I was looking at a graveyard of splatted flies in front of me and couldn't help wondering about my own life. Our lives.
I don't know how many flies there are but there's an absolute shitload of us. And we die all the time. We're born and then BAM! Dead. That's it. Two generations later, we may as well never have existed.
Our atoms, those things that made up each of our parts, are still there though, right? We're all just made up of bits. Not all that different to the flies. To a chair. Anything. Just a bunch of stuff that came together and made a form. Could actively move those atoms around.
Isn't that amazing? That we can group these parts together and move them around in space actively, with our own thoughts? Which, in turn, are some incredibly complex organisation of these parts and impulses from one to another. It is amazing. In many ways, it's totally and utterly unbelievable.
Am I to believe this is an accident?
That our self-awareness is little more than an accidental curse? A by-product of a random system created by millions of years of chaos?
That looking down on Earth, we're nothing more than the movement of atoms brought together by gravity?
Doesn't sound quite right. It actually doesn't sound all that likely.
If it is, it's not likely that we'd be unique. The only ones here. There must be others like us (at least in some ways) in the Universe. You know, now that I think about it, it's weird to think that there is so much life, has been so much life, all over our planet... and we're the only ones writing books? Painting pictures? Wasting our time on blogs? How is it we have come so far and not one of those millions of other life forms on our planet haven't?
There's not just one life form that can swim. Not just one that has camouflage. Not just one that can light up. Not just one that can use sonar.
But there is just one that can make a television. Build a car. Flip a burger.
That just doesn't sound likely to me.
There's something not quite right about our whole existence. It just doesn't sound likely to me.
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Doesn't sounds likely? Compared to what?
I'm not really comparing it to anything. It just doesn't sound all that likely.
I'm not sure I believe it. I'm beginning to think our existence may be just some crackpot theory.
I don't know if I have mentioned this already but... I wise friend of mine once came up to the epiphany:
The fact that we humans are aware of our own irrelevance, is *precisely* what makes us relevant.
How is it we have come so far and not one of those millions of other life forms on our planet haven't?
Well —Dennis, the brother of Terence McKenna, once received a rather humbling message from the supposed 'hyper-intelligence' coming from the Ayahuasca entheogenic potion he tried:
"You monkeys only think you're running things"
;)
There's a quote on that page that describes the issue I have here. It's from Stanislav Grof -
"The probability that human intelligence developed all the way from the chemical ooze of the primeval ocean solely through random sequences of random mechanical processes has been aptly compared to the probability of a tornado blowing through a gigantic junkyard and assembling by accident a 747 jumbo jet."
That's it there. But that doesn't quite represent the magnitude of it. It's much, much bigger than that and far less likely.
As far as I'm concerned, the Universe was set in motion with a specific number of rules that favored the appearance of organized life forms, and in some instances, intelligence.
But it's all a test. The Universe is continually —one might even say that brutally— testing those experiments to see if they are fit to survive. The dinosaurs became extinct, because they didn't have a space program —like Arthur C. Clarke said.
So I don't know if that could be called Intelligent Design. Maybe... Intelligent Management?
Maybe God it's not so much like a prepotent Walt Disney, always reviewing personally every single aspect of His creation; maybe the bearded dude is more like Brad Bird or John Lasseter: leaving enough room for independent spontaneity ;)
...compared to the probability of a tornado blowing through a gigantic junkyard and assembling by accident a 747 jumbo jet.
See, here's what I was getting at with the comparison. What if there is a bajillion universes with a bajillion earthlike planets with a bajillion tornadoes happening every day. Wouldn't the odds of one of those tornados assembling a jumbo jet go up?
All I know is that we know nothing.
"See, here's what I was getting at with the comparison. What if there is a bajillion universes with a bajillion earthlike planets with a bajillion tornadoes happening every day. Wouldn't the odds of one of those tornados assembling a jumbo jet go up?"
That's basically the answer of mainstream Science to the current evidence of the Anthropic principle that we keep uncovering: how any tiny difference in the energy of neutrons or electrons or in other major physical constant would prevent the formation of stars and ergo us hairless monkeys.
So, the cosmologists borrow a bit of quantum juju from their particle physicists compadres and Voilá: Infinite Multiverse, and we're still just a happy accident without purpose.
It seems like an easy sleight of hand, if you ask me. But I'm just a layman; anyway, an Infinite Multiverse seems as mind-boggling as the bearded dude they tried so hard to eliminate out of the equation :)
Yeah, I'm not sure I buy that. I never bought into the bearded dude thing either so it leaves me sort of with nothing.
If it's a random accident in space, then that brings up the question of what space is - where the boundary is and what is beyond it. How big does it go? And, as we keep on discovering smaller parts, how small does it go?
And then my brain explodes.
In all of that, we may well be the result of freak chance but then... is everything? All the planets? Galaxies? Neutrons?
Depends on how you look at things. I could look at flies at those horrible nasty things you swat and if you live in a place like Florida you have to put bug guards on your car certain times of the year to avoid them going all over your grill and into your lights and messing the car up because they are attracted to the lights and mate that way.
Or... I could take the writer in me. Make it real romantic. (cue soft music in background). We are the stuff of moonbeams and stardust . And when we die, we return to moonbeams and stardust to whence we came, traveling the skies for all eternity.
And then, Martha Stewart goes and ruins it all by dusting off the end table where I am laying!
Good piece Bitter!
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