Herp a Derp

I remember a long while ago. Maybe 4 or 5 years ago, I did a google search for, "what is our current paradigm?" and found myself browsing through some websites archives.

Evolutionary Theory
An Esalen Invitational Conference
November 14-19, 1999

Anyways I was browsing through the archives (did I already mention that?) and came across an interesting perspective. This guy's talking about how life is just a collection of matter that's purpose is to remain in a collective state. Now...my memory could be foggy but the idea I was getting (in other words maybe I'm WRONG), but his perspective was that in the beginning, there was a cesspool of mud.

We've all heard the theory before (or most of us have, anyways), that life was formed by some pool of dirty water and that's how bacteria or whatever got the whole evolution thing started. And at that point, life was just a simple matter of simple matter holding itself together in the shape of complex carbon molecules and water. And that's basically all we are today. A complex arrangement of molecules.

So this guy's going on, about how they were trying to CREATE life. By taking different substances and using different methods to get the substances to organize themselves into a way that's self-repeating or cloning, or however simple life works.

Last night I'm lying in bed thinking about predation. One cell eats another cell, and uses the molecules of the feast to keep itself alive. Basically a collection of molecules was disassembled, and then reassembled back into the shape of the predator. Seems like a pretty simple system to me. That's predation on a very basic level.

And expanding upon that, we have predatory instincts. Actually, let's back track for a second: a cow eats grass, and (aside from the shit that comes out the other end), most of the molecules in the grass, are turned into....more cow. As the saying goes, you are what you eat. But we convert what we eat into ourselves. To sustain ourselves. Simple predation, right?

My roomate left a pile of tangerines in his cupboard space, and a couple months later I noticed there was an assload of fruit flies everywhere. Took a few days, but I found the source... a pile of black, ooze and shit, in my roomate's cupboard. That pile of shit, USED to be tangerines. And those fruit flies in the air...USED to be tangerines. It was no longer orange. It was black, and 30% of it was now flying in the air in the form of animated life.

So really...what defines life? Were the tangerines alive before they turned to shit? Were the fruit flies living creatures? Is the pile of shit alive? Are the cells in your skin alive? Is each cell it's own, living creature? How about the collection of molecules in those skin cells, are they alive? They certainly could be disintegrated, and reassembled into the form of grass, or a cow, or a tangerine, or a fruit fly.

So what defines life? Really... I used to think of life and ...unlife, in terms like black and white. Over there is black, (unlife), and over there is white (life). The two definitions and aspects of reality were clearly discernible from one another. But not so much when sharing this viewpoint, of the man from the Esalen Conference. From this angle, all I see are shades of grey.

ANYWAYS...let's pull out of that rabbit whole for a moment to explore a new one. Predation. I was thinking about how predation works. Creature A consumes Creature B, to continue the life of A. It's why you and I are still alive today. It's basically a survival strategy. I mean...if we weren't designed to sustain ourselves and have sex, we'd all have died long before we even became Homo Erectus. Taking into account a "various shades of grey" mentality, imagine that wars, are a manifestation of predatory instincts. The only difference, is that instead of Species A, and Species B, is that it's more like...Religion A, and Religion B, or color A, and color B...etc.

We like ourselves. We enjoy who we are (hopefully), and we want to keep ourselves on the planet. And on some frequencies, it's not a matter of disliking color B, or religion B, it's a matter of making more efficient use of those particles. The people that make up Race B, Color B, Religion B. I mean people B, are just a much less efficient use of those carbon and water molecules, and would be put to better use as People A...right?

Anyways, I don't know where I'm going with this. CYA!