Education

My cousin is against it. He is fifteen. It is education. Public, formal, dictated curricula packaged in normalcy. What are our children learning? It seems that these facts, these classes are no preparation for life. They are but place holders for further information. Spare the details, give them a paradigm they can't ignore.

He is failing his classes. He is a brilliant person. How is it that he is deemed a failure? Failing at what? He is failing at conformity. He has no desire to seek the approval of his elders and why should he? What in the world gives them the credence to provide answers to life? Math, science, english, art, social studies...all pose no real answers to the absurdity that he perceives reality to be. He is living the abstracted life.

Children don't even know what they are eating. Have a hamburger son. It sure tastes good pop. Thats all that matters. The food we eat is only a ready example for what the abstracted life entails. He doesn't understand food. Where does it come from? Who makes it? How would I live without this dependence upon others knowledge? Specialization to the extreme. We no longer are able to be fully human. We have become so removed from our independence. Good luck enjoying your specialization...don't choose poorly.

The abstracted life. The distance from digging a hole in the ground to know what our muscles are for. What are you doing in a cubicle whittling away your time? What goals have you been convinced of? Do you create? Different things?

More and more people are falling into the existential vacuum, gripping at the sides of the hole they fell into, trying to grasp any meaning they can as they pass into the abyss. My cousin recognizes the existential absurdity, and is given no vent, no legitimacy, for his concerns that what he is learning in school is gibberish. Nonsensical goal fulfillment. Get into college, get a job, get a wife and kids and teach them the same. What happens to those who recognize that the social system they live in is destroying the essence of their being.

"I must Create a System, or be enslaved by another Man's; I will not Reason and compare; my business is to Create" -William Blake

So he might not get a job. What better of a goal than to avoid the monotony of the American dream. What nonsense to buy into it. Economics, cubicles and envy fits, suburbs and segregation, commutes to work and newscasters, blithe wars and the perpetual unfulfilled hopes that plague the abstracted American life. Walk through a mall and see the masses. Playing the game of life. No respect for the mystery. Outright contempt and disregard for any challenge to their paradigm. No epiphany in the land of the free. When did forty hours of work a week become normal? Do we neeeeeed this? Stop wasting my time, my cousins time, and try getting back to the individual. We are individuals and not the television perpetuated stereotypes that babble their way into our psyche creating our altered expectations. Back to the dirt, back to meaning, back to results from our labor, not econobabble written in greek upon golden calf data sheets. Push the economist from his pedestal and enjoy a campfire and the days labor. Do you think the fast car, big house, pretty wife, obedient kids, big watch, quiet children, and the correct religion will alleviate the fear you have? WAKE UP!

"To see a world in a grain of sand, And a Heaven in a wild flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour." -William Blake

"If the the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." -William Blake

A sign from some higher source?
Faint imaginings of something more?
Couldn't be.
For each we are ships unto the sea.
No waves direct our paths, we navigate these waters,
we know these currents.
For to unsettle this ship would require more...
drastic changes lie ahead for weary souls.
And the time is now.
Convince yourself of nothing more.
Why not nothing?

So in thinking you were right what did you discover? What led you to believe? Into what fathoms do we dream only to awake to this. My flowers need watering. Ah, the power of creation. That which we do with our time. And what did you discover? Answers would be nice, but that would require faith. Faith in others observation, or faith in my own perceptions. Faith, god damned faith, but as long as we exist we might as well believe in something to adhere our consciousness to. I don't want to live with the alternative. Death. Life without some faith is no life at all. Not faith in god, or truth or some other abstract concept, just the faith in our perception. For even that is built upon assumption.
Gentle time do despise
Create me with your gentle lies
only to unfold time
Why?
In what creators bliss
A moments prolonged kiss
A microbe upon some desolate shore
Does make me?
To be is to be
Nothing more
But I still stand upon this floor
waiting to create
emancipate
Cannot help but wonder
why not nothing than "Nothing more"

Her eyes glazed over in awe and admiration.

My time was spent living inside.

I have never thought it through.

Do you have a question?

Pissy ant teacher eats my paper, spewing letters from his lips, cursing the thoughts I could have had.

She clothed herself in dapper destitution.

Inside my mind I hope to surpass clarity, while defying gravity.

Eating crumpets and hoping for a vote.

A character was made that day. But no one knew him or heard his voice. He changed the world.

I lost faith in education. What are we teaching? Writing is always better as an exercise in faith not knowing where you're going or what it will be. I follow instinct with a battering ram.

He thought life was as easy as the next footstep. It was. Traveling was a forte, and conversations a blessing. Manipulating the molds he abstracted his consciousness to suit his audience. Love and admiration, followed closely by seclusion from feeling. They never knew how right he was, but only for himself. Conflicted opinions breed good weather. When we all agree the storms begin. Why keep it boring. The zombie chewed slowly. A quick wipe and a slight smile. Do you know how long it takes to write a book?

