Hello,
Firstly, welcome to all subscribers new and old. I appreciate all your engagement. Although this may not come across obviously, I am more grateful to you than you probably think. For allowing me the indulgence of hope.
I’m currently travelling, so won’t be able to publish anything fresh this week. What I do have however are volumes of failed articles. Sifting through this trash mountain of penned failure, I came across perhaps one of the most embarrassing things I’d ever tried to create.
I originally performed the below as a reading. Like those history channels on youtube that use dialogue to talk you through an historical event or epoch. Or put a story to an archaeological discovery. I recorded it with voice, added sound effects and dramatic droning music for epic effect. I even threw in “Also Sprach Zarathustra” for the last segment. My own homage to the chimps circling the monolith. This whole recording was initially meant as an intro to that nervous system podcast I did.
For sure we can all be our own harshest critics; and in this case I felt that harshness was entirely justified. I turned tomato red on first listening to it. Draft 1 was beyond saving. So I tried again. And again, even with the extreme sexual powers inherent to my psycho-spiritual esoteric voice, I still ended up feeling like I should kick myself in the goolies. For attempting something innocent and fun like the dull-witted peasant I really am.
“Ridiculous!” I screamed at my computer screen. Enraged and humiliated I binned the second file.
Fear engulfed me at any thought of potential release. The sunk time for nothing was a better option. Aristocratic dank memelords - those with such refined tastes in humour that they’re now only capable of laughing at jokes about genocide - would rightly have a field day with me. I simply couldn’t commit this to the eternal online record. Given the subject matter, I also felt I couldn’t risk some wandering innocent digital neural network accidentally sucking it up. Thereby turning into an unfunny, roly-poly jerk because of it.
Now with the emotional respite of distance from this whole thing…and time on my hands in this freezing cold hotel room with no working temperature control, I’ve chosen to reprint the script below. If you’re game to read it.
I did a tonne of research into early forms of life, arousal and game theoretical approaches to understanding what drives biological life. I even plumbed the depths of the habits of the average person. Norms. This was a great sacrifice for me. It seems a shame that this paltry, rather silly set of words and story-line is all that came out of the great pain self-inflicted from that investigation.
In truth, I think it doesn’t give a bad overview about how, in a way, we’re really a kind of clumsy, lumbering conglomerate-kludge of ancient circuits and process-mechanisms. At best, relatively recent adaptions and tinkerings of much much older things, haphazardly and cheaply thrown together into a no-frills service-bot for devilish, potentially immortal genetic coils. A sort of kindergarten cardboard science project, sticky-taped together into a “just good enough” frankensteins monster of a creature.
Many of the things that make us feel like “wow look at what I can do” are really hundreds of millions of years old things that we had nothing to do with at all. Other than from a point of commonly held delusion, we still don’t have anything direct to do with how they function. According to the growing fossil record inarguably things we have because of our ancient pond-scum ancestors. Who we refuse to thank.
Look at this this way. Arousal is primordial. As cells clumped together like milk left out in the sun for too long, neural nets and early brains seemed to have started as a kind of house of representatives. A metaphorical parliament house managing the priorities of the greater community. So everyone got a say according to their sway.
The more complex hodge-podge forms became over time, the more complex and bureaucratic the brains, or governing bodies, needed to be. To manage the processual priorities of the communitay. Underneath it all, what drives it are powerful ancient arousals and energies compelling us forwards. To new succulent mats of scum buildup. New horizons. Now a succulent Chinese meal. Though some have returned to tradishun, to sludge as a supplement I’m told.
Of the ancient oceans.
Of course the work presented here at this blog I consider to be a re-engagement with the primordial. Coming into contact and integrating the prime matter - so to speak. So a deep dive into the deep waters of the deep past certainly pays dividends in this respect. And scientists have come a long way.
It’s boggles the mind no one ever talks about it and works it into their world-views. It’s a bit like how no-one ever speaks about the implications of split-brain studies, preferring to continue on in a straight-line as an irredeemable wordcel. Or some other form of delusional loser.
But here we are. Our nature is truly that we are beings of intertia, as I keep saying. We are lazy. Like our energy conserving sea cucumber ancestors, we too prefer to float listlessly in luke-warm puddles, only occasionally getting expressing excitation when coming across sustenance or a mate. So…it’s not really so surprising…
Without further ado I present the script here. Feel free to take the piss out of me below.
