Death

Cont' from: "Memory and Existence" - Saturday, 20 July 2013


Continuing from that previous train of thought on our identity and who "we" are I am struck by an absence of fear.  The consciousness that is writing this, part of the gradient that is Stephen James, that being me in this moment, is aware of a slow and inevitable erosion from existence into non existence, effectively death.  But it... or I... will simply transform, no, will be succeeded by a new identity a new consciousness.

Furthermore the inevitable is to be accepted, not feared.

In the same way the gradient that is Stephen James, in its entirety, will inevitably pass into non-existence (what conventional wisdom calls death) but this gradnet of identities, that is itself: a person; a story; an identit.  It to will be succeeded  by a new consciousness, one or two or a hundred, children, grandchildren, friends, a stranger's life that was unwittingly impacted.  This is the larger gradient the great consciousness and identity that is Humanity.  And so in the same way that we accept our short term deaths, the deaths we live each day or year or decade, we should not fear the passing of the greater gradient that is "us", our greater death, because we are succeeded, we are a part of a greater gradient of which we are all a part, from Abraham Lincoln and Galileo Galilei right down to the lowliest street sweeper or starbucks "barista".  We are ALL a part of this gradient, some of us play larger roles, some set great presidents for human morality or push the boundaries of human understanding, others simply live out their lives, impacting those around them simply through their own existence.

As the story of human history grows longer and longer we are all lost to the ages but we are still a part of the whole.  And our own value should not be measured solely by our contribution to it, but rather to the standards we held in our lives, and our pride in the machine we were a part of.

We will all be forgotten eventually.   And all but a few of us will be lost sooner than we like, how many of us can name out great grandparents?  Or our great great grand parents? or so on, even the best of us could only manage perhaps a handful of our recent ancestors, and even if we did recall their names, what would we know of them?  Who they were how they lived their lives.  But the absence of our knowledge does not diminish the value of their lives, they lived, well or badly, and that is a part of time.  Even the greatest of us, Plato, Aristotle, Newton, Einstein,  Hawking, their names may live for thousands of years, but time will wear away at even there great identities, and even of them, we may have some ideas, but none of us truly know them, how could we?  But again that does not diminish the value and contribution (good or bad) that they had in existence.

"The value of ones Life should not be measured in the memories of those who do or do not recall their existence, but rather by the standards that they held in life, regardless of whether or not those standards resonated in those around them. "

The Close One

Cont' from: "Purpose" - Monday, 27 May 2013

The worst Travesty that could befal the cosmos is for it to pass, unnoticed, uncomprehended, and unadmired from existence to nothingness.

I was challenged the other day, someone claimed that this would not in fact be the worst case scenario.  the universe after all, they stated, didn't have to exist at all, wouldn't pure nothingness be worse that a universe without an admirer?  A universe as intricate and beautiful as our lacking only in intelligent life to comprehend it?

This had in fact occurred to me, my answer is no.  It is not the complete lack of existence that is the most tragic of circumstances.

I stand by my original statement.  It is the close one.  The near miss.  The fire that didn't have to happen.  The man who wins the lottery and then dies of a heart attack that same day.  That man has the more tragic story than the man who dies in a car wreck, he almost made it, he was close.  The near miss is the most tragic.  We do not mourn the trillions of children never born, yet we weep for those unfortunate souls whose existence ends in childhood or babyhood.

In the 2013 Playoffs Toronto fans never expected to best Boston.  But in the final game the Leafs astounded everyone by gaining a 4-1 lead.  Then... well we all know what happened...  But the failure was made more brutal by the near victory.

In this same way a Universe that never existed would be no more tragic than a child who was never born.  But a universe without life?  A child without a mind.  The most tragic of all circumstances.

Memory and Existence

We are not who we were, I don't mean that in a symbolic or a metaphorical sense, I mean it literally.  If you reject the idea of a soul, as I have, and accept that our sense of self and existence are as one with our physical bodies, that our mind and counchiness are made up of matter and not some kind of magical psychic ether then then you will inevitably arrive at the following conclusion.  We, me sitting writing this and you reading it, here in this moment, we do not have 80 or 90 years on this earth or even 40 or 50, I'm not sure how many we do have but I think its probably very few.

Think back a week, a month, a year; we change as much and as permanently as the landscapes of the earth, never to be the same again.  But the features that change are those same features that define our sense of self, our identity.  Regardless of who you are or what standard you use to measure yourself and your identity; whether it be morality, knowledge, your way of thinking or viewing the world, your physical attributes such as strength or beauty; it matters not, there is not a single feature within us that is immune to change. We are as ever changing as the currents of the oceans or the floor of a forest.

