only _____.

that’s about all i get out of it these days. and yet i soldier on, hoping for a moment of realizing something i hadn’t expected. and that happens just enough to keep my interest, so lucky for me. but i broadened my scope a little bit since i was seeing all moral points from a simple two step program. the ability to worry about such problems is a consequence of not having to worry so much about our physical well-being, and having nothing but our minds around to keep us entertained. a luxury, in a sense. problems arise, but this giant glob of humanity keeps pushing on. it’s not like an asteroid threatens our planet or something catastrophic like that.

i feel i can just look at the issue of single-payer health care and think “if this is the best idea we got, then if it isn’t serving us now, it will eventually serve us until we find some better idea to fill the void.” and this could basically be applied to any idea. questions of moral implications of ideas aside (which will be another fun future topic), this is what it boils down to. ideas are pretty easy to spread around (especially with things like the internet), but to have them understood, integrated, and acted upon takes much more time. but in the end, majority will rule, until enough people decide another idea is better or that the previous idea was lacking in something. this system can be gamed of course, but that’s an inherent part, not a flaw. it would be static otherwise.

so we got ideas, we use em’ (with or without morals), and then we justify them. then maybe some new information comes in, and some ideas change because of it. if we’re lucky, we can write this information down and go back and check on it. this is where i should probably make some snarky existential comment like “rinse and repeat” or “dem’s the breaks”, but really, that’s not the point. did i have one in the first place? i’m not sure, details like this normally work themselves out. i think there’s a million variables here, but just like any system it can be simplified down to the main components, and then maybe you can understand it a little better when the nuiances do arise. use your arsenal of ideas to try and hammer out more, or deal with the ones you have? i love you, rhetorical questions. i answer you with my soul.

i think the point i originally set out to explore is how universial ideas are, yet so silly at the same time. ideas are ideas, and we assign value to them. then we apply them to our day to day lives, and maybe it spreads out far enough to influence a larger amount of people. then more information comes in because of these ideas leading to revisions and newer, better ideas. and then….what? all of this leads to repeating itself off to infinity, which may not be a bad thing. that’s why we need more questions to appear out of answers and not vice versa. we would be screwed as a glob if we ran out of things to question.

what the hell else would we do with our consciousness?

you’re conscious, what better things would you do?

i answer you with my soul.

i look back at the last couple of posts and kinda wonder what happened. it’s like my brain goes a little off, needs some outlet, maybe figures something out well enough to live with it, then boom. nada. brainy is tired from idea grasping, needs a break. nothing to do but wait until the next round of psuedo-dissatisfaction with life to poke at my irrational side until it can’t take it anymore and flips out.

so now would be the time to do something productive.

be productive!

do it!

DO IT OR THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES.

take a step back and have a quick peek at my brain. two distinct hemispheres. i forget to think about it like that sometimes. one side with the logic and one with the intuition. i like to think of them as individuals, but they are the part of the same whole.

when you cut the corpus collosum (don’t care if it’s spelled right, the linkage between the two hemispheres), people develop two distinct personalities. brain science is some crazy stuff. if there’s no linkage between the two halves of my brain, i am no longer the same person, the one that takes information and processes it with both logic and intuition. i become two separate extremes of myself, and i can only imagine the destruction that could be wrought without one side giving the other some perspective. thank god in my mental landscape, i have the ability to do that.

sometimes i corner myself into thinking that it’s a question of it being fortunate or unfortunate that i have the capacity to get all existential on myself. but that’s really not a question, it’s more of a statement. the obvious answer is: it doesn’t matter. i have the capacity to do it, so i have no choice but to either deny it or embrace it. denial is not the path for the living, it is for the dead. i choose life. as black and white as that sounds, sometimes, a line has to be drawn.

your move, self.

there’s a few ideas i left out of yesterday’s post concerning the whole chemistry of life, that i thought about at some point last night, but forgot to amend. it’s that chemistry is basically applied physics, with molecules. so while there are tangible events that can happen due to direct observation of the chemistry occurring, i seriously doubt that’s the whole story. i mean, if you break this down into forces applied, and products that come out of it, there’s still a whole lot we don’t know. i mean it’s not like you’re watching an acid and a base react to become a water and a salt on the scale that you can watch a football game or something. it’s all mostly empirical knowledge.

i think along with the basic chemistry of life that makes very practical observable things like a membrane or a mitochondria, there’s whole other levels of other types of reactions going on. if you delve past the chemical bonds and attributes of a given substance, you get to how the electrons interact, how their energy is in harmony to create different effects, based around concentrations and reactivity. but go further and it’s physical forces playing with each other. go further and you start getting into some quantum mechanics. i think there’s all sorts of stuff going on in these reactions beyond what we observe, and chemicals are just the vessels stored with energy. whether everything going on between them is observable, is completely unclear. that’s where the beauty in all of this lies. physicists can’t explain what’s really going on with gravity, and yet somehow it still exists. there’s just has to be so much going on with these reactions that we don’t know yet, so we can still play that mystery card if so desired. considering how feeble my brain is in the face of all this, i’m good with that.

