In the early morning coolness under the pin oaks on the sidewalk of the Placid Baker cafe, a Honey bee comes to sip sweet coffee from my lips. "come on bee, there's a whole cup of it over there!" but no, here she comes again the only woman to kiss me in a long time, yet i shoo her away, and finally where is she? "oh, man has she fallen into the coffee? Stupid bee you are supposed to have so much brain power, two hundred seventy skills each of you gals have!"
I fish her out of the coffee and she flies to the window to dry herself off. But i realize, "wow, maybe being drenched in caffein is way too much for a tiny bee like her" So i go into the cafe and get a cup of water and bathe her in it to wash the coffee off of her..
Now she is staggering around in a sunspot on my table. I hope she recovers.
I watch her up close, my eyes an inch from her face, as she runs her legs along her toungue to clean it. Her tongue as long as her whole leg, long enough to reach the golden nectar of deep flowers.
I watch her dry herself off, up close her fur is golden. First she rubs her hindlegs together, then hind leg on middle leg, then front legs from mouth to antenna clearing her senses... yup, probably more than 270 skills! My thoughts run from kissing to engineering. "Where is the circuitry, little bee, to handle so many complex algorithms? You've only got, what? a million neurons?" I do a quick calculation: let's see..., I think it's only a hundred thousand packed into that pea sized head of hers stuffed mostly with the dozens of glands bees have. That's some engineering feat, distributed processing, that we haven't mastered yet.
Then my engineering calculations are distracted by a woman of MY species walking by, flaxen wild hair flowing garments of many colors, free, licking her lollypop she must have gotten from the Pioneer Bank around the corner. The bee, startled, flies off, both gone.
I go back to my coffee. it must have just been a dream.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
I Don't Want To Occupy Wall Street, I Want To Occupy Troy, NY, My Home Town!
When I hear the phrase 'occupy Wall Street' what comes to mind is that I wish to fully occupy the city that I chose to call my home, Troy, New York. But alas, there are militant presences that have also chosen to occupy Troy, with devastating effects.
What immediately comes to mind is the automobile/petroleum/insurance/medical/legal/war industry that occupies the very streets and parking garages of troy, that occupy the soundscape and the air we breath. I think of the Hoosick street bridge overpass, a monstrous military presence that some combination of huge automobile industry/government bodies dropped on a once thriving neighborhood like a giant atom bomb, and now occupies that space, exuding It's lifeless larger than human scale ugliness and the violence of 100s of tons of metal and explosive combustion of gasoline every second speeding by at an inhuman speed barely touching the landscape it races past (unless of course it's 'rush hour'). I think of butt-ugly housing projects and parking garages and cheaply slapped together soulless buildings that now occupy the spaces and streets of troy in which i would like to enjoy living, in which once historic buildings were occupying that were built by people who made their fortunes in troy and chose to invest those fortunes in the town they admired and chose as their home. I think of multinational corporations which have at their disposal all the power of our nation's military to occupy Troy and cities like it across the American landscape, who have sucked the life out of those cities in much the same way as have great empires sucked their colonies dry for profit. And I think of the electronically amplified and disseminated entertainment and communication complex that occupy our soundscape, our conversations and our very minds, so that we no longer talk to each other face to face, no longer sing to each other breath to breath, or in fact sing WITH each other, no longer tell each other our stories, and ultimately no longer can think for ourselves.
These are the forces against which I would like to RE-OCCUPY the city that I wish to call my home. If such a re-occupation were to take place locally in every city (with the ghastly Disneyland suburbs contracting once again to cities and farms), then the source of wealth of the multinational banks and their collusion with our government would simply dry up.
So, I don't want to occupy Wall Street, I want, along with my neighbors to once again fully occupy the city I call home, Troy.
