Memorial Day musings.
Yesterday was Memorial Day. I went out to get some food and everything was closed, so I had to go to McDick's. After eating I was troubled by questions of consciousness as I sat on a bench in the sun near my building. I was watching flies darting back and forth to various pieces of trash, and pigeons, and a very tiny and amazingly fast bug of some sort racing over the rough stone surface of the sidewalk, running around in impossibly quick circles every time it bumped into a stone and then heading off in a new direction, like living Brownian motion.
My brain outweighed that entire bug by a factor of something like 28,000. Every so often it would stop dead in its tracks with no warning, maybe because it had run across some food. I wondered how so much energy could be stored in such a tiny form. If the bug were the size of a human, it would have been running at perhaps a hundred miles per hour. I thought that a bug that tiny, with its little Brownian motion pattern, could have its behavior described with just a few algorithms.
At that moment, everything living looked like exactly what it is: bits of animated matter. Consciousness, then, is a troublesome property. If we're all just complex machines, why aren't we just fully automatic, and why do we have any awareness at all? I am just a collection of molecular machinery, dissipating energy to maintain local order -- so why do I think behaviorism is a load of depressing bullshit? I thought of religion.
As I was considering these questions with my McDrink in my hand, which I had been careful to conceal from people I walked by on the street lest they judge me for what I ate, another animate bundle of matter threw its frisbee too close to me, and then gestured at me, asking if I wanted to play with it and its girlfriend. English was not the first language used by these elaborate contraptions, and I looked at the girl and thought of the billions of DNA replication processes taking place inside her just at that instant. I remembered a micrograph some scientist had made of actual DNA transcription from a living cell -- from the central strand of DNA sprouted a forest of daughter strands, each one longer than the next as the intricate replication machinery progressed further down the gene. Then I played frisbee.
It was only after this that I came home and started reading Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions.
It's like this in here nearly all the time.
My brain outweighed that entire bug by a factor of something like 28,000. Every so often it would stop dead in its tracks with no warning, maybe because it had run across some food. I wondered how so much energy could be stored in such a tiny form. If the bug were the size of a human, it would have been running at perhaps a hundred miles per hour. I thought that a bug that tiny, with its little Brownian motion pattern, could have its behavior described with just a few algorithms.
At that moment, everything living looked like exactly what it is: bits of animated matter. Consciousness, then, is a troublesome property. If we're all just complex machines, why aren't we just fully automatic, and why do we have any awareness at all? I am just a collection of molecular machinery, dissipating energy to maintain local order -- so why do I think behaviorism is a load of depressing bullshit? I thought of religion.
As I was considering these questions with my McDrink in my hand, which I had been careful to conceal from people I walked by on the street lest they judge me for what I ate, another animate bundle of matter threw its frisbee too close to me, and then gestured at me, asking if I wanted to play with it and its girlfriend. English was not the first language used by these elaborate contraptions, and I looked at the girl and thought of the billions of DNA replication processes taking place inside her just at that instant. I remembered a micrograph some scientist had made of actual DNA transcription from a living cell -- from the central strand of DNA sprouted a forest of daughter strands, each one longer than the next as the intricate replication machinery progressed further down the gene. Then I played frisbee.
It was only after this that I came home and started reading Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions.
It's like this in here nearly all the time.