also, environment is huge, bigger than i let on, i think. you have this base set of “you” chemical reactions, and a genetic predisposition towards expression, but the environment you are in dictates which ones get used, how often, and in what concentrations. the complexities between environment and genetic expression is so huge and interrelated that it’s pretty much it’s own wing in the study of genetics now. thus the linkage between the self and the environment, and how connected they are.

i also thought that there are monastic sects that devote themselves to minimizing their physical bodies to devote more to their mental. so it hasn’t been going on since we developed computers in the last couple of decades, it’s been going on for thousands of years.

they could still get in a biking accident though.

i don’t know how i typed up what i did yesterday, but it definitely took some very deep and unexpected turns. the fact that i have bitched so long about existence without bringing it back to simple justification is mystifying in how i never made the connection sooner. that was huge. but now it’s time to polish it up a bit.

ah yes, let’s bring this back to some hard chemistry here.

the whole idea of a bag of fluids fascinates me. most of the time, i just think of myself as something more of a concept, like what i expect to see in the mirror when i take a gander at myself. it’s all very abstract. it might be my training as a biologist (environment!) but when i sit and think about things like the soul and the self, i always boil it down to the chemistry in my body. this can be taken as a very bitter pill, that people are basically the way they are and experience emotions because of chemical reactions. it’s sounds too simple, but that’s what makes it beautiful. the fact that molecules based on how they are paired can have trillions of permutations is simply amazing. the fact that there are trends in these reactions that can be categorized is even more so.

i guess the fact that the ideas of self are so personal and mystical that to boil it down to science is crude and smacks of over-simplification. which it very well may be. but i feel that natural law plays a part here and the idea that millions of chemicals are interacting in millions of ways in my body to create something unique isn’t much of a stretch. something so unique that comes out of a wellspring of chaos is amazing, and almost divine. but divine or not, the product still exists, is here, and can be reflected on. the fact that we are catagorizing genes and establishing connections between all the systems in our body right now is some form of proof that out of this chaos springs order.

that’s a very bare-bones rationalization, but i’m not really looking to delve into that right now, it’s more of a prelude that comes more around to ownage of myself. i understand that there has to be a me here, a self, that is my own in a sense. my self is mine, but only by default. my mind is mine alone for the sheer fact that there’s no way anyone could have the access to it that i do. i could write a diatribe here millions of pages long and it still would only be a fraction of how i function as a self. in my mind, i am beholdant to no one, but no matter how i break it down, i am still tied to this vessel, this bag of water. it is mine, but it is still fleeting. not even in the sense of death and all that. i could just fall off my bike, hit my head, spill some blood on my brain and do some serious shorting out.

then who would i be? it would depend on what i shorted out. it might only be motor functions, leaving my sense of self intact but unable to really function physically with my body. or i could hit up my frontal cortex and basically become lobotomized. who would i be then? would i even know? the fact that i can’t know is what makes this self so impermanent. i think that there is an illusion of some type of permanence in all of this because wherever you go, there you are. i can’t just leave my mental self at the side of the road (in a sense, i’m not thinking about things like schizophrenia or anything), just like i couldn’t do it with my physical self. even when i do dream and feel like i am leaving my body behind, i am not. the structure of those dreams are tied to my physical being, which is supplying all the energy and nutrients i need to let my mind do something abstract. but maybe i’m putting too much importance on the factory here.

but here we come back to balance, one not existing without the other, the seeming duality of everything. but the way i’m looking at this now, one could not exist without the other. so how could there be duality at all? jesus, i’m not even gonna try and touch on that one at this moment. for now though, one cannot exist without the other, my mind and my body. the operative word there being “for now”. which may be a root for why this is all so tough to hash out. we have so much technology that is running parallel to ourselves, mimicing and modifying our “self”. it seems like we are so close to breaking the ties to the physical we can taste it. mastering our physical so completely that it is integrated into the mental. break the ties that hold our mind hostage, achieving freedom beyond our wildest dreams.

i’m swimming way out of my depths now though, and it’s tough to wrap my mind around that concept. it sounds so liberating and esoteric, but it’s about as unfathomable as losing my consciousness. the prospect of it doesn’t even get me all excited. it just sounds different. it’s not like freeing ourselves from one shackle will lead to fulfillment and understanding, it will only lead to more ideas that are considered limitations, and finding ways to break free.

but that’s a total gut reaction, there’s no way i could know. and there’s still a lot of ideas to sort through here.

slow down….i’m losing myself. and what of it? i have been slowly redefining my image of “self”, or it feels like something along those lines. trying to remove my ego from all of this and look at myself as my environment. it’s strange at first but then just feels comfortable to me, i don’t know why. thinking about it objectively makes me feel like i’m giving it up, surrendering. but that’s only the objective thought, the subjective interpretation feels more like accepting a truth i’ve always denied to myself, but at the same time, i am unsure what that truth is.