What immediately comes to mind is the automobile/petroleum/insurance/medical/legal/war industry that occupies the very streets and parking garages of troy, that occupy the soundscape and the air we breath. I think of the Hoosick street bridge overpass, a monstrous military presence that some combination of huge automobile industry/government bodies dropped on a once thriving neighborhood like a giant atom bomb, and now occupies that space, exuding It's lifeless larger than human scale ugliness and the violence of 100s of tons of metal and explosive combustion of gasoline every second speeding by at an inhuman speed barely touching the landscape it races past (unless of course it's 'rush hour'). I think of butt-ugly housing projects and parking garages and cheaply slapped together soulless buildings that now occupy the spaces and streets of troy in which i would like to enjoy living, in which once historic buildings were occupying that were built by people who made their fortunes in troy and chose to invest those fortunes in the town they admired and chose as their home. I think of multinational corporations which have at their disposal all the power of our nation's military to occupy Troy and cities like it across the American landscape, who have sucked the life out of those cities in much the same way as have great empires sucked their colonies dry for profit. And I think of the electronically amplified and disseminated entertainment and communication complex that occupy our soundscape, our conversations and our very minds, so that we no longer talk to each other face to face, no longer sing to each other breath to breath, or in fact sing WITH each other, no longer tell each other our stories, and ultimately no longer can think for ourselves.
These are the forces against which I would like to RE-OCCUPY the city that I wish to call my home. If such a re-occupation were to take place locally in every city (with the ghastly Disneyland suburbs contracting once again to cities and farms), then the source of wealth of the multinational banks and their collusion with our government would simply dry up.
So, I don't want to occupy Wall Street, I want, along with my neighbors to once again fully occupy the city I call home, Troy.
Monday, September 26, 2011
The Problem With Sex - is that it is evolution's way of toying with us
The problem with sex is that is it evolution's way of TOYING with us.
We are just momentary stopping points on life's grand 3.6billion year old journey of exhuberant and horrific creativity. The urge to sex is THAT old, we really have no choice in the matter(and if we had complete choice, i'd wager that our branch of life would come to a dead end). When we start juicing and desiring sex, it's our protoplasm's way of taking us along on its 3.6billion year old joyride and we really don't have much say in the matter.
Through sex this ancient journey of life EXPERIMENTs with our children as would an artist, and like any artist, life ends up throwing away many possibilities in the trash heap. To create involves risk, the risk to produce nonsense, and indeed many of the gametes you and i produce are nonsense and not viable, and many conceptions turn out to be grotesque nonsense to be expelled before the mother even knows she is pregnant, and even after birth... there is no guarantee that our child won't have 3 arms or no trachea or only half a brain and live for only a week...
And either way we eventually die. Some, if they are lucky, peacefully, but for many it is harrowing for them and their loved ones.
It is not an easy situation to take, that human suffering is the price we pay so that we can be part of this immensely creative show. Let's face it: most people aren't terribly interested in creativity.
Most certainly are not interested that Life has come up with over a million different colorful and surprising ways to say insect (and i'm not sure how many religious people would respond if it was pointed out to them: god likes beetles, 600,000 different kinds! or worms for that matter... I suppose many might think it is Satan's work...) Or even closer to home, that we share this creative show with dirty smelly noisy Gorillas, Chimpansees, Bonobos, Orangutans, and Gibbons (not to mention all those puzzling fossils suggesting that there were quite a variety of us human-like critters on earth some time ago), or even god forbid, gays and negroes...
Anyway, when humanity collectively woke up to this reality, that their intensely experienced personal lives are encased in bodies that are seemingly made of featureless 'meat', When humans realized that they could dream of infinity, and imagine whole Kosmoses inside their heads and yet were imprisoned in bodies that would decay horribly and in the end limit them to finite lives - humanity rebelled and created the story of a grand drama of a benign eternal father (not mother, she would fear childbirth as possibly dangeous and anyway could threaten to abort...) who has a carefull plan for us, that we are not merely contingent whims of a grand evolutionary game, but that we are children of a father who desired to create precisely us and loves us and has put us here in these flesh prisons for...