Less poetically our cells die, not all at once but a few at a time, just like our ideas and opinions, replaced with new ones over time; give it a month or a year or a decade.  However or wherever you decide to draw the line between what is you here and now, reading this, and the person who will come to exist in your stead, this you, the person reading this, will die.  Not suddenly, but slowly, eroded away by time, like a mountain in the wind.  To be replaced by a new landscape, a new existence to replace the old.  This new person will inherit some of your memories, but not all, they will take from you some ideas and morals, but not all, they will have some of the same cells in their body, but most will be different.  They will not be you, not mentally, not physically, not morally.  You will be dead.  The identity we perceive as "us" is not a single being that exists in autonomy but a gradient of new consciousness and death.  So enjoy this moment as you sit and read this, look around and experience this existence, this moment.  Because it is the only moment that this particular "you" can exist in.

Explorers

Humans first evolved in Africa some 4-5 billion years ago.  Our evolution was a result of necessity.  The ancient jungles of africa were disappearing; giving way to the great sun baked planes we know today.  Our ancient ancestors where forced to leave the trees and adapt to the new environment.  But even our incredible adaptions to bipedal running and walking seemed to not be enough, the newly fledged human race was fast approaching extinction, biologists believe the total population of humanity dropped a low as 6000.  And yet we survived, a group of humans made a great exodus from the plains of africa, crossing deserts to reach the fertile crescent of the modern day middle east; and from there humans spread out, sailing on rafts or crossing mountains to populate nearly every piece of land on earth (the only exception being Antarctica) and all this before the discovery of steam power.  Of course those humans that chose to remain in africa did pull through and survived and flourished on the african plains but that does not distract from the incredible journey those that left undertook.

What stories and fables there must be.  Untold and long forgotten journeys and adventures of men and women who set out to cross seas and deserts; oceans.  They possessed no knowledge of what they would find, they must have known there chances of ever returning; or even living to see what, if anything, they would find, was extremely remote.

Yet they went, out of bravery or desperation we cannot know, perhaps they are one in the same.  Perhaps they went for the same reason we went to the moon, and now talk of Mars, that reason is perhaps the most attractive of all; because it was there, and because no human had ever been there before.  This spirit of adventure seems to infect the human race, it is an addiction.  Once caught, one can never be rid of it.  It is the reason humans risk there lives to climb great mountains, or dive to the depths of the oceans, there is something intrinsically within us that drives us to this path.

Yet recently we seem to have stopped, many humans still climb mountains and dive the depths of the oceans.  Yet is seems the majority of us are content to sit and hide comfortably in our small bubbles of awareness.  What malady has stolen our spirit of adventure?  It is the very core of what makes us human; without it we are little better than apes, surely not worthy of the stars we seem not to lust for as we once did.

Yet there is hope MARS-1 is without a doubt the greatest undertaking of an age they aim not only to send some of the remaining explorers to the Red Planet, but they also aim to inspire the masses.  MARS-1 may be like a shot of adrenalin to a dying man;  perhaps it will be enough to wake us from this slumber and send us toward the stars once again.

Below is a message to the first human explorers of Mars from the late Carl Sagan. 

Aware

Self awareness is an incredible thing; that atoms and molecules can come together in such a way as to suddenly become aware of there existence and then go further still and look out into the world and across the cosmos and wonder at it intricacies and ask questions about what all this is and where it all came from.  And THEN STILL to begin to explore and answer those questions through genorations of organisms each passing the collective revelations and achievements of all pervious on to the next; so that we as a species might stand on each others shoulders, growing taller and taller with each passing genoration.  In this way we have a form of immortality, not of ourselves but of our awareness.

It is truly mind boggling to consider the shear number of events that had to unfold in perfect order and perfect harmony for us to even exist as a species let alone for you and me to exist as individuals here and now and in this state. For the laws of the universe to permite matter and complex molecules, for that matter to come together in stars and eventually planets and create lifeforms.  For the lifeforms on one particular chuck of drifting rock to evolve into primates and evolve intelligence.  NOW consider the number of humans to have lived on this planet and the number of events that had to take place, going back to the dawn of man, in order for each pair of your ancestors to meet and raise each consecutive ancestor.  A million million people had to shape there lives the way they did for you great great grandparents to have any shot at existence, and that chain of history had to sit just that way for you to be born as you are in this time, for you would not be you under any other set of circumstances.

This is one of my favourite quotes by Richard Dawkins, a well known evolutionary biologist with some outstanding writings. 

Nature's Gamble

Intelligence is an evolutionary "all in".  It's nature risking it all at the blackjack table to try and make it rich.

