Finally the light of rationality is tearing apart the darkness of
ignorance and mythology. We have defeated the kingdom of the spirits, haven’t
we?
No more fairies or demons, no more ghosts and gods, we cleaned our
epistemic world from all those fictions.
Yet, if you think a bit, something of the old tales is still
around: focus, it is right there...Think: YES! The mind.
Have you considered your mind? We don’t believe in ghost and we
have no reason to think that our highest cognitive faculties are represented by
spectre, right?
OK so, after the awakening from the night of legends and myths,
our minds can finally re-join their biological organs, which are cognitions of
living beings. Human minds are the enhancement of more basic cognitive
architecture. Take an amoeba: it pursues sugary areas and avoids acidic ones.
This is the core of intelligence: discrimination of differences: seek for
nutrients (which are pleasures) and escape from dangers (which are painful).
Any further sophistication in the cognitive department is just an extension of
that primeval differentiation.
Now, living beings are instances of life and they execute a
program to survive. Seeking pleasures and escaping dangers are rules of the
general program: survive.
In fact life, contrary to the rest of the universe, wants to
survive. No stars or planet or mountain or cyclone, really wants to survive.
But living beings do. They are a resistance to decay, an affirmation of being
there. If it wouldn’t tear apart the corpse of good old Martin (Heidegger), we
could call living being as “Dasein machine” (Dasein: German for being there).
So all these butterflies and monkeys, all these oaks and algae,
everybody that moves (or roots), is an instance of the primeval resistance to
decay. Now where life took its inspiration from? Well proteins are in the
business of folding themselves; folding and catalyse further reactions. One day
a protein folds a bit more and catalysed itself. Bang, life.
WHY did it happen?
Try to predict where the first gas-ball will appear in a boiling
pan, or the first crack in a glass under pressure, or the path of a drop of
water on a perfectly even surface. It is simply pure chaos, pure accident. A
folding protein was bending here and there and one day it went in a posture of
self-organizing replication. You can’t really take your eyes off a protein that…
After the appearance of the first self-replicating conglomerate,
you have essentially the random group which tends to survive, the one which is
indifferent and the one which drives towards annihilation.
Guess which one survives after few generations...
At the beginning all the starting conglomerate are equal: pure
chemistry, but in few duplication a selection of the program will start. The
program itself doesn't aim to anything: it is purposeless.
In few generations the program which casually benefit survival,
replicates more. In retrospective we can track down a winning lineage and we
can recognize a goal, a tendency to survive: here we are! The resistance to
decay.
Living beings are goal-oriented to their own survival and at the
same time this tendency is purposeless.
But proteins are not gods: they have some imperfections. And they
started to duplicate themselves with errors. Mistakes are the mother of
complexity: in few millions years you have amoeba’s descendants who wears Gucci
and talk to I-Pad. Any human brain is just the heir of those successfully
folding proteins.
Our wisdom and rationality is dissipating all the old stories and
finally we can see with clarity that our existence is purposelessly oriented to
avoid the painful sophisticated projection of acidic environments and to pursue
the wealth, the richness and the pleasure of sugary ones: properly speaking
human minds are hypertrophic amoeboid brains.
Congratulations human race, you reach a real image of yourself.
Now I suppose you’ll start to blab as usual about the fact that brains are
narrative and we are made of stories. It seems to me that after dissipation of
smokes and breaking of mirrors, stories are just an excuse to keep the dreaming on. Oh well, who I'm kidding, pass me another story!