That part is confusing, the repulsion to being flesh was so intense that, well, perhaps like many children, we continued to wish to believe that our parents were perfect and that we were being punnished because it was our fault. As it is for young children, to have entertained the possibility that our 'parents' were not perfect, that there is no plan to it all... was too dizzying a prospect to take in. When we first woke up to all this awareness, we had very little experience of what our powers were as humans, and probably had no confidence that we could stand on our own two feet in a world of exhuberant and chaotic creativity and destructivity.
So most of us still choose to hide behind our imagined parents' aprons. And the dominant Stories we created (most mythologies and religions) are our responses to this situation.
It will be a long road ahead of us. The courage it takes to accept as our role to be, each one of us, in some sense alone, our own masters in this chaotic storm of creativity, that each of us is at the cutting edge of this creativity, responsible for playing our part in this vast game of evolution (which means that many will fail, sometimes miserably), is not easy.
There is hope. I would look at the stories of Buddhism, Judaism and science... but i suppose that will have to wait for the next installment!
We are just momentary stopping points on life's grand 3.6billion year old journey of exhuberant and horrific creativity. The urge to sex is THAT old, we really have no choice in the matter(and if we had complete choice, i'd wager that our branch of life would come to a dead end). When we start juicing and desiring sex, it's our protoplasm's way of taking us along on its 3.6billion year old joyride and we really don't have much say in the matter.
Through sex this ancient journey of life EXPERIMENTs with our children as would an artist, and like any artist, life ends up throwing away many possibilities in the trash heap. To create involves risk, the risk to produce nonsense, and indeed many of the gametes you and i produce are nonsense and not viable, and many conceptions turn out to be grotesque nonsense to be expelled before the mother even knows she is pregnant, and even after birth... there is no guarantee that our child won't have 3 arms or no trachea or only half a brain and live for only a week...
And either way we eventually die. Some, if they are lucky, peacefully, but for many it is harrowing for them and their loved ones.
It is not an easy situation to take, that human suffering is the price we pay so that we can be part of this immensely creative show. Let's face it: most people aren't terribly interested in creativity.
Most certainly are not interested that Life has come up with over a million different colorful and surprising ways to say insect (and i'm not sure how many religious people would respond if it was pointed out to them: god likes beetles, 600,000 different kinds! or worms for that matter... I suppose many might think it is Satan's work...) Or even closer to home, that we share this creative show with dirty smelly noisy Gorillas, Chimpansees, Bonobos, Orangutans, and Gibbons (not to mention all those puzzling fossils suggesting that there were quite a variety of us human-like critters on earth some time ago), or even god forbid, gays and negroes...
Anyway, when humanity collectively woke up to this reality, that their intensely experienced personal lives are encased in bodies that are seemingly made of featureless 'meat', When humans realized that they could dream of infinity, and imagine whole Kosmoses inside their heads and yet were imprisoned in bodies that would decay horribly and in the end limit them to finite lives - humanity rebelled and created the story of a grand drama of a benign eternal father (not mother, she would fear childbirth as possibly dangeous and anyway could threaten to abort...) who has a carefull plan for us, that we are not merely contingent whims of a grand evolutionary game, but that we are children of a father who desired to create precisely us and loves us and has put us here in these flesh prisons for...
That part is confusing, the repulsion to being flesh was so intense that, well, perhaps like many children, we continued to wish to believe that our parents were perfect and that we were being punnished because it was our fault. As it is for young children, to have entertained the possibility that our 'parents' were not perfect, that there is no plan to it all... was too dizzying a prospect to take in. When we first woke up to all this awareness, we had very little experience of what our powers were as humans, and probably had no confidence that we could stand on our own two feet in a world of exhuberant and chaotic creativity and destructivity.
So most of us still choose to hide behind our imagined parents' aprons. And the dominant Stories we created (most mythologies and religions) are our responses to this situation.
It will be a long road ahead of us. The courage it takes to accept as our role to be, each one of us, in some sense alone, our own masters in this chaotic storm of creativity, that each of us is at the cutting edge of this creativity, responsible for playing our part in this vast game of evolution (which means that many will fail, sometimes miserably), is not easy.
