688
dating back to a hominin physiognomy wherein the tongue, palate, sandstorm of
sighs are mere murmurs against a Milky Way that does not so much as whisper. Not
a single ancestor that exerts anything remotely cognitive. The real “data” is before
science (Fig. 75.1).
What meaning have we contrived that should give us to actually believe some
natural selection works on our ideas or elevates instinct in the manner of apotheosis? It is no reach to compare our social antics to a global shuffleboard of sub-atomic
particles randomly skittering upon glazed, non-reflective surfaces. Distractions of
life and death, and of a host of other categories, we cannot fully reconcile. While a
philosophy consumed by the forbidden cities, entrances, and exits of no-meaning
has little appeal to a species that squirms restlessly, there is also no good reason to
discount the essence of all probability. That equation is an equal sign in whatever
contest of delusions, out of which we might wonder whether something does not
come of nothing.
Imagine if it were true, and if truth herself could hold on long enough to make
contact. The question What would it mean? has no context, no preparatory ground
upon which to launch a formal enquiry. There is, again, nothing but the empty wonderment, and empty it indeed is. We have no reason to delegate substance to consciousness, however furiously we attempt to trace its origins, loci, gene markers, or
specific nerve endings. The brain belabors itself, millennium after millennium, to
no effect.
Yet, at any instantaneous juncture of wonderments we can easily posit a suspicion that is grand and elaborate. This vacuum of weightless, fully dematerialized
stuff of the universe, which we grab for ourselves in the name of Self, or of Mind,
in fact, is readily translated. Air fixating upon air, the nothingness aspiring to corporeality by nothing more than a whim. These are not transcendent concepts because
the concept itself has no substantiality, is without density or mass, or even energy,
Fig. 75.1 Arabian Leopard (Panthera pardus nimr), IUCN-Critically Endangered, Possibly Fewer
than 40 Individuals in the Wild, Photographed at the Saud al-Faisal Wildlife Research Center, near
Taif, Saudi Arabia. (Photo © M.C. Tobias)
75 The Natural Selection of Indeterminacy
dating back to a hominin physiognomy wherein the tongue, palate, sandstorm of
sighs are mere murmurs against a Milky Way that does not so much as whisper. Not
a single ancestor that exerts anything remotely cognitive. The real “data” is before
science (Fig. 75.1).
What meaning have we contrived that should give us to actually believe some
natural selection works on our ideas or elevates instinct in the manner of apotheosis? It is no reach to compare our social antics to a global shuffleboard of sub-atomic
particles randomly skittering upon glazed, non-reflective surfaces. Distractions of
life and death, and of a host of other categories, we cannot fully reconcile. While a
philosophy consumed by the forbidden cities, entrances, and exits of no-meaning
has little appeal to a species that squirms restlessly, there is also no good reason to
discount the essence of all probability. That equation is an equal sign in whatever
contest of delusions, out of which we might wonder whether something does not
come of nothing.
Imagine if it were true, and if truth herself could hold on long enough to make
contact. The question What would it mean? has no context, no preparatory ground
upon which to launch a formal enquiry. There is, again, nothing but the empty wonderment, and empty it indeed is. We have no reason to delegate substance to consciousness, however furiously we attempt to trace its origins, loci, gene markers, or
specific nerve endings. The brain belabors itself, millennium after millennium, to
no effect.
Yet, at any instantaneous juncture of wonderments we can easily posit a suspicion that is grand and elaborate. This vacuum of weightless, fully dematerialized
stuff of the universe, which we grab for ourselves in the name of Self, or of Mind,
in fact, is readily translated. Air fixating upon air, the nothingness aspiring to corporeality by nothing more than a whim. These are not transcendent concepts because
the concept itself has no substantiality, is without density or mass, or even energy,
Fig. 75.1 Arabian Leopard (Panthera pardus nimr), IUCN-Critically Endangered, Possibly Fewer
than 40 Individuals in the Wild, Photographed at the Saud al-Faisal Wildlife Research Center, near
Taif, Saudi Arabia. (Photo © M.C. Tobias)
75 The Natural Selection of Indeterminacy