Thursday, March 15, 2012

Words - the definitions of our stubborn ignorance

With our subjective conscious came something that has helped us but also deterred us in ways of the which we haven't even scratched the surface.  With this newly acquired awareness has come this insatiable desire to understand everything around us, and I commend this.  But the means by which we attempt this endeavor is sometimes ethologically, biologically, zoologically, physiologically, but always everythingically unfavorable.  There is this tendency of us to DEFINE everything in order to correctly catalog and understand it in our minds.  There is nothing wrong with this except that we also let our overly immature emotions decide that these definitions are irrevocable laws.  We cannot let our subjectivity fool us into thinking that we have some inherit right to control this world with our words and definitions.  Like I have stated in earlier articles, as far as subjectively conscious beings, we are the first ones and therefore the least experienced.  we are babies with our emotions just a new born is with its body. Yet we walk around spitting out words and enacting laws around them like we were Gandalf.

With this said I will do something reeking of such hypocrisy that you will want to take your computer and let your garbage pail devour it because it was tainted with my words.  I will take a word and use it completely out of the context to which we have grown so accustomed, and liberally paint it with a color many of you may never have seen before.  What I hope you notice is that what I do is anything but hypocritical.  

There are many laws that govern our physically visible, tangible life that we take for granted, precisely because they are physically visible.  I will use the law of correlation as an example simply because it is my current fascination.  No one will argue that there are correlating characteristics with the physiology of all species.  use Animals with longer heads tend to have longer legs as an example.  Lets get personal with us Homo-sapiens.  You have all heard the phrase "you know what they say about people with big feet".  That isn't just a comedic uttering, it has deep underlying truth.  whether what this particular example is referring to is true or not I will leave for the dogs to decide, but its principle can be seen in countless forms.   Red-heads being especially resilient to spicy food,  Clowns having big red noses that emit annoying sounds etc.  With the evolution of any particular characteristic, there seems to be a correlating characteristic that always evolves in sync.  

Now I will mush all these colors I have presented with my own.  Since words are just an attempt by us to understand our world, and they in no right are law, there is no reason I can't take the word "life" and apply it freely wherever I want.  As long as it is mutually understood that there is no law governing how I define something, and therefore every definition is up for revision, there should be no problem with me taking the word "life' and "culture" and making them one solid word.  Take all the nuances and assumptions we take with what is "life" and apply them to "culture".   This isn't radical or revolutionary.  Many people have played with this idea before.  No one would argue that a body is alive, but very few would say culture is alive in exactly the same way, but in my eyes there is no difference between the literal physiology of a culture and a human body.  Why can't they both be one and the same?  If they were it would make understanding one and the other a lot easier because we would have more information to draw from.  For example, Culture is made up of many things, one of the most important being  the living organisms within.  Our bodies are made up of many things, one of the most important being the living cells within.  This is just one observation that strongly supports life and culture being one and the same, and I made it while pooping.  If you delved deeper (into this idea, not the toilet ya goofball!!) I am sure you would dig up even more gems. 

But I don't want to go too much into this because my goal is to emphasize that I don't HAVE to.  The very essence of words and the definitions we have given them allows me to willy nilly do what I please with them.

We can use laws we take for granted in our conventional understanding of life to help us understand the more unconventional lifeforms like culture.  for example the law of correlation; what if there were similar connections within culture where if you changed one, another would follow in suit.  Many people have taken this law even further with our bodies by saying that the formation of a tooth is in direct correlation with how our femur and pinky toe and inner child are formed.  Why can't we do the same with culture.  it isn't that fantastic an idea.  George Soros unintentionally implemented this law when he made is billions in the stock market.  You do it every day when you smile at someone.  It has become common cultural knowledge that when you smile other people might treat you better.  It wasn't always this way just like we didn't always walk on two feet.  Culture evolves just like organisms do because it is alive just as organisms are.  Just imagine all the other similarities between our physical and cultural lives that if understood and managed correctly would change each one dramatically and then think; it might only be our stubborn faith to our definitions that blinds us from the fact.

P.S. They are intrinsically the EXACT SAME THING!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

P.P.S.  What correlations between cultural and physical organisms can you think of?

P.P.P.S. In case it wasn't clearly expressed, I am putting forth the possibility that a culture is a living organism.  As alive as the organism in which resides the eyes you are using to read this sentence.

4 comments:

  1. Ok, a few things.

    In that first paragraph, i would replace many of those "we"s with "I"; you are a curios person, but I have met people who intake norms, accept them to be true, and get on with life never wondering about questions like 'why?' or 'is this accurate?'.

    I don't know if culture could be defined as a living organism or not, but I will full heartedly assert that if you take many people, who behave like people, and put them together in another 'system' (like a culture or a corporation), that 'system' does not behave like an individual person - it behaves like a new organism.

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  2. Damn, this comment sparked something inside me that i need to communicate, but it will take a bit to find the right words. I will leave you in the meantime with this disclaimer: when I talk about the "I"s and the "we"s I am referring to an entity that is neither of the two. "I" and "we" and "you" and all the plethora of pronouns we have created have a huge amount of subjectivity that makes it impossible to correctly portray my objective goals, but for my dependance on convenience I stuck with them. I think It must be understood that when I talk about "us" I am acting under the opinion that "we" are all inherently void of any form of personal volition, that all we do comes from some deep form of programming dating back countless generations, So whether of not a person consciously asks a "why" question doesn't excuse that person from my "we" category for this category is void of conscious thought. every organism's underlying purpose is the same regardless to how different each one appears to do it. I must understand this stance more, but for now this is all I got.

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  3. An individual person isn't individual from the cells point of veiw, just as a cell isn't individual from the genes point of veiw and so on. so flip in reverse and you could justify the individualism of any organism that consists within of an multi-facet cooperation of "smaller" organisms. It is seemingly never-ending which makes me feel like I am in the twilight zone. or a room full of mirrors.

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  4. person is just an intimate term we use for organism.

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