There is hope. I would look at the stories of Buddhism, Judaism and science... but i suppose that will have to wait for the next installment!
Friday, July 1, 2011
Troy-On-Hudson Unfurles Her Sails
After loosing another two pounds of sweat at African dance class in downtown Troy(thank you Emily), I walked two blocks down State street to the Hudson river where an amazing breeze and blaze of sunlight met me to dry the sweat off of me and the river calm and here comes a couple paddling kayaks upriver and the trees on the far shore and the seagulls wheeling above calling for the ocean and
behind me are those riverside apartments that from the river's side have those quaint windows and brickworks, and we could be in Europe with cafe's down there by the river's setting sun and damn the parking garages and
I walk up River Street to Monument Square(triangle) and the space is amazing and the care and craft supported by commerce that went into the details of those buildings, hoping the same care would go into the ones to be built in the site of the thankfully demolished 20th century version of city hall, but alas... and yet...
walking up Broadway I find two new bars open and there ARE side walk cafe's where you can get a cheeseburger and sweet potato fries until 10pm and there's some life wakening here, and
the sun still spilling down broadway and bronze Columbia, standing atop the pillar her skirts billowing in the breeze and I begin to imagine Troy at full capacity, sails unfurled catching the strength of one hundred thousand people with every shop open and all crafts and commerce and commotion and there would be more reasons to be in Troy and less reasons to drive away, more people would live in Troy and less need to drive cars here... there would be less cars,
and more children running around the streets playing ball and hopscotch on the sidewalks and what did we use to play back in nyc? skilsies!, and RPI blowing into a full grown university reaching her arms into downtown uprooting the suburban sprawl that has blighted 6th street, and between them parks grow over parking lots and playgrounds devour parking garages and more children and and more dogs running around and even philosophers and writers sitting at sidewalk cafes
all fed by the river, boatloads of produce floating down the river from farms and more people chugging up the river from the whole world and Troy begins to draw its energy again from the river Hudson, the river that brings strength, the river that can take you places, the river that can bring calm, the river that can rise up again and take a whole city back down into the ocean where it all began.
behind me are those riverside apartments that from the river's side have those quaint windows and brickworks, and we could be in Europe with cafe's down there by the river's setting sun and damn the parking garages and
I walk up River Street to Monument Square(triangle) and the space is amazing and the care and craft supported by commerce that went into the details of those buildings, hoping the same care would go into the ones to be built in the site of the thankfully demolished 20th century version of city hall, but alas... and yet...
walking up Broadway I find two new bars open and there ARE side walk cafe's where you can get a cheeseburger and sweet potato fries until 10pm and there's some life wakening here, and
the sun still spilling down broadway and bronze Columbia, standing atop the pillar her skirts billowing in the breeze and I begin to imagine Troy at full capacity, sails unfurled catching the strength of one hundred thousand people with every shop open and all crafts and commerce and commotion and there would be more reasons to be in Troy and less reasons to drive away, more people would live in Troy and less need to drive cars here... there would be less cars,
and more children running around the streets playing ball and hopscotch on the sidewalks and what did we use to play back in nyc? skilsies!, and RPI blowing into a full grown university reaching her arms into downtown uprooting the suburban sprawl that has blighted 6th street, and between them parks grow over parking lots and playgrounds devour parking garages and more children and and more dogs running around and even philosophers and writers sitting at sidewalk cafes
all fed by the river, boatloads of produce floating down the river from farms and more people chugging up the river from the whole world and Troy begins to draw its energy again from the river Hudson, the river that brings strength, the river that can take you places, the river that can bring calm, the river that can rise up again and take a whole city back down into the ocean where it all began.
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Discussion on Jesus as Sacrifice For Our Original Sin
so Mirrizin says:
Nachum Braverman, a Jewish Rabbi, describes the process
"You rest your hands on its head and you confess the mistake you made. Then you slaughter the cow. It's butchered in front of you. The blood is poured on the altar. The fat is put on the altar to burn. How do you feel? (Don't say disgusted.) I'll tell you how you feel. You feel overwhelmed with emotion, jarred by the confrontation you've just had with death, and grateful to be alive. You've had a catharsis. The cow on the altar was a vicarious offering of yourself"
...