Back next week…
"I want to you to imagine, 3.5 billion years ago, floating around the a primordial soup, as a bacterium, specifically the Cyanobacteria, perhaps you are one of these, certainly you’ve inherited parts of the features of these lifeforms…
The atmosphere at that time of course, being mostly devoid of oxygen, very high in methane content, and extremely warm sometime, perhaps up to a temperature of 85 degrees celsius or as the savages amongst you refer to it, Fahrenheit, about 180 or so maybe more.
The earths rotations period was perhaps only 15 or so hours, and you needed to develop a way, some think, to assist with your desire of expansion, cellular division and other sensitive processes, and so you need some time to escape from the light. And so, you develop a circadian rythmn to account for the rotation of the earth, at 15 hours, and the need for cellular division under condition of less light.
And in the cyanobacterial brethren that harbour the development of the circadian clock, where its period matches with that of the light and dark cycle, showed better reproductive fitness, and soon enough, this feature was to be found in a distant relative, in the hypothalamus.
Perhaps 2.8 billion years later, during the Ediacaran epoch, you are reborn, as a reified immortal soul, as a distant relative, a member of the bilateral clade, you are named the Kimberella, and as the supine jelly mollusc, probably member of the protostomes, lacking all spine, but proud member of a neural net family. You eat backwards, aroused by the delicacies of the rich Cambrian microbial mat, that you greedily sink your pair of bore teeth into.
The neural net of course excited you when pond scum is about, and also when a female is around, in the form of some kind of type of proto-arousal effector systems, and you too
the ability to detect physical contact or flow change and the ability to distinguish diverse chemical cues. Responses to these inputs would generally have been mediated on short timescales through movement and on longer timescales through physiological changes, gamete maturation and pro- duction of stress response molecules. Photosensing was likely much less important to Cryogenian than later animals, and was perhaps limited to orientation, establishing circadian rhythms, and locating appropriate habitats.
600 million years later, as your immortal reified bacteria supine jelly soul is now inhabiting a complex collective of processes that a quirk of hyperthermic self-consciousness and consequent ability to self reference for the sake of environmental orientation and memory based caulcaitons, refers to itself as Norml
ACCORDING TO YOUR ANCIENT hypothalamic suprachiasmatic nuclei, send signals to the brain, arousal you inherited unknowingly, ancient nuclei you ungratefully inherit, your sleep systems operate via clock gene oscillations in brain tissues
the same that were in the primitive bacterial ancestors, in accordance with the sun, your eyes, inherited from the beginning of the Cambrian explosion, open and you roll over. These ancient neuronal structures, now located in a newly adapted primate brain with a larger neo-cortex than your chimp brethren, which incidentally you refuse to acknowledge being true,
sending messages through the brain steam into the nervous system, indicating that some processes are to down regulate - some to up.
You notice powerful arousal circuits have been working during your sleep, but much less often so even you’re surprised, say compared to your youth.
Your visual system, by way of your simian brains left side Inferior frontal gyrus, the hemispheric additions themselves indicate to your memory centres that there’s you’re wife. The mere sight of this fat bundle off drives and processes, with its insatiable appetite and boundless desire to graze, supping upon glucose and fat rich food sources, self-referentially referred to as…
Pru…Prudence…instantly your arousal circuits flip to stress responses, sending messages to your endocrine system by way of your relatively sophisticated neural nets, as the drives crash against the rocks of reasoned expectations,moving from excitation to mild resentment and stress, as various memories flood your norm-mind.
This female bundle of drives is still far beyond your idealised vision in terms of it’s size. You’ve asked her on multiple occasions to have respect for herself primarily, but also you. You remember utilising language, primate sounds, to express your unpleasant internal state. You feel an affective state of resentment, and also mild disgust, as the extra weight she’s carrying dictates that she snores like a geriatric walrus.
You face a choice.
For sure, uncertainty yields surprises, which are bad for you as a biological systems because they can be stressful, and the surprise that you experience, the model you have of your Pru versus the reality of the graziers current condition is creating stress. The feedback mechanism streams through your neural net, central nervous system.
Should I stay here, remain immobile and let the drives get the better of me? There is a heightened breath rate, heart rate, with a hot feeling streams throughout the body, and it is signalling something - no that you’re aware of it.
Or will I do what all NORMS love to do. You have a temporal sense of the future after all, a new adaption, in which you anticipate you will be engaging in one of the primary, proudly held rituals of your species - you will be “grilling” in line with the .
The drive needs to express itself, and so, setting your tissues in motion, a sense of annoyance and resentment is quickly replaced by strong emotions of pride, as you stare at your ride on mower.
A delightful bio-skrying experience as i read your intelligent bio-graphic insight. Thanks