Duck, Duck, Goose

Wednesday, 3 June 2009 – Sitting here imagining a You who is a generic person made of all the people I know, don't know, haven't met, will never meet, and lived puts me in mind of those of you who specifically occupy my thoughts. In other words my humanity gets in the way.

I am not myself. I already know that. I am you/You. I reached that conclusion a long time ago, going through the exercise of seeing and reading about what makes a person a person, first realizing I am my parents' genetic output and supposed to procreate and then realizing I am the combination of the input from my surroundings, too, including those nearest me (sister, grandparents, family, and friends) and those who influenced me via books, magazines, movies, advertisements, and television, as well as other parts of this planet and universe, including animals, plants, minerals, stars, galaxies and meteors.

Nothing new under the sun. Granted. Stated. Accepted.

Yet I keep buying and reading new books, looking for the next new “thing.” Have I, as both individual human and representative iota/widget of the human population outlived my supposed usefulness?

Let's think about it for a minute. Actually, we have all the time in the world to contemplate this idea. If we have no individuality, no self, no soul, no consciousness, no hidden meaning, no primary directive, no purpose besides replicating our genes, then why do we create skyscrapers, rocket ships and sewing machines? Shelter, mobility, and clothing, you might think, in reference to the last three examples of human accomplishments, I imagine.

Seriously, though, we humans have asked and will ask the same questions over and over again. Why do I have all this excess capacity to procreate when the procreation process is so simple and easy? Why do I even have an “I” to begin with? Why don't I/we have an innate understanding of and connection to collective intelligence so that repetitious questioning is negated by the answers of others?

We are not born with the languages we speak. We have to “learn” them. We are malleable. We are sponges. Et cetera, et cetera, ergo sum, enjoy a good plum, etc. So we have built ourselves and our civilizations based on banging out nonindividual individuals using the hammer of language. Tools creating tools. Self-replicating robots, if you will (ignoring the arguments about the autonomy/consciousness of artificial beings or robots).

In macroeconomics and crowd analysis, we treat the human condition as one of automatons responding to given input with predictable output. Expose a large population to continuous bombardment of the same message for a long period of time and the majority will talk about, accept/reject, and make the message a part of their collective experiences for the rest of their lives. Culture.

Do you know what a Petri dish is? If so, have you ever used one, grown a colony of bacteria in a culture medium and...wait! What was that? “Culture”? Sorry, I used that word in a different context than in the previous paragraph. Or did I?

Maybe not. Culture, as we think about it, is a word that signifies experimentation, does it not? We want something, whether it's an improved version of a product we designed/sold, a larger bank account, a safer life, a catchier tune, deeper meaning or better understanding, that culture provides.

And all this time, we transform our condition, expanding the limits of human experience, incorporating more about what we know, discovering new animal/plant species that we can identify and catalog to say, “in this place and at this time, this ecological zone contains the following items” so that future humans can compare the previous version of a place to the new one and make human-related observations, using words like “extinct” or “overpopulated” to inform other humans about changes to an environment that may or may not have been directly changed by humans by other than the observation process.

I was not born on another planet. I was not born as another species. My only experiences are human. I may enjoy spending time with other living things (temporary vortexes that swirl together universal elements into what I recognize as living things, anyway), but my skin and bones, my sensory perceptions, are human-based.

Therefore, I am a momentary occurrence of the eddies and whirlwinds of physical elements of the universe, using the collective consciousness called culture to share my condition most directly with other humans and indirectly with other species, all while not participating in the single process that living requires – reproduction.

In totality, humans don't like the fact that our species destroys other species to live. We want to believe that “higher” consciousness separates our species from other species and consciousness separates species in general, meaning we should use our consciousness to conscientiously preserve other species. We even use the word species as a separator to show that we recognize that others with specific characteristics deserve the right to exist in that state perpetually. And yet, at the end of day, while all of us are looking at the world through our microscopes, our eyes, fixing our binocular gaze on the microcosm and thinking, “Ah, this is who I am,” the world has no concept of us as species or individuals. We are no more important as an entity than a raindrop – each is a mixture of the building blocks of galaxies that holds human-calculated properties but individually cannot move a planet or solar system.

We will act collectively and individually, building rocket ships that carry our species beyond this planet. We will encounter extraterrestrial life and continue to claim we are unique in the concept of living. We will make more of Earth toxic to living creatures, including humans whose lives we will extend beyond “natural” limits by manipulating our chemical composition. We are anomalies in a universe of anomalies. We are analogous to ourselves. Languages will disappear. Cultures will flourish and flounder.

Let's face it. Humans are earthworms, rechurning the material we encounter into material to be used by other parts of the universe, including our waste, which takes a life of its own. We do not destroy other species because species is not a universally recognizable condition. We are disappearing as the species that we are now, just as we continually disappeared as the species we were 100,000 years ago. In fact, we are not a species. We just like to think we are (even though we don't think, either). We see a tree or rock doing nothing and compare it to our bodies, concluding that our difference in mobility makes us unique. We are not. We are the same. We are the universe. You may decide to have kids and take care of your family or you may not. In either case, you do not exist. However, you can perpetuate what you think is your species because in the local environment in which you live it still feels that way – one day, your kids' kids' kids will think otherwise.

I am you so I do not exist and...aha! I just figured out why I stopped being interested in creating new words, acronyms or phrases – because you/You do it for me!