It seems reasonable to deduce that an inevitable result of intelligence is, what we call, society, that's not quite true as a way of manipulating the environment is also needed (in our case hands) but lets look past that for a moment.  Society is the networking and cooperation of "intelligent" organisms to assist each other in the task of survival.  Well sure but that's not gambling that's just one of many evolutionary traits.

The gamble comes into play as soon as that society starts along the technological path.  Its a fast one too, life has existed on earth for approximately 3.5 billion years, intelligent life (in the form of humans) has been around for 3 or 4 million years and we first started to figure out how the world worked 2 or 3 thousand years ago.  So in the timescales of the earth's history our progress from stone age to age of computers and space travel was microscopically small.

But what about that gamble.  Well we've deduced that intelligence leads to society and that (as long as the organism can manipulate its environment) society leads to technological developmental.  Well we can see the results of technological development all around us and to my eyes there are three major results.

The first is that our ability to survive has become incredibly effective, there are now over 7 billion humans on the planet, that's vastly more than could possibly have existed pre-technological development.

The second is that, partly as a result of the massive population, life on earth has taken a beating, even conservative estimates sit at around 20 million species extinct as a direct result of human activity, so the cost of developing intelligence and technology has been incredibly high. And that cost may be higher yet, the threat of global nuclear war destroying ALL life on Earth is almost gone but new threats are a dime a dozen, Global-warming may be just the beginning, as our technology grows so too will our ability to destroy the planet.

The third result of our technological growth is also the potential "pay off" of the gamble.   For the first time in the earths history a species of animals that evolved here has left, in 1969 humans set foot on the moon, in 2023 humans are scheduled to not just set foot on Mars but to LIVE there, for the remainder of there lives.  Technology opens a new doorway to us, a future beyond the earth and, one day, beyond the sun.  Natures Payoff could be to see its children spread out across the stars and seed new life everywhere they go. If we but rise to our challenges and continue along the path of science and progress we will inevitably spread out among the stars, the alternative is death, not for you or me, but for all of humanity.  Even if we survived a nuclear war, or similar catastrophe, we would be sent back to the stone age.  With the surface oil and natural materials needed for early civilization already depleted we would likely not be able to build our great civilization again and would be doomed to die with the earth and the sun, not as great carriers of knowledge and history but as hunter gathers, scratchin in the dirt our our decimated planet.

But if we do succeed, if we do spread out and seed life across the stars; we will bring with us not just the preservation of our DNA but comprehension, history, poetry, and a deep and profound appreciation for the cosmos and our place within it, preserved far beyond the few billion years the sun has left to live -- humanity would be shepherds of knowledge and history for trillions upon trillions of years; perhaps even outliving the universe itself and stretching into infinity.

Purpose

What is the measure of human happiness, or human value?  I suppose it is a question we have all asked ourselves at some time, in some form.  It is a valid question but perhaps a deeper one is to discuss if happiness is, or should be, our goal in existence.  The "Purpose" in life. Might not another purpose be to learn and understand the natural world and the wonders that is holds? What about freedom? My own answer to the age old question of freedom versus happiness had always been freedom.

If our question is the meaning or purpose of life and existence then let us consider something else; a house cat can and does arguable live a happier life than many humans.  Can we accept that the highest aspiration of man (or woman) kind is to be content in our own lives?

Let us consider the differences between ourselves and other things.  Among all the creatures of the earth we are one of a handful that seem to be aware of our own existence, and we are the only ones to have begun to unravel the mystery's behind that existence, to answer the question "why are we here?".

Does a rock have a purpose in its existence? What about the atoms themselves? What purpose does a hydrogen atom have? What about a dog? At what point does a configuration of matter become complex enough to warrant a "meaning of life"?

We struggle with our own mortality so some might say that children are the meaning of life, a new life that followed as a result of ours. That certainly fulfills our biologic and evolutionary purpose and it seems to fill a deep seeded need to surpass our own mortality.  But surely there is purpose in our own life beyond reproduction.

For me, I find my purpose in simple understanding of my own existence and universe in which I am a part.

What is a great art work worth, if there is no one to marvel at it's beauty?

The beauty and intercity of the cosmos is beyond our small human comprehension, yet we, we small creatures, living on our tinny pale blue dust mote can look up and understand a small yet incredible part of this marvellous canvas and we can marvel at its beauty and that act brings purpose the cosmos itself, and that is all the purpose I could ever need.

"The greatest travesty that could befall the cosmos is for it to pass, unnoticed,
uncomprehended, and unadmired, from
existence, into oblivion...
Like a beautiful artwork, rotting away, with no one to admire or appreciate it's existence in the fist place."