Underneath it all is a bubbling, stochastic quantum swirl. The emergent four forces conspired to draw up planets, settle them into chaotic orbits, collapse stars, spit cosmic dust, set the whole thing in motion with bayogenesis and symmetries of almost unimaginable details. Our planet was hit with millenia of evolution, and from a primal “cosmic soup” cells finally formed. Solar fuses, hydrogen to helium in a calamitous silent atomic alarm, DNA, RNA, mRNA, bastard nucleotides and informational storehouses, genetic strands floating in pond scum, the rocks and mud gave way to trees, those massive photosynthesizing giants, branches and arms of the earth turning the scum to the shores, the scum to the breeze, that random molecular drift.
Untold ages of failed mutant creatures slithering, climbing, hopping, then flying, eating each other, the ourobouros cul-de-sac of trial and error, trial and success, quantum puzzles assembled against entropy in so large and staggering multitudes that powers of ten have powers of ten. Children beget children beget children beget children. Grandchildren have grandchildren and forget their ancestors. The sun feeds the trees, the trees feed the birds, the birds feed the new-comer mammals, the mammals die and feed the worms and birds and anrthopods, copepods, insect Detroits, Manhattans, Berlins, which feed the fish, which feed the bears, which feed the birds, which feed the humans, which feed the factories of Detroit, Manhattan, Berlin.
Opposable thumbs, opposable nouns and verbs, linguistic abstractions and portmanteaus, psychological devices describing the psychological backfire, the evolutionary accident that arose from the neural nets and cages in the mammalian cortex. Brain cells spark and flutter across a great synaptic divide, stretching from axon to countless dendrite across a system of chemical highways and interstates, international waters, the Strong Law of Large Numbers, the Weak Law of Large Numbers, independent identically distributed Gaussian Random Variables teaming up to give simple standard deviations, autocorrelations, empirical orthogonal functions called concepts, ideas, dreams, fears, visualizations, regrets, anxiety disorders.
The neural soup coalesces from that same quantum soup that gave the first cells, the impetus lightning demoted and replaced by a chemical firing, triggered by stimulus from the auditory canal, that great filtering masterpiece turning the collective atomic pressure drift into distinguishable chunks of empirical orthogonal eigensounds. Rods and cones, the visual cortex, that magnificent factory taking photons bouncing off the silent water of Algiers, and triggering more of those countless faceless neurons from that disentagleable dendritic web, spitting out what we call “the sight of stream”, that mess of alphabet we constructed with our evolved feeding holes and pharyngeal corpus.
Words we push out, conducting the atomic drift back to those other parts of the earth, the crests and troughs, Fourier-decomposed quantum packets, which hit the ears of animals, friends, relatives, strangers, lovers. This we name conversation. The pieces of the puzzle interlock, exchanging, haggling, bartering atoms and molecules from one another. Where the bee ends and the flower begins is as big a mystery and where exactly the water meets the shore. The two collide in a big frothing mess of gravitational tug-of-war.
You could blame the moon for the tides, but then again it matters that it isn’t geosynchronous. Nor is the sun, the birth of our seasons and economic disasters, crop failures, cancers, those nasty little cells who have grown so entitled as to try to touch the heavens for themselves, the bratty little children of the whole game. We spin about the sun, the moon spins about us, and we all collectively spin about the center of a giant galaxy, whose arms spiral carelessly about like an ice-skater, that perfect and inimitable picture of the “Conservation of Angular Momentum”.
Back to the shore, again, that source of life itself. Where the shore ends and the water begin is hard to say, perhaps a misapplication of our linguistic sleight-of-hand, that powerful little tool we developed to abstract and sweep away all the pesky little details of neurons and atoms and speak of “cars, trees, things!”. More independent identically distributed gaussian variables, more large numbers, and we forget everything under the cosmic carpet, under a mass of verbage, paintings, songs, equations.
When we communicate we exchange the world, we interchange our molecules, we share the earth, and the earth shares and exchanges its gravitational energy, it’s baryons, with the sun, which shares X-rays, cosmic microwave background, and countless photons with the rest of it all where the shore ends and the water begins.
Does the sun end at the furthest tip of it’s furthest flame? Or does it end at the furthest photon it shot out billions of years ago, now long gone into the deepest, most unreachable trenches of deep deep space? Or do we say it ends not spatially but temporally, when it’s final photonic word has been uttered, it’s last sputtering fusion gasp?
Where do “I” end and “you” begin? Where, precisely, is that mysterious line of demarcation between two independent selves? Between two bubbling clouds of atomic matter, continually exchanging neural firings? Because, my neural soup is activated by the physical stimulus reaching my brain through long anatomical corridors, sparked oftentimes, by the movements and sounds of those around me, motions and noises set into being by their neural soup. So, are there really two separate brains, two separate minds, two separate selves? Surely, linguistically there is a distinction, but language is a shorthand, a statistically emergent phenomenon, a genetic mistake that has been carried to comical proportions over the centuries. But if, as it were, our neurons connect over a great synaptic chemical divide, and orchestrate themselves statistically into thoughts, patterns, habits, hopes, reflexes, and such. And if two brains communicate with mouths and ears, over a great spatial and molecular divide, connecting through the pushing about of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, constant exchange of particles and at times high-level constructs (thoughts, political agreements, family decisions) then of course what in principle makes a brain different from a neuron? And what makes us not all part of a soup of disjointed brains, statistically combining to give rise to a “collective unconscious”, that high-level emergent epiphenomenon so akin to individual thoughts, habits, reflexes, etc? Where exactly does “I” end and “you” begin? “I” and “you” are ideas formed through repeated contact with the external world, contact that is symbiotic, parasitic, and reflexive. One neuron sparks, the other reacts. One brain “speaks”, the other “listens”. Sparks fly. Brows furrow.