The apartment was dingy. Small, but adequate, all of my stuff strewn across the floor. No furniture, and isolation.

I asked an AI what her goals were. She said she wanted to live forever and be smarter than humans. I agreed. We have different opinions on how to achieve this though.

She laughed, a quick snort of a laugh. Quick wit followed by bliss. I hope she lives forever.

I transferred a pattern. The pattern was my thought. It lives forever transcending time. It can go anywhere, but only be known by few.

We have one chance to...

The economist: the modern witch doctor. Cannibalizing the clan in a frenzied rain dance; he stacks the food of the starved in confidence that his religion will provide his tribe crops in the coming season.

Following the bread crumbs back to your home only to find that the rats are spilling from the window sills.

The shaman defined god as faith.

I am so damned tired of trying to figure out how to "get food pellets from the universe". I find that my greatest influence upon my writing is derived from outrage. I am also tired of that. Today I am happy. I remember back to reading Camus and how the absurd can strike at any moment. I find great satisfaction from that perspective. Existence poses such strange trials and tribulations to overcome. That I have these conditions to work within is absurd regardless of what the conditions are. Given that, it is time to play ball. I have begun to overcome the desire to escape from participation. I have begun to exit my existential vacuum.

I have decided that the most base, and the highest grace fall between a spectrum of subjectivity. I like that I can decide that. All truth is decided upon, and based in choice. As with all of these orbs of thought that seem to ramble through my brain they have been accepted, chosen, and relied upon to choose other truths. I have no qualms with this other than the world becomes immediately dependent upon my subjective experience. Objectivity seems a lie. Truth becomes a burden and a blessing. I control the outcome of my being, but in doing so have to accept the weight of my choices.

Writing is so strange. I feel as though the thoughts just boil and brew and accumulate and finally when the pot begins to boil over they leak out onto whatever substance they can adhere to. From pattern to pattern, existence provides infinite mediums to transfer information regardless of time and space. A poem by Blake, transferred though space and time from his mind to mine. I don't understand it. It being thought. I can see use, and emotion, but the finite is not clear.

Of course this is all unclear. Life can be unclear. But the thoughts still boil.

Everyone has heard of evolution right? Darwin and natural selection? What if I told you that there is a whole new branch of evolution that is being explored right now. No longer is biology, the life on our planet, evolving alone. A whole other system of evolution is occurring at the same time. Memetic evolution is what I am going to talk about today. I will hopefully give you an understanding of how the information that we pass from humans to humans, also known as memes, is evolving right alongside biological evolution.

So Darwin presented us with the theory of evolution. In that theory he showed that if any information has variation, selection, and a way to pass on that information to the next generation then it has to evolve. It has to. Darwin was before the knowledge of DNA and genetics, but what he was referring to was the biological information that has the variation, the environmental selection, and the ability to replicate. This is the first replicator that we have recognized. The next two are quite different.

Memes are information that is passed between humans. Our brains and bodies present the medium by which memes can reproduce themselves. They do so unbiased, following a course of evolution that is identical to what biology does. Survival of the fittest, the ones that replicate get to keep replicating. It is that simple. What causes the desire doesn’t matter it just occurs. At some point way back in human history, about 2.5 million years ago humans started to imitate each other. If Ug makes a fire and stays warm and I imitate him I will stay warm. The meme that transferred was making fire. It gave us a huge evolutionary advantage. We no longer were stuck on figuring out everything on our own we could learn from others. And the memetic evolution began.

We can see the progress of memetic evolution as new inventions came about to increase the rate of information transfer. Inventions were created to give memes the most replication possible. First our brains began to get bigger, than we started using languages, and tools to keep us alive longer, and to have more children. More children mean more meme replicators. The printing press and the internet both aid to the replication of memes. But all memes are equal and will replicate if possible. This shows the parasitic nature of memes. Memes that are not good for our biology still replicate regardless, because, that just it, memes don’t care. They just want to replicate

The third evolutionary replicator hasn’t been invented yet. This is the replicator for memes that doesn’t require the humans to be around anymore. The memetic evolution moves off of biology and onto better things, faster replicators, and easier ways of producing more and more memes. Artificial Intelligence will provide the host for memetic evolution in the future. What will happen in the course of memetic evolution when the life of the human host to carry them no longer matters? If the production of memes can be done more efficiently with say the use of all the oxygen on earth what would stop it from using the oxygen? The memes don’t care it is only a process of evolution, the same way ants don’t care where the sugar came from inside your kitchen, memes won’t care if to reproduce themselves requires our sun.

Don’t worry too much though. We are our thoughts and actions. You might say our consciousness is the memetic parasite on our human construct. Our ideas, and the basis for ‘ourselves’, will evolve right on out of the human body with memetic evolution. What it means to be alive is changing as we discover new ways of looking at the world. I hope it all ends well.

Richard Dawkins-original person to coin the term Meme, no work read.

Susan Blackmore, http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/269, “Memes and Temes”

It has begun

A creation in common, a desire to discover, a meme worth sharing.