Tue 24 Dec 1996 15:48
[deadness.doc]

                                Deadness

Problem: What do I do?

The basic motivation of all individual organisms is to die. All living things do this without fail. Surely I shall die. While always my motivation to die is working, secondary to that there appears to be a motivation to live. This is less apparent and more hidden, because there is little I have to do in order to survive. But this motivation manifests itself in ways which prolong the fulfillment of my more basic motivation. For example, I am motivated to eat when food is available. I am motivated to fuck. This last does not seem to prolong my individual survival, but, if nature has its way, another organism will be produced, prolongning the gradual extinction of the species, and, perhaps, distracting me from my more basic goal of dying.

In spite of this basic motivation to die, people continue to live. Some, even, become so involved in living that they forget that their most basic purpose is to die. Others focus their entire being on the goal of dying, and, I have heard, are even able to spend several days buried alive (Pirsig, 1974). Even so, why do these not kill themselves? There seems to be no hurry among living things to die. Once you have achieved your ultimate goal, what else is there?

Here we see the universal conflict: All living things are motivated to die, yet all living things are the product of the species' motivation to live.

Perhaps we should consider further if the basic motivation of the species is to die. It may be that the species' most basic motivation is to live, and likewise, the most basic motivation of the individual members of the species must be to die, yet to live a while before they do, and to create more of themselves.

We should consider the nature of the species. This is not some unchanging category. The species I refer to has been all species. It is some powerful thing the parts of which are continually reproducing and dying, evolving something new. To what end?

There is, most likely, no end to consider, simply a process by which a greater complexity of order is produced.

The greatest organisms are those which have produced the greatest order from the greatest complexity.

Like Csikzentmihaly says, we like that most which increases our order, we like negentropic activities. It seems that the living organism, comprised of all living organisms, feels the same way. How does the universe feel? Yet it must be realized that the most ordered state for a living thing is death, for then there is no order or disorder either way, and, in fact, the most ordered state of the universe must have been its very beginning, when nothing was more ordered than another. This living thing seeks order in a different way, perhaps the wrong way, and that is why it is always motivated to continue on away from undifferentiability.

So we continue on away from undifferentiability, not actually making more order, but making more complexity. From what little I know of entropy, I will imagine that in the beginning of this present epoch, or any epoch, there was no differentiability. Gradually there came to be different areas in space, maybe time, you know, I am working on the acceptance of time. I don't know enough about einstein's weirdness if it is weird at all. Before there was life, there was life. There was this increasing differentiation. This does not seem to be the basic principle. We like more complexity and more order both, there can only be order if there is complexity, or differentiation. I guess then, the universe-organism is both becoming more disordered and and becoming more ordered. I mean, that has to happen. There cannot be order without disorder.

The human organism is nothing special really. It is, at once, a more ordered and disordered thing than ever before. It is a marvel that the things in our body have some order, that they work, yet we are so many different parts working together, not just our individual selves, but the sun and the earth and their relationship, and many more besides. It is more disordered because of the many more states that are possible because of its greater differentiation than ever before. Before there was only one thing, now there are many more different things. The different things combine to make still more different things, and more combinations are possible. Not only do I have more limbs than the sea slug, I can move them in many different ways. The trend does not seem to be greater order or disorder, but greater complexity, always.

As order requires disorder, so complexity requires simplicity. This inane language game I play pretending to come to some understanding, some more simple perception of the ever more complex environment. Before there may have been only mitochondria, only one part of the cell, or before there were only subatomic particles, how more simple could it be? Yet within the apparent simplicity of the world without life, or the group of subatomic particles, there is the full potentiality for the complex existence that is now. And so there is now this organism which can look back or look presently and wants to look for some simplicity in the apparent complexity. And both the simplicity and complexity are the same. Like life and death.

Can we continue to entertain this dualistic way of operating our understanding? An approach might be to consider in which state of the apparent dualism we are in and to act appropriately. This is difficult, because we are in neither. We are alive and dying, or we are the simple, progressing to the more complex. We cannot have greater simplicity without greater complexity.

Mixed up. There are more different things, but the less different things are being confined to certain positions. While there is more differentiation, there is more order, in that the less different things are stuck in specific times and places.

A baby learning language becomes more differentiated, but more ordered.

How could it be that things become more disordered, less differentiated over time? The idea is that any process in the universe is going from a higher energy level to a lower and energy is lost. This entropy business doesn't seem to be working.

I am getting no where.

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