Branch Pattern, Last Light . . .
On the road in the American Northwest.
Branch Pattern, Last Light . . .
On the road in the American Northwest.
FOUR METAPHYSICAL MINIATURES
(I)
We shape the world and the world shapes us.
Just as an excess of sugar and salt in the diet drives
appetite into the much-will-have-more of culinary runaway,
an excess of sex and violence drives film and TV into the
obsessive frenzy of too-much-is-never-enough.
Evidently, imbalance seems strongly to favor a kind
of synergistic co-evolution in multiple, parallel dimensions
simultaneously. Either way, junk food for the eye, or cheap
thrills for the tongue, both are not just, as the saying goes,
'tasteless.' More importantly, they leave us with the sad,
ever-dissatisfied feeling of self-abuse, an abuse which
quickly degenerates into the most hard and fast form
of cultural habit.
So the salt & sugar man develops hand in hand with
the couch potato sex & violence connoisseur, verily an
evolving subset of a potentially new species, an
Homo seduto shall we say. Yes, "Man with his ass
glued to the seat of a chair."
(II)
We shape the world and the world shapes us.
From the ecological, energy household perspective,
a deficit of input—especially of an absolute necessity—
may become a major force or driver behind creative
leaps of the evolutionary process. Who is to say that the
wings of flight were not adaptations to the fact of great
distances between ever-scarcer sources of water?
(III)
We shape the world and the world shapes us.
Humans are the only species that does not live in a
world of fact. Think of it. We do not really directly see
the world as it is, but rather as a complex map-like
representation. A cattleman's, a goldminer's, a developer's,
an ecologist's or a conservationist's map or representation
of exactly the same territory will look very different. That
is because they each abstract or draw out from any given
territory a different set of what they see as potentially
relevant facts.
Because we possess this extraordinary capacity to create
an unlimited supply of these alternative representations,
each with their own varying degree of truth content, we
are also provided with a unique and unlimited opportunity
to falsify, ignore, deny or lie about facts. That is, as long
as we can get away with it.
So we play false, largely because of some form of self-
interest, both individually and collectively, with our great
natural gift of representation. The task of Philosophy and
Metaphysics is to help clean up the game.
(IV)
We shape the world and the world shapes us.
Adaptation? A million solutions to a single problem—
change to fit the fact.
II.20.2009,
Snow Wiki Camp,
Eagle Cap Wilderness,