Christ took the guilt with him. The point of a Jewish sacrifice, I think as I've recently read (check with blackskimmer, perhaps? or davidmordichai? Prefect?) would be not to appease God by giving something away, but to project your guilt onto a living thing and then symbolically slaughter it to remind yourself of what you had done, and then to shock yourself back onto the right path.
Jesus wasn't killed because God likes killing. Jesus was killed because he was trying to get his (God's) point across. Christ took it all with him so that we could see the way to go.
and I said:
jesus was all about shock! his message: get out of the slumber of your everyday family life, political life, religious life and WAKE UP, drop everything and follow me and examine your life.
were's my thoughts on why god committed seppuku?
why jesus died for our sins < blackskimmer > 05/25 13:23:37
the formulation i came up with back when i lived some christianity was this:
life for humans in this universe inherently involves sinning. no way to avoid it, not hard thought nor technology. there are always mysteriously unavoidable dilemmas. i.e. abortion, saving lives, hell even just to die at your appointed time seems like a sin against such a splendid being.... that's how life is for organisms as complex as us. Sometimes we even blame ourselves for our own deaths. Certainly this is a biblical take on the situation, that human failing is responsible for the introduction of death in the world.
Even birth, to conceive a child, an act of love, of creativity, of hope, creates the possibility of danger, to the mother and the child.
so what do you do? recall Arjuna's dilemma in the baghavad gita. he was a warrior in charge of an army in a major battle. he was up on the hill watching the two sides and started to imagine all the suffering and destruction that would occur if he sent his side into battle. also all the suffering and destruction that would occur if he didn't fight and the other army attacked...
so he froze! it took the whole book for krishna to convince him there was no way possible for finite humans to understand which way to act brings less suffering in many cases, but we cant just crawl under a rock and NOT enter the fray.
what i take jesus dying on the cross to mean is that our life involves sinning, that's a given, not quite we 'inheritted it from an act of adam' but that's just how it is to be human, even to be interesting.
We are not perfect robots, but creative beings, and beings born into the act of creative evolution. all creation involves risk, involves invention of ideas and choosing between them. to be able to take part of this creative act of evolution requires that we be vulnerable. to congenital illnesses, to cancers. to death. we find this horrifying, but the alternative is to be perfect, eternally fixed.
but who can love a perfect robot? we love each other because we can identify with the other's frailties.
i figured there are two levels of responsibility? if you think YOU are responsible for getting yourself into one of these impossible dilemmas where either choice is a sin, if you think you are responsible for your own death, then you are in anguish and freeze. and even if you freeze something bad will happen anyway because you didn't act...
the message of jesus dying is: 'you are NOT responsible for being in that situation, it is the common human condition. I, God, put you there by creating you that way. i'm the only one who could forgive you for being human! so now go and choose one of the choices that you think is best, and act on it. and even if you think it is not the perfect choice, go ahead and bumble through it anyway (no perfect choice may be possible) TAKE RESPONSIBILITY for that choice and live with the consequences, but don't be burdened by thinking you put yourself into the position to make that choice.'
and then we are called to emulate god in his forgiveness, to forgive each other for not being perfect.
Nachum Braverman, a Jewish Rabbi, describes the process
"You rest your hands on its head and you confess the mistake you made. Then you slaughter the cow. It's butchered in front of you. The blood is poured on the altar. The fat is put on the altar to burn. How do you feel? (Don't say disgusted.) I'll tell you how you feel. You feel overwhelmed with emotion, jarred by the confrontation you've just had with death, and grateful to be alive. You've had a catharsis. The cow on the altar was a vicarious offering of yourself"
...
Christ took the guilt with him. The point of a Jewish sacrifice, I think as I've recently read (check with blackskimmer, perhaps? or davidmordichai? Prefect?) would be not to appease God by giving something away, but to project your guilt onto a living thing and then symbolically slaughter it to remind yourself of what you had done, and then to shock yourself back onto the right path.
