Again I found myself questioning the often unquestioned fact of life, namely that of attraction and sex drive. (University campuses will do this to any mind which chooses to turn in on itself in reflection… amid a sea of active bodies and minds). My a priori conclusions in that regard are thoughts for another piece.
Today I just shook my head at the near incomprehensibly of it all, and instead chose to acknowledge my discomfort, or present lack of joy.
To comfort myself, I said that the coming of summer and the associated adornment of the Sun’s rays would lift me up. Stop. I immediately was pushed to ask ‘well, what the hell am I? A flower?!’
As funny, perhaps, as such an arrival may be, I may have found something. One of my recent (and lasting) observations of the world around me pertains to the uncomfortable similarities (or commonalities) which exist between living beings and inanimate matter. Think about how we have eyes and a nose… a deer has this, and a fish has similar things. Look at a tree and the way that it reaches up and flays out each branch in accordance to a fractal form…just as its leaf is constructed… exactly as the veins of our hearts or neural net within our brains form… no different from the arrangement of filaments and structures of the cosmos itself. This I believe to be high importance, when considering the ‘bigger picture’.
No, I do not believe that it necessarily follows that rocks have interests, or that fish have thoughts as you and I know them. Rather, as humans are a result of evolution, and this goes back to proteins and chemical combinations…these earliest ancestors are themselves derivative of that matter which is unequivocally inanimate. And so here we can see a common ancestry of humans and mountain ranges (namely God… or natural law & mathematics as that pertains to matter).
From this I argue it follows that animals (sentient bodies) are but inanimate matter which is merely at a higher level of complexity … (think plants-plus).
This actually fits with the recent iteration of my worldview (concerning the aforementioned similarities between the Earth, all upon it, and beyond it).
Perhaps the Earth is a greenhouse, and it stands within the cosmos, which itself is an ostensibly barren garden. In this view, rock, plants, and people are separated only by degrees of complexity. Here, as humans, our mobility simply facilitates our attainment of sunlight. Just as the elements (pertaining to rock and air) which had to be fired in the kilns of stars, just as plants use photosynthesis to take the offering of the Sun and to draw gasses and carbon from the air, we must move about and eat the plant that eats the earth, air and sunlight (or further the chain by eating another animal which has eaten the plant).
Plants have sexual organs and attract insects and animals with good form and alluring colours… just as we do in regard to one another with ‘style’, hips, facial symmetry and the like.
[Here I must digress for a moment] I may argue that as per a metaphor, God is a gardener… of course I highly doubt there are any true deities besides the most perfect forms of intellect and these too are derivative of something which came before, and thus not ‘God’ as many would think of him/her. First causes… though convincing by the apparent causality of this reality do not seem to be rational. It appears that the Universe has a beginning. But if one were to be thrown through a door and into a room of finite space… it might seem logical that there is nothing outside the room, nor was there anything before said room. God, if anything, is the space within which reality is based… he is the math by which… she is the laws by which…it is the space within/upon which the cycling of matter and energy persists. Here a beginning is also the ending. Think here of a Möbius strip… infinitely causing and being caused by itself forever with necessary boundaries that are the result of entropy. [Yeah, that WAS a digression. Moving on]
Perhaps this ‘phylogenetic tree of complexity’ pushes upward until a species of sufficiently intelligent ‘plants’ may turn upon the Earth, create language and thus give birth to the world of ideas, to then govern over creation as Gods themselves.
Maybe all that is left is for humanity is, with compassion and respect for the sanctity of life, to mature and recognize its role as governor of all that is, to order over creation and push complexity into the infinite. (Maybe our natural destiny is to give life to artificial intelligence, superior to our own by virtue of its lack of mortality and malice. Not necessarily, but it feels right to postulate further if I am to already stand so far from where my feet are comfortable.)
Perhaps.
And if you and I and everyone we know are the very Gods we seek… oughtn’t we live differently (higher, greater) than mere animals or plants? Oughtn’t we live more loving lives, to do so more thoughtfully, and more honestly?
Maybe our prayers ought to be directed at one another to cease violence, join in cosmological communion, and to at once turn our attention upon the Earth as a parent does a child, or a gardener does his soil.
a testament of sentience 
I enjoyed your post and found it very interesting. I too am fascinated by formal archetypes and recurring patterns in the universe. However, I must object to your image of humanity’s place in the world.
“Maybe all that is left is for humanity is, with compassion and respect for the sanctity of life, to mature and recognize its role as governor of all that is, to order over creation and push complexity into the infinite.”
It could be argued, (quite plausibly, depending on your perspective) that since humanity has begun to take upon itself the “role of governor,” that the changes of recent history have on the whole tended towards a decrease in complexity on our planet, through systematic homogenization. I will not fully undertake that argument at this time, but here is a tentative list of reasons I have in mind: habitat destruction, reduction in biodiversity, mass extinction, urban sprawl, global capitalism, mass production, ultra-division of labor (which results in oversimplified, dull, and unsatisfying ways of living, among other things)… and so on. Perhaps we are not “governors” or quasi-gods but just another kind of animal, born to eat, screw, and die like all the rest; a species on an ill-fated swarming cycle (think locusts/lemmings). I do not mean this in a pessimistic or negative way; I would rather be an animal than a governor… but maybe that’s just me.
Thanks for the comment.
I am a humanist-existentialist… so I speak not simply of what is (I would agree that what I talked about in the piece does not appear to be happening in reality), but rather what we must become. We have the capacity, I think you would agree with that.
A counter-argument (to my own) which still holds true to this idea of humans governing the world is one of the macro-sentience. Perhaps the ‘evolution’, as it were, is accomplished by the function of the internet to connect the whole of the world. Perhaps this way a ‘higher consciousness’ can be achieved… something like the invisible hand of God.
Maybe the individual will come to act as to neuron, and with more and better connections, humanity can form an array of ideas. Maybe with the acceleration of technology (if we can avoid massive war, or the like), this aggregate thought can be put to a similar end. Yes ultra-division of labor does weaken the individual, but it creates a new mind that may succeed where the contemporary individual fails.
Cheers,
Good answer 🙂
To me its a matter of which is preferable: continuing towards the global collective “wired” conscienceness or returning to pre-industrialism, local economy, and becoming one with nature. For my part, I would choose the latter, but this does not mean that the “new mind” is without merit. I suppose that, being an individual, I am concerned with the power and presence of individuals, and care little for the interests of any “super-organism.”