when i look at myself as my environment, it makes me realize the tasks that occur in this environment aren’t what are important, it’s more about what populates it. i’ve done a pretty good job of keeping the riff-raff out, and surrounding myself with things i enjoy and people i appreciate, but still leaving a semi-permeable membrane around it, so it’s not completely static. but at this point in my life, it’s pretty much hit homeostasis, which is something most unconscious things strive for without being aware of it. i am aware of this homeostasis i have achieved, but am also aware that things could be pushed and prodded to try and make it a better homeostasis, or worse, but just different in general. as a single being, i am not unsure of how i could go about making myself a better life but am just more unsure if i want to.

i’m having trouble phrasing this in a way that doesn’t make me sound defeated, because i don’t feel that way at all. in a way, i feel like i looked around at the environment i have created, took a breath, and then exhaled. i noticed that i had taken part of myself, and had thrown it into the collective whole, and realized i don’t have to fight anything at all, because that is the type of person i’ve always been. fighting isn’t pointless, but so is not fighting. these lines of ideas and truth are so vague and blurry, that it doesn’t even matter if it makes sense or not. existing in the moment is about all i can do, and be appreciative to have even that. this environment i have created is so large and abstract that i couldn’t begin to break it down into parts, it just is, just like it’s always been.

i feel like i am starting to look at truths and ideas, look beneath their exterior and see them for the mostly unsubstantial things that they are, the things that i have assigned meaning and value to. i assigned them, but not really. my environment did. all the parts of me that i snake out to everyone and everything in the space and time i exist. these things are as much me as everything that is contained in this body, in this mind.

it’s not really mine, and it never was. none of this belongs to anyone. i just appropriate it for now, and invariably end up passing it on, but that depends if someone else finds it useful. but anything can be useful or a hindrance. i can have anything, or deny anything, but within a certain construct. i already have rights in this life that have been mostly established on majority rule. it’s not perfect, but it doesn’t need to be. emotions can be experienced individually, but generally stem from the environment existed in. i remove the self from my emotions and look at them. the power i have over my environment is my ability to shift the focus of my perspective wherever i want. but my focus isn’t just dictated by me, it is pushed subtly or not-so-subtly by my environment, and whatever reaction i have seems calculated and planned, on the surface. but i’d rather not spend time calculating and planning, and even when i feel like i’m scheming for some better end, i am just adjudicating such matters to whatever it is deep inside of me that has come this far, and feels a need to keep making decisions like it always has. in tune with my environment, that which i surround and connect the singularity of “myself” to.

i think that deep down, this self of mine has always been trying to find a justification for its existence. that if i couldn’t justify it to others, i could at least do it for myself. but there is no me here, just a large string of ideas and muddled truths. i always felt like i never had to really justify my existence to others, but was too dense to apply the same principles to myself. the justification of my existence is my existence, and the things i do with this existence are largely inconsequential, yet it is also all that there is. and it makes me smile to think that.

all i can think about now is this line from Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf where in a dream, Goethe says to the main character “In eternity there is no time, only an instant long enough for a joke.”

i giggle a little, smile serenely to myself, and get back to my life.

what a fascinating place this is.

dance the dance!

dance the dance of language!

if for nothing else than maybe just to get some exercise in. to get a feel for some ideas that can maybe be parlayed in this fashion.

because there’s not really much to write about, things are kinda slow. i’ve mostly been thinking so hard on my routines as a person. i took a step back and looked at it objectively, and patted myself on the back. i and other people would mostly approve. stellar work, good sir. you might want to try reading a little more with a little less of the TV. or volunteer in some community thing. or eat more veggies. maybe then you’d feel better about the things you do. but i know how dubious this is in the first place.

when my hands rest on the keyboard, they feel good, potential energy lying in wait. typing feels good as well. potential energy being turned into kinetic. but directed, in patterns. patterns that feel comfortable, patterns that have built on what has come before. i am here, now, with some purpose i have taken from myself and others, on a madcap ride through life in an attempt to further something that is terribly abstract to me. not so much abstract in the sheer amount of variables (although that is part) but more abstract in that my day to day life experiences can hardly be compared to such ideas as life purpose and life viability.

this leaves me…where? in position. to do something that jibes with me. that’s a pretty nice thing, especially when there is always the potential for worse things to happen.

huh. hey growth, how’s it hanging? i just had this funny thought about you. just like most organisms on this planet, growth starts exponentially. it seems like it will never stop, because resources are fresh and plenty. but then something happens, the environment you exist in isn’t boundless, otherwise growth would continue to be exponential. no, suddenly some resources become harder to obtain, scarcer. so growth slows, but doesn’t stop. suddenly, the exponential curve shifts to conform to it’s boundaries in the environment it exists and becomes a logarithmic curve. so growth slows but never completely stops, although it may appear to do so. so growth comes slower as the asymptote approaches infinity. the environment is the limiting factor here, but there’s not a whole lot to be done about that. leaps and bounds don’t come any more, it comes slower, and i have a lifetime of accumulated feelings that dictate so much to me, unconsciously. there’s always the chance that something catastrophic may happen to the environment, getting back to some form of exponential before swinging back to logarithmic at some point. this is happening with all the facets of my life.

all i can do is approach infinity.

it’s scary how closely related our last couple of entries were….even if they’re more interrelated than related.