Jesus wasn't killed because God likes killing. Jesus was killed because he was trying to get his (God's) point across. Christ took it all with him so that we could see the way to go.
and I said:
jesus was all about shock! his message: get out of the slumber of your everyday family life, political life, religious life and WAKE UP, drop everything and follow me and examine your life.
were's my thoughts on why god committed seppuku?
why jesus died for our sins < blackskimmer > 05/25 13:23:37
the formulation i came up with back when i lived some christianity was this:
life for humans in this universe inherently involves sinning. no way to avoid it, not hard thought nor technology. there are always mysteriously unavoidable dilemmas. i.e. abortion, saving lives, hell even just to die at your appointed time seems like a sin against such a splendid being.... that's how life is for organisms as complex as us. Sometimes we even blame ourselves for our own deaths. Certainly this is a biblical take on the situation, that human failing is responsible for the introduction of death in the world.
Even birth, to conceive a child, an act of love, of creativity, of hope, creates the possibility of danger, to the mother and the child.
so what do you do? recall Arjuna's dilemma in the baghavad gita. he was a warrior in charge of an army in a major battle. he was up on the hill watching the two sides and started to imagine all the suffering and destruction that would occur if he sent his side into battle. also all the suffering and destruction that would occur if he didn't fight and the other army attacked...
so he froze! it took the whole book for krishna to convince him there was no way possible for finite humans to understand which way to act brings less suffering in many cases, but we cant just crawl under a rock and NOT enter the fray.
what i take jesus dying on the cross to mean is that our life involves sinning, that's a given, not quite we 'inheritted it from an act of adam' but that's just how it is to be human, even to be interesting.
We are not perfect robots, but creative beings, and beings born into the act of creative evolution. all creation involves risk, involves invention of ideas and choosing between them. to be able to take part of this creative act of evolution requires that we be vulnerable. to congenital illnesses, to cancers. to death. we find this horrifying, but the alternative is to be perfect, eternally fixed.
but who can love a perfect robot? we love each other because we can identify with the other's frailties.
i figured there are two levels of responsibility? if you think YOU are responsible for getting yourself into one of these impossible dilemmas where either choice is a sin, if you think you are responsible for your own death, then you are in anguish and freeze. and even if you freeze something bad will happen anyway because you didn't act...
the message of jesus dying is: 'you are NOT responsible for being in that situation, it is the common human condition. I, God, put you there by creating you that way. i'm the only one who could forgive you for being human! so now go and choose one of the choices that you think is best, and act on it. and even if you think it is not the perfect choice, go ahead and bumble through it anyway (no perfect choice may be possible) TAKE RESPONSIBILITY for that choice and live with the consequences, but don't be burdened by thinking you put yourself into the position to make that choice.'
and then we are called to emulate god in his forgiveness, to forgive each other for not being perfect.
Hitting Your Thumb While Trying To Hammer In Your Life
expect cursing
when you attempt to dive
into the tumultuous waters
of religion.
don't you curse
when trying to hammer in a nail
and you hit your thumb instead?
how much deeper the pain must be
when trying to drive in straight
a whole human life
and miss...
when you attempt to dive
into the tumultuous waters
of religion.
don't you curse
when trying to hammer in a nail
and you hit your thumb instead?
how much deeper the pain must be
when trying to drive in straight
a whole human life
and miss...
Friday, June 17, 2011
How An Animal Grows From a Single Egg Cell: It's Like a City Growing From One Colonist Stranded On a Lush Tropical Island
An animal is a society of tiny single celled organisms, that is growing by way of these living cells giving birth to more and more cells and informing each other and rearranging each other.
To what kind of human venture is it most like? The founding of a city? So pretend one person washes up on a beach a lush tropical island beach and for the hell of it, pretend people are unisex and reproduce by splitting in half. (quite odd, eh?) so this person eats all the cocounts and mangos and gets fat and splits. At first the fellow is doing everything, finding food, chasing away monkeys, building fire, foraging for supplies, building shelter... then the twins split and they split...
