Thursday, April 24, 2003
93223942:: 10:32 PM

Ego as a (non-essential) adaptation
Ok. So a common feature in Eastern philosophy is the idea that self and ego are illusion. I don't really know how they came up with that, but regardless was thinking about it recently. Everything we experience in our world is made of matter. We consider some collections of matter to be conscious... other not... but why is this so? -- After all, it's all just matter.

Well biochemists, psychiatric professionals, philosophers and physicists have all been nibbling at the nature of consciousness for a long time. After a lot of discussion we still don't know much for sure but I have another idea to throw into the pot. It goes like this: All organisms on this Earth go through a process of natural selection. All the organisms we see are part of an iterative process which has been going on for about 2 billion years. In this time all sorts of adaptations and features have developed: fins, fur, exoskeletons, eyes, brains, vertebra. What if consciousness is just one of those? It is just another feature that we got, but it is no more fundamental or essential than having wings or toenails -- i.e. there are other constructs and configurations for the same matter which could do the job of consciousness. You don't need bat wings if you have bird wings. You don't need flippers if you can snake through the water -- and perhaps you wouldn't need consciousness if there was just some other feature which was good at sustaining life.

One could hypothesize about a different sort of feature which serves the same purposes of consciousness, but is still foreign to our traditional ideas of what ego, self, and consciousness are. Maybe if humans had evolved differently so that we were all physically or mentally attached, our sense of "self" would refers to a community of brains... maybe if we grew in such a way that we were rooted to the ground, we would feel the soil and rocks were part of us... or maybe we wouldn't even need any construct like consciousness at all.

The idea of self is so deeply ingrained in or language and approach to the world it is hard to imagine having no sense of self. But what if it was as arbitrary as having 5 fingers? We'd do just as well with 4 or 6, or fins(!) if we lived in the water. Perhaps it is an "essential" part of being human, but only so much that have two legs and two arms is "essential."

In this way, Eastern philosophies might have been right. Matter is just matter. Consciousness and Self are an "illusion" -- a non-essential construct which some living beings assume to be essential :: Alternatively, maybe Eastern philosophy is just so open and fungible that I get to make it into whatever I want! :p ... Or maybe those ancient dudes *really* knew something when they said that the world was illusory :: Afterall, very little of the universe is made of matter (4%), most is dark energy and dark matter. I can imagine the ancient masters meditating by pools listening carefully for neutrinos and percolating positrons. Haha. Ok. I'm just being silly now.

93165997:: 1:12 AM

Digital Graffiti
On this site you get to virtually tag a train. It's got all sorts of nice touches to add to the realism: you only take 8 cans... its dark... the cops come! After you're done you can see other people's work by clicking the "watch flick" links on the front. Mine are #253 in the IRT Division and #33 in the BMT Division.

If you want to see some real world graffiti instead, check it here.

While we're on the topic of city things... Seattle is the safest city to walk in. Nice. Good news for people with no cars :p.

Wednesday, April 23, 2003
93101524:: 1:55 AM

There was something I was going to write about... hm. Oh, I read an article from SFGate about the self-esteem myth. It turns out those asian parents were on to something... That is pretty interesting, but not what I was going to write about. Oh, there was also this -- probably one of the wierder pictures on the internet -- you'll need to read this site to understand(?) what that's all about.

I totally forgot.

Did you know that "birl" means "to cause (a floating log) to spin quickly by treading upon it?" Hey this was pretty neat too. Anyway, I will eat salad and sleep, nothing is making sense.