Creation, Complexity, & Living the Imagined Life (Recycled Thoughts)

What follows is another post I wrote quite some time ago.  In the process of discarding my Tumblr blog I'm trying to salvage a few of the thoughts/writings which still resonate with me.  So here is another of those recycled blog posts:

Lately I’ve had a few thoughts that continue to rattle around in my head. I’m definitely not the first to have such thoughts but maybe I can add something, pass it on, and keep adding to a larger/expanding bank of people having similar thoughts This may not be related to either tattooing or biking, but it is my blog and I’ll make the rules around here.

I keep thinking about the act of creating something, creating absolutely anything. We’ve reached this evolutionary point in which we can have a concept, a thought, something that has no physical form, and we can manifest that non-physical idea into the physical world. This simple concept blows me away when I really think about it. We are living in a world created by our imaginations. For the most part we’ve separated from nature and live in these small thought experiments known as cities and towns. Within those cities are our homes, within them are all of our belongings … all of these objects/structures began as nothing at all; nothing more than a firing of electrical pulse somewhere within our little brains. Through all of our human ingenuity these ethereal ideas are now existing in the physical realm. What is going on here?

We take it all for granted. We pass things off as “oh, it’s just your imagination”. What does that mean? It’s all “just our imagination”. And now we’re testing the waters and manipulating nature on a more intricate level. Modifying plants and animals. We’ve taken control of our immediate human environment, what comes next?

There’s been a long standing idea of separating humanity from nature. We can be down on humanity all that we want but it all pushes towards more and more complex systems. Our human brains are by far the most complex creation of nature on this planet. We’re taking the abstract and making it physical. We’re evolving at a bizarrely fast rate. The gene is no longer the quickest form of coding out there. The thought has taken over. The idea of Dawkins’ meme as the vehicle for transferring information is a far more direct and explosive passage of information than the physical process of reproduction. The gene is the physical transfer (which takes generations), the meme is the non-physical transfer (which takes the time for light to reach your eyes or sound to reach your ears). And the ideas can be passed on quicker and quicker (through all forms of media) to an ever expanding audience, which continues to speed up the process exponentially. We take it for granted and just accept these changes but let’s take a step back and look at life ten years ago, twenty years ago … could we have imagined where we are now? We can communicate our every thought instantaneously to people on the other side of the earth through text messaging, the internet, the telephone, facetime, and so on. We’re all getting more and more connected, the hive is buzzing at an ever increasing rate.

Still, our technology is cumbersome in comparison to nature but we’re getting smaller/faster at an ever increasing rate. Nature has it down far more than we usually give credit … DNA is by far the greatest information storage device out there. A single human contains an astounding 200,000,000,000,000 meters of DNA (that’s 2 x 10 to the 13th power). That is the equivalent of nearly 70 trips from the earth to the sun and back. We usually feel as though we have a pretty good understanding of what’s going on but truly we only understand 2 or 3 percent of what that DNA is coding for. The other 97 – 98 % is known as “junk DNA”. Our technologies unconsciously mimic the structures seen in nature, the patterns are eerily similar. It all seems to be heading somewhere. Not in the sense of a master plan orchestrated by one mind which is conscious of all the results/possibilities. We all play out little role which ends up adding to something far greater.

The idea of humans versus nature is a common one. Ultimately we are a creation of nature. The ever increasing complexity, the manifestation of physical forms stemming from non-physical thought patterns, the speed of transferring information. These all seem to be the unconscious aims of humanity, they also seem to be the unconscious aims of nature. Of course there are uncountable ills created by our incessant urge to move forward … in a lot of ways we are destroying our planet. It all starts to seem like a race. The evolution of our thoughts is racing against the greed for resources (which out thoughts have created). The optimistic view would be that at some point our knowledge will surpass out greed and we’ll be able to exist in whatever utopia our thoughts create next. It’s a stage of transition and it all seems to be ramping up at an ever increasing rate. This life things continues to get more an more interesting.

Having said all of that, I’ll go back to creating on my own very small, very personal scale. From mind to paper, it’s such a perfect and rudimentary example of all that I’m talking about.