Now at first they are identical twins. But soon the colonists begin specializing in different tasks, and the more each twin specializes and perfects his craft he interacts differently with his other twins, and forces them to change their habits too. now, all the while they are still splitting so guilds form and specialization within guilds happens. A village starts to form, with twins building huts around themselves and some roads to make it easy to move resources and materials around. And then some guilds start specializing on building and roadmaking... Since they are all clones of each other, they form a very closeknit and well coordinated society.
As the village grows, more specialization happens, different groups start forcing each other to reorganize, rerouting roads etc.. More structure forms, more organization, more complex interactions, materials are processed in more elaborate chains of production. As storms come, seasons change, land gets used up, visitors come, possible invaders... the village begins behaving in more complex ways, forms complex governments, diplomatic missions, armies, traders, politicians...
In essence, the city is built from within by its 'cells'. That's how animals form. Now to make our city more like an animal, imagine the city structure build like a giant robot like one of those transformer toys. Instead of being built on the ground, the whole structure is being built in 3 dimensions, the whole city structure is flexible capable of walking about, or even flying. A giant honeybee robot!
To get closer to being like an organism, lets add one more layer of complexity. Most of the scaffolding and mechanisms of an animal are made of the cells themselves, (with some nonliving bone and fiber built in for strength...). Now, a honeybee is a million cells. That's how many people in a fairly big human city, say just manhattan. The reason that the organs and tissues of an animal are so much more flexible and responsive than human city structures is that the animal organs and tissues are build out of the living cells themselves. So all the structures are dynamic, responsive to each other.
So imagine the roads are lined with these ... ok, so imagine these colonists as not QUITE humans, a little dumber, a little more able to settle for performing very simple roles. As indeed some animals are, like oysters, and various simplified parasites... which start off as flexible swimming sensing larvae and then settle down to become basically, sessile, eating tubes producing eggs.
So imagine these colonists, making buildings out of themselsves, holding onto each other. Imagine the elevators are groups of people some holding each other making a basket for other people to ride in while the others do the climbing up and down. Some are the windows opening and closing because the 'people' that form them can sense the environment and respond the the people inside. The scaffolding is people holding onto each other so it can respond to changing loads , the building can shift over if it needs to. Cars and busses are simply bunches of people holding onto each other walking with their legs letting riders sit on them, some of them use their eyes to see, steer, communicate with other cars, some collect food and distribute it to the other 'people' that make up the car.
So all the structures and machines in the city are alive, are made of 'people' that can communicate with each other, allowing the structures to respond to each other and even think how to respond.
So that's what animals are. Cities made mostly out of societies of simpler single celled organisms. You and I are stupendous cities made of a trillion cells. that's like one hundred thousand new york cities full of people. One step in realizing that life is not a shear magical mystery is realizing the numbers involved, the complexity capable of those numbers.
If you wonder how a brain can think, realize that it is made of a hundred billion neurons. A society of one hundred billion simple critters capable of making simple decisions, inventing tiny snippets of ideas, memorizing a word or two at a time, all having conversations with each other. Typical neurons are connected to a thousand others at a time, and synthesizes information from all of them while then sending out signals to hundreds of others in the network. This society takes over 30 generations to form (typically a cell takes about a day to divide into two cells) Over the time of these 30 generations the cells form all kinds of social bonds and rearrangements and habits of communication...
And, if these cells that build the organism-city out of themselves, are themselves organisms too, simpler ones, what are THEY made of? If they are like animals, do THEY have organs and parts? Are THEY cities of even SIMPLER sub-cellular organisms?
Kind of...This living world is made of quite a few levels nested in deeper and deeper... Very strange universe! In the next chapter we will explore the world of those subcellular parts - molecules, what are they and What can they do?
