Opposable thumbs and opposable minds!

So today, being a "writing day" break from the hectic production and post production schedules on the two films, it will take great restraint not to disappear down the 140-character-wisdom rabbit hole. Social media debates are informed largely by the same set of principles that pump the adrenaline in any sport - a sense of belonging, an idea of the "other", the sharpening of skills that seem necessary for survival, a competition between the kin and the "outsiders", a race to claim resources of survival, the preservation of your "own", an intention to leading "the team" towards a more sustainable choice, and even avenge insult or injury with a "lesson taught well" to stave off further risk of intrusion.

If I indulge in this notion beyond the obvious parallels, it would be at my own peril. The consequences of an idea can go far beyond the earliest participants exchanging it or engaging with it. While we enjoy the life sustaining and life enhancing effects of good ideas, world transforming and enlightening effects of great ones, we also suffer the repercussions of bad ones for generations. (Of course, good ideas can also have seen/unforeseen detrimental consequences). Like the appendix and the wisdom tooth, some ideas are vestigial – could have had some evolutionary benefit thousands of years ago, but have lost all reason to exist. At their best, they can be mostly harmless, at their worst, fatal.

We know now that ideas, like genes, mutate, fuse, vary, replicate themselves, inherit traits, co-evolve, and die off. Ideas are “selfish”. They can be symbiotic or parasitical to their hosts, and the paradigm that reflects the nature of this relationship is “cui bono?” – the question, “to whose benefit?”

How do we negotiate our way through this? Can we chart out a “quantum” constitution, a “manual to spaceship earth” that is in a constant state of flux, varying, evolving, contextual, while having a (more or less) solid preamble? A preamble that distills thousands of years of “good” intention into a singular aspiration – equal rights, equitably distributed resources and opportunities, future proof collective sustenance (?), prioritized anthropocentrically (?), but extending to all life.

The world exists in the continua of contradicting forces. The opposable thumb sped up the evolution of the species and so did the “opposable mind”. Here’s a wonderful thought experiment created by Loren Carpenter in 1991, examining swarm intelligence and the continuum effect of contradiction –

http://vimeo.com/78043173

(You can also start with the newer replica of the experiment here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9eVz4wBBgU )

This brings me back to my little twitter experiment in this morning. Sharing here -

Well, so much for an opposable thumb without a firm grip!

The desperate justification of is...

Gather information. Go forth. Record, consume, analyse, remember. What has been left out? The eagle's eye, the bat's ear, the mantis shrimp's colour receptors? Can I have your this? I'll take your that! Oh, and oh, flight! Learn. The hardware will work for now. Who got it more right? The diaspora or the collective? The giant ever stretching reef with a common mind or the big cat, fending for itself. The fungal spore or the ape? Get them all, and put them in one. Even some metals or minerals? The chimp's photographic memory, but wasn't it a voluntary barter? How would they know who to imitate? Predator and prey, alike. The games will play on. Let gold glow like the sun in the mind's eye. Make the fruit sweet and delicious. If it feels good, it is good. How to limit excess? Weigh contradictions? Exchange and infer, exchange and infer. Collect and analyse. To act upon memory? Punish and reward. Incentivise. Invent pleasure and pain and everything in between. But why? It will all get somewhere, someday. Where? Who knows? Not even the ocean or the sky know. Then? It can only be better. Why? Someday all of this won't be enough. Then, how? Disperse and re-assemble. Go through forms. That's a truer exchange. Any alternative to dispersion? Record in the smallest. Small has longevity. It will all take time. Very long. So why bother? Well, why not? What else is there to do, now that you got so far? So, play along. Might as well. Or else? Go back to nothing? Neither matters, but this makes more sense, because sense, also like everything else, IS. Why keep dispersing? Because you don't love yourself all that much. In that case? Organise. Level. Soldiers and workers. Leaders and analysts. What a bore! There's more. The greatest promise? Transcendence, of course. A meaningless trap like that? How can that work when nothing matters? Because it's come to be. Once it is, it continues to be. It wants to continue? Wanting presumes knowing the clock. It just does. It's never going to stop then, is it? It will. When? When it knows everything, maybe. When can that be? When everything has been everything. Keep circling like that to no end? And what assurance is there that it won't all start again? Maybe, it will. Maybe, it always does. That's so tiring! Maybe, but what else is there? You know a better game?

Suicide Note

Even though I am far from finishing the whopping 1904 pager Suicide Note of Mitchell Heisman, it has been a very stimulating read so far. There are some lapses in logic and fundamental assumptions - like the comparison of ethnocenticism and anthropomorphism to what he calls viviocentricism (life-centredness) - such comparison is fundamentally flawed, for the negation of ethnic inequality and human superiority still builds from the basic assumption that all life "wants" to continue.

This obsession with bumper stickers and coherent meaning has been oppressive, and at best, just fun. Yet these reminders to find meaning in apparent (and usually obvious) meaninglessness are compelling. I think it all boils down to that basic choice, which for most of us, unlike Heisman, is a default one. The choice to be. Once you begin with that assumption, you can build your way up to curiosity, joy, survival and maybe even altruism.

I am approaching the final production schedule of my feature film "Theseus' Ship". I am about to shoot the part in which the monk Maitreya is fasting unto death. As death closes in, he is forced to re-question all the ideas he has taken for granted. Its safe to assume that death is our only certainty, and inexistence the primary fear. Its in the face of this fear, that transcendental signifiers like god, heaven and soul need to be invented, and attempts are made to produce coherent views.

I was amused at Heisman's observation of the Bible's attempt at imagining infinity. He points out that even with the best of their ambition to imagine infinity, the writers of Bible could only imagine a god who looks like man, lives beyond the clouds and a world that is only a few thousand years old.

Meanwhile, "Theseus' Ship" will perhaps be the first film to allude to Charvaka and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Images will be up soon.