What really are THE BASICS–
nature of the world we are born into,
the reality experienced, observed, felt,
contemplated, studied, contemplated,
felt, known 1st hand, unknown 1st hand:
…mind…life…setting…self…?
One fundamental seems to be not just SCALE, the fact that multiple scales exist, each order of magnitude more or less distinct unto itself in that location, but that these MULTIPLE SCALES exist EVERYWHERE & in EVERYTHING SIMULTANEOUSLY, as a characteristic of form, matter, spacetime & relationship. (As one uncle liked to say, “That’s a some meatball!”) Now throw in mass & vibration, effects of gravity & musical scale.
Leave the cosmic orders aside for the moment, along with the largely conceptual sub-atomic particulates (indirectly imagined “not-quite-entities” like quarks, strings, loops, leptons, sleptons kleptons &/or whatever); the undeniably most basic aspects of actual reality we mortals encounter must be the direct sense of experience where mind, life & self meet, including sensation (comfort, discomfort; pleasure, pain; etc.) along with a sense of relationship –felt on a spectrum from wholeness to abandonment, being lost & disoriented to being part of a functional whole, with infinite variation in associated emotions between.
Although we feel aspects of it in experience, the IDEA of life is mostly a conceptual abstraction. Self, being so close & personal, seems to end up being just as elusive & hard to pin down. Setting (location in space, time, & scale) at first seems to be the most objectively definable–until reality shows us the many degrees of otherwise, i.e., the many forms of trans-locality, psychological & technological, possibly being tips of that quantum-scale iceberg-ocean with permeable borders, if any. About as local as we get, the very air drawn in with each breath is from someplace else, many places, with molecules from anywhere & everywhere. Same for most foods, clothes, supplies in your chains.
Even more so for language, communication, technology, ideas, science, culture…our own thoughts…. But what does “our own” mean? Inside our heads? In our immediate surroundings? Typed onto the website that exists anywhere? When it comes to ambiguity in location, mind takes the cake. Whether thinking of or speaking with a far-off partner; contemplating light-sources billions of imagined light years distant; chasing a high fly ball; or simply gazing through a window at birds coming & going in the backyard, it’s not easy to define the exact extent, location or limits of the mind. A brain may be precisely mapped & located in conventional spacetime–not the mind, which roams dimensions real, conceptual & imaginary.
Mind is actual, at hand, & directly observable at this very moment you use & experience it now, yet remains intangible, hard to put one’s finger on, let alone grasp its ultimate source, mechanisms & meaning in the universe. In the case of air, we can describe the relation between an individual’s immediate air source & the surrounding air drawn from & returned, along with the complex global patterns in constant flux. In the case of mind, there are analogous volumes of variables affecting minds in relation to one another.
In the relatively simple case of the birds in my yard, awareness each has of the other overlaps the mental space, affecting feelings, states, & actions. I move slightly to catch a better view–one flock bolts in unison, having picked up a quick glance of being seen by a being for whom intent’s unknown. On the other hand, various others have remained behind, more familiar with their seed-&-suet source. The flock that left did so as a single mind, expression of a single shared thought & sense of movement in space, returning more like one-by-one. Our minds affect each other as they interact in countless ways.
Mind, life & self melt into (& out of?) each other, but seem essential parts of all organisms. Need we specify living organisms? All three terms, as well as organic nature of organisms, already specify living, however imperfectly defined, let alone understood. “We know it when we see it.” “We’ll see it only after we know it.” I love many origin stories, some possibly as insightful as we get. But in the end, who really knows the mind-self-organism meatball, what it is, where it comes from, what happens when the self goes out (a night on the town, an eternity of all-in-nothingness, or something in between)?
Who truly knows the nature, purpose, extent, & implications of life or mind in the universe. (Presumably a small percentage of those who truly believe they know….) The mind’s own capacity to know is likely the biggest, deepest mystery, even to itself. A blind-chance materialist may follow its evolutionary emergence from “natural selection” &/or from neuro-genetic translations through form & function, structural & metabolic correlates, with or without grasping larger meanings & their implications, including the nature of the mind, whether seeking to know, or believing it does.
In the case of life, for example, from a purely mental, conceptual, objective perspective, life may be no more than a planetary infection, however common or rare in the cosmos at large, more or less routinely disinfected by cosmic forces, whatever you want to call the rays. We feel earth-life is far more & better, however, even sacred, beauty-filled, with wonder, grace & even love, starting perhaps with mother & place, land & companions…extensions of the semi-sentient self time flows through awhile–blink of an eye– (then pie in the sky) (beat our wings & off we fly) (dust & ashes by & by)….
Ah! Now (i.e., soon) we can ask a super A.I.! (to be continued). [11/1/2023]