To what kind of human venture is it most like? The founding of a city? So pretend one person washes up on a beach a lush tropical island beach and for the hell of it, pretend people are unisex and reproduce by splitting in half. (quite odd, eh?) so this person eats all the cocounts and mangos and gets fat and splits. At first the fellow is doing everything, finding food, chasing away monkeys, building fire, foraging for supplies, building shelter... then the twins split and they split...
Now at first they are identical twins. But soon the colonists begin specializing in different tasks, and the more each twin specializes and perfects his craft he interacts differently with his other twins, and forces them to change their habits too. now, all the while they are still splitting so guilds form and specialization within guilds happens. A village starts to form, with twins building huts around themselves and some roads to make it easy to move resources and materials around. And then some guilds start specializing on building and roadmaking... Since they are all clones of each other, they form a very closeknit and well coordinated society.
As the village grows, more specialization happens, different groups start forcing each other to reorganize, rerouting roads etc.. More structure forms, more organization, more complex interactions, materials are processed in more elaborate chains of production. As storms come, seasons change, land gets used up, visitors come, possible invaders... the village begins behaving in more complex ways, forms complex governments, diplomatic missions, armies, traders, politicians...
In essence, the city is built from within by its 'cells'. That's how animals form. Now to make our city more like an animal, imagine the city structure build like a giant robot like one of those transformer toys. Instead of being built on the ground, the whole structure is being built in 3 dimensions, the whole city structure is flexible capable of walking about, or even flying. A giant honeybee robot!
To get closer to being like an organism, lets add one more layer of complexity. Most of the scaffolding and mechanisms of an animal are made of the cells themselves, (with some nonliving bone and fiber built in for strength...). Now, a honeybee is a million cells. That's how many people in a fairly big human city, say just manhattan. The reason that the organs and tissues of an animal are so much more flexible and responsive than human city structures is that the animal organs and tissues are build out of the living cells themselves. So all the structures are dynamic, responsive to each other.
So imagine the roads are lined with these ... ok, so imagine these colonists as not QUITE humans, a little dumber, a little more able to settle for performing very simple roles. As indeed some animals are, like oysters, and various simplified parasites... which start off as flexible swimming sensing larvae and then settle down to become basically, sessile, eating tubes producing eggs.
So imagine these colonists, making buildings out of themselsves, holding onto each other. Imagine the elevators are groups of people some holding each other making a basket for other people to ride in while the others do the climbing up and down. Some are the windows opening and closing because the 'people' that form them can sense the environment and respond the the people inside. The scaffolding is people holding onto each other so it can respond to changing loads , the building can shift over if it needs to. Cars and busses are simply bunches of people holding onto each other walking with their legs letting riders sit on them, some of them use their eyes to see, steer, communicate with other cars, some collect food and distribute it to the other 'people' that make up the car.
So all the structures and machines in the city are alive, are made of 'people' that can communicate with each other, allowing the structures to respond to each other and even think how to respond.
So that's what animals are. Cities made mostly out of societies of simpler single celled organisms. You and I are stupendous cities made of a trillion cells. that's like one hundred thousand new york cities full of people. One step in realizing that life is not a shear magical mystery is realizing the numbers involved, the complexity capable of those numbers.
If you wonder how a brain can think, realize that it is made of a hundred billion neurons. A society of one hundred billion simple critters capable of making simple decisions, inventing tiny snippets of ideas, memorizing a word or two at a time, all having conversations with each other. Typical neurons are connected to a thousand others at a time, and synthesizes information from all of them while then sending out signals to hundreds of others in the network. This society takes over 30 generations to form (typically a cell takes about a day to divide into two cells) Over the time of these 30 generations the cells form all kinds of social bonds and rearrangements and habits of communication...
And, if these cells that build the organism-city out of themselves, are themselves organisms too, simpler ones, what are THEY made of? If they are like animals, do THEY have organs and parts? Are THEY cities of even SIMPLER sub-cellular organisms?
Kind of...This living world is made of quite a few levels nested in deeper and deeper... Very strange universe! In the next chapter we will explore the world of those subcellular parts - molecules, what are they and What can they do?
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