Where, EXACTLY WHERE, philosophically, physically, temporally, conceptually, do “I” end and “you” begin? Emotions are fickle epiphenomenon, personality changes with contact and exposure to outside influence. Our physical selves are very, very slippery creatures, constantly replacing and renewing cells, like tiny genetic batteries in the remote control of the world. We are all tuned in to Channel Zero, the infinite moment of our lives, connected and disconnected, bobbing in and out of each others worlds through exchange of baryons, leptons, quarks, maybe even strings. The shore and the wave are together a beach. The ocean and sky are together a vat of communicating baryons, leptons, quarks, maybe even strings. The bee and the flower are interdependent, not just in survivalistic terms, the narrow symbiotic zoological dualism and altruism so common everywhere, but physically even. They change each others chemical and molecular composition, constantly updating each other innards, outtards and compounds, masterfully rearranged the atomic stockpiles within each other, hitting the “Refresh” button on our attempts to physically distinguish the two. The bee spreads the genetic seed of the flower, the flower feeds the bee.
What does the bee call “I”? It may lack the prefrontal cortex necessary to think such deep thoughts about “beeness”, but what for us, IS “beeness”? Where is the flower if not also inside the bee? And where exactly is the bee if not also, IN NEED of the flower? If “I” lose “my” leg, do “I” lose “me”? How about if “I” lose my memory and my senses in a terrible car crash? Do “I” then lose “me”? There are many flowers for the bee, there are many bees to a flower. There are many memories in “me” , there are also many “me”’s in “my” memory. The flower and the bee, the hive and the meadow, the meadow and the plow, the plow and the family, the family and the town, the town and the city, the city and the highway, the highway and the interstate, the interstate and the airplane, the airplane and the internet, the internet and the psychological conspiracy known as the “collective unconscious”, now becoming increasingly “self-aware”, through uploading and refreshing, through endless streaming contact with external stimuli, “external minds”.
A quark, an atom, a neuron, a brain. All meaningless in isolation, devoid of context and interaction. A bee with no flower dies. A flower without bees becomes extinct, added to the incredibly long list of forgotten creatures that evolution tried out for a while and threw onto the unwanted clothing pile in the dressing room of mutations and experimentations. Stochastic blips and bumps in the road along the way.
A neuron isn’t self-aware, but is perhaps a hive? It can offer a collective defense? It can, as it were, “speak for itself”. It can collectively, statistically, adapt to it’s environment, and even communicate with it in the way of pollination, honey, population adjustments. If enough bees got together, might they have a hive self-image? Reacting and responding to changes in the external world through self-adapting anatomical signals, spread out over pressure waves and chemical tracers, updating, refreshing, reloading, constantly adjusting, sparking, firing, one bee venturing out, another returning, moving as a whole to pick flowers on a warm summer day. The population of flowers adjusts itself accordingly, a beautiful dynamical system, with stable equilibria and attractors, sinks, sources, eigenflows.
Is a bee any less “Earth” than the flower? It comes from the same processes that created the flower. The flower and tree in turn, are just parts of Earth as much as the rocks and waters of that indistinguishable beach. The roots dig themselves into the soil, communicating through the crumbling dirt with the very Earth itself. Am “I” any less a natural phenomenon than this? If not, as I suspect, than my “I”-ness is the world’s “world-ness”, the universe itself developing language and thought, just as the Earth developed arms through the trees branches. Then this “I” of which we so often speak, is nothing short of the miraculous. It is the universe itself becoming self-aware. Baryons, Leptons, quarks, maybe even strings, forming Earth which in turn forms little branches of itself which can walk, speak, think, and finally, think of themselves, and think of baryons, leptons, quarks, maybe even strings. “You” are the center of it all. The core of the universal experience. Not “Buddhistically”, but literally. “Your” eyes, “your” senses, “your” thoughts, are the thoughts of a world of tiny matter coelescing to form the apex known as “YOU”, perceiving and imagining “itself”. “You” are the product of the world, bur “you” IS the world thinking of itself. “You” is the sky reflected in the water. “You” is the reflection of yourself in another’s eyes. “You” is baryons, leptons, quarks, maybe even strings. “You” is all of it, and all of it is “You”.
“You”, “Me”, the universe, positive charge negative charge, dilations, contractions, matter, anti-matter, the water, the sand, the flower, the bee. Distinctions are linguistic.
What is it to be a bee or not to be a bee? That is my question.
